Rewrite That Witch
CH587 · Rewrite
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Chapter 587: A Nameless Victim

“Magic reaction?” Earl Delta turned to Sylvie, confused. “What’s that?”

“Tell your knights to stand clear — now!” Brian was already moving.

He had barely finished the sentence when believers in indigo robes burst from around the corner in a mass that struck the guiding knights like a breaking wave. Horses went down under the impact. Knights were pinned beneath their mounts before they had time to process what was happening. The others drew swords and closed to fight. On the street, the civilians who had been watching scattered all at once, falling, trampling each other, filling the air with screams.

“Treason!” Delta went from shock to rage in a single breath. “Kill the rebels!”

Then a piece of pavement tile struck him silent.

It had come from below — risen from the road, followed by more, a dozen slates lifting and accelerating in a motion almost too fast to see, a green blur that resolved into a trail of destruction. The first knight it hit bled from his joints, from his eyes; his armor compressed as if something had squeezed it from all directions. He did not survive. More tiles moved freely after that, without hierarchy of target — knights, believers, anyone standing in the path. Vertical stone shattered bone. Horizontal cuts it clean through.

Before Delta could process this, Brian had already dragged him out of the line of fire.

“Fire,” Iron Axe said.

The volley was continuous. Everything still standing went down — the sound filling the street, the smoke rising fast and thick, and when it began to clear, the field held bodies scattered in every attitude of collapse. Some still moved. Most did not.

“Where are the remaining enemies?” Brian held the intersection in his eyes without blinking.

“They fell,” Delta said, faintly. He had not expected this. A dozen armored knights and what had seemed like unstoppable believers had been disabled in the time it took to see it.

“Incoming,” Sylvie said. Her voice had gone hoarse and flat.

A woman came around the corner.

She was unspooling the street slates ahead of her like a carpet peeling back from the road, lifting them into the air one by one and accelerating them toward the column. The second volley tore through most of them immediately — but one piece survived long enough to spin sideways through the formation, horizontal, moving like a blade without a hand behind it.

A flintlock can’t break stone fast enough. Brian’s stomach dropped. When that hits unarmored men—

Purple light appeared in front of the troops.

A cage of condensed magic power — Iffy’s — closed around the incoming slate, contracting, stopping it absolutely. The remaining floating pieces fell.

The First Army held its fire until the smoke had cleared.

When Brian could see the intersection, a woman lay on the pavement in a pool of blood. Her hair — dark green, thick, curling — spread into the red around her. A priestess’s robe. Two palm-sized exit wounds through the stomach and abdomen. The first volley had hit her during the initial exchange; she had continued to lift and direct stone through the wounds until she could not. The cuts on her arms and legs were from her own materials, ricocheting back.

Her willpower was remarkable.

Delta moved closer with visible caution. “Is she really a witch of the church?”

“His Majesty’s pamphlet made this clear in King’s City.” Brian heard the edge in his own voice and let it stay. “The church poisons ordinary people with Berserk Pills and secretly trains witches to serve them. The innocent ones — the ones the church persecuted — are on our side. Have you genuinely not read any of this?”

“I had heard it. It seemed… difficult to believe.”

Brian kept the rest of what he thought behind his teeth. The church’s lesser crimes were only the beginning, and the nobles hadn’t been much better. He said nothing.

Edith had not moved from where she stood.

This was her first engagement with the flintlock troops, and what struck her was not the violence but the structure of it — how all the soldiers had needed to do was hold their ground. That was the principle. And it scaled. The larger the engagement, the more decisive the advantage. In the Western Region, behind Roland’s production lines, these weapons were being built continuously. What she had seen today in this street would simply repeat at every scale the war required.

Traditional combat — armor, formation, blade and nerve — had not been surpassed. It had been made obsolete.

Her choice had been right.

Iron Axe ordered the advance resumed. Edith fell into column.

The First Army turned the next corner and reached the church’s front entrance. Several bodies lay outside — patrol troops, identified by their clothing. The full picture assembled quickly: when the patrol had tried to seal the building, the Pure Witch had sent more than two hundred enchanted people into the streets as cover, some to fight the patrol directly, others to riot in the outer city, a group to attempt a breach of the main gate. The First Army had been less than a hundred meters from the church at the time. Fifteen more minutes and the Pure Witch would have been through the wall and gone.

Brian led a squad inside and cleared the remaining resistance.

Then came the systematic work — documents, correspondence, anything of value. His Majesty had been explicit: take what matters. Under Sylvie’s guidance, soldiers set small explosive charges on the iron gate blocking the basement. The gate came down.

Behind it, arranged in orderly rows: more than ten crates of God’s Stones of Retaliation. Gold stacked alongside them, neat as the church’s record-keeping.

The soldiers stared for a moment in collective silence.

Then Brian turned and walked back up the stairs to report to Iron Axe.

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