While the sound of a magically amplified tortured scream of a well cooked Bloodcursed Emperor trying to probably stop his self-made barbecue went on above, Vic swatted aside a sword’s piercing thrust with the large shadow palm of her hand, leapt two times back, and rolled on the ground to avoid a volley of magically hyped up arrows that phased right through her without inflicting damage.

  Noooooobs. Noobs, the lots of them. The whole mass of those cultists was charging forwards as one big chaotic wave, driven by what she could at best describe as a strange mix of recklessness and bloodthirstiness. All under the agonizing screams of a cult leader that most likely deserved something way worse than being deep-fried.

  She was truly a saint for not killing his little brainwashed minions. It wasn’t her fault that they seemed to be people. Just a tiny little bit.

  “Bah bahh baaah”, Vic said, singling out that one soldier at the vanguard of the wave that’d just tried to replace Vic’s throat with his sword, pulling out her tongue at him instead, “Your attacks are useless! How does it feel to be useless? Worse, how does it feel to be a useless cultist? Get a real job! Bahhh baaaah baaaaaah!”

  The fanatic eyes of the cultist before her blew wide in anger and lost all reason. This panting guy, who didn’t happen to have any enchanted equipment, rushed forward with a burst of manic energy he got from nowhere, leaving behind any care he had for his life.

  Vic raised her arm in a panic to stop the attack of the blade. It dug in her shadow armour’s palm, but didn’t manage to pierce anywhere beyond the second layer. Damn, he managed to go through one layer. A huge win, for a normie. His sword got stuck, obviously, and he tried to keep pushing through the small dent he’d made. Clearly, his luck had run out. She just hadn’t seen him coming as she’d been thinking about something else before. She’d expected him to temporise with the others to attack together. Ughhh, this was a pain, if only she had her…

  …Her sword to parry the strikes.

  Vic’s eyes blew wide.

  Cabrón.

  Her sword! That’s what she’d forgotten about! YEAH! Right, she’d been missing her immense reach from before… that’s how she’d gotten around those goons with the flat edge of her giga magic blade. She really, really needed to get back her weapon before leaving this accursed city but… Ugh… Where was it?

  She pulled again her tongue at the guy, dislodged his sword and him by slapping his body to the side with most of her strength. He tried diverting her attack against her, but her gentle slap was far too strong with her shadow armour on. A few dark purple sparks soundlessly blew along her hand with the mighty clap of the “slap” that echoed loudly while the guy went flying sideways. Huh. The dark purple sparks were new. And very cool looking. Nice, very nice.

  The guy crashed four metres behind on two other cultists, and Vic pictured the distinct sound of a bowling strike at the back of her mind while metal pieces clanged together when armours struck each other soundly and bodies crashed down.

  Everything was fine. She could still see the first hp bar of the Bloodcursed Emperor dropping. In about thirty seconds it seemed liked the second bar would start dropping too. He was still shrilly screaming through his noise amplifying spell. What a silly goose. He was making a spectacle of his own suffering, huhuh.

  Maybe he was a little more than medium rare now.

  A small smile spread on her lips.

  She flicked her head violently backwards just in time to dodge a fireball that passed five centimetres ahead of her nose. Dang it. The mages were joining in the chaos instead of listening to whatever orders they had been following all along. Chaos was fun, except when that chaos wanted her mostly dead. And that said chaos was three metres away now. A wave of rushing bodies was imploding towards her, and it would probably not be wise not to move. Hm.

  She retreated from the mob with a healthy 180 degrees turn and an unhinged jog and a good few rolls on the ground to dodge arrows and a thrown javelin. Getting back up, she realised she was starting to get annoyed. And when she was annoyed, there was only one thing for her to do.

  “Did you know that I dodge all those attacks mostly for the sport of it?”, Vic yelled loudly to anyone who cared to listen, trashtalking, crouching down and preparing to leap up vertically to figure out where her sword was. “I don’t need to do it, really, my shadow armour is impenetrable!”, she lied with extreme prejudice, digging in the ground with her fingers. “You’re all SO weak!”, she said, before jumping up with all her strength and the Shadow armour’s support. “I’m allowing this mostly so I can feel good about myself!”, she said while flying through the air, at least four metres above the ground. “So go ahead, be amusing and amuse me! DuUH!”

  There were gritted teeth and scowls and war cries beneath her as the momentum of her jump brought itself to a halt. Time felt like it was slowing down. There were screams, but she couldn’t understand any of the impolite answers she was getting because they were all speaking at the same time. They’d madly rushed beneath her like they were just waiting for her to drop back down, slamming their bodies against each other in the mob. She saw someone get swallowed down by the mob by pure accident. Swords and spikes were pointed upwards, just waiting to skewer her. They felt like a mad raging sea to her.

