Chapter 1106: A Universal Strategy
Ashes got the door halfway closed when Tilly coughed behind her.
“Ahem. Do you understand what Roland meant by ‘taking care of her’?”
Ashes kept her face arranged innocently toward the door. “Attend to her needs. Leaf is injured, so naturally she’ll require — ”
“Oi.”
The innocence held for another half-second. Then it didn’t.
“Oh. You were testing me.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Ashes said, turning around. She held Tilly’s gaze for a moment. “Roland wants me to monitor magic power fluctuations — any unusual presence, I warn Leaf in advance and we move. The same way you and I found each other, the first time.”
If I hadn’t had that sensitivity, Tilly said once, I would never have noticed you at all. You were very good at not being noticed back then.
“I’m not a demon,” Tilly said, folding her arms with a precise dignity.
“Just an example.” Ashes waved her hand. “The principle holds. And I’m the only one who has actually faced the Magic Slayer.”
“And after? If it comes again?”
“Find reinforcements. Repel together.” A pause. “I’m not interested in duels for their own sake. That’s Lorgar’s domain. As long as Leaf’s ability isn’t suppressed, she can cross the entire forest in seconds — there’s no heroic last stand required.”
Tilly exhaled. The tension in her shoulders dropped a fraction. “Don’t forget that.”
“I won’t.” Ashes crossed the room and stopped in front of her, close enough that looking away would have been a statement. “I’m going to be with you for a very long time. Andrea is a fine fighter and she knows it and she finds it entirely sufficient. She doesn’t have the patience for people.” A corner of her mouth moved. “I do.”
“O — oi, that’s not — ” Tilly shot her a look that was meant to be withering and landed somewhere between flustered and fond, and then she walked into her room with the brisk efficiency of someone ending a conversation they have lost.
She stopped in the doorway.
“I’m glad you saved Leaf.” Said to the doorframe, not to Ashes. “It would be a waste — ” A breath. “To only ever protect me.”
Ashes waited.
“You always said the best thing would be for me to return to Sleeping Island.” Tilly still hadn’t turned around. “But you actually like it here. You smile more. I’ve noticed.” She paused. “Back on the island you never smiled. You had the face of someone always about to leave for somewhere worse.”
Ashes became aware of her own hands, and what they were doing — pressing against her own cheekbones, checking for evidence of the thing she’d been accused of.
“The new witches are still afraid of you,” Tilly continued. “Only Maggie isn’t, and that’s because Maggie reads people the way birds read weather: not very accurately and mostly in hindsight. But you get on with the Witch Union now. And you have an admirer, if I’m reading the situation correctly.”
“Lorgar and I train together. That’s — ”
“All right.” Tilly turned, finally, and looked at her straight on. Her expression had settled into something that wasn’t quite a smile but contained the same essential information. “I prefer the current you. The avenger version was exhausting for everyone, including you.” A beat. “But this doesn’t mean you’re allowed to fight the Magic Slayer alone again without considering the consequences. Do you understand me?”
After a moment: “Yes.”
“Very good.” She nodded once, with the satisfaction of someone who has said the necessary thing and said it correctly. “Perhaps soon I’ll be beside you on the battlefield.”
“Any progress on the Aerial Knight?”
Tilly’s expression shifted into something genuinely alive. “Roland is testing a new engine on the glider. If it works — a different kind of plane entirely, one that doesn’t need Wendy’s ability to stay up. Faster than a Devilbeast. Higher.” She said this the way people describe a door that has finally opened. “It would be built around my proportions.”
“Roland will never let you fly in active combat.”
“He made you a promise.”
“He did.” Ashes didn’t offer any further editorial. “I’ll watch you test it.”
“Good.” Tilly moved toward the washroom. “I’m taking a shower. I smell like the Seagull and the Seagull smells like engine oil and twelve anxious people.” She paused. “Don’t suggest joining me.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.” The door closed. Then, muffled: “Liar.”
Ashes sat down in the recliner in the empty living room and looked at her hands for a long time.
The moment she’d hit the Magic Slayer — the precise fraction of it when she’d kicked the tree and something in her had exceeded its normal ceiling and kept going — that moment hadn’t left her. It sat in the center of her body like a coal that hadn’t cooled. She hadn’t told anyone about it, not fully. The part she’d described to Roland: the demon was thrown. The part she hadn’t: that for a half-second it hadn’t felt like she had thrown it. It had felt like the magic had stopped consulting her and simply acted, and she had been carried along as an interested observer.
Phyllis had warned her about this exact sensation.
Magic power doesn’t only affect the physique. It shapes character. If you use it to pursue something, it will guide you toward it. You need to know what you’re actually pursuing before it decides for you.
What are you fighting for?
The question she hadn’t been able to answer on the march to the front. The question she’d been putting off with motion and training and purpose and loyalty.
Because you’re an Extraordinary. The potential is enormous. But potential without an anchor doesn’t build — it erodes. The Transcendents who became Transcendents all faced this moment. The ones who didn’t — the demons found them, eventually.
Ashes closed her hand. The residual tremor from the impact was still there if she looked for it, faint as a struck bell still ringing.
She was beginning to understand what she should be fighting for.
Not yet sure she had the words. But the shape of it was clarifying.
Roland hung up the telephone and called the Administrative Office.
“Connect me to Barov.”
Barov answered on the second ring, his voice carrying the specific alertness of a man who had learned that calls from the king during unusual hours indicated unusual requirements.
“The elementary school exam — when does it sit?”
“Next week, Your Majesty. Approximately 2,650 students.”
