Chapter 475: The Light
“You mean—ordinary people can reach that kind of proficiency through training?”
“Exactly.” Roland nodded. “The bolt rifle’s greatest merit is its improved range and accuracy. Unlike the guns before, there’s no gap between barrel and cartridge—no air leak. With a telescopic sight, any ordinary soldier can place shots at four hundred to five hundred meters. A revolver’s useful range is a hundred.”
Iron Axe grasped at once why the weapon was so deadly. At that distance, most men never thought to be afraid. A shooter concealed in a building or on high ground could take a life before anyone knew to look for him. And if that shooter was Lady Nightingale—moving unseen, untouchable—no one would survive at all.
“Your Highness.” Andrea raised a hand to cover her smile. “You agreed to give me one when they go into production.”
“Of course.” Roland set the two bolt rifles aside and crossed to the other end of the test range, where something rested beneath a cloth. He pulled it off. “In fact, bolt rifles are just the beginning. This is today’s main event.”
Iron Axe fixed on the new weapon the moment it was revealed. Where rifles were steel and wood, this one was pure black metal—larger than anything he had seen, perhaps half his own height including the tripod. The barrel was thick as half his wrist. A long cloth strip, studded with bright cartridges, connected to the receiver: a belt of death, waiting to be fed.
Nothing in its design resembled what had come before.
“This is a heavy machine gun,” Roland said, patting the receiver. “Same cartridge as the bolt rifle—you can pull a round from this pouch and chamber it in the new rifle. The mechanism is far more complicated than a rifle, so I’ll spare you the details. I’ve designated it the Mark I Heavy Machine Gun. Let me show you.”
He settled behind it and pulled the trigger.
What happened next was difficult to understand.
Flame erupted from the muzzle. The blast of hot air sent the loose snow spiraling upward in white plumes. The belt fed itself—constant, relentless—and spent brass rained from the ejection port, a cascade of hot metal, dozens of shells per second.
The sound was nothing like the Flintlock Squad. There was no pause between shots, no breath between beats. Roland aimed at the ground ahead and let the gun run, and where the snow had barely begun to settle from one burst, another burst tore it skyward again. The snowy field shook like the surface of boiling water. The storm of rounds wove a pattern across the ground—a web no soldier could cross and live.
“It’s—it’s remarkable,” Carter murmured.
He was not alone. Iron Axe swept a glance across the witches and saw the same expression on every face. Only Nightingale, who never left Roland’s side, appeared entirely calm. Ashes—black hair, enormous sword—wore something more complicated: shock, confusion, and beneath those, something that looked like frustration.
Iron Axe felt it too. He had earned his place as Chief Bodyguard of the Osha Clan through knife work and archery, skills pressed into his body since childhood through years of relentless practice. In the Southernmost Region, warriors like him were prized by clan leaders, and rightly so: the finest fighters were those who had given their bodies to a discipline and been remade by it.
But there was no discipline that could outrun these bullets. The Mark I did not even require a pause to reload. If the First Army fielded twenty of these weapons, every fighter’s decade of hard-earned skill would become a jest.
A fighter could not easily accept that.
Fortunately, Iron Axe had found a new path.
Leaf moved through the dense undergrowth, driving the demonic beasts that had crossed into the Misty Forest back toward the city wall. Her reach now spread across an area almost as large as the town itself—every tree, every tangle of vine a limb or an eye. She could shape the growth to her will, raise walls of living wood against intruders.
But His Highness had been clear: find them, report them, do not engage—especially not demons. If demons sensed her presence and burned the forest, the town would lose its early-warning net and one of its greatest assets. She was to be eyes, not claws.
She had already reclaimed an empty lot near the town. When the Months of Demons ended, she would plant Golden Ones wheat on it; with the Heart of Forest lending her its power, those seeds would grow without pause and produce enough to supply all the farmers in the Western Region.
Then she felt them—a pack of demonic wolf hybrids, approaching fast from the forest’s edge.
Eight strong bodies, moving with urgent, disordered speed. She reached out with branches and vines to slow them, ready to send a carrier pigeon to the First Army—
But she paused.
They did not look ferocious. They looked driven. Something behind them had frightened them more than she had.
Could it be demons?
Leaf frowned, and as she extended her range of sight, something fell warm across the top of her head.
She looked up.
Golden light pried through the cracks of the cloudy sky—not one shaft but several, slanting down across the snowfields of the Western Region, touching everything they reached with color.
“How do I handle this one?” Tilly pointed to an equation in the book.
“You substitute equation four here, form a new expression, then differentiate—like this.” Anna wrote the derivation on a scrap of paper in a few quick strokes. “That’s all.”
“I see.” Tilly studied it, then clapped her hands once. “If you use this substitution, the result should approach one.”
“You worked that out in your head.” Anna’s admiration was genuine.
“That’s my ability—it’s cheating, really.” Tilly smiled. “You’re the impressive one. You absorb everything in his new books so quickly.”
Anna smiled at that—the particular kind of smile that only appeared at the mention of Roland Wimbledon.
Every time Tilly saw that smile, she found herself thinking the same thing: a girl this honest, this simple in her sincerity, could not love a wicked man. Roland must have changed. Whether he was truly the original Roland or not seemed beside the point. The man who lived in Border Town now was unlike any noble she had ever known—as though he had arrived from somewhere else entirely—and yet she felt entirely comfortable in his presence, and the longer she spent near him, the more she found herself drawn to something she could not precisely name.
She stopped herself from following that thought any further.
Tilly pointed to the next problem. Then, before either of them had looked down at it, the page lit up.
Both witches turned to the window at the same moment. Light—real, golden, long-absent light—had broken through the clouds and rimmed them with fire. In the streets below, people were stopping, pointing, pouring out of doorways. The sound of cheering reached the tower in waves.
Tilly stood at the window and let the light fall on her face. Emotions moved through her like weather: relief, and something near grief, and something she did not have a name for yet.
When the gunfire ended, a heap of spent brass lay at the prince’s feet. The muzzle held a faint, dull glow of heat, and a thread of white smoke rose from the barrel.
No one spoke. No one needed to. The thing they had all just seen was still too large for words.
Iron Axe could not hold himself back. He dropped to one knee in the manner of the Sand Nation.
“The world is yours, Your Highness.”
He believed it without reservation: his new path was to lead the First Army—armed with weapons like this—and carry Roland Wimbledon’s banner across every horizon left to cross.
A hand came down in front of him.
Roland pulled him to his feet. He did not look satisfied, or proud, or pleased in the way Iron Axe had expected. His eyes were on the Impassable Mountain Range, and his voice, when it came, was quiet.
“Our real enemy is demons.”
Before Iron Axe could speak—even so, I will fight for you until I die—a blade of light pierced the cloud cover, and the whole snowfield blazed white. Behind them, the witches cried out. More light followed, and more, until the sky itself was too bright to face directly.
Then, silently, the dark clouds began to dissolve—the way ice dissolves when fire is held near it, without drama, without fanfare.
The sun appeared.
The Months of Demons were over.