Rewrite That Witch
CH418 · Rewrite
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Chapter 418: Finish the Fighting

They waited a week on the ridge before Lightning spotted the platoon at the north gate.

The church had assembled carefully: twenty-five Judgement Warriors at the head of the column, fully armored, riding stallions. Behind them came the transport corps—roughly a hundred mercenary fighters and believers on foot, two coaches rolling in the middle of the column. Nightingale watched from the Mist as the caravan moved past. Through the distorted outline of one coach, a silver light pulsed. Magic power, unmistakable.

The Saint is there.

Five witches could not have routed this column in the open. In the open, even with Ashes at the center, the numbers and the God’s Stones would eventually tell. But they weren’t going to fight in the open. They were going to choose the moment and the ground.

Nightingale had made her decision deliberately, a long time before it became a plan. She had not wanted to make it. But a platoon this size, carrying the church’s intelligence and an active Saint, moving toward Redwater City—if it arrived intact, whatever it was bringing would arrive with it. If it disappeared in a forest, Hermes would not know what had happened to its emissary delegation. Not until spring, when the roads opened and someone was sent to find out. By then, stopping the consequences would be someone else’s problem in someone else’s season.

She did not regret the decision. She filed it.

They followed at distance while the column worked its way toward Redwater City. When the platoon entered the forest, where the trees would prevent any signal from reaching help in time, Nightingale gave the signal.

Maggie came out of the sky.

She folded her wings at the last moment and swept low over the column—not attacking, just arriving, her body blocking the sky, her shadow swallowing the road. The horses reacted before the people did: a wall of sound, rear legs punching air, harnesses snapping taut and breaking, animals going sideways through their neighbors. The people froze first, then scrambled.

Maggie’s wings drove a wall of air down the road as she banked away, and the person who’d been riding on her back dropped from twenty feet and hit the ground running.

“Enemy attack!”

The shout broke the paralysis. Believers grabbed weapons and turned toward the noise.

Ashes was already inside the column.

She had an ordinary iron sword—Maggie couldn’t carry more weight—and she used it until it cracked, then seized whatever was in reach. A halberd. A stick. Someone’s iron hammer. Each one was a lethal instrument in her hands, because the ability that came with being an Extraordinary didn’t discriminate between tools. She moved through the column like a scythe through wheat, and the people she passed through were divided at the waist—a clean, specific horror—before they understood they were in contact with anyone.

The God’s Stones of Retaliation every one of them wore were dark holes in Nightingale’s Mist-vision. Against an Extraordinary, the stones were irrelevant.

Blood spattered against armor. Bodies went down.

At the rear of the column, the mercenary fighters had their own problem. Andrea was moving through the tree line—a pale figure appearing and vanishing between trunks, never in the same place twice, an arrow leaving her bow at each appearance. Every shot took a man between the eyes. Every one of them killed. Her quiver was a fixed quantity; she wasn’t wasting any of it.

In under ten minutes the column had ceased to function as one. It had become three groups of individuals, each trying to solve a different crisis with instruments that weren’t equal to any of them.

Nightingale paid none of it any particular attention. She had only one target.

The coaches had broken free when the horses panicked. Both of them were moving now, coachmen whipping the animals toward the tree line, each carriage lurching off the road in a different direction. Nightingale stayed with the one containing the silver light and let the other go—Lightning and Maggie could handle whatever was in it.

Four Judgement Warriors had peeled away from the collapse to escort the Saint’s coach. Nightingale followed at a range she found comfortable, let the gap between herself and each guard narrow in turn, and shot them one by one. The shots were spaced—not hasty, not theatrical, just efficient—and the last man fell while still trying to locate the sound of the gun. No magic resistance made armor better against a large-caliber ball that had already punched through it.

After the fourth guard, she aimed at the horses.

Both animals went down together. The coach’s momentum sent it into a tree trunk and it came apart on impact, timber and wheel-iron spraying in every direction. Through the debris, a figure wrapped in silver light tumbled free and found its feet.

Nightingale fired immediately.

The silver light intercepted the rounds—individually, deliberately, each bullet caught and stopped with the focused attention of something that had done this many times. She stepped back, reloaded, and considered the geometry.

This is not the tower room.

In the room she’d had five meters of space to move in. Here she had the entire forest. The Saint’s ability reached maybe twenty meters under optimal conditions; Nightingale’s revolver was accurate at fifty. The Saint could move toward her—but so could Nightingale, and in the Mist, tracking a moving target in a forest was a different problem entirely from tracking one in a small room.

“Traitor!” The silver light surged forward, reaching for where Nightingale stood.

She wasn’t there. She’d already moved.

One cartridge. Two. Three. At fifty meters she was not precise enough for a decisive shot, but she was precise enough to make each round cost the Saint something—and the silver light was finite. It had a capacity. She’d found that out in the tower.

After five cartridges the silver light dimmed. Visibly. The glow that had been solid and confident became uneven, guttering. A round took the Saint in the left shoulder. Another went through her stomach.

She fell in stages: knees first, then sideways, then still.

Nightingale did not approach immediately. She went back to the debris of the carriage first and found what she was looking for—a God’s Stone of Retaliation from the coach interior, fallen clear in the crash. She pocketed it, then walked to the Saint.

The woman’s right arm extended toward her as she arrived—the only thing still moving. The silver light tried to form, found nothing to draw on, and faded.

“Damned demon.” Blood on her lips. “The gods will judge you.”

Nightingale looked down at her. The blindfold was still tied across the burned scar tissue where her eyes should have been. The face beneath it was younger than expected—not much older than Nightingale’s own.

“I’ll wait for that day,” Nightingale said.

She pressed the trigger.

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