Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 616: The Violent Tide Rises

The booms came from everywhere at once, overlapping until they were no longer individual sounds but a single sustained pressure against the ears.

Zero listened for what existed in the gaps between them: the faint, abbreviated cries of pain. Brief sounds—sounds that ended.

The formation had been a good one. God’s Punishment Warriors at the front, carrying iron shields thick as a man’s thumb, each shield heavy enough that only a converted soldier could bear it in battle. The arrangement—called the Big Shield formation—had been designed against swarms of demonic beasts and worked equally well against crossbows and flintlock volleys. Timothy’s imitation snow-powder pipes had never dented it.

But this time, it was failing.

Iron balls came in low and fast and did not stop at iron. They split the shields and the men behind them together, passed through and struck whoever stood a step further back. Not wounds. Erasures. Those who survived the initial impact held their entrails or clutched at limbs that were no longer there and screamed—and that was almost worse than the dying, because the sound of it traveled down the formation and put something in the survivors’ eyes that had no place on the face of a God’s Punishment Warrior.

“We can’t continue this way,” an assistant shouted. “Give the order to charge!”

“He’s right.” Another commander clutched his fists. “The balls travel in straight lines. They can’t fire quickly enough to stop a spread-out charge. If we scatter the formation—”

“Pass the orders,” Soli Daal said. “Spread out. Full charge.”

The shields came down and the warriors ran.

Then something new entered the field.

Zero had no name for the sound it made. Like rain, but faster and without variation—like gold daggers striking in sequence, one after another, after another, after another without pause. A cloud of smoke erupted in front of the charging line. The warriors fell the way cut wheat falls, stumbling into each other, the whole formation collapsing from the front backward in a wave.

The commanders’ faces went gray.

Everyone understood, in that moment, what the outcome would be.

A hissing split the air—sharp, directional, like the sibilance of a viper cutting through grass. Zero’s body heard it before her mind did. She was already turning, already beginning to move—

And remembered she was not in her own body.

The iron ball hit the ground two paces in front of Soli and bounced. As it came up, it caught his shoulder at an angle. Zero’s vision spun. The ground came up at her face and she was looking at the dirt, and the place where Soli’s arm had been was now wet and vacant, and he was clenching his jaw against the sound that wanted to come out of his throat.

Voices converged from all directions.

“Your Eminence—”

“His hand, his—”

“Retreat! Get him out—”

“I’ll stay, take him—”

The memory broke.

Zero opened her eyes.

The God’s Stone prisms of the Pivotal Secret Temple glowed steadily in the dark around her. She was crouched at the center of the cage, and the guard captain at the entrance had not spoken in some time.

She was smiling. She could feel it.

So that’s what happened. She let the pieces settle into their proper arrangement.

Why Roland Wimbledon had gone from the obscure lord of a border town to the king of Graycastle. Why he had broken the duke’s knightage, scattered the second prince’s army, taken King’s City in a single day. The continuous booms, the smell of powder smoke hanging in Soli’s memories, the line of warriors falling like grain—it all had an explanation now.

A new class of snow-powder weapon. Not an improvement on Timothy’s models. Something of a different order entirely. Something that could be operated by any soldier, that fired without interruption, that reached beyond the range of any armor or fortification the church had designed its tactics around.

If Zero had not experienced the battle through Soli’s memory, she would not have believed it was possible.

Of course this was not a Wimbledon family secret. Timothy and Garcia would not have been ignorant of it if it were. Something had happened in Border Town—some discovery, some encounter, some ability—that had given Roland this advantage. Perhaps a reclusive craftsman carrying knowledge from before the Union’s dissolution. Perhaps ruins in the Impassable Mountain Range; the old records mentioned unknown structures near the Barbarian Land border, and it was an underground labyrinth that had eventually fractured the Union itself.

But Zero’s truest instinct pointed elsewhere.

A witch’s ability. Something that transformed ordinary snow powder into what she had just seen. That would explain everything—why Roland had changed his policy toward witches, why he had recruited them openly, why he had gone to the trouble of clearing the injustices against them at a time when no secular lord in history had found it advantageous to do so.

It doesn’t matter, she thought. Whatever the source, Roland Wimbledon knew it best. And if she devoured him, she would know it too.

She let the smile complete itself, then breathed until it was gone.

“Call back all the pure witches still in the Kingdom of Dawn,” she said, walking out of the cage toward the guard captain.

He looked startled. “All of them? But the plan—”

“The decisive battle is coming,” Zero said. “I want everyone here.”

She walked past him without slowing.

There was no question anymore. Compared to what Roland carried in his mind, the entire Kingdom of Dawn situation was a distraction. This level of weapon—mass-produced, operable by anyone, with that range and that rate of fire—if it could be deployed before the Bloody Moon arrived, the Holy City’s chances of defeating the demons would change fundamentally.

And for herself: one step closer to the divine will. One step nearer to winning the Battle of Souls.

Deepvalley Town, Northern Region of the Kingdom of Graycastle.

Iffy’s feet had not quite stopped moving for a fortnight.

She set down her pack and let out a yawn she couldn’t suppress—the kind that opened all the way, jaw-stretching, involuntary. The Tooth Extraction Campaign first, and then the march to this small mountain town, and then guard duties at the camp while Edith organized the evacuation of Coldwind Ridge. Every day had been useful. Every day had been exhausting.

She sat on the edge of her bed and let the quiet settle.

Something had shifted in her over these two weeks. She had noticed, gradually, that the non-combat witches—herself among them—had their own indispensable place. Not dramatic. Not the kind of contribution that earned recognition in a moment of crisis. But real. She had begun to feel, for the first time since joining the Witch Union, that she was not defined only by the capacity she lacked compared to the combat witches. She was something particular. That was enough.

There had been progress with the others, too. Tentative. Maggie had said hello to her during a watch rotation—unexpectedly, warmly, though Lightning had not looked pleased about it. Iffy did not expect forgiveness. She did not want it. She wanted only to do enough that the debt eventually became livable.

Atonement. That was the word she kept coming back to. For Annie. Only Annie.

She was reaching to unlace her boots when the knock came.

She opened the door and found Tilly Wimbledon.

“I want to talk to you,” Tilly said softly. “About the Bloodfang Association. About Heidi Morgan.” A pause. “And about Annie.”

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