Rewrite That Witch
CH845 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 845: Eye of the Branch Nest

“It hurts!”

“It hurts enormously!”

“I cannot bear it!”

The monster beat its tentacles against the seawater. The “blades” and “feet” sheltering inside its body trembled — animals that had learned the shape of its rage and flinched from it.

Pain was not unfamiliar. From the moment of birth through its life as an Eye of the Branch Nest, the monster had endured injuries, annexations, evolutions, and losses beyond counting. All of it had sharpened its senses, opened it to more of the world’s magic. These were the necessary cost of growth.

But this was not about the pain.

It was about something else. Something the monster could not name — and when it reached toward the accumulated knowledge of every creature it had ever absorbed, trying to match the feeling to something recorded, it found that the search was unnecessary. The feeling required no reference. It lived in the instincts of nearly every species the monster had ever encountered, common as breathing, impossible to eradicate.

Fear.

A feeling the monster had never experienced until now.

The unfamiliarity bewildered it, and bewilderment became anger almost immediately.

“Kill her!”

“How dare she — a speck of a creature — break into my body and challenge me with that pathetic sliver of magic? One day I will tear her apart and mount her skull the way the red mist insects do with their prey.”

But neither the anger nor the fear was a productive response, and the monster recognized this even in its distress. It had never before felt the need to examine such things. It had never been frightened of pain, and defeat had never unsettled it more than briefly. What unsettled it now went deeper.

Evolution had always been enough. Always been the only thing. Evolution was the species lifting itself above the animal — survival was mere self-interest, small and individual. The monster had never confused the two.

Something was wrong with its body.

Thinking clearly about the question cost it, for its head was still swimming — the hot flames had devoured a third of its mass and left a concussive fog behind. It needed time. Time to regenerate, time to find the answer.

The monster suppressed the fear, the anger, and the unsettling cluster of smaller feelings it had no language for, and sank into the deep water.

More than ten days passed before it crept out of hiding.

The losses from the battle were extensive, but these things did not concern the monster greatly. Whatever was destroyed would grow back. Right now, hunger was the more immediate problem.

In the stillness of recovery, it had also worked through the questions that had baffled it. Several conclusions had emerged.

First: it had lost many of the pheromones it had gathered from various creatures over the years. Pheromones were how evolution moved through a group — every eye of the branch nest collected them, passed them to the central nest, and received refined instructions in return. Losing them was a real setback. The blast had caused it to lose control of its body; some of the specialized brain-tissue that stored pheromones had burst and could not be repaired. Even if the tissue regenerated, the pheromones themselves were gone — like water squeezed from a sponge and scattered. Repairing the vessel did not restore what had been in it.

Not catastrophic, the monster told itself. Creatures exist in abundance. I can recollect. And I retained the red mist multi-eyed insect — the most important piece. The total loss is acceptable.

Second: it had lost the connection to the central nest.

This was harder to accept.

Since birth, that connection had been a constant — a sensation as natural as pressure in the water. Through it the monster had always sensed the central nest regardless of distance, had always felt the flow of the group’s shared mind. Through it, collected pheromones were delivered and evolution instructions received.

Now there was nothing.

The monster had been too occupied by its wounds to notice the silence at first. But once its mind cleared enough to attempt pheromone delivery, it had reached through the water and found only stillness. No voice from the central nest. No tide of shared purpose. Nothing at all.

At first it wondered whether the problem lay in its own incomplete recovery. Then it remembered: any individual separated from the central nest retained the connection until death. It was not something that simply failed. The monster examined itself closely and found the answer — part of one of its brain segments had fused with the red mist multi-eyed insect rather than absorbing it. Two materials joined along a seam neither could dissolve.

The insect must have made one final struggle during my weakest moment.

The monster felt both fear and anger at the realization, then suppressed them and tried to think.

By any objective measure, what the insect had accomplished was limited. The monster had absorbed the insect’s eyes and could now use them — could “see” through them, watching the primal creatures of this region as they moved and looked back at it from a strange new angle. But the merged fragment had disrupted something deeper.

The connection to the central nest was blocked not by injury but by blending. The insect’s nature had woven into the monster’s in a way that introduced incompatible signals — incompatible feelings. The fear, the anger, the other small things that had no name yet. These were not the monster’s own.

They were the insect’s.

Under these circumstances, the correct course was clear. Return to Zenith Sea. Report to the Mother of the Nest. Surrender itself for annexation — the only reliable method by which the group could preserve all that the monster had learned, every pheromone, every evolutionary direction, without losing it to isolation.

The monster understood this. Evolution above survival — a foundational understanding that every individual in the group shared.

And yet.

It hesitated.

In the last dozen days it had thought more than it had in the previous hundred years combined. Fighting, annexing, collecting, growing — these had been pure instinct. It had not examined them. Now something in it examined everything, and found itself reluctant to stop.

Moreover: the restrictions on pheromone use no longer applied. Every step of evolution had always been a collective decision, filtered through the central nest’s analysis, distributed carefully to ensure the whole group moved together. But the connection was gone now. There was no central nest to report to, no analysis to wait for, no constraint on which pheromones the monster could use.

During recovery, it had accidentally applied a pheromone from a creature with a remarkable self-healing ability. The wound that should have taken months had closed in less than a fortnight. And that was not the only change. Looking at itself now, the monster recognized that it was no longer a standard nest eye. Something had shifted.

Its “foot” hauled prey efficiently — the aquatic creatures of the region, the things the insects called fish. The “blades” took off their heads cleanly, and the smell drew more. The feeding was easy. Quick.

As the monster watched the fish swarm stupidly toward the scent of their dead, it felt something it could not categorize — a thought that moved sideways from the observation, connecting to itself in an unexpected way.

It had developed fear. And with fear, it no longer wanted to go back to Zenith Sea. It did not want to be absorbed, not because it disagreed with the logic but because, for the first time, it did not want to disappear. The insect’s feelings had taken root. Survival, which it had once dismissed as a small and selfish thing, had begun to seem important in a way the monster could not argue away.

The anger was still there as well. She — the tiny insect, the speck — had done this. The anger had not faded; it only waited.

More, the monster thought, and the thought surprised it. It had never wanted more before. Every nest eye had done its assigned portion. More or less had not been categories that mattered.

But they mattered now.

Evolution remained the path. The difference was that this time, everything the monster gathered and everything it became would belong to nothing larger than itself. No group. No central nest. No mother.

Only this. Only the creature it was becoming.

It engulfed another mass of fish and turned its attention to what came next.

It had never been so impatient before.

Discussion

Suggest a change