Rewrite That Witch
CH167 · Rewrite
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Chapter 167: Victory

They held it at the foot of the western wall, in the cleared ground where the training ranges had been set up.

The spectators — Roland, Iron Axe, Sir Pine, Brian, and the full assembly of the Witch Union — climbed to seats on the wall itself to keep clear of any stray rounds. Below them, the two fighters took their places on the flat ground, and between them, a fat pigeon sat on the grass and watched.

Carter had left his armor behind. He wore leather training clothes that moved with him, a holster at each hip carrying a revolver, and a knife across his back that Roland privately hoped he’d never need to draw. His face had the focused blankness of a man who had done nothing for six days but practice this specific action and was now performing it for real.

Ashes stood across from him in her black robe, her great sword slung from her back and still wrapped — until she reached back with one hand, unwound the cloth, and let the sword hang free. It absorbed the light rather than reflecting it, the dark iron surface showing the age of the weapon in its uneven texture, the pitting where rust had been neglected, the notched edge that said this sword had hit things harder than itself.

She looked at Carter’s weapons. Thought for a moment. Then drove the point of her sword into the ground and stood with her hands loose.

She’s read it right, Roland noted. She knows it’s a ranged weapon and she’s going to come in fast.

Echo amplified his voice to carry the rules — no movement before the bell, surrender always open, Nana standing by to heal. Both fighters confirmed.

The bell rang.

Ashes pulled the sword from the ground and swept the flat of it across the earth in one enormous horizontal arc, a motion that launched soil and grass and gravel in a spreading curtain between her and Carter.

Carter fired through it.

The shot was nearly instantaneous — he hadn’t flinched at the incoming dirt, had simply tracked her through the haze and pulled the trigger. A second shot before the sand screen had settled. No arrow visible, no bolt, just the sound and the flash and the smell of powder, and Ashes was already moving under the cover she’d created, closing the gap in the time it took the soil to fall.

She changed direction once, a sharp lateral cut that would have thrown off a crossbowman mid-reload. Carter pivoted and fired again. She was four or five meters out, sword held across her chest as a shield, driving straight for his center of mass.

The third shot hit the sword.

The sound was wrong — not the flat impact of steel on steel but a deeper crack, and black fragments sprayed sideways, and Ashes’s body kept moving forward but her momentum had changed. She hit Carter chest-to-chest and drove him backward in a short arc, and he went down hard, and she didn’t go down with him.

She was standing. Sword used as a crutch, point driven into the ground. Her robe had opened at her right side and what was beneath was not something Roland let himself look at for more than an instant.

She was standing on her feet with a section of her abdomen missing.

Still standing. He moved down from the wall.

Maggie reached Ashes first — arms around her legs, because the height difference didn’t allow anything higher — and Nana was already sprinting toward Carter.

When Roland reached Ashes, she turned her head. The effort of it was visible.

“I lost,” she said, and Roland started to say something, and she fell forward against his shoulder before he finished it.

He had watched the whole thing in four or five seconds of clock time that felt considerably longer.

The extraordinary’s initial move had been exactly correct — she had created an obscuring screen and used it instantly, reading the weapons as projectile-based before the duel began and deciding that her best chance was to deny him a clear sight line. Carter’s response had been equally right: he had not moved, had not flinched, had tracked through the disturbance and fired twice before the screen fell. That he had missed both times was not an error but a demonstration of what she was — moving faster through cover than most soldiers could move in open ground.

The third shot was what mattered. At four or five meters, straight-line approach, sword held as a forward shield: Roland had designed this scenario in his head a dozen times. A lead ball would have deflected, or transferred its momentum into the sword rather than through it. A 12-millimeter steel warhead at that range did not deflect. It hit the iron, and the iron was structurally unsound enough that the impact created fragments, and the fragments and the flattened warhead both passed through the damaged blade into her side.

She had still hit Carter hard enough to launch him several feet.

He filed that away. She had a gut wound visible to the eye and she still moved him. An extraordinary at peak capacity — unarmed, fully conscious, motivated — would be something else entirely.

He stood at the edge of the ground while Maggie tried to hold Ashes upright and thought: this is what the God’s Punishment Army is. But with the God’s Stone, they’d be indistinguishable from soldiers.

Then we make soldiers, he thought. We make enough of them, trained enough, armed enough.

He looked at the shape on the ground — the woman who had traveled from the Kingdom of Endless Winter as a child, who had spent years in a monastery and left it burning behind her, who had fought her way across two kingdoms and come here to warn people she thought were in danger — and found that he wanted her to wake up and stay.

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