Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1336: Starting the Counterattack

Iron Axe returned to the Cage Mountain command post aboard Seagull the following morning, and the first thing he did was walk into the General Staff office.

The room smelled of black tea and old paper. Maps covered every flat surface. Through the window, the pale sky over the western pass was the colorless white of exhausted light.

“How was the journey?” Edith sat at the mahogany desk, a cup raised to her lips.

For days, every officer on staff had worked past dawn, grinding themselves down to the edges of coherence. Yet Edith looked precisely as she always did — composed, unhurried, as if she alone had been allotted more hours than the day contained. Iron Axe had long since stopped being surprised by this. He simply admired it.

“Morale is encouraging,” he said.

A faint smile crossed her face. “Then we can begin the next phase.” The Pearl of the Northern Region set down her cup. “Speaking of which — the defending armies of Sand City withdrew from their defense region last night.”

“That leaves only Sedimentation Bay.” Iron Axe turned toward the large map on the wall.

“We should evacuate them as soon as possible — send a squadron out to receive them. There is no reason to wait for a break in the defense line.”

Iron Axe nodded. More than fifty thousand demons had consolidated from east and west by now; a force that size could encircle Sedimentation Bay without straining itself. Once the demons fully assembled, the window for retreat would close. Since the war’s objective had never been the defense of cities or territory, surrendering Sedimentation Bay to preserve the troops was not a difficult calculation.

The evacuation had never fully stopped in any case. Civilians and merchants had been the first to go; after them came the noble families who had bound their fortunes to Roland. What remained in those cities was nothing but an enormous, hollow shell. The moment the order arrived, the garrison would move.

“I don’t understand.” Agatha looked up from the newest battle report, her voice uncertain. “The casualty discrepancy — the demons’ losses are nearly thirty times our own. How is that possible?”

She had been verifying the figures for some time. Four cities, four separate engagement reports, each tallied and cross-checked. The arithmetic was consistent no matter how many times she reviewed it. Over fifteen hundred dead on the human side. Nearly fifty thousand on the demons’.

In the days of the Union, Agatha would have called those numbers a fabrication — the kind of inflated tally a commander invents to justify a promotion. But she had fought alongside the First Army. She knew their reporting system, the multiple parties responsible for verification, the culture of exactness Roland had built into his officer corps. If there was falsification, it was at the margins; it changed nothing fundamental.

Still, the scale of it defied her instinct.

During the northern expedition, they had faced a demon army of twenty thousand on the Fertile Plains. At Taquila, they had ground out a victory over the course of nearly a year — hundreds of kilometres of railway laid, one fortress constructed after another. That campaign had cost them dearly. This campaign had produced double the enemy losses in eight days, and the strategy, on paper, had consisted of nothing but retreating.

Even filled with conviction about the First Army’s capabilities, she was astonished.

“No wonder,” Edith said, after surveying the figures. A quiet laugh. “Honestly, the results exceeded even my expectations — but the credit doesn’t belong entirely to the First Army. The demons cooperated. The ambush on Hackzord likely left him badly injured; he has not had the energy to manage the details at the front line.”

“Only that?” Agatha said.

“I know what’s troubling you.” Edith waved a hand. “It looks as though we achieved this by retreating a few times, and the battle plan appears almost trivially simple. But that isn’t quite right. When you served the Union, you were generally at the rear — it is not strange that you would see it that way. The truth is simpler: only the current First Army could have executed this strategy.

“The difference between a controlled withdrawal and a rout is often as thin as paper. Simply maintaining strict formation under enormous pressure is a feat in itself, let alone withdrawing with perfect order. A nobility’s army, given the same command, would likely scatter — that would be the best one could hope for. If the First Army had not survived the Taquila night raid, if those separated squads had not demonstrated exactly the kind of zeal for executing difficult orders that they did, I would never have dared put this plan into motion.”

She paused. “And the new weapons — their effect on the field is beyond obvious. In the city streets, without Longsong Cannons, our forces held with general-use machine guns and artillery alone. The great advantage of those weapons is distance. The moment the entire army is mobile, that advantage stays with us wherever we go. Achieving this result follows naturally from that premise.”

Edith set down her cup. “But we have in fact lost the outer defense line. What comes next is the critical part of the entire plan. Once the demons occupy all four cities, they will begin preparing their next offensive. Cage Mountain is both a defensive barrier and the production site for the raw materials of the Glory of the Sun — we cannot keep withdrawing indefinitely. We must move first and reduce the enemy’s strength before they recover.”

“Red Mist,” Agatha said, quietly.

“Precisely. All four cities lie outside the Red Mist region. The demons’ dependence on their supply lines will grow significantly — and those supply lines will almost certainly reappear. The front is now stretched across the entire width of Wolfheart. I do not believe they can cover every point along it.”

“Before the storage towers were constructed,” Iron Axe added, “the only things the demons had to rely on were the obelisk-like Fortress-like Monstrous Beasts and their own manpower for transport. In the past, the flanking attacks they launched all originated from those beasts — but according to Lightning’s and Maggie’s observations, the protection around the Fortress-like Monstrous Beasts dropped sharply after the mass deaths among the Mad Demons. When they were attacking the four cities, the main force’s supply line was concealed inside the Red Mist. Now it will be exposed entirely.”

“The problem is that this requires us to strike first,” Agatha said, hesitant. “The Fortress-like Monstrous Beasts move under their own power, and they aren’t frightened by the Aerial Knights. Destroying them requires ground forces. But if we can see the enemy, the enemy can see us. Even if their protection is thinned, they can call for reinforcements on short notice — and when you add the time for the approach and return, we are very likely to lose the advantage of distance. If the demons catch us in open ground—”

In an open engagement, even a First Army victory would come at severe cost.

“Speed, then, is everything.” Edith lifted the corner of her mouth. “We simply need to complete the counterattack before the enemy can react.”

But how? Agatha studied the map — the web of paths and hard roads spreading between Cage Mountain and the four cities, built out over months of evacuation. Plenty of routes. None of them collapsed the distance.

The First Army had no cavalry corps. Even with an abundance of horses, it was doubtful whether riders could catch the Fortress-like Monstrous Beasts before they moved. And a mounted soldier could carry only so much; you could not confront a behemoth with what a horse could carry on its back.

“It won’t happen now, of course.” The Pearl of the Northern Region seemed to read her puzzlement. “The plan is still missing a key element — when that element is in place, all the conditions are met. You will see it soon enough.”

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