Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1468: Ignition

Good clenched his control stick and did not look away.

Time thinned.

At first he could still hear the engines. Then, by degrees, the sound receded — replaced by his own heartbeat, heavy and regular, until that too went quiet. The world around him became very still.

The bomb drew away from the Fury of Heaven, and the opening in the dome grew. It filled his cockpit glass. At that scale, the demons who had noticed the three planes and were turning to respond moved like figures in cold honey — every motion too slow to be real.

Fragments of the pre-mission briefing came back without his invitation.

“Your Highness — does the bomb the bombing squadron is carrying really have that kind of power?”

“If I fly fast enough, can I outrun the blast?”

Finkin had asked both questions. Regardless of occasion, he could always find the words that pulled laughter from a room. Good sometimes envied that.

“Only if you fly faster than light,” the princess had replied without mercy. “At the moment of detonation, the initial flash is sufficient to cook you before you register the light. If luck carries you past that — which it won’t — the following shockwave will exceed the speed of sound for a brief interval. The only safe method of escape is to maintain adequate distance in advance.” She had paused. “At minimum, for the first bomb.”

“And the second?”

“If the god of luck chooses to bless you, there may be a chance. But rather than praying, you would do better to nudge your control stick and begin your retreat early.”

Laughter from the room. She had not continued past that, but it had lodged in Good’s memory.

By the time the first bomb had detonated, he had already guessed at what she had been pointing toward. The Glory of the Sun alone could not obliterate the Deity of Gods. That was why the mission plan had specified the Red Mist Lake as the target — the interior detonation, the floating city’s own body acting as the shield, confining and amplifying everything inward. And Princess Tilly had been not quite wrong on one point: it was not entirely a matter of luck. A great deal of it depended on your squadron mates.

For anyone else, Good would not have been so certain.

The aircraft commander of the Ark of Peace was Eagle Face.

Eagle Face did not believe in luck. He believed in the completion of what was required. If it was the instructor at the controls, he would meet his responsibility. That was not in question.

Which was precisely why Good was here — to ensure the enemy’s luck could not undo what the instructor had done.

“Hey! Good! Are you awake!?” His companion’s voice tore through the stillness. The engine roar and wind poured back in all at once. “If you wait any longer, we’re going in with the bomb! Do you really want to leave Rachel—”

“Do you remember the exercise sequence?” Good cut him off. “Three. Two. One.”

Ahead of him, Manfeld’s plane climbed hard.

Good pulled the control stick all the way to his chest.

The three planes fanned outward like a flower opening, and at the center of the flower was the round bomb.

The g-force pressed him flat against his seat. Breathing required effort. His vision rotated — the opening, the Blackstone pyramid’s exterior, the sky, around again — and even with the Fury of Heaven’s engines pushing everything they had, the maneuver was barely at the edge of possible. You could not pull this in a normal dive. You could not make this turn anywhere except where the plane’s speed was already committed to gravity and had to be redirected rather than overcome. And once the bomb detonated, every cubic meter of air near the Deity of Gods was going to become dangerous; what they could do was angle themselves against the pyramid’s outer walls and use the stone as cover while distance gave them a heading.

In that moment of rotation, Good saw a demon unlike any other he had passed close to.

Its appearance. Its bearing. The quality of the air around it. Different in some fundamental way from every other creature on this floating city — not louder, but different in category, as though it occupied a classification that nothing else in his experience shared. Less than fifty meters between them. He braced for the sensation of being shredded or turned to stone. Neither came.

It stood motionless and watched him go by.

The bomb brushed the edge of the opening and fell into the dome.

Nassaupelle lowered the hand that had held the core high.

Luck was not with the demons. He had understood that from the moment he saw the three iron birds escorting the metallic object down. That changed the calculus entirely. What the humans had done was not a bet against fate — it was the prepared meeting the unprepared. When one side had already committed to every measure within their reach, no coincidence could reverse it.

He closed his eyes and connected to the Birth Tower.

The King was still issuing instructions — mobilizing the forces stationed at Arrieta, cold and mechanical, the voice of a machine that had forgotten it was ever anything else. Nassaupelle went directly through the core apparatus and severed the connection. This exposed his tampering unambiguously, but he had nothing left to preserve. The King reacted immediately: the Realm of Mind beneath his feet churned. Magic became dense enough to push against the skin. In the Realm of Mind itself, the King had no doubt already begun stirring waves. Any contact with that substrate would pull Nassaupelle straight into the Presiding Holy See, and there would be no resistance worth the name.

The network he had built contained no pathways to the Realm of Mind.

This was his domain, only his, and it would remain so.

He screened off every brain that could sense magic power. The world went silent.

In that silence, he was the Birth Tower. And this was the only place from which to witness humanity’s newest legacy at its full measure.

The metallic object entered his sight. Nassaupelle spread all of his arms wide toward the sky.

“Come. Let me see—”

—the power of knowledge.

The second half of the sentence did not form. The light consumed him.

The Blackstone pyramid swelled.

Good saw it happen from the edge of the pyramid’s outer face, and his mind reached for analogies and abandoned them one by one. The stone — which was not stone, or not only stone — bulged outward as though the pyramid’s inner shell had become a liquid under pressure. Clear ripples propagated across its surface. At the furthest extent of the swell, the shell ruptured: an inferno tore through the cracks along with volumes of smoke that created a column instantaneously taller than the first. The pyramid’s top layer was gone — nearly a third of the stone ejected into the air above.

If he had been a second slower, that stone would have been him.

Then the inferno changed color.

What came next from the cracks was not smoke or stone. It was the color of blood — thick, adhesive, luminous. It poured out at a scale that exceeded the smoke, climbing past the column and spreading across half the sky. He recognized it. Not Red Mist. Burning Red Mist.

The Deity of Gods had become a volcano.

And when that burning spread to its limit, when the heat had nowhere else to go, the second detonation came. Not from the bomb. From the Red Mist Lake itself.

The Red Mist had ignited.

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