  …It would be kind of annoying to dodge all of that once she landed on the ground.

  …It would be fairly easy to just… blow them all up with a plasma beam.

  But it’d kinda be… merciless. Since when did she care about the lives of cultists of all things? There were more important things in life, such as the topic of dinner for tonight.

  Vic instead focused on quickly scanning the ground to spot any shiny thin piece of metal dropped on the floor that could very much happen to be her precious sword.

  Three things happened at once. Vic only had the time to notice two of them.

  First, Vic, with a big smile on her face, recognized her adorable awaiting sword in the side of one of the holes made by the roots retreating back to the ground. Relief coursed through her.

  ‘Found you’, she thought. Thank goodness! She didn’t know where she would have been able to find a sword as great and cherished as this one.

  Secondly, as her momentum truly came to a halt, she slightly looked back towards the mob, and through her back, a vibrant, enchanted arrow that was nearly as long as a spike flew straight into her lower chest. A small gargled noise exited her throat. Vic blinked, looking down at the very tip of the head of said arrow that was poking out above her tummy. Layers of her shadow armour at her back had been pierced one by one, progressively slowing it down but failing to stop it fully. She hadn’t been focused. She hadn’t been strengthening. The head of the arrow didn’t manage to get fully out, as the layers of shadow armour on the other side had now brought it to a halt.

  And Vic, in an instant that nearly became an eternity, stared down blankly at her wounded abdomen.

  And thus, Vic failed to notice that third thing that happened.

  _

  As Vic fell down, she felt that the huge arrow was long enough to unbalance her. She was now falling on her back, having a nice view on the stormy, windy sky above her. She was falling, freefalling. Her motion had been somehow cut. A quarter of her health was gone in an instant of shock and the rest was dropping because she was bleeding out.

  [Advanced reaction time: auto-activated], the game interface blinked.

  Vic took a small breath.

  It was okay. Everything was okay.

  It was fine; only about thirty spikes and swords were waiting below her. It could be thousands of them instead. Stay positive. Improvise!

  She formed a layer of shadow armour that wrapped itself firmly around the arrow. It was immobilized. It hurt less as it moved less in place with every whim of the rushing wind.

  Her head didn’t move. Her eyes looked back and found the one that had shot the arrow. It was a huge, tall warrior that looked better equipped than the others, in full plate in an enchanted glaze, standing on top of one of the roofs about a hundred metres away. A commander of sorts. Or part of reinforcements that were just now arriving in the plaza. He was putting another arrow in his bow. All was happening in slow-motion.

  Vic gargled out one thing, she thought.

  “AzaAROSos, MALDITOS CABRONES, fUCKING FUCKERS FUCKING POROTOS-”

  It hurt. The arrowhead hurt, hurt so much, the pain pulsing out with a vengeance as soon as she moved. The dark fabric against her skin there was sticky. And warm. But cold because of the wind from her fall-

  She was falling.

  Oh.

  She was falling.

  She fell.

  She crashed.

  Vic felt the pinpricks of spikes and blades at the back of her shadow armour. Some of them somehow began digging through layers.

  And she crashed down on what was beneath and behind her.

  The arrow fully went through but snapped halfway as the ground pushed it upwards and the armoured layers of the shadow armour resisted. It excruciatingly went through her flesh and guts.

  Vic couldn’t understand what was happening. A gash appeared on her arm as a blade somehow managed to pierce all layers. Her heartbeat drummed at her temples. Pain flared through her left ankle, and all she could think of doing at the last moment was create at least five new layers over her body and ten more around her chest.

  Perhaps that saved her as she heard screams and clashing metal and confusion.

  The layers began forming around the shape of blades. They became stuck in place. The layers formed around them. She heard people screaming. One right beneath her had a hand stuck in her layers of encompassing shadow armour and couldn’t get it out.

  She didn’t have the time to think about how weird but funny looking that was.

  But she was also stuck in this position too. And everything hurt. And she wanted to curl up and cry.

  Vic raised a very slow trembling finger and scrolled through her list of spells.

  She could kill them all. She’d already stained her hands before, killed a few filthy cultists.

  …But the guard screaming because his hand was stuck no matter how much he launched himself back looked so pathetic, with his huge opened eyes, pimple-faced and gritted pleading prayers. In a sad and pathetic but very amusing way. In a human way. Others were just trying to stab down while ignoring anyone who might be crushed beneath her. Some enchanted swords made it through three to four layers.

  She made more layers.

  And yet she wasn’t safe at all. It felt like the shadow armour would shatter at any moment if she abruptly moved. She picked a spell with a slow flick of finger.

