Chapter 710: Elimination and Innovation
In retrospect, Roland still wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel about it.
An ordinary time traveler, dropped into a fantasy novel’s physics, who somehow managed to be the divine instrument of victory against the demon horde. He tried the sentence several ways and found none of them improved it. Perhaps he should write a poem about the occasion. He had a few that came to mind, none of them appropriate for the situation.
When Agatha had come to him in the early morning with the observation, his first response had been to suspect he’d misheard. When the witches present confirmed it individually, he decided to accept the information provisionally and see what it produced. The Taquila survivor would need to verify it herself — this was obvious, given how heavily weighted everything was on that outcome — so he’d mentioned his afternoon reading as an available window. He’d fallen asleep, as he did most afternoons, with little difficulty, having read three pages of Advanced Mathematics on the couch in his office. When he regained consciousness, Nightingale had her pistol drawn and Phyllis was on the floor.
That had not been the plan.
He didn’t believe, practically speaking, that anything had chosen him. What the Taquila survivors had found in the ruins was something extraordinary enough to split a civilization under pressure of extinction — which meant the object itself was genuinely remarkable. But “remarkable enough to cause a schism” was a long distance from “directly ordained by supernatural forces.” If it were truly a divine weapon, he had some questions about why its creators were currently residing in an underground maze.
What interested him more was the confirmation that came sideways from the whole event.
He’d long suspected the Dream World wasn’t purely his own production. The level of internally consistent detail it generated — architectural specifics, economic systems, physical laws — exceeded anything his individual memory could account for. He’d read the relevant neuroscience before he arrived here; he knew what human memory and imagination could plausibly produce. The Dream World was more than that. Something else was filling in the gaps, assembling the outputs, maintaining the consistency of what he’d built.
The ring’s observation confirmed it. The beam it detected wasn’t coming from him — or rather, it was coming through him, through the connection Zero’s defeat had opened. The Dream World had a structure his consciousness could access but didn’t generate. A barrier. A black box that took orders and produced results.
He’d been thinking about this for the better part of two hours.
Every witch’s ability, when you examined it from the engineering side, worked the same way. The witch’s consciousness formed an intention. Something between the intention and the outcome executed it — a translation layer that converted the order into physical effect. No witch experienced their ability as calculating; they simply reached for what they could do and found it there. The mechanism was opaque to them by design.
It reminded him of the magic systems he’d read about in fantasy novels from his previous life: wizards accessing a network, casting spells through the network’s own grammar — gestures, words, materials as protocols for formulating requests the system could interpret. The Magic Net as infrastructure; the mages as users; the spells as API calls.
The Five-Colors Stone ring was doing something related. An artificial construct that read the complexity of another construct’s access patterns. The “Key” wasn’t measuring raw power — it was measuring the sophistication of the interface between a witch’s consciousness and whatever was on the other side. Simpler abilities, easier orders; complex abilities, more sophisticated grammar.
And the ruins of Taquila, apparently, had produced something that could replace the witch’s consciousness entirely — that could issue orders directly to the barrier, without a biological terminal.
That’s technology, not theology.
Whatever the Taquila survivors were calling it, the philosophical architecture of it was deeply interesting to him as an engineering problem. The study of magic in Taquila’s ruins had reached a level that the present witch-centric framework didn’t yet have language for. That alone was worth the conversation.
But first, Phyllis needed to see what she was being asked to work with.
He summoned Iron Axe to the office.
“The demonic beast situation,” Roland said, when the man appeared with his standard salute.
“Scattered, Your Majesty. The patrol teams on the walls are handling them without difficulty.”
“Good. I want to arrange a cannon exercise in the wall area. Needs to be impressive — for an audience — while minimizing actual ammunition consumption.”
Iron Axe considered this for a moment. “You mean… a false exercise?”
Roland found himself smiling. The man’s understanding of how gunpowder could be used had come a long way from his early days. “Half true, half false. Accurate shooting demonstrations use live rounds. Fire coverage demonstrations use embedded black powder charges. The electric wire ignition should make the coverage display at least as convincing as the real thing.”
“Understood, Your Majesty.”
“Make the final sequence dramatic. Spare black powder for that part. And—” He paused. “While we’re discussing this: begin planning the phase-out of the twelve-pound field artillery.”
Iron Axe’s expression shifted into the professional attentiveness of someone who has received unexpected information and is rapidly reorganizing around it.
“The Coldwind Ridge battle gave us a clear answer,” Roland said. “Heavy barrel, low rate of fire, solid shot against a dispersed mobile enemy. The numbers afterward were explicit — almost all God’s Punishment Army kills went to the machine guns and the Longsong Cannons. The twelve-pounders accounted for perhaps a hundred, and those were the ones slow enough or unlucky enough to stand in an arc long enough to catch iron.” He gestured with his tea cup. “Transportation is the other half. We can’t coordinate the artillery with infantry movement or operate effectively in urban environments. The weapon’s use case has already narrowed to the point where we’re maintaining capability we can’t actually deploy.”
“The revolving rifles—”
“Stay for now. Powder consumption per round is low enough that we can hold the stock comfortably.” He set the cup down. “The chemical reform program is moving well enough that we’ll have doubled our double-base production by spring. At that point, the black powder weapons become a liability we’re paying to maintain rather than an asset we’re building around.”
Iron Axe’s eyes had gone to the drawer that Roland was already opening.
He spread the paper on the desk.
The drawing was simple and intentionally legible: the tube, the baseplate, the bipod, the angle ranges. Clean lines. Labeled dimensions. The shell cross-sections in the lower corner.
“A rigging-angle cannon,” Roland said. “Variable elevation for variable range — close support or distance fire, same weapon. Disassembles for portability; several soldiers carry the components and assemble in position. Thin barrel wall is possible because of the shell geometry — the shell does the structural work the barrel doesn’t need to.” He tapped the shell cross-sections. “Manufacturing is straightforward compared to a hundred-fifty-two-millimeter howitzer. The complexity is in the shell, not the tube.”
Iron Axe bent over the paper for a long moment. He was reading it carefully, the way he read everything — with the patience of someone who had decided that thoroughness was worth the time.
“I can follow the appearance,” he said finally. “It does look like an iron pipe. But with walls this thin…” He was working through the physics of it intuitively, matching what he was seeing against everything he’d learned about cannon design.
“The key is the shell,” Roland confirmed. “The barrel doesn’t need to contain a full charge the way a conventional cannon does. The design distributes the force differently.” He paused. “Try firing it before you doubt it.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Mortar.” Roland picked up his tea. “Simple word for a simple concept. We’ll see how it performs.”
Iron Axe straightened, looked at the drawing one more time, and nodded with the particular nod of someone who has decided to believe something before they’ve seen the evidence, purely because the source has not yet been wrong.
“I’ll begin the preparations for the exercise immediately, Your Majesty.”