Origin Witch - Marnell's Last Stand

Marnell’s boys hadn’t built a fort. They’d built a pigpen with wooden stakes. Crouched inside a shallow mud gulley two miles south of the central creek, forty men in greasy leather vests and dented iron caps were huddled around three open fire pits, roasting waterlogged rabbit carcasses over damp spruce logs. The camp smelled of wet dog, scorched hair, and stale gin. They’d hauled twenty heavy oak logs up from the riverbank to form a crude palisade, but the timber was green, dripping sap into the dirt, and the stakes weren’t even notched together at the top. They just leaned against each other like drunkards leaving a tavern at two in the morning.

High above the gulley, hanging in the gray afternoon mist forty yards off the forest floor, Corinne floated silently beside the broad trunk of a giant cedar. Her paralyzed legs drifted under the hem of her dark linen tunic, swinging a half-inch with every cold gust that spilled down from the northern ridge. Her spectacles sat snug against the bridge of her nose, the wire arms cold against her ears. Through the blue-tinted lenses, forty pale blue text boxes hovered over the camp below, tracking every man, every rusted iron spear, and every cracked wooden shield.

[Human Transfer: Marnell (Level 5)] – Status: Hostile / Syndicate Lieutenant

[Human Transfer: Outlaw Vanguard x 38] – Status: Hostile / Unarmored

Beside her neck, Steelwool was tucked inside her tunic pouch, its round gray head sticking out, its honey-colored eyes fixed on the smoke rising from the camp. It let out a soft click-click with its beak, its steel-like feathers twitching against her ribs.

Corinne didn’t reach for a crossbow. She didn’t draw her Moonstone Carver. She opened her Pouch of Preservation. Inside the spatial pouch, sitting in five reinforced leather racks, were fifty round, yellow glass throw-vials. Twenty Grade-E High-Yield Explosive Charges. Fifteen Flame Potions. Fifteen Corrosive Slowness Decoctions. It was her entire morning production run. Three hours of boiling sulfur, Fire-Bell sap, and ground wolf heart tissue inside her meteorite cauldrons.

Down in the mud gulley, Marnell was standing on a flat rock beside the central fire pit, holding a wooden mug of boiled river water. His rat-like face was flushed, his greasy ponytail hanging loose over his leather collar. He spat a mouthful of gristle into the dirt and slammed his mug against the stone.

“Keep those spears sharp, you idiots!” Marnell barked, his voice raspy from smoke. “Garrett Thorne’s boys think they own the ridge because they’ve got a few red vials from the witch. Once the storm clears completely, we’re taking the southern ford back. If any gatherer wants to cross with herbs, they pay us three pounds out of five or they get their ribs kicked in!”

A few thugs grunted in agreement, banging their iron-tipped pikes against their oak shields.

“What if the witch comes down herself, boss?” a skinny kid with a bandaged arm asked, leaning against a timber stake. “They say she blew Knife-Face into ash.”

“The witch is a cripple sitting in a tree three miles away!” Marnell spat, kicking a wet log deeper into the fire pit. “She floats. So what? You think she’s gonna fly all the way down here to fight forty men over a few handfuls of weeds? She’s a merchant. Merchants don’t fight; they count coins.”

Corinne, floating forty yards directly above his head, reached into her bag. “Right,” she whispered softly to the cold wind. “Merchants count.”

She pulled the first yellow glass vial from her belt, a High-Yield Explosive Charge. She didn’t announce her presence. She didn’t shout a warning. She leaned her torso forward, adjusted her aim by three inches to account for the gentle crosswind, and opened her fingers. The round yellow vial dropped through the gray mist. Three seconds of absolute silence.

The charge struck the fire pit dead-center and detonated in a blinding, sulfurous flash.

The explosive charge hit the central fire pit square in the middle, detonating the dry red ember bed in a blinding, sulfurous orange flash that sent burning wood splinters and hot coals flying sixty feet in every direction. The thirty-point kinetic shockwave slammed Marnell off his rock, throwing him flat onto his back six feet away in the mud. Three thugs sitting beside the fire pit were lifted straight off their feet, their oak shields shattering as the blast wave tore through their chests.

“AAAGH! MY EYES! MY EYES!”

“FIRE! IT’S A BOMB!”

“WHERE IS IT COMING FROM?!”

Panicked screams erupted through the gulley before the smoke even cleared. Men scrambled over each other, tripping over logs, dropping their spears as they tried to find cover under the crude palisade. Corinne didn’t wait for them to find cover. Her hands moved with cold, rhythmic efficiency. Drop. Drop. Drop. She released three Flame Potions in a tight triangular spread across the eastern edge of the camp where twenty men were crowding together behind the timber stakes.

An eight-hundred-degree sheet of liquid fire erupted across the mud.

