Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 926: Quitting Math for Dummies

The anti-aircraft machine guns were only the first step toward reclaiming the sky. The real answer to air supremacy — what the Union had once answered with flying witches and Extraordinaries bearing Stones of Flight, warriors whose rank within the Blessed Army had been the highest of any corps — was an air force.

For common soldiers without magic, that meant machines.

Roland needed to design an aircraft.

He was honest with himself about the difficulty. He knew, in rough outline, how a biplane from the First World War worked. He had seen diagrams. He had read technical history. But the gap between knowing the rough outline and producing a design was exactly the kind of gap that got test pilots killed. Flight control surfaces — rudder, elevator, ailerons — had tolerances he could not simplify the way he had simplified the locomotive’s braking mechanism. The locomotive’s failure mode was a slow stop. An aircraft’s failure mode was the ground arriving quickly.

He’d never flown anything.

A glider was more tractable. Wendy could sense wind speed and direction more precisely than any instrument he could build; she was a better test pilot than any human without her ability. With Lightning and Maggie standing by to catch her if something went wrong, he could iterate on an airframe safely — write the manual from the resulting data, refine the controls through feedback, build toward powered flight from a foundation that actually worked.

He filed it under eventually and came back to the problem in front of him.

“Your Majesty.” The Astrologer of Dispersion Star spoke, and Roland surfaced from his thinking. “I understand your requirements. The Arithmetic Academy will construct the aiming tool as quickly as possible.”

“Good.” Roland was relieved, as he always was, to work with someone who understood the intention before he’d finished explaining it. Bringing the Astrology Association wholesale to the Western Region had been one of the better decisions in a period of many decisions.

They were practitioners as much as theorists. Sages, yes, but sages who had spent decades building telescopes with their own hands, grinding lenses to precise specifications, taking measurements night after night until their data was reliable. No blacksmith knew how to fabricate a telescope’s components to the required tolerances — so they had designed and assembled everything themselves. Their hands were as capable as their minds.

Roland started to leave. Dispersion Star still had something on his face.

“Is there anything else?”

The astrologer coughed delicately into his fist. “There is a matter I cannot resolve. The books you gave me — ‘Analytical Geometry,’ and the others. The word ‘Intermediate’ on every cover. I have been uncertain what it signifies.”

Roland found himself smiling despite himself.

Kyle Sichi had been lured into his current position by exactly this mechanism — dangled the promise of Intermediate Chemistry, then Advanced Chemistry, recruited into building an entire department in pursuit of a book he could never quite reach. It had worked brilliantly. But Dispersion Star didn’t need managing that way; he’d already demonstrated a devotion to mathematics that no artificial incentive could improve.

“There’s a book called Advanced Mathematics,” Roland said plainly. “The primary and intermediate texts are the trunk of a tree. The advanced text is the crown. It covers mathematical theory — the kind that underlies all the rest.”

“And this higher text has a name?”

“It has an alternate name.” Roland laid out his hands. “‘Quitting Math for Dummies.’”

Dispersion Star stared at him with an expression of profound sincerity. He understood neither the joke nor the implication, and he was too composed to guess at it. Then he stood very straight and said, with the earnestness of a vow, “Your Majesty. I will pursue that theory until the last day of my life, if necessary. I will not be defeated by a book. Might I — ”

Roland, who had slept through more advanced mathematics lectures than he preferred to remember, felt a faint glow of something like embarrassment. He cleared his throat. “After you complete the aiming tool project. Come to the castle.”

Dispersion Star dropped to one knee, face lit as though he’d been promised a mountain.

Roland left the Arithmetic Academy and walked to the backyard of the North Slope.

He had more to design.

The God’s Punishment Witches needed purpose-built weapons. He had spent enough months among the Taquila survivors to know what they were — not soldiers in the ordinary sense, not warriors who had chosen a profession, but women who had been waiting centuries to settle a debt. The demons had killed their families and friends, destroyed the civilization they’d built, and left the survivors carrying forward in borrowed bodies. Their hatred was not heat. It was structural. It was the shape their lives had taken.

Giving them swords was wasteful. He’d thought so since the first time he’d watched a God’s Punishment Witch demonstrate her strength.

His first plan had been a portable variant of the Mark I — a heavy machine gun light enough for them, ammunition carried in a backpack, the whole assembly converted into a self-contained mobile weapons platform. Walking fortresses. He had liked the image.

He’d changed his mind.

Some Mark I guns were being converted to anti-aircraft roles. A new Mark I variant was entering large-scale production. Ammunition consumption would climb fast. The current production lines couldn’t keep three hundred mobile fortresses and an active air defense network in bullets simultaneously — not without a production expansion he didn’t have time to organize before the Bloody Moon.

What he needed was a weapon that spent fewer rounds to achieve a decisive result.

He sketched it on paper. A gas-operated, automatic-firing gun at 40mm caliber. The grapeshot principle: a wide killing area compensated for imprecision, and the enlarged caliber extended effective range beyond anything a rifle could match. It fired automatically, reducing the skill barrier. It could support the rifle lines in suppression at distance, and in close terrain — ambush terrain, the kind you chose, not the kind you were pushed into — it could be decisive at very short range.

The demons’ tactical doctrine, as far as the second Battle of Divine Will had revealed it, was still cold-steel doctrine. They threw spears in direct confrontation. They didn’t operate guns, didn’t use suppressive fire, didn’t hold ground with ranged weapons covering the approaches. Against a God’s Punishment Witch in cover, bearing an automatic grapeshot gun, that gap would be total.

He set the sketch aside and rolled his shoulder.

Five days later, Sylvie found them again.

Twelve Devilbeasts this time, coming out of the west in a dark cluster, moving toward Neverwinter with a certainty the first group had also shown — the certainty of creatures that had never expected the sky to be contested.

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