Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 610: The Hunter

The sun climbed to its height and the Judgement Army appeared at the foot of the mountain.

Danny had seen their approach through the sights long before the rest of the trench noticed — a line of armored figures descending the switchback road, catching the noon light on burnished plate, moving in column. The God’s Punishment Army was in the van, shields upright, each man’s silhouette wide and heavy as a door.

He understood Iron Axe would not wait. No experienced commander gave the enemy time to form up after they had already walked into the guns’ range.

The thunder came from behind — not thunder: fifty field artillery pieces speaking at once, a sustained concussive roll that he felt in his sternum before his ears processed the sound. Lines of shadow arced overhead, barely visible, and then the ground at the column’s front edge erupted in dust and smoke and scattered forms. Wildflowers of upthrown clay blooming at a hundred-meter intervals.

The column broke formation — a normal reaction, the first time the sky falls on you — but it did not retreat. It accelerated.

Danny watched them come.

By the time they closed the first four hundred meters, the artillery had completed three sustained salvos. The combination of fifty guns firing in sequence was a different thing than any barrage he had experienced on the other side — it was relentless, methodical, one wave following before the dust of the last had settled. Without horses, the God’s Punishment Army walked through it on foot. Shields raised. Moving.

At five hundred meters, the line resolved through his sights: God’s Punishment Warriors in the front row, shields upright and touching, a grey iron wall moving across the cleared ground. Behind them, the Judgement Army in tighter clusters.

He watched a bullet strike a shield. The shield disintegrated — not dented, not stopped, but cracked apart along the impact point, the holder going down beneath the wreckage. The Judgement Warriors behind it stumbled over each other, exposed.

“This won’t take long,” Danny said.

Malt peered over the trench wall, up on his toes. “Why isn’t that a good thing?”

“Because at this rate they won’t even reach the first trench.” Danny tallied the rounds in his waist pocket. Thirty bullets. Against this engagement, with fifty field guns already doing the decisive work, a sharpshooter stationed three rows back was scenery.

He picked up his rifle.

“Where are you going?” Malt grabbed his sleeve.

“Front trench.”

“I’m coming—”

“Stay here. Captain’s order.”

He pulled free and moved along the communicating trench at a low crouch, rifle forward, each burst of incoming return fire — scattered, disorganized, the church’s soldiers had no real answer for what was landing on them — shaking loose thin lines of dirt from the walls. He passed the second trench position, third, fourth. Around him, soldiers crouched at their firing steps, working bolts, letting spent brass clatter against the earthen floor. Nobody said anything to him. In a battle that had the shape and rhythm of a rehearsed exercise, one figure moving forward was simply someone going to his post.

He found a gap in the forward parapet and pressed himself into it.

Three hundred meters. Close enough to read faces.

He could hear them now — not words, but the sound of men in extremity, voices scraped raw by the effort of advancing across broken ground under continuous artillery fire while carrying thirty kilograms of iron. Some of them were praying. Some were shouting at each other. Some were simply making the sounds men make when they have committed to something they cannot stop and have not yet decided to survive.

Danny settled the rifle across the lip of the trench, cheek to the stock, right eye to the sight.

A shield. The soldier behind it was visible above the rim — helmet, forehead, the angle of a neck bent forward against the weight and the wind and the noise.

He exhaled half a breath and held the rest.

He put the crosshair on the throat, adjusted a fraction for the fact that the man was moving, and squeezed.

The report was a single sharp crack in the middle of the sustained roar. Behind the falling shield, blue blood — blue, not red, and he had known this intellectually and had never quite prepared for it — caught the light briefly and was gone.

The Judgement Warriors behind that gap stared at it.

Danny worked the bolt: smooth forward throw, a quarter-turn lock, smooth back-pull. The spent case tumbled hot against the back of his hand. He pushed the bolt home.

The first one.

He found the next gap in the line and settled in again. The bolt-action’s rhythm was the rhythm he had always looked for in hunting — the pause between shots where everything resolved to simple arithmetic: angle, distance, wind, and breath.

He had time. The First Army’s guns were doing the heavy work. He had thirty rounds and a clear field, and the men coming through it were men who hunted witches and called it righteousness.

He squeezed the trigger again.

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