Rewrite That Witch
CH337 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 337: Rescue

Anna nodded. She extended the black flame into a thread and pressed it against the crystal column.

The witches around her went quiet—the particular silence of people holding their breath without deciding to. A continuous ribbon of green smoke rose from the point of contact: not the flame’s true color, but a shifted tone under the cold radiance of the illumination flame, something between teal and grey. The thread dug in.

“How is it?” Tilly asked.

“Taxing,” Anna said. “But I can open it.”

Then the coffin changed.

A crisp sound—like glass under a thumbnail—and fractures appeared at the point of entry and raced outward, branching and branching, covering the entire surface in the span of a breath. A web of cracks, wall to wall, before anyone had time to react. Shavi’s barrier rose instinctively, enclosing the group.

No explosion followed. The crystal simply fell apart—each fragment separating cleanly from its neighbors, the whole structure dismantling itself piece by piece—and what it revealed was genuine ice beneath, a core exhaling cold air in a visible rush. The temperature dropped sharply; Tilly felt it against her face like a hand. Then Anna drove the heat upward to match, and the cold receded.

Under the black flame’s steady heat, the remaining ice melted faster than ordinary ice had any right to. It lost its clarity as it shrank—edges rounding, corners softening—until what was left was almost shapeless. But the meltwater never reached the floor. Every liquid surface vaporized on contact with the heat, drifting away as faint wisps, as though the ice coffin were choosing its own erasure. The floor beneath stayed dry.

When only a shell of ice remained, the girl’s body was uncovered.

She looked like someone interrupted mid-sleep: long hair undamaged, garments dry and unsoiled, nothing about her suggesting she had spent any time inside a creature’s digestive cavity or sealed in crystal. Her body listed backward without the column’s support, and Ashes caught her.

“Is she alive?”

Ashes pressed one hand to the girl’s chest. A pause. “The heartbeat’s there. Very faint—but it’s there.” Another pause, different in quality. “This is… not possible.”

It was possible, Tilly thought. Everything this week had been impossible. She had arrived in Border Town expecting to find her brother’s eccentric administrative experiments; she had instead found gun-equipped soldiers drilling in autumn snow, witches working with alchemists on things that had no name in any book she’d read, and a night-and-day transformed territory that felt more alive than a capital city. Compared to all of that, one girl surviving in ice didn’t seem like the hardest thing to accept.

The girl was a witch. She had to be. Nothing else could explain surviving the temperature of genuine ice crystals, sealed and dormant, for however long she’d been in there.

The expedition had not been wasted.

Her name, her origin, why she had been sealed in those ruins and left beneath the Concealing Forest—those were questions for later, for a fire and a warm room and someone with time to be patient. For now, the fact of her survival was enough.

On the surface, Andrea waited.

The forest was quiet enough that she could hear snow settling off branches fifty meters away. She stood at the cave entrance and kept her attention divided: one part monitoring the sounds from below, calculating whether what she could occasionally hear was progress or crisis; one part on the treeline. The cold had settled into a steady grey that wasn’t quite snowfall, just winter breathing on her face.

Nightingale was somewhere to her left. Or had been. She was now an absence—a gap in Andrea’s peripheral vision shaped approximately like a person.

Ah. Right. Invisibility.

Andrea shifted into listening mode. When sight became unreliable, hearing filled the space. She had learned this as a girl, practicing in dark corridors with her bow, learning not to panic when she couldn’t see.

The footsteps she heard were not Nightingale’s.

She knew Nightingale’s footfall by now—the particular soft compression of someone who had spent years moving without being heard. What she was hearing was different. Multiple sources, distributed weight, spaced at intervals that suggested a group trying to move quietly but not trained for it.

The sound was coming from the tree line, no more than a hundred paces away.

She looked. Nothing—undisturbed snow, no shadows between the trunks, no outline, no movement visible to the eye.

Invisible.

Her hand was already at her bow when the first one materialized.

The explosion came first—a sharp crack that seemed to happen directly beside her ear—and then the creature was simply there, as though the air had chosen to take a shape: a long narrow head, two bladed appendages like a mantis’s forelimbs, a body that walked upright in a way that no insect should. The side of its skull was missing. Black blood arced outward and fell across the snow inches from Andrea’s feet.

It toppled.

Nightingale appeared in the same motion—white cape catching the winter light, her firearm already tracking the next target.

The second shot came before Andrea had fully processed the first.

I missed it. The thought was cold and precise. I was standing here with a bow in my hands and I missed it. She had been monitoring the perimeter carefully; she had shifted her attention correctly when her sight failed; and it had still not been enough. The creatures had gotten within arm’s reach before she registered them.

She drew back toward the basket and the other witches—tactical decision, not retreat, she told herself firmly—and kept her bow raised, trying to find an angle. Four shots total; four creatures dropped. Each kill was instant. When Nightingale lowered her firearm and materialized fully beside the last body, Andrea let out a breath she hadn’t consciously been holding and walked over.

“What are those?”

“Not a demonic beast, judging by the anatomy.” Nightingale crouched over the body and examined the bladed appendages with detached interest. “But the blood color says demonic beast.” She stood. “Mixed breed, probably.”

“When did you notice them?”

“When they appeared.” She smiled. It was a particular kind of smile—not unkind, not boastful, just the flat factual expression of someone for whom noticing things was simply what they did. “The fog makes their magical radiance stand out. Like stars against a night sky.”

“A demonic beast that can turn invisible.” Andrea was aware that her voice had taken on a flat tone she usually reserved for problems she hadn’t solved yet. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

The smile faded slightly. “Mixed breeds tend to be… unusual.”

The group from below reached the surface before she could pursue it further—seven witches climbing out of the dark, and on Ashes’s shoulder, a blue-haired girl who had not gone in with them.

“Is that her?” Andrea stepped forward. “The one who was calling from the ruins?”

“Yes.” Tilly brushed dirt from her sleeve. “Full account once we’re back in the basket. The longer we stay in this forest, the less I like it.” Her gaze went to Nightingale. “Trouble up here?”

“A few mixed breeds. Nothing remaining.” A slight shrug.

The Hawk Eye’s envelope filled and the basket rose—slowly at first, then with gathering purpose, until the treetops fell away below and the balloon found the sky again. The forest opened out beneath them, white and grey and vast.

“My god.” Sylvie’s voice was sharply different from her usual register. “What is that?”

She was looking down at the ruins. Andrea leaned over and looked.

The corpse of the nearest creature was half gone—not decomposed, not dragged away, but consumed, the missing portion simply absent where it had been. The bloody snow around it had been disturbed in a pattern that suggested movement without visible source: a wavering at the border of mud and snow, like the distortion above a hot surface, almost impossible to catch unless you already knew to look for it. Under the illusion of stillness, things were moving.

“More of those mixed breeds,” Nightingale said. Unimpressed. “About a hundred, if I had to guess. All converging on the hole.” A beat. “Looking for a meal, I’d imagine. The worm’s down there.” She yawned. “Not our problem anymore.”

The balloon carried them north into the grey sky. The forest closed over the ruins below—the hole, the worm, the hundred invisible shapes converging on a feast they had no part in anymore. All of it shrank, whitened, disappeared. Border Town’s walls appeared ahead, a grey line against the grey distance, and Tilly kept her gaze forward on it, and said nothing more about the ruins or the direction they had come from.

Discussion

Suggest a change