Rewrite That Witch
CH128 · Rewrite
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Chapter 128: Pill Test

The rest of Wendy’s account took the shape of a question Roland couldn’t yet answer.

He listened to Nightingale’s relay the next morning — still in the office, before anyone else had arrived — and turned the word over when she finished: extraordinary. A witch who could fight through God’s Stones. Who had torn trained Judges apart with her bare hands. Who had cut through an iron sword with a weapon she’d picked up from the floor.

“A self-enforcing type,” he said. He pulled a classification sheet from his desk drawer and pushed it across to her. “I’ve been categorizing witch abilities by mechanism. A self-enforcer continuously channels magic into her own body — physical enhancement across every parameter. Most witches get a baseline improvement from using their powers, but the self-enforcing type specializes in it.”

“Scroll is self-enforcing?” Nightingale looked at the sheet with open skepticism.

“Her memory is perfect, her illusions are perfect, and she can maintain them indefinitely. She’s not enhancing her arms or her speed — she’s enhancing her cognitive and sensory systems. That’s still the same category.” He took the sheet back. “The important point is the God’s Stone resistance. A self-enforcer operating at full output may simply be generating more energy than the Stone can absorb. Or the enhancement is at a level that makes the Stone’s interference irrelevant.” He paused. “Either way, the Church has known about this class for as long as they’ve been hunting witches. Which means they’ve been dealing with it. Somehow.”

He put the classification sheet away and picked up the folded paper with the two pills.

“We test these today.”

The test site was on the flat ground outside the western wall, chosen for sight lines and distance from anything flammable. Roland positioned four First Army riflemen at the cardinal points of the perimeter before anyone else arrived. Anna stood at the wall with a prepared green fire barrier — a closed ring, maintainable at range. Nana was beside her.

Carter had requested a proper duel. Roland had refused. The prisoner — convicted of murder and robbery, awaiting execution — had agreed to participate in exchange for five gold royals delivered to his family. He’d hesitated about three seconds before agreeing.

Roland had not given him iron weapons. He had not given him armor. He wanted data on the pills’ raw output, not the output of a trained soldier in full kit.

The prisoner swallowed both pills, and the transformation was fast and visible.

The veins along his forearms and neck went blue, surfacing through the skin like something pressurized from inside. His skin flushed deep red. His breathing accelerated and then steadied at a higher baseline, the way a bellows sounds when it reaches its working temperature. He picked up the wooden training sword and stood for a moment with an expression of concentrated surprise, as if hearing a sound he hadn’t expected.

Then he moved.

Carter stepped aside and delivered a lateral cut — a controlled test, calibrated to be survivable but injurious. The blade opened a wound across the prisoner’s chest that went deep enough to nick bone. Blood came immediately, in volume. In any normal subject, that wound would end the fight inside thirty seconds: shock, loss of motor control, involuntary retreat.

The prisoner turned back toward Carter.

He swung the wooden sword in a high arc. Carter parried on instinct; the impact drove him two steps back and the wooden sword shattered against iron. He shook out his sword hand with an expression that was the closest thing to surprise Roland had ever seen on him.

“Another weapon,” Carter said.

The prisoner didn’t take the offered replacement. He turned and ran.

Not a disorganized retreat — something more like a decision, executed at a speed that had no business existing in a man with a four-inch chest wound. He crossed the test perimeter before Carter had finished the sentence and hit the nearest rifleman shoulder-first, not breaking stride. The soldier went airborne. The other three fired. At least two shots landed — Roland could see the impacts, could see the stumble — and the prisoner kept running, already forty meters from the line.

Then he stopped.

He looked down at his abdomen with an expression Roland recognized from the battlefield, the particular moment when a person understands something has changed in their body and tries to locate it. His hands moved toward the source. Below his hands, a horizontal cut had opened his abdominal cavity, and something was coming out of it.

He turned slowly.

Nightingale stood behind him in white, her silver dagger in her hand.

He looked at her. He looked at the dagger. He sat down in the grass.

Nana reached the injured rifleman first — a broken collarbone, two cracked ribs. She healed him with the focused efficiency she now brought to everything, no visible emotion until the work was done and then a small tight exhale. Roland watched her and made a note to check on her later.

Carter was already at the body. At Roland’s direction, he extracted the bullets: half a finger deep, lead fractured on impact. The wounds were the same as they would have been in any ordinary subject. The pills enhanced output — they didn’t change what a bullet did on arrival.

“Your assessment,” Roland said.

Carter looked at the ground near the body rather than at the body. “He was stronger and faster than any untrained man has any right to be. He didn’t train, so he didn’t know how to use what he had — I could read him. Against a knight who knew what he was doing, in equal armor—” He stopped. “I don’t know. It would depend on the knight.”

“Against King’s Guard?”

“With that kind of speed and that pain threshold—” Carter shook his head slowly. “I can’t say I’d win that fight.”

Roland crouched beside the body.

The skin on the prisoner’s hands and forearms had gone from deep red to ash-grey during the fifteen minutes since his death. He pressed his finger against the forearm. Not solid — hollow, the way dried mud becomes hollow. He made a small cut with his belt knife. The subcutaneous fat had liquefied. Beneath it, the muscle had atrophied to nothing, as though consumed from inside.

“Nightingale.”

She crouched beside him. She didn’t need the question.

“The same as someone who swallowed a God’s Stone,” she said. “The same kind of nothingness. Slower, but the same process.” She looked up at him. “The pills are made from the same material.”

Roland stood.

So the God’s Stone doesn’t just block magic, he thought. It consumes. It converts. And if you can control the rate of conversion and direct the output—

He wrapped that thought carefully and put it away. He didn’t have enough information yet to do anything useful with it. What he had was this: the pills worked, the pills destroyed the user over time, and the Church was willing to offer them to him at cost and without apparent concern for what happened to the people who took them.

Because the people who take them aren’t the point, he thought. The war they fight is the point.

He picked up the folded paper that had held the pills. He put it back in his pocket, empty now. He looked at the riflemen forming back up, at Nana helping the injured soldier walk, at Carter cleaning his sword.

“Add mercury fulminate to the alchemy research list,” he said to no one in particular. “And breech-loading rifle mechanisms. I want experimental work started this week.”

That evening he taught Anna and Scroll primary physics until the third candle was burning low.

Nightingale was on the sofa. She had been on the sofa since approximately the second law of thermodynamics, and she was making a sound that was peaceful and entirely undignified.

Roland took his coat off his chair and draped it over her. She didn’t move.

He led Anna and Scroll out of the office into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind them, and let himself smile briefly in the dark.

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