Rewrite That Witch
CH1416 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1416: Trapped in a Dangerous Situation

The world turned and turned and came to rest on its side.

Metal shrieked through the whole length of it — the groan of carriages bending against each other, the furnace-rush of escaping steam, Hank screaming somewhere above him and then below him and then silent. The moment stretched far past its natural length, the way bad moments always did, measuring itself in how many handrails you’d grabbed and how many you’d missed. Then the carriage stopped, and Charms was lying on a window pane, looking up at the far wall.

He took stock. Hands — moving. Feet — responding. Nothing grinding or detached. The best possible outcome from a derailment was simply being alive, and for the moment he was alive, and alive meant he had work to do.

“Hey — you all right?” He pushed through the smoke and steam, following Hank’s sounds to their source.

“I think so.” Hank groaned, testing his limbs against the floor. “Heavens, what happened—”

“Demonic beasts broke the track. We need to move.” Charms got a hand under his companion’s shoulder and pulled. “I don’t know what city you’re from, but I’ll tell you this: in Neverwinter, heaven doesn’t protect you. The King does, and so does this flintlock. Stay with me.”

He hauled himself out through the window above and got his first look at the full wreck. The carriages lay across the ground in a broken diagonal — off-track, overturned, but none badly crushed. The speed reduction before impact had saved the shells of them. All along the line, survivors were already emerging: windows pushed open from inside, hands gripping sills, people dropping to the ground and helping each other up. Some of the militiamen were already organizing.

A gunshot rang out — clear, distinct, close.

Dusk.

Charms turned to Hank. “You’re leading everyone west. Get them all clear of the carriages and run for the tree line — if they reach the Misty Forest, they can call for Ms. Leaf’s help. Go.”

“I — yes. I’ve got it.”

He didn’t wait to see the nod before he was moving, running along the tops of the overturned carriages toward the rearmost section. When he reached the last carriage, he found four militiamen holding off a pack of wolf-type demonic beasts — two wolves already down, three more coming over the carriage roof in their place. Charms shot from ten meters. He had never fired against a living enemy before this day. The muscle memory from training took over cleanly and left no room for the consideration of what it was he was doing, which was, he thought dimly, probably the design of it.

The last wolf dropped.

He had drawn breath to ask about the Witches when the ground hit him.

Not the carriage — the ground itself. A tremor, rolling and deep, that sent empty bullet casings sliding off the metal in a cascade of small rings. It lasted for two long seconds and then the surface of the plain broke open — dirt and stone erupting outward as something vast forced its way through from below.

The mouth was the first thing. Then the body: a worm of improbable scale, its hide ridged and slick, its upper body rearing above the level of the overturned carriages. The militiamen began firing immediately; blood spattered from the impacts, but the wounds were points on a surface too large to matter.

The creature’s skin began to swell. Beneath the surface, bright green channels traced where the veins ran, close enough to see throbbing. Then, from somewhere deep inside, came a sound of wet, muscular movement — and the worm began to expel things.

Demonic beast hybrids, sheeted in mucus, landed around them and separated and shook themselves out. Combined forms. Charms counted at least six species in the mix of what was emerging, combinations that had no natural precedent. If they were allowed to scatter and flank, the humans would fold within minutes.

“Open fire! Don’t let them spread!”

The militiamen rallied. The carriages became cover. Bullets tracked the creatures as they moved and cut several down before they could establish position. But the worm was still contracting, still working at something larger inside.

The final hybrid tore out through the worm’s mouth in a spray of blood and split tissue — not born but forced, a pair of long sharp tusks lacerating the opening as they came through. Four legs and two pairs of arms, thick fur like layered armor, tusks that could level a wall. Charms knew the description from his father’s accounts, had filed it alongside the things he hoped he would never personally encounter.

The Fearful Beast of Hell.

Ordinary firearms could not stop it. Every engagement that had ended well involved specialized equipment or Witch intervention — and he had neither. The beast’s tusks found the edge of the nearest carriage on its first charge and buried themselves deep into the metal, which was the only thing that gave the humans a second to breathe. Two militiamen who hadn’t moved fast enough were swept under the carriage as it slid, and then they were simply gone, no scream, no time.

The men who remained fired everything they had. The beast’s hide deflected it. It was irritated, nothing more.

Then a slender figure broke from the side of the wreck and ran directly toward it.

Every muzzle swung that way. Every finger came off every trigger.

“It’s dangerous — get back!”

“Balshan!”

She did not slow. She twisted as she reached the creature, dropping below its eyeline, rolling into the shadow of its belly. Charms watched her hand reach up and make contact with the thick fur.

The decay was immediate and visible — moving outward from her palm, the fur going gray and translucent at the edges, the deep brown darkening to something sick and hollow. The Fearful Beast of Hell threw its head back and screamed.

And then every other demonic beast in the vicinity received the sound of that scream and understood, in whatever way they understood anything, that there was a threat beneath that creature that had to be destroyed. They converged.

Balshan was exposed. Too close to the beast for the militiamen to fire safely, too close to the ground for any real defense against the wolf-types and the avian hybrids now closing in on her. She knew it. She did not look up. Her attention stayed fixed on the Fearful Beast of Hell, spreading the decay at whatever pace her magic allowed, trading her own safety for the square footage of corrupted fur.

Damn it. No other choice.

Charms gritted his teeth and ran.

It was strange — the cognitive wrongness of it, running toward the thing every instinct in him was organized to flee. But the thinking was simple enough: the closer he got, the narrower the angle between his rifle and her body, the safer the shot. He didn’t have the luxury of distance.

A bear-type hybrid lunged. He shot it through the open mouth mid-lunge, did not watch it fall, kept running.

When he reached her position, the work was close and fast and brutal. The Van’er rifle’s capacity was the margin — no reloading between shots, no pause that would have given any of the beasts the half-second they needed. He took bites. He was hit in the leg by something clawed and hit in the shoulder by something heavier, and both times he put his body between the contact and Balshan, because that was the logic of the position he’d chosen, and he did not revisit it.

The decay spread. The fur went from armor to paper. The creature’s internal architecture, no longer supported, began to fail — and then it staggered, and its legs gave out in sequence, and it toppled sideways. What came out of the first point of failure smelled like something reclaimed from a long-standing sewer: the internal organs had already been composting from the inside, turned white and structureless. The carcass hit the ground and did not move.

The remaining beasts scattered.

Charms caught Balshan as her legs went.

She was a wreck. Wounds tracked across her whole body, and her legs — the parts that had been exposed longest to the incoming bites — were something he did not look at directly for more than a second. Bone showed. The flesh around it was not organized in the way flesh was supposed to be organized.

He held her upright and said nothing useful.

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