Chapter 557: Damage Testing
After dinner, Roland went straight to the backyard shed. He wanted the evening with Anna—he had wanted it since the steamers appeared at the western bend—but the Red Mist from the demon was limited and the experiment could not wait for morning. What could be learned would be lost by tomorrow evening if he delayed.
Nearly every member of the Witch Union had come, including those with no role in the tests. The chance to see the enemy at close range was apparently too compelling to pass up.
The Mad Demon lay at the center of the shed floor, immobile under Breeze’s control. It was the first time Roland had seen an alien creature that was genuinely, fundamentally different from a human being—not merely strange in proportion or color, but different in kind. It stood taller than Iron Axe by a full head’s height. The arms, frosted and stiff, were the circumference of a man’s thigh at their narrowest point. Ridges of defined muscle ran beneath skin of blue-black, the color almost normal given that the blood that fed them was blue, not red. Roland pressed two fingers against the forearm. Warm—warmer than human skin. Higher metabolic rate, which meant lower environmental tolerance. An organism that burned fuel fast ran badly in the cold and died without its Red Mist.
The respirator connecting the demon’s face to its helmet still hid its features, but its overall structure was clearly chordate, clearly bipedal, clearly—in some ancestral taxonomy—recognizable. A Mad Demon, Agatha had explained, had lower intelligence than a human. Senior Demons were cunning in ways that crossed the line into something recognizable as thought.
“Among the five demons recovered,” Agatha said, rubbing one temple with the look of someone who has not slept enough, “the Supermagic was destroyed by the Sigil, and one Mad Demon was dissected by Anna on the way back. The remaining three yielded two containers of Red Mist, used during the journey. What we have left will degrade by tomorrow evening. The experiment should complete before then—I’ll need half a day to prepare the Sigil base, and I expect at least a few failed attempts.”
“How did you transfer the Red Mist from the armor?”
“We enlisted help from the common soldiers.” She indicated the hard-shell containers stacked to one side. “I brought back the empties. We may need them again.”
Roland turned to Breeze. “Can you control the magic power it uses when you give it commands?”
Breeze considered this with the seriousness she brought to anything mechanical. “I don’t direct each individual action. I give it an order and force compliance—a command that bypasses language and operates at a level even demonic beasts respond to. It can’t be too complex. But for a specific physical task, yes.”
“Good.” He looked at Nana. “Reconnect the limbs. I need to see the power and timing of its spear throw.”
“Here?” Lily’s eyebrow went up. “In the castle?”
Behind Wendy, Mystery Moon and Hummingbird had quietly positioned themselves with a wall at their backs. Paper and Summer—who had joined after the Witch Cooperation Association fell and had no memory of what that fall had sounded like—watched from the front of the group with open curiosity.
“There won’t be an accident,” Iffy said from the flank, with a calm that Roland suspected was partially for the newer witches. “We’re watching it.”
Nana crouched beside the demon with the reluctance of someone being asked to treat a disease she finds objectionable. There was no conventional surgery possible here—without antifreezing agent, tissue reconnection would normally produce cellular damage the cold had already caused. But Nana’s power did not follow the logic of normal tissue reconnection. The mottled burn-damage on the stumps faded as he watched. The skin, which had been black and cracked, slowly shifted toward green as circulation returned.
Half an hour later, the demon stood up.
The witches followed it into the backyard in a long line behind Wendy and Scroll. Mystery Moon’s expression was the same complicated mixture of fascination and alarm that Roland associated with encountering something that cannot be classified. He found this inadvertently amusing.
Leaf had prepared the range: two hundred meters of open lawn between the shed and the far garden fence, where a steel plate and a cuirass hung from grapevines looped through the olive trees on either side.
“Begin,” Roland said.
Breeze’s confirmation was barely audible. The demon’s arms swelled visibly. The Magic Stone mounted in the arm plates glowed yellow. It set its weight, bent forward, and threw.
