Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1162: The Last Struggle

The Mad Demons didn’t stop when the Spider Demons went down.

They came in on three sides and they came in waves, which was different from how they’d fought in open terrain — more coordinated, the mad-demon aggression organized by something directing them from above. Andrea could track Ursrook by the pattern of the attacks: when he moved, the pressure shifted. When he settled above a position, the demons massed against it.

She shot from Elena’s back, one arm hooked around Elena’s neck for balance, the bolt worked between teeth and left hand in the rhythm she’d practiced until it was automatic. She’d shot fourteen by her count. Possibly twelve. The painkiller was doing its work, which meant the feedback from her legs was abstracter than it should be, which meant she trusted her count less than she would have liked.

She wasn’t going to stop counting.

The second Senior Demon — the one that had come up from the underground passage behind Ursrook, lower-grade, built for durability over intelligence — had developed a particular habit: it used trees. Not as weapons exactly, but as obstruction, uprooting them and redirecting them into the God’s Punishment Witches’ firing lines, forcing them to clear the obstacle before reengaging. Every tree it toppled cost them three or four seconds. Over the course of the engagement, three or four seconds at a time added up to something that felt like being slowly buried.

Lightning and Maggie’s arrival had changed the arithmetic. The grenade launcher stripped Mad Demons from positions in seconds, and Maggie’s Devilbeast form absorbed fire that would have reached the witches and kept moving. The demon count dropped. The pressure dropped with it.

But not enough.

Ursrook had not committed to a killing blow yet, and Andrea could not work out why. He had the position. He had the numbers. He had the anti-magic field when he chose to use it. Every time the witches stabilized their line, he had the resources to break it again, and he hadn’t.

He’s accumulating something, she thought. He’s feeding on the combat. Don’t let him get what he needs.

She didn’t know how to stop him from getting it without disengaging entirely, and disengaging entirely meant abandoning Ashes.

She reloaded and fired and tried not to think about the state of her legs.

The Magic Slayer moved like a gap in the air.

Ashes had been fighting him for the better part of an hour and she had learned, in that time, what Ferlin had meant by real monster: not the power level, which was immense, but the adaptability. Every pattern she established, he noted. Every technique she repeated, he anticipated. He fought the way she imagined a creature that had survived multiple Battles of Divine Will would fight — not with strength alone, but with the particular intelligence of something that had catalogued every way a fight could go and remembered all of them.

She was faster than she had ever been. She knew it in her bones — literally, in the sensation of her own movement, the way her body arrived at a position before her conscious mind had fully decided to send it there. She could read the trajectory of a bone spear before it was thrown. She could intercept the second Senior Demon’s tree-swings at the apex of the arc rather than on the descent.

And she was not winning.

She was keeping them from winning. That was different.

If only I could be a little faster.

The thought ran in a loop she couldn’t stop. The whole battle would resolve differently if she had one more increment of speed, one more unit of force behind the blade. She was at the ceiling of what an Extraordinary could do, and the ceiling was insufficient, and she had been touching it for the entire engagement.

Phyllis had said, once: those who couldn’t successfully become Transcendents were all eventually killed by the demons.

She’d thought it was a warning.

She hadn’t thought it was a description of a present situation.

The moment came quickly.

Ursrook feinted — a body movement designed to look like a committed attack and peel Ashes out of position — and when she tracked the feint instead of the real intention, the second Senior Demon threw its tree and two of the God’s Punishment Witches dove to clear it, and in the gap the Mad Demons pushed through on the right, and Ursrook was past Ashes and moving at Elena and Andrea before the line could close.

Ashes saw it happen from four meters away and could not get there in time.

She watched it like watching a calculation resolve: Ursrook’s clawed hand coming down, Andrea raising the rifle, the rifle going sideways in two pieces under a knife-hand strike that didn’t slow.

The second blow came immediately.

Elena stepped into it.

The cut was deep. Ribs. Organs. The kind of wound that would have been immediately fatal for anyone not constructed the way the God’s Punishment Witches were constructed. Elena fell, but fell controlled, angling her body to stay between Ursrook and Andrea even on the way down.

Zoe had Ursrook at point-blank range before he completed the strike. She emptied the magazine into him. The shield shattered under sustained fire at that distance — nothing held against that — and the bullets went through. Blood. Multiple hits. He rolled back from the impact, backwards, through the air, and he was already healing before he stopped moving.

The black light ate the wounds from the inside.

“Monster,” Sylvie said. The word came out small and without inflection, which was worse than if she’d shouted it.

“I kill to improve,” Ursrook said, wiping his face with the back of his hand. The blood there was blue-black. “It’s impertinent to call that monstrous.” He reached out a hand behind him and accepted a gas tank from the second Senior Demon. “Your every wound nourishes me. All your spent energy feeds the next iteration. If you surrender now, I’ll grant you a painless death. That’s a real concession. You’ve earned it.”

“Go to hell,” Zoe said. She was reloading. Her hands were steady. “I’ll tear you to pieces. Every death and every time I come back — I’ll tear you to pieces. That’s my concession.”

Andrea couldn’t hear them properly.

Something had changed in the way sound was reaching her. She was aware that she was on the ground, that Elena was beside her, that the battle was continuing above them both. She was aware of her own hands, which had found Elena’s without her deciding to reach for them.

Elena coughed. There was blood on her teeth.

“Why,” Andrea said. It wasn’t a real question. She knew why. She’d been told, once, that the God’s Punishment Witches had volunteered for everything — the transformation, the army, all of it — and that what they wanted in return was the thing they’d been denied: the ability to choose the moment and the reason.

Elena had chosen.

“We’ve reached our limits,” Elena said. Her voice was fading but it was clear. “You haven’t. That gives me a good reason.” She found Andrea’s face with one hand. “Don’t be sad. I can’t feel it. I’m just—”

A pause.

“—a bit tired.”

Her breath became deep and slow. Her chest kept moving.

Andrea held her hand and looked up at the sky.

Dark clouds had been building for an hour, pulling in from the west. The ceiling had lowered until the canopy and the cloud-base were almost touching. In the overcast grey she saw, between two closing cloud banks, a flicker of something gold.

Then the world went dark.

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