Origin Witch - Settling the Traitor
Corinne’s thumb throbbed under its strip of linen, a small souvenir from a pot rim that had clipped her knuckle during the midnight marathon. She bit into a thick slice of dry toasted bread and scrolled the Magic Desk feed with her free hand.
Midday light in Sector 666 during an Ether Tide looked like bruised plum juice poured over wet slate. Corinne sat slouched against the oak wall of her ground-floor workshop, her bare legs draped uselessly over the edge of her straw mattress. She had spent twenty minutes scrubbing her face with cold Anseic spring water, but a thin gray shadow of soot still clung to her jawline and eyebrows.
Beside her knee, Steelwool was tearing into a bowl of raw rabbit liver, its beak making sharp snip-snap sounds that echoed through the quiet room.
The public [Regional Chat] feed was moving with an erratic, stuttering rhythm that told its own story. The population counter at the top of the display had taken a sickening plunge.
Sector 666 Population: 3,812 / 10,000.
Over six thousand people dead in thirty-six hours. More than half the sector had been wiped off the map. The weaker shelters, the Tier-1 huts built from thin pine boards and unreinforced dirt, had collapsed under the violent atmospheric pressure, leaving their occupants exposed to the raw, dissolving tide-ether.
Corinne scrolled up through the chat log, her black frames reflecting the wall of white text. Most of the recent posts weren’t about wood or wolves anymore. They were about one single name.
[Lin Feng]: SUN-TAE YOU BASTARD! OPEN THE INNER GATE! OUR SKIN IS PEELING OFF!
[Wu Gang]: HE LOCKED US OUT! HE TOOK OUR WOOD AND LOCKED THE HEAVY OAK DOORS FROM THE INSIDE!
[Zhao Dulai]: There are two hundred of us standing in the mud outside his ridge walls… the purple light is burning through our clothes… please… someone help us…
[Unknown User 4412]: Sun-Tae! We gave you everything! I gave you my thirty iron nails and my sister’s blanket! YOU PROMISED US SAFETY!
[Sun-Tae]: My dear brothers and sisters. Please try to understand the mathematical reality of our situation. Our central Ward Engine can only sustain a maximum load of fifty individuals for the full seventy-two hours of the tide. Admitting two hundred more people would drain our energy reserves in less than four hours, resulting in the death of everyone inside.
[Sun-Tae]: Your material contributions have ensured the survival of the chosen fifty who will carry the flame of our Heavenly Peace Sanctuary forward. Your sacrifices are noble, holy, and necessary. Your names will be carved into our foundation stone once the storm clears.
[Zhao Dulai]: NOBLE?! SACRIFICE?! YOU SCAMMED US YOU SOCIOPATHIC PIECE OF SHIT! MY HANDS ARE DISSOLVING! MY EYES ARE GONE!
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Zhao Dulai’ has died. Cause: Ether-Sickness / Cellular Dissolution.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Lin Feng’ has died. Cause: Ether-Sickness / Cellular Dissolution.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Wu Gang’ has died. Cause: Ether-Sickness / Cellular Dissolution.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Unknown User 4412’ has died…
A streak of thirty red system death alerts flooded the screen within ninety seconds, ending the thread in absolute, suffocating silence.
Two hundred people. They had dragged their remaining wood, stone, and iron across three miles of storm-ravaged forest, believing the Saint who had promised them a shared sanctuary, only to have their materials taken through a wall chute before the heavy oak gates were dropped in their faces. They had died in the purple mud outside Sun-Tae’s walls, their skin dissolving while Sun-Tae and his fifty inner-circle lieutenants sat inside a warm, fully-fueled Tier-3 fortress, sipping clean water and reading the chat.
Corinne chewed her dry bread, her face blank behind her glasses. She had seen guys like Sun-Tae before. Back in Sector 9, before her parents died, there was a local street preacher who ran a community shelter out of a basement on 4th Street. He took everyone’s food stamps, took their winter coats, and locked the steel doors from the inside the moment the city turned off the steam pipes during the ’18 freeze.
