Rewrite That Witch
CH730 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 730: News from the Mountains

The whistle came in three blasts — one long, two short — and the sound of it carried across the shipyard to Roland’s window with enough clarity to be unmistakable.

He set down his quill and listened.

The first expedition battalion of the First Army had been boarding since morning. The concrete boat at the primary dock would carry the first unit of soldiers down the river toward Fallen Dragon Ridge, where the new recruits were already assembled, waiting for the veterans who would form the experienced core of the combined force. When both groups converged, the campaign to take Iron Sand City could begin. It would take time — the convoy of supply and ammunition boats would follow in sequence — but the first step was complete.

He felt, watching from his window as the boat’s departure sent ripples across the gray water, something appropriate to the occasion. Not grandeur exactly. More the specific satisfaction of a plan that has reached the point where it no longer requires his direct management to continue.

He turned back to his desk and the draft plans spread across it.

Internal combustion engines had been occupying his spare engineering attention for several weeks. The technology was not mysterious to him — the principles were well-established in the knowledge he’d carried from his previous life — but the manufacturing requirements were more specific than the steam engine, and the chain of dependencies was longer. Steam engines could tolerate imprecision in ways that combustion engines couldn’t. The tolerances required for piston rings, the fuel injection systems, the ignition timing — each element demanded a precision manufacturing capability that Neverwinter was still building toward.

But the endpoint justified the path. Steam engines had been revolutionary. Internal combustion had done something different: it had untethered power from the proximity of a heat source. A mobile machine could carry its own fuel. Ships, land vehicles, eventually flying machines — all of these required the combustion engine and couldn’t exist without it. Neverwinter was reaching the point where the steam engine’s limitations were visible. The combustion engine would remove them.

The oil project was central to this. The Southernmost Region — specifically the Blackwater deposits that the underground fire had been gesturing at for decades — was not a side interest. If the oil surveys came back positive, the entire industrial expansion he was planning became straightforward. If they didn’t, he would need to calculate an alcohol-based fuel economy, which was possible but considerably more constrained.

He hoped for oil.

A knock at the door.

Agatha entered without waiting for more than a second, which was her particular style — she knocked to be courteous and entered because she had information and saw no reason to let the information wait.

“Your Majesty,” she said. “Taquila’s witches have responded.”

He put the engineering drafts aside.

“When?”

“Phyllis crushed the stone yesterday. The phantom instrument activated this morning.” She closed the door behind her. “They’re ready to speak with you.”

He had been expecting this, and still felt the weight of it when the moment arrived. The Taquila survivors in the underground maze — Pasha, Alethea, and those who remained after four hundred years of decline — were making a choice that would determine the shape of the war that was coming. The First Army was on its way to the Southernmost Region, the Witch Union had new members, the city had passed another winter without breaking. All of that was the preparation.

What was about to happen in the hall below was a different kind of beginning.

“Take me there,” he said.

Discussion

Suggest a change