Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 812: Segmentation

Nightingale had been right.

Most of the hybrid demonic beasts could not locate her. They clambered at the cliff face in the wrong directions, lunged at empty air, crashed into stone. The flying creatures were worse — they swooped with terrifying speed but missed her consistently, their trajectories reading to her as arrows loosed at guesswork, every one gone wide. As long as she kept moving, they could not box her in.

The only beasts that could find her were the mutated ones with sickle-shaped forelegs.

These moved differently. They drove their reinforced legs into the rock face and locked there, using it as a second floor, and they converged on the dome in response to the monster’s command. They were not chasing her blindly — they were cutting off her approach.

She would have to clear them before she could reach the thing above.

The dome of the cave became her private battlefield. It had been a long time since she’d fought alone.

She remembered how it felt before — roaming Silver City under her own power, walking in the Mist for survival, serving the wicked branch of her family until Wendy had found her. That had been loneliness of a particular kind, the kind that sharpened into hatred at the edges.

This was nothing like that.

She was alone by choice. No threat had put her here, no compulsion. The faith filling her now was clean, uncomplicated: she was protecting her companions.

She wasn’t alone at all, she realized. Soraya’s protective suit was on her body. Agatha’s explosives rode on her back. And at her hip, engraved with the words To Veronica, hung the pistol Roland had made.

Everyone was with her. She just happened to be the one moving.

The sickle beasts converged. Sixteen of them. She counted.

She drew the pistol, released the safety, and waited until the nearest was within a few paces. Then she stepped out of the Mist and pulled the trigger.

The beast lunged at the same instant.

Its powerful tail and locked legs launched it like a spring-loaded trap — the strike was nearly simultaneous with her shot, predator and projectile meeting in the space between them. The bullet drove home. But even as the beast dropped, the shockwave reached her.

She had anticipated it.

The moment the shot left the muzzle she re-entered the Mist, stepping onto a borderline that happened to be receding — from outside, it would have looked as though she’d leapt several meters backward in an eyeblink. In the Mist, it was the ground itself pulling away beneath her.

The bullet burst the sickle beast’s pointed skull. Shell and viscera scattered outward like a flower opening. The magic glow dimmed and the invisible body reappeared as it fell — and here, in the Mist’s inverted geometry, it fell upward, sinking toward what appeared to be the vault of the subterranean lake above.

She used the same technique again and again. The changing borderlines of the Mist were both tool and terrain: she could use them to sidestep the beasts’ momentum, lure them into the regions of the cave that the earlier battle had pocked with hundreds of impact craters — footing that made it difficult for their leg-spikes to find purchase.

But the tactic had limits.

Each shot required her to step briefly into the ordinary world, and each time she did, more beasts registered her position. The flying creatures adjusted. Instead of diving blindly as before, they began hovering low against the dome, patient and waiting. When she fired and re-entered the Mist, they dodged — and then she had to relocate entirely before firing again, spending precious time and magic power on the borderline maneuver to avoid their next pass.

Seven minutes in, she was wounded.

She had not found a clean angle of retreat after one exchange. Two flying beasts caught her between them, and their claws opened a long cut from her flank to her waist — tearing through Soraya’s coated suit but not through her entirely, the coating absorbing what would otherwise have gutted her. What it could not absorb was the force. The pain nearly stopped her breathing. She had to hold still for a time she couldn’t afford.

She thought about the monster above her — the Multi-eyed Demon, clearly, or some variant of it, marshalling these hybrids that would otherwise fight each other on instinct. Something about its presence made them cooperate. It was hiding down here in the Great Snow Mountain when it could have turned these forces against Neverwinter, and that was a question she’d let Roland answer later.

For now she had work to finish.

Ten bullets. Ten dead or neutralized beasts — eight by direct impact, two more driven off the cliff face during the chaos and into the underground current below, which she doubted they’d survive. Four sickle monsters left.

No time to reload.

She tucked the pistol back and moved.

When a cluster of hybrid beasts surged at her, she didn’t dodge. She leapt over the nearest one, landed on its back, and pulled — dragging it sideways, into the Mist.

The beast’s world changed instantly: color gone, gravity strange, everything in black and white and somehow tilted. It froze.

Nightingale’s magic power ran from her fingertips and the next beast to collide with the first was drawn in too, and then the next. As the count inside the Mist grew, the drain on her power accelerated, pushing toward the edge of what she could sustain. The misty world began to destabilize — the clean geometric lines that formed its structure curling, flexing, coming loose from their usual order.

She had been waiting for exactly this.

One of the dome’s constituting lines — a long curving white thread of the Mist’s architecture — peeled away and came whipping toward the cluster of trapped beasts.

When it swept through them, they froze mid-motion.

A fraction of a second later, something impossible materialized above the underground lake: a gap, a blank in the air, as though a section of space had simply been removed. The beasts reappeared — but in two pieces. Lower halves where they had stood. Upper halves, several meters distant, drifting in the dark air as if a single enormous blade had bisected every one of them simultaneously and translocated the cut edges apart.

They hung there for a few seconds.

Then they rained into the lake, raising columns of water that caught the faint glimmer from above.

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