  It’d been a while since she hadn’t used that one.

  It had a long charge up time and wasn’t adequate for any fight requiring mobility, but it wasn’t like she was going anywhere from how squished she was from all sides.

  She savagely smiled as she mentally made the sequence in her mind. She was a fucking saint. Saint Vic, the all merciful. What a joke.

  She took a deep breath. She had to speak. Speaking while is slow-motion time was weird.

  It was time to lie again. Vic opened her mouth as she finished it, and screamed with all her lungs:

  “Whoop-Whoop! Guess-who-co-pied-the-gla-cier-spell-of-some-sno-bby-pries-tess?!”, she boasted with a beaming lie, articulating and speaking out the slow words that her throat could make. She had to sound so weird. “Whose-ass-going-to-get-fro-zen-li-ke-a-pop-si-cle?! AH-HA-HA-YOU-GOT-IT-RIGH-T, YO-URS!”

  Winds violently picked up just above her as she finished the spell and it blew outwards, an ice storm spreading from around Vic to everywhere else. There were screams, and panic, and people trying to run away, while others tried advancing in the opposite direction. It was a mob. It was chaos. She was in the middle of a sea of people that had currents that made no sense. People wanted in, people wanted out. She was pretty sure some soldiers didn’t even know where she was. Meanwhile her fellow pal who had his hand stuck in between layers of shadow armour started screaming as he couldn’t even choose to remove himself despite the subzero freezing blasts coming straight at him from ground zero. He was turning pale and just a little blue from the intense icy blowing winds irradiating from Vic. He couldn’t escape this, his open mouth letting out a humid pale breath whenever he breathed out. Maybe he couldn’t even realise it. Things were happening so fast for him.

  And well, that was just sad.

  Vic smiled. Time to pick up a moment to somehow escape. She let the small raging snow storm coming out from above her intensify. She made the long sequence of the same spell pop two times on her sides to amplify the effect after their respective break times. It was really less impressive that Lilyn’s glacier spell, but this was just a little scare tactic. She remained totally unaffected by the cold thanks to the layers of the shadow armour.

  She glanced at her hp bar. She was two thirds down. Mierda. Her bleeding hadn’t stopped. Her health points were slowly, but uninterruptedly dripping down. She… had gotten new injuries, even some that she knew she wasn’t aware of after she fell down.

  It was fine.

  Think better, Vic. Stay positive. No time could be wasted on spilt milk or her own spilt blood.

  Arrows might be deviated by the small snow storm she was making. But she was still a target. She needed to destroy any sort of visibility that her enemies had on her. That was how she had gotten shot, because she made herself too visible. No, worse than that, she’d made herself an ideal target that separated itself from a crowd of enemies because she thought that all the important threats had been disposed of. A mistake. She’d done a mistake. She could fix it. It was fine. She opened her mouth and made that thick, swirling hot smog rush outwards, blanketing all in dark, burning fumes. That Lilith priestess had no mana juice left. She wouldn’t be able to disperse the thick volcanic smog with a wind spell like she’d done before. Perhaps another mage would, but for now, she was taking this bet.

  The heating volcanic smog reacted weirdly with the intense cold storm, swirls of black ash and white snow intensely mixing together because of the temperature’s difference, but at least now her little stuck soldier-dude wasn’t going to die of cold, but probably drown in a puddle of ashen wet snow in a few minutes. How kind-hearted of her, truly. His lifespan had been extended from seconds to minutes. He was now trying and failing to stab down on her with a trembling hand to get himself free.

  It was fine.

  Everything was fine. It could have been worse. There was just a laceration on her left ankle and one on her arm. She knew where they were. Her lungs hadn’t been pierced. It had instead been her tummy. And her lower abdomen had always somehow been more resilient to injuries than what she’d expected of it. This was fine. It was actually perfect that she got shot around her stomach instead of the lungs. The injury was basically just a scratch. Yeah.

  [Advanced reaction time: deactivated], the game interface signalled to her, because clearly, the freaking game interface thought she couldn’t have this cheat code for a few other precious minutes.

  She began to laugh manically as pain rushed to her head so intensely that she blacked out for what had to be a second or two.

  And she laughed and laughed and laughed, painfully, sharply, because she also couldn’t stop herself from doing it.

  She abruptly pushed herself up to her knees then to her feet to the surprise of the stuck soldier, her shadow armour cringing as the extremely numerous layers were forced to superimpose themselves and shattered in resonance. She immediately kicked the paling stuck soldier on his back. She raised her hands up, defenceless once again, an arrow to the gut, and made glitters of shiny rainbow appear in her eyes for a small mana price. It was important not to show weakness. It was important to look like an undefeatable dark souls boss.

