Rewrite That Witch
CH077 · Rewrite
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Chapter 77: Holy Mountain (Part 3)

Leaves could not move.

The spear had taken Scarlett and two others in a single line. They were on the ground now and not getting up, and out of the dark to the left came the shapes that had thrown it.

Two of them. They rode beasts — wolf-forms, but larger, built wrong, with wings that had been cut to stumps and a harness of bone and leather fitted to the remaining frame. The riders themselves were twice the mass of any man Leaves had known: wrapped in a material that was not cloth and not armor but something between, bloated and tight, giving each limb a swollen, packed look. They wore skulls over their heads — demonic beast skulls, the eyes replaced with lumps of reddish-brown crystal that caught no light and reflected nothing. Strips of old skin hung down the backs of the skulls.

The spear-carrier still had a full quiver on the mount. The other wore a gauntlet that appeared to have three fingers.

Devil. The word arrived without her choosing it. It was not a metaphor.

“Attack!” Cara’s voice, sharp and immediate, cut through the freeze. Stone dropped to one knee, pressed her palm to the ground, and turned the snow-covered earth beneath the creatures into a sucking bog. A good response — the beasts’ wings were already gone, so they could not clear the obstacle. The riders would have to go around.

They did not go around. They drove their mounts into the swamp at full speed, used the momentum to launch from the creatures’ backs, and cleared the distance through the air. They landed behind Stone — directly in the cluster of non-combat sisters, who had been placed at the rear for exactly this situation.

“Spread out!” Leaves shouted.

The three-fingered gauntlet devil moved through them at a pace that made Leaves’ vision blur trying to track it. The witch nearest to where it landed had no time — her head shattered under a single punch before anyone processed that the blow was coming. Two more necks broken in the seconds that followed, so fast it seemed like one continuous motion, and then the rest broke and ran.

One witch did not run. Shino stood her ground, brought the crossbow off her back, aimed, and fired. The devil sidestepped without apparent urgency, then kicked her in the chest. Shino left the ground and did not stop until she hit the earth ten meters away, rolling twice before lying still. Blood from her mouth.

On the other side of the swamp, the spear-carrier had turned toward Stone. It raised the spear, drew back, the arm already beginning to swell — and then a burst of flame erupted in front of its face. Red Pepper, the fire witch, had aimed for its lower body; the devil recoiled, and in that half-second, Red Pepper grabbed Stone’s wrist and pulled her clear. When the devil tried to follow, a wall of black-stemmed grass rose between them.

Leaves was already spending herself. Every seed in the frozen ground, every bulb and dormant root within range — she called them all, felt them tear upward through the packed soil, vines knitting into a net around the three-fingered devil’s feet. The devil looked down at the crawling tendrils with something that might have been curiosity.

“Pain.” Cara sent two snakes. Each one bit into a different arm.

The devil shook them off — a twitch, nothing more. The venom moved through it and left no visible mark. But in the moment of distraction, the vines pulled taut and the creature fell backward into the snow.

“Run!” Leaves’ voice was raw. “Everyone — run, now — they are the evil from the ancient book, they came through the gates—”

The fallen devil was already fighting the vines. Its companion, the spear-carrier, stepped back into its throwing stance. The arm swelled again, grotesquely, skin stretching so thin the dark-red tracery of blood vessels and bone beneath became visible.

“Leaves!” Stone’s voice.

The quagmire struck the devil’s feet a moment before it released. The earth swallowed one foot to the ankle, and the spear left the hand at a changed angle, drove itself into the ground six inches from Leaves’ feet.

The swollen arm shrank immediately — dried, withered, loose — like a bladder with the air let out.

One shot. It needs time to recover.

No time to think about that. The vines on the first devil were dying — her reserves hitting their limit, the roots going limp and colorless. Stone and Red Pepper had seen what she saw: they were running toward Cara, trying to get her mobile before everything gave way.

The three-fingered devil stopped fighting the vines. It extended both arms toward the three running witches, hands open.

No —

The blue light came without sound first — a crack, then a burst, then crackling arcs of lightning jumping between Stone and Red Pepper and Cara, connecting all three at once, white smoke rising from where the current passed through them. Their bodies twisted and then stopped moving. The devil sagged afterward, heaving, unable to take a step.

Leaves looked at what remained of her magic. Almost nothing. The vines lay dead around the devil’s feet. She had barely enough left to stand.

She stood anyway.

The three-fingered devil was still recovering. The spear-carrier stood knee-deep in the swamp, struggling, sinking a little with each attempt to free itself. Cara lay on the snow, alive, barely, the lightning having passed through her at the edge of range.

Now. Before the other one recovers.

Ironhand — the three-fingered devil, she named it without thinking — reached Cara while Leaves was still cataloguing. It grasped her throat and lifted.

Cara fought. Her hands worked at the fingers, finding no purchase. She sent her last snakes — they bit the devil’s arm, bit its neck, bit anything they could reach. The devil did not release her. It did not appear to feel the bites.

Then the snakes broke the skin.

Red fog poured from the wounds. Not much — a seep, a widening seep — but the fog touched the devil’s own flesh and the effect was immediate and catastrophic. The skin at the wound site went dark, then wet, then open, exposing tendon and bone as the dissolution spread. The devil released Cara and grabbed at the wound, trying to hold its own body together, but the fog dispersed into the air around it and what it touched it consumed. The creature shook. Then it fell, and did not move.

The remaining devil, sunk to the hip in Stone’s bog, screamed. Not a beast-sound — something worse, a resonant composite of frequencies that landed somewhere behind the eyes and refused to leave. Leaves felt the sound more than heard it.

She ignored the feeling. She picked up Shino’s fallen crossbow. Loaded it with hands that shook only slightly. The devil in the swamp was struggling, working its arms, sinking further with each motion. It saw what she was doing and tried to raise its arms to block, but every movement drove it deeper.

For my sisters.

She pulled the trigger.

The bolt took it in the neck. The red fog released from there, too — thinner, dissipating faster — and then the head dropped forward into the black mud.

Leaves let the crossbow fall.

She turned. Behind her: more than ten of her sisters on the ground in the positions where they had fallen, scattered across the frozen plain without markers or order, under an empty sky that had already closed over the place where a city had been.

The grief was not a metaphor. It arrived through her knees — dropping her to the ground — and then through her chest, and she had no more reserves to hold it back.

She did not try.

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