Chapter 251

“Ahh!”

After the crisp shatter of glass, a cloud of smoke mixed with fine black sand spread out and swallowed the two Ladies of the Wood nearest the Witcher.

Whispess and Brewess.

The two let out startled, frightened shrieks and tried to turn into crows and flee, but their bodies flickered unstably, and blue arcs crackled over their folds of fat. The anti-magic metal bomb had created a brief void of magic, cutting off their spellwork.

Realizing things had gone wrong, the Ladies of the Wood withdrew at once. The boy Karl ran the other way, while the five Witchers gave chase, swifter and more agile by far, flashing over the ground like lightning. In a single bound they surrounded the broad-bellied Brewess.

In the next instant, under the blazing sun, five lithe figures ringed a mountain of flesh. Amid the tearing hiss of air, cold sword-light and flashes of magic engulfed the old hag.

She looked like one of those weighted dolls that could never fall, hacked from front and back and both flanks at once, her body trapped in endless stiffness.

In mere seconds she took at least twenty strikes. Against an ordinary monster, even a Higher Vampire, that would have turned it into a pincushion and left it grievously wounded.

But Brewess was far tougher than the Witchers had imagined.

The drab gray garment she wore, and the fish-basket-like cage over her head, had more defensive strength than plate armor, protecting every vital place on her body.

And beyond that, the slabs of diseased, blotched flesh hanging off her folds were a natural armor of their own.

When a silver sword struck those hunks of meat, it felt like a cudgel hitting a cowhide water bag. The fluid fat within quivered and shed the force of the blow aside.

With both protections working together, even a Witcher’s silver sword lost its sharpness, leaving only shallow wounds across her body, no deeper than the skin.

No blood ran from them. Instead, a pale transparent fluid seeped out, as though the blade had pierced not living flesh, but a walking corpse.

Luckily, the Relict oil on the silver swords still worked to fine effect, burning Brewess until she wailed without pause and could not strike back at all.

With a little more time, the Three Hags would have become Two.

But Brewess’s sisters would not allow it.

Weavess, who had stayed behind, finished her Incantation. As her hunched claw pointed into the air, a thread-end flew from the sleeve of her blood-stained garment, growing in the wind from the thickness of a hair into a stout rope. It snaked across the air and lashed out toward the Witchers.

Roy felt a gust at the back of his head. He lightly pivoted on the balls of his feet, turned his blade, and cut diagonally from front to back, slicing the rope into two pieces.

Yet the severed rope writhed like an eel cut in half, still springing and thrashing, harrying the Witchers to either side.

The rhythm of the Witchers’ assault was broken.

Brewess gained a brief moment to breathe, and then, before the Witchers’ stunned eyes, she stamped those crude feet of hers, each more than fifty yards wide, upon the earth, and her immense, bloated body somehow launched itself high into the air before crashing down like a meteor.

Boom.

The earth shook. Dust billowed up in a mushroom-like cloud. Centered on Brewess, a violent burst of air threw the Witchers outward by brute force.