Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1381: Extreme Racing

After passing Cage Mountain, the trio flew west toward the Impassable Mountain Range.

In less than half an hour, Maggie was the first to concede.

At fifteen hundred meters, the Phoenix ran easily on its twin engines at four hundred kilometers per hour. Maggie’s petrel form could match that speed—but only for a sprint, a few desperate minutes before her wings faltered. Against the new Type-14 engines that never tired, losing her was only a matter of time.

“How are you holding up?” Tilly asked, one hand cupped to her lips.

”…I-I can still fly…” Maggie gasped between heaving breaths. “Coo!”

“You’ve done everything you could. I’ll take it from here.”

Lightning caught her exhausted companion and pulled her close, then took up the second stage of the chase.

Girl and plane began a new pursuit across the evening sky.

The landscape below shrank and simplified: the mountain range that divided the human kingdoms narrowed to a wriggling black seam, and the Red Mist rolled along the continental ridge toward Everwinter and Wolfheart like a stained curtain drawn across the horizon. Everything behind it had drowned in red. Up here, above the curtain, the true face of the world was still visible.

“Is this your limit?” Lightning’s voice carried a bright edge of challenge. “I can fly faster than this!”

In matters of raw speed, Lightning had no equal. Even the Sky Lord, who could open portals through space itself, had lost a race to her once.

But winning wasn’t what Tilly was chasing.

To pilot something this enormous and this nimble, to push it until she felt exactly where its ceiling lived—that was satisfaction enough.

She drew her gaze back inside the cockpit and smiled. The nose tilted upward; the plane climbed.

Lightning matched her, but held a lead of roughly a hundred meters.

According to the manual, the Phoenix had been optimized using technology from the Dream World, with every critical component built by Anna’s own hands. The result was a machine whose base quality far surpassed the Fire of Heaven in every measure. Maximum level-flight speed: five hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Range: over fifteen hundred kilometers. The twin star-shaped engines, one under each wing, carried turbine systems that let the Phoenix operate at three thousand meters without meaningful performance loss. None of the mass-produced aircraft could claim any of this. But none of it was the Phoenix’s most remarkable feature.

The airframe itself had been reinforced by Doris and Candle. In terms of durability and material integrity—the fusion of technology and magic power—it was without peer.

Tilly knew the problem. Propellers had their natural ceiling: efficient at moderate speed, progressively wasteful as velocity climbed. Chasing Lightning on engine thrust alone was a losing proposition. She needed another force entirely.

She climbed above the cloudline, pushed the throttle to its stop, and drove the control stick forward.

The engines detonated into a sustained roar.

Phoenix rolled over and dove.

Lightning adjusted at once, angling sharply downward to maintain her lead. She held a horizontal separation of roughly a kilometer to avoid interference. The vertical gap held steady at a hundred meters. At this altitude and speed, the light-membrane her magic power generated became visibly distinct: luminous ripples wrapping her body, shielding her from the cold and from the pressure differential hammering at everything around her.

At that intensity, her magic consumption was running far above anything she burned on routine patrols.

Roland had once told her as much—that the reason Lightning should never hold supersonic speeds for long was not the baseline energy cost of flight, but the sharp, nonlinear spike that came with pushing magic-body synchronization to its extreme state. Lightning understood the warning and honored it. Squandering magic power was the most dangerous thing any Witch could do.

Tilly was in no better position. The thin air clawed at her lungs. The cockpit shuddered continuously under the gale the engines were generating. She had no protective membrane—only her body and her grip on the stick.

The altimeter’s velocity reading climbed toward eight hundred kilometers per hour.

That was well past the Phoenix’s design limit.

Lightning still held her lead, but she’d stopped using the Sigil of Listening. There was no attention to spare.

Gravity. That was what Tilly had found, back when she was still flying biplanes: accumulate enough altitude, convert it to speed in a single plunge, and the aircraft would exceed what the engines alone could never reach.

The risks were not small. Pull out too late, or let the airframe flex past its tolerance, and the plane wouldn’t come back up—or wouldn’t come back in one piece. Only her perceptive gift, the one that let her feel the structural stress of anything she piloted like a second skin, made the maneuver survivable. Without it, she would never have attempted this on a maiden flight.

Even so, catching Lightning outright remained unlikely.

She remembered Roland explaining it: piston engines fighting the transonic regime paid an enormous penalty for every fraction of a Mach number gained. The propeller became both thruster and anchor simultaneously. That was why jets had replaced pistons the moment they were viable. Lightning could break the sound barrier whenever she chose—cleanly, instantly, with no mechanical resistance. The disparity wasn’t marginal. It was categorical.

So Tilly needed something else.

Below the dive’s apex, dense dark cloud sat at twenty-five hundred meters. She aimed for it.

Phoenix punched through and carved a fog-pillar in its wake.

Nine hundred kilometers per hour. The airframe’s trembling spread from the fuselage out into the wings. Tilly could feel the sharp leading edges carving through air that no longer behaved like air—it had thickened into something closer to dense liquid, resistance pressing back from every surface. The gales howled.

Lightning vanished from her sight.

Now.

Tilly held her attention on the controls with the narrow precision of someone threading a needle in a moving cart. At this speed the propellers contributed almost nothing to thrust—they were barely better than brakes. Any ordinary pilot would have been hauling back on the stick already, desperate to arrest the dive. Tilly did the opposite. She found the last margin and took it.

The speed increment was small. But it was enough.

When the Phoenix broke out of the cloud base, the world opened wide beneath her again.

Lightning emerged at the same instant—and she was no longer ahead. She was alongside the cockpit, matching Tilly meter for meter. The realization hit her a half-second later; she snapped through the sound barrier in response, a sharp crack lost in the general noise of the dive, then bled the speed back down and banked toward the canopy glass.

“Well done, Your Highness.” Lightning’s expression held no trace of disappointment—only a clean, unguarded admiration. “You actually used the clouds.”

“If they’d been any thinner, I never would have caught you.” Tilly hauled the nose level and laughed.

From the beginning, the plan had been exactly this: let Lightning settle into a rhythm she trusted, then use the overcast as a blind, bleed every last meter per second out of the dive under cover, and close the gap in the one place Lightning couldn’t see. Only for an instant—but the Phoenix had done it.

“Wait—where are we?” Maggie lifted her head from Lightning’s chest.

Tilly looked down. Unfamiliar terrain. The Impassable Mountain Range was long behind them; somewhere in their chase they had drifted far to the northwest. “Somewhere in the Fertile Plains, I’d guess.”

“Probably.” Lightning raised her telescope. “A part of the Fertile Plains neither of us has ever seen. If I’ve read the route right, the boundary between Wolfheart and Everwinter should be to our east, and the continental ridge ought to be—”

She stopped.

“What is it?”

Tilly followed her gaze, and her hands went still on the stick.

Behind the cloud and mist, faintly outlined, stood a mountain range—taller and more massive than the Impassable Mountains. She had heard of its existence from Agatha and the Exploration Group; the sight itself was no surprise.

What stopped her breath was what sat above it.

The summit was buried under dark, churning red cloud. Lightning flickered constantly within that mass—not the clean white of a storm, but something deep and arterial, like electricity born from old blood. Strike after strike threaded the red in silence, too far away for the sound to reach them.

It was not a natural phenomenon. Nothing about it was.

The red clouds settled into Tilly’s chest like a weight, and she could not say why.

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