Different world. Same rats.
She tapped Sun-Tae’s profile picture, a clean-shaven man in his late thirties wearing a spotless white linen shirt and a pious, soft smile.
Corinne didn’t post a message on the public board. She didn’t call him a murderer, and she didn’t join the thirty remaining outcasts who were cursing his name in the chatroom. She opened the administrative control panel of Corinne’s Store and added Sun-Tae’s name to her master blacklist. Then she added his second-in-command. Then his three squad captains. Then every single one of the fifty chosen survivors registered under the Heavenly Peace Sanctuary’s internal shelter roster.
System Notification: 55 primary targets permanently blacklisted from Corinne’s Store. Access Denied: Target accounts are blocked from purchasing potions, trading raw materials, or accessing public alchemical guides.
No health potions. No mana potions. No anti-fire elixirs. No slowness decoctions. Not now. Not after the tide ended. Not ever.
She closed the administrative window and opened her private channel with Jasper Finch.
[Jasper Finch]: You saw the South Ridge massacre?
[Corinne]: I saw.
[Jasper Finch]: Sun-Tae is sitting on two hundred thousand units of stolen wood and stone now. His Ward Engine is fully charged for the rest of the tide. But he’s a dead man walking the moment the barrier drops on Day Twenty-Three.
[Corinne]: Who’s going to kill him?
[Jasper Finch]: Everyone who survived. Garrett Thorne’s war-band has already pledged three hundred iron bolts to the siege. Marnell’s southern squad is bringing four heavy battering rams. Even Elodie is sitting on the northern ridge right now, cleaning her crossbow scope.
[Corinne]: Good. Tell Thorne if he brings me Sun-Tae’s head, I’ll give his war-band ten cases of Grade-E Health Potions for free.
[Jasper Finch]: You really hate that guy, don’t you?
[Corinne]: I don’t hate him, Finch. I just don’t like competitors who give my industry a bad name. Scamming people out of raw wood is cheap. Real business requires a product that actually works.
Jasper let out a dry, short chuckle through the text thread.
[Jasper Finch]: Fair enough. By the way, our potion supply lines held up through the night. Garrett’s three fortresses are fully stable. Piper Bell’s cabin is sitting at ninety percent ward energy. My core haulers are safe.
[Jasper Finch]: Sector 666 has been stripped down to its bare bones, Corinne. The weak, the gullible, and the slow are dead. The three thousand people left standing are the hardest, most ruthless bastards in the forest.
[Corinne]: That makes marketing easier. Hard bastards know the value of a good potion.
She closed the messaging window. She pulled herself up using the Magic Desk’s wooden edge, her upper body drifting six inches off the floor as Zephyr Float engaged once more. Her dead legs hung beneath her tunic, swaying as she floated over to her workbench.
On the table sat the three-inch crystal blade of her Moonstone Carver, its transparent edge glinting under the amber lantern light. Beside it lay five freshly washed Bitter-Grass roots and three pounds of dried Yellow-Tail petals sent over by Piper Bell’s morning trade.
Outside the round glass window, the purple lightning of the Ether Tide was still flashing across the dark sky, casting long, jagged shadows across the giant oaks of Sector 666.
Corinne picked up her iron mortar, dropped the dry roots inside, and raised the pestle. She had two days of storm left to ride out, and her cauldrons weren’t going to boil themselves.
A dry, hacking cough caught in Corinne’s throat before she cleared the top step of the heartwood staircase. It smelled like copper filings, damp soot, and the bitter, turpentine tang of boiled Yellow-Tail paste. She spat a glob of gray phlegm into a scrap bucket by the door frame, wiped her chin with the ragged sleeve of her gray linen tunic, and let her torso drift two inches above the wooden floorboards.
