Rewrite That Witch
CH1080 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1080: A New Station

“Miss Sylvie confirms no additional forces in detection range.”

“At that distance, five minutes minimum before they enter effective threat radius. The anti-aircraft machine gun squads can prepare in two.”

“Threat assessment: no Senior Demons. Risk to Her Highness — negligible.”

“Rail removal team is the primary liability. If we clear them now, we’re looking at one or two casualties regardless of demon action. If we keep them working and the demons close, same estimate.”

The command post moved at its own tempo — not frantic, not leisurely, the professional pace of people who had been drilled to produce conclusions faster than events could outrun them. Conclusions went on the board in chalk. The board filled. The board was read.

Ferlin Eltek, hand pressed to his chest in the old knight’s habit of address, presented the summary to Iron Axe. “Our assessment is to continue construction and maintain basic alert. The demons will understand our intention regardless — His Majesty anticipated this. Four flying scouts do not represent a threat the First Army cannot absorb.”

Iron Axe looked at the board.

In another army, in another age, a vanguard of five thousand men might have stopped for four Devilbeasts circling the horizon. Might have pulled everyone behind the earthworks, canceled the shift, waited. Here the calculus ran the other direction: the contractors’ death-risk clause was already written into their employment agreement. They had accepted the terms. The construction did not stop for acceptable risk.

He looked at Edith.

She had said nothing. At the command post, silence meant assent.

He opened his mouth to relay the order — and then Edith spoke. Not to him.

“Do you have a way to swat those flies directly?”

Agatha and Phyllis turned.

“Take the initiative?” Agatha’s frown was the kind that contains a calculation running in parallel with the visible expression. “Against a patrol of four?”

“I dislike being watched,” Edith said. “I find it clarifying, if that’s the right word — every day they come, they learn something about us. The schedule of our shifts, the range of our weapons, what we protect and what we leave exposed. I would rather they learned nothing.” She paused. “Lightning and Maggie have the speed. With the Lady of Dawn for support, the three of them could clear a four-demon patrol without ground engagement.”

Agatha said nothing for a moment.

Iron Axe watched her. He had seen Agatha at the Battle of Divine Will. He had seen her come back from things that should not have allowed anyone to come back. She was not a woman who hesitated at the edge of danger — she walked into danger the way experienced people walk into cold water, without flinching, because flinching accomplishes nothing and you’re going in regardless.

But she had gone quiet.

“In theory,” she said, slowly, “if there are only two demons, the exposure risk is manageable. With three—” She stopped. Started again. “Andrea could potentially reduce the number before Lightning and Maggie close the distance. But the engagement window is short and the margin for error—”

She stopped again.

“It’s a war,” Edith said. “Risk is not optional.”

“I know that.” Agatha’s voice was level. Flat in the way that things sometimes go flat when they are being controlled rather than when they are naturally calm. “I’ve known it since Taquila. I will take any risk that’s mine to take.” She looked at Edith directly. “Lightning is not in a condition where this is safe to ask.”

The room absorbed this.

The Battle of Divine Will: Lightning had stood in front of something that dwarfed everything she had previously understood about the scale of power available to her enemies. That was not a wound that showed on the body. Agatha had seen versions of it before — God’s Punishment Witches who had survived encounters they shouldn’t have, who had emerged technically functional and quietly broken, who needed time or medicine or the specific mercy of smaller, winnable problems to rebuild whatever the encounter had stripped from them. Compelling Lightning toward another engagement now, in that state, was not sending her into danger. It was something else.

Edith raised her eyebrows but did not push. She had stated her reasoning; she would not repeat it.

“How about this,” she said. “The Magic Ark for concealment, Andrea at range, Lightning and Maggie as maneuvering support. They don’t close to engagement distance unless the opportunity is clean. The goal is disruption — drive them off, deny the reconnaissance, reduce the pattern.” A pause. “Even that much is better than nothing.”

Agatha looked at Iron Axe.

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll inform the Special Action Team.”

What followed was not a battle.

It was a pattern, and patterns have their own kind of logic.

Nearly every day, a team of Devilbeasts circled the outer defense perimeter. Sometimes two teams on the same day, arriving from different directions, as if the demons were mapping the First Army’s response time from multiple angles. Sylvie’s sight was the decisive counter: she saw them before they saw anything meaningful, and the warning allowed the construction teams to continue working up to the last possible moment. Workers had a number now — they knew approximately how long before they needed to move, and after the first week they moved with efficiency rather than fear, like people evacuating a building they know will still be standing when they return.

The demons, presumably, kept arriving because they were getting information. Iron Axe was certain of this. He was equally certain they were getting less of it than they believed.

Andrea’s contributions were unpredictable in the specific way that made them stick in the mind. Sometimes nothing for a full day. Then two kills before noon, or three across different encounters, the anti-Devilbeast rifle appearing at ranges that should have been impossible, each shot landing with no warning and no pattern the demons seemed able to anticipate. After a while, the workers began keeping a running count. The gamblers among them started a book — not on whether demons would appear, but on how many would leave.

Most didn’t know about the Special Action Team operating out in the concealment of the Magic Ark. They knew that someone was shooting back. It was enough.

The railway advanced.

Section by section, station to station. According to the combat plan, every fifty kilometers of track beyond the Misty Forest’s protection would be anchored by a fortified station: concrete and steel blockhouses at the corners, trenches connecting them, a garrison small enough to supply easily and large enough to hold ground against anything short of a full assault. The armored train — the Blackriver — would cruise the open sections, its Longsong Cannons covering the track against sabotage. Even if the demons managed to destroy a section of rail, the repair teams could reach it within hours. The stations were nails. You hammered them into the plain one by one, and the plain became yours.

Tower Station No. 0 was finished. The front had moved.

Tower Station No. 1 waited fifty kilometers further on, still just a survey line and a stack of materials.

Not for long.

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