Rewrite That Witch
CH977 · Rewrite
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Chapter 977: Gliding Wings

“Three days,” Nightingale said suddenly.

“Yes.” Roland nodded. “Three days, and they should reach the staging area.” At the army’s current pace, they’d entrench the hill—that broad slope facing the demon camp, good sight lines, natural defensive contour—within seventy-two hours. Once the First Army dug in, with guns and cannons anchoring the line, there was no realistic way for the demons to break them.

The pressure fell on the sniper team for now. While the army was still on the march, demon scouts could intercept them across the open plain. The witches would have to work without rest to prevent those scouts from reporting back.

But the demons would keep sending more. Sheer numbers would eventually overwhelm any surveillance net—the demons would narrow their patrols precisely to those areas where scouts went missing, and eventually some credible report would get through. Once that happened, it would be too dangerous for the witches to act at all.

The best possible result was for the demons to notice the witches and dispatch their flying units while the witches withdrew to the First Army’s position. That would consume the demons’ strategic assets and buy the army enough time to fortify before any strike came. But that assumed both sides would behave predictably—one miscalculation in either direction and the situation could fracture into something far worse.

“Give them credit,” Nightingale said, reading his expression. “The Taquila witches know how to assess risk. And they have the Magic Ark to fall back on. Even if they run across a large scouting group, those witches are not an easy target.”

“You’re right.” Roland rested his chin on his hand. The real trouble was Neverwinter’s own limitation. The slow march of infantry was the drawback everything else traced back to. If the army had wheeled vehicles, the sniper team would only need to hold the demons off for a day—even if the enemy spotted the column approaching, they wouldn’t have time to intercept it. But the vehicles didn’t exist yet.

After a moment he let the problem go. Dwelling on it changed nothing he could change today.

“By the way—has Wendy grasped the principles of flight?”

“Almost.” Nightingale tossed a piece of dried fish into her mouth. “She talked in her sleep last night. Something like ‘runway cleared’ and ‘all lights green.’”

Roland smiled. “Good. The weather’s looking decent today. Maybe we can move the flight trials up.”

Nightingale’s eyes sharpened at once. “Are you testing it? Now?”

“Interested?”

“How could I not be?” She straightened, voice brightening. “You can fly in the sky without wings. More freely than a hot air balloon—and controlled by anyone. If you succeed, do you know how your subjects will look at you? Their reverence would surpass anything they’ve felt for God.”

Her eyes were lit, and she was already somewhere else in her mind—back in the chaos-drink halls of the Fjords, perhaps, that same pleasure of being at the center of something that mattered.

Roland laughed. “We’re still working on it. There’s a long road between here and the thing you’re imagining.”

The steam engine didn’t have the horsepower to lift an aircraft off the ground. He knew he’d have to redesign the propulsion soon. A combustion engine—that was the next necessary thing.

“But it will happen, won’t it?” Nightingale smiled as she backed toward the door, hands clasped behind her.

“Yes,” Roland said. “It will.”

One kilometer east of Shallow Beach.

The beach itself was completely submerged—only a long line of cliffs stood above the waterline, running southeast until they formed the natural border of southern Graycastle. For people who’d grown up inland, in the Western Region, it was simply the edge of the hills where the endless whirlpool sea came into view. For sailors, it was an impassable wall: fifteen meters of sheer rock above the water, nowhere to dock, nowhere to unload. That was why the Western Region—with a full third of its border running along the sea—had no seaport until the passage to Shallow Beach was cut through.

In other words, the lack of access was the primary reason the Western Region had always lagged behind the east and south. The Months of Demons hadn’t helped, but it was the cliffs that had decided things.

Now, however, that same terrain made it the perfect location for a flight test.

By the time Roland and his companions arrived, the Garrison had cordoned off a full kilometer in every direction. At the far end of the concrete runway, soldiers were pushing three identical Mark I Glider prototypes onto the launch platform.

“So—that’s your new machine.” Thunder stood with his hand at his chin, studying the gliders. “It does look like a seabird. But compared to the steam engine…” He left the thought incomplete, but his expression said it: fragile.

Thunder was one of the most dependable allies Neverwinter had, the famous Fjords explorer, and his instinct wasn’t wrong. Roland smiled without confirming it and turned to Margaret. “What do you think?”

“Your Majesty,” she said carefully, “to be honest—it looks so unlike your previous inventions that if someone told me it was made by the Society of Wondrous Crafts to deceive us in your name, I’d have believed them.”

“The Society of Wondrous Crafts?” Roland asked. “What organization is that?”

“A society of half-craftsmen, half-explorer lunatics—their own description, more or less.” Margaret settled into the explanation with the tone of someone recalling a useful cautionary tale. “They refused to live quietly as craftsmen but were also too cautious to sail dangerous seas. So they focused on unusual inventions. Two years ago, one of them made something similar to this—a pair of wooden wings, man-sized, that he claimed would allow a person to fly.”

“Wooden wings?”

“About the same size as a man. A similar silhouette to yours, though much smaller.”

“Did he succeed?” Wendy couldn’t help herself.

“No.” Margaret shook her head. “He wore the wings and jumped from a high tower. They flipped immediately, and he dropped like a stone. He died on impact.”

Wendy swallowed.

“Before the trial, he’d claimed several times that he’d successfully flown on previous occasions—which had drawn attention from the chamber of commerce. In the end it only made him look like a fool and damaged the Society’s already poor reputation.”

Roland listened and said nothing for a moment. The man had understood, at least partially. He’d recognized that lift was the essential principle—that a frame of hard material needed to survive the force of ascent. Naive, but not without logic. It was a genuine step beyond merely imitating birds. Better than the inventors of feather-wings, flying umbrellas, flying cloaks—all those who had watched birds and decided that feathers were the answer.

The man had probably tested from low heights first, where the variables were simpler. At low altitude, you could make a fixed-wing structure work under certain conditions. But when descent speed increased, the contact force against the wind increased with it—there was a threshold past which human muscle alone couldn’t hold stability, and without understanding the math of it, the moment came without warning.

It was a shame that Fjords admired only the explorers who found new islands, and looked with contempt on those who stayed ashore to think.

“We shouldn’t call him a liar,” Roland said quietly. “What he was attempting carries a price that everyone working toward flight has to accept. Without the witches’ assistance, I would have had to pay that price in tests too. If the man had a name, record his story.”

Margaret blinked, then curtseyed. “As you wish, Your Majesty.”

Roland turned back to the Mark I Glider as the soldiers finished positioning it on the platform. Unlike the locomotive or the iron ship, it looked almost absurdly delicate—no cabin, a bare aluminum frame with large wings spread above and below the open seats, a structure so minimal it seemed like a sketch of a machine rather than the machine itself. The wings were longer than any bird’s, longer than Maggie’s transfigured wingspan, and their slim tips shivered faintly in the sea wind.

He’d built this one differently from anything before it. The locomotive and the ship he understood deeply; their principles had been his professional territory. The glider he’d assembled from fragments—from half-remembered lectures, from the shape of things he’d seen. All he truly understood was the principle of flight, which was far from enough to make a real aircraft.

The first thing needed was a Flight Manual. Data. Real feedback from real flight.

These prototypes were simple. But they contained, in their plain frames, everything a flyer needed to understand the sky.

It looked like a newly hatched bird—bald, angular, uncertain.

It was also where everything else began.

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