Alexander's search for stone ammunition led his men to raid places like temples, the town square, and even the lord's manor and unilaterally stripped them of all the stones they were worth.
But even these were hardly enough to sate Alexander's ravenous appetite.
His need for projectiles was so vast that one had to see it to believe it.
The roughly 30 catapults he had were capable of launching around two projectiles a minute, or an insane 3,600 shots per hour!
And assuming each shot was 20 kg in weight, this was 72 tons or around 12 elephants!
This was for only one hour, not a day.
To get that, you would have to multiply the number with the average hours- 8, giving you 576 tons or 100 elephants per day.
No matter how many villages were raided, there was no way, they could produce nearly 600 tons of stone, even if everything there had been made of stone, rather than mostly earth and timber.
In fact, not even the world's largest quarry could do this.
Of course, Alexander would never fire these catapults at their maximum rate for the whole day. That would have been insane.
The people operating them would long have had their arms drop off from sheer exhaustion and the strings operating the catapults would likely long before that.
In fact, such a prolonged burst of fire would not have been even possible in modern times.
Even the country with the largest amount of artillery- the Soviet Union, which had huge artillery barrages before a major offensive only used them for half an hour to at most one and a half hours to soften up enemy strong points.
And that was an industrial nation producing millions of shells per month.
Typically a modern artillery used ten to twenty shells a day, and even that was when the fighting in the frontlines was heavy.
So Alexander's attack on the wall was really perhaps a few hundred shots a day, averaging to a single catapult firing once or twice in an hour.
The firing mission would either be done by pounding a select stage of the wall constantly using a couple of catapults, each shooting once and then waiting for all the others to finish before firing again.
This would go on for hours, with the crew operating them and the catapults used changing after a few hours, the latter being done to decrease the wear on the ropes operating the machine.
In this way, by keeping the weapons firing periodically nonstop, it helped to keep the defenders on edge and slowly wear them down.
The problem was such wearing down took time, months of time.
So sometimes a different tactic was used.
Here, the entire stock for the day would be shot out as quickly as possible, possibly within an hour, as a way to shock and awe the defenders by killing some of them or trying to exploit a crack in the walls.
The idea for the latter was to deny the defenders any chance to try to repair the damaged walls while expanding the wound.
Sometimes, if it was too cold, Alexander would even postpone the attack, thus making those watchmen go without sleep for an entire day.
In this way, the attackers slowly began to get the edge over the defenders.
However, even with this modest success, Alexander found the speed of progress too low.
He found that there was no possible way he was going to break through the wall any time soon.
He would at least need a few months, two in the most optimistic sense.
But he was not willing to stay here for so long.
It had already been nearly five months since he came here and he intended to be in Zanzan, by the end of the sixth, travel time included.
Hence unable to wait any longer, he turned to Metztil with a cruel proposal.
With a sunny grin, Alexander chimed,
"Chief Metztil, it seems our enemy is too cowardly to meet us in the field. And cracking the hole he has hidden himself in is proving to be a very tedious affair. Problem is my quartermaster says we might not have enough grain to last until the end.
So why don't you and your men take a long around the countryside? Help us gather some of it from the people!"
This was Alexander not so euphemistically giving Metztil permission to raid and plunder the nearby Sybarians.
And Metztil's eyes instantly lit up with joy hearing this
"Heh heh, indeed, indeed Lord Alexander. Sometimes to catch a rat by its tail, you need to set fire to its home,"
His voice sounded unusually excited.
So without further ado, Alexander set about 5,000 of these rabid natives into the surroundings, with the single task of causing as much destruction as possible.
Within a week they produced results, as the entire province of Caira began to burn, and soon messages began to flock to Miss Linda from various nobles, begging her for help.
Yes, this was Alexander's way of forcing a battle.
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