Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 34: Trial Explosion

When Roland had built the cement production house, he had laid out the northern production cluster in his head as a single plan — the cement building first, then additional structures flanking it, all positioned close enough to the mine to be guarded together. The gunpowder house had gone up quickly; brick and a wooden ceiling, constructed in parallel with the wall without pulling labor from the main project.

The saltpeter from Willow Town was stored in a dedicated warehouse next door. Separate handling crews managed the saltpeter, the charcoal, and the sulfur — never the same group for all three, so that no individual outside the locked production room ever had full knowledge of the formula.

Roland measured out twenty pounds of finished gunpowder and poured it into a prepared sheepskin bag. The production process had been meticulous: compacted, air-dried, broken down with a wooden hammer, screened through cloth, filtered again. Uniform granular size was the difference between reliable combustion and irregular burning that could kill the person holding the charge. Every step done with ceramic and wood — no metal, which could generate static.

He wrapped three more layers of sheepskin around the bag and tied it with rope.

Carter looked at the bundle. “That’s all of it? A bag.”

“A bag,” Roland agreed.

The chief knight’s expression went through something careful and professional. Snow powder, properly packed, could make noise. In the hands of an entertainer it could produce a satisfying boom that startled horses and impressed crowds. Whether it could do anything to a demon beast was a different question. His Highness had a record of surprising him, which was the only reason Carter hadn’t said any of this aloud.

They rode out two miles west of the wall, to the flat ground between the forest’s edge and the mountain slope. Iron Axe was already there with several hunters — the best archers in Border Town, men who had heard only that the task came from the prince and had needed no further incentive. A rope fence enclosed the test area; on the wall side, Carter’s knights were positioned to keep bystanders back.

“Did you bring the animals?” Roland asked.

Iron Axe produced a cage: pheasants and rabbits, tied in pairs by the leg.

Carter shook his head slightly. “Your Highness, pheasants and rabbits startle at nothing. Scare them and you’ve only proven you can scare pheasants.”

“I’m not trying to scare them.”

Carter waited.

Roland carried the bag to the center of the cleared area and set it down. He cut a small opening in the outermost layer and let gunpowder trickle out, then drew a trail of loose powder backward in a steady line, stepping away from the bag while he poured. He stopped when the trail was a hundred yards long.

Iron Axe had the animals placed at intervals: every five paces from the center, out to thirty paces. Five tethering stakes. Five animals at five distances.

Roland checked the wind, checked the distance, and found it satisfactory. He told everyone to lie flat and cover their ears.

Carter was still on his feet when Roland got down. He looked at the distance between himself and the bag, looked at Roland on the ground, and then made the calculation that respecting authority sometimes required unfamiliar postures. He lay down in the frozen mud. Through his chainmail the cold traveled upward in a steady press.

He was composing a thought about how this distance was excessive for any product of snow powder, however reformed, when the world came apart.

The sound arrived at the same instant as the shockwave — they were too close for the gap between them to register. What Carter experienced was a single physical event: ears gone suddenly blank, ground striking up through his chest, a dark mass rising from the center of the field and spreading against the sky. Mud and frozen gravel pattered down around him for several seconds after, like a brief heavy rain.

He lay still. His ears were ringing with a sound that had no pitch, only presence. He turned his head and saw Roland already on his feet, hands still pressed to his ears, expression satisfied in the specific way of a man who knew exactly what he was going to see.

The center of the field held a pit half a yard deep. The nearest tethering stake had nothing attached to it. The rabbit was simply gone — not thrown, not scattered in any visible direction, just absent.

The pheasants at ten and fifteen paces were on the ground. No visible wounds. They did not move. Roland crouched and confirmed they were dead.

The rabbit at thirty paces was alive. Its ears were bleeding. When Roland approached it did not flinch — sat perfectly still, looking at nothing, deaf and diminished and waiting for something that didn’t come.

Carter stood in the test area and tried to find a professional frame for what he had just witnessed. Snow powder, in three buckets, at point-blank range, produced a satisfying boom. This — twenty pounds, at a hundred yards — had just killed animals at fifteen paces through the concussive force alone, without touching them, without burning them, without a wall or a sword between them.

“Can it be mass-produced?” Iron Axe asked. His voice had a quality Carter recognized from his own chest: the tone of a man revising his assessment of a situation.

“Twenty or thirty of these before the Months of the Demons begin,” Roland said. “The saltpeter production is the limiting factor.” He looked at the pit. “We’ll use the guns and bows as primary killers. The gunpowder charges for the choke points.”

Carter finally located the frame he had been looking for. He had spent his career studying the arts of the sword, the lance, the shield formation — techniques that had evolved across centuries to give trained fighters an edge over less trained fighters. All of that expertise depended on a fundamental premise: that the body in front of you was vulnerable, and the body behind you was yours to protect.

The bag had not cared about any of that.

He did not say this. He dusted the frozen mud from his chainmail and followed the prince back toward the wall.

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