The Pope said something whose meaning he himself didn't understand, but he could be certain that they had won the war, and that Archduke Franz was indeed as extraordinary and transcendent as the rumors claimed.
No, this was completely beyond anything he had imagined.
Airships rose into the sky one after another, drifting over the ridge before dropping barrel after barrel of terrifying bombs on the rebels.
The barrels were filled with a mixture of Nitroglycerin, whose power was thirty times that of the commonly used black powder. Nitroglycerin's instability had become an advantage here, since it needed no fuse.
The impact of falling from such a height was enough to detonate this horrifying explosive, though in reality, some barrels exploded before they even hit the ground, under the sustained force of gravity.
Although they hadn't exploded on impact as expected, tests by the Austrian military showed that Nitroglycerin bombs were even more powerful when detonated in midair, with their lethal radius expanding by at least 1.5 times.
The Austrian Airships kept raining explosives down over Lapol's army. Faced with an aerial assault unlike anything they had ever seen, the rebels were at a loss.
Some raised their rifles, then lowered them again, wondering whether their guns could possibly do any good against such enormous monsters.
The blast from a bomb hitting the ground flung everyone nearby into the air, while rocks and splinters flew in every direction.
The rocks, which had seemed so insignificant, became deadly weapons. Striking the soldiers around them, they broke bones and tore sinews; some particularly unlucky men were hit directly in the eye or pierced through the skull, bursting into a spray of blood.
"Help! Monsters!"
"My hand! My hand's gone!"
"I can't see! I can't see anything!"
"Ahhhhhhh!"
Wails, screams, and explosions rose