Rewrite That Witch
CH1314 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 1314: Dilemma

The difficulty of building the two types of radio equipment was, of course, not remotely comparable. The vacuum tube—the heart of the AM transmitter—was still eluding the engineering team entirely. The pile of failed prototypes outside the laboratory had grown into a small mountain.

Edith’s suggestion in her report about modifying Fire of Heaven was another matter. That one genuinely excited him. On a technical level, fitting a thirty-five-millimeter sniper cannon onto a biplane was not a difficult problem—embed the cannon body beneath the aircraft’s belly, remove the gunner’s seat, limit the ammunition load to fewer than ten rounds to keep the weight balanced. Beyond that, nothing needed to change.

The problem was the ammunition itself.

To produce large-caliber God’s Stone bullets, one first had to use witch blood or demon blood to melt and separate raw God’s Stones from the mine until they formed God’s Stones of Retaliation in the required dimensions. Only then could further machining begin. If the stones came out too large, the blades and lathes currently available could not work them. Too small, and the stones were too brittle to be used. The selection of base materials alone consumed enormous quantities of magic blood. Even with the full support of the Witch Alliance and the Sleeping Spell, what they had would fall far short of what a war demanded.

The real solution lay with the demons.

Either they discovered how demons managed to process God’s Stone pillars of such size—

—or they used demon blood to create the bullets themselves.

Fire of Heaven could now return to Neverwinter from the frontline within a day. With Agatha’s refrigeration ability as additional support, transporting fresh demon blood directly from the battlefield was not obviously impossible. Roland noted the idea quietly on his agenda.

That night, following his routine, Roland entered the Dream World.

To accelerate the Design Bureau’s projects, he had sharply increased the frequency of his visits over the past month, and the Dream World—which had been running behind the real world in season—had begun to catch up. The city that had been in late summer was now touched by winter; snowflakes drifted past his apartment window as if the two worlds, though separate, shared a single cold front moving across them.

A typical morning in his neighborhood was still bustling. The expansion of Erosion and the disaster at Prism City had not reached these streets—the breakfast stalls lining both sides of the road were as loud and crowded as ever, their owners calling out to passersby without pause, white snow trodden into grey slush by the foot traffic that had already been through.

Even knowing what Lan had told him—that this world, too, faced its own Battle of Divine Will—the comparison to the Red Mist-soaked battlefield in the Kingdom of Wolfheart was difficult to hold in the mind simultaneously. This place simply felt different, by a very considerable degree.

The lengthening time he had spent here had also changed something in the demon world-traveller.

After careful observation, Roland was now essentially certain that the woman who called herself Valkries was not actually a native of Cargarde Peninsula. The registration records restored by the Martialist Association confirmed someone of that name and origin—but among the Peninsula’s actual visiting group, no such person existed. Her behavior, meanwhile, resisted any ordinary explanation.

Roland was not unfamiliar with the phenomenon of a real identity hiding a fundamentally altered person. He was himself the clearest example of it. The most natural explanation was that Valkries was, like him, a world-traveller.

In the beginning she had maintained her cover as a normal martial artist with reasonable discipline—browsing books, speaking as little as possible, blending into the background. But over time the composure had worn through. Especially after her injuries healed. Once, she slipped deep into the restricted zone of Prism City and stood in long, fixed silence before the Erosion rupture. According to Dawnen’s report, her expression at that moment had been visibly anxious, almost yearning—as if she were waiting for something on the other side. Dawnen had thought more than once that Valkries was about to leap in, but she always stopped herself.

It was too simple to call this grief for her companions. Valkries had not hesitated for a single moment when the visiting group came under attack; the Erosion had been her aim from the very beginning.

Looked at from her perspective, the shift in her behavior was not hard to understand.

In the beginning, arriving in a modern metropolis from a demon city, she would have needed to keep her composure simply to orient herself—to establish where she was and what she was dealing with. But as the weeks passed with her prospects of returning no clearer, anxiety would have become inevitable. Her excursion to Prism City was likely exactly what it appeared: an attempt to find out whether the same chasm she had entered could carry her back.

The memory fragment had not given her what she wanted.

Whatever one made of her motives, what she had achieved was remarkable. Valkries did not know that Dawnen had been watching her every movement; only the small moments when she was entirely alone had given anything away. In all her interactions with other martial artists, not a single flaw appeared.

When Roland considered whether he could have managed the same, the honest answer was no.

But now that her identity was confirmed, the question was what to do about it.

He was still turning that over when his phone buzzed.

A message from Phyllis.

Your Majesty, everyone is ready.

He pocketed the phone, turned, and walked into the living room.

Zero was carrying a bowl of egg noodles to the table, holding it with both hands and moving with exaggerated care. She looked up when she saw him, set the bowl down, and put her hands on her hips. “Uncle, you haven’t forgotten your promise, have you?”

“Did you get up this early because you were afraid I’d disappear?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she said, pouting.

“Relax—this time I definitely won’t.” Roland laughed, crossed the room, and patted her on the head. “Eat breakfast first. Then we’ll go next door, call Sister Garcia, and set out together.”

Aside from the New Year, the biggest event of this winter was the Martial Arts Contest, held once every four years. For junior high school students across the city, watching it live at the arena was the kind of thing you talked about for months afterward. Zero, who ordinarily had no interest in such competitions, was no exception to the anticipation—and after her persistent campaign of requests, Roland had agreed to take her to the arena during the school’s winter break. It was a reasonable promise. She had to return home every holiday; this was her one request.

There were guards on duty at today’s matches and it was still the round-robin stage, so the likelihood of Fallen Evils appearing was low.

There was no good reason to refuse the little girl’s “only request.”

And Roland had already decided: today he would confront the demon world-traveller directly.

It was now the fourth month.

Although Valkries appeared to be watching the match, her attention was entirely elsewhere.

Four months here had given her a working understanding of this world and of the human legacies. In some respects she had even become a part of the process herself—absorbing it, piece by piece. If she could only return to reality, she would be able to bring her race enormous advantage. The problem—the problem that had not moved an inch in four months—was that she had found no way out of the Realm of Mind.

She had a mountain of intelligence and no one to deliver it to. Like finding a sealed bottle of water in a desert and discovering it could not be opened.

Whether she sent signals to Hackzord or reached with her mind for any trace of the King, nothing answered. Even standing in the gap of this domain, meditating, the Realm of Mind returned only silence. She had never encountered anything like this before.

What had kept Hackzord from attempting to wake her in all this time?

Her irritation toward the Sky Lord had begun to shade into something closer to resentment.

Discussion

Suggest a change