Rewrite That Witch
CH553 · Rewrite
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Chapter 553: The Trophy

“Gems? Coo!” Maggie pushed the white hair back from her forehead with one finger and leaned in, eyes bright.

“Magic Stones.” Agatha crouched to collect them, turning each one in the light. “I don’t know what kinds these are, but the base color—before the Chaos Beast changed them—would have been high-quality God’s Stones of Retaliation.”

“The Senior Demon’s trophy must be something worthwhile,” Leaf said, still managing a smile despite the blood on her shirt. “I’m only surprised it hid them inside its body.”

Maggie’s head lifted. “Are there more boxes like this in the other dead demons?” She was already backing away. “Coo! I’ll check!”

“Watch the tanks—the Red Mist is still restoring,” Agatha called after her.

Maggie returned in under ten minutes, two more black boxes tucked under one arm.

“The ones in colored clothes had them.”

Nightingale reached into both in turn through the Mist. The stones she extracted were smaller and dimmer than the first—lesser grade—but there were several of each.

Agatha gathered them all in her palm and her brow creased.

“Something wrong?” Nightingale asked.

“Too many.” Agatha lined them up by size. “The Union killed thousands of Fearsome Demons over the decades and still could not collect Magic Stones in any real quantity. That is why the Quest Society spent so much effort capturing and raising Chaos Beasts rather than relying on battlefield salvage. So why do these demons carry so many?”

“Maybe they’re savings.” Nightingale attempted a thin smile. “Four hundred years of accumulation on a long journey—like an unlucky man who spent his whole life building a nest egg, only to get robbed and killed the day he started for home.”

Nobody laughed. They all understood what the alternative explanation meant: if the demons had been producing Magic Stones continuously for four hundred years, their war reserves by now would be enormous.

Agatha was the one who finally broke the silence. “No point dwelling on it. We fight them regardless. There’s no other road.”

Lightning led the First Army through the trees not long after.

Wendy jumped from Lightning’s back at a run and moved person to person checking each witch by hand. When she reached Anna, still unconscious on the ground, she stopped.

“She just exhausted her power,” Nightingale said. The words came out steady; she was concentrating on keeping them that way. “Everyone is alright.”

“I told her,” Lightning said darkly. The linen wrapped around her head had slipped to one side, revealing only a few wisps of pale hair at her temple. “She kept rushing me anyway.”

Brian stared at the bodies laid in a row. His face went the particular blank of a man who has never seen what he is looking at and is not sure whether to be afraid. “Are those—demons?”

“Dead demons.” Nightingale nodded. “Tell your soldiers: everything goes back with us. Bodies, armor, clothing, weapons, every scrap of remains. That’s His Majesty’s order—nothing left behind.”

Brian’s expression hardened into something more familiar. “Yes. I’ll see to it.”

“What a pity we didn’t take one alive.” Agatha sighed. “The plan to make new Sigils will have to wait again.”

“About that—” Lightning tilted her head to one side. “There might be one.”

The group turned as one.

“I’m not certain,” Lightning said, blinking. “But if it can swim, it might still be alive.”

The paddle steamers left the harbor that afternoon, turning downstream toward the City of Neverwinter.

The soldiers crowded the forward deck of one steamer. The demon bodies, laid out in the bow under canvas, drew a steady rotation of gawkers.

“This is what we’re fighting in the future?”

“Doesn’t look like much—except for the size.”

“Don’t be an idiot.” A sharper voice cut in from behind. “You saw what happened to His Majesty’s witches. Did that look like not much to you?”

“Anna brought down the whole breach wall by herself,” someone else said quietly. “She sealed it. Just her. And she fainted.”

“I was at the wall that night. She saved me.”

“Me too—I was being run down by demonic boars.”

“Miss Angel isn’t here. Otherwise, they’d all be cured by now.”

At the stern, Nightingale and Agatha stood apart from the others, listening. They glanced at each other and shook their heads, both wearing the same complicated expression that was close enough to a smile.

For Agatha—who had woken into a world where witches were masters of human civilization, where common people served—the easy camaraderie in those voices was a thing she had no framework for. She found she could not decide whether it unsettled or moved her.

For Nightingale, who had spent years hiding from those very voices, concealing what she was to survive—the difference was not subtle.

“What are you thinking about?” Nightingale asked.

“The test target,” Agatha said. “I was thinking how lucky we were to come back with one at all, when we expected to come back with nothing.”

The test target in question—a living Mad Demon in an iron cage—was causing considerably more excitement among the soldiers than the dead ones. According to Lightning’s account: when the hydrogen balloon exploded, the blast threw this demon into the river, stunned and burning. It had been conscious enough to try swimming to the bank for half a day before blood loss and the current beat it. Maggie had pulled it out—the demon, she said, had apparently mistaken her Devilbeast form for a rescue, and called out. It had not expected to become a prisoner.

Iffy lacked the power and endurance to maintain a cage for the journey home. After some discussion, the witches had done what was necessary: Anna amputated both arms and both legs, and Agatha cauterized the stumps with ice so the demon would survive long enough to be useful and lack any means of acting against that survival.

“Hard to believe we finished the mission after everything went wrong,” Nightingale said.

“Your waist,” Agatha said. “You should rest.”

“Leaf used to handle all our injuries before we met His Majesty.” Nightingale shrugged. “I’ve had worse.” She paused. “You were hard on yourself earlier—the Senior Demons.”

“I didn’t account for them. That was a failure of planning.”

“No one could have predicted Senior Demons in a location this remote.” Nightingale said it plainly. “That’s exactly what confuses me about it.” She turned to look at the river. “Senior Demons don’t act alone. They stay behind armies, and they are few—the Union counted fewer than twenty across decades of war, including the ones killed in battle. I had assumed we would not see one until the Bloody Moon came. But now—”

She did not finish. Agatha finished it for her.

“The Magic Stones. If they have been accumulating those for four hundred years—if the production of Stones kept pace with their population—then their numbers of Senior Demons may have kept pace as well.” Agatha was quiet for a moment. “We know almost nothing about them. Their lifespan. The upper boundary of their development. How they reproduce. Four centuries is a long time to grow an army in the dark, with no one watching.”

The thought settled between them like cold water, and neither spoke again for a while.

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