Rewrite That Witch
CH778 · Rewrite

Chapter 778: Commandeering a Meeting

Roland remained crouched for a moment, turning over what the central carrier had just demonstrated.

Nine-digit multiplication. Instantaneous. Whether she operated through repeated summation, column method, or some principle he had no name for, the result was exact and immediate. The practical implications arranged themselves without much effort: she could verify the calculations of the Arithmetic Academy—every large-scale computation, every engineering estimate, every financial projection. At minimum, she could catch errors that slipped through human review. The value of that function alone was difficult to overstate. Even if she could only ever answer yes or no, this entity would save incalculable amounts of time.

Without thinking about it, he patted one of her main tentacles, the way he might clap a colleague on the shoulder.

“You’re brilliant.”

The red light went out.

Pasha, gently: “Your Majesty, she can’t directly communicate with you.”

“She understands my words. She gives yes and no answers.” Roland stood, untroubled. “That already constitutes communication. The difficulty is on the output side, not the understanding side.”

He did not intend to leave it there. The yes-or-no constraint was real, but constraints had workarounds. A carefully structured binary protocol—the kind of thing programmers in his original world had built entire systems from—might let the carrier express considerably more. The question was engineering, not fundamental limitation.

He thought about it for a moment, then decided to test one angle.

“Suppose we assign values. One lit tentacle means one. Two lit tentacles means two.” He waited for her stillness to indicate she was attending. “Can you show me three?”

The question looked simpler than the multiplication problem—and was, mathematically. But it asked something structurally different. Not just verification, but active output: displaying a value she chose, rather than confirming one he provided.

She did not answer immediately.

After a few seconds, one tentacle began to glow. A second shimmered—bright, then uncertain, the light fluctuating. The third stayed dark.

Roughly thirty percent correct, Roland calculated.

That reading lasted only a moment. The second tentacle’s light steadied briefly, then went out. Then the first followed.

Dark. All three.

“That’s… a no?” he said, more to himself than to anyone.

Celine moved beside him and let out a sound that had the quality of a quiet sigh—thoughtful, not sad. “That question exceeds her capacity. What you asked required her to output a value in a new encoding system she had never used before. When she can’t answer purely with yes or no, she slows down and loses coherence.” She paused. “We’ve tried similar approaches—asking her to express short phrases, basic concepts. Each time she realizes she can’t reduce her response to a clean binary, she stalls. Once she stalled for several weeks before accepting questions again.”

Roland felt a flicker of something that was almost guilt. “Did I just… create a logical barrier in her thinking?”

“She’ll recover in time. I once asked her a self-contradictory question, and she refused to accept input for over a month. But it passed.” Celine’s tentacles moved in what Roland had begun to read as a reassuring gesture.

He straightened and considered the problem properly. The carrier was a biological computer with extraordinary processing capacity and a structurally limited interface. Designing a new communication protocol to expand that interface was not beyond imagination—it was essentially a question of information encoding, of building meaning from minimal signals—but it was well outside his own training. He understood the concept. He did not understand the implementation.

He let it go for now. It was a problem for people with the right expertise: engineers, mathematicians, possibly the academy staff. Not a problem he could solve standing in a cave.

“The carriers need heat and moisture to function,” he said, moving to practical matters. “Is there a magma source nearby?”

“Fran hasn’t tunneled that deep yet,” Pasha said, “but we found a boiling underground river not far from here. The sulfur content suggests lava flow somewhere close. For the central carrier, we pump water from the river and bathe her with it every few days. It seems sufficient.”

Hot water. Not magma. A boiler could replicate that. Roland filed the thought—carefully, without acting on it. The Taquila witches had just arrived; the trust between them was a seedling, not yet something that could bear weight. Asking to relocate their most sensitive asset to the Arithmetic Academy now would be presumptuous regardless of how reasonable the long-term case for it was. He would wait until the snow mountain expedition had built something more substantial between them.

He toured the rest of the Third Border City before returning to Neverwinter. What had been built was a frame, not yet a structure—rough tunnels, temporary spaces, the bones of something that might one day become what he had named it. True defensive value would come later: when tunnels connected the peaks of the Impassable Mountain Range, when artillery emplacements were added above ground, when the stronghold was genuinely incorporated into Neverwinter’s outer defensive line. For now, it served as shelter and as proof of concept.

Back in the castle, he summoned the department leaders of City Hall to the reception hall.

A curtain of purple light materialized slowly in the air before them—Pasha projecting herself through the Illusion Core—and expanded until it filled the room.

Roland had warned them in advance. He had been precise about what they would see and had kept nothing back. It made no difference. The faces around the table changed anyway: Sirius Daly, the young Minister of Agriculture, struck his teacup hard enough to send it spinning across the table; Barov pressed a handkerchief to his forehead and did not put it down; Kyle Sichi and the Astrologer of Dispersion Star stared at the light curtain with the expressions of people who had just heard something in a dark house and were deciding whether to run.

If Roland had not been sitting calmly in his chair, several of them probably would have.

He looked around the table. Every face read fear, except one.

Edith, the Pearl of the Northern Region, had startled—a single sharp movement, quickly suppressed—and then her expression had shifted to something that functioned like appetite. Curiosity dressed up as composure. And when she looked at Roland, her eyes held something he had not seen from her before: a recalibration, as though a number she had been working with had just changed.

Women, Roland thought, with genuine bewilderment. I will never understand how that accounting works.

He had expected the officials’ fear. He had also expected their resistance. Fear and resistance were different problems. Fear passed; resistance required management.

His purpose in gathering them was simple: the ancient witches hidden in the mountain could not stay hidden from City Hall indefinitely. When someone noticed the tunnel work, the unusually guarded perimeter, the smoke from the underground river—questions would follow, and rumor was harder to manage than disclosure. Two years in City Hall had, he believed, widened these men’s apertures. They were not the same people he had inherited.

He explained everything. Who the Taquila witches were, what they had survived, how they had moved their relics and their equipment from Taquila to the Third Border City under First Army escort. He explained what the snow mountain expedition was, why it was necessary, and how the Taquila God’s Punishment Witches and the Witch Union had complementary capabilities that made working together the most rational approach.

The response was not enthusiastic.

Barov cited the timing: the Finance Department’s annual accounts were nearly complete, and introducing new budget requirements now was disruptive. He added that with troops already deployed to the Southernmost Region, the Border Area’s defense posture had been stretched thin enough.

Carter doubted the safety of joint operations with entities whose allegiances could not be verified. He argued that internal conflicts within a mixed expedition force were more dangerous than any external threat.

Sirius listed the grain stocks and found them insufficient to support another major deployment alongside the ongoing desert mission.

Karl raised geological concerns: the ancient witches had excavated extensively through the mountain range, and he was not confident that the mining and furnace areas above were stable.

Roland listened to all of it. He heard, beneath the specific objections, the common shape: they were telling him not to trust the tentacle blobs. Every argument, however technically framed, pointed in the same direction.

This is not a parliament, he reminded himself. I can act when they cannot reach consensus. I built the institution; I am not bound by its inertia.

He had done this before—when he had first decided to shield the witches in Border Town, before anyone understood why, when everyone around him had reasons and warnings and reservations.

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