Rewrite That Witch
CH1260 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1260: Passion

Tilly watched through the Eye of Magic as the first team scattered.

Plane 1 and Plane 3 split in opposite directions, moving to bracket Team 2 from both flanks. A reasonable instinct. But Team 2 held their formation — three planes close together, a wedge of weight bearing down on Plane 1, the nearest target.

Three against one. Plane 1’s pilot could have accepted the trade: absorb the hit, take at least one of the three down with him before the red flag. He didn’t. Panic chose for him — a hard stomp on the left pedal, the nose swinging away, trying to run. Five hundred meters separated the teams when he broke. Team 2 pivoted instantly and gave chase.

What followed was an education in numbers. The pilot of Plane 1 threw everything at the problem — every technique from the past month compressed into a single frantic performance, the plane diving and twisting, climbing and cutting. Tilly could see, even at this distance, that he had worked hard. The aircraft responded cleanly. It wasn’t enough. Three opponents meant he was always watching the wrong one; every time he covered his tail, someone else settled into position. He dropped, slowed, ran out of sky to maneuver in — and turned to charge, desperate, directly at Plane 3.

Which was exactly when Plane 6 dove from above, nose angled down at thirty degrees, riding Plane 1’s tail with nowhere left to be argued out of.

Ten seconds.

“Red flag for Plane 1,” Tilly said.

“Plane 1 is down,” Finkin confirmed, head craned back over his shoulder. “The number on the field is red — but they’re still fighting, they can’t see it from up here!”

“They’ll figure it out,” Good said, studying the field below. His team had performed worse than he’d expected. Plane 1 panicked. “Where’s Plane 3?”

“Black dot coming northeast — has to be them! Mate, it’s a mess down there. Time to join!”

“One more minute.” Good didn’t look up. “Turn around. Can you see the sun?”

Finkin turned. The light hit him full in the face and he flinched back, eyes squeezed shut. “I’m blind. You absolute — yes. We’re directly in the sun.”

“Which is why they haven’t seen us,” Good said. He pushed the lever forward. “Now.”

“Yesssss!”

The engine bellowed. The plane shook as it pushed through the air currents, the whole frame vibrating in Good’s hands, the sensation spreading up his arms and through his chest until he couldn’t separate his own pulse from the aircraft’s. He aimed the nose at the fight below and let it fall.

He was a charging knight. The whole sky was under him.

The pilot of Plane 3 was focused on the slowest plane in Team 2 — the safe target, the obvious target. Planes 4 and 5 were closing from two angles, eyes forward, triangulating. None of them were looking back into the sun.

When the shadow arrived, it arrived too late to matter.

Finkin had time. He used it.

The two Team 2 pilots heard the plane before they saw it, and in that brief moment of realization they had to choose: break off Plane 3 and deal with the new threat, or hold position and let Finkin take the aim. They hesitated. That was the decision, even though they hadn’t meant to make it.

Good swept past Plane 4 and turned immediately for Plane 5. He had locked a firing solution on Plane 4 on the way in — couldn’t be certain of the result, but he had aimed and Tilly would judge accordingly. Plane 5 was close. He could see the machine gunner’s face, white and rigid, tracking Good’s approach with the expression of a man who has just realized the situation has changed.

Four planes tangled in the air above the Swirling Sea. Chase and counter-chase, turn overlapping turn, each pilot trying to establish an angle and losing it before it could be held. Good pushed the airspeed as high as it would go. He was faster and he used it — burning through the engagement, never settling long enough to be bracketed, looping back to threaten before Plane 5 could stabilize.

“Five is red!” Finkin shouted.

A beat later: “Three is down too.”

The field below them confirmed it. Two red numbers.

Now: Plane 6 and Plane 2.

“What were they doing?” Finkin’s voice had dropped from triumph into irritation. “Three and one didn’t knock a single plane out! Now it’s three against us!”

“We used them as a distraction from the beginning,” Good said. “And there’s another possibility — that Plane 6 is simply hard to beat.”

The answer came immediately.

Every direction Good chose, Plane 6 was already cutting off. Not guessing — anticipating, the pilot reading Good’s movements before they fully resolved into action. The turns that had kept him alive against Planes 4 and 5 weren’t working: Plane 6 moved differently, tighter and faster, and the gunner in the rear seat was tracking every approach. Good had to keep moving. The moment he slowed to establish position, Plane 6 would be inside his range.

“Fly faster!” Finkin snapped.

“I’m already at limit.”

“We’ll be knocked out. Do something! The port — we can use the ships for cover!”

“And if we hit a refugee ship?”

”…They’d execute us.” A pause. “Forget the port. We’re done unless the wind cooperates.”

Wind.

The word struck something.

“You’re right,” Good said, and the geometry assembled itself in an instant. “I know how to get out.”

“What?”

“The upwind at the cliff. Do you remember it?”

The cliff along the Academy’s shoreline. The way the sea wind hit the stone and folded back on itself — a specific current in a specific band of altitude, unpredictable in timing, violent in effect. Sailors had learned to read it by watching the birds that nested there. The upwind existed only in a narrow band; outside it, the sea breeze swallowed it entirely. The cliff’s uneven face sent air in every direction at once. Trying to fly through it was worse than threading a ship through rocks.

“You’re insane,” Finkin said flatly. “There might not even be an upwind right now. Get too close to that cliff and you’ll put us into the stone.”

“I need a little lift and we’ll reverse our position entirely.” Good was already turning. “There’s a way to read the timing.”

“How could you possibly — ”

“The refugee ships. Watch the birds on the mast.”

Plane 6 saw the turn and came after them. Good let it close. Let it close further. He needed Plane 6 committed, moving fast, no time to adjust once the moment came.

The Academy’s shoreline grew ahead of them. The cliff face rose white and broken, the sea working against its base. Below on the water, a ship was moving toward the Shallow Port — immigrants at the rails, most of them staring up with the confused terror of people for whom aircraft were still miraculous and possibly violent things.

Good wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at the birds on the mast.

“We’re inside the range,” Finkin said, very quietly. “Six seconds. Five — four — three — ”

The birds moved.

Not randomly — all at once, a single decision spreading through the flock, wings lifting them off the mast in a sweep that curved toward the cliff. Good had watched them for weeks from the runway. They didn’t flap when they rode the updraft. They glided.

The moment the first bird reached the cliff’s edge, Good pulled back on the lever with everything he had.

The elevation angle was dangerous. Any other moment, any other aircraft speed, it would have been a stall. But the upwind hit the plane from below like a hand placed flat against the underside, and instead of stalling, the whole aircraft surged — shook violently, yes, trembled in a way that moved through the airframe and through Good’s chest and arms — and then reversed, shooting upward, the world pivoting around him until the horizon was where the sky had been.

Everything was upside down.

Time stopped.

In the space between one second and the next, Good saw Plane 6 directly below him, the pilot looking up through the gap between wings — astonished, exposed, completely unprepared for anything to be above him and inside his rear arc simultaneously.

Somewhere past the horizon, a flock of birds burst out of the cliff-top, their white wings spread wide, ascending in a column toward the sun.

Finkin was already counting.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

Good hadn’t lied to Princess Tilly.

He had joined the Aerial Knight reserve and learned to want flying the way he had never wanted anything else — not ambition, not competition, something simpler and more fundamental. The trembling in his hands before every flight wasn’t fear and wasn’t excitement; it was the body recognizing what it was about to do and refusing to be still about it.

That was what he had meant by passion. He hadn’t known how to say it then. He understood it now.

The situation had changed.

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