“Good. Draft me a recruitment proposal. New project. Five hundred people to start.”
“As you command.”
The current Neverwinter operated on a principle Roland had built deliberately, though he’d have described it more plainly: people who know things teach people who don’t, the circle expands, and somewhere in that expansion the techniques stop belonging to individuals and start belonging to the system. It was the difference between a workshop and an industry, between knowledge that died when its holder did and knowledge that compounded. It was slow until suddenly it wasn’t. The city had crossed that threshold and was still accelerating.
He opened the bottom drawer and removed the stack of papers he’d been annotating since the night attack at Tower Station No. 1.
The research had started in the Dream World. Most of the theoretical material was there, in the architectural memory of a life he’d lived in a different place, a different century. What required work was translation — not language but circumstance, adapting what had existed for specific factories and supply chains to what Neverwinter could actually manufacture with current resources. He had been working through this problem the way he worked through most engineering problems, which was to say: by writing down the constraints first and refusing to pretend they weren’t there.
The constraints pointed to one solution.
“New idea?” Nightingale materialized from the grey of the Mist without ceremony, a piece of dried fish in one hand, her tone managing to be simultaneously skeptical and curious.
“Yes.” Roland sorted through the pages, found the sheet he wanted, set it on top. “That’s it.”
Nightingale moved behind his shoulder and looked. She had the quality, after years of this, of reading his papers without reading into them — taking in the actual content rather than confirming expectations. “Looks like an oversized bamboo tube.” She tilted her head. “What’s it called?”
Roland’s mouth curved. “The RPG’s ancestor.”
“R… P… G.” She pronounced each letter with the careful enunciation of someone who suspects the joke is coming and wants to be ready for it. “That’s a code name? Or someone’s initials?”
“In the Dream World it’s been called a great many things. The name itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that it became so prevalent it achieved a kind of religious following.”
Nightingale’s eyes sharpened with the specific expression she wore when Roland said something that sounded like deflection but probably wasn’t. “Like the twin blades of legend? The ones that were supposed to save and destroy everything?”
“Those are your words, not mine. But the principle isn’t entirely wrong — a modern version of this weapon did reshape the balance of power in ways that are hard to overstate.” He set the paper flat. “This, however, is the ancestor. The humble version. We start here.”
“The Black Ribbon. The Madame.” Nightingale recited two words from a list she’d apparently been maintaining. “Those were the evolved forms of the glider and the concrete ship, right? I do pay attention.”
“Ahem.” Roland looked at the paper instead of at her. “Those are — we don’t need to revisit those names.”
“Of course not.” She bit off a piece of dried fish. “So. Why this weapon now?”
Roland leaned back. The northern slope engagement and the Tower Station No. 1 night attack had demonstrated the same structural problem from two angles: regular infantry could not effectively engage Senior Demons. This wasn’t a morale problem or a training problem. It was a physics problem. Senior Demons had magic barriers — varying in type and strength, but consistent in their presence, some reflexive variant of the shielding ability that presumably represented ten thousand years of evolutionary pressure filtering out the demons who hadn’t developed it. If you stood a human soldier in front of a Senior Demon and gave that soldier a rifle, the outcome was not good. The demon moved, covered distance, and closed to a range where the rifle became irrelevant before a sufficient number of rounds connected.
The God’s Punishment Witches existed to solve this problem. Three hundred of them. Against a demon army that appeared to be fielding Senior Demons in increasing numbers.
The math didn’t work.
It didn’t require anything but arithmetic to see that it didn’t work, and Roland had a deep suspicion that the arithmetic was going to get worse before it got better. So the question became: how do you give an ordinary soldier the capability to damage or kill a Senior Demon?
The answer was: you gave them something that delivered enough kinetic energy to a small point, fast enough that even a moving target couldn’t fully compensate, with sufficient blast radius to prevent the demon from using its speed advantage to simply step aside.
An anti-armor warhead, in essence. Against a magic barrier that functioned like armor.
“The Panzerfaust,” he said, which was the name the Dream World had given to the most elegant early solution to this problem. A cylinder. A propellant charge of black powder — simple, manufacturable, no complex chemistry required. A shaped charge in a warhead designed to focus energy inward at a single point rather than disperse it outward. The Monroe Effect, he’d learned to call it, though it would need a different name here.
The original version had problems — short range, poor accuracy, limited to one shot, dangerous backblast that required open space behind the shooter. Roland wasn’t planning to simply copy it. He was planning to begin with its principles and address the known failure modes from the start: a modified nozzle at the rear of the tube to convert the propellant force and extend range, a folding tail fin on the projectile to stabilize flight and improve accuracy, a proper grip and sight because any weapon that couldn’t be aimed reliably wasn’t a weapon so much as a directed prayer.
The shaped charge warranted the most attention. The hollow cone warhead — inverted, recessed, positioned correctly relative to the target surface — could direct the explosion’s energy into a focused jet rather than letting it spread. Against a magic barrier that had to absorb the whole impact rather than shed it laterally, a focused penetrator changed the calculation substantially.
All of this was producible. Black powder he had in quantity. Sheet steel and mild steel Anna could work. Machining the nozzle geometry required precision but not impossibility. The cost per unit, in materials, was low enough to not require calculation.
He stood and walked to the window. Below him the city continued its evening business — lamplit windows, the distant sound of the rail terminus, smoke rising from three forge chimneys in a line.
Any soldier trained for a week. A shaped charge that could breach a magic barrier. The Senior Demon advantage, suddenly portable, suddenly answerable by anyone who could carry a tube and pull a trigger.
He had, as far as he could tell, found a good deal.