Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 482: Zero’s Will

The upper level of the Pivotal Secret Temple blazed with light—dozens of Magic Stones set into the walls of the circular library, making it as bright as midday. Anyone sitting here would have had difficulty believing the room was underground.

This space was the underground counterpart to the Tower of Babel above in Hermes Cathedral. It was Zero’s favorite place. Through the window, she could see the whole Pivotal Secret Area spread below her—the figures moving around the God’s Stone of Punishment Pillar like ants performing their assigned duties. She found a deep satisfaction in this view: every life in this space was hers to direct. She was the Lord of a small kingdom, and the people below her were its obedient builders.

When she had time, she would take a book of the Union’s history and secrets from the shelf and read it here, with a cup of black tea—coltsfoot steeped in it, as always.

Since becoming Pope, Zero had found herself more relaxed, not less. She did not lie awake worrying about the impending Battle of Divine Will. She looked forward to it. After more than two hundred years, life had grown dull; the Senior Demons described in the records as unbeatable seemed, if anything, like interesting opponents. I wonder, she thought, if I bring one of them into the Soul Battlefield, whether they’ll still seem so fearless.

But that battle was years away. She needed a shorter goal to fill the time.

There were few people Zero found genuinely interesting. Roland Wimbledon happened to be one of them—the only mortal, in fact, who had caught and kept her attention.

He had been dismissed by everyone at the start. A prince of poor reputation, minor territory, no visible political strength. And yet, from the Royal Decree on the Selection of Crown Prince onward, he had outperformed every expectation—fighting well against two far stronger contenders, gaining ground steadily, refusing to stay where he had been placed. This alone was unusual.

But there were other things. In the memories she had taken from Garcia, Zero had found an interesting clue: the Queen of Clearwater had placed a maid near Roland and given her a poison—odorless, colorless, soluble in water, lethal on intake, with no known antidote—and it had completely failed. The furious queen had then executed the alchemist who supplied it. Zero, curious, had tasked a member of the Secret Pivotal Area with replicating the compound from Garcia’s memory of the recipe. The result was exactly what the alchemist had promised. Effective. Reliable. No flaw she could identify.

So: had the maid deceived Garcia? Or was the man now ruling in the Western Region not the original Prince Roland?

The more she turned the question over, the more she inclined toward the second answer. He had reversed his reputation entirely, redistributed power in the Western Region from the ground up, and made both the church’s diplomatic delegation and its military arm disappear—not through accident, but through a coherent series of choices that did not resemble anything Prince Roland had done before. If such a man was content to remain the lord of a small territory, it would be a genuine waste.

Therefore, he had to be brought into the church. Made part of her. Zero ran her tongue briefly over her lips. It was also why she had changed the order of her campaigns—if her inference was correct, taking the Kingdom of Graycastle would yield more than could currently be calculated.

Of course, a lord of any significance kept himself behind the lines. The question was how to flush him out.

She was still working through this problem when the library door opened and Isabella walked in.

“Is the meeting finished?”

“Yes.” Isabella rubbed her neck. “Lucky you—reading and sipping tea all afternoon, while I have to lie to those old men. No, actually—one old man and two madmen.”

“It’s more than lying,” Zero said, without particular sympathy. “It concerns the operation of the church’s lower levels. Without those men, we couldn’t have gathered the resources to pursue the final goal. Witches may be the church’s core, but they are not its body.”

“Fine.” Isabella yawned. “They’ve agreed on a timeline: we’ll have to wait until the second month of summer for the resources committed to the attack on the Kingdom of Dawn to be redirected toward Graycastle. And that’s the optimistic estimate.”

Not too long, and not too short. Torturous in the waiting; sweeter for it. “What’s the current status on pill production?”

“Three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand in storage. But do you really intend to send all the civilians into battle against the demons?” Isabella frowned. “Millions of people would exhaust all of Hermes’s reserves. And beyond that—we might not even win. They’ll cause chaos no matter where we deploy them. Their days are numbered from the first pill, so if the demons don’t attack quickly enough, the timing falls apart—too few pills and they’re useless, too many and they burn out before the battle is joined. And even if the demons attack all at once and the crazed army somehow breaks them, those people won’t be capable of anything afterward.”

“You don’t understand.” Zero rose, crossed to the large table at the room’s center, and lifted the cloth covering it. Beneath was a map of the Wild Places. “I was never planning to use the crazed army to defend Hermes. The final battle won’t take place here.” She placed her finger on the map. “It will happen somewhere on the Fertile Plains. Probably near the ruins of the Holy City of Taquila—it’s the closest point to us.”

She looked at the mark her finger had made.

Everything had a location. Everything had a time. After two hundred years of patience, the shape of the endgame was finally coming clear.

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