Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 853: Preparing for the Battle

After a night in the hollow stump, they set out again. Half a day in the air, and Lorgar finally saw Taquila.

She held her breath without meaning to.

It was so much larger than she had imagined.

Below them stretched a vast expanse of green, and through it — brown walls, broken and incomplete, standing in fragments across an area five or six times the size of Iron Sand City. Lightning had said four hundred years abandoned, but even now the scale of it declared itself. A hundred thousand people could have lived within those walls. More, perhaps: if each resident required ten in the surrounding lands to support them, then nearly a million souls had once worked and starved and died in this wild territory.

A million people.

How did a kingdom that built this lose to the demons?

She thought of what Roland had told her. The Battle of Divine Will isn’t a clash between two tribes — it’s a comprehensive war that determines which civilization survives. At the time, it had grated on her. She had been impatient, dismissive of a king who wanted to talk when she wanted to fight. But standing above this ruin, looking at its sheer scale, she felt the weight of it differently.

He had not been trying to frighten her when he said I don’t want to send you to die.

She felt oddly better.

Lightning signaled. They descended onto a section of wall relatively intact — the top as wide as twenty-odd paces, room enough for two carriages to pass side by side. Moss and vines had taken what the centuries left. Scattered across the stonework were round holes, each one wide as a man’s torso — she could not imagine what force had punched through stone of this thickness.

“You probably already know,” Lightning said, coming to stand beside her, “but this city was the last line of defense for the witch empire. They didn’t hold it.”

Lorgar turned the thought over. The witches Ashes had mentioned — the survivors, centuries old — they were the remnant of this? And the Four Kingdoms, and the Church that burned witches as heretics, had all risen from the rubble of their defeat?

She kept the questions to herself. Someone clearly wanted that history forgotten. Not one traveling trader she had ever met spoke of it; not one resident of Neverwinter had offered it unsolicited. She was not part of the Witch Union, and she did not need to dig at what had been deliberately buried.

She unfolded the map instead. “Is Taquila at the edge of your patrol area? If demons attack Neverwinter, which direction will they come from?”

“Anywhere west of the ruins,” Lightning said, “though it’s dangerous for us to go further in, even flying.”

“Why?”

“The mist,” said Maggie. “Sometimes even the sky turns red.”

Lorgar frowned. “What is it?”

Lightning turned to look northwest. “A life-support system for demons — what air is for us. Today’s clear, so the sky is blue. But in poor weather, when dark clouds gather, you can see red mist on the horizon from altitude. It’s toxic to witches. Even without inhaling it, touch alone is enough to badly hurt you. We don’t know how far it can reach, so we rarely cross Taquila going west.”

She went on to outline the demons’ weak points.

Lorgar’s ears shifted as she listened. “So if I can pull out the tubes at their backs, they become vulnerable.”

“It’s not easy,” Lightning said. “The Senior Demon I told you about last night — almost no openings in a fight. If you genuinely encounter one, retreat at once and tell His Majesty.”

“I know how to handle it.”

She pressed a fist to her chest. Demons who were near-invincible as a group were not necessarily invincible alone, and the strongest opponents were precisely where skill advanced fastest. She had spotted several large demonic beasts from Maggie’s back during the flight — the Barbarian Land offered plenty of material to sharpen herself on, and she could wait for a solitary demon while she worked through the rest.

Below, the wilderness extended in every direction, unhurried, immense, alive with possibility.

The road she had dreamed about had become much clearer — extended and changed in character, sand replaced by green, the horizon wider than she had ever let herself imagine.

She was going to be here a long time. She was certain of that now.

Since issuing the order to march, Roland had one or two meetings every day. Battle plans, logistics arrangements — everything required his approval. He had enjoyed the feeling, at first: the clean exercise of power, decisions flowing outward from a single point. Then the workload compounded, and what had been pleasurable became something he simply navigated.

Neverwinter was no longer a single city. Plans that one person had once constructed now required entire teams, and the teams still required him to sign off on every layer. After enough of these sessions, Roland found himself understanding, with unexpected sympathy, the historical rulers who had preferred comfortable distance from the details of governance. A man who spent his days listening to explanations of things he neither remembered nor entirely understood would naturally prefer not to. Had Scroll not condensed and filtered the numbers in every report, he suspected he would have joined their company.

He had been a mechanical engineer. This was not the same thing.

The battle plan from the Ministry of Defense interested him more than the logistics did.

The First Army intended to concentrate its force on the Holy City of Hermes — high walls, documented resistance, a need for sustained firepower. They had drawn from the Great Snow Mountain campaign: enough cannons, enough ammunition, the Taquila survivors and First Army soldiers and witches operating as a combined force. Surprise raids in all directions, sky and ground simultaneously — the defensive formation disrupted before it could consolidate.

Many of the plan’s particulars were underworked. But the concept was right.

He had not been wrong to put the Pearl of the Northern Region in the Ministry of Defense.

The first problem he needed to solve — before any of this could function — was ensuring the God’s Punishment Witches of Taquila would obey orders in the field rather than act on individual judgment. They were not trained for unified command. They had survived for centuries on individual judgment. Changing that orientation would take more than a direct order.

The solution was straightforward.

He would invite all the survivors participating in the coming battle into his Dream World.

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