Rewrite That Witch
CH964 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 964: Birth

According to Sylvie’s observations, a standard demon reconnaissance patrol consisted of two Mad Demons and three Devilbeasts, sweeping a fixed region in overlapping arcs at regular intervals—a broad surveillance net with no gaps between teams. The flying demons’ field of vision was simply too comprehensive: the moment the First Army crossed into the detection zone, the patrol would see them.

Roland intended to put holes in that net. A no-fly zone. A blind spot.

The demons had no radar, no instantaneous long-range communication. If a patrol team disappeared without first sounding a horn, the absence might not register for hours. The Devilbeasts tasked with ferrying Red Mist cans extended the patrols’ reach—but that same extension delayed any return report. A missing team might not be noted until evening, when they failed to nest. Locating the source of the attack afterward would be harder still, since the sniper team would strike from well outside the demons’ own visual range. Patrol teams couldn’t operate at night; the First Army could. A methodically maintained blind zone in the surveillance network would give the army two or three days of undiscovered movement. Not a decisive advantage—but enough to matter at the shelling site.

The anti-Devilbeast sniper rifle was what would make that blind zone possible.

To call it a gun was already a stretch. Roland had set the caliber at twenty millimeters—the formal demarcation between small arms and cannon—to guarantee long-range lethality and stable ballistics at the required distances. It hadn’t been designed larger for a specific reason: Andrea’s ability required her to hold the weapon with her hands while firing. That had been confirmed during artillery training. The moment she released the barrel, even the most detailed verbal instructions couldn’t recover the precision for the soldiers beside her.

The alternative—bracing against artillery recoil with her bare hands—had been raised exactly once in planning.

Tilly would have been furious.

Sniper cannon was too awkward. Gun it remained.

The engineering itself contained no real innovations. The structure was simpler than the Mark I heavy machine gun: air-guide backseat, semi-automatic action, clip-fed. The one new component was a muzzle brake to manage recoil—already applied to the main artillery of the shallow-water gunboats, so not genuinely new at all.

The build took two days. A day and a half went to materials selection and post-processing.

Lucia produced the alloy. Anna shaped it. Candle consolidated the form. Doris demonified it. Four witches contributing to a single weapon—the barrel wouldn’t deform under sustained high-temperature gas and enormous pressure, which was the other critical requirement for continuous and accurate long-range fire. Legendary, in the most literal sense.

“Where’s the aiming scope?” Andrea said, examining the weapon.

“There isn’t one,” Roland said.

She went very still. “I can’t hit a target I can’t see.”

“A standard scope wouldn’t reach the effective range we need. So three people are here to compensate.” He looked toward Sylvie, Spear Passi, and Camilla Dary.

Andrea understood at once. Camilla would connect her to Sylvie’s sight. Sylvie would locate and track the target. Countess Spear would manage their collective magic reserve. That was who Maggie had meant by they’re waiting for you—not a gathering but a formation, assembled specifically around her ability.

“I never actually wanted to leave Fallen Dragon Ridge at all—ah-choo—” Spear Passi began, in the tone of someone who had been nursing a grievance for hours and had finally found an audience for it. “Since His Majesty was so kind as to invite me personally, naturally I couldn’t refuse. But I do wish I’d been given some advance notice instead of being collected by flight. Cold wind and I have an old disagreement. I’m still not entirely recovered.”

Roland kept his expression neutral. She had already received Lily’s Cleansing Water and filed a formal request for City Hall’s next cohort of trained students. The unpaid-laborer performance was one she’d had decades to perfect.

Camilla, by contrast: “Her Highness hopes I’ll do my best.”

“I’m not certain my ability will still function under the Eye of Magic,” Andrea said. The concern was real—she’d never needed to test it, because stones and bows had always fallen within her natural visual range. This was different territory.

“That’s exactly why we test first,” Roland said. He looked at the assembled group, then at the sky. “Let’s begin.”

Carter Lannis had been pacing the corridor outside the bedroom long enough to have lost track of how many times he’d covered its length.

He couldn’t recall being quite this disturbed on any other day of his life. The moment Roland had approached Anna without a guard—that had been sudden, immediate, snatching the air from his lungs. This was different. This had been building for months. This he had known was coming.

May was in labor.

Her importance is as high as His Majesty’s, he reminded himself, though the joke had no teeth at the moment. Find some courage. A man shouldn’t look like this. It’s just a birth. Nana is in there. Lily is in there. Three nurses from the hospital. Everything is prepared. If there’s difficulty, they can open her belly and take the child out, and both will survive.

That thought lasted perhaps two seconds before the other voice in his head pointed out that he had never once heard of a child being delivered from a living mother’s belly with both surviving. Not once. It seemed fantastical.

Don’t you dare question His Majesty’s knowledge.

But nobody has ever—

The argument cycled without resolution. His forehead was wet.

“Rest easy, Sir.” Irene stood nearby, hands folded—she had come with the whole of Star Flower Troupe. “Sister May will be all right. She’s the toughest person any of us has met.”

The other members nodded.

“Thank you,” Carter said. The words felt disconnected from whatever was happening in his chest.

Then—through the window—sound erupted from the street below. He went to the glass.

A column of soldiers was moving slowly toward the frontier wall. Brown-and-green uniforms, irregular in pattern, dense and heavy in mass—the whole body of them advancing with the patient, unhurried weight of something geological. The people lining the street were cheering and calling out, their voices overlapping into a single sustained roar.

“Does the army set off today?” he heard himself ask.

“Yes.” Irene smiled with the specific expression of someone proud and aching at the same time. “My husband is with them. He’s been waiting for this battle for a long time—he calls it vengeance. To honor those killed by the demons.”

Carter repeated the word. “Vengeance.”

To honor those killed by the demons. A craftsman’s husband marching in formation, carrying that intention alongside everything else he carried. The country His Majesty had described in those early days of Border Town—not described, argued for, insisted on—was not a speech anymore. It was the column on the street.

Carter should have been among them. He had been first. He had been one of the people Roland trusted. Somehow, while he managed the law and attended courts and stood in corridors, the army had moved beyond him.

The annoyance pressed in past the fear, briefly overriding it. His attention drifted outward.

Then a sound came from the bedroom—high, thin, clear, and entirely unmistakable.

All thought dissolved. His body moved before his mind could issue any instruction. He was through the door without having decided to open it, at the bed without having crossed the room.

A baby lay on the pillow beside May—wrinkled, reddened, crying with the full commitment of something that had just arrived in the world and had opinions about the temperature. Around them, nurses moved in quiet, practiced order.

“Congratulations, my lord,” one said, smiling. “A very healthy boy.”

Carter moved toward the bed one step at a time, as if hurrying might break something. He knelt—one knee, the way he’d taken oaths. May’s hair was soaked through. Her face was pale and still and turned toward him, and she looked at him without managing words.

Outside, the cheering from the street mixed with the child’s crying and rose through the open window—two sounds that had nothing to do with each other, braided anyway into something that felt like a single thing.

May’s mouth moved. She had no strength behind it.

But Carter understood exactly what she meant.

Tears arrived without any forewarning.

Now you’re a father, she had said.

Discussion

Suggest a change