Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1163: Transcendent

She was moving faster.

Ashes knew it the way you know a change in temperature: not by reasoning about it but by feeling it happen. The whole battlefield had slowed around her. Not changed — everything was still moving at the speed it had always moved — but she was moving faster than it, faster than she had ever moved, and the gap between her speed and the speed of everything else was increasing.

She could see the cracks in the bone spears before they hit, the exact trajectory of each projectile, the specific instant when the second Senior Demon chose its tree. She could read three moves ahead. She could cross the clearing in a time that was not quite enough to save everyone but was closer to enough than anything she’d had before.

The magic power was burning in every vein. She recognized the sensation: it was the same sensation she’d felt in the first encounter with the Magic Slayer, the brief window that had opened and then closed before she understood what it was. This time it hadn’t closed. This time it was widening.

This is what Phyllis meant, she thought. This is what upgrading feels like from the inside.

And she still could not beat him.

She could stop him from winning. She could redirect, deflect, intercept. She could hold the space between Ursrook and the rest of the team for long enough that Lightning and Maggie could extract them, if they moved now, if there was a direction left to move in. But she could not close the gap and end the fight. The Magic Slayer was above her. Not enormously — the distance between them was measurable in increments now rather than magnitudes — but above.

“Is this the fastest you can go?” Ursrook said. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “Your friends will die if this is all there is. Perhaps you’re planning to abandon them.”

She didn’t answer. She deflected a spear that would have hit Zoe and kept moving.

“Don’t listen,” Zoe said, loading on the move. “He’s trying to push you into rage. If you rage, he wins.”

“I know,” Ashes said.

She knew. She also knew that the tactical answer — hold the line, buy time, accept the incremental costs — was going to run out of time before the Seagull arrived. One more cost like Elena, and they were done.

If speed isn’t enough, it has to be power. And if power isn’t enough, it has to be something I haven’t been willing to reach for.

She remembered what Phyllis had said: what are you aiming to achieve exactly?

She had not been in a situation, then, where the question was immediate. It had seemed like philosophy. Now it seemed like instructions.

What are you aiming to achieve?

The answer was so simple it surprised her.

She wanted everyone to get out of this forest.

All of them. Margie with the spear wound and the labored breathing. Sylvie who had been utterly still since Ursrook named her. Andrea who was on the ground holding Elena’s hand and not moving anymore. Lightning who had come back when she could have gone. All of them.

She had one option left. She had known about it for a long time. She had filed it in the category of last resort and had not looked at it since, because looking at last resorts before you needed them was its own kind of distraction.

Sorry, Tilly.

The change was internal first.

She stopped holding the ceiling.

The magic power had been pressing against something she’d maintained without thinking about it — a limit, a boundary, the shape of what she was willing to be — and when she released it, the power didn’t flood in gradually. It arrived all at once, from everywhere, the surrounding magic of the battlefield and the forest and the storm building overhead, and it found the shape of her and exceeded it.

The pain was indescribable.

She described it anyway, to herself, in the interior where the words didn’t have to be said aloud: it was like the power rebound from every training session she’d ever had, compressed into a single moment, distributed across every surface. Her skin was burning. Her bones were resonating at a frequency that should have been impossible. The sword in her hand had gone from steel to light — or it looked that way, gold spreading from the grip to the tip until the blade was a line of something that was not quite fire.

The world slowed further. It nearly stopped.

She could see Ursrook’s surprise from across the clearing.

She swung.

The gold reached the sky before it reached him. It connected with the clouds that had been building for an hour and drew from them the way lightning drew from them — not through, but from, pulling the charge down through the blade and through her body and releasing it at the arc’s endpoint.

The forest lit white.

The sound came after.

Ursrook had less than a second.

He used it to generate the anti-magic field.

The field absorbed the edge of the strike — the outer radius of it, the distributed discharge — but the center hit through anyway. The golden light punched through the field the way light punched through fog: it didn’t go around, it went in. Half of the side where his Stone of Flight was embedded simply ceased to exist. He fell.

He did not hit the ground. He caught the air fifty meters down, in the burning that was his new body’s response to catastrophic damage, and he hung there and assessed.

Half a body.

The Stone of Flight: destroyed or suppressed, he couldn’t tell which.

The magic power remaining: enough.

He was not dead.

He was not dead because the anti-magic field had absorbed enough of the strike. He was not dead because the Extraordinary had just exceeded the limit of what an Extraordinary could do, and exceeding a limit destroyed the structure it had broken through. She was burning herself. She would not be able to do that again quickly.

She had opened the gate of the Realm of Mind.

He had felt it when the golden light touched the field — that specific resonance, that recognition. It was the same gate he had been working toward for years. She had reached it before him, without a Magic Stone, without a Battle Tower, without the entire accumulated infrastructure of demon advancement.

In a single battle.

He connected to his junior guard’s mind.

“You upgraded,” Tartarus said, before Ursrook could speak. The guard’s voice was thin, weakening, the connection degrading. “But you can’t finish it alone.”

“No,” Ursrook said.

“Then—” A long pause. Not hesitation. Consideration. “Is that all you need, sir? That’s—”

“I know,” Ursrook said. “I know what I’m asking.”

“It’s nothing,” Tartarus said. “I was going back to the Origin of Magic anyway. Let me make it worth something.” A breath. “Will we win, sir? Will we see the Heaven they promised?”

“We will,” Ursrook said. And because he was speaking to Tartarus for the last time, he said the name: “Tartarus.”

The guard’s eyes brightened. “Take me with you—” it murmured.

Then it drove its finger into its own skull.

Ashes had not recovered.

She was upright. That was what she had. The power rebound was stripping her from the inside in layers she couldn’t feel individually but could feel as a total, an accumulating absence. She could see her hands and confirm they were there. She could hold the sword. She could not, at this moment, summon the gold again. The gate was open but the corridor behind it was empty; she had spent everything in one strike.

So I’ll fight without it, she thought. This is still my sword. This is still me.

She watched Ursrook descend from the air with his new arm — thicker than his original, the absorbed skeleton’s musculature visible in the texture of it, two thorns jutting from the shoulder and elbow — and she adjusted her grip and she waited.

“I admire you,” he said. Not performing it. Stating it. “You exceeded the greatest witch in human history. You opened the gate. For a race that lives fewer than a hundred years—” He shook his head. “It’s genuinely impressive.”

He spread his hands. The black light was already rebuilding the shield around him.

“But the gate is open on both sides now. And I’ve been here longer.”

He lunged.

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