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Chapter 939: Andrea the Marksman

She didn’t look to see where the first bullet landed.

There was no time, and besides — she knew. The magic in her told her. What she needed now was the next target.

The constraint of long-distance shooting was precise: the harder the shot, the more magic power it consumed, and the reserves that would sustain two to four hours of arrow or stone work would last her perhaps eight minutes at this range. She had to use every one of those minutes.

Her ability answered before she had finished the thought.

In the years since she had left the Quinn family’s protection and found her way to the Combat Witches, she had come to think of her power as something living — responsive, attentive, like a partner who had been waiting for the right music to start. Now, six hundred meters from the palace wall with a rifle in her hands and the cold morning air against her face, she was dancing.

The adjustment of the barrel — the rise of her arms — the weight shifting with the breath — it was a performance she had drilled until the seams disappeared. Ten bullets gone, clip changed, the whole process moving like water over stone. She wasn’t counting. The magic counted.

What happened on the wall was not elegant.

The knight she’d taken first had been the one commanding the crossbow crews — directing the angle, the timing, the coverage. With him gone, the coordination broke immediately. The others, weapons drawn, searched in every direction they could reach. The enemy did not appear. The second shot arrived. The third. The bodies lay where they fell.

For seasoned fighters, there is a particular quality to dying from a threat you cannot answer. These men had earned their confidence in a world where skill had a proportionate response — if you were good enough, you survived. What Andrea gave them was a different world entirely: one where skill was irrelevant. Experienced and inexperienced fell the same way. The panic that followed was not cowardice. It was a reasonable response to the erasure of everything they’d been trained to rely on.

Less than a minute. Over twenty down. The moaning spreading.

Then the chief knight found his voice.

A figure in golden-lined armor moved quickly along the wall’s center, pulling the survivors toward cover — behind the battlements, behind the big logs, behind anything that broke the sightline. He began directing fire outward in broad arcs, without a target, filling the air with God’s Punishment Arrows. No specific direction. Just pressure, and volume — enough to force the witch to move or go silent.

Andrea measured him.

He had positioned himself in the one dead angle she had from the belfry. The battlement covered him almost completely. All she could see was the arm that extended past the stone edge when he gestured to his men, and a small section of his helmet above the crenellation.

A normal shot at that target was not possible. The angle didn’t exist.

She had watched the First Army’s cannon demonstrations more carefully than anyone had known. She had thought about trajectory — the arc, the relationship between distance and drop rate, the way a projectile thrown high enough would bleed speed at the apex and regain it on the descent, arriving with both forward and downward momentum. Arriving from above. Arriving at an angle the battlement was not designed to block.

She drew the magic into her arms and lifted the barrel until it pointed at open sky.

When the familiar harmony arrived — rock-steady, feather-light, both at once — she fired.

Immediately after, she lowered the barrel, found the fragment of helmet visible above the stone, and fired again.

The second bullet arrived first. It hit the face of the battlement squarely and came apart into a spinning, deformed mass that struck the helmet’s upper rim and knocked it sideways with enough force to haul the chief knight off-balance — he lurched forward, instinctively, and his neck appeared above the stone.

The first bullet arrived from above.

It had traveled a longer arc. It came down at an angle the armor wasn’t positioned to catch, and drove into the back of his neck at the base of the skull. The fractured vertebra made a sound like a branch in winter.

He heard — she imagined — a muffled impact. Felt the cold.

Nothing after that.

The magic emptied out of Andrea all at once. The dizziness arrived like a door swinging open. Her hands shook so badly she barely held the rifle. The world tilted in the lens.

But she held on.

On the wall, the chief knight fell, and the line broke.

There was no order left to retreat in; they simply dissolved, turning and running for the stairs, abandoning the crossbow machines, the hot oil, the logs. They left everything. They left the wall empty.

Below, the horn sounded — long and low, carrying across the Rising Sun Avenue and the gathered crowd.

Elena moved first.

She carried her standard tools and a bundle of hemp rope, a square iron hook knotted at one end. She threw the hook and it caught on the battlement rim on the first try. She was up the rope before the echo of the horn had died, hand over hand, quick and efficient, five meters of stone treated as a mild inconvenience. Behind her the other God’s Punishment Witches followed, throwing their own ropes, and within seconds the wall had a half-dozen hemp ladders hanging from its top edge.

What Elena found on the other side was a space in active collapse: wall guards fleeing the stairs, the Castle District’s supervisory teams milling without instructions, and — in the confusion — the guards of Earl Luoxi turning their swords on the Kingdom of Dawn’s own troops. Three groups in panic, in too small a space, none of them with a coherent objective.

She pulled the great sword from her back.

The blade was not subtle. Neither was the arm swinging it. As long as someone came within her range, the encounter ended the same way — a wound deep enough to take them out of the fight, a body that hit the ground and did not get up quickly. She did not need to be clever about it. She needed to be fast, and she was.

A path opened through the chaos. The other God’s Punishment Witches came through it.

By the time Earl Quinn’s column arrived at the Castle District’s gates, the wall no longer had anyone on it who was fighting for Appen Moya.

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