An eight-hundred-degree pool of liquid orange fire erupted across the wet mud, clinging to the leather vests, the wooden stakes, and the dry grass. The volatile Fire-Bell syrup burned with an aggressive, white-hot intensity that devoured the green timber palisade in seconds, turning the stakes into roaring torches.

“SHELTER! GET TO THE CAVE!” Marnell shrieked, crawling frantically through the mud on his hands and knees, his leather jacket smoking from stray embers.

Corinne pulled two Corrosive Slowness Decoctions from her bag. She tilted her upper body forty-five degrees, glided ten yards to the left to match his crawling trajectory, and released both vials together.

Another vial landed in wet meat with a splattering rip.

The glass tubes shattered against the granite rock three feet ahead of Marnell. A thick, mustard-yellow cloud of pressurized acid mist erupted across the gulley floor, adhering instantly to the mud, the rocks, and Marnell’s boots. Marnell’s forward crawl came to an abrupt, gurgling halt. His Agility attribute plummeted by 3 Points. His arms felt like sixty-pound lead pipes, his legs twitching against the mud as if he were trying to swim through wet cement. The acidic mist ate through his leather jacket, sizzling against his skin, causing him to howl in raw, pathetic agony.

Down in the burning gulley, the thirty-eight outlaws were completely shattered. There was no battle. There was no line of pikes. There were no tower shields. It was an aerial carpet-bombing run against forty unarmored men trapped in a dirt trench with no anti-air weaponry.

Corinne drifted through the high branches, her white dress fluttering in the smoke-heavy air, her hands casually pulling vial after vial from her spatial pouch. She dropped explosive charges on the heavy wooden racks, flame potions on the supply tents, and slowness decoctions into the narrow exit paths where thugs were trying to scramble up the steep mud banks.

Explosion after explosion tore through the gulley – fire, then splintering timber, then the rush of superheated air.

The gulley turned into an inferno of orange fire, yellow acid smoke, and shattered timber. For six minutes, the forest echoed with the terrifying, continuous roar of alchemical explosions. When Corinne finally stopped, her spatial bag was thirty vials lighter. She hovered thirty feet above the burning gulley, her spectacles reflecting the bright orange fire below.

The camp was gone. The green timber palisade had been reduced to smoking black charcoal. The three fire pits were cratered, filled with melted iron spears and charred leather. Of the forty men who had been roasting rabbit an hour ago, less than ten were still conscious, crawling blindly through the mud away from the heat, their clothes scorched, their weapons abandoned.

Marnell lay flat on his belly near the southern rock wall, his right arm pinned beneath a heavy, burning oak beam that had fallen from the windbreak. His face was covered in soot, his leather jacket burned away, his rat-like eyes wide with pure, unadulterated terror as he stared up into the gray mist. Through the yellow smoke, he saw her. A white-dressed figure hanging weightlessly in the air thirty feet above his head, her dead legs dangling limply beneath her tunic, her black frames glinting coldly under the orange firelight.

“You…” Marnell wheezed, blood trickling from his nostrils as the acid fumes burned his lungs. “The… the witch…”

Corinne didn’t drop another bomb. She didn’t draw her crystal knife. She simply hovered there in the quiet air, her hands resting calmly on her lap, looking down at him through her lenses as if she were inspecting a broken test tube on her workbench.

“Tell Garrett Thorne that the southern gulley is clean,” she said softly to the cold wind. Her voice didn’t carry anger. It didn’t carry triumph. It was just flat, raspy, and entirely practical.

For one breath she registered it without flinching. The line was crossed now, and she could not walk back from it. The woman who had spent her days counting logs and weighing coin against copper was gone, burned out of the gulley along with Marnell’s palisade, and something else hung in her place. Not triumph. Not guilt. Just the cold, flat knowledge that the merchant was dead and the witch had done the killing.

She turned her floating body toward the nearest cedar, settled onto a high, bare branch, and pulled the empty leather vial rack from her pouch onto her lap. Thirty depleted tubes, still warm from the fire below. She counted them once, by feel, the numbers flat and final, then tucked the rack away and let her eyes return to the burning gulley until the last of the smoke thinned into the gray afternoon.

A seam of wet grit had worked its way into the frayed cuff of Corinne’s gray tunic, but she didn’t stop to pick at it. She hovered three inches above the dirt floor inside the subterranean basement ruins beneath Aldous Thane’s old estate, two miles west of the Spire. The air down here was stagnant, heavy with the smell of wet limestone, ancient rot, and the sharp, copper-like tang of dormant mana.