Outside the glass balcony doors on the third floor, the sky held no sunrise. It held a bruise. Purple lightning, thick as pine trunks and silent as grease, rolled across the swollen bellies of the clouds, washing the Spire’s interior in a cold, flickering lavender that made every oak grain on the wall look like a twisted vein.
Down on the Magic Desk, the regional chat feed was a bloodbath. It wasn’t just scrolling anymore. It was a frantic, jumping wall of text where names vanished every six seconds as their owners’ shelters collapsed under the raw pressure of the tide. Over six thousand outcasts were gone, dead in the mud, dissolved into purple foam, or crushed inside their own pine-plank lean-tos when their ten-thousand-point Ward Engines ran dry.
Corinne drifted over to her worktable, her bare, lifeless feet trailing lightly through a pile of dry granite dust. She reached into her Pouch of Preservation, pulled out her spectacles, and unfolded the thin, dark wire arms. The glass lenses settled onto her nose with a tiny metallic click, framing the desk screen in pale blue diagnostic lines.
Her private inbox had ninety-nine plus unread notifications.
[Private Message from: New-Year-Joy]
[Private Message from: Mark_North]
[Private Message from: Unknown User 8812]
[Private Message from: Sarah_P]
[Private Message from: James_B_09]
She opened the first one.
[Scout-Tze of Sector 665]: Mercer. We watched your green banner from the northern treeline. Our forward probe counted four hundred starving outcasts circling Sun-Tae’s gate. They’ll break through the moment the tide lifts. We want first right to buy the Flame Potions that melt his oak. Name your wood price.
[New-Year-Joy]: We don’t care about his cult. We care that his stolen timber could’ve built our own ward. Sell us the melt-pots and we’ll gut him for you, then split the haul. Reply before the purple lightning dies.
Corinne stared at the text. Sister Corinne. She remembered this guy. Yesterday morning, when she put her first batch of Grade-E health potions on the market at a hundred basic units per vial, he was the loudest voice on the regional feed. He had called her a greedy witch. He had called her a sociopathic parasite who was extracting blood money from dying people. He had typed three separate paragraphs calling for a sector-wide boycott to force her to hand out free medicine.
And now, with his skin blistering under the violet storm outside Sun-Tae’s closed oak gates, he was talking about her mother’s heart. A small, raspy chuckle rattled in her chest, a cold, empty sound that didn’t reach her eyes.
“Mother’s heart,” she whispered to the empty room. “Right.”
She didn’t reply. She didn’t type an insult. She didn’t demand an apology. She tapped the profile settings icon beside his name, pulled down the administrative menu, and clicked [Permanent Blacklist].
A red prompt flashed over his text thread: User ‘New-Year-Joy’ has been added to the master blocklist. All store transactions, private messaging, and public guide access revoked permanently.
She opened the next thread.
[Mark_North]: Hey, Corinne. Look, I know I posted on the main chat saying your potions were overpriced yesterday. But we’re all Earth transfers here. We have to stick together against the system. I have forty pounds of raw iron ore sitting in my storage. Give me three health vials and five mana vials right now, and I’ll tell my squad to stop calling you a scammer on the boards.
Click. [Permanent Blacklist].
She opened the third.
[Sarah_P]: Please… my little brother is coughing up black blood. He drank creek water two days ago. Sun-Tae took our timber and locked us out. I don’t have wood left to trade, but I have a silver locket from Earth. It’s real silver. My grandmother gave it to me. Please, I’m begging you on my knees, just one health potion…
She set the ledger aside. They had never once harmed her directly. She was erasing them because leaving them breathing was just another Mickey Callahan waiting to happen. Not industry. Not reputation. Simple math: a threat unburied grows teeth.
