Rewrite That Witch
CH1155 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 1155: The Battle of Taquila (I)

The alarm cracked through the encampment and the response was already in motion before the echo died.

“Drop what you’re working on! Move to the nearest exit!” The evacuation officers had been doing this for months. Their voices were not panicked — they had the focused sharpness of people who had rehearsed a thing until it was the body’s first language. “Shelter Six is full! Keep moving, next shelter, don’t block the passage!”

Two thousand workers flowed into the underground bunkers through the exit passages. The bunkers were Lotus’s work — steel-lined, reinforced, built into the Fertile Plains bedrock at Roland’s specification. They could absorb mortar fire from above and a machine gun engagement at the surface. Even if the outer defensive ring broke, the shelters would hold.

The surface emptied. The construction site lights went dark. The First Army filed into its positions in the measured silence of a force that knew where its post was.

In the observation room above the underground headquarters, Sylvie stood at the center of a dozen telephone lines and tried to hold the picture together.

The two God’s Stone pillars were still moving — she could track their edges, the boundaries of the blank zone they created. A hundred and fifty meters of blindness, each. Everything inside those zones was simply not there as far as her Eye of Magic was concerned. She could not see through them, could not see what moved behind them, could not tell Iron Axe whether there was a Senior Demon or a thousand Mad Demons or both.

She needed eyes outside the Eye.

“Lightning, Maggie — can you hear me?”

A burst of static. Then Lightning’s voice, tight and level: “We just took off. Maggie’s above me. What happened?”

“Large demon movement. Giant God’s Stone cylinders creating blind zones ahead of the force. I can’t see behind them.”

A pause.

“We’ll take a look.”

“The Magic Slayer—”

“I know.” A breath. “He can hear me at max speed. But if I’m already past him when he hears it—”

“Lightning—”

“I can do this, Sylvie. I’m faster.”

The connection broke.

Lightning had stopped being afraid of the dark some months ago. She had not stopped being afraid of the Magic Slayer — that was a different thing, a specific and calibrated fear that she had learned to function alongside rather than through. The Realm of Silence was available to her again. She had found the entrance back into it six months ago on a railway siding in the dark, and she had not lost it since.

What she felt now, accelerating northeast over the Fertile Plains with Maggie tucked against her chest in owl form — enormous glassy eyes, white feathers, that comical massive head poking from her flight suit’s collar — was not the absence of fear. It was the presence of something stronger.

The train conductor had died bringing the Blackriver to Tower Station No. 1. His son had come to find her and say thank you, and she had not known what to say back. The soldiers in the bunkers below her were down there because she was up here. Lorgar had pinned her under stone and lightning and she had flown through it. Joan had gone under the ocean and not come back.

There were things behind her that required her to go forward.

She broke the sound barrier.

The plains beneath her turned abstract — blur and pressure, the world compressed into a tunnel ahead of her. Behind her: a boom that would roll across the encampment and make heads turn. The Magic Slayer could hear that. Everyone could hear that.

By the time he heard it, she was already gone.

“Magic Slayer — front right — he saw you—” Sylvie’s voice came through the sigil in fragments, the signal degrading from the synchronization of magic power.

Maggie: “That monster — front right — COO—”

The haze came before she processed either warning.

Black. Not darkness — something that absorbed light in the specific way the anti-magic field did, a quality of air rather than a color. It spread from a point ahead and above her, moving to cut off her path.

She dove, went to maximum, felt the edge of the field brush the bottom of her boots — cold, the specific cold of suppressed magic — and then she was through it and the pressure released and she was past him.

She leveled out over the demon encampment.

The formation came into focus in the moonlight: two enormous cylinders of God’s Stone on their sides, each one the size of a bell tower laid flat, moving toward the First Army’s line at the pace of the Spider Demons pushing them. Seven or eight Spider Demons per cylinder, working in unison. Behind each cylinder, the Mad Demons were massed into columns, using the God’s Stone as a mobile shield from aerial fire.

A moving blind zone, she thought. They built them into artillery shields.

Behind the formation, deeper in the ruin, the rest of the force was in the shadows. She couldn’t estimate the full count from this altitude.

Enough.

She climbed. Behind her, from the direction of Taquila, she felt rather than saw the Magic Slayer’s position — he was watching her, she was certain of it, the specific sensation she’d learned to read over the last six months as something that could kill me is aware of me. She kept her back to the moon so she was visible in silhouette.

He did not come.

He knows he can’t catch me.

She turned to face the direction she’d come from, in the darkness above the demon lines, and raised her hand. Extended one finger.

Roland had taught her this. A gesture of victory, he’d called it, slightly flushed about the ears when explaining it. Use it when you’ve earned it.

She had earned it. She was still here. She had gone into the Magic Slayer’s range and come out the other side.

She held it for three seconds.

Then she turned and flew back to the First Army, faster than the sound of it.

Sylvie wrote down Lightning’s report as it came in — cylinder dimensions, approximate position, the formation behind them — and passed the data to Agatha for computation. Agatha worked the geometry and produced firing coordinates within minutes; the output went to the Artillery Battalion.

Van’er acknowledged.

The Longsong Cannons spoke.

The encampment lit from the muzzles — multiple at once, the fire leaping outward, the shells arcing into the darkness toward targets that could only be approximated. Sylvie tracked what she could from the edges of the blind zones. She could not see whether the shells landed true.

But the demons were still moving, and the First Army was answering, and that was the shape of the night.

Above the Fertile Plains, the Seagull held altitude in the dark, waiting.

Discussion

Suggest a change