Chapter 1076: The Power of “Worms”
The test site was a valley cut deep into the Impassable Mountain Range — steep walls on three sides, no roads in, no roads out. No human foot had ever pressed this soil. You could reach it only by air or by burrowing through the mountain’s own bones. Roland had chosen it for that reason, and for one other: what happened here would not be witnessed by anyone who needed to remain ignorant.
Napalm was not a state secret. But its demonstration deserved a controlled audience.
“Ah,” said Celine, swaying a tentacle as she emerged from the crack in the rock face, “the air here is extraordinary. I can smell flowers. Fresh soil.” She paused, rotating her bulk to take in the blue overhead. “It has been over two hundred years since I last saw the sky.”
Retnin went rigid.
Roland watched the alchemist’s face cycle through shock, animal panic, the rigid courtesy of a man who cannot afford to offend his sovereign, and finally a kind of paralyzed composure. He clapped Retnin on the shoulder.
“They were human once,” he said, keeping his voice mild and informative, the tone of a man explaining a mechanism. “The demons remade them. They communicate mind-to-mind — that’s why you heard her without seeing her lips move. If you want to reply, speaking aloud works fine. So does thinking it clearly.”
He turned to Celine. “It can’t be that difficult for an original carrier to take in some fresh air occasionally.”
“That’s because Celine seals herself inside the research room.” Pasha’s voice preceded her emergence from the earth by a full second, a disembodied alto materializing ahead of her body. “The God’s Punishment Witches have been talking about her. There is apparently a word for it now. A shut-in, I believe you call them.”
“I recall there are two adjectives preceding that term,” Alethea added, surfacing last — and with her, the bound shape of the Senior Demon.
“Do you really want me to say them?”
“Oh. No.”
Roland raised an eyebrow at Retnin. “You see?”
“Y-yes. Your Majesty.” It did not sound convincing. But the panic had downgraded to something more workable, a wariness edged with the first inklings of curiosity. The alchemist’s eyes kept drifting back to Celine’s tentacles — not in revulsion now, but in the evaluating squint of a craftsman clocking an unfamiliar tool.
Progress.
“Their resistance to heat and corrosion is exceptional,” Roland continued. “They can handle chemicals bare-handed that would dissolve leather gloves. Their tentacles can sort materials by touch alone — simultaneously, across a dozen specimens. For someone who works in chemical research, they are, structurally speaking, ideal laboratory partners.” A shrug. “I thought you might be interested.”
Retnin swallowed. The silence stretched. “I… am fine, Your Majesty.”
Roland shook his head — not disappointed, just filing it away — and walked to the demon.
Kabradhabi sat bound at the cliff’s edge.
His legs were gone. Roland had not wanted to take the chance regardless; this body had been a God’s Punishment Warrior, and the residual strength in those arms was something an engineer accounted for rather than dismissed. The ropes were triple-redundant. The position was chosen so the demon would have an unobstructed view of the valley below.
Roland crouched in front of him and looked into his eyes.
Without a linguistic bridge, the demon could not parse a single syllable of what Roland said. It did not matter. What lived in those eyes needed no translation — a contempt so ancient and so absolute that it had calcified into something almost geological, layers of it laid down across centuries of looking at humans and finding nothing worth counting.
“You are Kabradhabi,” Roland said. “I prepared something for you. Your kind committed atrocities across the Land of Dawn. You destroyed more than half this kingdom.” He held the demon’s gaze. “It’s time we showed you what we’ve learned.”
He nodded to Retnin and stood. “Go ahead.”
The alchemist cast one last look at the bound demon, squared his shoulders, and shouted: “Yes, Your Majesty!”
They descended into the tunnel. The demon remained on the cliff.
“Explosion countdown — ten, nine, eight—”
The detonation was quieter than Roland had expected.
No thunderclap, no shockwave that knocked gravel from the tunnel walls. The high explosives they’d used in maneuver drills hit harder, louder, with that bone-deep percussion that reminded you the world could come apart. This was different. The initial blast was almost modest — a dull concussive thump, and then a column of orange light rose from the valley floor, thick black smoke swelling above it like a bruise.
Then the umbrellas opened.
Hot air drove burning fuel skyward in sheets, and as it reached its apex it cascaded back down the way lava falls: slow, almost graceful, spreading wide. Each cascade caught and bloomed. The aluminum met the iron oxides in the combustion-supporting layer, and the chemical reaction detonated a second time — not a single explosion but a chain of them, a rolling exhalation of heat that stretched across seconds rather than the instantaneous crack of conventional ordnance.
By the time the valley floor was fully ablaze, it was already impossible to think about the testing animals.
Through the porthole Roland watched thick smoke and flame separate like the components of an emulsion settling out. The smoke climbed and dispersed. The fire spread — horizontally, patient, consuming everything from the brook at the center outward to the tree line, and then the tree line itself.
The valley burned for four hours.
Alethea curled her main tentacle.
If only we’d had this.
She did not say it aloud. Pasha and Celine were already thinking the same thing — she could feel the current of it between them, the old grief running parallel to the new arithmetic. Fire was the natural enemy of the Red Mist: every outpost the demons raised was stripped of combustibles precisely because of this, because they understood what fire did to their atmospheric weapon. It had always been impossible to ignite sufficient fuel near a demon position without magic-assisted flame sources — and magic sources required witches, required bodies, required the endless expenditure of lives they could never afford to spend.
But this. You could deliver this from a distance. You could drop it from the air, roll it down a slope, detonate it before a single witch stepped within range. She watched the burning mist storage tower assemble itself in her mind — a pillar of fire where the Red Mist reservoir had been, and behind it a clear road, no gas, no invisible killing field, just open ground and the God’s Punishment Witches walking through it standing upright.
The three of them exchanged nothing that could be called words and reached the same understanding in under a second.
Alethea looked at Roland, standing at the porthole with his arms folded and his expression quietly satisfied, and something that was not quite grief moved through her.
What a pity he was not born four hundred years ago.
When the flames finally dropped, Roland climbed out of the tunnel into air that felt like midsummer — not spring, not the mountain cold the valley should have held, but the thick residual warmth of something that had burned very thoroughly. The scorched earth was still radiating. What had been forest and brook and field was a single continuous char.
He looked at Kabradhabi.
The shelter above the cliff had been kept clear; the fire had not reached it. The God’s Punishment Witches registered no heat regardless. The demon was unharmed. He sat where they had left him, ropes intact, gaze fixed on the valley below.
Roland studied his face.
The contempt was still there, layered and geological as ever. But underneath it — visible, if you knew what a crack in stone looked like — was something the demon had perhaps never had occasion to show before.
Disbelief.
This was what Pasha and Celine and Alethea had come for. Not submission. Not information. Not the small satisfactions of captivity.
They had come to make it understood — the creatures this ancient enemy had spent centuries looking through had learned, at last, how to annihilate them.