313: Chapter 153: The second time building an army, the team is in its initial stage_3 313: Chapter 153: The second time building an army, the team is in its initial stage_3 But this time, Leon would rather spend a lot of money to keep the horses than dare to sell them, conversely, if he trained enough riders in the future, he would thick-skinnedly ask Baron Eriv to buy back the warhorses he had sold last time.
Selva had gone from being an undisturbed hollow in the hills to a borderland rife with strife.
Expanding the cavalry was an urgent need, after all, whether in his past life or the world he currently lived in, heavy cavalry had almost always dominated the battlefield in the era of melee weapons.
Even though there were numerous historical cases where heavy cavalry had spectacularly failed, those cases were notorious precisely because they had deeply entrenched the impression of the “weak” overcoming the “strong” in people’s minds.
The maneuverability of cavalry was crucial for controlling the battlefield, and ultimately, for deciding the outcome of the battle.
Especially heavy cavalry.
Leon still remembered watching a nonsensical program in his previous life that claimed “Mongolian light cavalry swept across Europe, dominating European knights in plate armor.”
As a young boy, he was shocked to see Mongolian light cavalry, clad only in cloth and shooting arrows to easily defeat plate armor knights—until later, when he learned from genuine historical sources that those “plate armor knights” who were turned into sieves by the steppe bowmen were from a period at least a century or so after the Mongols’ western campaign.
The European knights who actually faced the Mongol Empire were merely a bunch of riders draped in chain mail, who had to confront, at the time, the world’s most luxuriously equipped, powerful, and massive heavy armored cavalry—the real driving force behind the Mongol Empire’s sweep across the globe.
The strength of heavy cavalry on Earth in his past life had dominated the battlefield continuously until the perfecting of gunpowder weapons, the increase in bullet power, and the widespread use of machine guns.
And it seemed that the same was still true for the land he lived in now.
Especially since crossing over and awakening to this time, Leon had not even heard of the existence of gunpowder.
The closest thing to gunpowder from his past life would be those alchemy crystals used by Kovis back then, capable of triggering elemental reactions.
He really didn’t know if the formula of one saltpeter, two sulfur, three charcoal would still work in this world, but Leon contemplated taking the opportunity to give it a simple try.
Charcoal was easy to come by, and although he had not heard of the first two components in this world, perhaps there were similar isotopic substitute materials?
However, setting aside the yet-to-be-discovered gunpowder weapons for the moment, on this continent, there were indeed things capable of threatening heavy cavalry.
The most direct threat was “magic.”
Whether it was Isa’s Arrow, Emmon’s Fire Snake, or Met’s transformation into a monster with his peculiar spells, they all posed extreme danger to ordinary knights.
Leon found it hard to estimate just how powerful the ancient Lorelette civilization that produced Miss Lora was.
But Lorelette had long since vanished without a trace, and this land was no longer the age of magic, with just a dozen or so Warlock Masters in the entire Northern Kingdom, which boasted a population in the tens of millions.
Moreover, there were over a thousand individuals like Orland, who were as strong as supermen, Knights of Valor…
and that didn’t even include civilian martial artists like Olivia who hadn’t yet obtained a knight’s title.
Excluding the scarcity of magic, in terms of pure violence, the other things that could potentially shake the position of knights and heavy cavalry, as far as Leon could imagine, would probably be those behemoths he had either seen with his own eyes or heard of.
Like the Horror Mountain Bear he had escaped from back then.
Like the Griffin that had saved Selva.
Like the so-called “dragons” he had not yet seen in the flesh.
Suddenly, Galliard’s greasy demeanor flashed in Leon’s mind, and he couldn’t help but close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose.
Since Lola had seen through the man’s true identity, he certainly wouldn’t question the judgment of the Ancient Pope.
But it was really hard to associate the elegant and cool mythical creatures illustrated in the Magic Guidebook with the minstrel’s cheap behavior.
…The prolonged realm management meeting had ended, and the establishment of a permanent force of about a hundred men was expected to burn through at least three thousand Gold Coins this year alone.
Leon, with his thoughts on military expenses, went to the backyard of the mansion after the meeting, calling upon those three soldiers who had been under constant surveillance by Zabron and others for witnessing Canis’s death.
Surrounded in the middle by six guards, the three men appeared visibly uneasy, seemingly worried that they might be disposed of by the Lord for some unintentionally learned secret.
Clearly, their time under house arrest had led them to all kinds of wild thoughts.
“There’s no need to be nervous,” Leon said to them with a smile.
He finally had the time to attend to this not-too-big yet not-too-small “problem.”
Even if the secret leaked out, there was no madman who would believe that a rural lord could bring the dead back from the afterlife imagined by people.
But just in case, it was necessary to make the three men in front of him keep their lips sealed.
In his previous life, there really were fools who would believe claims like “I am Emperor Qin Shi Huang, I am Chen O-hope.” One couldn’t guarantee that this Otherworld did not have the same type of gullible people who might just hit the mark concerning his secret.
However, he wouldn’t resort to silencing the guards by slitting their throats, using the reasoning that dead men tell no tales, in order to keep his secrets safe.
That was not his style of doing things, and in fact, he had already made the dead speak.