Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 624: Devastation

“An absolute slaughter.”

Nail sat atop the tower with both hands on the machine gun’s grip, watching the slope below. The thought arrived with the flat certainty of observation, not judgment.

The weapon never tired. Depress the trigger and it answered endlessly—muzzle fire, spent casings rattling against the floor, and down on the mountain path the bodies accumulated with mechanical regularity. Every position caught in its arc became a killing field. Everything that entered that field became fragments.

The elevation intoxicated him. So it did his team.

“That’s sixty-six!” someone called.

“Are you blind? That was sixty-eight.”

“Look, that one’s still moving. His intestines are already on the ground—let him struggle.”

“Save the ammunition.”

With a click, the belt ran dry. Nail straightened. “Cover the third trench—I’m reloading!”

“Already on it.” The neighboring team traversed their barrel to cover the gap.

His loader brought the next box. Nail pulled on his heat-resistant glove, gripped the spent barrel with the extraction tool, and lifted it free in one practiced motion—the steel still warm enough to brand skin through cloth. He set it aside to cool and seated the fresh barrel, clicked it home. The belt fed. The percussive stutter began again.

They could not fire continuously except under critical conditions; the barrels would warp and fail. It was said each barrel had been machined to tolerances so precise that only the witch Anna could maintain them, each one worth fifty gold royals. The team handled theirs accordingly—with the careful reverence you reserve for something irreplaceable.

“Witch in the east! First trench, east side!”

Nail swung his sight.

A woman in a red robe. She was on the ground, dragging herself forward with her elbows. The robe left a thin smear of blood on the stone behind her. A bullet must have caught her leg. She moved slowly, with a kind of animal persistence.

He lined up the shot. His finger found the trigger.

He did not pull it.

She was young—too young, from the lines of her body. He could not tell how young, but the thought stood between him and the trigger like a wall.

“Shoot! What are you waiting for?”

“I—”

A burst from another position swept across her. The crawling stopped. Blood pooled from her belly, spreading into a red bloom on the pale stone.

“We just lost a tally point.”

“Stop that.” A hand came down on Nail’s shoulder. “You’re tired. Trade out.”

Nail exhaled. “I’m fine.”

He was not fine, but he pulled his attention back and held it there. This was a war against the church. The enemy did not distinguish by age; neither could he. He could regret it later, in private, when it cost nothing. He clenched his teeth, pushed the softness somewhere small, and held the grip again.

“Wait—third trench! The ground is—did it collapse?”

Nail was already turning.

The center of the third trench had dropped into a clean square hole, walls cut perfectly flat as if something had passed a blade through the earth. A woman in a black veil climbed out. She stood at the lip of the pit without moving, hands behind her back, and simply looked forward.

He fired.

A sound, high and sharp, hit him from the left—he turned his head on instinct, and the rifle butt caught him across the face.

The world went black.

The last thing he registered before losing consciousness was his own teammate raising the weapon toward him.

Roland watched from the command platform through his telescope, tracking the tide at the defense line.

Some of the enemy had crossed the first three trenches and were driving toward the fourth. But the soldiers pulling back from forward positions were concentrating the defensive fire rather than diluting it. From the two machine gun towers—commanding lines of sight that covered nearly every approach—the God’s Punishment Army’s advance was slowing visibly. By this trend, they would not reach the remaining five trenches.

The Judgement Army was entering the field now. Artillery had bled it badly on the approach, but it had not broken—the Berserk Pills again. Yet compared to the God’s Punishment Warriors, the Judgement Army posed a secondary threat. The pills drove men mad, not invincible. When field artillery and machine guns answered madness with metal, even divine will had limits.

The real credit for holding this line belonged to the bunker network and the eight Mark I heavy machine guns in the towers. Supplying continuous fire required both adequate ammunition and a rotation of barrels—each team had nearly ten spares. The cost of ammunition had been severe. But the cost of leaving the main church force intact was steeper.

During this stretch, Sylvie periodically swept the field for magic reactions. Pure witches had appeared in the advance but had accomplished little—drawn into the smoke and artillery fire before they could act, or neutralized before they reached the line.

The outcome was visible—and Roland let himself see it. The Church of Hermes was burning out.

Then Sylvie’s voice cut through everything.

“Pure witches—forward of our position! Four—no. Five!”

The surface of the third trench bulged upward as if lifted by invisible hands, then dropped—taking the barbed wire and stakes with it into the earth. A square pit opened where the trench had been.

The woman in black emerged from it.

She did not attack. She stood still and looked forward.

In the trenches, soldiers turned their weapons on themselves. Guns pressed to chins. The sound that followed was wet and brief and came from many places at once. Red mist hung over the trench line like weather.

Four machine gun forts went silent simultaneously.

Soldiers elsewhere—those unaffected—responded the moment they understood what they were seeing. Several shots struck her in quick succession. She fell back into the pit.

And the Judgement Army, driven forward on the pills, poured through the gap.

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