Chapter 346: Bygones (Part III)
“So,” Roland said. “Does this count as a High Awakening?”
Agatha did not reply immediately. There was nothing in her mind except a single, circling question: how is this possible?
The Holy City was gone. The Union had dissolved. There had been nowhere for witches to receive proper training, guidance, or mentorship for centuries — a void that should have meant the gradual erosion of ability across each successive generation. And yet. A young witch who had barely passed her Day of Adulthood. Two promotions. Not in fifty years of dedicated practice, but in what sounded like a single year or two.
This could not be explained by luck. Even in the Union, at the height of its concentration of talent, a witch like this would have been spoken of in the same breath as Alice.
And if she had heard correctly — three others, equally advanced?
Agatha watched Anna return to her place, the black cube gone, the hands still and quiet in her lap. “This counts as a High Awakening,” she said at last. Her throat was dry. “I don’t have a Measuring Stone, so I cannot quantify the precise change — but yes.” She paused. “I want to ask, if I may: what did Anna experience before each awakening? They seem to have occurred recently, and in rapid succession.”
She heard herself using the honorific without having chosen it. It was not social grace. It was simple accuracy. A witch’s standing had never depended on origin — not in the Union, not anywhere that understood what ability actually meant. Whatever Anna’s background, whatever this strange frontier town was, the girl in front of her was qualified to sit at any senior table the Union had ever convened. On her current trajectory, she might already surpass Agatha herself. Recognizing that cost nothing and pretending otherwise would have been embarrassing.
“My first awakening came after I exhausted my magic entirely during a battle with demonic beasts,” Anna said. “The second, I believe, was caused by learning.”
“Learning.” Agatha turned the word over carefully. “What kind of learning?”
“Ahem.” Roland cleared his throat. “We can return to that subject later. For now — Alice. And what exactly the God’s Punishment Army was. Can you tell us?”
She absorbed this deflection. He doesn’t trust me yet, so he won’t explain the knowledge that triggered her second awakening. Reasonable. But if what he was implying was real — if understanding certain knowledge could catalyze a High Awakening — then whatever he possessed was extraordinary in a way she could not overstate. Enhancing the probability of evolution had been one of the foundational research goals of the Exploration Society. If she could understand the mechanism, the possibility of reviving the Union’s intellectual tradition was not entirely theoretical.
But she could not access that before she had earned his trust. For now: Alice.
“Alice was extraordinarily powerful,” Agatha said. “Even when facing multiple Lords of Hell simultaneously, a God’s Stone of Retaliation could not suppress her — her ability exceeded the Stone’s interference threshold. But Transcendents were vanishingly rare. And that was the Union’s structural weakness: not a shortage of witches in absolute numbers, but a profound shortage in the right kinds of witches.”
“Diversity?”
“That’s the word. A witch cannot know before her awakening what ability she will develop. Historical analysis suggested that only about ten percent of awakened witches were suited for direct combat — and of those, only a small fraction ever achieved the Extraordinary level. There were fifty-year stretches in the Union’s history when not a single combat witch evolved. The fighting force was brilliant at its peak and deeply unstable when that peak was not represented. We built a mortal guard corps to compensate for the gaps, but mortals — even equipped with God’s Stones of Retaliation — could not match a Mad Demon in direct combat.”
Roland’s hand moved to his chin. “So: not every mortal manifests magic. Of those who awaken, not all are suited for combat. Of those who are, achieving Extraordinary level is rare and unpredictable. The fighting strength of the Union was genuinely dependent on luck.”
“More or less.” She exhaled. “Alice commissioned the Exploration Society to research a way to produce warriors who could exceed the limits of the human body — a reliable answer to the numbers problem that didn’t depend on waiting for the right witches to be born.”
“And did they find one?”
She was quiet for a moment. “They did. But I had already left the Society before the solution was implemented.”
“Why?”
“Because the approach they chose was to fuse witches and ordinary people by force using God’s Stones of Retaliation.” She kept her voice flat. “The process consumed the witches. Used them as material.” She looked at him steadily. “I could not accept that. I believed our research focus should be on expanding the applications of the God’s Stone — finding what else it could do — not on treating witches as consumable inputs. The final line in Alice’s diary is correct. That approach would bring destruction.”
The expression on Roland’s face shifted — not theatrically, but visibly. Something genuinely troubled behind the eyes. She found this mildly surprising, and slightly reassuring.
“Alice did it out of necessity,” Agatha continued. “Taqila was collapsing. She had no time and no alternatives she could believe in. But the fact that the Union is now gone proves the approach failed — or at least that it could not prevent the outcome she was trying to prevent.”
She looked down at the book in her hands. The familiar lines of the slogan were on the last page — climb over the mountains, wade through the rivers — and she had to press her fingertips flat against the paper to stop them from shaking.
Where are you now? How do I revive the order alone, from nothing?
“But the God’s Punishment Army still exists.”
The words hit her before she processed them.
Her hands stopped moving.
She looked up slowly. “What did you say?”
“I’m not certain this is a coincidence,” he said, picking each word with deliberate care. “The Church — the organization you’ve never heard of — established two cities at the center of the Impassable Mountain Range. They named them Holy Cities. They were also the ones who began hunting witches. Beyond that, they recruited orphans and street children, brought them back to monasteries. Wendy was one who escaped.”
He kept going.
“The Church has its own army and its own territory. Its most powerful warriors form the God’s Punishment Army — individuals who have lost their sanity but possess nearly unlimited physical strength, comparable to Extraordinary Witches. Their numbers are substantial. They may also command several powerful witches of their own. This is why I placed the God’s Stone on your ankle: before you told us what you knew, we had always assumed it was the Church that built the original Holy City of Taqila, fought the Devils, and left the ruins.”
Agatha’s mouth was open. She did not have words for what she was hearing.
An organization composed of ordinary people had taken the most sensitive secrets of the Union. Repurposed them. Built an army using the Union’s own methods. And then turned that army against the witches, hunted them across four kingdoms, built an institution powerful enough to outlast every witch-governed city by several centuries.
What did the people who crossed the mountains actually build? The question cracked open in her chest. What order did they reestablish? Was it always going to end like this?
The headache came fast, enormous, the kind that started behind the eyes and radiated outward in waves.
Wendy must have been watching. Her hand came to Agatha’s shoulder, steady and warm, and pressed her gently back down against the pillow.
“Enough for today,” Wendy said quietly. “Sleep. We’ll find the answers. I promise.”
Something lightened from her ankle. She felt it before she saw it — Anna removing the God’s Stone shackle without ceremony, setting it aside. The room emptied, one by one, the witches filing out in the particular quiet of people trying not to disturb something fragile.
The last to leave was Roland.
As the door closed behind him, she heard his voice — even, unhurried, directed at no one she could see.