Rewrite That Witch
CH415 · Rewrite
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Chapter 415: The Fight

Nightingale’s body moved before her mind caught up.

She leaned back. The silver light grazed her cheek. Even inside the Mist, she felt it—the scorching intensity of it, more than light, more than heat. She rolled sideways and put distance between herself and the source.

“What’s happening, Lady Saint?” Rosad’s voice, ragged with panic.

“A rat has found its way in.” The witch’s tone had gone flat and professional. “Find something to hide behind and stay there.”

“A witch? Here?” The priest’s footsteps lurched toward the door. “I’ll summon the Judgement Warriors—”

“Don’t bother. I haven’t hunted in a long time.” An almost satisfied pause. “Stand aside and watch.”

Nightingale studied the Saint from her position in the Mist. The church was training witches—she had known it theoretically, had prepared herself to know it—but seeing the proof split something open in her anyway. This woman had been entirely claimed by the institution: possessed by it, high-ranked within it. And that hunger for a hunt—the word priceless hovering in her voice—came from somewhere that had nothing left in common with what Nightingale knew herself to be.

She thought of the witch who had attacked them at the harbor outside King’s City. Who had stabbed Wendy. These were not witches who had made a mistake; they had taken a road with no road back. A different species, wearing the same face.

No more hesitation. Nightingale pulled her revolver.

“Where did you come from?” The Saint tilted her head—tracking Nightingale by sound, maybe by something else. A white ribbon blindfolded her eyes; she moved like someone for whom sight had long since become optional. The silver whip curled at her side, its tip raised and swaying. “If the priest can’t see you, you have the power to conceal yourself. If you can dodge like that, you’ve been trained—or you’ve survived enough fights to amount to the same thing. Either way, that’s unusual for a wild witch.”

“Where I come from is my business.”

She noted the whip. It moved in the Mist—magic-formed things weren’t immune to the Mist’s passages, but they registered as something. Were those coils how the Saint was finding her?

“You may not know it yet, but the church has crowned a new Pope.” The Saint’s hand lifted to her own chest—the gesture of prayer, or its pantomime. “He is compassionate. He believes that even fallen witches deserve to be saved. Surrender now, and the church will cleanse your sins and accept you. If you came with others, bring them too. The Holy City of Hermes offers rebirth to all who seek it.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Nightingale said. She kept moving as she spoke. “But if being born a witch is a sin with a cure, why didn’t the church cure it from the beginning? Why help my sisters now, after hunting them for generations? Do you take me for a child?”

She drew in a breath. Let it fill her.

“I have not sinned.”

She stepped out of the Mist and fired.

The silver whip snapped upward in the same instant—a wall of light that intercepted the bullet, wrung the force from it, and dropped a crumpled slug onto the floor with a small, dismissive click.

It blocked a flintlock shot.

“What kind of weapon is that?” The Saint’s voice sharpened with something that wasn’t quite curiosity.

Then it cooled entirely.

“I’ve changed my mind. You’ll die here tonight.”

The light split. What had been one whip became dozens, radiating outward, filling the room.

Nightingale threw herself back into the Mist and ran. Unlike ordinary matter, magic-formed objects remained solid even inside the Mist—she couldn’t pass through the whips, only around them. The room wasn’t big enough. One of the tendrils caught the side of her shin and she felt it: a numbing brightness, her leg going unreliable, the floor arriving too fast. She hit it hard. The whips struck the stone behind her and pulverized it.

If she’d been half a second slower, that would have been her spine.

She ignored the shin and fired the remaining rounds into the room—all of them, fast, not aiming, buying herself time. The silver light contracted into a spinning shield, catching each bullet in sequence, controlled and contemptuous.

She couldn’t reload inside the Mist. Once the revolver ran empty she had no deterrent, no range, and the room was shrinking. She drew her second gun, emptied it, and dropped through the floor—two stories down, passing through beams and joists and plaster in the dark—and landed in the basement corridor.

“She escaped!” The Saint’s voice, above her, knife-sharp. “Lock down the church—every exit. Guards to the Marquess’s cell. The witch might have come for her.”

“Through what?” Rosad, genuinely baffled. “The door wasn’t touched. The walls—”

“The walls, the ceiling, the floor. Her power goes far beyond invisibility, and her magic’s gone from the room.” A short silence. “Tell every man to arm their crossbow bolts with God’s Stone shards. She’s injured. She won’t get far.”

Nightingale, in the corridor below, pressed herself against the cold stone and listened to the footsteps scatter overhead.

In the empty room above, the Saint lowered herself carefully to the floor, her hands trembling.

She sat with her back against the desk and looked at her palms. They shook. She hadn’t felt this in years—this specific exhaustion, the hollow weight behind the eyes when the magic light ran down too far. Hundreds of arrows had never done it. Steel bolts, siege weapons, nothing had ever threatened the light enough to drain it.

That weapon. The one that sounded like a crack of thunder.

Each round had hit with enough force to actually cost her. Five or six of them in quick succession and she’d been hollowed out within seconds.

Dead or alive, she thought, and her hands kept shaking. I want that witch. Either way.

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