Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1153: A Real Monster

Tower Station No. 9 had changed.

Agatha noticed it as the train pulled in — not the station itself, which was familiar, but the quality of attention in the faces around it. The soldiers and engineers who had been running the frontier for the past week were exhausted in the particular way that came from sustained alertness rather than hard labor. They had been watching for something and not seeing it, and that was its own form of fatigue.

Ferlin Eltek was at the platform. He administered the military salute with precision and made eye contact with each of the senior officers in a way that suggested he had things to report and had been organizing them.

“Welcome back,” he said. “Well done to the command team — the construction held through everything.”

“What’s in the red zone?” Iron Axe asked, already moving toward the map room.

Ferlin fell in alongside him. “Three kilometers from the ruin. The demons have been digging.”

Agatha stopped.

The map confirmed it: a zone three kilometers from Taquila marked in red, threaded with crude lines that resolved, when you looked at them correctly, into a trench network.

“They started six days ago,” Ferlin said. “Miss Sylvie spotted them first. They’re coming out of the Red Mist and digging — Mad Demons, mostly, working in pairs. Miss Lightning confirmed the layout.”

He unfolded a drawing on the table. The sketch was rough but sufficient: horizontal trenches connected by vertical shafts, the whole thing oriented toward the First Army’s encampment.

“They’re learning from us,” Agatha said.

It came out flat. She had not meant to say it aloud.

“They copy, but they adapt imperfectly,” Edith said, studying the drawing with her usual attention. “Look at the density of the vertical shafts. Too many for retreat — they wouldn’t need that many if they were planning to fall back through them.” She traced the pattern. “They’re approaching shafts. The horizontal lines are cover. The vertical lines are assault routes.”

“Pushing toward our lines,” Iron Axe agreed. He did not look pleased. He also did not look alarmed, which was the register he reserved for situations he expected to handle. “When they’re in the Longsong Cannons’ range, the Blackriver answers. These trenches won’t change anything — we just have to stop them before they close the distance.”

“What about the Magic Slayer?” Agatha asked.

The silence that followed was the kind that had a shape to it.

Ferlin’s expression had changed. Not fear — Ferlin had been at the front for months and she trusted that he understood what he was standing next to. Something else. The particular quietness of a soldier who had been near something he found genuinely hard to categorize.

“He came more than once,” Ferlin said. “The pattern was always the same. Anti-aircraft machine guns fired when he appeared, Devilbeasts joined the engagement, the encampment went into a controlled response.” He paused. “But each time — even when we hit him — when he came back, he was faster. More deliberate. The first encounter, one machine gun squad was enough to keep him at distance. By the fourth, we needed three.”

Iron Axe set his hands flat on the map table. “He’s learning too.”

“He is,” Ferlin said. “And last week, the morning after a particularly bad night, we broke one of his arms.” He stopped. “Three days later he appeared again. The arm was healed. Like it never happened.”

No one spoke.

“Senior Demons upgrade through combat,” Agatha said. She heard the flatness in her own voice and didn’t try to correct it. “It’s not myth. I’ve seen it over four hundred years. They survive injuries that would kill anything else, and the next time they’re stronger — better magic, better technique. The injuries themselves are what drive the advancement. We helped build the demon who’s currently holding Taquila by hurting him enough to force his upgrade and not hitting him hard enough to finish him.”

“He has a self-repair ability on top of the upgrade mechanism,” Edith said. It wasn’t a question.

“Very likely.” Agatha thought about Ferlin’s phrase: like it never happened. An arm was not a small injury. An arm broken under machine gun fire, healed in three days without apparent assistance — that required something beyond standard demon physiology. “He’s been specifically selected for this operation. Or he volunteered. Either way, he’s the most dangerous individual asset they’ve deployed against the railway in six months, and they’re using him as the critical piece in whatever’s coming.”

She looked at the map. At the red zone with its too-dense vertical trenches. At Taquila, half-visible in its own ruin, three kilometers beyond.

“If we let him escape this battle,” she said, “we will not like the version of him that comes back.”

Iron Axe nodded slowly. “Then he doesn’t escape.”

Ferlin looked between them. Something in his expression had resolved — the quietness replaced by something harder and steadier.

“He’s a real monster,” he said. “I know that now. But the plan you brought back — it’s designed for real monsters.”

“Yes,” Agatha said.

It was the most reassuring thing she could offer, so she offered it simply and let it stand.

The railway now reached to within twelve kilometers of Taquila’s edge. In the distance, visible from the lookout towers on clear days, the Giant Skeletons still stood inside the ruin like sentinels. The Red Mist churned between them. The new trenches were invisible from this distance but the Eye of Magic showed them — a network under the corrupted ground, patient and deliberate, growing closer by the day.

Agatha looked at the map for a long time after the others left the room.

They’re doing what we did, she thought. Adapting. Learning. Fighting harder when they’re losing.

It was not, she realized, comforting.

It was a reminder that the final battle would not be easy just because they had earned it.

She folded the map along its creases and set it back on the table.

That’s fine, she thought. We’ve had practice.

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