Corinne’s thumb hovered over the red button for three seconds. The locket meant nothing in Kaelum. Silver wasn’t an alchemical base material in Grade-E brewing. It was just soft metal that couldn’t hold a mana charge without melting. The brother was already dying of high-density ether poison. She knew the symptoms from Thane’s notes. Without a specialized, high-tier cleansing elixir that required Grade-D dragon-root, a basic health potion would only delay his lung failure by twenty minutes while burning through fifty points of her own hard-won ward energy.
Her aunt had used that same tone five years ago in the hospital hallway.
“Corinne, sweetie, we have to think about the family’s future. The insurance company is being so difficult, and your uncle needs to keep his truck running for work. You don’t need all that cash sitting in a trust account while you’re in a bed, do you?”
They had taken the check. They had bought a brand-new Ford F-150, paid off their mortgage in suburban Ohio, and then stopped picking up the hospital’s phone calls when the orderly moved her down to the basement storage ward. People didn’t change because the sky turned purple. They just dropped the polite paint when the temperature fell below freezing.
Click. [Permanent Blacklist].
She went through the list with a cold, mechanical rhythm. Every outcast who had participated in New-Year-Joy’s boycott campaign yesterday. Every gang lieutenant who had sent her threats about Mickey Callahan’s fifty boys. Every net-beggar who had posted about community obligation while sitting on their hands during the protection week. Click. Click. Click.
Fifty. Eighty. One hundred and twenty.
By the time her thumb stopped moving, she had locked over three hundred people out of her store network. They couldn’t buy her red health vials. They couldn’t buy her turquoise mana vials. They couldn’t read her published herb identification guides. They were cut off from the only functioning liquid medical supply in Sector 666.
Ping. A private message notification popped up from a name that wasn’t on her blocklist.
[Jasper Finch]: I see your store blocklist count just spiked by three hundred. The southern regional feed is screaming about ‘The Witch’s Cleansing.’
[Corinne]: They’re noisy.
[Jasper Finch]: Sun-Tae’s stronghold is officially surrounded by four hundred dying outcasts. They’re trying to chop through his outer oak gates with copper hatchets, but his Ward Engine is holding at ninety percent because he has all their stolen timber. He’s sitting inside laughing at them.
[Corinne]: He won’t laugh when the tide ends on Day Twenty-Three.
[Jasper Finch]: No, he won’t. Garrett Thorne’s war-band just moved fifty heavy iron pikes to the southern ridge. The second the purple lightning stops and the outdoor spell stability returns to normal, Thorne is going to tear Sun-Tae’s fortress down to the dirt.
[Corinne]: Is Thorne’s ward holding?
[Jasper Finch]: His three stone fortresses are rock-solid. He’s burning the iron kegs of mana you sent over midnight. His men have enough energy to ride out the next forty-eight hours comfortably.
[Jasper Finch]: What about your inventory? Do you need more raw herbs for the evening run?
Corinne looked at the rear floor of her first-floor workshop. The hundred industrial iron cauldrons she’d run through the night were empty now, washed clean with Anseic water from her stone well. Her storage racks held twenty full iron kegs of pure Grade-E Mana Potion and fifteen kegs of Grade-E Health Potion.
[Corinne]: I have enough stock to supply Thorne, Piper, and your core haulers through the end of the tide. Tell your men to stay inside their shelters. I’m not running the hundred pots again tonight.
[Jasper Finch]: Good. Get some rest, Corinne. A dead banker doesn’t pay dividends.
She closed the desk interface. The Spire was quiet now, save for the low, rhythmic hum of her Tier-3 Ward Engine pulsing against the northern wall of her third-floor bedroom.
Energy: 28,400 / 30,000.
The barrier was stable. Her water tank was full. Her bird was asleep in its wool scarf nest. Corinne drifted up the wooden staircase to her second-floor laboratory, her weightless body floating smoothly through the warm, pine-scented air. She picked up a small iron file from her workbench and began slowly, methodically sharpening the split tip of her gardening trowel, listening to the dry, rasping sound of metal against steel while the purple storm howled against her glass balcony doors outside.
— Origin Witch —