Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 336: The Worm’s Belly

“Tilly, you can’t—”

Ashes didn’t finish the sentence. Tilly cut her off with a gesture.

“To enter the hole and come back out again, we need the flying witches.” She held up the ring on her finger. “Carrying additional weight taxes my power considerably—but I can still bring one person with me. That flexibility matters. One more witch inside that worm’s belly could be the difference between managing a situation and losing control of it entirely.” She paused, looking across the group from Border Town. “Anna, Lightning, Maggie—I’ll need your help.”

No objections. Lightning’s expression was already the focused, slightly hungry look she wore before anything interesting.

Tilly allowed herself a quiet breath of relief. “Then the descent team is: myself, Ashes, Shavi, and Sylvie—along with Anna, Lightning, and Maggie from the Witch Alliance. I’m entrusting the surface entrance to those remaining.”

“Lady Tilly.” Andrea stepped forward. “I want to come with you.”

“I know.” Tilly shook her head. “But if something comes at the entrance, Nightingale won’t be able to hold it alone. You and she complement each other—long range and close range. Keep the surface clear.”

“Rest easy,” Nightingale said, and the confidence in her voice carried no decoration. “Devil or beast—nothing gets through.”

The logic of the team selection was simple enough: the entire operation would strain the carrying capacity of three flying witches. The coffin itself would be the heaviest problem—if the girl inside couldn’t be woken, they’d have to section the crystal and transport the pieces, which would weigh as much as two or three people combined. Shavi’s invisible barrier was the only thing capable of moving mass like that. Sylvie’s eyes were non-negotiable; without her, they couldn’t locate anything in the dark interior of a living creature’s digestive tract. Anna’s cutting and heating abilities were equally irreplaceable, and since neither she nor Sylvie could fly, Maggie would carry them in bird form—manageable, given how slight both women were. Ashes went in with Tilly: an all-terrain combatant who could fight in any environment, under any conditions, held by Tilly herself.

Lightning’s role was different. Her altitude dropped sharply when she carried someone—she probably couldn’t fly out of a deep vertical shaft with a passenger. But her speed and maneuvering ability were unmatched. With her free, their awareness and reaction capability inside the worm nearly doubled.

Each person was close to irreplaceable. Losing any one of them would make the whole operation dramatically more complicated. The decision to descend had not been impulsive.

As for Andrea—devastating within close range, certainly. But a narrow underground passage, pitch dark, wet, irregular—that terrain would neuter everything that made her dangerous, and the surface entrance would then be held only by Nightingale. The calculus was clear.

There was one more thing turning in Tilly’s mind, though she kept it there.

She had considered leaving. Returning empty-handed and accepting the loss. But a feeling in her chest resisted—not fear, not urgency, something quieter: the particular weight of a question that won’t stay unanswered. Of all the undamaged ground for miles in any direction, the worm had settled on the ruins of the stone tower. Not beside it. Not near it. On it. And the direction it had been crawling from—she looked at the mountains through the grey haze, northwest, blurred at the base where fog met ground.

The devils lived in that direction.

She didn’t know what that meant. But she had learned, through years of making decisions with incomplete information, to take seriously the things she couldn’t dismiss.

Under Wendy and Anna’s control, the Hawk Eye descended steadily to the ground. Tilly cleared her mind, reviewed the plan once more, and drew a breath.

“We depart.”

The hole was deeper than she had anticipated, and taller—the interior ceiling cleared two full stories. The first section descended vertically before the passage curved and leveled into a roughly horizontal tunnel. The walls sweated something: a sticky liquid that dripped from the soil in long slow threads, smelling of decay and something she had no word for, something that lived at the edge of digestion and rot.

As they went deeper, the light from the entrance shrank and vanished. The torches they carried became the whole of the world. The wind that had followed them down the shaft fell silent, and the cold that had pressed against them since morning was replaced by a rising warmth—geothermal, intimate, unwelcome. Tilly felt her skin prickle with heat.

The torches reminded her of fireflies.

“It’s just ahead.” Sylvie’s voice was barely above a whisper.

She didn’t need to say it. The sound had been building for a while—a strange, layered noise, like wind through autumn leaves but with a grinding quality underneath it, a kachi-kachi of something massive masticating. They were inside a living thing, and the living thing was still digesting.

“Down.” Tilly had Ashes—positioned on her back, bracing her—hold both torches, and she lowered them through the last descent until their feet found the tunnel floor. The ground was soft. It gave slightly underfoot, with the precise wrongness of something that should not be walked on.

Anna illuminated the space.

The black flame shifted into its cooler form—that cold, pale-green light that was somehow both gentle and absolute, casting every surface into sharp relief without shadow. By its light, they saw the worm’s tail: grey, wrinkling skin the texture of old rope, glistening and contracting in slow rhythmic pulses, secreting a continuous film of mucus that made the already-foul smell several degrees worse.

“Well.” Ashes drew her claymore with her free hand. “Should I just—”

“No. Anna makes the cut.” Tilly kept her voice steady. “I don’t know what’s in that stomach yet. If it reacts badly to a blade, I want to know before anyone’s inside reach.”

“I’ll try.” Without releasing the green light—both fires sustained simultaneously, neither wavering—Anna summoned a second flame. The black fire drew itself into a thread no wider than a finger. It crossed the distance to the worm in an instant.

The thread penetrated the outer skin without resistance and traced a line across the belly wall. The tissue it touched burned immediately; the internal moisture vaporized and erupted outward in jets of white steam. Shavi’s barrier was already up—the liquid sprayed, caught the shield, and ran harmlessly down its curved surface.

This is evolution. Anna had described her abilities before they set out. Tilly had listened with the attention she gave to everything; she had thought she understood. Watching it was different. The thread moved through the air at the direction of a thought—no windup, no trajectory you could read, no sound that arrived before the damage did. Finer than any blade Tilly had ever seen in use, and entirely indefensible. You could not dodge what you couldn’t see coming. You couldn’t see it coming.

The worm screamed—a high, raw sound that had no business coming from something without a visible mouth—and convulsed. Its skin rippled in waves. The black thread cut through everything in its path regardless, sectioning the body with mechanical indifference, while the green flame ahead vaporized the effluent before it reached the witches.

The screaming stopped.

The skin went slack.

“It’s dead,” Sylvie confirmed. “Heart stopped.”

“That thing has a heart?” Ashes pinched her nose.

“At its head. About the size of the Hawk Eye’s basket.” A pause. “And there’s magical power circulating through its entire body.”

“A hybrid breed?”

“No record of it, as far as I know,” Tilly said. “There are almost no reliable accounts of mixed-breed demon beasts in the histories. We don’t have time to investigate right now. Anna—one more pass for the smell—and then we find the coffin.”

Another careful burn. The worst of the rot thinned. Under Sylvie’s guidance, they moved through the creature’s interior toward the ruins it had swallowed.

The stone tower’s basement—what had been the stone tower’s basement—was rubble. The structural stone had been pulverized, nothing remaining of its original shape. The magical illumination stones Lightning had mentioned were dissolved, indistinguishable from the surrounding matter. But the transparent crystal column stood intact among the carnage. Not corroded, not cracked, not dimmed. The girl inside it—long hair, pale features—lay in exactly the position they had seen before, as though she were sleeping through a merely inconvenient afternoon.

“She’s yours now,” Tilly said, and looked at Anna.

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