Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 798: The Will of the World

“What is your Lord’s name?”

This creature was more than a Fallen Evil — its responses carried emotional texture, fluctuating as the situation shifted. Roland pressed the advantage, drawing it into speech while he gestured behind himself: Faldi and Dawnen needed to get out. If the situation forced a retreat, he would clear the building faster than any of the witches. Let them move while the creature was still engaged with him.

“My Lord is everything and nothing simultaneously.” The creature’s phantom wings spread, dark red at their edges, and it pressed both hands flat against the floor. “Your tricks won’t work. You want them to run? Too late.”

Scarlet blood unwound from its body and ran outward in every direction — a tide that didn’t flow so much as assert itself, claiming the room surface by surface. Within seconds, the floor, walls, and ceiling had turned the deep crimson of the inside of a wound.

Ling, her hiding place erased by the spreading red, was pushed from the shadow as though something had reached into the wall and expelled her. She landed beside Phyllis.

From behind Roland came the small, soft sound of Faldi’s fear. He turned. Spiked tentacles had risen from the red-black void and coiled around the witches’ ankles, pinning them.

I’ve seen this before. He searched his memory without result — there was no time.

The warmth inside him had already responded. He stopped thinking about where he had seen it, gathered every ounce of physical strength, and ran at the creature.

“Ooh?” Astonishment, genuine — the creature hadn’t expected him to move at all. Its palm came up. “How about this?”

The impact was a hammer. A single, concentrated force that lifted Roland off his feet and drove him through the air into the wall. The collision knocked his organs sideways — he could feel the displacement, a deep nauseating shift, and the wall at his back was on fire with it.

He coughed, and tasted something sweet and metallic from his throat.

“Your Majesty!”

Phyllis’s voice came from somewhere behind the curtain of his vision. She was the only one still mobile. Her blade claws worked frantically at the tentacles on the floor — cutting, and cutting again, as more grew to replace them. She couldn’t reach him.

All right.

His mind was surprisingly clear. No fear — whatever fear was, he had apparently mislaid it somewhere in the wall. What remained was the warm current, which was now moving faster than it ever had before, pulled along by his heartbeat the way water follows a channel cut for it.

The red tide slowed where it reached him. Bled around him, as if the room’s geometry had a question about his edges. Wherever his body contacted the floor, blue traces appeared.

He hadn’t done this. This was happening outside his control.

All of the world’s magic power is coming toward me.

A sound pressed against his ears — he could not locate its source. Not in the room. Inside the walls of the room. The creature’s roar, the witches’ shouts, the scrape of claws on tile: all of it seemed to bend toward the same underlying note, as if noise itself were converging.

Kill it kill it kill it—

The creature noticed. The dryness in its voice developed a crack. “What is happening to my magic power—what have you done—”

Roland didn’t answer. He could feel that the warm current had reached its ceiling — that his body was arching of its own accord, the same way a bridge arches under load. Then he was moving. Not running. Launched, like a cannonball in the moment the fuse hits the charge.

“KILL IT!”

The creature raised its hand again. The same force.

This time the warmth surged ahead of him — poured out through his skin and formed something in front of him, something he had never produced before: two curtains of blue light that collided with each other and threw a burst of radiance above his head. He hit the creature’s chest and went in.

Not through hard material. Through something like dense liquid that gave and gave, resisting without yielding, until he felt his arm sink in a fingerbreadth past the star jades. He opened his fist. Closed it around the largest ring.

The creature let out a sound without volume — a deafening thing, pressure rather than noise. “No — this is the Lord’s strength — you cannot touch it—”

The ring quivered.

Rich red, shifting toward blue. Then white at its edges. The change was slow and contested; it came in surges, fell back, surged again. Roland held on, and the warm current poured in from every direction — the witches’ magic, the room’s ambient power, something deeper still, as though the world had decided to take a side.

“So that is what you are.” A vortex-shaped eye, which had been sealed above the creature’s crown, cracked open. “You are responsible for this world. You are the one who defeated my Lord.”

“You just called your Lord ‘everything and nothing,’” Roland said, through his teeth. “How could I touch something like that?”

“You fool — my Lord is almighty, but cannot intercede everywhere at once — you are destroying everything — go back, go back, and do not return here — every living thing will perish if you continue—”

The voice was breaking up now, growing fragmented, as though something were interrupting the channel.

Roland felt the ring’s resistance ebb. The color change quickened.

“Every living thing?” He looked briefly over his shoulder at the witches sitting on the floor, drained and pale. Then, quietly: “No. The only things that shall perish are your kind. I don’t know where you come from, or what you truly want here. But this world is better without you.”

“From — hssst — Bottomless Land — no intention — hssst — this is rule—”

The sentences had collapsed into fragments. The emotional range was gone from its voice entirely, replaced by something flat and mechanical, like a recording playing back after the person who made it had left.

When it finished, resistance vanished.

The star ring began to spin. The star jades around it spiraled inward, drawn by the pull, and collapsed into a single brilliant point of white light. For a moment Roland felt something he couldn’t name — a heartbeat not his own, enormous and slow, somewhere beneath the floor.

The creature folded into itself, condensing into a sphere, and then released a column of silver light that drove straight through the ceiling and held there for a long, sustained interval. Standing at its source, Roland felt the pleasure of it move through every part of him — larger than anything before, larger than the sum of every previous encounter — and he could find no comparison that didn’t fall short.

When it was done, the witches were still on the floor. Not wounded beyond function — their magic was simply gone, drawn out entirely during Roland’s deadlock with the creature. Phyllis reported that at the peak of the fight, the power of all four of them had poured into him. In the real world, this would have been impossible. In the Dream World, apparently, nothing was quite as fixed as it seemed.

Under the circumstances, it was simply one more item on the list.

Roland located the car key on the suited man’s body. He and Phyllis carried the safe. They led the witches quietly out of the foothill villa and into the dark.

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