  Appearances mattered, sometimes.

  Visibility was so reduced from the coils of blanketing ashen smog than she couldn’t see farther than a few metres ahead of her.

  She was going to monologue, so by all rights, no goons should be able to interrupt her. Except no, nevermind, she changed her mind. Monologuing would just be making noise and bringing attention to herself, and she might just get killed if she did so. However, she wouldn’t die if she didn’t monologue, and she didn’t need to monologue to live, because she just wasn’t that much of an egocentric maniac. Clearly, one option outweighed the other. No monologue for now. Dramatics for later, yes-yes. She was so level-headed, yes-yes. She was fine. She was fine.

  She stared down at the guy who had been stuck at Vic’s side because of his unlucky stuck hand. He was shaking very badly and crouched up on his back on the ground. The freezing soldier was staring at her with pure dread in his eyes. Frozen. Frozen in terror. Vic looked down at him with an emotionless gaze.

  Without breaking eye contact, without any shadow armour on, she pulled her arm against herself, seized the arrow by its length, and plucked it out in one swooping move.

  Her vision faded to black for what must have been a short time, because her raised hand was now down, a slack grip holding barely onto that cursed, shiny, enchanted arrow. Being briefly in shock tended to do that. An abrupt chunk of hp had disappeared from the removal of the arrow’s tip. The feeling of ants crawling over her eyes had stopped, meaning that the shiny irises spell had broken off on its own. The pain was starting to get to her.

  It hurt. It hurt so much worse than being friendless for all middleschool. Ugh. Not a good time to joke.

  She failed to fully swallow the screech of pain, but there wasn’t anyone to notice. Except that crouched up guard, that was now looking at her oddly from his curled up position. He wasn’t moving. No threat. No threat.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  She stared at the sides and saw some other bodies of soldiers that must have failed to get out of the stampede. She wasn’t quite sure if they were alive.

  It was okay, it was alright. Not her fault. She didn’t care, anyway.

  Vic smiled all the same as she plucked out one of her two last mid grade health potions from her inventory and difficultly poured it down on her back and on her front. The liquid that dripped down was cupped and poured once more with a grunt. Half-emptied, she took the glass jar to her lips and downed it, leaving only droplets for her other injuries.

  Her hp bar was now only halved, and slowly going back up. There. Crisis adverted.

  Now, Vic, get that sword, yeet away, and never return.

  …Perhaps it would be better to give up on it.

  No. No, out of the question. No. She had still enough mana left to play around. For safety’s sake, she recast another snowstorm and spewed out some more ashen burning smog.

  She met back the stare of the freezing, sweating soldier. He was not a threat. He couldn’t even get up no matter how hard he was trying to. He was a pathetic insect that she shouldn’t care about. And thus, there was a great amount of confusion from him when she turned her back on him, sparing him. She didn’t care.

  She walked composedly towards where she’d previously spotted her discarded sword, hearing far away the roaring of thunder. Which was weird, considering that this morning, the sky had been perfectly cloudless.

  Anyway, once she had her sword back, it’d be even more of a piece of cake to keep her distance from those darned cultists.

  It was going to be okay. Everything would be fine.

  _

  Cursing a bit as her left foot ached from a previous freshly barely healed injury, she continued spamming the burning smog spell, even if keeping her mouth open to blow that burning air out was getting tiring. Really, at first, she’d loved how cool and badass anime-looking that magic trick had been, but, she might soon be getting jaw cramps if she kept going. Which she was, because she was now making sure no one could get a clear sight on her. Each torrent of smog was separated by a brief five seconds interval to make sure not to conjure up blisters on her face from the sheer heat of the spell, even with a layer of shadow armour on.

  The uneven terrain was making it really hard to walk through it. She stumbled several times, hearing projectiles and elemental spells be thrown in the thick, murky, dark air, aimlessly so. The sky rumbled again, so far away. It’d been barely minutes.

  And Vic spotted from her lucky eyes the back of a solitary soldier striding forwards, a light spell above a lone raised hand lighting the way forwards, barely managing to pierce through a few metres of the surrounding darkness.

  Ohhhh. That was a mage. A lost mage, trying to find a way out of the dark murky fog full of mysteries and one creeping teen-sized monster. Vic’s eyes lightened up. It was a mage. One of those screwy hell deserving mages. She hadn’t been seen by said mage. And for that mistake, the mage would pay.

  …Perhaps it would be wiser to walk away. But no. That would be foolish. She was going to meet guards in her smog no matter what. There was no use avoiding them. Especially one that was so… alone.

  An evil little smile spread on her lips. She could use a distraction.

