Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1309: Thunder

The war on the western front had changed how the Sky Lord understood the world.

His knowledge of humans had been assembled from battle reports and the discussions of the Presiding Holy See, filtered through the contempt that most grand lords wore like a second skin. The consensus was old and unquestioned: humans lacked Awakened warriors. Their Upgraded were as rare and unpredictable as those of the demon race, their overall strength volatile, their potential impossible to measure in advance.

Human males without any magical power at all served on the battlefield purely to inflate the numbers — the equivalent of Inferior Demons, the foot soldiers the race had discarded entirely after the first Battle of Divine Will. The Inferior Demons were no longer permitted to fight. They moved supplies, dug trenches, and were otherwise invisible. That a species still fielding them in significant numbers expected to determine the fate of the world was, to put it plainly, absurd.

The Sky-sea Realm inhabitants were a different matter — so far above humans as to make comparison meaningless. From their ocean-devouring ships to their least capable warrior, every one of them wielded magic as though they had been constructed for war. Even the beasts they corrupted eventually grew into power. The Sky-sea Realm was the strongest of the four races, and no serious argument had ever been made otherwise.

This was why Ursrook’s last words had hit the Presiding Holy See like a stone dropped into still water. No one had been ready for them.

Now, Hackzord found himself believing more of them with every passing week.

Human fire alone was not enough to trouble the King. But the discovery his forces had made two weeks ago was not fire.

Without a single witch, without a trace of magical ability — human males, creatures that should have been irrelevant to any real battle — had flown through the sky inside strangely fashioned iron birds.

His first response, when he received the report, was disbelief so complete it felt like a physical refusal. The sky, since before any record existed, had belonged to magic. The heavens existed above the reach of those without power. That was not philosophy; it was the structure of the world. How could creatures that held not a drop of magic intrude on it?

But there had been multiple witnesses. He could not dismiss them all.

He accepted the report. And then the larger implication settled on him: humans were evolving. Not through their manipulation of fire. Something deeper. The rate was wrong — too fast, too sudden, impossible to account for without positing some mechanism that hadn’t been in any of the reports.

He was beginning to be convinced by Silent Disaster’s theory. The Upgrade Theory. Perhaps the Nightmare Lord had already arrived at this conclusion before him, which was why she had chosen to enter the Realm of Mind in search of answers.

There was no mention of the iron birds in Ursrook’s report. Had humans possessed such a weapon at the time, they would have used it. The only coherent explanation was that in less than a year, their development had breached the sky.

An Upgrade. That was the only thing that fit.

Once males became a real battlefield force, the humans’ fighting capacity would multiply in ways the demon race had no current framework for predicting. That was, perhaps, what Ursrook had actually been warning them about — and had not known how to say plainly.

Fortunately for Hackzord, he knew the sky better than any creature alive. The iron birds these humans had built were not substantially stronger than Devilbeasts. As long as he was here, no one else would be permitted to claim the air.

This attack will not fail the way the last one did.

His confidence was not the confidence of contempt — he had put that particular error behind him. His certainty came from somewhere else. From his own title and what it meant.

He was the supreme lord of the sky.

Hackzord stepped through the Door and appeared on the edge of the island.

Around him, his Parasitic Eye Demons kept pace. If ordinary Eye Demons were rare, Parasitic Eye Demons were rarer still — among the most precious resources available to him. Yet Hackzord had deployed them to the front line without hesitation, keeping them close. They were the only reliable counter to Ursrook’s other named target: the witch with the exceptionally long-range attack. As long as she didn’t appear in his awareness, he could act without having to account for her.

Up to the moment he arrived on the island, her silhouette had not materialized. She was not here.

And there was no observer positioned to catch sight of him, either.

There would be no better opportunity.

Hackzord activated the Distortion Door — the full form, unrestricted. A black aperture spread from behind him and expanded outward at speed, extending several meters across. No wall, no moat, no natural barrier could interfere with the Door’s passage.

Red haze poured through. Siacis — a higher ascendant — was the first through, stepping forward to present himself.

“My lord. Your army is ready.”

“Convey my command: seize this island. Kill all who resist.”

“As you wish!” Siacis screamed.

As a psychic who had undergone three upgrading ceremonies, the sound was more than a signal — it was a weapon. Any human not wearing a God’s Stone who heard it would drop immediately. Those wearing Stones would still be thrown into disorientation, their minds briefly blanked out. The scream was the signal; and when it ended, a tide of Primal Demons and Symbiotic Demons came pouring through the Distortion Door and fanned out across the island.

The humans’ fire weapons derived their power from range. Close the distance, and the Symbiotic Demons — new-breed forces specifically developed against the enemy’s lines — would punch straight through whatever defense the humans had assembled.

The vanguard moved fast. They crossed the island’s outer perimeter and pressed toward the human settlement at the center.

Still no sound of gunfire.

A thread of unease moved through Hackzord.

He had spent weeks forcing himself past the old contempt, working to hold the humans at something like proper tactical weight. So what was this massive gap in their awareness? Could they genuinely not know their territory was being invaded?

Siacis returned at a run a quarter of an hour later, something visibly wrong in the set of his shoulders.

“My lord. We have taken the inner city.” He paused, and in the pause the news was already there. “We found no humans. The city is empty.”

Hackzord stared at him.

“Many of the buildings are unfinished. Based on the color of the exposed materials, construction was recent — abandoned recently. I believe the humans evacuated one or two days ago.”

The boats the sentries had been watching. Not weapons being brought onto the island. People being taken off.

But — how?

The humans had behaved as though they had known he was coming. He had been meticulous. He had kept his forces away from every city and town along the route. He had swept every path with Eye Demons before moving. The most obvious source of a leak — the human workers who had been laboring on the island — had been placed under centralized supervision with all external communication cut. Even if the enemy had noticed something unusual, there shouldn’t have been time for an evacuation at this scale. Not this quickly.

How had the information escaped?

He was still working through the question when the explosion erupted from the center of the island.

It hit the ground first, then the air. The earth shook with a force that traveled through the soles of his feet and up into his chest. A cluster of fireballs tore through the overcast sky and turned the clouds above them orange, and then rolling black smoke climbed straight up in a column so dense and fast it looked like a fist being driven skyward. The shockwave moved outward from the fireball cluster and scoured the inner city flat. Every soldier caught inside vanished into the surge of smoke and displaced air.

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