Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1228: God’s Enmity

At the entrance to the Prism City.

Every lamp on the square burned at full brightness. The roar of machines filled the air and did not stop. The rescue operation had run for nearly sixteen hours, and the Defender Rock stood in the temporary headquarters tent with a face like quarried stone, waiting for news.

People said nothing could unsettle him. They were wrong, and this was the proof. Lan’s death had struck him like a blow he hadn’t seen coming, and what ate at him most was that he had not been there to fight alongside her. But grief was a luxury the situation would not allow. What the situation required was information about the bottom level — about what was still happening down there.

After Exit 04 fell under attack, Exits 01 and 05 were surrounded as well. The teams there had learned from Lan’s fate and cleared the Fallen Evils at a lower cost, but the casualty count was still staggering. Every single attacker had been transformed from a staff member stationed at the lower floors. The dead numbered three hundred and twenty — nearly the entire bottom-level complement on duty that day.

At this rate, the Fallen Evils would hold the entire lower building before morning.

Rock could not make sense of why those people had merged with fallen cores so quickly. The Prism City ran the most advanced emergency systems in existence. Even completely isolated from above, the lower floors could sustain themselves for a meaningful stretch of time. Every staff member down there understood the Association did not abandon its own. The exits had been clear. They had only to wait.

But Rock had no time to untangle the why. What gnawed at him was the central hub — more than three thousand fallen cores stored at the building’s deepest level. If those cores reached the open world, three hundred Fallen Evils would become a modest beginning.

“Mr. Rock.” A man in a suit stepped into the tent and bent close.

The new problem landed on him like another stone. Two touring groups of martialists from Cargarde Peninsula were inside the Prism City when the Erosion expanded. The floor nearest to the hollow had given way and dragged them down. Their survival was unlikely.

“What do we do?” the suit man murmured. “Some of them are celebrated names from Cargarde. If we mishandle this, it could become a diplomatic incident.”

“Find them. Save whoever we can. That’s what we do.” Rock’s voice was flat. “What else would we do?”

“But the Peninsula’s Defender may not defer to your authority—”

A pause. “Understood. Keep this quiet for now. I’ll ask the Sky City director to assist.” He watched the suit man leave, then turned to the liaison officer who had been waiting at his elbow.

“Exit 01 has broken through! They’ve opened a passage and are going down!”

“Put it on the main screen.”

Static crackled, then resolved into footage from a head-mounted camera. The lighting in the shaft was surprisingly functional — emergency generators still running, which meant the elevator still worked. That would save the team considerable time. Nobody in the tent cheered.

Every eye had fixed on something in the image.

A red patch, irregular at its edges, embedded in the concrete as though it had always been there — an asymmetric shape that looked almost like art if you didn’t know what it was. Rock knew. Anything the Erosion touched was consumed: matter, Force of Nature, all of it. That red mark was the seam where the Prism City had been cut in two.

“Forget the headquarters level,” Rock said. “Go to the bottom. Confirm the central hub is intact.”

The rescue team descended. No Fallen Evils met them on the way down. Rock saw almost no signs of struggle in the footage. The lower building was silent, perfectly ordered, as though everyone had simply stood up from their desks one morning and walked away.

When the team reached the central hub, the temporary headquarters went quiet.

Another Defender: Furious Flames. Slashed in two at the waist, his upper body pinned against the steel gate — four inches of reinforced metal — his clothes reduced entirely to ash. In the gate’s center, a rough hole punched through by extreme heat, edges still fused and glassy.

Furious Flames had tried to stop what came through. He had failed.

This was not the work of Fallen Evils.

The team forced the gate. The hub was empty. Every core, gone.

Silence in the tent. People stared at the screen with the particular stillness of a group that has just understood something they were not prepared to understand.

Rock’s fist tightened. The staff at the bottom level would not have emptied the hub without cause. He said, with the kind of quiet that commands a room: “Get me the surveillance footage. I want to see exactly what did this.”

The words broke the trance. The contingency power had been running since the breach; the surveillance system had continued recording. Technical support pulled the backup hardware and pushed the footage to the main screen.

The moment the Erosion had expanded, several masses of something like clotted blood had escaped from the red hollow and hit the floor. They writhed. They took shape. Human shapes, loosely speaking — one of them had the ability to melt through any surface it touched, and it immediately drilled downward through floor after floor to reach the bottom level. Another was worse: it moved among the lower-floor personnel like a puppeteer working with new strings, driving martialists and staff alike into the fallen cores, converting them into something that shambled and obeyed.

Within half an hour the bottom level was gone. The surviving personnel — dazed, no longer choosing — merged with cores and became their attackers’ instruments. After that, the monsters devoured the remaining cores wholesale, burned through the hub’s outer wall, and vanished from the camera’s range.

Rock had witnessed considerable violence in his years. He had never seen anything like this.

He thought of the last joint mission — the survivors speaking of a monster born from a man-made Erosion. He had believed, until now, that the Erosion simply consumed. A force like weather: impersonal, indifferent. But what he had just watched was not indifferent. It moved with intention. It selected targets. It weaponized the people it didn’t destroy outright.

The Erosion had changed. Or it had always been more than they thought, and they were only now meeting its true character.

What Rock felt from the footage — from the systematic dismantling of the hub, the precise conversion of the lower-floor personnel, the two creatures emerging directly from the hollow like soldiers from a gate — was not accident.

It was enmity. Specific, directed, relentless.

But he had stood over worse situations and found a way forward, and he would find one here. What mattered now was morale. Fear was contagious and it would spread faster than anything those creatures could deploy if he let it.

Rock straightened and let his voice fill the tent.

“Everyone — as you’ve just seen, this was not an accident. The Erosion is invading this city.” He let that land, then continued before the shock could take hold. “I know how that sounds. It’s the truth. This is a war. They want this world. I’m contacting every Martialist Association today, and together we will find a way to destroy these enemies.”

He paused. One beat.

“As my student Lan said: the Battle of Divine Will has begun.”

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