Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 129: The Evening Course Begins Again

Roland spent the next morning working through the implications of what the pills were.

Not what they did — he’d seen that — but what they were. God’s Stone material, refined and concentrated and made orally active. A God’s Stone suppressed magic by generating some form of nullifying field. If that field could be redirected inward, made to consume the user’s body at a controlled rate and route the released energy into physical output—

He stopped himself. That chain of reasoning required assumptions he couldn’t verify and would produce conclusions he couldn’t act on yet. What he could act on was the empirical data from the test.

The pills worked. The enhancement was real and substantial — an untrained man had rattled a senior knight and outrun a horse for the length of the test perimeter. The side effects were permanent and lethal, the body consuming itself once the active phase ended. And the Church had offered them at cost, with apparently no concern about what happened to the users afterward.

Because a soldier who uses up in one campaign is still a soldier they had for one campaign. He wrote that down and looked at it. And if they have thousands of pills and thousands of willing users, the math is acceptable to them.

Which meant the question wasn’t whether the Church would use them. The question was on whose behalf.

Timothy was fighting from a position of weakness after Eagle City. Garcia was strong but geographically constrained. Either could be the beneficiary of a Church intervention that tipped the scales — and if that intervention came in the form of enhanced soldiers who didn’t know they were consuming themselves—

He added two items to his priority list, circled them twice, and sent for his engineering staff.

The breech-loading rifle was conceptually straightforward. He could sketch the mechanism in thirty minutes: a rotating or pivoting breech block, a self-contained cartridge with primer, powder, and ball. The principle was nineteenth century, not sixteenth; it existed in his memory as a thing that had been invented and worked. What he didn’t have was the primer compound.

Mercury fulminate. He knew the name, knew the raw materials — nitric acid, mercury — and knew he was missing steps. He also knew it was shock-sensitive enough to blow off the fingers of anyone who got the synthesis wrong. Which meant he needed an alchemist, not a soldier, and a dedicated workspace in a location where an accidental detonation wouldn’t take out anything irreplaceable.

He wrote out a budget for the laboratory, a site requirement, and a recruitment notice for qualified alchemists, and passed all three to Barov. Barov looked at the budget with the expression of a man who had learned to stop asking why and started asking where is this going, and took it without comment.

The population was about to increase. The factory capacity for rifles needed to keep pace. He added expanded production facilities to the construction queue behind the furnaces and the toilet structures, and then stopped himself before the list became infinite.

One thing at a time. In the right order.

The evening course had been interrupted by the campaign. Roland restarted it after dinner.

He had thought about what the most efficient educational structure was for Border Town’s development — had sketched curricula in the margins of other documents, revised them, revised them again — and had arrived at a conclusion that was equal parts strategy and convenience: teach Scroll everything, in sequence, and Scroll’s memory would convert the teaching into a reproducible curriculum. Anna was included because Anna would be there whether he invited her or not, and because she had the unusual quality of asking questions that were better than the ones he’d expected.

He started with matter.

Molecules, atoms, the basic building blocks — he kept it phenomenological, grounded in things they could see. Ice to water to steam: the same substance, different states, driven by the activity level of the particles composing it. A flame is not a separate thing; it is matter moving fast enough to emit light. Temperature is not a property objects possess; it is a description of how fast their components are moving.

Scroll listened with her total and slightly unnerving attention, capturing it all in the format she would later produce as a textbook. Anna asked three questions. Two of them he could answer. The third — what causes the particles to attract each other rather than dispersing infinitely — he could not answer precisely enough to satisfy her, and said so.

She looked at the candle flame while he admitted it, with an expression he couldn’t read.

Around the third candle, he became aware of a sound from the sofa. Nightingale had been there since approximately the Newtonian mechanics section, and she was now demonstrating what happened when a person who spent all night standing guard over a prince’s sleep finally encountered a warm room and a comfortable surface. Her posture was, objectively, the least dignified he had ever seen her achieve.

He took his coat off the back of his chair.

“That’s enough for tonight,” he told Anna and Scroll.

He draped the coat over Nightingale carefully, not waking her. Blew out the remaining candle. Led the other two into the corridor and pulled the door closed without a sound.

In the dark hallway, Anna was watching him with an expression he couldn’t interpret and didn’t try to.

“Good night,” he said.

She bowed. “Good night, Your Highness.”

He went to bed and slept without reviewing the list again.

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