Reborn In 17th century India with Black Technology

A few hours ago,

A small battle group unknown to the Dutch slowly entered the South China Sea through the Java Sea.

Captain Prabhakar, the person commanding the battle group, was a bit nervous. Although he had been in many battle situations since the formation of the Navy and had served as a captain for almost five years with excellent records, he still felt the pressure when he got the chance to command his own battle group.

However, he knew that this was something he had to get accustomed to, so he did not let the pressure bother him. Instead, he forced himself to rise to the challenge as he always did.

He was feeling pretty tense when he entered through a gap between the southernmost tip of Sumatra and Jakarta, but to his surprise, he did not feel the firing of the cannons from the island of Sangiang, an island right in the middle of the gap he was about to pass through. If the island did not exist, then his fleet could actually pass through the centre of the gap without being noticed by anyone since his ships would be covered by the curvature of the Earth. Instead, all he saw through his telescope were a few lookouts running into the tower with panicked expressions on their faces.

Prabhakar understood the reason for their panic since his fleet was quite imposing, but he felt that the panicked expressions on the faces of the lookouts were very wrong. It was as if they were expecting something entirely different.

Prabhakar began to get suspicious, and he quickly ordered his battle group to move forward quickly.

"Boom!"

"Boom!"

While blasting apart the fort in the process, of course.

A few hours passed, and the battle group sailed through the South China Sea and arrived near the southernmost tip of Malaysia at a small fishing village called Singapura (Singapore).

Throughout his journey, Prabhakar's suspicion only grew since he was not attacked by artillery fire as he had expected; instead, everything was quiet. In doubt, he took out his telescope and looked at the coast to see what was happening. Surprisingly, although the platform for the artillery was present, the artillery itself was absent. Even the army soldiers who operated the artillery were nowhere to be seen. Only a few people could be seen running into the hinterlands with panicked expressions on their faces.

Prabhakar guessed that these people were going back to inform Henry of their arrival, but from what he knew, Henry was in no position to receive the information for the next couple of hours. So he wasn't worried that he would be counterattacked. In fact, even if some unforeseen circumstances occurred, he could just retreat to the Philippines, where a small battle group of the Bharatiya Empire was located at Manila Bay.

The battle group had arrived near Karimunbesar Island, an island located in the Strait of Malacca.

Prabhakar looked around with his telescope to see if there was any enemy or suspicious object nearby, but unfortunately, he didn't find anything.

He looked around, confused as to why the Dutch had not responded even though his battle group along with the main naval fleet of the Bharatiya Empire was already within the Malacca Strait, the main backyard of the Dutch. However, his confusion didn't last long as a sudden news alerted him. "Battlegroup captain Rakesh of BNV Dhwani Clipper found something suspicious," the executive officer reported.

Prabhakar became Interested immediately. He boarded a smaller boat and sailed to the location where the anomaly was found.

"What is this?" Prabhakar asked, confused, as he looked at the wooden object floating on the water. He would not have paid too much attention to it if not for the fact that it had some spiky protrusions outward, like a caster seed.

"Have you tried to make contact with it?" he asked.

Rakesh, the captain of the Chennai-class Clipper BNV Dhwani, immediately shook his head. "No, sir. We first wanted to alert you."n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

"You did a good job," Prabhakar nodded his head as he praised.

He stroked his chin hesitantly for a while and came up with an idea. "Have a sailor row a rescue boat as fast as possible and aim it directly at that thing," he pointed.

"Just as the boat is about to contact the thing, have the sailor jump off the boat."

Rakesh nodded his head and immediately had his crew follow the suggestion. The rescue boat was immediately lowered into the water, and a sailor quickly got on it and started rowing towards the weird wooden object.

Just as the rescue boat was about to make contact with the unknown object, the sailor decisively jumped.

'Click!'

In the curious eyes of everyone, the rescue boat finally made contact with the unknown object, but at first, there was no reaction. Instead, a few mechanical clicking sounds were heard from inside. Just as the rescue boat was about to move past the unknown thing,

"Boom!" A loud explosion was heard, and the rescue boat's tail was blown into pieces.

