Chapter 1151: The Ambush Plan (II)
Edith had said the new weapon made by Queen Anna, and Roland had known exactly what she meant.
The God’s Stone bullet. Six weeks of development, three of them spent entirely on the question of caliber.
The problem was geometric. God’s Stone of Retaliation suppressed magic within a radius proportional to its size — a small stone created a small dead zone, a large stone created a large one. To have any meaningful effect on a Senior Demon in the air, the stone needed to be large enough that the suppression field extended beyond the Devibeast’s wingspan and reached the rider. Which meant the stone needed to be large. Which meant the casing needed to be large. Which meant the barrel needed to match the casing.
At thirty-five millimeters, the mathematics worked.
The God’s Stone itself was shaped into a thirty-millimeter cylinder — uniformly round, copper-coated, with a pointed brass jacket to carry it through the air without the pressure of firing crushing it. The suppression field would reach approximately one and a half meters from the impact point, which was enough to pull a Devibeast rider out of the air.
The barrel had to be two meters minimum to keep the stone from entering its own dead zone during firing. The barrel at two meters, chambered for a thirty-five millimeter cartridge, required a mount rather than a shoulder stock — the recoil would break a shoulder. The mount required assembly. Assembly required cover.
The full system — barrel, mount, two-person operation, assembly time — was the reason for the jungle. Not the sightlines. Not the terrain. The weapon needed time to set up, and time required concealment.
Anna had designed the final version. Roland had reviewed her calculations and found nothing to correct. He trusted the result.
“The ambush team,” Edith said, moving to the second section of the briefing. “Sylvie: Eye of Magic, target tracking. Andrea: primary shot. Camilla and Margie: weapon assembly and support. Ashes: general protection — her role is to ensure the team survives any complications before or after the shot.”
She paused.
“Lightning: scout and transport.”
Roland caught the slight weight she put on that.
The God’s Stone bullet couldn’t be carried in a standard supply pack. It suppressed magic within a meter and a half — which meant that anything magical near it stopped working, including the abilities of any witch who got close enough. Lightning could carry it by hanging it on a rope, keeping the stone at arm’s length, below her feet as she flew. The field wouldn’t reach her at that distance.
Maggie couldn’t do the same. Maggie’s transformation was her ability — if the stone suppressed it, she stopped being a bird and started falling.
Which meant Lightning carried the bullet, and Lightning’s ability remained functional only because she kept the rope at exactly the right length.
Nothing about this plan has excessive margin, Roland noted.
“The Seagull team,” Edith continued. “Tilly, piloting. Wendy, wind. Four God’s Punishment Witches — Zoe leading. The limiting factor is payload: the God’s Stone rifle, assembled, the grenades, and the armor have taken the weight allocation. We’ve reduced the team from the original fourteen to ten. Hummingbird has done what she can with the equipment weight.”
A pause.
“No complex tactics for the Seagull team. Their mission is direct: follow the retreating demons until the Magic Slayer separates from the formation. When he’s in the jungle sight line and Andrea has him, Tilly holds position. If he moves, Tilly tracks him and Andrea adjusts.”
Roland looked at the map.
The operation exhausted most of the Special Unit’s capacity in a single engagement. If it failed — if the Magic Slayer wasn’t drawn out, or if the bullet didn’t suppress his ability in time, or if a second Senior Demon appeared that wasn’t accounted for in the plan — there was no reserve. The next operation of this scale would take months to prepare.
This was the correct choice anyway. The Magic Slayer was the single most dangerous asset the demons had deployed against the Fertile Plains front. Leaving him operational while the railway extended toward Taquila was not a viable alternative to the risk. But Roland had been trained by the experience of the last two years to notice when there was no recovery option, and to name it clearly rather than let the adrenaline of the planning session make it look smoother than it was.
He named it in his own head. Then he set it aside.
Edith looked at him at the end of the briefing. Not quite at him. Somewhere in the area of his left shoulder, which meant she was about to say something she expected to be received badly.
“Your Majesty,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Once the final operation begins, I’d like to request that you and the City Hall relocate to the Third Border City for the duration.” She kept her eyes on his shoulder. “The witches in the Castle District as well.”
Barov, who had been waiting for two hours for exactly this kind of opportunity, cleared his throat loudly.
“Are you suggesting His Majesty has insufficient defenses at the capital?” he said.
“I’m suggesting that we don’t know the exact size of the demon force,” Edith said, with perfect patience. She turned to Barov and addressed him directly, which was a choice she made deliberately and which had the effect of making Barov feel simultaneously addressed and diminished. “The Red Mist supply line tells us how many teams are running it, not how many demons total are deployed. If the demons decide that Taquila is lost and redirect their available Senior Demons toward Neverwinter instead—”
“They’ve come to Neverwinter before,” Anna said. The question in her voice was not alarm, exactly, but attention.
“They came to demonstrate capability. This time they would not be demonstrating.” Edith folded her hands. “If it’s a Senior Demon who knows where the Castle District is, at maximum speed, and we have a standard guard rotation—”
“I take your point,” Roland said.
Barov’s prepared objection deflated.
“Barov,” Roland continued, “handle the City Hall relocation. You know the protocol. Third Border City, minimum disruption, standard security posture.” He looked at Edith. “The witches in the Castle District will move when we do.”
Edith put her hand flat against her chest.
“Thank you,” she said.
To be entirely transparent, Roland thought, I was planning to watch the battle through the phantom instrument from the Third Border City anyway. The relocation was Edith’s suggestion, but the conclusion was identical. There was a certain pleasure in a subordinate’s independent reasoning landing in the same place as your own.
He stood.
The room went still in the way it went still when he was about to speak — not silent, exactly, but attentive in a way that had a physical weight.
“You already know what this is,” he said. “You’ve been preparing for it longer than most of you have known me. The demons have had the Fertile Plains for four hundred years and we are taking it back from them. Very few people outside this room understand what that means. The ones who come after us will.” He let that sit. “Beat them. Take Taquila. I’ll be watching from the window and expecting good news.”
He looked around the room — the ancient witches and the trained soldiers and the engineers and the strategists, all of them sitting in the same underground chamber with the same map on the same table — and felt something that was not quite pride and not quite gratitude but was adjacent to both.
“That’s all,” he said. “Dismissed.”
The hall answered as one voice.
He stayed at the table after they filed out, with the map in front of him and Edith’s calculations running through his head.
Outside, through the stone ceiling, the Fertile Plains waited.