Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 558: Beauty

Roland set the last report down.

The conclusion relieved him somewhat. Demons were not physically exceptional against conventional force — machine guns and cannon could clear enemies at five hundred to a thousand meters, and the spear-thrower’s attack was unsuitable for trench warfare. A Mad Demon needed three to five seconds to charge its Magic Stone before each throw, which meant bullets would work as long as production kept pace. At minimum, the humans would be competitive on the frontlines.

“It would be nice if you were born in Taquila,” Agatha said. She was looking at the weapon in Roland’s hand with something like sorrow. “The Fertile Plains had a hundred times more common people than Graycastle, and a hundred times more witches. If every one of them had carried a spear, the demons might have gone back to wherever they came from.”

Roland smiled but did not agree.

A witch-dominated empire. If there had really been a weapon that gave common people strength beyond witches — would the seniors of the Union have accepted that lightly? Witches had always been the minority. Millions of humans, thousands of witches. That ratio had held from the Land of Dawn to the Fertile Plains. Would the long-oppressed majority willingly step onto a battlefield they had spent centuries excluded from? Once the balance of power shifted, the collapse of the old hierarchy would produce civil strife. The idea of fighting for human survival was already abstract and thin. Expecting those who had lived like slaves to embrace it as a lofty ideal was something else.

He would not say any of this to Agatha. She was a researcher of the Quest Society, not a politician. The problem was not hers to carry.

At the table, Anna severed the demon’s arm cleanly and lifted the creature back into its steel cage. The limb was already beginning to regenerate as it settled.

“Is that all?” Agatha asked.

“For today. The injury tests begin tomorrow morning.”

“What sort?”

“Resistance of different body parts to shooting, blades — and the chemicals. The Pill of Madness and the Dreamland Water. I also want Lucia to separate the Red Mist into its component gases and see what she can isolate.”

A pity the demon can’t be kept alive indefinitely. With Nana’s ability cycling through it, the data would be comprehensive. Without her—

He set the thought aside.

“You’ll need assistants,” Agatha said, yawning. “Two witches for the Sigil work, at minimum. And the materials have to be prepared in advance — blood doesn’t hold once the demon is dead. Better to start melting the God’s Stone while it’s still living.” She paused. “By the way, what kind of Sigil did you want?”

“Can we make any of them, provided we have sufficient Magic Stones?”

“Of course.” She nodded. “A failed attempt doesn’t consume the stone itself, but I—” She stopped. “Never mind. A slip of the tongue.”

Roland raised an eyebrow.

“At worst you lose some raw materials,” she said, curling her lip.

He did not press. “Let me read the Magic Stone Collection tonight. I’ll give you an answer tomorrow morning.”

It was bound to be a sleepless night.

Edith Kant stood at the window, overlooking the city under the dark sky. Businessmen describe city wealth in candlelight: the brighter a place after dark, the richer its blood. In the king’s city, the Inner District glowed only near the taverns and theaters — entertainment districts, not productive ones.

Here, the Southern Redwater shore burned past midnight without pause, and the light was wrong for firelight. Not orange. Not flickering. A soft, steady yellow — like sunlight strained through gauze — that came from lamps inside the factory buildings rather than bonfires outside them.

The factory area ran through the night. It did not sleep. It produced.

She had spent the entire afternoon of the previous day inside one of those factories, following a City Hall officer who had grown visibly impatient with the visit by the second hour. He had been glad when they finally moved toward the exit.

Edith had not been glad.

What had arrested her was difficult to articulate afterward. The factory was not beautiful in any conventional sense — running water stained with grease, metal shavings across every horizontal surface, noise that accumulated inside the chest, air that tasted of burning oil. And yet she had stayed for four hours without meaning to, because something in the sequence of operations — rough iron ingot, spinning lathe, cutting tool, emerging component, smooth and precise and still warm from the work — had caught at something she did not ordinarily attend to.

The officer, on the way out, had said something she found herself remembering with unusual clarity: What is there to look at in all this? Only His Majesty Roland thinks there’s beauty hidden in these black blotches.

Hidden beauty.

She had felt a recognition she could not precisely name. The beauty in question was not decorative — it was structural. The beauty of force precisely applied, of a machine that did one thing completely, of material transformed by a controlled process into exactly the shape it needed to be and nothing else. A steam engine was not lovely the way a gem was lovely. But a gem was inert. A steam engine did something — kneaded and shaped and converted — and once you understood how, the operation itself had an aesthetic quality that gems, however expensive, did not.

How does he know this? What else does he know?

She was still at the window when Cole appeared in the doorway with damp hair and a towel over one shoulder.

“There’s something in the bathroom,” he said, “that you absolutely have to try. It’s like a special fat, but it dissolves in water and it cleans — I can’t describe it properly, but I’ve had milk baths and this is better. The water pressure alone is remarkable. It comes out of this pipe in the wall and you just—”

“Get the servant to boil fresh water.”

“The pipe water is already warm. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“How does it get up there?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“Something about a standing iron tower. They fill it from below with the steam engines, I think.” Cole came the rest of the way into the room, toweling his hair. “You should sleep. You’ve been standing there for hours.”

“I know.” She did not move from the window. “The factories run all night.”

Cole looked. “Is that what those lights are?”

“Yes.” She watched a cart move along the shore road below, loaded with components she could not identify at this distance. “In the morning we go back to the castle. I’ll do the talking this time.”

“Already?” He blinked. “You usually wait until they ask who you really are.”

“We can’t afford to.” She turned from the window. “And don’t write to father yet.”

“Are you going to agree to His Majesty’s proposal?” Cole’s voice climbed slightly. “He’ll — he’ll be unhappy.”

“I’m not agreeing to anything yet.” She went to the bed and sat. “He’s put his terms on the table. Now I put mine on it. That’s how negotiations work.”

She picked up the promotional pamphlet from the nightstand — Roland had given it to Cole at the end of their meeting — and turned to the opening statement. The writing was dense, awkward in places, structured more like a philosophical argument than a policy document. It was entirely unlike the flowing rhetoric she expected from royal communications.

That’s why it’s interesting. The clumsiness was the proof of the thing: whoever had written this had not been writing to impress. They had been writing to explain. To someone they expected to understand.

What does he want the people who read this to do with it?

She read it again.

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