Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1322: The Light That Breaks the Darkness

Pasha saw it more clearly than the others.

Original carriers did not rely on eyes. For her, Alethea, and Celine, any single tentacle could stand in for sight — and nothing could be worn to block the light.

Even though Roland had warned them to avoid looking directly at the explosion in the five to ten seconds immediately following detonation, Pasha did not avert her gaze until the very last second. Neither did the other two.

None of them were willing to miss this.

Can humans defeat demons?

The question had gone unasked across centuries while the Taquila survivors endured underground. In those years, they had gritted their teeth and held on mostly from a sense of obligation — persevering for the sisters already lost. As for the final outcome, a kind of refusal rose in the mind at the mere thought of it, because thinking too deeply would hollow out the tenacity and fighting will that had kept them alive. The pitch-black ceiling of their underground burrow, visible every time they raised their heads, had been pressed into their memories like a brand.

And then the cage of blackness was broken apart by a streak of brilliant blue light.

It was not a pure blue — nothing like the blue of dye or paint or crystal or lake water. Pasha had no words for it. It was as though light had become so white that it surpassed white entirely, and the excess had bled into an illusory hue.

Hugging the horizon, the light expanded with savage speed and lit up the entire plain in front of them.

She could not help but stand with her mouth open.

Apart from the sun and the moon, this was the first time she had ever witnessed something illuminate an entire landscape. It was not her imagination — she saw it clearly: the dark, night-quiet snowy plain returned to the appearance of morning, trees throwing long black shadows across the fallen snow, the terrain’s silhouette sharpening the closer it lay to the center of that white light.

Almost simultaneously, Pasha felt an acute, burning pain across her outer surface — as though her skin had been held beneath a midday sun. Searing. Precise. Real.

She felt no fear. She spread every tentacle open and welcomed the darkness-breaking light.

If it could bring humanity a new kind of hope, what was this small pain? It would only give her more pleasure.

The light lasted less than a second. Then the blue became white, the white became red. The ground shook violently as the shockwave churned through the snow and struck the bunker’s outer wall with a cracking sound. The roar of the explosion followed — everything else had come first — and dragged on and on, as though the earth itself was crying out.

When the thunder finally passed, the world recovered its silence.

Over the distant horizon, a strange and beautiful cloud had formed: large at the top, narrow at the base, like a mushroom blooming upward. Dark red flames still rolled and tumbled at its crown.

To illuminate the skyline all by itself — no other weapon had ever achieved this.

If its power reached this far at fifteen kilometres, what would it be like to stand beside it?

Pasha could already picture the weapon detonating in the midst of a demon formation. A hundred cannons firing at once had been, until this moment, the most overwhelming thing she had ever witnessed. Now even that seemed small.

If the cannon exercise two years ago had reshaped every Taquila witch’s understanding of the world, this experiment had reshaped it again.

Whoosh —!

Cheers and applause erupted through the command post and the observatories.

The three high-level witches wound their main tentacles tightly together.

“Is this really something we created?” For the first time, Alethea did not use the words ‘mortals’ or ‘ordinary humans’ to mark the distance between herself and them.

“Of course! I was responsible for processing part of the outer shell.” Celine’s voice was bright with excitement. “Though honestly — I didn’t actually think this thing would be exactly as His Majesty described —”

“Why not?”

“Well… leaders do tend to exaggerate results to encourage people, didn’t the Three Chiefs do the same before —” A pause. “Wait. I’m not saying it’s wrong to do so. Don’t tell His Majesty Roland.”

“Fine, fine,” Pasha cut in. “What do you think the Battle of Divine Will will look like now?”

“We can win — we can definitely win!” Celine answered without a moment’s hesitation.

“It may not even last until the next Bloody Moon,” Alethea agreed.

A year ago, survival itself had been their definition of victory: withstand the demons’ attack, endure until the Battle of Divine Will concluded, develop for four more centuries, then look for another opportunity. Somewhere, without their noticing, that standard had risen to somewhere unrecognizable.

“As expected,” Pasha finally laughed. “We share the same opinion.”

Humans could defeat demons.

Faster, perhaps, than any of them had thought.

Because the darkness was gone.

Among the crowd of ecstatic witnesses, only Roland and Anna stood quiet as usual.

“How was the result?” Anna removed her sunglasses and asked.

“We’ve made at least the first step.” Roland spread his hands. A fission reaction had undeniably been triggered — the blaze of light was proof. No combination of over a thousand kilograms of conventional dynamite could have produced that impact. Observing the aftershock and the smoke column, the result was clearly different from his theoretical prediction — on paper, it should have been more powerful. “The specific numbers will have to wait until the teams in the command post have gathered all the field data.”

Half an hour later, the small research teams returned with the ‘detectors’ that had been placed around the site: floating sheets of paper. Because Neverwinter lacked any instrument capable of precisely measuring explosive yield, Roland had devised a method of using paper to approximate power. When undisturbed air moved over them, the sheets lifted and settled nearby. When a blast wave struck, they flew substantially farther. The difference in landing distance, compared against a parameter table Roland had transcribed from the Dream World, gave an approximate yield. It left some room for error, but it was enough to guide the experiments.

After comparing the data, the results came out much as he had suspected.

The test bomb’s explosive yield was equivalent to roughly three thousand tonnes of TNT — yet the investment had been forty kilograms of Uranium-235. In the first atomic bomb ever used in actual war, “Little Boy,” approximately six percent of the fissile material had participated in the reaction, producing a yield of thirteen kilotons of TNT. By that measure, the material utilization rate of this test was below two percent. It qualified, technically, as a dirty bomb.

Roland was not disappointed. History had never established a clean definition for the term — the earliest bombs used in real wars were all, by the standards of what came later, dirty bombs. A hundred-and-fifty-two-millimeter shell carrying only a few kilograms of explosive charge could do devastating damage. Three kilotons of TNT was not a small number.

As a first experiment, No. 1 could not be called a complete success — but it was, beyond any question, a lethal weapon.

“A long road ahead,” Anna said, setting down the data form and exhaling slowly. Her eyes held no discouragement. Only readiness. “Indeed.” Roland nodded.

He had never expected to reach the goal in a single attempt. The work ahead was to find the causes of the gap, modify and improve continuously, until the yield could genuinely compete with the sun for glory.

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