  She felt around her shadow armour, and stared down at her magically conjured claws.

  …She’d been pretty good at bowling earlier on in this fight. And the still ongoing omnipresent music was hyping her up for more. Huhuh. Alright, she was doing this.

  Vic sneakily sneaked up in the twirls of fog, as light-footed as she’d learnt to be, going unseen on the side of the foolish mage who was trying to get out of the dark fogs. She walked where the mage walked, in rhythm with the steps before her. That guard had no idea she was right there, two metres away. Teehee. The thin fabric the mage held against mouth and nose and eyes mustn’t have helped. Now that she thought about it, the dark smog might be a bit hot and irritating for normal non-magically shielded people. Eh. Not at all her problem, and mostly, very much at all her fun.

  Stalking now from a metre behind the random unidentified guard for another five metres, she saw them turned to their left, looking ever so slightly back by removing the fabric held against their eyes but not so much, perhaps having heard her. The foolish, stupid mage nearly caught sight of her, but failed to do so as she rushed on their other side in time. The soldier froze all the same, perhaps having now the certainty or the intuition that they were being followed, but not wanting to know by what exactly they were being stalked by.

  That was when Vic skidded in a few seconds to the mage’s right, and uttered a little:

  “Booh”, she softly said, in the mage’s right ear, rainbow glowing irises abruptly welcoming any eyes foolish enough to stare back.

  The spine of the mage made a strange shaking motion as they raised very straight up and froze. Veins in the hand holding up their light popped up. But not a single move was made.

  Duh oh, what a bad response to imminent danger! Freezing? Really?

  In an instant, she grabbed a little awkwardly the mage by their sleeve, solidly got a grip on them, twisted, spun and threw them as far and as high as she ever could. The mage screamed from the deep end of their guts. The side of her hand was placed against her eyebrows to better see. She stared at the blurring, human shape make the dark mists part away as it disappeared far, far away. She immediately started running away from the spot where she’d thrown the mage to the skies like any random pokemon would have done with the Team Rocket at the end of every cookie-cutter episode.

  A scream trailed behind the passage of the soaring mage. What a breakthrough for the mage! Learning so soon a brand new way to fly! What a quick level up! She truly was too good for this world, a real gift for all, a blessing in wolf’s clothing.

  She had to swallow a giggle as she raced away. This had been a good mood-lifter! She was pretty sure her previous spot was going to get bombarded with all kind of strikes in any minute now though. Huhuh.

  And it was. She stared a little back while running and feeling very smooth. Of course she’d been right. Several arrows immediately shot through the twirling dark mists and missed their mark, lightened up by the passing of a few fire spells and some other shiny looking magic spells that she didn’t want to get touched by. There were still confused yells far away, beyond the heavy smog that muffled all. She didn’t linger her eyes on any of them. She preferred to look towards the sky with muffled laughter.

  Her foot kicked against a bump on the ground and she nearly crashed on the ground because of it. She swore. Then stared at what she’d kicked against. Down there, was a shiny, beautiful piece of metal and she stared and stared and stared at it.

  An abrupt rush of dopamine went straight up to her brain as she took in the sight of her lost sword. Only to fully take in the sight and realise that its length had been halved.

  Her sword… had been… melted in half.

  Her breath wasn’t getting out of her chest. The shock was pooling in her stomach. She couldn’t quite think.

  Her last two available braincells connected the dots.

  Her plasma beam fest. Her sunny self-inflicted sunburn. It… had done this.

  Fuck.

  She mindlessly remained unmoving from the sheer backlash. The abrupt joy of finding back what had once been lost simply melt before the dull realisation that said lost treasure was broken beyond repair. Of course it’d been! She’d let it go just before blasting plasma everywhere. She squeezed her eyes closed. Damn it. Damn it, damn it. She hadn’t had a choice. She opened back her eyes.

  She could see no chunks of the molten metal around her. What was beneath her eyes was it. That was what was left of her sword. The rest had been lost in the battle.

  “…I’m… sorry”, Vic numbly said.

  She dropped down to her knees, gently, delicately taking the damaged blade in her hands, and began cradling it.

  A long winded noise like a sob went right between her clenched teeth in the dark smog.

  No… No.

  She’d been meant to keep this sword till the end. She’d been meant to take care of it until she didn’t need it anymore, until she could lay it to rest because using it would be senseless and useless and out of the question.

  It was a gift. It was her first real sword. It was her sword that she’d earned rightfully.

  She raised up to her feet. Someone… someone was going to pay for this.

