Rewrite That Witch
CH357 · Rewrite
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Chapter 357: Unfinished Work

The second time, Agatha covered her ears in advance.

Then she watched something she had no framework for.

There was no endless charging cycle. The barrel, enormous as it appeared, was not as unwieldy as it looked. Each shot shook the earth. Yet the base held perfectly still — as though the barrel and its mount were not connected at all, as though the recoil passed through the tube and simply vanished. Between each shot, the operator withdrew the stopper, extracted the copper casing, seated the new bolt, and fired again. The whole sequence was fast enough that the ground shook almost every ten breaths. Between the firing and the moment the snow columns erupted downfield, there was almost no interval at all — the shells moved too fast for the eye to follow.

Not one Transcendent alive could dodge this.

She stared at the silver-white barrel and felt something shift in her chest — a private, involuntary concession to a thing she had not expected to be real.

If Taquila had been guarded by weapons like this — The thought arrived whole, uninvited. The demons never could have pressed us to the walls. The attrition that broke us — it need not have happened. The war might not have gone the way it did.

She let the thought stand for a moment, then asked quietly: “Was this weapon made by witches?”

The finish was too uniform, too precise for iron hammers and mortal hands. She was certain of it.

But the prince’s answer surprised her.

“It’s a joint creation,” he said, smiling. “Witches handled the smelting and casting of the Longsong Cannon. The alchemists were responsible for the shells. And the witches working in manufacture — all of them, except Anna, are what you would call assistant witches.”

The idea she’d carried for four hundred years listed slightly.

She had always believed herself generous toward mortals — generous enough to be quietly marginalized for it within the Quest Society. But this. Assistant witches. The ones the Union had considered support functions, secondary capabilities, lesser contributors — they had made this.

Had the Union been wrong from the beginning?

Did it mean Roland’s claim — mortals can defeat demons — was actually right? But if the cooperation of witches and mortals could produce this kind of power, then why had the first Battle of Divine Will ended in catastrophe?

The questions crowded each other, and she stopped trying to sort them into order.

Tilly, standing further along the wall, was shaken in her own way.

She had stood on walls before and watched shells tear into demonic beasts. She knew what the old firearms could do — and she knew what they could not. They were difficult to aim at range. If enemies closed, the angle of fire became useless. Somewhere in the middle distance was their effective zone, and even there, the loading was slow enough that a fast hybrid beast might reach the foot of the wall before the next shot was ready. A mortar team needed five to ten operators, and the failure of any one step broke the whole chain. Open fire for ignition meant the weapon was worthless in rain.

The Longsong Cannon had none of these problems.

Breech-loading kept the muzzle angle low enough for close-range suppression. Firing rate was multiplied several times over, with three operators instead of ten. No open flame for ignition — it could be worked in weather. Its range exceeded anything a mangonel could reach. Roland’s description — epochal weapon — was, she was reluctant to admit, accurate.

And she knew this was temporary — that witches were currently needed for manufacture, but only temporarily. Sylvie had confirmed it: where only the Chief Knight had once carried an automatic weapon, now every soldier carried one. Anna created the production facilities and equipment. The casting and assembly could be completed by ordinary workers.

She watched Ashes and Anderlia from the corner of her eye. Both stood wordless, the way people stand when they encounter something they hadn’t believed was possible.

It’s good to have an ally like this. The thought came easily. What came harder was the feeling that followed: As a brother, he feels even more distant than he used to.

She had a sense — not a conclusion, just a feeling she couldn’t yet disprove — that Roland had moved far ahead of her.

It made her restless in a way she hadn’t expected.

If only he could be more frank with me.

Watching the shells exhaust themselves in their brilliant succession, Roland felt a small private ache. He kept his face still.

This was not, in any real sense, a weapons test.

He’d borrowed an elite artillery crew from the First Battalion and had them running simulative drills for days beforehand, including two live-fire practice rounds. It was a demonstration, prepared specifically for the witches, and the result had been excellent — Agatha’s expression alone was proof the cannon had performed beyond her expectations.

But by Roland’s own standards, the Longsong Cannon was nowhere near finished.

Except for the caliber — the sacred 152 mm — nothing else matched what he knew the weapon could be. With Anna’s precision machining, Lucia’s elemental purification, and Sylvie’s crack detection, they could in principle produce something genuinely comparable to a modern cannon, rather than this replica that peaked at seven or eight kilometers.

The problems were in the details.

The chamber was too small. He had deliberately reduced its volume to manage the weight of fixed ammunition, which left the powder charge insufficient. The 40-caliber barrel was long enough; the range was the chamber’s failure.

The propellant. Nitroglycerin was still in testing. What they loaded was nitrocellulose — and the nitrocellulose consumed by a few shells could have loaded thousands of rifle rounds. Furthermore, the propellant had not yet been gelatinized, which reduced the effective powder charge further still.

The shells themselves were, in essence, scaled-up rifle rounds. Without a bursting charge, they relied entirely on kinetic energy. Miss the target and the damage was zero. Against slow enemies they worked. Against anything fast, the margin was narrow.

Before they could lay down suppressive fire across any terrain they chose, there was still a long road.

And Roland was beginning to suspect he had less time than he’d once thought.

Ever since he learned that the Magic Stone transformation originated from the demons — that their technology was not static, not a fixed thing to be studied and outpaced — he had felt a quiet urgency he couldn’t quite set down.

If the demons have their own science, their own development arc — will they reach their own leap forward at some point?

The cannon fired its last round. Iron Axe called out the results in a flat, professional tone. Roland nodded and made careful note of the shell count.

The question stayed with him, patient and unresolved.

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