Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1086: A Sharp Confrontation

The demons came in low and fast along both flanks.

Sylvie tracked them through the Eye of Magic, her vision stretched thin across the dark plain: two minutes to close five hundred meters, moving from somewhere beyond fifteen hundred to something under a thousand, and the encampment’s night-blind sentries had not yet registered the shift. She had notified the liaison officer the moment the signatures moved. It had not been fast enough.

Worse — they dropped prone.

She watched them flatten against the earth as artillery rounds walked toward them, those heavy limbs eating the ground in a crawl that covered distance with ugly efficiency. The machine gun squads that had shredded every charge during the unification war, that had turned the Church’s crusaders to ruin the way a scythe levels ripe wheat — they were hosing bullets into the dark and missing. The demons spread their formation deliberately, thinning the beaten zone to nothing. Sylvie relayed corrections in real time. Without eyes on the impacts, the gunners could not walk their aim.

On the opposite flank, the Longsong Cannons were working. The black mantle blocking her Eye of Magic was solid to magic but hollow to steel; shells crossed three thousand meters of night air and detonated inside the blind zone, and torn limbs and shards of dark stone vomited outward through the shroud each time. From the rate of fire and the density of the impact signatures, she had concluded the Spider Demons inside the zone were arranged in columns — the only formation that packed so many bodies into so narrow a frontage.

“Keep firing. Advance in twenty-meter increments.” She said it through the Sigil of Listening, crisp and without inflection. There was no room in her voice for what her hands were doing, which was pressing flat against her thighs hard enough to bruise.

“Got it.”

The logic was simple and brutal: push the artillery up, close the range, flood the ground between four hundred and eight hundred meters with mortar shells until nothing moved there. The defensive line had to hold. If the line held, the encampment held. If the demons cleared the encampment’s outer perimeter, First Army died piecemeal in the dark.

Fish Ball had not expected to still be alive.

He had clenched his teeth and sprinted to the shooting position before his brain could countermand the order, and he had stayed there for the same reason — because one soldier had gone first, and then the next had gone, and the atmosphere had drawn him forward the way a current pulls a swimmer. His brain had not participated in the decision. It had simply switched modes, the way a boiler trips to automatic when a hand leaves the valve, and now he was here, crouched behind the Mark I’s baffle plates, watching stone needles skip off the metal two centimeters from his ear.

He was a member of the anti-aircraft squad. The Mark I had a rear sight and an optical sight, adaptable to ground fire; the baffle plates, designed to deflect aerial projectiles from above, left his back exposed the moment he lowered them. He had lowered them anyway. Miss Nana can heal him. She can only heal him if the field medics get to him first. The field medics have to be fast.

He shot until he ran dry, reloaded, shot again. The sequence collapsed to a mechanical rhythm — pull, fire, shout for another belt, pull again. The Longsong Cannons were indistinguishable now from the Spider Demons’ return strikes; the whole battlefield had become a single compressed roar.

On the third cartridge, a silhouette resolved at the edge of visibility. His first clear look at one of them. He clicked empty.

“Reload!”

Nothing.

“Did anyone—”

He wheeled around. The two loaders were on the ground, stone needles punched through them at chest height, the blood so dark in the bad light it looked black.

Fish Ball stared at them for one full second. Then he found his lungs and screamed for the field medics, and the battlefield screamed back at him with artillery, and nothing else answered.

The mortars opened up.

Hundreds of rounds arced up and dropped in a curtain between four hundred and eight hundred meters, and for one strobe-lit instant the fires of their detonation illuminated everything: the front slope of the demon advance, the smeared plates of his machine gun, and the blood that was not black after all but very, very red.

Sylvie had been waiting for exactly that light.

The Blackriver had degraded the Spider Demons’ long-range strikes, had chewed through their front ranks, but had not stopped them. Every few minutes another stone pillar fell across the defensive line. Agatha, Shavi, and Molly were cycling across the perimeter as fast as they could move; two hundred meters of line was too long for three witches to seal. All Sylvie could do between fire direction calls was read off which positions needed help and in what order.

Then Maggie’s voice crackled through the sigil, bright and guileless as always.

“This is the artillery, coo! The Taquila Witches have cleared all infiltrators from the encampment, coo. Commander Van’er says he is ready to fire and requests your direction, coo!”

Sylvie’s fist closed hard.

“Stay on the sigil. Direct relay is faster than the phone lines.”

“Noted, coo.”

The four Longsong Cannons were elevating when the retreat signal came — a single piercing whistle that cut through every other sound on the battlefield. The demon army ebbed. It did not route, did not collapse; it simply withdrew, clean and deliberate, pulling back through the dark the way a tide pulls back from rock, leaving only the stranded dead at the forward edge.

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