  Her poor sword… halved in two, her poor, only sword that had never done any wrong to anyone except… killing some creatures and some insane cultists… That beautiful shiny blade that she’d learnt to clean, sharpen and take care of, that gentle weapon who would have not harmed a fly if not for Vic’s own actions… Oh that poor baby girl… she’d never named her blade, had she ? And only now that it was gone did she realise that she should have named… her ? Oh, yeah, her botched blade was a she, Vic just knew it within her.

  Vic sighed while slowly shaking her head sideways. She was joking. She was also fully serious. Today was not a good day. Today was not a good day at all. If she had a sanity bar, it would be close to nigh zero. She breathed slowly in and out, relaxed, and opened two eyes filled with a brimming, burning determination.

  She was calm. She was brimming with rage. She could act on it all. She decided enough was enough. She was going to fuck things up all the way out of this cursed city.

  She walked away towards where the closest wall of the Plaza had been from memory.

  Meanwhile, she started doing the minigame to bring back her third most powerful spell once more back to this party: her big magic sword started incarnating itself through her broken blade when a lot of red exclamation points spread all over the wide expanse of the smogged up sky.

  What? An attack from the sky? What the hell?

  That couldn’t be from the Bloodcursed Emperor, right? Trees didn’t grow from the air upwards down. His root spells couldn’t be doing that.

  Wait.

  He’d stopped screaming. The sound amplifying spell had stopped broadcasting his screams for all to hear.

  >>Fatal danger incoming: Above<<, the game interface helpfully provided a second afterwards obnoxiously in front of her eyes. She flicked the notification away.

  Vic stared at the patterns that the exclamation points were forming. Hm. The area attack wasn’t falling everywhere at once. She stepped a good three metres away from where she’d been standing while continuing the musical sequence because an exclamation point had started flashing on and off faster and faster right above her.

  The upbeat music spreading around her dancing movements rhythmically beating along a few “Perfect combo!” “Perfect combo triad!” “Good job!” did nothing to make her feel better about all those rapidly blinking exclamation points that were not coming to an end by being replaced by an attack.

  What was up in the air anyway? Her view was blocked, so she couldn’t know. Well anyway, there was no point worrying for the inevitable, not when she had a weapon in hand.

  Her big magic sword started taking its final shape into the world, an ever thickening aura of mana warping itself outwards. Its size was reduced in size by two, just like her damaged sword was. Well daw fucking damn it, her reach was lessened.

  And abruptly, something incredibly weird happened.

  An enormous cluster of exclamation points appeared right above her while her magic construct took form, blinking on and off extremely fast, faster that all the other exclamation points splattered over the sky.

  She immediately leapt away, rolling on the ground. Barely a second afterwards, the soil behind her was struck by a torrent of ear-shattering lightning that lit up her surroundings thirty metres ahead of her, lightening up the fog. The shape of a wall between thick layers of dark smog was briefly lit up, and she turned wide-eyed as she realised how close she was to finally being out of that death trap of that damn plaza.

  She ran straight ahead with all her legs with a surge of amused desperation.

  Exclamation points appeared right ahead of her trajectory.

  Huh. Something was very wrong. Her assailant knew where she was going despite the fuming smog cloaking everything.

  She zigzagged, leaping to the left while rolling, sword held parallelly to the ground, and saw another enormous downpour of lightning hit the ground. She hadn’t leapt far enough. Some of the bolts reached her, but phased right through her because she was rolling on the ground.

  It was a very strange sensation to be in the middle of a lightning strike, see waves of dirt fly and the air tense and the ground crack and burn and yet not to even feel a single bit of pain as it went right through her. It was like being in spectator mode in minecraft.

  But seeing the results up close… She really didn’t want to get hit by one of those.

  She decided to make just in case a second roll before her assailant made another attack right afterwards. But no attack came. At the end of the roll, she smelt a very strong stench of ozone, and immediately jumped up like a distended spring with all her strength, flinging herself on the wall of the building she’d seen the shape of in the middle of the attack. Her clawed hands found the rocky wall and dug in it. She pushed against it and flung herself even higher. Her right hand caught the edge of the roof.

  Fucking finally.

  She was outta here.

  She rushed herself upward and immediately rolled on the roof. She didn’t even need to look up to the exclamation points to know. Lightning struck again, sending broken tiles flying while she did a second roll and the ground rumbled from the attack’s intensity.

  Vic began racing in zigzags on the roof, still with fuming smog at her mouth, obscuring her surroundings. The smoking layers of volcanic ash had on their own begun spreading out of the plaza, but a little help wouldn’t hurt her chances of not being targetted.

  And yet, despite the smog, the lightning strikes seemed to know where she was, somehow. Their patterns were weird. No. There was no pattern. There was only pursuit. At least the normies couldn’t target her with their unfairly enchanted weapons with all that smoke.