The sound traveled: a crack at launch, then a clang from the far end that rang clearly through the quiet garden.
The arms contracted, shriveled, as though something had been drained from them in a single expenditure. Recovery time was long—given the demon’s injuries, Roland estimated an hour before full restoration.
The bone spear had driven entirely through the cuirass and pinned itself to the fence post. The spearhead had fractured from the impact. A replacement iron spear would do more damage—but looking at how the demon equipped itself, iron appeared not to be a material it worked with readily. The Senior Demon’s armor, Agatha had noted, was not pure metal either.
Of course, Roland thought. Smelting requires high sustained heat. The Red Mist doesn’t sustain fire. If human civilization organized itself around fire, demons may have organized themselves around its absence—around cold, distance, and magic. Different solutions to the same physical world, along entirely separate evolutionary branches.
The next test: rapid succession. Two bone spears inside a short interval.
The demon threw the second. Its arms locked in an extended position, shriveled and cracked at the surface like bark that has dried too fast, and did not recover. The sharp overuse of the Magic Stones had produced pain the body control could not override—the demon vocalized through the entire sequence, a continuous sound that the witches visibly reacted to even though they understood what was being done and why.
Both spears had struck the steel plate—three millimeters thick—and neither had passed through.
Roland stood at the far end and looked at the marks in the metal.
The revolving rifle firing black powder rounds performs at approximately this level. The bolt-action rifle would exceed it—would punch clean through. The spear throw, the Mad Demon’s most dangerous individual weapon, was matched by small arms that his factory was already producing. At range—five hundred meters to a kilometer—machine guns and artillery would render Mad Demons ineffective before they could close to throwing distance. The charge-up interval of three to five seconds made them entirely unsuitable for trench fighting.
The humans would be competitive on the frontline. Not comfortable—competitive.
“If you had been born in Taquila,” Agatha said behind him, studying the bolt-action rifle in his hands with an expression that might have been wistfulness, “the outcome of the war might have been different. The Fertile Plains supported a hundred times more people than Graycastle, and a hundred times more witches. If every person there had been armed with something like this—”
Roland smiled and said nothing.
He thought: A witch-dominated empire, four hundred years ago. If there had been a weapon that gave common people power beyond what witches possessed—would the senior leaders of the Union have accepted that willingly? Witches have always been the minority. Millions of humans, thousands of witches. The common people Agatha imagines fighting for humanity’s survival were, in her era, living as subjects of witches. What does the consciousness of a slave become, when you hand it a weapon? Not necessarily the consciousness of a soldier who dies willingly for the species. More likely: the consciousness of someone who has just realized the accounting has changed. The idea of fighting for human survival was still abstract even after nationalism awakened in his own world, among people who had freedom to lose. He could not imagine a version of this calculus that ended cleanly.
He would not say this to Agatha. She was a researcher, not a policy architect, and these were conclusions that required a particular context to be useful.
After the damage testing, Anna amputated the demon and returned it to the steel cage.
“Is that all?” Agatha asked.
“For tonight.” Roland folded his notes. “Injury testing tomorrow morning—resistance to projectiles across different anatomical sites, effects of chlorine and other agents, Pill of Madness, Dreamland Water. And ask Lucia to analyze the Red Mist composition.”
“I’ll need two witch assistants to make the Sigil, and materials must be ready before the demon dies—the blood components don’t hold once it’s gone. Best to begin melting the God’s Stone while it’s still alive.” She paused. “Which type of Sigil do you want?”
“We have enough Magic Stones to make any of them?”
“Of course. Failed attempts don’t consume the stone itself—” She stopped. “Never mind. You’ll lose only raw materials.”
Roland looked at her. “What were you going to say?”
“A slip of the tongue.” She turned away. “Nothing significant.”
He did not press. “Give me until morning to review the Magic Stone Collection. I’ll have an answer before breakfast.”