Rewrite That Witch
CH342 · Rewrite
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Chapter 342: Countermeasures

“Don’t forget about me.” Lightning flung herself forward before the embrace had ended.

“I want one too,” Nana announced, not to be outdone.

“Guu!” Maggie called out from somewhere behind them.

Roland stood and let each of them have their turn. When he looked up, Tilly was watching from across the garden with her arms folded, her expression caught somewhere between amusement and something warmer.

“You really do have a harmonious relationship with them.”

“You want to hug your big brother too?”

“No, thank you.” She shook her head, smiling. “I still clearly remember the time you picked me up and dropped me on the ground.”

He raised his hands in a gesture of pure innocence. Then he turned and saw, for the first time, the woman Ashes was carrying.

Ocean-blue hair. Young — roughly Anna’s age in frame and face, though the stillness about her suggested something else entirely. Her eyebrows were slightly upturned, her skin unblemished, the teardrop mole at the corner of one eye dark and precise. Her eyes were shut. She looked less like someone who had been imprisoned in a flooded stone tower basement than like a woman sleeping off an unremarkable afternoon.

But it was her clothes that held him.

Even in this age, fabrics were restricted by what dyes could be produced and what looms could manage. Violet cloth of that depth and consistency was rare enough to be a kind of small miracle. The robe was layered with interlacing white stripes and talisman-worked prints, structured and detailed in ways that clothing almost never was. He had seen something like it once, in a film, on a costume designer’s version of high fantasy. He had not expected to see it in real life.

Orange-tier equipment, he thought, and immediately felt ridiculous for thinking it.

“Is she alive?”

“Yes,” Nightingale said. “But her magic is nearly exhausted — it reminds me of Anna’s condition just before her adulthood. Unlike Anna, her recovery rate is unusually slow. At this pace, three or four days before she’s back to anything like normal.”

“Then let her sleep.” He nodded. “I’ll have a room prepared on the third floor. Everyone else, to the hall — I want to hear what happened.”

Listening to Tilly and Nightingale’s account, Roland found himself gripping the armrest of his chair without noticing. Going underground after a creature they had never seen before, with no map and an incomplete assessment of what it could do — even knowing how it turned out, the image of it made his stomach uncertain. Tilly had committed to the plan in the space of minutes and led the team herself. The witches followed her not because of her title, he thought, but because she gave them reason to.

“When you were underground — did you think it had a connection to the devils?”

“I don’t know. It’s not impossible.” Tilly’s voice was relaxed, the way a general’s becomes after the battle is finished. “A witch from the Cooperation Association once encountered devils riding hybrid demonic beasts in the wild. The beasts had had their wings removed and were following commands — livestock, essentially. And behind the Impassable Mountains, there are creatures capable of flight that look nothing like devils — perhaps another category of demonic beast entirely.”

“So the relationship between devils and demonic beasts might be similar to humans and hounds. They have some method of compelling obedience, and they use these creatures to accomplish tasks that are too costly or inconvenient to do directly.”

“It really does seem that way.” Tilly shrugged.

Roland turned it over in his mind. Demonic beasts initiated attacks on human settlements only during the Months of Demons — but that did not mean they lay dormant the rest of the year. The moss and weeds he had seen packed into the carapaces of the sieging beasts were years of accumulation; those creatures had survived for decades. And if the reason devils could not simply sweep the wilderness clean of humanity was that they were confined within the red mist, nothing stopped them from dispatching beasts year-round rather than only in winter.

There was also the wolf-lion hybrid from Iron Axe’s first winter to consider. It had not been merely clever in the way a clever animal is clever — following instinct and pattern. It had observed, analysed, and selected. If long-lived demonic beast hybrids could develop that level of cognition, the idea that they were simply tamed like dogs became much harder to credit. You could not break a creature that smart the same way you broke a horse.

“But compared to what you found underground,” Tilly said, “what concerns me more is the enemy Nightingale encountered outside the stone tower. Able to conceal itself in broad daylight and move without making a sound — it’s practically impossible to defend against something you can’t see or hear. We know too little about demonic beasts. I have no idea how to prepare for a threat like that.”

“If Nightingale hadn’t seen it herself, I wouldn’t believe it existed.” Roland exhaled. “But such creatures have never appeared at the western border — if they had, Longsong Stronghold would have been ruins years ago.”

“The Months of Demons are growing longer and the beasts are growing stronger — history is clear on that. The first snowfall this year came in autumn, which means whatever we face this winter may be considerably worse than anything we’ve seen before.”

Tilly’s use of we landed somewhere in his chest. She might not have decided what he was to her — brother, ally, something still without a name — but she had decided what Border Town was: her problem too. That was, at minimum, something worth holding.

“Then Nightingale will have to be the eyes on the perimeter.”

“Actually — let Sylvie take that role this winter.” Tilly leaned forward. “The walls divide into two sections, east and west, and a single circuit takes nearly a quarter of an hour. Nightingale’s workload would be unsustainable. Sylvie can sit inside the castle and cover the entire wall at once. She’ll be able to alert the others the moment a demonic beast appears.”

“That works.” He paused, glancing at Scroll, who had been quiet throughout.

“I still have the same concern as before,” Scroll said. She did not need to name the woman upstairs. “Her identity is unverified. She could be an enemy.”

“I know. She’ll wear a God’s Stone of Retaliation in the meantime.” He breathed out. “Hopefully she won’t misread that as a declaration of hostility.”

The room on the third floor smelled of clean linen and cold stone. Anna was the only one still there when Roland knocked and pushed the door open — sitting at the bedside, straight-backed, watching the woman’s face for any shift in color or tension.

“How is she?”

Anna shook her head. “Still no response.”

The woman lay motionless beneath the blankets. The furrow between her brows had softened since he last looked in; Nana and Lily had done what they could, and now it was a matter of waiting. She looked improbably intact — no sign of the cold, no pallor beyond natural sleep. Centuries in ice, and the flesh had kept its answer.

“She was frozen for so long,” he said, “and not a trace of it remains. That’s genuinely remarkable.”

“It’s similar to how I’m unbothered by fire.” Anna glanced up with a faint smile. “Her ability almost certainly plays a part.”

“I heard you were the one who opened the coffin.”

“I can’t take all the credit.” She said it without false modesty — simply accurate. “She had engineered it with precision. The outermost layer was ice crystals at near room temperature, sealing in a much colder layer that had stopped all circulation in her body. The temperature differential between layers was the key: the outer shell prevented the inner cold from thawing prematurely. She must have achieved an extraordinary level of control to manage both at once.”

Near room temperature. The phrase sounded self-contradictory, and Roland recognized that it wasn’t — Anna’s black flames had long since taught him that summon-type abilities operated by their own physics, shaped by intent as much as by natural law. The temperature of what you summoned was, apparently, as variable as its form.

“When I cut through the outer shell,” Anna continued, “the entire structure came apart at once — like a door swinging open, not like something breaking. She had left the exit ready. She knew someone would eventually come to find her.” A pause, measuring. “She was certain she would wake up.”

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