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Chapter 1346: Tilly’s Letter

Graycastle. Neverwinter.

Roland reached the end of the frontline reports and held the last page for a moment before setting it down.

“What’s the matter, Your Majesty?” Nightingale, leaning against the wall, had noticed the way his hand had tightened.

“Nothing.” He let the breath out slow. “I’m happy. Everyone’s performance has exceeded my expectations.”

“Really?” She sounded surprised, then amused. “Seems like they’re all working hard.”

“They are.” He stood, crossed to the sideboard, and poured two cups of Chaos Drink. He held one out to her. “They really have.”

He wasn’t reaching for a polite phrase. He meant it from the bottom of what he knew. If someone had told him, years ago, that the border troops and the First Army were the same organization — the same people — he would have found it nearly impossible to believe. Eight days of intense fighting, then an organized strategic retreat. Open-ground operations with genuine cover coordination. A command that actively sought the key to victory rather than waiting for orders to arrive. Beyond the army itself, the Kingdom of Dawn’s cooperation and the refugees who had voluntarily stayed to support the rear services — all of it was evidence of something larger changing, something in humans as a whole.

But what surprised him most was Edith.

She had surprised him before, more than once. This time the surprise was the sum of everything before it, multiplied. She had taken the steam-powered trucks’ carrying capacity and turned it into a doctrine — mobile Longsong Cannons operating across Wolfheart’s territory, long range and massive power deployed from platforms that could move. It bore a recognizable resemblance to Blitzkrieg, in ways that no one had discussed with her in those terms. And then the first half of the strategy: voluntarily abandoning the cities, deliberately allowing the enemy to overextend, waiting until their defensive lines were long and thin before striking at the vulnerabilities that length created.

The Pearl of the Northern Region. Without doubt, she was the most commendable element in the First Army’s achievement — destroying large amounts of the enemy with minimal losses, stopping their advance three hundred kilometers outside the Red Mist region.

It was true that Roland had discussed battle theory with Edith, had talked about mechanical equipment and how it might change warfare. But he had never mentioned armored vehicles specifically — those were still in the factory, half-assembled, having begun life as tractor designs. For Edith to independently connect mobile firepower to truck transport was, by any fair measure, a leap forward in time.

Individual strength and collective strength, combined. That was what had won this.

The demons were pinned now. New recruits and supplies for the First Army moved steadily to the front along the main road. Both sides ebb and flow — but the tide was with the humans. The real counterattack would come when the accumulation reached its peak.

Roland and Nightingale touched their glasses together.

The good news always arrived first. Then came the problems — the things only he could solve.

The report’s opening item was painful losses from high-intensity maneuvering. In the field, without proper tools or a repair environment, the crew of a broken-down truck could manage a flat tyre or a minor leak. Suspension failures, transmission problems — the components that wore out most reliably in hard use — were beyond them. In most cases, all they could do was unload the Magic Cube and abandon the vehicle. Over fifteen trucks had been lost this way since the demons launched their full offensive. Had the north-south road not been maintained so well, Roland suspected Edith might have simply moved the entire vehicle fleet into Wolfheart and not looked back.

Improvement required a dedicated support force, and repair and maintenance sites — the same infrastructure that the Aerial Knights had already built for their aircraft. Field repair vehicles. Tow trucks. All of it would need to be on the next production schedule.

Once again he felt, with the particular acuteness that came from looking at the actual shape of a problem, how much complexity came with putting large machines on a battlefield. Not just the machines themselves — every piece of surrounding infrastructure, every trained person, every specialized vehicle that kept the machines running. One kingdom alone was starting to show the strain.

The military’s top brass had also requested 75-millimeter cannons and general-purpose machine guns, citing multiple engagements that had proved their value. Several accounts used the phrase almost a perfect weapon if not for the heavy ammunition consumption, which Roland recognized as a polished version of give us more and the money to use it. He approved the request. The phrasing had made him smile despite himself.

At the bottom of the pile, he found a letter in Tilly’s handwriting.

He had his guess before he opened it. Either she wanted her personal plane expedited, or she wanted more Fires of Heaven produced. He placed his hand on his forehead preemptively.

“Brother, long time no see.”

“You have not forgotten your promise, have you?”

“Now that the demon offensive has weakened, we should be able to live through the Months of Demons in peace this year. I will make time to visit Neverwinter. I hope to see it as it really is.”

Of course. He could picture her saying it, perfectly reasonable, each word measured. The overall structure of her personal plane was already becoming clear, and he genuinely did need Tilly to test whatever was built — so the request was, objectively, well-timed. That didn’t make it less predictable.

But what she wrote next was not predictable at all.

Tilly had used a substantial portion of the letter to lay out the insufficiencies of the Fire of Heaven in real combat — systematic, precise, and culminating in a suggestion to temporarily suspend production of new planes until meaningful improvements were made. The central problem was the two-seat configuration.

She had tabulated all Aerial Knight kills. Of sixty-five Devilbeasts destroyed, one had been attributed to a backseat shooter.

The reasons were not difficult to understand once laid out. The Mad Demons did not fight like biplanes. They didn’t need to commit to long dogfights — their riders threw bone spears with a range of elevation and swing that covered most of the angles a biplane could approach from. They routinely slipped into the blind spots above and beneath the Fire of Heaven, where the backseat gun simply could not reach them. And even when a target was within range, the shooter had no reliable reference for estimating distance in the open sky, no way to predict the plane’s own flight path during the shot, and a hit rate from a hundred meters that was, in practice, pitifully low. Most backseat shooters returned from missions having fired all their ammunition without confirming a single kill.

The same problem appeared when strafing ground targets. The rear gunner had only the brief window as the plane pulled up — a second, maybe less.

Against all of this, the cost: the additional crew weight, their weapons and ammunition, the reinforced cockpit, and the full pilot-equivalent training each rear-seat operator required. All for a gun that functioned, in practice, as a decorative item. Tilly’s phrasing was blunt: a design error.

If the rear cockpit were removed, the number of qualified Aerial Knights would instantly double, and the saved weight could be applied to fuel range or a miniature bomb load. If the change couldn’t be made immediately to existing planes, at minimum the rear cockpit should be sealed with skins.

Roland set the letter down. He could hear her saying it — not angry, not vindictive, just precise, walking through the logic until the conclusion was unavoidable. He felt the small exasperation of someone whose creation had been correctly criticized. He also recognized that Tilly’s field summary was worth more than any reference from the Dream World.

He reached for the old Fire of Heaven blueprints.

The phone marked Administrative Office rang.

He picked it up.

“Your Majesty.” Barov’s voice came through with unusual energy — the brightness in it of a man who has just witnessed something. “Your iron tower project is done.”

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