"Oh, Deva!" Looking at the flames rising on top of the water, Prabhakar was horrified. 'Gulp!' witnessing the rescue boat that sank to the bottom of the sea, he couldn't help but feel his scalp tingle.

"Fortunately, fortunately, I chose to test this thing with a dummy boat instead of driving a warship over it," he wiped the sweat from his forehead and felt relieved.

However, he suddenly remembered the area he was in. It was the Strait of Malacca, a narrow sea channel passing through Indonesia and Malaysia into the heart of Southeast Asian countries.

'Oh Deva, could it be?!' He took a big gulp of saliva and had the ship sail forward at a slow pace.

The small ship eventually got rid of the obstruction from Karimunbesar Island and could now see the full view of the Malacca Strait. And when he saw it, his hands and feet couldn't help but shake with fear and dread. In front of him were countless water mines ready to explode on contact. If he hadn't seen the previous explosion, he would have been confused by seeing all the wooden debris floating on the water. He might have even thought there had been a battle here a moment ago. But now, after witnessing the explosion, he could immediately identify these prickly bombs floating on the sea.

Not only that but when he used his telescope to see how far forward these mines were spread out, he actually saw nearly three to four small frigates of 400 tons hidden behind various natural barriers. It might not pose that big of a problem to the Bharatiya Navy if there were only four frigates, but Prabhakar actually saw at least a dozen groups in his line of sight alone, not to mention how many would be present in the much further reaches. Not only that, the artillery he had been missing was actually densely packed in the narrow Malacca Strait, and that was only within his line of sight. He couldn't even imagine how densely packed it was much further ahead.

His mind ran at full speed, and he immediately thought about what was going on.

"Go back quickly, let's go back!" he ordered, and at full speed, he got back to his Delhi-class battleship.

Getting to his cabin, he immediately took out the biggest firework used for sending emergency messages and blasted it into the air without hesitation.

----

Prasanna Nair, who had just completed demolishing Kuala Lumpur, was confident as he ordered his fleet to go to the interior of the Malacca Strait.

However, suddenly he saw the flare go up in the far distance. The flare was very vague, but he had no doubt that it was a warning signal.

In fact, the signal he had seen was the 7th one. The originator of the signal was the battle group he had split apart, which was currently 200 kilometres away on the other end of the Malacca Strait tunnel.

Due to atmospheric scattering and light intensity loss, a single firework, no matter how powerful, could not be seen 200 km away. But when Prabhakar sent the emergency alert signal, the spies of the Bharatiya External Pragya, operating in Malaysia and Indonesia under the command of Deputy Director Jalandhar Keshav, immediately acted. Even though they knew their lives would be in danger, they did not hesitate to light the firework and blast it into the sky.

Not only that, taking advantage of the fact that, in order to remain as camouflaged as possible, the small frigates hiding all over the Malacca Strait did not actually bother to place the water mines too far away from them, the spies, hundreds of them, joined together to set off the mines using simple bows and arrows. This startled the hidden naval sailors of the Dutch. Although not many of them were injured, since they were not stupid enough to be stationed within the blast radius of the mines, they were still startled and knew that their plan had failed. They immediately got down from the ships and ran to their command centres for further instructions. Of course, the spies were unfortunately caught and killed on the spot.

In such a way, with the sacrifice of many people, one after another, seven gigantic fireworks were blasted into the sky, and nearly 49% of all the hidden ambushes were momentarily startled and left the ship, buying the main fleet enough time to react. All of this was done within an hour, and then Prasanna Nayar had gotten the message.

"Halt!"

He roared immediately, stopping his fleet from moving forward.

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Before he could react, the frigates that had been hidden behind the Rupat Island in a secret location that couldn't even be found by the scouts immediately launched their attack after knowing that their plans had been exposed.

Prasanna Nair's eyes turned bloodshot, and killing intent radiated from his eyes. "Use the monster cannons, destroy them immediately!" he roared.

"BOOM!"

"BOOM!"

"BOOM!"

The cannons roared to life once again, and the frigates were immediately unlucky. Before they could get into the firing range, they were bombarded by the 40-kilogram cannonballs.

To be Continued...