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Chapter 1156: The Battle of Taquila (II)

Lightning crossed the demon encampment, climbed until the formation below her was a smear of shapes in moonlight, and stopped.

She hung in the air for a long moment. Behind her — south, where the ruins were — she could feel the Magic Slayer’s attention the way you feel a fire at your back: not warmth, exactly, but a kind of pressure.

He hadn’t followed her.

She turned around and looked south, into the darkness where Taquila sat in its ruin and its Red Mist and its four hundred years of occupation. She could not see the Magic Slayer. He could see her — her silhouette was against the moon, backlit, unmissable to anything with decent night vision.

He still didn’t move.

He can’t catch me and he knows it. She’d proven that. Not as an article of faith, not as a performance for Sylvie’s benefit, but as a demonstrated fact: she had entered his anti-magic field’s range, felt it brush her boots, and come out the other side. He had calculated the same math she had and arrived at the same conclusion.

She raised her right hand. Extended one finger.

Roland had been embarrassed teaching her this gesture. He’d turned slightly pink at the ears and explained it in the most neutral possible terms: a gesture used in my world to indicate that you’ve won a contest. Use it when you’ve genuinely earned it.

She held it for three seconds.

Then she turned and flew back.

The encampment was already alive with sound by the time she descended.

She delivered her report to Sylvie in the observation room — cylinder dimensions, position, the demon columns stacked behind the mobile God’s Stone shields — and Sylvie relayed it to the artillery in precise sequential calls. Agatha computed the geometry. Van’er’s battalion acknowledged.

The Longsong Cannons began.

Muzzle flashes bloomed from the encampment in sequence, each one leaving an afterimage that hung in the eye for a second before fading. Shells arced northeast over the Fertile Plains — she could track the angle of the fire by the direction of the light — and she heard, a few seconds later, the first distant concussions from where they landed. The night absorbed the sound and gave it back as a low, sustained rumble.

Maggie surfaced from the front of Lightning’s flight suit, enormous owl-eyes reflecting the muzzle flashes, and said with great reverence: “So beautiful, coo.”

Lightning stood into the wind and felt the knots in her hands slowly release.

One more obstacle, she thought. One left.

She already knew what it was.

Ursrook watched from altitude and felt something he did not usually feel.

He examined the feeling and identified it as revision. He was revising his estimate of the situation based on new evidence.

The “fiery rain” — he had filed this in his reports to the Sky Lord as escalation of thermal weapons, fire-type, medium-range, probable witch-sourced. He still thought that was accurate. What he had not accounted for, watching six months of incremental combat, was the rate at which the humans integrated new capabilities into existing doctrine. They didn’t just produce the weapon. They trained it, coordinated it with their scouting system, built supply chains to sustain it. He had seen the artillery fire go from reactive to anticipatory across six months — from responding to demon advances to shaping them, cutting off lines of approach before they could be used.

The stone pillars had been effective initially. The King had believed a hundred of them would annihilate the human race. Ursrook had not agreed with this assessment even when he’d received them, but he had worked with what he had.

Less than forty remained.

The shells bounced off the God’s Stone cylinders — that much was true, the stone was impervious — but they reached the symbiotic demons sheltering behind, and the demons’ armor, which had held against everything in previous cycles, was not designed for this. Iron fragments traveling at the velocities these weapons achieved penetrated the articulation points, the joints, the exposed sections. Each hit that didn’t kill left a demon less effective than before.

He had submitted his honest assessment: the pillar strategy was containment, not victory. The Sky Lord had disagreed.

Below him, the demon formation was slowing under the artillery fire. The junior demons had fallen behind the cylinders’ advance pace — the fire was landing in the space between the shields and the main body, cutting communication and coordination. Not destroying the assault, not yet, but degrading it.

He made the decision methodically, the way he made all decisions: the night was optimal conditions for the assault, the humans had less visibility, the formation was still intact enough to close the gap if pushed. To let the advance stall was to lose the advantage of the blind zones entirely once daylight came.

He accelerated.

Three anti-aircraft gun positions swung toward him simultaneously. He had learned their aiming patterns, their lead times, the particular delay between the human observer’s decision and the barrel’s adjustment. He moved through the tracking arcs before they corrected, shed speed at the last moment, grabbed the basket of the nearest observation balloon with both hands.

The man inside saw him for approximately one second.

Ursrook dropped the body.

He threw back his head and produced the command: a sound that carried through the Red Mist, through the demon communication network, to every unit on the battlefield. The junior demons heard it not as a sound exactly but as an instruction encoded in the vibration of the air. They knew what it meant.

Now.

The encampment erupted from three sides as the junior demons abandoned their cover and swarmed.

Three hours of artillery had not broken the First Army.

Iron Axe had watched it from the underground headquarters — had listened to it, really, because the Eye of Magic was still blinded by the God’s Stone cylinders and he was running the battle on sound and telephone reports. Every five minutes: a crash from above, dust from the ceiling, the reports coming in from the surface about demon positions and ammunition expenditure and casualties.

Zero casualties in the first three hours. He was proud of his soldiers for that and said nothing about it, because the night wasn’t over.

“They’ll fight back when they’re in mortar range,” Edith had said. She was right about most things. “The flares will change the situation.”

“When?” Iron Axe had asked.

“When they’re close enough to see.”

Three kilometers. That was the threshold they’d planned for.

When the sensors reported the cylinders at three kilometers and closing — the Magic Slayer’s order having pushed the advance back into motion — Iron Axe picked up the command telephone.

“Van’er. Flares. Maximum arc. Now.”

The encampment shuddered with a different quality of discharge: the flare mortars, lighter, faster, the shells climbing high and then splitting open at altitude. The magnesium-aluminum mixture caught — brilliant, white-orange, searingly bright after hours of artillery muzzle flash.

The Fertile Plains came back.

Shadows snapped into existence across the field. The demon formation materialized from the darkness — the cylinders, the Spider Demons laboring behind them, the columns of Mad Demons that had been invisible shapes for the last three hours suddenly resolved into specific bodies at specific distances with specific vulnerabilities.

The Artillery Battalion didn’t wait for orders.

The Longsong Cannons and the mortars and the heavy machine guns opened simultaneously, and the night became noon.

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