Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 808: Close Quarter Combat

“Did you hear something?” Edith turned to Brian, who was directing the soldiers in arranging the underground defensive line.

“Something?” He stopped and looked around, puzzled. “Nothing, Miss Edith — only the water.”

“Really.” She frowned. “I may be mistaken.”

“What kind of sound?”

“Like a horn. Very muffled, similar to moving water.” She paused. “It seemed to come from the south.”

That was the direction the witches had gone, deeper into the mountain. The turbulent underground river flowed north to south and disappeared into a lightless passage beyond the range of even the luminous plants growing along the banks. The waterway gaped like the entrance to an abyss, swallowing everything she could see.

“I imagine it’s the depth of the mountain doing it,” Brian said, with the patient good humor of someone accustomed to calming others. “No sky, no open fire. The men who’ve been on a battlefield before know the feeling — the closed-in darkness plays tricks. Nothing to worry about. If you feel uneasy, Miss Margie can escort you back to the passage entrance.”

A familiar look. Familiar words. Edith was not surprised by any of it.

She was wearing light leather armor, a helmet, and a walking sword, but most of the people here still regarded her as an observer from the City Hall — or more precisely, as the Pearl of the Northern Region, a title that conjured images of something lovely and breakable. That was why they hovered. That was why they offered to escort her out.

What they did not understand was that the pearls produced by giant clams in the Northern Region grew large because of blood. The blood of fish, of water creatures, sometimes of the fishermen themselves. That was how they reached the size of a fist.

Roland Wimbledon was probably the only person she had encountered who had looked at her from the beginning as an opponent, not a prize.

“Thank you, but I’d rather stay.” She let nothing of this show in her face. “If I run back now, I’d be embarrassing His Majesty’s City Hall.” It took a beat before Brian recovered enough to stop looking at her. He had been holding her gaze for a full moment longer than he intended.

“His Majesty wouldn’t mind, nor would Administrator Barov.” He coughed twice. “I confess I don’t fully understand why you came with the First Army to a place like this.”

“Because only this way can you trust me,” she said, with the directness she reserved for questions that deserved an honest answer.

“I… what?”

“You have heard of the Battle of Divine Will.” Her voice remained steady. “When a battle that determines the survival of humanity begins in earnest, His Majesty will have more to attend to than he can manage alone. He will need officers to assist in commanding the army, and those officers will depend on the City Hall for logistics. When that moment comes — will you trust someone who fought alongside you, or someone who spent the war sitting at a desk?”

Brian was quiet for a moment. Then: “That is a bold thing to say aloud.”

She understood what he meant. Even a man who had come up through the city’s Patrol forces would understand that what she described could be called assistance, or could be called interference in military command — something no traditional lord would have tolerated. But the First Army had already exceeded five thousand men. The old model of knighthood-based management had broken under its own weight long ago. His Majesty’s Adviser Department existed precisely in that space between the army and the City Hall, unified under Roland’s authority, but with command authority distributed beneath him. Because she understood how Roland’s thinking ran, she could say these things aloud without flinching.

She was not asking to join the Adviser Department. She was working to extend her reach wherever reach was possible.

“If this were any other king, I wouldn’t dare,” she said. “But His Majesty is different.” She folded her hands. “And I’m the one who proposed that anyone seeking promotion in the City Hall must first see a battlefield. It seems appropriate that I set the example.”

“Has His Majesty agreed to that?”

“Not explicitly. But he didn’t object.”

Brian looked at her with new uncertainty. “Doesn’t that mean he agreed?”

“In politics,” she said, “you cannot read things so simply. Even a spoken commitment can shift before it’s written down. Silence is not approval.”

“I see.” The Gun Battalion commander exhaled. “Politics really is complicated.”

“It is.”

Beyond political positioning, she had another objective that required no justification at all: she needed to understand the witches. To know their abilities and their limits, to understand their personalities, to spend enough time alongside them that they thought of her as someone familiar rather than someone to be politely ignored. His Majesty had invested enormously in the witches, and Neverwinter’s construction depended on them in ways no one outside the inner circle yet fully grasped. If she intended to reach the position she was working toward, she would need their trust.

So far, the approach had gone smoothly. Being the same gender helped — her presence did not produce the wariness that Barov’s had.

“Are the God’s Punishment Witches the next group to come down?” she asked, changing direction.

“Yes. Margie can only carry five or six at a time, so it will take about ten trips to set up the sentry post properly.” Brian glanced around. “Where do you think we should position the second machine gun?”

“Somewhere elevated—” She began to turn toward the cave wall behind her to find the right point, and then one of the luminous plants near the rock appeared to distort. The air seemed to buckle in a small, precise way, just where it met something invisible. Everything in that zone went briefly blurred.

“What is—”

Before she could call out, the air behind one of the machine gun squads buckled again, more violently. The light from the glowing plants splintered along the edge of an invisible shape.

A quiet sound. A soldier’s head left his neck — and the smile on his face remained there, frozen, for a heartbeat longer than it should have.

“Enemy attack!” Edith shouted. “They’re invisible!”

Two more soldiers fell almost simultaneously, their chests pierced through. As the blood spread across the ground, the invisible things left red-outlined shapes in the air — rippling outlines, slightly visible now in the light.

“There is more than one!”

She processed the situation in the space of an inhale. Retreat meant fighting on two fronts. The bonfire was the only means they had of tracking the invisible creatures — leave the light and they were blind. Running was the worst option.

Offense was the only one.

She threw a dagger at the location of the first kill, then drew her sword and charged the rippling shape. The dagger was knocked aside — but the angle of deflection told her where the creature’s grip was. She drove her sword in from a different angle.

A sensation of give moved through the blade. Skin. Flesh. She had hit something.

Before she could pull back, cold air swept from another direction — moving at a speed she felt before she could see it. Years of fighting had already dropped her to the ground before her mind caught up to the decision. Something scraped the back of her head. Long strands of hair scattered around her like fallen petals.

From the ground, she called out: “Brian! Fire in my direction — now!”

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