Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1160: A Trap

“Margie!”

Ashes was already between Ursrook and the others, sword up, when the God’s Punishment Witches came out of the trees.

Grenades first — three of them, from different angles, overlapping arcs that left no clean dodge corridor. Ursrook went straight up, all the way through the burst radius, came down on the far side of the blast with his shield intact and a new sheen of blue light tightening around him. The bullets followed him all the way down and he moved through the tracking arcs the way he’d moved through the anti-aircraft guns: not by being fast enough to outrun them but by being exactly one adjustment ahead of each.

The God’s Punishment Witches reformed around the wounded.

“Are you all right?” Zoe reached Margie first, then scanned the others.

“Go,” Andrea said. “We have to go — ” She already had her bearings: south was blocked, the underground passages were south, Ursrook had positioned his force between them and the First Army’s line. “West. Into the Misty Forest. If we run south we’re going into whatever else he has waiting.”

“But the army—”

“The army can’t help us faster than we can die. West.” She looked at Zoe. “We have to move everyone.”

Zoe was already giving the signal.

Ursrook watched them start moving and confirmed his calculation.

The sniper had good tactical judgment. Better than he’d expected from someone who fought at range — the close-combat assessment was fast and correct. West was the right choice. It prolonged the engagement and gave their aerial support time to respond, but it was still the right choice from what they knew.

He adjusted his position above the clearing, keeping his shield active, letting the gun positions below track him without giving them a clean angle. He was expending power, but not faster than he was accumulating it. The battle was feeding him.

Below him, the Extraordinary fought with the quality of motion he’d observed from a distance over the previous six months: controlled, efficient, always positioned between the threat and the people she was protecting. She’d improved since the first encounter. He could feel the acceleration in her movements — magic power responding to the demands being placed on it, the way it always did in the practitioners who survived long enough.

“You’re quite fast, Extraordinary,” he said. Not conversationally. As an observation, the way a researcher noted a data point. “If you hadn’t tried to block that first strike, the smaller one could have died cleanly. You chose the more expensive outcome.”

Ashes didn’t answer. She redirected a bone spear into a tree and kept moving.

“The one that manages the magic vessel,” Ursrook continued. “Was she chosen specifically for this mission? Her ability is the extraction mechanism. Without her, they can’t load.” He glanced toward Margie, who was being carried between two of the God’s Punishment Witches, pale and laboring for breath. “You understand what her injury means.”

“I understand it just fine,” Ashes said.

“Then you also understand that my ground forces are moving to cut the western route. You have perhaps eight minutes before they close the forest.”

Sylvie heard this, and Andrea heard this, and Andrea watched the math resolve in front of her without finding a solution she liked.

He’s telling us, she thought. He’s telling us because he wants us to spend those eight minutes panicking instead of thinking.

She put that aside and thought instead.

The God’s Stone rifle was gone — too heavy to move fast, and Ashes had confirmed it was single-use. The personal weapons the God’s Punishment Witches carried were fully functional. Her own ability was depleted to near-empty from the shot. Elena and the others could fight; the question was how long they could fight a Senior Demon with a full shield while also holding off however many Mad Demons were moving through the underground passages toward the western approach.

One solution, which she named and then immediately discarded: she and Ashes could engage Ursrook directly while the others ran. She had no ability left. Ashes was at her limit. That solution ended in seconds.

Second solution: buy time. Ask questions. He was willing to talk.

She turned back to him.

“Something I don’t understand,” she said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of how steady it was. “If you knew the ambush location — if you were already underground when we arrived — why let us fire? You had us in position. You could have moved before the shot.”

Ursrook looked at her for a moment.

“I needed you to commit,” he said. “A team waiting for an opportunity is alert and variable. A team that believes it has won is—” He paused. Not for effect. Looking for a precise word. “Settled. The half-second after you believed the shot connected was the safest moment to announce myself.”

“You needed us not to scatter.”

“I needed Sylvie not to open the Eye of Magic until the right moment.”

Andrea thought about this. Then she thought about what would have happened if Sylvie had been scanning when the decoy fell — if she’d seen through the performance while there was still time to run.

“The Eye it sees,” she said, thinking aloud. “When it looks at an Eye Demon, it sees what the Eye Demon wants it to see.”

“Precisely.”

“So if Sylvie had looked—”

“She would have seen me still in Taquila. And you would have left.” He didn’t sound annoyed by this. He sounded interested. “Your plan was well-designed. One variable — the reflexive assumption that the Magic Eye sees truth rather than magic — was the entry point.” He tilted his head. “I’ve been building toward this since the forest engagement, when I first saw how the Eye was used. Six months of information.” A pause. “You weren’t the only thing I came for. But you were worth coming for.”

The Mad Demons arrived at the western tree-line.

Ashes moved without being told, redirecting the first spear volley, and the battle that had been a conversation became a fight.

Andrea pressed herself against a tree and reloaded on one hand while Elena shielded her body. Across the clearing, the God’s Punishment Witches were holding the demon line — holding it, not breaking it, which was a different thing.

She counted bullets. She counted witches. She counted demons.

She thought about what Ursrook had said: you weren’t the only thing I came for.

She still hadn’t figured out what the other thing was.

Then Ursrook raised his arm again, and the second set of thumps came from above, and she stopped having time to think about it.

“Anti-magic area!” she shouted.

The black field dropped around them like a curtain.

Elena grabbed her and ran.

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