PrePub - Ascendance of a Bookworm

I think Ferdinand has too complicated a mind. Instead of summoning winter and all that, my first step to take the last remaining silver ship, would have been to ask the Dunkelfelger knights who successfully took the other ship how they did it, or just have them come over and tell them to repeate what they did with the other ship.

Alternatively they could have the two squads with them fish some debris of the sunk ship out of the water and use that as make-shift shields against the silver needles. Those needles go through any mana-based defense, but something called a needle will surely have too little momentum to punch through planking of an ocean-going vessel. And then once they are on deck, form a sort of shield wall around them, covering any angle from which one of the launchers might attack them and force open a hatch. If the Dunkelfelger knights could get inside the other ship, there must be some kind of entrance that pure (magically enhanced) muscle power can pry open.

Or, knowing exactly were on the ships the cells are, they could have just gone back to dropping boulders. If they use smaller rocks, they could guarantee that they'd only smash the turrets, but won't punch all the way through the ships and out the bottom. Or they could drop just a single big boulder on the middle of the ship. A single hole should make the ship sink only slowly, so they have plenty of time to cast he Aub's protection on the captives. Then follow it up with firing a concentrated blast - like the one that destroyed the other ship - into the hole. WIth the mana blocking tiles being on the outside, this will almost asuredly make the ship come apart from the inside. And if by some miracle, the silver tiles will turn the shockwave back, that will only make it bounce around inside the hull in chaotic fashion, blasting it's inside apart and turning it into a chaotic hellstorm of flying shrapnes, that will shred anyone to pieces, who isn't protected by Rozemyne.

I guess the chance to show off Rozemyne to the Ahrensbach nobles has some merit in it's own way, but I question whether that alone was worth the risk and delay. The whole plan was based on the guess that the silver metal would contract in the cold, which is a double guess. First off all Rozemyne can't even know for sure, that metal in her new world works like it does in her previous one and she doesn't even know for sure whether the silver material is metal in the first place. Imagine if they went to all those length, only for the silver ship to sit there, chilled, but otherwise completely undamaged. I guess it would still have blocked the needle launchers for a few minutes, but a few rocks, or bits of the sunken ship dropped from great enough height could have done the same faster and with less mana and materiel expenditure.

I also think that either Kazuki sensei, or Quof got a bit lost in the way communications work in the story, when either of them had Strahl respond with an "uh" via Ordonnanz. That is something that might happen over a radio transmission, but there's no way that Strahl would record just uh, then tap the bird with his schtappe, fill it with mana and give it the mental instruction to fly to Ferdinand, no matter how flabberghasted he was.