Rewrite That Witch
CH628 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 628: The Intertwined Battle of Fate (III)

Five deaths had taught Roland the shape of his problem.

Powerful weapons could harm him as readily as they harmed Zero. The blockhouse had become a fixed target for the Sigil of God’s Will. And Zero almost certainly knew the composition of black powder—if she chose to burn the roof itself, to turn the architecture into a weapon, he had few lives left to absorb that kind of cost.

He could not win by firepower alone. He had to hold her.

He turned the problem over, rejecting ideas as fast as they came. A cage. A directional mine. An electrified perimeter. A laser fence.

None of it would work. Zero’s resurrection point was unconstrained—she could reappear anywhere on the rooftop. Anything that depended on confining her to a fixed location would fail the moment she died and came back three meters to the left of whatever he had built. And he didn’t have the lives to spend on trial and error.

Deprive her of mobility.

Keep the roof intact.

Kill her many times in a single configuration.

He sat with those three conditions and let them work on each other.

Is there a way to do all three at once?

He looked at the rooftop surface.

“During these two hundred years,” he said, “how many soul battles have you fought?”

“Over a thousand. Perhaps more. Only a few truly impressed me.” Zero watched him with the patience of someone who has run out the clock before. “They had stronger wills than you do. It made no difference—the endless deaths wore them down eventually. Very few people choose to keep going once the outcome is clear.”

“Has anyone ever tried to create lava? Fill this space with seawater? Change the environment entirely?”

“Not a new idea. And no one can do it. Changing where we stand consumes as much energy as dying. Changing the world is a delusion—only a god could do that.”

“There’s no god in my world,” Roland said.

“Then have you decided to surrender?”

Zero bent forward and lifted his chin, her fingers cool. “Submit to me. Come with me.”

“I’m sorry.” He smiled, found her shoulders with both hands, and gently pushed her back. “I want to try one more thing.”

Zero stood and drew her weapon.

The distance between them began to grow.

She stepped forward. The distance continued to grow. She increased her speed. Still growing. She moved at full sprint and the gap between them did not close—it widened, as if she were running in the wrong direction on a moving surface.

She looked down.

The floor was a mirror. Not merely polished—a surface of absolute smoothness, frictionless in a way that violated every intuition. Her feet moved correctly; the floor responded to nothing. Her body held its velocity and direction with no mechanism to change either. She was a stone thrown; nothing could deflect her now.

She tried pressing her hands and feet against the ground. Tried changing her angle. Nothing worked. She was sliding at constant speed in the direction she had been walking when the floor changed, and the laws that governed friction no longer applied to her.

“What did you do?” Zero’s voice, for the first time, held an edge.

“A small change to the battlefield.” Roland shifted position, sitting more comfortably. “Not a large one—just the surface properties of the floor. The energy cost was lower than I expected. You mentioned that changing the environment is expensive, but you also said the key is the scale of the change. Have you heard of inertia?”

“Inertia…?”

“Newton’s First Law: an object not subject to external forces will remain at rest or in constant linear motion. Without friction, there is no external force to redirect you. You can run all you like. You’ll keep going in the same direction forever.”

He touched the railing.

The roof transformed.

A monument rose from the surface behind him, assembled itself from steel in the time it takes a person to blink. It was tall, wide, divided into even layers, each layer subdivided into rectangular units—a structure like an elongated Rubik’s cube, or a bank of cells, each one fitted with a long black barrel pointing outward. A hundred barrels, aimed at the constant trajectory Zero’s inertia guaranteed she would hold.

“My turn.”

Zero saw what was happening. The golden light gathered in her hands. The Sigil—

Roland fired.

The roar of a hundred cannons speaking simultaneously converted the air above the building into something that had not existed outside of weapons test facilities: a concentrated column of fire, pressure, and supersonic projectiles moving at nineteen hundred meters per second. The gunpowder burned and the air expanded and the campus, which had just slipped into evening, lit up white.

Light scattered across the sky—thousands of fragments caught at various angles, arcing and crossing and descending. They hit the ground in dense patterns, overlapping, filling every square meter of Zero’s projected path. Where they landed, the surface erupted. Where they found her, they found her completely.

Roland could not hear any of it. The first discharge had ruptured both eardrums. He existed in a world of vibration—the metal structure humming through his hands, the floor shaking beneath him, the heat washing up from the barrels in waves.

But he could see.

From atop the monument—which had lifted him above the worst of the blast—the rooftop below looked like a chessboard, each square pouring coordinated fire. Zero was visible in it: thrown upward, torn apart, resurrected in the same frictionless trajectory, torn apart again. She could not change direction. She could not find cover. There was nowhere on the roof she could reach that the fire could not reach first.

The floor was unmarked. Absolutely smooth, absolutely hard. The tetrahedron carbide the smiths used for their finest cutting edges would have been soft by comparison. He had changed the spacing between atoms in the surface—bound them so tightly they no longer existed as ordinary matter—and now that surface bore the detonations without a scratch.

“Impossible!” Her voice pierced the silence his ruined ears imposed. “You can’t create something that doesn’t exist—this surface—this can’t exist!”

It exists because I understand why it should. He could not become Superman. But he understood the physics that allowed a surface with near-zero friction and near-infinite hardness to exist, and understanding was the key. The weapons fired because he understood propellant and ballistics. The floor held because he understood atomic bonding.

Zero tried for the Sigil three more times. The continuous fire allowed no pause. Each resurrection placed her back in the same trajectory, the same exposure.

She was losing the ability to maintain her form.

“Please.” Her voice changed—something softer entered it, and then a different voice entirely. “Please—” Garcia’s voice. Roland’s sister. Pleading. “Stop. You’re killing your own blood.”

Then his father’s voice, hard and reproving. “Stop this. You’re a monster. You’re slaughtering family.”

Roland did not move his hands from the controls.

“It’s time,” he said, inside himself, where it was quiet. “I’ll defeat the demons in your name. Rest in peace—all of you.”

“I won’t let you go!”

A blue light—total, annihilating—detonated across the entire night sky.

The world came apart.

Discussion

Suggest a change