Rewrite That Witch
CH762 · Rewrite
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Chapter 762: Music, Rapid Fire, and Strength!

The moment the announcement fell, Cut Bone’s warriors drew their weapons.

No probing. No preliminary assessment. They came from both flanks simultaneously, moving to close the encirclement around four people. Deliberate. Practiced. The motion of men who had learned this lesson on other platforms in other years.

It did not matter how well Osha had planned. They were four. When the encirclement closed, attacks would come from every direction at once.

These warriors had been shaped by holy duels since boyhood. They had no apprehension before a life-and-death contest. The moment they stepped onto the platform, they had surrendered themselves to the Three Gods. This was not merely a contention for power. It was an offering.

Then a voice rose from the center of the platform.

Drow Silvermoon’s song.

It swallowed the underground fire’s bluster, drowned the voice of the Styx River, and filled the arena the way smoke fills a closed room — complete, and from every direction at once. The melody moved like something from beyond the horizon: mournful and enormous, freighted with loss so old and particular it seemed less like an emotion and more like weather. Deep feelings of grief and suffering embedded themselves in the sound, and anyone who heard it without protection found they could not say when the tears had started.

The Cut Bone warriors’ advance faltered.

“No — stop that!”

“What are you doing?”

“Stop it! You’re blaspheming this place!”

“Heretic!”

“I’ll kill you!”

Among the onlookers, expressions shattered. Some turned on the Cut Bone clan with pointed fingers, shouting. Others hid their faces. What Thuram witnessed next would not fully leave him — the Cut Bone warriors rotating with murderous purpose toward their own people. In an instant, the spectator stands ran with fresh blood. Blades opened abdomens. Heads rolled. He saw all of it in sharp and terrible clarity: the faces seized in disbelief, the sorrowful melody rising around the carnage like a chorus of documentation.

He blinked.

It was gone.

The twenty-two warriors still advanced, but slowly now. Their feet had lost their certainty.

This was unavoidable. Their people — the ones who were supposed to be their strength, their reason, the voices that made a hero’s death into something worth having — were cursing them. The other clans that had meant to support them now stared as though they had committed an unforgivable act. You could face any enemy without fear. You could not disregard the rebukes of your own.

The Osha princess’s ability?

Thuram had encountered mind-control abilities before — Kabala of Sandstone Clan, and others. But never at a range like this. He pressed his fingers to the God’s Stone of Retaliation at his throat. Drow Silvermoon stood far beyond ten footsteps from the spectator stands. Her singing voice alone had moved people without stones to tears?

The Cut Bone warriors were thinking the same thing. He could see it in the way they looked at one another instead of forward.

In a duel, doubt was fatal.

Andrea had already moved.

She held no bow. Without raising the short bow across her back, she flung an arrow at each of the four nearest enemy duelists — a hard, flat release, the motion precise and unhesitating. Perhaps they were rattled by the events at the sidelines. Perhaps they had lowered their guard because she was not holding a weapon. By the time the arrows registered, there was nothing left to do about it.

Each arrow found the same spot: just below the right clavicle, deep enough to catch bone. The four warriors’ dominant hands went slack and useless. They were out of the fight without a drop of blood beyond the entry wounds, and a gap opened in the encirclement.

The song pivoted.

From mourning to fire. Grief became drums — a beat that struck inside the chest like a fist demanding entrance — and the feeling it planted was not sorrow but motion, forward, now.

Ashes moved like a black shadow through the noise.

She carried a sledgehammer and a shield. Her footsteps suggested neither. There was a lightness to her advance that was entirely at odds with the weight she bore, a quality of drift — as though the platform’s surface were optional — and no one who stepped in front of her could maintain a defensive stance before the hammer moved. She did not break them. She held the hammer horizontal and carved through the formation, redirecting, sweeping, subduing six or seven in rapid succession without once striking to kill.

The numerically superior Cut Bone warriors found themselves caught.

To continue flanking from both sides meant contending with Andrea’s arrows, which found legs and shoulders with the impartiality of falling rain, and navigating around Ashes to mend the gap she tore through them every few seconds. Their own God’s Stone arrows, fired in panic, ricocheted and hit the ground — and Iron Axe, serving the defensive position, stepped on them: each expensive stone ground under a boot heel like a coin dropped carelessly.

To abandon the encirclement was to abandon the advantage numbers gave.

“Everyone, close up to me!”

One of the standing warriors — perhaps a dozen left — called the rally. They gathered. The mathematics of the platform had shifted past what their strategy could accommodate.

And here — here was the thing that no one had quite expected — not one participant had died. Ashes’ hammer had power enough to cave skulls. She had chosen differently with every blow.

Every warrior on this platform was a clan asset: irreplaceable, expensive in years of training and battles fought and survived. To sacrifice them in a meaningful death — that, the Three Gods honored. Blind slaughter served no one. Mother Earth was not a bloodthirsty goddess. She loved courage and strength. She did not want needless deaths.

The remaining warriors sheathed their weapons. They stretched both hands in front of them: open, palms out, intentions unmistakable.

“Humph.”

Ashes laughed easily and set down her shield. She walked straight toward them and raised the sledgehammer horizontal.

The hammer struck the line of men.

“Ow!”

“Hold on!”

“Don’t fall back!”

From the spectator stands, shouts rose — but no clan’s name. In this moment, nobody seemed to care anymore about which side won. What mattered was the contest itself: brave, controlled, enormous. The people who had been weeping minutes ago now had their fists clenched, their eyes fixed on the center of the platform. The drum beats had done something to the crowd that even Thuram could not quite account for — he found his own arm raised, his own voice contributing to the noise, and it did not seem strange at all.

Ashes bent into a long slanted line and dropped her center of gravity. Her arm muscles pulled taut into an arc that was, improbably, both beautiful and mechanical — strength rendered visible in the body that produced it.

This was not, of course, a duel between one person and an entire clan.

Iron Axe, Andrea, and Drow Silvermoon joined the line. Four against the remnant of twenty-two — and slowly, step by step, shouted at each advance by the crowd, they pushed the Cut Bone warriors backward across the platform.

The drums built.

Every footstep had begun, somehow, to land in time with the beat. The warriors had no strength left. The Osha quartet roared together and drove them over the edge.

The music stopped precisely as the last man fell.

The melody stayed in the air, reverberating through every chest in the arena, refusing to dissipate.

“The winner is the Osha clan!”

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