Rewrite That Witch
CH696 · Rewrite
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Chapter 696: Victory of the Wise

Garcia had made an effort at inconspicuous. Plaid shirt. Jeans. A cap pulled low and sunglasses in a room that didn’t particularly need them. Reasonable. The kind of precautions a person took when her face was the kind that created situations.

It didn’t work on Roland, but that was a function of his particular familiarity rather than any failure of the disguise. He checked the name on the arm of the chair — his name, right seat — before he said anything.

“Why can’t it be me?”

She made a sound through her nose that expressed dissatisfied acknowledgment and said nothing.

A moment later: “I can’t believe you have a child.”

“My cousin,” she said, with the flatness of someone correcting a record rather than defending themselves.

A substitute, then. Zero’s memory had captured Garcia in it, and the child beside Garcia in this classroom — whoever the cousin was — occupied the adjacent slot. Close enough to fit the structural requirements of the scene.

What he found himself noticing, without quite intending to, was the shift in her manner since their first encounter. The first meeting had been contempt at full pressure, turned on him like something she’d been carrying and found the right place to set down. What he was getting now was impatience — open, honest, not much bothered with whether he saw it. Progress, possibly. Or just a different kind of ceiling.

The meeting began. Teacher. Term plan. Commitments, goals, guarantees. The rhythm of it was universal.

When Zero stood to speak, the murmuring started before she’d opened her mouth — her white hair and red-tinted pupils and the particular quality of her appearance cutting through the room the way it always did. Every witch carried something like it into the Dream World. A residue of the form they occupied here. In Zero’s case the effect was considerable, and the parents and students who caught sight of her for the first time spent a moment too long not looking away.

Roland stood alongside her, as the situation required. He was wearing a cartoon short-sleeved shirt and knee-length pants. He was aware of this. He was also aware of the inventory of glances from the other attendees — the ones that landed on Zero’s fine features and then traveled, skeptically, to his general presentation and concluded that some kind of clerical error had placed them in the same family. He endured this with the equanimity of someone who had made his peace with the gap between his living circumstances and his theoretical potential.

He sat back down.

Garcia’s gaze was on him from behind the sunglasses. The sunglasses were a remarkably effective tool in her hands — she could examine whatever she wanted while he couldn’t confirm whether she was actually looking. He stared straight ahead and said nothing.

The nudge against his elbow came a few minutes later. A folded note appeared in the corner of his vision.

He opened it under the arm of the chair. Her handwriting was sharp and controlled — the handwriting of someone who had decided what they thought before the pen touched the paper.

You’re the mysterious martialist from the street the other day.

Roland looked at the note. Looked at the stage. Looked at the note.

How.

He turned, and found her already writing something else. The second note followed.

Don’t deny it. Martialists develop specific observational habits — body geometry, movement patterns. I noticed your figure in the news footage and had a feeling. Now that I can compare directly, I’m certain. So tell me: did you awaken your Force of Nature recently, or have you been concealing it from the beginning?

He read this twice.

Her figure recognition was — he wasn’t sure whether to be disturbed by the precision of it or simply impressed. The footage had been brief, the angle poor, his face unidentifiable even to himself. And she had managed, from whatever detail the video preserved, to connect it to the man she’d seen twice in a building hallway. That was a level of observational acuity that explained several things about her, none of which he would say aloud.

The pen arrived before he asked for it.

He had been going to deny it. The denial had felt like the obvious move — implausible, dismissible, but at least buying time. Then something rearranged itself in his thinking.

He had no interest in martialist culture, in competitions, in whatever civic obligations came attached. He had practical interest in the Force of Nature as a tool, but not in the institutional infrastructure around it. None of that was the point.

The point was the apartment two doors down from his, and the door inside it that he hadn’t been able to examine.

Roland wrote: I don’t really understand what Force of Nature means. Could you explain?

The note came back quickly: Children know what it means. Stop performing ignorance.

She had also removed the sunglasses for a moment, just long enough to give him a direct look from the corner of her eye.

He wrote: Does it explain why my strength increased suddenly? That’s the sum of what I’ve noticed.

Force of Nature is broader than that. There’s an entire Martialist Association with relevant information. Have you not looked into it at all?

I’m not interested in fighting or in associations.

Participation isn’t only about competition. Martialists carry civic responsibilities. Public order. Social security.

I’m not sure I follow.

It’s complicated. We should discuss this somewhere more appropriate.

Roland read that sentence and allowed himself a moment of private satisfaction.

He wrote back: I’d be glad to. The problem is I need to go to the company this afternoon. Could I come to your place this evening instead?

The pause before her response was slightly longer than the others had been.

Then: a nod. Brief and sufficient.

When Garcia’s cousin rose to speak, the room’s attention shifted again. The murmuring this time was a different frequency — not the open curiosity that Zero had provoked but the more practiced social calculation of people trying to place someone within a known hierarchy.

“The Clover Association—”

“He didn’t come with his parents.”

“Famous entrepreneurs. You’d hardly expect them to clear their schedules for a parents’ meeting.”

“She must be a relative, dressed down on purpose—”

Roland filed the name. Clover Association. Whatever it was, it apparently registered immediately in this room as a signifier of a particular kind of wealth and standing. Yet Garcia lived in what he had assessed as a modest building — not poverty, but not what you’d expect from someone adjacent to an organization people recognized on sight.

He glanced at her.

The sunglasses were back on. But her jaw had set slightly and her hands in her lap had closed into something near a fist — not quite there, maintained below the threshold of expression, but present.

Something there, he noted, and set it aside for later.

Tonight he would have a better context in which to ask.

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