Rewrite That Witch
CH200 · Rewrite
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Chapter 200: Hunters and Prey

Roland watched from the platform and thought about the mathematics of it.

The militia had entered the bunker formation’s crossfire zone and the front half had been dying since then, but the back half had not known it — could not know it, had been running on compounds that suppressed the sensory updates that would have communicated something bad is ahead. The column had compressed into itself as the front slowed and the back kept coming. By the time the canister shot went to work, the men at the center had been packed together in a way that made every round a multiple.

Echo had been the critical variable. Without her voice manipulation, Lehman’s knights might have maintained enough command authority to order a controlled rush — spaced groups, alternating waves, enough separation between them to reduce the canister’s effectiveness. Instead they had charged in a mob, fast and dense and concentrated exactly where Roland needed them concentrated.

He had given her a single instruction: keep them on the road. She had done it for nearly twenty minutes, working from inside the tree line, guiding fifteen hundred people with the borrowed voices of their own commanders.

He would not forget this.

Lightning, on her signal post in the tree line, had switched to the red flag while the infantry at the bunkers’ midpoint were still shooting. The cannons shifted, the angle of fire flattened, and the canister rounds reached their zone.

The mathematics of canister shot was different from solid ball. Each round was a container of iron pellets that spread on discharge — not aimed so much as directed — and at the ranges and densities now present on the road, it was closer to a systematic clearing than a firefight. Pellets traveled through multiple bodies. Nothing in the pill formulation addressed iron.

The mill of men at the bunkers’ forward line stopped advancing. One man stopped. Then three. Then ten. The fear was its own compound — not a drug but a biological fact — and it propagated faster backward through the column than the pill had propagated forward.

The rout came all at once. The way they had run toward Border Town, they now ran away from it: the same driving pace, the same expressionless faces, except now the faces were moving in the opposite direction. Men who could not get out of the road fast enough were knocked down and trampled by the men behind them.

Roland watched until the cannons switched back to solid shot and the road began to clear, and then he came down from the platform.

Levin had been in the trees when he spotted her.

A woman in white, moving with the militia’s flank, always twenty meters from the nearest group, always at the boundary of cover and open ground. Moving, not hiding — she had been guiding them to stay on the road, which meant she had to stay roughly parallel to the road, and that had made her trackable for anyone who was not themselves a pill-fed mob.

Twenty of Levin’s remaining men had gone into the tree line after her. He had come himself.

He understood within thirty seconds that she was doing something with her voice that did not require her mouth. The sound came from everywhere and from nowhere — left, right, behind him, in front of him — and the content kept shifting. His own voice, Duane’s voice, invented voices from inside the militia, calling for concentration and forward pressure. He could not locate her by sound. He could only track her by movement.

Then the woman in white appeared again.

White robe, silver-grey weapon in her hand — not a crossbow, but shaped like one, compact and gleaming. He had seen what it did to the back of Lehman’s head. He was not going to stand still and let it do the same to him.

“Take the pills and rush her when she shows!” he shouted.

He himself stepped back.

The men he had sent went for her. She fired three times in the time it took a man to cross thirty meters. Each shot produced a sound like a hard slap followed by silence, and each time she fired, someone stopped being a problem for anyone. The encirclement shredded. The survivors scattered.

She’s not the one I need, he reminded himself, breathing hard. The voice-witch is still out there.

He moved back through the trees, looking for the other one. The undergrowth was wrong — thick in unusual places, vines running low and tangled, the kind of growth that appeared in spring when something had been accelerating it. He tripped twice.

When he came out of the tree line, the militia was gone.

The road was silent in the specific way that roads are silent when they are covered with the dead. What had been fifteen hundred men was now a collection of things on the ground and a distant sound of running that was getting quieter with every second.

How? was his first thought. And then: it doesn’t matter. The only remaining calculation was survival.

He drew his sword, turned, and thrust it behind him in one motion — fastest draw he had ever made, the kind that the body makes when it knows the mind has no time left to contribute. His blade hit something and sent sparks flying and the force of it drove backward into his hand and up his arm until the sensation stopped at the elbow.

He looked at what was left of his arm. Red and white. Clean geometry, the kind of cut that didn’t require force, only precision. Like the bunkers. Like the road itself.

The woman in white looked at him from three meters away with an expression like someone evaluating a problem they have already solved.

He tried to back up. His feet found a vine.

She put her boot on his shoulder and pressed the barrel of her weapon to his forehead and he looked up at her face under the hood in the blue afternoon light and thought, with the last clear thought he had:

Beautiful.

The sound was very small from the inside.

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