Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 927: Air Defense Battle at the Border (Part I)

Roland had run two short telephone lines from his office — one to the Neverwinter garrison command center, one to the Taquila survivors — so that both stations could reach him the instant anything changed. The castle, the First Army camp, and the Third Border City received the news simultaneously.

Pasha spoke first. “This is sooner than expected.” Something in her voice was uncertain rather than alarmed, as though she were reading a pattern that didn’t quite fit. “Based on what we observed in previous battles, there should have been half a month before the second attack. At minimum. A city the size of Neverwinter — they can’t reach it quickly. They need time to let the fear work.”

“Explain.”

“The fear must spread on its own. The lord could do nothing about it, and that was the point — every day, the stories grew larger, the monsters more terrible, the outcome more certain. The second attack arrived when the people had already defeated themselves. Five days is not enough time.” She paused. “They seem hasty.”

Roland turned it over. She was right. Five days was barely enough for word to move from the wall to the markets, from the markets to the taverns, from the taverns to the parts of the city that still felt like separate worlds from the government buildings where official reassurances were issued. Neverwinter wasn’t the disconnected world he’d grown up in; information moved faster here than it had in any other city he’d seen. But fast for this era was still slow.

Unless they think the plan has already worked, and they want to close before we recover.

Or unless the old rumor was truer than he’d wanted to believe, and the demon who had devised this strategy had not understood the specific sociology of Neverwinter when they’d applied it.

He kept that thought to himself.

“What do you intend to do?” Alethea asked.

“Kill them.” He said it flatly, because there was nothing else to say. The aiming tool had been installed on the converted Mark I guns in the last week, and the hastily assembled machine gun squad had completed exactly one live-fire exercise — against balloons. But Nightingale had come back. Lightning and Maggie had come back. The witches were here.

He looked at them. Lightning had her hands clasped behind her, practically vibrating with contained readiness. Maggie sat on the edge of the table, wings folded.

“Follow the plan,” he said. “The most important thing — ”

“Safety! Lightning completely understands!” The little girl had her hand up before he finished the sentence.

“Maggie too! Coo!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll keep them both in line.” Nightingale’s voice was even, almost bored. She was watching the window.

“Which one of us is small?” Lightning’s chin went up.

“Obviously you. Coo.”

“Why? Explain yourself.”

“I’m bigger than both of you together when I transform! Coo!” Maggie spread her wings, taking up considerably more of the room than her usual form suggested possible.

“That has nothing to do with anything!”

Nightingale bent and tucked one girl under each arm, and carried them both out of the meeting room without visible effort.

Roland watched them go. Something in his chest unwound slightly.

He turned to Tilly. “I’m leaving the city wall’s defense to the Sleeping Island witches.”

“They’ll do everything they can,” she said immediately. No hesitation.

“Good. I’ll wait by the telephone.” He let his voice carry the weight he intended. “Move. Now.”

When the room was empty of everyone but Pasha, she spoke again. Her tone had shifted — not alarmed, but careful.

“Are you certain about this? If the demons see this many witches fighting together, they will reinterpret what Neverwinter is. They’ll stop thinking of it as a common lord’s city and start thinking of it as a Union-controlled one. Their tactics will change accordingly.”

“I know. You warned me when we made the plan.”

“I worried that humans would prefer to avoid the escalation.”

Roland crossed to the tall window and looked north toward the border, toward the flat line of the grassland under the late-afternoon sky. The frontier he’d been building toward for three years. The territory the demons thought belonged to them.

“They’ll come regardless,” he said. “Sooner or later, there’s no version of this where they don’t escalate. Given that — I’d rather fight the battle we’ve prepared for than wait for the one they choose.” He turned from the window. “The First Army was hunters and miners and farmers a few years ago. They’re something else now. But every soldier becomes elite the same way: by surviving encounters that should have killed them, and learning faster than the enemy expects. Every engagement we initiate on our terms is training the demons can’t account for.”

“Your resolve has moved me.” Alethea’s tentacles shifted with something he had started to recognize as approval. “You are better than most common people, from this alone.”

“Common people aren’t common because they’re weak,” Roland said. “They’re common because there are many of them. That’s always been underestimated — by ancient gods in stories, by dragons, by everyone with enough power to feel contempt. In the Dream World there are tales of beings that could not be touched by swords or stopped by walls, and still forty ordinary people brought them down.” He shook his head. “Twenty-five, with better weapons.”

“I have heard no such legend.”

“They’re not purely false.” He turned back toward the table and picked up the tactical map. “And the demons are about to compound their mistake. They’re going to see Neverwinter deploy its witches, and they’re going to conclude that this is a Union city under witch control, and they are going to completely fail to understand what they’re actually looking at.” He set the map down. “Neverwinter is not a common lord’s city. It’s not a Union city. It is something they have no category for, and by the time they realize that, we’ll have had months to prepare.”

Fish Ball had his eyes fixed north with the particular intensity of a man refusing to blink.

He’d known the demons existed for over a year — His Majesty had told the Army that much. He’d seen what they looked like for the first time five days ago. He had been standing on the wall when the bone spears came down, and he had watched men he’d trained beside crumple and stay down, and he had felt the fear — not the abstract awareness that danger existed, but the specific animal knowledge that nothing in his range could reach the things that were killing his companions.

He had wanted to run.

He hadn’t run. His trained responses had held him long enough for something else to take over: fury. Not clean heroic fury. The ugly kind, the kind that came from feeling powerless and hating it.

He’d been known as a coward in the old Border Town. Everyone had known it. He’d more or less known it himself. Then Van’er had tricked him into the Militia with a promise of two eggs, and on the first night standing the wall against a demonic beast assault, he had been so afraid he’d pissed himself. And then he’d survived it, and nobody laughed at him anymore, and he’d understood something: the fear didn’t have to leave. You just had to act past it.

Van’er was Artillery Battalion commander now. Fish Ball was a squad captain in the Machine Gun Squad. He didn’t resent the difference in rank — Van’er was simply a better soldier than him, and had the guts to speak directly to His Majesty, which Fish Ball suspected he would never be capable of. But he had stopped believing that the distance between Van’er and himself was fixed.

He had traveled on a concrete ship and felt the thrum of the steam engine through the hull. He had been part of the assault on the nobles’ capital. He had fought alongside the campaign that ended the Church’s hold on the south. He had come this far.

So why the demons?

The observer’s voice cut across his thoughts. “Attention. Suspicious targets spotted, ten o’clock!”

Fish Ball saw them at almost the same moment — dark shapes at the horizon’s edge, small enough that they might have been large birds if the observer hadn’t called them first.

He pulled back the bolt of the Mark I and raised the muzzle toward the sky.

Nobody else knew what was still lodged in him from five days ago. The shame of standing on the wall and feeling nothing but the need to flee. Only the blood of the enemy could wash it out.

He wasn’t going to miss this time.

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