Rewrite That Witch
CH372 · Rewrite
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Chapter 372: Leisure

A week later, Border Town received its last month of autumn in a blizzard.

Roland stood at his office window and watched the dark figures moving across the snow-covered rooftops—townspeople clearing their daily accumulation, shoveling the weight off before it collapsed the beams beneath. A year ago today he had arrived in this world. Last autumn had not been nearly this cold, and the view from this same window had not been nearly this orderly.

At that time, the town had been a wasteland. A handful of solid wooden houses ringed the square; beyond them, clay huts and straw shacks. Most of the nobility lived near the square, connected to the castle by the only paved stone road. Everything else was mud and reek—the smell of human and animal waste ground into every lane and corner.

Now cement ran wall to wall along every road, and even the unpaved sections had been packed firm. The town was divided into districts: commercial frontage along the main road, residential blocks spreading out from it. The manufacturing quarter had taken shape—not workshops improvising piece by piece, but continuous assembly lines, at least for steam engines. The Blast Furnace Zone turned out iron ingots at a pace the engine factory could actually use; the blacksmiths had gone from knowing only a hammer to operating a variety of tools with confidence, and most of them had taken on apprentices. Anna still had to produce the high-precision components herself, but that gap was narrowing. What these men had built, they had built with their hands.

He might as well call the engines what they were: these workers’ achievement.

Ammunition and gunpowder production had passed entirely into civilian hands. Anna still needed to make the firearms herself—not from any shortage of tooling, but because the blast furnace’s iron lacked consistent quality, a problem already on his list. Chemical production had surprised him most. Because he had expected nothing, everything it produced was a windfall. Sulfuric acid and nitric acid now came out in volume; explosive compounds were in early development. As long as ammunition output kept climbing, the shift to repeating rifles was only a question of when. The methods were crude by any standard he knew, but crude production was still production, and at Border Town’s current scale, volume mattered more than elegance.

When Paper’s control over her ability stabilized—when she could direct her power with precision rather than intuition—chemical engineering might see another jump.

What mattered above everything was that all of it moved in the same direction. Production, education, construction—every line on every ledger trended upward. As more people became literate, breakthroughs in every field would come faster, and they would compound.

He had transformed a ruin into something worth defending, in a single year.

Roland felt he could have stood at the window all morning.

Then the bells came from the northwest, tolling fast and hard.

The demonic beast alarm.

Since the Months of Demons had begun, the alarm rang every three or four days. The First Army didn’t need him anymore—not the way the old Militia had, that first winter, when he’d had to stand beside them on the wall to keep them from throwing down their weapons. They knew their work now.

“The demonic beasts are back. Should I go take a look?” Nightingale’s voice appeared beside his ear.

“Sure.” He nodded. “Be careful.”

“They can’t touch me.”

A faint warmth against his cheek, then nothing. He was alone in the room.

Roland shook his head. The witches were restless—winter had them penned indoors, and Nightingale was too sharp not to need an outlet. The combat witches who had come over with Tilly were the worst of it; they kept angling for shifts on the wall, waiting for demonic hybrids to crest the battlements so they could test themselves. Nightingale had heard about this and started joining them whenever the alarm sounded. He suspected she was quietly measuring herself against each of them in turn, cataloguing who came closest to her mark.

If only she were this enthusiastic about her training, he thought, and then let it go.

Fighting side by side pulled witches and soldiers closer together, and the defense line needed both. The revolving rifles held against most demonic beasts, but demonic wolf-lion hybrids were a different matter; a few powerful witches on the wall meant fewer soldiers carried out in stretchers. So far, the First Army had not lost a single man. He intended to keep it that way.

The thought led him to the assistant-type witches, who had no beast-wall to occupy themselves with and no comparable outlet. He should think of something for them.

He summoned Soroya.

“Your Highness, do you have a new task for me?”

She looked well—the freckles across her face had faded, and her eyes carried that sharp, alive quality he had come to associate with people who had found their purpose. She had done remarkable work for Border Town, and the question she put to him now carried an eagerness that made him feel unexpectedly guilty.

“Have you been busy lately?”

“Not especially.” She pushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “Fewer workers have been coming to the factory through the cold, so the coating takes me only a few hours each day. The metal boxes Sir Kyle keeps asking me to treat fill the rest sometimes.” She tilted her head and smiled. “But I prefer this to the Witch Cooperation Association’s camp. I’m glad my ability is useful to you.”

That smile almost made him clear his throat.

“Ahem—I called you here to design some new cards for me.”

“More Gwent cards?”

“No, everyone’s probably tired of those.” He waved a hand. “Too simple. Once you know your opponent’s hand, the game’s over.” He took out a sheet of paper and drew a rough grid. “These are different. Four suits, numbered one through thirteen in each, plus two jokers. Fifty-four cards total.”

Soroya’s evolved ability let her produce a complete deck directly from the sketch, the cards materializing crisp and clean in her hands. “How do you play?”

“Dozens of ways.” Roland took the deck and shuffled it, and the feel of the cards in his hands sent him somewhere else briefly—a firelit room, the sound of a television countdown, firecrackers at dawn. His family had always played until morning on Spring Festival, the game going on past the point of caring who won. “Let’s start with an easy one.” Unlike mahjong, poker traveled anywhere and bent to any group. It was probably the most played game in the world, wherever he came from.

“Go find Anna,” he said, and smiled. “I’ll teach you both how to play Fight the Landlord.”

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