  That’s what she was protecting herself from. Fucking arrows.

  Vic reached the end of the huge roof’s building and leapt up to the next.

  She crashed on the next roof with a maddened scramble and immediately rolled on the ground. No lightning strike welcomed her. She got back on her feet in all haste and rushed forwards.

  She grimaced. The smog was actually obscuring the farthest roofs. It was decreasing her ability to figure out the best escape routes.

  Yet the most dangerous moment was when she was in the middle of a jump. She couldn’t roll on the ground in the middle of the air. And yet she had to in order to leave this city. Her attacker hadn’t realised this yet. If only it could last.

  Maybe she could divert the lightning strike with her magic big sword. She had no idea if that would work at all. It worked with magic spells, sometimes, but would it with a lightning strike?

  She gulped as she zigzagged to avoid yet another lightning strike that had been about to strike once more the path she’d been about to take.

  She went straight to her left and leaped up in the air as lightning struck the roof behind her.

  And Vic then saw a cluster of exclamation points right before the point where she’d land.

  She couldn’t avoid that one.

  Her hands held firmly her sword. She brought them far behind her right shoulder, trying to get as much momentum as possible, and swung her sword left as hard as possible.

  Her timing was perfect.

  The horizontal swing caught itself against stone exactly as it should have.

  Ten centimetres of the tip of her magic swirling sword dug in the structure of the roof. Her momentum swung her to the right, deviating the course of her entire body away from ground zero.

  Tiles cracked and broke as lightning struck that spot, just as her sword dislodged itself from there.

  And crackles of lightning blew everywhere. And crackles of lightning found the tip of her magic sword, that was barely fifty centimetres away from them.

  Vic swore. She refused to let go of her sword, or didn’t get the time to choose.

  She was still stuck in a spinning motion. She simply kept whirling in the air, and saw lightning be diverted by her magic sword. Because that’s what her sword did to magic spells.

  But not all was diverted.

  Her eyes widened as a remaining arc of electricity reached the handle of her sword and connected with her hand.

  Vic screamed through a spasm and crashed messily on a roof.

  Disorientated, she got up, breathed in once very calmly, breathed twice very not calmly, and slapped her cheek. The sensation made her realise that there was a metallic taste in her mouth. She could feel the way the hairs on her arms were toasted too.

  “Focus! Focus”, she screeched, glancing at every corner of the twirling dark smog, glaring at the sky, and glanced at her health points. She was down to a third of her hp bar once more.

  Her fingers were still shaking from the aftershocks. She held on tighter to the handle of her sword. She’d lost so much health despite having her shadowy armour on and having deviated the blow. This was very, very bad. This was downright too overpowered.

  She stared around, calmly breathing. Nothing was happening in the thinning fog. There were no newly appearing exclamation points to be seen anywhere.

  What was her attacker doing?

  Abruptly, an echoing, deformed voice spread from several different directions. Vic took on a defensive stance, trying to glance towards each direction the sound was coming from.

  “You cannot absorb too many spells with your sword…” the Bloodcursed Emperor, the one who had been attacking her, droned on eerily through a sound spell that made his current position impossible to know, “…as that would be too much magic for you to handle in one take.”

  Ah. Of course. The guy had felt the compulsive urge to monologue. That’s why he was stopping. Well good. Good, that allowed her to get some time to rest and get a hold of herself.

  “You have a limit”, the Bloodcursed Emperor said. “You do.”

  There was a far too insistent ominous edge to the voice. Was… was he trying to convince himself of what he was saying?

  Vic smiled bloodthirstily.

  “And what are you gonna do about it, huh??” she yelled at everywhere and nowhere in the most arrogant, stereotypical voice that some edgy punk would use against authority, “Huh??? Huhhhh????”

  Vic barely had the time to dodge as a lightning blast shot down towards her. She had rolled on the ground in time, and she immediately got back up on her feet to raise defiantly her sword towards the sky.

  “Why are you trying to cook me??” she yelled, “I don’t even taste that good, you freaky cannibal!”

  “You heretic. Rat. Bane. Pest. Blight”, he said. “I will purge you. I will purge your irreverent existence from my hallowed world.”

  Vic stared numbly at the immensely dense cluster of exclamation points superimposing themselves one over the other. It expanded over a forty metres wide ring.

  Well.

  Wasn’t that just…

  Overkill.

  That had to be extremely mana expensive, right? That was an insane amount of future lightning strikes.

  She began calmly walking away. That megalomaniac dude enjoyed his dramatics, so she was taking things slow. She just needed to seamlessly get away from this area of attack. She probably needed to monologue back in order for the guy to postpone a little bit his attack because he’d want to enjoy the verbal spar.