Beside her, Steelwool sat perched on a fallen oak beam, its big amber eyes tracking her every move as she ran her fingers over the smooth stone wall at the rear of the cellar. Her Spectacles of Discernment were glowing with bright, golden diagnostic lines:

[Structure: Arch-Alchemist Thane’s Inner Sanctum Vault] [Security Array: Grade-C Nodal Lock] [Requirement for Entry: Lore Rating > 100 OR Origin Alchemy Alignment]

Corinne adjusted the wire frames against her nose. Because she had spent her nights reading Advanced Transmutation & Element Fusion, her Lore attribute sat comfortably at 112. She reached out, her right index finger touching a small, triangular depression carved into the center of the granite wall.

Channel. A faint, honey-colored line of mana flowed from her tip into the stone.

CLICK-CLACK.

The heavy granite wall didn’t slide open smoothly. It shuddered, ancient gears grinding against accumulated dirt, before dropping three inches into the floor and sliding back to reveal a dark, narrow corridor six feet high. A wave of dry, preserved air rushed out of the vault, smelling of old vellum, dried dragon-root, dried lavender, and turpentine.

Corinne drifted through the narrow stone opening, her white tunic dress floating inches above the dust. The inner vault was small, less than fifteen square meters in size, built from thick blocks of polished black basalt that hadn’t let a single drop of groundwater seep through in decades. In the center of the room sat a solid stone desk, and resting flat on its surface was an iron-bound book the size of an encyclopedia. Beside the book lay a small glass cylinder containing a thick, glowing silver fluid that moved in lazy, viscous swirls without any heat applied to it.

Corinne drifted over to the desk, her heart beating with a quiet, steady thud against her ribs. She reached out, her gloved fingers touching the dark pigskin cover of the heavy book. The title was hand-carved into the leather in ancient, flowing runes: The Ledger of the Origin Witch.

She opened the first page. The handwriting wasn’t chicken-scratch like Thane’s early notes. It was precise, elegant, carved with a steady hand that had spent decades drawing high-tier transmutation arrays:

To whoever inherits this vault:

If you are reading this, the world of Kaelum has broken again, and the World-Wills have summoned new souls to feed the shattered land. Know this: Alchemy is not the art of boiling plants in iron pots. It is not the craft of making gold for foolish kings. Alchemy is the fundamental rewrite of reality.

Centuries ago, before the grand collapse, there lived a master known as the Origin Witch. She did not cast fireballs from her palms, nor did she summon storms with silver wands. She mapped the molecular arrays of the cosmos. She unlocked the secret of Essence Transmutation, the ability to convert raw atmospheric ether directly into physical matter without needing raw herbs or mineral ores. She forged the laws that govern Kaelum’s current magic system. She built the first Ward Engines. She forged the star-iron cauldrons. And when she vanished into the central citadel, she left behind the core truth:

Mana is matter. Matter is mana. Master the array, and the world is your workshop.

Corinne stared at the dry parchment pages, her thumb tracing the elegant black ink lines. Origin Witch. The phrase wasn’t just a title in a system announcement. It was an ancient lineage, a path of craft that bypassed the standard spell-scrolls and combat talents given out by the World-Wills, relying entirely on the systematic, scientific mastery of transmutation arrays.

She flipped to the middle of the book. On page seventy-four, a detailed schematic caught her eye. It showed an anatomical diagram of a human spine, specifically the L3 and L4 lumbar vertebrae. Surrounding the bone drawing were complex, three-dimensional array formulas detailing the chemical structure of a high-tier elixir:

[Blueprint: Nerve-Restoration Fluid (Grade-C)] [Primary Catalyst: 1x Grade-D Drake’s Spinal Marrow] [Secondary Catalyst: 1x Pure Water Element Essence] [Stabilizer: 10g Ground Dragon-Root Powder] [Effect: Permanently repairs severed or crushed human nervous tissue. Restores motor function to paralyzed lower extremities.]

Corinne’s fingers closed so tight around the edge of the parchment that the dry paper creaked. Her breath hitched in her throat. Permanently repairs crushed nervous tissue. Not a temporary levitation spell. Not an E-rank floating trick that dropped her into the mud the second the atmospheric magic turned volatile. A complete, permanent cure for her legs.

She stared at the blueprint for three long minutes, her eyes scanning every line, every weight, every array node. She needed a Grade-D Drake’s Spinal Marrow. A Drake. A flying, armored Grade-D beast that lived in the uncharted canopy of the deep northern swamps.

Corinne closed the heavy pigskin book, pulled out her spatial bag, and carefully slid the Ledger of the Origin Witch inside, right beside her glass jar containing the silver-fluid cylinder. She turned her floating torso around, looking back at the dark, basalt-lined vault.

“A Drake,” she whispered softly to the quiet dust, her voice raspy, cold, and filled with an absolute, unshakeable focus.

Steelwool hopped onto her shoulder, its steel feathers rustling against her tunic as it let out a low click-click. Corinne adjusted her spectacles, pushed off the smooth stone desk, and floated out of the subterranean vault into the bright afternoon sun, heading straight back to The Spire to prepare her cauldrons for war.

— Origin Witch —