Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 928: Air Defense Battle at the Border (Part II)

“Targets confirmed — demons incoming!”

“Two directions! Demons spotted at twelve o’clock!”

“They’re splitting — ”

The observers rotated through their telescopes in rapid sequence, each call overlapping the last. Fish Ball’s eyes stayed on the second group — his assigned sector, twelve o’clock’s neighbor, creatures that at this distance looked like leaves turning in distant wind. Only the rhythm of those wings — too regular, too purposeful — separated them from ordinary birds.

He worked the aiming tool. It was an odd device, nothing like anything he’d trained on before. Two concentric rings: one held a Devilbeast model that rotated freely, the other a set of small holes arranged in parallel at intervals. He had no understanding of the mathematics behind it. What he had was the procedure he’d spent an entire night memorizing, step by step, until it was reflexive.

Step one: align the heading indicator — the Devilbeast model — parallel to the target’s direction of travel.

The enemy swam into alignment with the aiming hole. Fish Ball glanced at the size comparison. “A quarter!” The target’s apparent area was one-fourth the model’s. Within range.

The Lord Astrologer of the Dispersion Star — who had spent two days drilling the squads in the theory of the device — had been careful to explain that the naked eye’s distance estimate was always approximate. Round up, he’d said. Round up and fire early; a premature burst was guaranteed to reach the target. A late one wasted bullets on empty sky.

The aiming call went back to his partner, who consulted the firing table. This step took seconds. Those seconds were elastic — Fish Ball felt time behave strangely around him, the ambient noise of the wall falling back, the shouting and the machinery and the other squads’ voices becoming background. He heard his own heartbeat. He felt the dampness in his palms.

The coward is still in there. He acknowledged it without surprise. He’d stopped expecting it to leave.

The Devilbeasts came on. They climbed as they approached — the same arc as five days ago, rising to the attitude from which the Mad Demons could throw their spears. Eight hundred meters, maybe nine hundred. The wings stretched wide, flattening the body into a thin profile.

Thin target. Even a sniper team would struggle with that silhouette. But the Mark I machine gun operated on a different principle. The scholar’s instruction came back to him word for word: Don’t aim at the enemy. Aim at the space in front of them, and wait for them to fly into the bullets.

“Fifth hole!” his partner shouted from behind.

Fish Ball drew a breath and lifted the muzzle, placing the Mad Demon inside the fifth hole of the aiming ring.

He pulled the trigger.

The muzzle flash and the report arrived as one thing. Time came back in a rush — the air over the wall was full of gunfire now, every squad firing simultaneously, the noise stacking until it was more pressure than sound. The barrel of the Mark I wasn’t pointed at any demon. It was pointed at a patch of air those demons were flying toward. Fish Ball kept his finger on the trigger and his eye on the arc of flight, and did not look away to see what was happening elsewhere on the wall.

Somewhere around the three-second mark, a red bloom opened at twelve o’clock.

A body, crumpling. A half-broken wing spinning away. Other pieces of something that had, moments ago, been cohesive and intact.

Two more Devilbeasts lurched midair — dropping, then catching themselves before they hit the ground. He couldn’t tell if they’d been wounded or whether they were breaking formation to dodge. It didn’t matter. They hadn’t recovered in time. Both hit the grassland.

The soldiers around him erupted. Cheering and shouting, names called, insults directed at the retreating silhouettes. A kind of joy that was also relief, also the specific animal release of having been afraid and then not afraid.

“Another one down!”

“Air Defense Squad, our turn now!”

“Kill them!”

“Long live King Roland!”

The demons reacted. They scattered, dispersed, and then they did something the first group hadn’t done: they pressed forward, accelerating toward the wall instead of away from it. No retreat. Spear range was the objective.

Fish Ball tightened his grip on the handle and tracked. “Three-quarters.” Not quite there. He adjusted. “Four — four-quarters!”

“All gunners, fire at will!” the observer called.

The revolving rifles joined in. The wall was chaos — sound, heat, the smell of powder, the constant motion of reloading and re-aiming and corrections shouted between partners. Four Devilbeasts were already down, but the remaining ones had started evading, jinxing their flight paths with sudden lurches that broke the tracking rhythm. The hit rate fell off.

Then one of them dove.

It came at him directly — angled, fast, larger in his sight line with every half-second. He could see the Mad Demon on its back clearly enough now. One arm swelling, already past its normal size. A bone spear forming in the grip.

The cold came up from the soles of his feet. Not the ordinary cold of a winter morning. This was the cold that preceded running.

Flee or die.

The familiar thing. It had his hands, almost.

“Ah —” The shout came out of him before the thought did. “Go away — I’m no longer — ”

He held the trigger down.

The Mark I fired and fired. At this range, the trajectory was essentially flat — no ballistic arc to compensate for, no need to lead by more than the demon’s own width. Just aim, hold, and keep firing until the body stopped coming.

The bullets found the Mad Demon. They tore through muscle and shattered bone and did what bullets did at point-blank range, which was thorough and not careful. The demon threw the bone spear at the same moment, arm already withering from the effort.

Fish Ball had known, when he pulled the trigger, what the likely outcome was. He’d done the geometry in the half-second before the shot. It throws before it dies. He’d accepted it and fired anyway.

The bone spear came at him like a shadow. And then it stopped.

A semi-transparent wall was there, between him and the spear, where nothing had been a moment before. The spear hit the barrier and shattered. The barrier itself shivered and held.

He blinked.

A witch was standing on the battlements. Short hair, short build, breathing out slowly with both hands spread in front of her. She’d taken the spear for him.

She lowered her hands and turned around. Her smile was light, almost casual.

“What were you shouting about?” she asked. “Of course you aren’t.”

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