Rewrite That Witch
CH307 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 307: Death from the Sky

Two thousand meters.

Lightning had measured the altitude by flying straight up from the balloon’s position until the cloud cover was close enough to make her want to reach for it — a loose cotton weight that still required several more hundred meters of climbing to actually touch. The ground below was a flat abstraction: grey-brown patches and lines that were fields and roads, the river a silver thread.

Cloud Gazer hung in the sky painted in blue and white patches, indistinguishable from the clouds at distance. Easterly Wind No. 1 wore the same camouflage. The witches had put on sky-colored clothing before leaving camp. His Highness had been explicit: a surprise attack from concealment, nothing attracting eyes from below. The First Army had disembarked before reaching Silver City’s pier and walked overland to the ridge. Under Sylvie’s surveillance, the whole operation from pier to camp had been invisible — no one in Silver City had seen anything worth noting.

They’d set up camp and Cloud Gazer had risen at dawn. The bombing would happen today.

It was the first day of the first month of autumn.

Maggie flew out ahead of the balloon as a white-tailed eagle — cloud-white shape ranging forward to scout, eyes that could resolve carriage wheels from this altitude without difficulty, reporting back to the basket in short circuits. Lightning flew loose alongside, working the air.

At least I have nothing to worry about with the target, she thought, tilting in a thermal. The palace was not a difficult mark. Large, white-roofed, centered in the inner district. You could not miss it.

“Are you tired?” Anna called from the basket’s edge, leaning out over the painted wicker. “Come in. We won’t encounter any Devils up here.”

“At this speed I can fly all day.” Lightning shook her head.

“Nervous?”

This was Wendy, leaning out beside Anna — both of them watching her with the specific expression of people who had decided to say something and were gauging the moment.

“I’ve practiced the course a hundred times,” Lightning said. “The palace is enormous. I can’t miss.”

Wendy smiled. “Even so — don’t be brave for the wrong reason. His Highness said our safety is the priority.” A pause. “And what happened at the Devil settlement during the reconnaissance mission — that wasn’t your fault.”

Lightning opened her mouth.

“Anyone could see you’ve been carrying it,” Wendy said, gently. “Not cowardice — inexperience. Battle instinct takes time to develop. If I had been in your place, I could not have done better.”

“Nightingale has reflexes none of the rest of us have,” Anna added. “Come in and rest. You’ll need your full ability for the impact corrections — it won’t be a small expenditure.”

Lightning said nothing for a moment. Then she dipped under the basket’s edge and came in, and before she’d found her footing Wendy had already wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

“No one blames you,” Wendy said. “So don’t blame yourself. Understood?”

”…Okay.”

Maggie returned mid-morning, wings folding as she landed on the basket’s rim: “King’s City is ahead of us. Almost there, goo.”

Lightning was out of the basket before the sentence finished.

She lifted the observation mirror.

Just as His Highness described it. King’s City’s walls were visible even from this height — a blue-green line drawn around an irregular shape on the plain below, the way you’d draw a boundary on a map with a slightly unsteady hand. In the grey centre of the enclosed space, a cluster of white — the palace — stood out the way a candle stands out in a darkened room.

There had been a plan, at one point, to drop leaflets over the city before releasing the bomb. Something to establish Roland’s authorship before the impact, to build the political meaning of the strike. They’d spent three test runs trying to make it work from altitude: papers tumbled unpredictably from two thousand meters, wind-scattered, uncontrollable even with added weight. Reducing altitude meant increasing visibility. Cloud Gazer was too large to bring low without being seen. And leaflets falling from the sky, regardless of their message, would draw exactly the wrong kind of attention before the strike.

His Highness had reassigned the task to Theo. The public announcement would come after.

Wendy adjusted the airflow and Cloud Gazer held position above the city, stable in the current, the basket barely swaying.

“Ready?” Wendy asked.

Lightning nodded. “Pull the valve.”

The mechanism released. Easterly Wind No. 1 began to move — slowly at first, then with accumulating certainty, dropping away from the basket into the open air below. The balloon surged upward as the weight left it, the basket lifting sharply.

Lightning was already falling.

Under the bomb’s downward current, the parachute at its tail snapped open — slowing it, making it trackable. She caught up easily and began making corrections, small adjustments of trajectory, reading the air and the angle of the palace’s roof below.

She knew King’s City. Not as home — as a place of transit, a place of hiding, of terrible months. The Witch Cooperation Association had sheltered in the slums here during the westward journey to the Holy Mountain: gathering food, recruiting, trying not to be noticed while witches died on the outer city’s public steps almost every month. Soraya had joined during that time. Echo too. Lightning had heard the stories — the close escapes, the ones who hadn’t escaped. She hadn’t been there herself, but the stories had become part of her knowledge of this place.

She had no affection for this city.

If ending the rule of the man responsible for those deaths required dropping a bomb on his roof, she was glad for the chance. If Roland had been king — if the right person had held this throne from the beginning — those women would still be alive.

I have a chance to correct it now.

The wind whistled past her as the altitude dropped and the details expanded: the dome, the banquet hall, the castle tower rising above the auxiliary structures of stables and barracks and warehouses. The steep outer walls. The roof: complex, angled, not ideal for the detonator’s function — which was why His Highness had selected the palace hall as the primary point of impact rather than the walls themselves.

The parachute reached its separation point.

Lightning pulled the release. The canopy fell away. She seized the bomb’s housing and began to rise — fast, hard, gaining altitude as Roland had specifically told her to do. Be at safe height before it hits. Do not look back. Do not look.

She looked.

A flash — white and total, expanding outward from the hall’s roof in the fraction of a second before the eye could process it as light. Then orange-red, blooming, a brief incandescence that hung in the air. Then the rolling cloud: smoke and displaced stone, churning upward with the slow inevitability of something very large that has just been undone.

The sound reached her a beat later. Not the crack of artillery, which she knew — this was larger, rounder, a pressure against the chest that didn’t come from a direction so much as from everywhere at once. She wobbled in the air and corrected.

Smoke poured from the hall’s windows and through the gaps between its columns, spreading across the surrounding garden and gallery. The dome showed cracks — fine at first, hairline fractures spreading from the impact point like ink dropped on wet stone, branching and widening, the pattern growing until the entire roof was marked with black lines that seemed to move as she watched.

Then the roof came down.

Slowly, at first — a sagging, a settling, as though the dome had decided to reconsider its position — and then all at once, the stone yielding to the math of it, raising a second cloud that dwarfed the first.

The smoke rose and spread and thinned in the autumn air above King’s City.

Easterly Wind No. 1 had done its work.

Discussion

Suggest a change