Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1394: The Stars amongst the Mountains

“Hell — what are those things?”

Lightning had been circling the Deity of Gods, watching for anything that changed, and the changes were difficult to miss. Dark columns rising along the island’s perimeter, angling upward, their arrangement too orderly to be accidental.

“Coo.” Maggie took a long moment staring before she answered. “Did they dig those stone pillars up from underground?”

From altitude, the columns were like stakes driven into the island’s surface — except they were rising from it, not planted in it, and the way they spiraled outward in even spacing made plain that they were arranged on purpose. Lightning felt the wrongness of it before she could name what it was.

She activated two Sigils simultaneously. “This is the Exploration Group — strange sightings on the floating island! Repeat: something is changing on the target!”

“Phoenix, copy.” Tilly’s reply came quickly. “I’ve also noticed dust activity on the surface. Continue observation — I’ll put the Aerial Knights on high alert.”

“This is Seagull.” Andrea’s voice. “Can you describe?”

“Some large black pillars are rising from the edge of the island.” Lightning organized her words carefully. “They look similar to the towers in Demon City. I can’t gauge exact sizes from here, but they’re large — ”

She stopped.

One of the steles lit up from within — a blinding, blue-white radiance that flooded through its translucent walls and turned the crystal surface brilliant. Then something shot out of it at tremendous speed, a hard vertical discharge aimed directly at the sky.

“The pillars are hollow inside, coo!” Maggie yelped.

“What’s hollow?” Andrea still hadn’t pieced it together.

Lightning shouted at the top of her voice. “Fleet — scatter!”

The ejected object streaked between her and Maggie close enough to feel, then arced — a long, unhurried parabola — into the aerial battlefield ahead. This time Lightning watched it all the way through. It was a stone pillar. Identical in shape to the needles she had seen Spider Monstrous Beasts produce, but scaled up by an order of magnitude, its surface sheened with magic power that crackled faintly as it traveled.

Both sides panicked at once. Fire of Heavens and Devilbeasts alike scattered and dove, seeking the fastest exit from the projectile’s arc.

In the vast sky, at ten kilometers and more, even a pillar of that size was threading through dots. It completed its arc and struck an injured Devilbeast that had been lagging behind — striking it apart, sending pieces tumbling groundward.

Just like that? Lightning stared.

They’re lobbing enormous projectiles across ten kilometers and they don’t explode, don’t fragment, don’t scatter. What are they hoping to accomplish? Swatting at insects with a flagpole?

Then Maggie’s claws turned her head.

Lightning looked where Maggie pointed — at the decoy artillery formation on the opposing slope.

Understanding arrived like cold water.

The pillar smashed into the formation. Blue light erupted on impact, and from the mountaintop a wall of snow mist shot upward several meters in an instant. The sound reached them a beat later — a crack and rumble that was in no way inferior to an artillery discharge. The pillar didn’t stop. It rolled, and rolled, and kept rolling for almost a hundred meters across the false position, destroying everything in its path before it finally came to rest.

Where the formation had been, there was ruin.

Lightning’s breath caught.

If that had been the real position—

“Lightning, what’s happening down there?” Andrea’s voice was tight. “Is Tilly in danger?”

“No — the planes are safe. Better not interrupt her right now.” Lightning brought her gaze back to the aerial fight; it was still unresolved, both sides too tangled for a clean outcome. Then she looked at the demolished false formation, and her expression settled into something harder. “But the ground units are in serious trouble.”

The pillar was not simply stone.

Through the dispersing snow mist, the blue radiance faded and went out. What remained behind as the dust settled revealed an interior — not rock, not rubble. Something with the texture of flesh. And then things were crawling out of it.

Lightning smacked her own forehead.

Maggie raised her head and held the image for a long moment. “Spider Demons, coo. Small ones, coo.”

Cat’s Claw and Jop had watched the decoy position reduced to wreckage from their sentry post. Their angle was wrong for detail — they couldn’t make out what the falling object was — but the upward bloom of white snow and the resonant crack across the mountain gap were neither ambiguous nor reassuring. The eighteen kilometers from the mobile fortress that had been their safety margin was no longer that.

The enemy could lure and strike simultaneously.

“Captain — targets have entered effective firing range.” The observer’s voice from the concealed post. “No deviation in the floating island’s trajectory. Cannons one, two, and three can fire.”

Cat’s Claw bit his lower lip and looked at Jop.

To fire now was a risk of the first order. The decoy had been destroyed. If the demons tracked back to the real position in time — if they had already done so — the moment they opened up, they announced themselves. But to retreat meant the entire operation had been built and abandoned for nothing. The Aerial Knights’ fight up there would have been for nothing.

“There are times,” Jop said slowly, “when we don’t need to think about whether what we’re doing will work.”

There was nothing wrong with being afraid.

Nothing wrong with failing.

The duty of a soldier was to fire when the order was given.

Cat’s Claw exhaled. He pushed himself out of the sentry cave and into the observation post and blew his whistle hard.

“Positions — now! We fire everything before the enemy can respond! Move, move, move — let the Aerial Knights see who the real trump card is!”

The still and empty position became a swarm in seconds. Camouflage sheets flew back to reveal the steel cannons beneath — cold, gleaming, their barrels dark with the chill of mountain air. These were not the painted logs of the decoy. These were weapons of war, and even cold and quiet there was nothing fake about the weight they carried.

Without any urging, the crews loaded charges and set ropes in a motion that had been drilled until it was no longer something they thought about. The process was nothing like the first time they had ever fired a gun in combat — that panicked, dropping fumble against Longsong cavalry. That had been a different army, a different version of each of them.

Cat’s Claw was not the only one who had changed. The force around him had become something capable of shaping the fate of the human world.

“Report — cannons one, two, and three ready!”

Cat’s Claw looked at the massive floating island hanging in the northern sky.

He spat.

“Open fire.”

The deafening discharge split the mountain air. Three barrels spewed flame simultaneously, and then again, and again — stars burning against the stone peaks, vivid and brief and entirely human.

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