"Let's roll, boys! Time to raid the place!"
Chaos erupted inside the Braavos military camp. The Grenadier Regiment players came pouring out, lugging crates of bottles and jars, while Bloodbeard led the Braavos Legion troops right behind them.
Bloodbeard watched the weird soldiers marching past with open curiosity.
Daario Naharis stood outside his own tent, staring at the departing Grenadiers with an unreadable expression. These were the same pyro-maniac lunatics who'd run around Pentos waving wildfire and blowing themselves up. He still had nightmares about that shit.
"What the hell are those?" Bloodbeard asked, eyeing the big tube-like carts being pushed along by soldiers. He'd only taken command of the Braavos Legion a short while ago.
"Those are cannons!" Player [Carpenter Emperor] walked over and explained.
"Cannons?" Bloodbeard repeated the strange new word, rolling it around awkwardly.
Yep. Cannons. [Carpenter Emperor] turned and left without saying more—he knew the native wouldn't understand the rest anyway.
Grinning with that classic time-traveler "look at my future tech, peasants" vibe, he barked orders at the makeshift artillery crew and got the three bronze cannons rolling to keep up with the column.
To the rest of the player base, the Grenadier Regiment hadn't dropped any jaw-dropping highlights or forum-shaking stunts in ages.
That was because, ever since they'd recruited a few "straight-A" players into the guild, the whole group had been brainstorming: the game world felt insanely realistic in every detail… so why not try something besides the usual smash-and-grab? Why not invent stuff?
Once the idea was out there, the whole guild jumped on it. Teflon and the other top brass gave the green light immediately: they were going to research firearms and cannons. They wanted to see if the game had any invisible walls when it came to tech.
Besides, the old suicide-bombing routine had gotten stale as hell.
These "pyromaniac lunatics" were now obsessed with building guns and cannons so they could stomp the locals with straight-up revolutionary tech.
The entire guild—from top to bottom—loved the plan.
Talking about it was easy. Actually doing it? Not so much.
Gunpowder already existed in this world, and every isekai player worth their salt knew the black-powder recipe by heart. Even an idiot could log in and out a few times to memorize it.
But the setting was pure medieval. Iron-working tech sucked, and there was no decent steel. Any iron guns or cannons they tried would just blow up in their faces—way less reliable than wildfire. At least with wildfire you could run up and chuck it.
Lathes? Yeah, right. The "straight-A" players threw up their hands. No way to hand-craft a proper lathe in a medieval world.
For a minute it looked like the whole idea was dead on arrival. A bunch of the shorter-attention-span players started losing interest.
That's when guild leader Teflon slammed the table and said, "Fine. If we can't make iron cannons and muskets, let's go even further back—bronze cannons and fire-lance hand cannons! Hell, bamboo cannons if we have to!"
Essos had plenty of copper. For test models they could even melt down coins. And after the Braavos war, the warehouses were stuffed with broken copper weapons from the mercenary companies.
With raw materials sorted, the brainiacs went to work. Players kept logging out to look up extra details and fill in the gaps.
Mud cores, outer molds, molten-copper casting, touch-holes, wooden carriages.
After a few failed attempts, they hand-crafted their first crude bronze cannon.
[Carpenter Emperor] had been one of the main guys hammering it together.
The finished bronze cannon was simple as hell: one fat copper tube, sealed at the breech, open at the muzzle, firing stone shot.
It wasn't super powerful, the accuracy sucked, and performance was mediocre… but it didn't explode. It was a real, usable cannon. For the players, that was a hell of a start.
Once they had the process down, they cranked out two more bronze cannons in no time.
If they could manage bronze cannons, fire-lance hand cannons were child's play.
A couple of the brainiacs even built individual bamboo fire lances on their own. The power was impressive, and the watching players thought it looked easy enough—"I could do that."
Of course bamboo had one glaring flaw: it burst pretty easily. But players gonna player. They copied the bronze-cannon method and made proper copper hand cannons—basically early handguns.
Effective range: five to fifteen meters. Still had a chance of blowing up.
At that point nobody cared. They finally had guns—even primitive ones. Who gave a shit about the occasional barrel explosion? It only cost a few Kingdom Coins to respawn anyway!
The simple hand-cannon design was dead easy once you knew the trick. One person could make one. Working together around the clock, the entire Grenadier Regiment had already produced over a hundred and sixty copper hand cannons.
When copper started running low and nobody wanted to spend money on more, they switched to bamboo versions and just accepted the higher boom risk.
Total count, bamboo included: three hundred and twenty-seven.
Add in the homemade grenades they'd already been throwing around, and the "Grenadier" name suddenly felt extremely on the nose.
The native soldiers had no clue what the weird weapons were, but the other players sure as hell did.
Firearms!
The Grenadier Regiment quickly linked up with [Pointing-Rat-Calling-It-Duck]'s joint task force—secret police, Kingsguard, and royal enforcers. The moment the three bronze cannons and the rows of hand cannons came into view, the players lost their minds.
"Holy shit, are those actual cannons?!"
"You guys are straight-up criminals. How long have you been secretly running an armory offline?"
"Lemme see that—stop hoarding!"
Guys are guys, no matter the world. A couple of White Cloaks were already eagerly turning the hand cannons over in their hands, eyes shining.
"Back off, back off! Don't you dare scratch my babies!" Teflon shoved the crowd away like a miser guarding his gold.
"Hide the gear, boys—don't let them steal any!" he kept yelling over his shoulder to his guildmates.
[Pointing-Rat-Calling-It-Duck] cursed him for being a stingy bastard.
Still, nobody forgot the mission. Once the columns merged they formed one long dragon of troops and marched straight for the House of Black and White.
The House sat on the Isle of the Gods. More precisely, inside a place called the Sanctuary—or, as [Pointing-Rat-Calling-It-Duck] liked to call it, the Big Junkyard.
Because that's exactly what it was: a giant storage shed for every forgotten little god from every corner of the world. If that wasn't a junkyard, he didn't know what was.