Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 986: Fiery Red Lotus

Sylvie could not afford to dawdle.

She gave the witches at the rear a hasty warning, then swung her attention back to the Army of Demons massing a few miles to the north, splitting her focus between the advance and the battlements behind her.

What she saw to the north stopped her breath.

It loomed there like something that had no right to exist—neither living thing nor machine, but some wrong confluence of both. As large as a two-story building, it resembled a reptile crossed with a crab or spider, but its torso and limbs were constituted of gleaming black stone, and its movement carried a faint, telltale stiffness. While its fellow demons were being blasted to pieces under the heavy musket fire, it advanced without registering their deaths at all. It moved the way Roland’s machines moved—indifferent to the carnage around it, locked on its purpose.

But it was not a machine. Not truly.

Beneath the thick shell, Sylvie could make out wriggling living tissue, magic light threading through it along a web of intertwined veins, pulsing like something that breathed.

Parasite. The word arrived before any other. A living being nested inside a mass of stone and metal.

In that light, the Siege Beast—which had once seemed terrifying enough—suddenly appeared tame.

Fortunately, the monstrosity was not invulnerable. The First Army could injure it indirectly: a shell landing near its legs could cripple its movement. But there were too many demons packed around it, and Sylvie had been feeding firing instructions to the artillery through the long, fractured minutes of the rear assault. Each shell traveled several miles before it could reach its mark. By the time the Devilbeasts had broken through and raided the artillery emplacements, only one of the five crawling things had been stopped.

Sylvie kept her attention on the front, though it gnawed at her.

The artillery battalion had not yet realized how serious a threat they had become to the demons.

She was, in this entire war, perhaps the only person who had watched the Longsong Cannons work from beginning to end. When the demons swarmed forward, the terrain eight miles distant became a slaughterhouse. Each shell drove pillars of earth ten meters into the air, and broken limbs scattered wide. Metal shrapnel and stone fragments sliced through the enemy’s bone-and-leather armor. The thick bodies of the Mad Demons became ragdolls stuffed with metal. Dozens of corpses sprawled around each crater, their black blood blossoming into the soil beneath them.

Not every shell found its mark. But it had taken only three volleys to break their formations. The demons scattered, and even from this distance Sylvie could read the stiffness in how they ran—stress in every line of them, the shock of encountering something they had no name for.

Had the Devilbeasts not interrupted the firing, the artillery would have finished them.

Even after the team restored the cannons, their accuracy and speed were compromised. The demons had taken that gap and pushed forward. By the time Sylvie spotted the multiple magic reactions erupting at the rear, the main enemy force was two miles from the defensive line.

Now the soldiers at the front would be able to see the swarm with their naked eyes.

She signaled Shavi as planned.

“The enemies are within mortar range.”

“Got it. I’ll inform the commander.” A brief pause. “By the way—how are things at the rear? Have they not finished those flying demons yet?”

“Something unexpected happened,” Sylvie said carefully. “But I think it should be all right now.”

“If Andrea were here, we’d have finished them already, wouldn’t we?”

“Well. Perhaps.” She decided not to share what she’d seen—no reason to seed more worry. While they spoke, her eye snagged on something in the north: the four crawling monsters had stopped advancing.

They threw themselves flat to the ground.

What are they doing?

The answer came an instant later. The back shell of one monster split open and ejected a cylinder of black crystal as wide as a man, its surface slick as if it had grown from living tissue. Like the monster itself, the cylinder was threaded through with veins and blood vessels—it contracted and expanded as the magic power inside it shifted.

Then the magic cyclone within the monster began to spin. It flooded the cylinder with light.

The cylinder launched.

It whistled above the demon horde and bolted toward the Northbound Slope like a magnified arrow—enormous, silent, almost elegant.

At the same moment, the First Army’s mortars gave a tumultuous roar.

Over a hundred shells arced into the sky, tracing their parabolic curves, gravity pulling them down toward the scuttling demons below.

For one suspended instant, shells and cylinder brushed past each other in opposite trajectories. Two powers, human and demon, intersecting above a strip of open ground. Four hundred years had passed since the last time something like this had happened.

“Shavi—shield!” Sylvie shouted.

The cylinder reached the defensive line.

A flash. The crystal detonated into numberless needles, each one blue-glinting with blood, and they rained down upon the soldiers waiting in the trench below.

The battlement went utterly silent.

Agatha moved the artillery team clear of the giant Devilbeast, leaving only the anti-aircraft machine gun squad to handle the last few airborne demons. In a moment, the field was stripped down to a dozen God’s Punishment Witches and the armored Senior Demon standing among the wreckage.

The demon surveyed them coldly. Then it threw its head back and produced a long wail—raw fury, louder than the distant machine guns, louder than anything that should have come from a throat.

Its right hand rose. A flash leapt from its palm, and a crackling sword materialized from the light.

It swung at the nearest Longsong Cannon.

The iron barrel split in half. The cut surface glowed red, heated to some impossible temperature. Magic—the sword was powered by magic.

Agatha held her breath.

Zooey did not move. “So.” A thin smile. “You came down here for a worthy enemy, and instead you found mortals. That’s what’s made you so angry, isn’t it?” Her tone was almost conversational—indifferent, even faintly derisive—but her eyes were burning. “You made the greatest mistake of your life the moment you descended. If you’d stayed above, you might have lived a little longer. Now you’ll understand how furious we have been for four hundred years. Compared to ours, your rage is nothing. It is frivolous.”

Neither could understand the other’s words, but the intent crossed the gap cleanly. The demon raised the magic sword and hurled it at Zooey, and it cut through the air like a dazzling thunderbolt.

The two God’s Punishment Witches flanking Zooey stepped in. All three spread their God’s Punishment Areas simultaneously.

Something in the air distorted—a strange warping of the space around them. The sword’s blinding arc was swallowed by a fathomless darkness and vanished as though it had struck nothing at all.

The Senior Demon stood blankly gaping.

Before it could recover, the other two witches raised their large-caliber grapeshot guns.

Gunfire saturated the air. The demon raised a cloud of blue protective light, but the light sputtered and died in seconds. Even the black armor could not hold. The shots hammered it in relentless succession, and the demon’s body twisted like a rag under the impacts. When the firing finally stopped, what had been a commander of the demon host had become a ruin of pulped bone and organ.

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