Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1386: The Breakthrough Point

Roland woke and called for Tilly immediately.

“I have detailed intelligence on the floating island. It’s a demon construct. They call it the Deity of Gods.”

Tilly stared at him. She had brought the news only hours ago—where in the interval between her arrival and this morning had he found a source? “How did you—”

“Special means.” He was aware of her question and let it go unanswered. The matter of the Nightmare Lord trapped inside the Dream World was not a simple thing to explain, and the explanation wasn’t what mattered now. “The information may have errors, so treat it as reference only—not verified intelligence. We’ll still depend on your reconnaissance to confirm the real situation.”

He gave her the outline of what Valkries had told him.

Tilly listened. Morning light was flat and gray through the office window, the kind that didn’t cast shadows. When he finished, she sat with it for a moment.

“So it’s actually a floating city.”

“Yes. But far larger than any city.”

The Deity of Gods had begun as a project measured in centuries of failure. To stabilize the parameters of the magic power core, the demons had run trials—one of them roughly a hundred years ago in Tapunise City, a trial that had nearly destroyed the city entirely. The violent surge of magic power had torn through the strata, collapsed structures, razed everything above ground. Countless Inferior Demons flung into the air and brought down as wreckage. The King had sealed the record, called it a magic power accident. The disaster had not stopped the project. If anything, it had accelerated it—because the scale of what had gone wrong proved the scale of what could go right.

The Deity of Gods was the final result of that logic.

Magic power extended thousands of kilometers into the earth and lifted a section of land spanning dozens of kilometers, drawing it skyward into a stable configuration. Viewed from above, it presented as an island. From below, the geometry inverted: narrow at the bottom, vast at the top, like a mountain driven into the sky upside down. With successive revisions to the core, the structure had gained not only the capacity to float but to move—a weapon that could carry the war anywhere.

For the demons, the strategic purpose was straightforward. Take the human territories, secure time to rest and rebuild, construct additional Deity of Gods, and use them to ascend to the Sky-sea Realm with enough force to end that war as well.

Roland held all of this in mind and felt a particular kind of respect—not admiration, not fear, but the recognition one competitor holds for another who has been solving a different version of the same problem and arrived somewhere formidable. Four hundred years of magical engineering, a completely different path than human technology, and not weaker for the difference.

Magic power remained the most unreasonable force he had encountered. The Deity of Gods proved it again: lifting an island was not a trick of scale—it was an act requiring energy measured in geological terms. That the demons had accomplished it through accumulated experience rather than formal theory was both remarkable and, in a sense, a limitation. Quantity produced quality changes, but theory accelerated the process by orders of magnitude. Once the war was finished, developing a scientific framework for magic power was not optional—it was imperative. Even without personal ability, he could set the direction.

That was science at its core. Something exists; therefore it can be observed; therefore it can be understood; therefore it can be built upon.

“I don’t know how you got this information,” Tilly said, “but it sounds right.” She leaned forward in her chair. “So how do we deal with it?”

“Two principles first: the First Army should not waste ammunition on direct bombardment—the Deity of Gods isn’t vulnerable to conventional firepower. And second, the Aerial Knights will be the most critical element in the next engagement.” Roland paused. “There is a method to destroy it. The probability of success is uncertain.”

He had already run the calculus on the Glory of the Sun. History had a useful data point: in the first nuclear weapons tests of his old world, a device yielding roughly twenty-three kilotons had been detonated in the air above an assembled fleet. The intended target was a three-hundred-meter warship. The device failed to destroy it. An underwater detonation proved no more decisive beyond a thousand meters of water. Nuclear weapons against large, dispersed targets were a study in diminishing returns—the physics of area-effect destruction against mass simply didn’t scale the way intuition suggested.

The Deity of Gods was not a warship. Using the Glory of the Sun against it directly was approximately equivalent to throwing grenades at the Impassable Mountain Range and hoping to chip it apart. Even at Neverwinter’s maximum achievable yield—somewhere around ten kilotons—the math remained wrong.

Which meant the weapon had to be used differently.

The obelisk was the core. Valkries had confirmed it: the obelisk stood at the center of the city, and around it the Inferior Demons had spent years digging—creating deep excavations to capture the Red Mist as it fell. Red Mist, being denser than air, accumulated in these pits and over time formed pools, then lakes. The compressed lower layers, under centuries of pressure, had liquefied and then solidified into crystal—the same configuration Roland had glimpsed in a memory fragment: towers arranged in a ring around a cliff, with crystallized Red Mist at the bottom of the pit. Likely the accumulation of a millennium.

The Red Mist Lake at the base of the obelisk was the Deity of Gods’ single vulnerable point.

Valkries’s account had also confirmed what Lily’s failed experiments had already suggested: the Red Mist was not a simple chemical vapor. It was a suspension of microscopic organisms—too small to see even under magnification, appearing as mist only because of their density and scale. These organisms wielded a passive magic power that expelled and consumed any external magic not belonging to demons. That was why Lily had been unable to control it.

But the organisms retained biological characteristics. Including one that mattered.

They feared fire.

Under high temperatures, the Red Mist retreated—macroscopically, it appeared to disperse and decompose. At a sufficient temperature, it ignited. Combustion point approximately eight hundred to nine hundred degrees—exceptional by the standard of most organic material, but not invulnerable. Because the organisms were microscopic, their combustion when mixed with air would not be simple burning. It would be explosive. A cloud of fine combustible particles suspended in air was not a fire. It was a detonation waiting for a source.

Iron Axe had once burned the capital of Wolfheart. City of Tusk, consumed from within. What was needed now was the same principle at an order of magnitude larger scale—not a city, but a sky.

The ignition temperature had to be high enough to initiate the chain reaction before oxygen depletion terminated it. In theory, enough conventional incendiaries would accomplish this, but the quantity required—hundreds if not thousands of fuel containers delivered above the obelisk—made a conventional bombing campaign impractical. There was no fleet large enough to carry what the math demanded.

The Glory of the Sun did not suffer from this limitation. Whatever its total yield, the core temperature was a fixed value, unaffected by scale, and it fell within the range required. The problem was not firepower. The problem was delivery.

Getting through the demon air forces and the Devilbeasts, clearing the airspace above the obelisk, and placing the device accurately—that was the problem.

“As long as there’s a way.” The morning light had not changed; it was still flat, still shadowless, but Tilly’s expression had settled into something that did not require shadows to be read. “Whatever the probability, we’ll find it. That’s what we do. Leave it to us, Brother—I’ll bring the word back to headquarters.”

The warmth that moved through Roland’s chest when she said it was not something he had expected to feel. He let it settle, then reached for his quill.

“One more thing. There’s something I need you to carry to Miss Edith Kant.”

He wrote without pausing, set the quill down, and passed the page to Tilly. No envelope.

She frowned at it. “These characters are—”

“Demonic,” Roland said, without looking up.

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