Rewrite That Witch
CH1409 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 1409: Bomb (I)

Sylvie understood, looking at it, that this was the target.

The center of the floating island bore no resemblance to Roland’s sketched illustrations. The demon city had been built in rings around the tall, needle-sharp obelisk, but a deep pit separated the two — city from monument — and the walls of that pit were alive with inferior demons clinging to the stone like barnacles to a hull. On closer attention, they were excavating: working at the rock continuously, pressing the pit wider. Most of the Red Mist pooled there at the bottom, forming a red lake that caught no light and gave none back. The towers closest to the pit’s edge had already tilted and begun their slow fall into the liquid below.

According to what she’d read: the obelisk began small and grew continuously, a living thing in everything but name, swelling as the accumulated Red Mist expanded. The city’s age could be read in both — the height of the monument and the size of the pit.

This city was ancient.

Next to the obelisk, the approaching biplanes were almost too small to register. Sylvie tried to imagine the bombs — she could do the arithmetic, she knew the weight, she knew the yield — and found that she could not make the numbers feel equal to the stone.

Then something made her stop.

“What is it?” Wendy asked immediately, hearing the change in her breath.

“There’s a demon up there. A strange one.” Her vision rested on the top of the obelisk. According to everything she understood about how the demons organized themselves, any figure permitted to stand at the highest point of the structure was someone of consequence. But the appearance of this one stopped the reasoning cold. Its cloak was wide enough to shelter three or four adult humans; all across its form, objects hung — bone knives, metal armor plates, fragments of hardware she couldn’t name. And its head. The head was shaped like a stacked column, and from it hung an array of masks, layered one above the other, varying in shape and size. The masks alone should have told her it was important. What stopped her was that the magic power emanating from it was barely perceptible.

“Does it show strong magical undulations?”

“No.” That was the confusion. Its appearance was that of at minimum a Senior Demon, but it stood entirely still, making no preparation to gather power, unleashing nothing. It simply watched. Looking in the direction of the incoming Aerial Knights as though what it was witnessing was a matter of academic interest.

Since it posed no immediate threat, Sylvie released the question. She had two Fury of Heaven teams nearing the city’s edge; the drop windows would not hold themselves open. She reassigned her focus to calculating the optimal release points.

Two minutes of measurement. Then the first command.

“Team One: release the package.”

“Roger. Good out.”

The sky was clear, but the clouds above the Impassable Mountain Range floated at a workable altitude. Moving at constant elevation with the cloud cover above, the Fury of Heaven planes that had stayed in the overcast had gone undetected. Five planes in single file released their bombs — one hundred and fifty kilograms each — from the belly of the aircraft at level speed.

The moment the weight left the plane, Good felt the entire airframe rise — an absurd lightness, as though the plane had taken a breath and kept it. He could not stay to watch.

Sylvie could.

Gravity took each bomb nose-first. The inertia from the aircraft gave them forward motion; together, the two forces bent their path into a long arc toward the city center. In the final five hundred meters, the trajectory was nearly vertical. The demons below noticed the shapes descending — another wing of Devilbeasts rose toward the clouds, hard and climbing — but the gap between a Devilbeast’s wing and a falling bomb closed in only one direction.

Five detonations came in sequence. The fireballs that erupted threw smoke, debris, and rubble ten meters into the air; the force exceeded anything a 152mm Howitzer produced, and Sylvie, though she heard nothing at her altitude, felt the blast waves as structural tremors in the sky beneath her. The heatwave pressed cavities into the Red Mist below — air pockets, the shape of bubbles pressed into soft dough — and the column of grayish-black smoke rising from the city was visible against the Red Mist’s uniform crimson for what seemed like kilometers.

The city had not been struck in centuries. In under two weeks of existence on this side of the Impassable Mountain Range, its core had been reached by humans twice.

But Sylvie’s heart had already dropped.

The drop pattern had been more accurate than any Longsong Cannon would have managed. They had landed in the city center, though across a spread the wind had pulled wider than ideal. Of the five bombs, only two had struck the Red Mist Lake at all. Of those two, neither reached the surface. They had detonated in midair — and the instant they did, she saw the ripple.

A blue light wave, spreading out from the obelisk’s base. She recognized the shape: the same barrier that Senior Demons carried as their own skin, scaled up to encase an entire city.

“What happened?” Wendy read her face before she spoke.

“The obelisk is protected.” Sylvie’s voice was flat. “A magic power barrier surrounds the Red Mist Lake. The bombs had no effect.”

“Hold on.” Shavi turned from the front seat, disbelief clear on her face. “You’re saying the demons expanded a personal barrier to the scale of a city? That’s not possible.”

She knew — all of them knew — the basic principle: the effect of any ability scaled directly with the power behind it. To encompass a space this large would require more magic power than every Witch they had ever trained could produce in concert. And yet the ripple was right there in front of her eyes.

That demon at the top of the obelisk—

The moment the thought surfaced, Sylvie looked back. This time the sight stopped her completely.

The figure had extended every one of its dry, elongated arms — she hadn’t realized how many arms there were — and was removing the masks from its stacked head, one by one, and discarding them. What the masks had covered was worse than the masks themselves. More than ten heads stacked one atop another — demon heads, human heads, shapes that belonged to creatures she had no name for — all facing upward, all wearing different expressions. One of the faces, near the middle, was unmistakably female. Each face smiled differently.

Every hair on Sylvie’s body stood.

She bent over the console and was sick. When she finally stopped her ability and pulled away, her vision was white at the edges.

Wendy had the transmitter already. “This is Seagull. Team Two: drop the bombs now and withdraw.”

“Copy. Did Team One succeed?”

“No. There is a magic-powered barrier around the obelisk. The bombs cannot reach the lake.”

A pause. “Barrier.” A longer pause. “Understood. But I want to make another attempt.”

“There’s been an incident here — Sylvie is temporarily unable to provide guidance, and the Devilbeasts are already reaching the cloud layer—”

“Don’t worry. Team One will cover us.”

Wendy connected to Tilly and reported. The response surprised her: not urgency, not alarm. Just a considered beat of silence, and then: “Let Team Two proceed. We haven’t reached the point of retreat yet.”

Discussion

Suggest a change