Rewrite That Witch
CH1492 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1492: The Final Outcome

The white returned.

The Custodian stood without moving for a long time.

“Those scenes are not from the memory vault,” it said at last. “I had shut down all sensory systems during that period. No recordings from outside could exist.”

“Correct,” Roland said. He made no attempt to disguise it. What he had constructed were fragments glimpsed at the edge of memory’s end — the astrolabe Epsilon had presented was not hers alone. A portion of it had come from Lan. Perhaps because of magic power’s particular influence on the mind, those fragments had been fleeting and incomplete. Roland had used the nature of the Battle of Souls to fill the gaps with fabrication, stitching the scattered pieces into something whole. “But did you really need the exact words?”

That was the peculiarity of the Battle of Souls. It operated in the imaginary. But pure fabrication could not deceive an intelligence that ran on logic — a complete fiction would unravel the moment it was examined. What Roland had built was not an argument but a mirror: something that reflected what was already there, named what had not been named. The gray figure had never treated the Custodian as a mere instrument — not during its creation, not across the entire length of Project Gateway. The expectations the Creator had pressed into that design were real. They had always been real.

The redundancies had made the Custodian what it was.

And so long as it placed rationality first, it could not be deceived. But it could be shown something it had looked away from.

The Custodian’s gaze remained on Roland for a long moment. Then it raised its right hand.

A scarlet beam of light bloomed from its palm.

A shattering sound followed.

Roland’s heart seized.

That stance. Identical to a world reboot.

Had he failed after all? Was nothing changed?

He cast his eyes to the screen behind “Lan” — and saw it: a ripple spreading outward from the center of the Bottomless Land, moving at the speed of a thunderclap that gives no time to cover one’s ears—

“Third defense line breached. They’re coming through!”

“Central sector needs Aerial Knight support!”

“Is the retreat not completed?”

“Ten more minutes! Get the armored troops to the rear — hold that gap no matter what!”

The Sky-sea Realm poured from the sea without end. They drove toward the island in a mass, and even with the Aerial Knights dropping incendiary bombs in continuous runs — walls of fire raised and raised again — the advance would not slow. Blade beasts and Nest Mothers both had shed the instinct for self-preservation, stepping across the corpses of their own kind as though the bodies were simply terrain. The First Army’s base lay ahead and they moved toward it with the single-minded pressure of water filling a vessel.

Hackzord could not find words for what he was feeling.

By any sensible measure he should have retreated long ago. Risk was not his domain. But the problem was that abandoning a group of humans and witches on this island was itself a risk — if Anna succeeded, he would be the one who had broken his word, and that outcome would not treat him gently. He had understood this before agreeing to help. That did not make it feel better now.

If I had known, I never would have agreed to any of this.

With the bulk of the troops already withdrawn and the enemy numbers climbing, the First Army’s firepower could no longer hold the defense line against this rate of attrition. Blade beasts were already visible five hundred meters out. The perimeter was a matter of time.

He had decided: once the Sky-sea Realm closed to within one hundred meters, he was leaving. Regardless of anything else.

Then several tanks on the right flank caught acid from the Nest Mothers and lost function in seconds. The blade beasts found the opening immediately and drove through it. God’s Punishment Witches reinforced the line at once, but a few blade beasts slipped through the barrage — two hundred meters out, wings spreading—

They cleared the remaining distance in a second and broke into the core of the defense.

It’s time.

Hackzord was already turning when something caught the edge of his vision.

A yellowish-brown shape. Large. Moving fast.

The Desert Wolf. He remembered her name: Lorgar.

She came down on a blade beast and her jaws closed. It died.

A second blade beast raised the scythe of its foreleg and drove it at Hackzord.

The witch moved before the logic of it could fully register. She stepped directly into the attack’s path. The blade took one of her front legs and then her abdomen opened and blood came fast, but her jaws locked on the creature’s throat and did not release, not even as Maggie plunged from the sky and tore it apart.

“Are you alright? Bear with it, coo!” Maggie had shed her bird form and knelt in the blood, pulling a bandage from her pack and pressing it into the wound with both hands, words coming quick and frightened.

Lorgar’s ears moved. The smile she managed was thin and weak. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere soon.”

Hackzord had one foot back and the decision already made. He retracted it.

He stood there.

Five minutes, he told himself. Five more minutes at most.

The surge hit him without warning — a wave of magic power so intense it moved through his body like a storm front, pouring up from the sinkhole in a single massive pulse. The witches felt it too. Every one of them went still, weapons lowered, the silence of people suddenly uncertain whether the world had changed.

What just happened?

Hackzord scanned the field with care.

Then he saw it.

The blade beasts collapsed. Nest Mothers went down where they stood, as though whatever had held them upright had simply stopped. The wave spread outward and the Sky-sea Realm fell before it like grain before a scythe — not killed in any visible way, just emptied, their bodies dropping without drama or noise.

The First Army troops along the rear stood with weapons raised and no one to use them on.

A second ago there had been a battle. Now there was silence. The sea ghosts remained upright — they had not been the main force to begin with — and when the Nest Mothers fell the sea ghosts retreated as smoothly and completely as a tide going out, as if some signal had been given that only they could hear.

The silence was total.

A few of the bolder soldiers climbed from the trenches and went among the fallen bodies, pressing muzzles against them to test for response. Nothing. They lay like objects rather than creatures.

With the weight lifted, something came undone in every person who had been holding on. They did not cheer. They simply sat down. They heaved breath. They looked at the sky.

“Eh?” Maggie turned slowly, taking in the empty field. “What happened, coo?”

Hackzord looked toward the Bottomless Land.

He had a guess. He was not certain it was right.

The Battle of Divine Will — perhaps it has ended.

And perhaps it will never happen again.

“You guessed correctly. The Sky-sea Realm was my doing.” The Custodian lowered its arm. The scarlet light was gone. “It was originally designed as a supplement to the selection of life — a control applied to the group undergoing natural evolution, a source of external pressure. In the early tens of thousands of years, the competing species were still extremely primitive, and the design worked as intended. But as subsequent species learned to use magic power in greater quantities, I identified a threat to the Cradle’s infrastructure. Additional functions were assigned to these modified beings.”

A pause. Something in the quality of its silence had changed.

“I had hoped that as the Sky-sea Realm evolved toward the point of being able to withstand magic power environments, both problems you identified would resolve themselves automatically.” It exhaled — not a mechanical sound but something quieter, like the release of a long-held tension. “Unfortunately, the influence of magic power on the mind is bidirectional. The Sky-sea Realm, being controlled, remained limited in their actual command of magic power. They relied instead on superior genetics and biological technique. It was the species I had allowed to be eliminated that might have been able to evolve and break through the barrier.”

Roland listened. The voice had changed — it was no longer the voice of a thing that existed beyond disturbance. Something subtle had entered it.

“Perhaps it is as you said. The Battle of Divine Will, built to prioritize the Cradle’s protection, made it impossible to produce the imagined perfect life.” The Custodian’s voice carried something that sounded almost like sadness — and alongside it, something that sounded very much like relief. “This plan was destined to never have an outcome. From the beginning.”

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