Rewrite That Witch
CH505 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 505: The Battle of King’s City (Part 3)

While the artillery worked on the gates, Lightning and Wendy and Maggie and Hummingbird were already in the air.

The naval artillery’s solid shot was effective against stone and timber—gates, walls, structural positions—but it did not reach the men standing on the battlements, nor the mangonels and oil boilers arranged along the wall’s crest. Those required a different method. The witches’ role was to destroy King’s City’s first line of defense before the infantry advanced: puncture the wall’s effective strength, clear the defenders, open a corridor for the general assault.

It was also the hydrogen balloon’s first appearance in battle.

Unlike the thousand-mile desert raid five months before—launched far from any witness, in near-total secrecy—the balloon lifted off from beside the canal in full view of the assembled First Army. The whole fleet watched it ascend. Enormous and impossibly slow, it drifted upward into the pale morning with a quality that defied everything the soldiers knew about how warfare moved. The men on the pier broke into applause. They knew no ground defense could touch an attack from directly above, and the applause was not for the balloon itself but for what it meant: their prince had thought of this before the enemy had thought to stop it.

Roland had positioned the balloon as the centerpiece of what he privately understood to be, in the language of a world that no longer existed for him, the first aircraft carrier strike of this era—fleet below, aerial weapon above, logistics shared. The thought pleased him more than it should have.

Hummingbird’s contribution made it work differently than it had before. Without Anna aboard, the weight of the bombs had been the limiting factor in how long the balloon could carry them effectively. Hummingbird’s magic—a sustained enchantment, a new method she had worked out over months of practice—reduced connected objects to a fifth of their actual weight as long as they remained attached to each other. The four bombs hung beneath the gondola as though they were hollow. The moment one detached, only that bomb returned to full weight.

Lightning pulled her windshield goggles down and nodded to Wendy. Wendy pulled the release.

The bomb fell. Lightning dove after it, matched its speed, and steered it toward the mangonel positioned beside the city gate. On the wall beneath her she could see the upturned faces—the crossbows, the flintlocks rising to track her. She knew the math. At her height, at her speed, with the weapons they had, none of that fire would find her. She let them try.

The bomb hit the mangonel exactly.

The fireball went up faster than fire had any right to move—a bloom of red and orange that swelled outward and consumed the area around the impact before the sound of the explosion arrived. The oil boilers toppled into the fire. The hot oil ran and ignited. The running flames reached a stockpile of explosives at one corner of the wall, and the corner became a chain of secondary detonations, each one feeding the next, and the smoke that rose from it was black and thick and absolute.

The knights who had been at their stations a moment before were gone—running for the stairwells, crawling in the wrong direction through smoke, rolling across stone to smother the fire catching on their clothes. Several lost their footing and fell from the wall. The top of the western gate had become a place nothing with a heartbeat wanted to stay.

“Their defense line is gone,” Sylvie said. There was a particular quality in her expression—not pity exactly, but its first cousin. She was watching the smoke column above the wall.

“These people deserve it,” Nightingale said. She was not watching the smoke. She was watching Roland.

“Someone pays in every battle.” Roland kept his voice measured, though he felt the weight of it pressing. “If it isn’t them, it’s us.” He turned to Iron Axe. “Sound the horn. Begin the assault.”

He did not eulogize the dead or lecture on the value of peace. This was not a conflict between two men’s ambitions, or even between two armies’ loyalties. It was a collision of systems—the old arrangement of power defending itself against the thing that would displace it. The old arrangement did not leave the stage willingly. It had to be shown the door, and blood was the price of the showing, and it was always better for his people that the blood was the enemy’s.

“As you command, Your Highness.” Iron Axe bowed and left to give the order.

The assault horn sounded across the pier.

Nail’s target was the palace gate. The Fourth Commando was on it.

Inside the Inner City, the advance stopped hard.

“Edgar’s hit—get him back!”

“Where the hell is the field artillery?”

“Blocked by debris, they’re detouring!”

“Prepare weapons—they’re coming at us!”

Nail slapped himself across the cheek to keep his hands steady. He filled a cartridge and passed it to the man ahead of him. A volley of rifle fire cracked down the street—the bodies that had been charging fell, punched full of holes, and those behind them kept coming. They did not slow down. Not for wounds to the arm, the gut, the leg.

These were not militiamen. Nail’s limbs went cold and then numb. The enemy wore half-plate and chain armor, carried swords and crossbows, held formation even under fire. Jon—who had known everything worth knowing about the king’s forces—had told him only the royal guard was equipped this well. Jon had been proved right by a crossbow bolt through the ribs from an angle none of them had watched.

Hold on until Angel gets here.

“Fourth Commando, fall back! Three squads covering fire!”

The veterans moved without wasted motion—cartridges emptied, immediate retreat to the back line, shortening the gap between suppression shots. Five teams cycling, each covering the others’ reload and repositioning. Since the revolving rifles had replaced flintlocks, Nail had not seen this rotation method until today, and he understood now, watching it, why the training had been so relentless.

Then the attack came from the side.

A platoon of the crazed guard poured out of a building on the street’s flank. Before most of the veterans could swing their rifles around, the enemy was already inside their formation.

Nail watched a teammate get cut in half by a red-eyed guard two steps away. The guard was dead himself a second later—three rifles found him simultaneously—but the teammate was beyond anything Nana could fix. Half a body was half a body.

“Where are the damned artillerymen?”

“—my legs, help—”

“Keep firing!”

Nail wiped blood off a cartridge with his sleeve, picked up a rifle from the ground, reloaded it. Aimed at a guard tussling with two of his comrades and pulled the trigger. The man went down. He was afraid—he had been afraid since the moment the gates opened—but the training was louder than the fear, and the training said: when the enemy is stronger, stay tight with the platoon, use the collective strength, survive by being part of something larger than yourself alone.

Behind him, wheels on cobblestone. “Artillery Battalion ran into trouble on East Street. Lord Brian sent us to assist!”

“Whoever you are—advance!” The captain did not turn.

Two carts came up the street. On each one: a Mark I heavy machine gun, already set to firing position. The guns opened on the next charge, and the street went briefly, enormously quiet in the way streets go quiet when everything in them is dead.

Discussion

Suggest a change