Chapter 1158: The Defeat
The celebration ended before noon.
The officers knew, and the soldiers knew, and the witches who had been at the front for six months knew: winning a battle was not the same as winning the war. The Magic Slayer was still at large. The railway still needed to reach Taquila. Until the Graycastle flag stood in the ruin and the army had safely withdrawn, the jubilation was premature.
The First Army went back to work.
Wounded were treated. Casualties were counted. The railway was inspected section by section for damage from the night’s engagement. The battlefield was cleared under guard, because demon dead could still contain surprises and no one had forgotten the Spider Demon incidents.
At the command level, the analysis took most of the morning. The executive estimate: fewer than five hundred demons remaining in the ruin after the battle. Not zero — enough to defend if they chose to — but not enough to stop the railway’s final push. The decisive fight for Taquila itself was still ahead, but it would be fought on the First Army’s terms, at the First Army’s timing.
The focus shifted.
The ambush plan had always depended on one thing: the Magic Slayer choosing to run. As long as he was willing to die in Taquila, the plan was irrelevant. But Ursrook was too intelligent for that kind of sacrifice, and the battle had been too badly lost. The bombardment that followed over the next three days simply confirmed it — artillery driving the Mad Demon remnants from their trenches back into the ruin, step by step, until even the trenches were gone.
The Magic Slayer appeared occasionally. He moved differently now — less as a combatant testing the line, more as a commander calculating when to stop testing. He never came close enough for a clean engagement. The machine gun squads reported him circling, at altitude, watching.
He’s deciding, Andrea thought, on the third day of the bombardment. She had climbed to the observation tower in the early afternoon and was watching the ruin through a field scope. The smoke from the morning’s shells was thinning. She could make out the outlines of the Giant Skeletons. He’s deciding when to leave and which direction to take.
On the fourth day, the railway reached ten kilometers from Taquila.
Van’er had come up with the rope arrangement himself: one line of cord running from the firing mechanisms of all twelve cannons to a single central position where the God’s Punishment Witches waited. One pull, one salvo. It was simple and it was correct, and when he explained it to Agatha she’d given him the particular look she reserved for solutions she wished she’d thought of first.
The hundred God’s Punishment Witches stood at their positions in the pale morning light, holding the rope, waiting for Van’er’s flag.
Phyllis was beside Agatha. She had said, earlier, without prelude: I thought it would be a disaster to entrust important tasks to mortals. I said so more than once, four hundred years ago. I laughed at you for choosing to work with them.
Agatha had waited.
It’s not too bad, Phyllis said. Fighting beside mortals. It’s not too bad at all.
The flag came down.
The rope pulled.
The cannons spoke simultaneously — a sound that was not individual explosions but a single event, a sustained crack that rolled across the Fertile Plains and didn’t stop, because the reloading was already happening and the second salvo came before the first echo had finished traveling.
The shells hit Taquila.
Agatha stood in the smoke and the sound and watched the ruin disappear behind the rising dust of its own destruction. The walls that were still standing. The towers that had survived four centuries of occupation. The streets she had run through as a seventeen-year-old being told by someone older and more frightened than her that there was still hope, there was always still hope.
She had believed it.
She had kept believing it for four hundred years.
Somewhere underneath those walls, her sister lay in the ground where she’d chosen to stay.
The third salvo went out. Then the fourth.
Agatha stood and watched and said nothing, because there was nothing adequate to say.
In the jungle west of the Red Mist supply line, Sylvie was watching through the Eye of Magic when the Giant Skeleton screamed.
It surprised her. She had not expected living things inside the Skeletons — had filed them as some kind of magical construct, mechanical, unfeeling. When the shell found the gap in the armored back and the Red Mist began leaking from the wound like blood from something that understood it was bleeding, and the scream came through the air all the way to the ambush position, she felt something she could only describe as unsettled.
“The Magic Slayer is moving,” she said.
A pause. Then: “He turned back. He’s retreating. The Skeletons are retreating with him. The Mad Demons are trying to stop them—” She watched, uncomprehending. “They’re being crushed. The Skeletons are walking through their own escort.”
The ambush team held its positions.
“The Magic Slayer has left Taquila,” Sylvie said.
Andrea was already at the gun.
Margie had been complaining about hot pot for the fifth consecutive day when the signal came, and by the time the signal came nobody was thinking about hot pot anymore. The witches in the jungle were on their feet before Sylvie finished speaking, the God’s Stone rifle assembled in the time it had taken to train it, Lightning holding the round at arm’s length on its rope, the whole mechanism aligned to the shooting lane they’d spent a week selecting.
Andrea touched the gun and felt it settle into her shoulder — the stock cold, the weight familiar — and opened her ability.
Her vision stretched.
The world became lines: thousands of them, silver and red and gold, threading through the air between her and everything that existed in the direction she was looking. Most of them extinguished immediately, irrelevant angles, bad trajectories. She waited for the one that would hold.
It came.
A single silver curve, steady, aimed at the armored shape moving along the supply line — northeast, slightly east of their lane, slightly close to the edge of her range, but inside it.
He doesn’t know we’re here. She could see it in the way he moved: purposeful, not cautious, the flight path of a creature that had decided on its direction and hadn’t yet thought about interception.
Eight kilometers. Northeast wind. This is the shot.
“Load,” she said.
Ashes loaded.
The bolt closed. The click was very quiet.
Andrea exhaled.
Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t move.
She pulled the trigger.
The gun hit her like a wall. She felt it in her shoulder, her collarbone, her teeth — a blow that no buffer could fully absorb, the physics of a thirty-five millimeter cartridge expressing itself through her body at once. Ashes caught her before she fell.
“I really don’t like—” Andrea started.
“Did you hit it?” Ashes said.
“The bullet is still traveling.” Andrea counted seconds. The silver thread was shrinking. The target was still moving. Twenty-five seconds at this range, and anything could happen in twenty-five seconds.
Don’t move. Don’t move.
The Magic Slayer turned around.
Their eyes met across nine kilometers of open air.
Then the bullet hit him in the back.
The God’s Stone crumbled on impact and the suppression field released all at once — a concentrated burst rather than a sustained field, every unit of energy delivered at the moment of impact. The armor split. The wound was not a wound. It was a rupture, something that had been pressurized from the inside suddenly free to expand. The Magic Slayer’s torso opened. His body folded at the middle.
He fell.
Andrea became aware, with some delay, that she had been holding her breath.
“The Magic Slayer is dead,” Sylvie said. Her voice was very controlled. “The bullet severed him in half. There is no recovery from that injury.”
Margie made a sound that was mostly relief and partly triumph.
“Good job,” Ashes said, and patted Andrea on the shoulder that wasn’t currently on fire.
Andrea was still thinking about that look. Nine kilometers. Dense jungle between them. The Magic Slayer looking directly at her, not searching, not scanning — directly, the way you look at something you already know is there.
Did he spot me?
She thought about asking Sylvie. She thought about whether it mattered, now that he was dead.
Then she thought about something else.
“Ashes,” she said. “That cut you got — the one from the forest attack. The shallow one. How long does it usually take to heal?”
Ashes considered this. “An hour or two. Why?”
“Does it still hurt?”
Ashes touched her cheek. Paused.
“It does,” she said. “That’s—”
Sylvie’s voice arrived in the same moment, sharp and stripped of its usual calm:
“Watch out.”
The shadow fell from above without sound.