Rewrite That Witch
CH380 · Rewrite
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Chapter 380: Flesh and Blood

Nail felt his heart leap into his throat.

Time did something strange. He watched the giant demonic beast without blinking, tracking the culverin’s traverse, praying silently that the new cannon would correct its aim in time. The creature kept running, vast and indifferent, covering ground with each stride in a way that made the wall feel shorter than it was.

The first shell landed well behind the target, kicking up a column of snow.

This is going to be bad.

His heart dropped. The beast was not crossing the sixth wall section’s field of fire at a right angle—it was cutting diagonally, which created a constantly changing lead calculation, and every few seconds the angle changed. The crew had to estimate both the speed and the lateral drift simultaneously and fire in advance. Firing behind the target meant they had underestimated the speed. The next shot had to do better.

Based on the rate he’d seen field artillery reload, they had perhaps one more chance before the creature reached the wall.

He could see the fur now. Could see the massive red mouth below the tusks, open. The four witches moving to intercept were together no larger than one of its legs.

He wanted to sprint to the sixth section and shout the correction. He stayed where he was. Iron Axe had not made his order ambiguous: a soldier who abandoned his post without authorization would be treated as a liability to the line, and the supervising team had standing authority to respond to that accordingly. Nail kept his hands on the loaders.

The second cannon shot came less than thirty seconds after the first.

He looked up at the sixth section. The smoke had not cleared from the first discharge, and already new smoke rose at the muzzle—but not from the front. He stared. The crew was clustered at the rear of the barrel, four or five of them working in fast rotation, and no one was approaching the muzzle end at all.

The third shot.

They haven’t reloaded from the muzzle. This cannon loads from the breech.

It fires like a revolving rifle. Round after round.

Nail did not see the shell strike. What he saw was a mass of black blood erupt from the creature’s flank—not a splash but a violent outward cone, a spray of fur and skin in the air alongside it, large pieces of matter he could not immediately name. The beast shuddered. Something passed through it that he had no language for: its entire body compressed, as though something enormous had passed through the substance of it, and the compression moved along its bulk in a visible wave, rippling the thick fur the way a thrown stone ripples standing water—and then the beast’s eyes bulged forward in their sockets and something dark and viscous ejected from them.

The sound reached him.

Then the fall. The creature dropped straight down onto its side, all at once, no stagger, one moment vertical and the next simply on the ground, with its tusks driven into the snow and its flank open. It did not vocalize in its final second. It died the way machinery stops—completely, without remainder.

When Nail could see the entry wound properly, its smallness astonished him. A hole near the base of the neck, barely remarkable against the scale of what it had killed, with smoke still rising from the charred fur around it. The other side of the carcass, he would learn later, had been opened entirely—organs and fragmented bone scattered outward where the shell had driven through.

“Long live His Highness!”

The shout came out of him before he had thought to make it. It went down the wall in both directions and did not stop.

Roland was informed after the battle.

He pulled on a wool coat and went out to the West Wall. The beast lay where it had fallen, its mass reorganizing the snow around it—black blood running out through the white in an expanding dark pool, the ice melting where the warmth of the blood reached it. The size of the animal was different at ground level than it had been from the rampart; seen this close, it was simply incomprehensible as a weight anything could bear.

He had expected to feel something clean—satisfaction, relief. Instead he found himself running the physics.

A solid pointed shell, rotating as it traveled. When it struck the body, the rotation destabilized under impact and the shell began to tumble, converting forward momentum into lateral shear throughout the torso as it drove through. What the tumbling shell found along its path was transmitted outward: internal pressure, organ displacement, bone shock. The entry wound was always smaller than what the round accomplished inside. The exit side was the true record of the energy transfer.

Still. The bone structure of land-dwelling creatures is constrained by their body weight in a way marine animals are not. This animal was several times the mass of an elephant. No bone architecture he knew of could manage that—the limbs should have buckled under their own load. The creature should have collapsed on flat ground without any external assistance.

Nightingale had mentioned it before: magic power moved inside some of the hybrid demonic beasts, visible to her sight in currents through the body. Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps the same energy that drove the Months of Demons also held these bodies together against physics.

“How—” The voice behind him broke. He turned.

Agatha stood at the perimeter of the black pool, staring at the carcass with her eyes wider than he had seen them. The flat assessment that was her natural expression had simply failed.

“Isn’t this the Fearful Beast of Hell?”

“Is that its name?” Roland asked. “It’s appeared in the Fertile Plains before?”

“Yes. In groups, they were difficult enemies for both witches and demons alike. Cities and towns fell to them.” Her voice had gone dry. “But they only appear when the arrival of the Bloody Moon draws near.”

“The Bloody Moon.” He remembered the phrase from the ancient records: When a Bloody Moon rises in the sky, the Gates of Hell will open once again. He had read it without full weight. “What does that mean?”

“It was recorded from the very first Battle of Divine Will, when magic power was at its height. When witches awakened in great numbers, magic power across the world surged—but so did the demons’ strength, and so did the demonic beasts’.” Agatha’s jaw was tight. “I’ve spent time with the history books you gave me. Based on the intervals between past cycles, I estimated at least twenty to fifty years before the next Bloody Moon. It should be impossible to see this animal now.”

Roland looked at the carcass. The black blood had widened the pool another meter while they spoke.

“But it appeared.”

“Yes,” Agatha said. Her voice was careful now, the way voices became when the only remaining option was precision. “It means we don’t have much time left.”

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