Misha: It's physics

(Part 2 in the Misha series. Here is part 1.)

A high-explosive round leaves the barrel of an M777 howitzer (thank you, USA, UK, Canada, Australia) at approximately 827 meters per second. That’s 2,713 feet per second — more than twice the speed of sound.

The shell that hit — the one I summoned, indirectly — was almost certainly an M982 Excalibur. GPS-guided. Smart-fused. Precision-manufactured for pinpoint kills up to 40 kilometers away. Standard NATO design. Steel casing. Refined brutality.

It carries about 10 kilograms of high explosive, packed inside a shell that weighs just under 50 kilograms total — roughly 106 pounds.

Kinetic energy at impact?

KE = ½ × m × v²

= 0.5 × 50 × (827)²

= 17,099,450 joules

≈ 17.1 megajoules

That’s before the fuse even ignites.

Put another way: it's like being hit by a small car — a Honda Civic — doing over 400 miles per hour. Except all that energy is concentrated into a point the size of a soup can. That’s what punched into the dugout. That’s what buried itself in the dirt beneath them, before exploding upward.

The fuse is delay-timed, by design. It waits. Penetrates. Then triggers. Not to kill the men standing outside, but the ones inside — the ones who think they’re safe.

I didn’t pull the trigger. But I gave them something to see.

I flew the drone where I knew their scanners were watching. I moved like bait. That’s how it works: signal, response. Pattern recognition. And if you understand the timing — if you’ve studied the rhythms — you don’t just dance with it. You conduct it.

The dugout is gone now. So are they.

I am still here. Counting. Calculating. Remembering the exact sound the shell made when it landed — the split-second pause, like the world inhaling, before the sky turned orange.

This is not guilt.

This is physics.