  But as she walked, the exclamation points began lagging and statically pulling themselves right above her, their slowly accelerating beating rhythm starting anew. The centre of the area of attack remained right above her. Vic frowned openly. This new type of attack that followed her around was going to be very annoying.

  “No, I won’t. I won’t die. And you will pay for this ?, Vic loudly said, because she was going to survive, no matter what. She spat the words, burning rage in her eyes. “Because- Well because that blade”, she said, raising her magic damaged sword higher, pointing at it with her free hand, “had a life! Had a life to look forward to… So much still to discover, and damn-screw you I loved that sword!”

  There was a beat of silence, and the rhythm of the exclamation points faltered.

  Wait, had she been that weird?

  “Pointless drivel”, the disembodied voice answered. “I’ve observed you. I know your weakness. Your spells of evasion work on a short time frame. You cannot do them in perfect succession. And for that, for your weakness, you will die.”

  Vic blinked.

  What?

  Oh.

  Well fuck.

  The exclamation points started appearing one after the other, leaving no future window of time where lightning strikes wouldn’t be blasted.

  Oh.

  …Oh.

  He’d figured it out. He was going to spam his overkill lightning spell for longer than her rolls could last. She was… No. Was she actually screwed?

  “You’re a fucking coward”, Vic spat. “You’re scared. You’re so scared of facing me directly. You’re pathetic. What a god you are. You’re so good at hiding, aren’t you? You can’t even face me.”

  “Your goading words won’t save you now, girl”, he said, voice oozing from self-satisfied malice. There was a sudden chuckle. “I see your provocations for what they truly are: the desperate outcry of a fool who thought she was so much more powerful than she actually was. And I do talk of you in the past tense on purpose, dear.”

  Well… at least she’d tried that. He wasn’t that stupid, apparently.

  Vic glared back up. She bared her teeth.

  Haughty, gritty laughter answered back.

  >>Fatal danger incoming: Above<<, the game interface very unhelpfully provided a second afterwards obnoxiously in front of her eyes.

  She flicked the notification away. This wasn’t helping. How useless.

  [Advanced reaction time: auto-activated], the game interface blinked.

  Vic blinked back. Well… that had never happened twice in a same fight before. Were things this dire? What could she do?

  She raised her sword. It looked a little bit bigger than before… But her magic sword would not be enough to divert any of that lightning, really. What a shame. She’d miscalculated on the usefulness of that spell in this fight after being so used to its great advantages in the wilderness. It’d always been her go-to spell when it came to dealing with actual pests.

  What else could she do? She wasn’t going to… die… because of her low health points, now, was she? A third of her total healthpoints was very little considering how much damage a deflected blow had done to her.

  No. No, she couldn’t die.

  Not from this.

  She wouldn’t die from not having drunk her last mid grade potion five minutes ago because she’d wanted to spare resources for later. That hadn’t been a mistake. If she got hit, that wouldn’t make a difference. She wasn’t going to die now.

  It was okay.

  What could she do?

  Running might not work. The exclamation points seemed to follow her along now. That was very, very annoying.

  She stared at the tip of her melted blade that had suffered from her sun spitting. It wouldn’t be able to divert that much lightning. Especially after having been melted by a plasma fest.

  A simple, stupid question happened in her mind then. What would happen if bullshit lightning magic met bullshit plasma beam magic?

  Ha… she could add… some dozens of layers of shadowy armour too. Combine the two together. That’d worked the previous time, and that was before she’d realised how to better stabilise the stacked layers of shadowy armour.

  It was okay.

  She smiled. At this point, that was nearly all that she had left. That, and a lot of riches and goods in her inventory. Heheh. And that wasn’t even all of it!

  She’d plenty mana left. Plenty enough for a bit of good old fashion attack spamming.

  The exclamation points above her were ticking on and off faster and faster, even despite the slow-motion effect.

  …This was going to be a battle of attrition. Dang.

  The question was, how much mana did the cult leader have left?

  She threw her sword spinning in the air. It planted itself tip down one third in the ground before her. She wouldn’t be losing sight of it this time around. Like this, it was like she wasn’t even alone when facing this.

  She tapped her hands together, threw them towards the sky, and began spamming the layers of shadowy armour that ended up enwrapping the shape of her sword too, and wasn’t that a weird feeling to have those two different spells connect together. She prepared herself mentally to throw plasma spells in a raging pulsing rhythm.

  “BRING-IT-ON, YOU-WET-FART-OF-A-CO-WARD!”, Vic loudly yelled, looking up to the skies while somehow managing to look down on them at the same time.

  Lightning struck down back in answer.