Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 929: Air Defense Battle at the Border (Part III)

Sylvie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

The Mad Demons’ first volley had done less damage this time. The Sleeping Island witches had been at work on the wall — spears deflected, trajectories strangely altered, bone that should have found flesh instead finding air. One spear had struck a heavy machine gun directly, the impact scattering metal fragments and forcing the squad to stop firing, but none of the soldiers had been fatally wounded. Nana could heal them. They only needed to hold until the battle was over.

The rhythm of it was clear to her now: the Mad Demons needed time to recover after throwing their spears, which meant they needed to hold position while their arms regrew usable tissue. The First Army didn’t need to stop. The longer the demons stayed in one place, the more bullets found them. Sylvie watched the equations resolve in real time, and she understood that the demons had already lost this particular calculation.

They seemed to understand it too. A horn sounded somewhere in the group — low, resonant, not human — and the surviving Devilbeasts wheeled and fled west at full speed. Where they had jinked and feinted approaching the wall, in retreat they flew straight, which was faster and also presented a much simpler targeting problem. The gunners on the wall were still firing. One retreating Devilbeast had a wing nearly severed — it spun out of control and fell into the Misty Forest at an angle that suggested no recovery.

When the guns fell quiet, five Devilbeasts remained in the air. Three of them still carried Mad Demons. Two were riderless.

Sylvie spoke through the Sigil of Listening, relaying the exact count and positions to the ambush team.

“Copy that.” A familiar voice, quick and bright. “I’ve got it. Watch a great explorer work!”

“Be care — ” But the sound of falling through sky had already drowned out the rest of her words. A specific sound: wind moving past a body in a very steep dive, the kind that turned the air into a physical thing.

The demons’ great advantage had always been that the attack came from above. Nobody on the ground expected downward violence — the horizon was the threat, not the clouds. But the witches were above the clouds.

Lightning was coming down from altitude at roughly a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.

At that speed, the wind had started cracking her goggles.

She’d done this before, over the King’s City. The calculation was the same: adjust horizontal position, account for drift, deliver the object in her arms to within arm’s reach of the target. The difference was that this time the object was Ashes.

It had taken some discussion to arrive at this arrangement. Ashes could fly on her own, using the Stone of Flight — but she couldn’t fight while she was actively managing the Stone. A free-floating Extraordinary in the air above a battle was not useful. The solution: Lightning carried her. Ashes kept herself neutrally buoyant through will, which meant she added almost nothing to Lightning’s load, and her body — toughened by years of Extraordinary conditioning — could absorb the airflow of a high-speed dive without injury.

They broke through the clouds and the world opened up below them — grassland, wall, the tiny figures of soldiers, and five Devilbeasts flying west at full extension.

The Devilbeasts hadn’t looked up.

Lightning released Ashes on the vector she’d calculated. Ashes drew her sword.

The demon controlling the nearest Devilbeast heard the blade arrive before it saw anything. By the time that awareness became action — arm swelling, spear forming in a desperate attempt at a parry — the blade was already there. The spear shattered. The demon came apart in two pieces. What the demon saw last, in the fraction of a second between blade-contact and darkness, was a pair of gold eyes without expression.

The other demons reacted to the sound and the aftermath. They screamed — something in their communication system — and the Devilbeasts lurched sideways, spreading out, spears raised in all directions at once. Their attention was split, looking for the source of the attack. Which was when the sound arrived from above again.

A roar. Not a Devilbeast’s roar — bigger, deeper, more resonant, the kind of sound that was part warning and part declaration.

Maggie, in her transformed shape, descended from the clouds like a cliff falling. She was vast in that form — her wingspan dwarfed the Devilbeasts below her. On her back sat a witch, clearly visible.

The demons knew she wasn’t a real Devilbeast. She was too large, and the witch riding her was too obvious. Spears. Two of them, launched simultaneously, tracking toward the giant form.

Then the giant form vanished.

A white pigeon floated in the air where something enormous had been. It tilted its head at them. “Coo.”

Nightingale was there.

The misty world was different in open air — she couldn’t move through it as freely as she could on the ground, the distorted space pulling at her with unfamiliar resistance. But what she needed wasn’t movement. She needed reach.

The first demon pulled into the misty world understood nothing of where it had gone. The space was wrong — light behaved differently, distance was unreliable, nothing had edges where edges should be. She put it down before it could orient itself, took the Devilbeast’s reins, and drove the now-riderless beast into the next one still flying beside it.

The last Mad Demon had time for two things: panic and desperation. It threw both remaining spears toward her, burning through the tissue of both arms simultaneously, half its body withering from the expenditure. The Magic Stone on her ring pulsed blue.

She turned the misty world upside down and stood on the Devilbeast’s belly while the spears sailed past where she’d been. The Devilbeast she was riding smashed into the last pair at speed.

When the misty world released them, the space was raining pieces.

Maggie — back in her enormous form — caught Nightingale as she fell. Lightning looped back and collected Ashes. They gathered above the grassland, taking stock of themselves.

“Two to one,” Nightingale said, holding up two fingers toward Ashes.

Ashes said nothing. Her expression said fine.

Lightning retrieved the Sigil of Listening from her bag. “Sylvie. Two Devilbeasts unaccounted for — can you find them?”

A pause. “Yes. Two-thousand, five-hundred meters northeast of your position.”

“I’m going after them.”

“Alone?”

“Maggie’s coming.” Lightning touched her chest once, a self-assuring gesture. “They’re just beasts — no riders.”

“No one gets away!” Maggie was already a pigeon again, planted on top of Lightning’s head, neck feathers raised with indignation.

“Watch the red mist canisters,” Nightingale said. “Don’t touch the mist itself.”

“And pull back if you spot any new enemies,” Ashes added. “Immediately.”

“Understood. Trust me.” Lightning’s thumb went up. She and Maggie were gone, banking northeast, dropping toward the grassland with the clean efficiency of something that had done this many times and fully expected to do it again.

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