Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1248: The Use of the Core

Within a week, the intelligence reports confirmed it: the Red Mist had appeared north of the Kingdom of Everwinter, and the evacuation was not going as planned.

The demons had not waited for the Mist to fully spread. They had compressed the Birth Tower’s growth cycle — accelerated it by some method the First Army’s scouts hadn’t anticipated — and come at human settlements from all directions before the timeline anyone had modeled made sense. The immigration units had fought during the retreat. Several were ambushed. Soldiers scattered among panicked refugees; retreat became flight. By Iron Axe’s count, casualties had mounted past three hundred — roughly what Taquila had cost in a single night’s raid. The refugees themselves had suffered worse.

Everyone had been caught flat-footed.

The dispersal of the advance troops had, paradoxically, accelerated the civilian migration — more soldiers broken into smaller groups meant more points of contact, more guidance scattered across more roads south. But the fighting capacity of the northern force had collapsed in proportion. A wrecked army covers more ground and conducts less warfare. Roland had already ordered that no soldier face punishment for flight when survival was the only rational outcome; the consequence was that no one turned to banditry, and the men drifted back to the Wolfheart garrison carrying their experience rather than their shame.

That experience included new threats.

Multiple units reported a variant of the Spider Demon not found in any training manual — heavier armored, harder to bring down than either of the two known types. Mortars and anti-demon grenades could not reliably penetrate the plating. Only the 152-caliber Longsong Cannon had produced confirmed kills. As for the other new Monstrous Beasts that kept appearing in the field reports, Roland had descriptions of their silhouettes. Their capabilities remained unknown.

The demons were learning from their battles. The Monstrous Beasts were evolving.

The leadership gathered for several consecutive meetings. The consensus that emerged: stop the demons’ advance. Buy time for the immigration plan to complete. Every week of delay bought more refugees access to the southern ports.

The numbers from Neverwinter supported urgency from the other direction too. The population surge was straining production, but it was also feeding it — more hands in the plants, more workers on the river, more people studying at night. Roland had always understood this mathematically. The problem was that mathematics moved slower than demons.

He wanted to ship entire cities south at once. The bottleneck was ammunition. The bottleneck after that was transport. The General Staff was working an alternative supply route to replace the railway logistics that had served the Taquila expedition, but solutions to that kind of problem took weeks, not days.

Then he read the specific detail in the rescue report from the Northernmost Port.

Zooey and Carol had offloaded the magic core rather than let it prevent them from turning back. A choice that would have been unthinkable to any Taquila witch even a year ago — and that was precisely what made it interesting.

The ancient witches could handle the cores. They already had. And the cores could do far more than sit in an underground hall waiting for a Chosen One who would never come.

He contacted the three Senior Witches directly.

Through the light screen, Pasha, Alethea, and Celine materialized on the wall — their enormous carrier bodies filling the frame, tentacles resting still, watching him with what he had learned to read as attentiveness rather than patience.

He laid out the idea plainly.

“You mean the Instrument of Divine Retribution as a power converter,” Celine said.

“Not only the Instrument of Divine Retribution. All the magic cores.”

The cores could simulate witch power in theory, provided the ancient witches restructured the cyclones to match. The largest core — the one the ancient records called the Instrument of Divine Retribution, the one designated as the underground civilization’s final secret weapon — had a cyclone of extraordinary complexity. Only the Chosen One could unlock it, and Roland had no magic power. So it had sat in the underground hall, irreplaceable and useless, accumulating reverence.

But if the cores could be converted into functional power sources, they were worth more deployed than preserved.

The only constraint that mattered was irreplaceability. Each core was unique. Once lost, it was gone — a fact that had caused deaths between the Taquila witches and the Starfall City, friendships broken, alliances poisoned. Roland had made a promise at the beginning of the coalition: no coercion, no appropriation. Even now that the Taquila witches had pledged allegiance, the promise stood. He wanted permission, not compliance.

Alethea spoke first, her tone careful. “Your Majesty, you could work with it freely inside the Third Border City. But transporting it — the risk of damage —”

Roland felt the ground shift. Even Alethea — the most resistant, the most invested in the cores’ preservation — was reasoning from concern rather than refusal. “I’ll handle it carefully. It won’t be lost to enemy action. Some wear from repeated use is unavoidable. But a tool that’s used is worth more than a relic that’s guarded.”

Alethea turned to Celine. “How long to convert the Instrument of Divine Retribution into a functional magic device? And to restore it afterward?”

Celine’s tentacles stilled in the way they did when she was calculating. “The cyclone is very complex. Restoration, if it can be done at all, is ten years of work. There would be wear that can’t be undone.” A pause. “But I agree with His Majesty.”

“The core can at least contribute to the war against the demons,” Pasha said. “We no longer need to search for a Chosen One.”

Alethea was quiet for a long moment. “If you all agree,” she said finally, “then I have no objection.”

On screen, Celine’s tentacle tapped once. She turned the smallest degree toward Roland’s image — a gesture with the intimacy of a private aside. See? I persuaded them.

Before he could respond, Pasha spoke again. “Your Majesty — take the Quest Society witches to the Dream World more often.”

A bribe. A transparent one. Roland’s amusement was genuine.

“So,” Celine said, composing herself into formality again — the original carrier’s face never changed, but she had a way of communicating formality through the stillness of her tentacles. “What power type do you want from the Instrument of Divine Retribution?”

He had known the answer for some time. “Mystery Moon’s magnetic force. The attaching magic type. I don’t expect the cyclone conversion to be particularly complicated?”

Celine’s equivalent of a smile. “Leave it to me, Your Majesty.”

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