Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1316: History

“What is so strange about it?” Valkries said coldly. “Do you think anyone can simply stroll into the Realm of the Mind? Or—are you proud of yourself for capturing a grand lord?”

She had not abandoned her pride, even caught like this. Roland had the distinct impression that if he pressed her too far, she would simply lunge at the witches and spend herself into death.

But her title genuinely had surprised him. He had asked only as a formality—high-ranking demons carried unique titles as a matter of course, and any demon capable of conducting an upgrading ceremony was no minor figure. He had not expected her identity to be so much more complicated than he had imagined.

His original theory was that Valkries was a consciousness that had escaped by chance from a memory fragment. Now a second possibility surfaced: she had come from the real world.

The name “Nightmare Lord” first appeared in Ursrook’s documents accompanied by a greeting—proof that the Nightmare Lord was no historical figure, still active somewhere near the upper reaches of demon command. Moreover, Roland had reviewed the memory fragment many times without ever hearing her addressed as a grand lord. If the demon language he had absorbed from Kabradhabi was correct, the figure presiding over the assembly at that time had not yet achieved that rank.

Taken together with Valkries’ own admission that she had voluntarily entered the Realm of Mind, and with the Pearl of the Northern Region’s analysis of conditions along the front, Roland grew increasingly certain of the second theory.

Which meant that the Valkries sitting across from him had lived through at least eight hundred years of history. Her power and her knowledge had to be vanishingly rare among her race. And if one counted her aberrant reaction to Lan, the timeline ran further still. A spirit copied from a memory fragment could not have responded like that. Even if they never exchanged another word, her mere presence here effectively removed a grand lord from the front line—a fact of no small consequence.

“I need to correct something.” Roland kept his voice even. “First, I have not captured you. You are free, at least for the moment. Second, entering the Dream World was your own choice. I don’t consider myself to have done anything wrong.”

Valkries was silent for a moment. When she finally spoke, her voice had gone stiff with the effort of restraint. “You call this place the Dream World?”

Her pride made any humiliation intolerable, but that same pride would not let her make an irrational protest—her earlier speechlessness had already confirmed where she had come from. She had entered here by her own will.

“I’ve found myself here every time I fall asleep,” Roland said. “In a certain sense, it is no different from dreaming.”

“Absurdity!” The word came out sharp as a slap. Opening a territory in the Realm of Mind demanded talent, a crushing concentration of spiritual energy, and a will strong enough not to dissolve into the sea of magic power. And this magically-disabled male managed it by taking a nap? The injustice of it made her want to overturn the table.

At that moment the waiter arrived, bearing a tray crowded with desserts and drinks that looked, against all reasonable expectations, genuinely appealing.

“This is the truth,” Roland said after the waiter withdrew, spreading his hands. “As I said: honesty serves us both. I have no reason to lie about something this small. In any case, it isn’t the important point. The important point is the truth about the Battle of Divine Will—and the future of every race.” He picked up his chopsticks and gestured at the spread. “We can talk while we eat.”

Valkries noted something. This male was different from every human she had encountered. Who discussed the fate of an entire civilization over a meal? Another person would have been stone-faced, taut with urgency, as though staring across a battlefield. But he showed no sign of performing gravity. To him, this was apparently ordinary.

She lifted the cup of murky Peninsula coffee and drank.

The thick, aromatic liquid slid down her throat.

It was, against all expectation, not bad.

For a reason she could not name, she felt suddenly as though she had lost something.

No. She had to regain control of this conversation. Valkries set down her cup with deliberate care and said, low-voiced, “Where did you hear that the Battle of Divine Will is not the Final Battle?”

Roland drew a photograph from his wallet and placed it on the table. “You have seen her before, haven’t you?”

The image of Lan—taken from video records left behind by the Reflection Church, almost certainly predating the Union’s founding—had been reproduced using Ling and some careful makeup to test the reaction of the demon from the memory fragment. The outcome had been somewhat different from what Roland had anticipated, but the shock on Valkries’ face at the time had been proof enough: she had seen Lan in the flesh.

After a long silence, the Nightmare Lord nodded. “Who exactly is she?”

“A traitorous Oracle.” Roland described the secret conversation at the Rose Café slowly, in full.

When he finished, Valkries’ eyes were wide despite herself. “Could it be… the Oracle my mentor mentioned—was her?”

“Mentor?”

“‘Transformer’ Heathtalese. She taught me a great many things.” Valkries hesitated, then let the past out: the history of the Cloud School, the failed upgrade that had robbed the unstable School of its last measure of protection.

“So that was why…” The pieces clicked into place. For the first time in history, the intelligence of two races had been laid on the same table and resolved into a single picture.

“Your Majesty, have you thought of something?” Phyllis asked.

“Do you remember the portrait on the wall at the meeting of the three queens’ vow in the Union?” Roland drew a slow breath. “I am afraid the person in that portrait was the high-level demon Heathtalese.”

“What did you—”

“The Union would enshrine the portrait of a demon?”

“How could such a thing be possible?”

The Taquila witches each wore a different version of the same disbelief.

“If we consider the influence the Cloud School wielded in the first Battle of Divine Will, something like that is not so strange at all. If a demon from the School could rise to grand lord, then it would be natural for witches and ordinary humans in the upper ranks to have passed through the School as well. My guess is that before Heathtalese died, she had already begun to doubt the Battle of Divine Will.”

To certain eyes, that kind of doubt was indistinguishable from siding with the enemy.

”…I cannot deny that.” Valkries closed her eyes. “She and the current King were in conflict, but the tide of war is not something one or two people can turn back.”

“The same is true on our side,” Roland said. “The disbanded Cloud School is, at most, a cherished memory now. When the second Battle of Divine Will erupts, even that memory will be gone. That period is not recorded in any surviving text. The Three Chiefs almost certainly destroyed the records—a past in which humans coexisted with demons would give people dangerous hope, and in times of crisis hope can eat away at the will to resist. The Cloud School had to be forgotten, buried as an embarrassment.”

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