Seeing the rows of cannons lined up below the city walls, many Georgian defenders were stunned.
Although they had long known that the Bosporus Romans had cannons, they never expected to encounter them at such a critical moment.
Witnessing the sudden drop in the morale of the defenders, Alexander I's composure almost shattered.
While he believed the Tbilisi city walls could hold out against the enemy for several months, he didn't expect them to bring so many firearms to bombard it!
Manuel, below the city walls, wasn't thinking of anything complex.
Caesar only wanted to quickly capture Tbilisi, take over the Georgian throne, and then rush east to punch the Black Sheep Dynasty, making his damned Turkmen brother-in-law taste the bitterness of failing to steal a chicken and losing the rice instead.
However, before that, he had to capture the capital of the Kingdom of Georgia.
Otherwise, how could he hope to subdue the remaining feudal lords of Georgia and confront the Black Sheep?
Therefore, even without directly seeing the true state of the defenders, Manuel, without any hesitation, immediately ordered from the front lines:
"Fire the cannons."
As the first cannon roared, the west city wall of Tbilisi, directly facing the Bosporus Army, seemed to wail as a large amount of rubble and stones were blasted off, causing the conscripted militiamen among the defenders to panic.
But after the brief smoke cleared, the Georgian defenders found that the city wall had not been utterly destroyed as they had imagined, but only had a not-too-large, not-too-small crater.
Relieved, the Georgians breathed a sigh of relief, and Alexander I was also influenced by this atmosphere, feeling a little more at ease.
However, their enemies were not overly annoyed, as the cannon that had just fired was merely a medium-caliber cannon.
Manuel felt the same; that shot, in his eyes, was more experimental.
"Although... I really shouldn't expect too much from medieval firearms," he thought.
Looking at the cratered city wall and considering that even with his specially improved gunpowder, the cannonball still cost several ducats, he felt a faint pang of heartache: how wonderful it would be if this cannonball had landed in an Ottoman city.
But he quickly adjusted his mindset and ordered dozens of medium-to-large siege cannons in the army to fire a volley together, continuing to put pressure on the Georgian defenders.
And the opposite side reacted just as he had predicted.
After more than half an hour of continuous bombardment, while the Tbilisi city walls showed obvious large numbers of craters and shell marks, these Caucasians also fearfully huddled inside the city walls to avoid the cannons.
This caused many soldiers of the Bosporus Army to laugh mockingly on the spot.
But Manuel couldn't quite smile.
They hid inside without many casualties?
How could these Georgians so fail to appreciate his "good intentions"?
For a moment, Caesar wanted to order a frontal assault to force these defenders out.
But to sacrifice his soldiers or loyal subjects in a costly assault for this easily obtainable city seemed a bit wasteful.
After careful consideration, he remembered the perfect expendables he had used when attacking Mtskheta city previously:
Aren't there still many heathens in the Autocratic State?
Feeling smug about this, Manuel immediately ordered a repeat of his previous tactic: in exchange for granting normal citizen status and freedom of belief to the conscripted heathens' families, he would continue to forcibly conscript two to three thousand siege expendables from Pontus to help the army besiege Tbilisi.
Before these cannon fodder arrived in the Caucasus, the Bosporus and its allied armies, just like on the first day, would regularly fire cannons at the city but not directly assault it, creating pressure, cutting off communication inside and outside the city, and tightly besieging the city.
After half a month of such days, Petros, who had long been promoted to quartermaster officer under Dungar, successfully transported the necessary supplies and arrived at the rear camp of the Bosporus Grand Army in the morning.
Along with them, three thousand heathen able-bodied men, forcibly conscripted from the Autocratic State's far rear, were also transported.
"They say able-bodied men, but most of them aren't very strong," muttered Deputy General Nicholas, who had come to receive and inspect these conscripts, after a cursory look at them.
Since following his superior and monarch through several rounds of life and death, this former ordinary peasant soldier had become the right-hand man of the Army Commander, even being allocated an enfeoffment and acquiring a building plot for his family.
His special task today was to carefully check if any Eastern Orthodox who should not have been conscripted were among these able-bodied men.
This military order naturally came from Manuel's personal command; although checking for "mistakes" in conscripting able-bodied men seemed somewhat incredible for a medieval regime, his subordinates faithfully carried out his orders.
The result of this inspection was that all those conscripted were genuine heathens, possibly with a few heretics mixed in.
This should be enough, it wouldn't lead to a disaster like last time, Nicholas thought.
He clearly remembered that not long ago, when Caesar temporarily inspected the Bosporus conscripts before marching into Georgia, he discovered Eastern Orthodox who did not meet the standards and were conscripted as heathens, and ordered a thorough investigation, which resulted in several related illegal military officers being executed.
Since then, there had been no more forced conscription of good citizens in the army; this lesson was quite effective.
At noon the day after these heathen conscripts arrived at the rear, they were rushed to the battlefield under the cover of cannon fire and smoke, climbed the ladders already prepared by the siege engineers, and launched an attack on the city walls under the urging of the main forces.
Now the Georgian defenders could no longer be ostriches.
Compared to the possibility of being killed by cannon fire, they were more afraid of the city being occupied and breached.
So, at the king's command, hundreds of defenders on the city walls had no choice but to risk being affected to kill this batch of cannon fodder, whose quality was far inferior to their own.
The battle lasted for nearly an hour, until the Bosporus voluntarily temporarily stopped bombarding the city with cannons and continued to drive the expendables to their deaths.
Through this slow-attrition tactic, the Romans successfully wore down nearly a hundred defenders on the city walls.
As for the conscripts they drove forward, hundreds were killed on the spot, with a casualty ratio of nearly 1:4.
But who cares? Only those fools overflowing with sympathy would care.
Observing the current state of Tbilisi's defenses, Manuel revealed a cold smile, causing his surrounding guards and subordinates to feel a subtle chill.
However, Caesar quickly returned to his usual gentle, even approachable, calm expression and ordered the entire army to prepare for scaling the city.
"Tbilisi won't last much longer; it's now a matter of one month, two months, or half a year."
Looking at the already battered Tbilisi city walls, Manuel's face turned into a confident and reassured smile.