I sat there looking at her in utter fucking bewilderment.

It had been a long… LONG fucking day so far. It was not the longest I’ve had, but a long day was still a long day. And here I sat, with a beautiful woman, who could not or would not move, in a fucking war zone. It sounded like a bad joke, but the real joke was how she thought she could do magic. Or quite possibly me. Maybe I was the joke, and I didn’t know it, but I somehow didn’t think so.

She was on something; she had to be to call herself a magical girl.

You couldn’t write this kind of shit.

I looked at the bombshell of a woman because she was fucking unbelievably good-looking for a humanoid and tapped her head to check if it was empty. I didn’t get a noise like a gong, so she had something.

“What, hey. Stop it!” she whined.

“Just checking that you have something in there,” I muttered, “Because I’m not a magical girl, because magic doesn’t exist.”

She looked at me, shocked, as if I had just told her the emperor had no pants.

“Of course, there’s magic. What do you think we can do? Because to me, it’s fairly obvious is magic.” She told me, “And just because you don’t believe me isn’t a reason to wack me on the side of the head.”

“I didn’t wack you; that was a tap,” I told her, “And magic doesn’t exist. You know what, why am I the one arguing this? You have an oracle in your head, you should know better.”

She pouted at me childishly, puffing up her cheeks in a way that made her lips stand out. The idea of asking her if she was single passed through my head, but I quickly bludgeoned my hindbrain into submission because now was not the fucking time for that.

“I argue with him all the time, but he’s a big meanie. If you don’t think we have magic, then how can you explain our hair? Have you seen your hair? Cream orange on one side, brown on the other? If it's anything like mine, it's not just half and half; it moves to be closer to our head. How do you explain that? It's obviously magic.”

I shuddered at the reminder that I was in this body, but it was only momentary.

“Now is not the time,” I muttered, checking my gear over once, which got me to wince as the line of scorched skin brushed my coat.

“OOH OOH! You hurt,” she said, which got me to focus back on her, my eyes dipping down for a moment, and I hoped she didn’t notice. She noticed.

“What about it? It’s not that bad, it’ll heal, it just takes some time.”

There was a hit of a smug look as she noticed the glance, and it intensified as I spoke. She haltingly raised her hand to her mouth in a weird gesture. My weird peacekeeper instincts whispered that she was hiding some of her joy at my gaze. The weirdo. I noticed the ring on her fingers again, their six-sided nature telling me that they were artifacts. One of them looked familiar, but I focused back on her as she spoke.

“Ha Ha Ha, did my beauty entice you? Either way, eyes up here,” she said before she rotated something out from inside her palm.

It had an orange cap and had a shape like a carpenter’s pencil, though only an inch or so long. It was rectangular and slightly ovoid in profile and had a tiny script on the side I couldn’t read.

“If you’re hurt, I have something that can help.”

I looked at her and winced a little.

I wasn’t one for scorning people for drug use. I smoked and drank, and there wasn’t much of a difference when it came down to it. But whatever she was on, it was something wild. She had claimed it was a combat med, some kind of healing in a tube, but if she was anything to go by, it was probably mind-altering. I checked her vibrant pink eyes, but I saw no crazy dilation. It could help, but it might also fuck with my head.

“Hold on one second,” I told her and turned to the side before asking, “Can that help me?”

“It could, though I would personally like to check it before use, though it's hard to do that without injecting yourself at the moment,” Lilly, bless her, said, “It could also just be a stimulant or something else. I doubt it’s harmful if that’s what you were thinking. There’s no way it could be with me here, but it could also be totally ineffective on you. If it's just a stimulant, I can give you some; your body makes it on its own, and if it's something else, that’s up to you.”

“What is it?” I asked, “Is it some of the combat medication you took? Or is it just a stimulant?”

Her smugness deepened, and a grin appeared on her silly face. “It’s medicine, not a stimulant. We might have better respiration, but it's practically mundane. This takes advantage of the unique biology we have. It’s currently fixing my muscles, but it can fix other stuff too. Not my best work, but it’s cheap.”

I looked at the tiny pen and thought it through for a few moments before I reached out and took the meds. I put it in a pocket, along with my ammunition. If that got hit, I was toast, so it was effectively the safest place for the ammo-sized ampule of healing.

“Thanks, I’ll keep it in case I get hurt,” I told her.

“But… But you are hurt,” she pointed out.

“Not that badly,” I told her, “It’s not serious, but if this can help me if I get seriously hurt, I’ll hold onto it.”

She grabbed at me for a moment, like a fish out of water, “Wu, wah? Well, if you're just going to take it in case you get hurt, then you might as well take some more. Let's see…”

She reached into her cleavage, which was incredibly distracting, and pulled out five more of them.

“Here are a few more, you know… Just in case,” she said, proffering all five out to me.

I looked at them, then at her. Then back down at the five of them.

“Your giving me all of your meds?”

She snorted, “Um, no. Are you dumb? I told you, they are cheap to make; I have like twenty more on me. One won’t stop something big, so I always carry a bunch in case I get a deep wound. I’m too good-looking to die choking on my own blood, you know?”

“Now that’s more like it,” I told her, nodding my head, “Maybe you do have some brain bouncing around in that head of yours.”

“Hey! I could say the same about you, little miss fight in melee without warform!” she nearly shouted, muffled by the tempest of carnage on the other side of the barricade as a round of the lunatics’ thundering lances went off.

I raised an eyebrow, “I… don’t see how that matters.” I told her, unwilling to tell her about not having access to my warform.

“Having armour for skin and the ability to run through a wall makes a teensy bit of a difference,” she told me chidingly, “Now, either take these, or I’m going to put them back in my pocket.”

I took them quickly, her tone brooked no argument, and stashing them along with the first, returning to continue the conversation when I was wet with a face full of cleavage.

It was incredibly distracting, and once again, it made my head spin out hard enough to put it in contraction, even if only for a few seconds.

This was not the time for thinking about a random woman's bountiful bosom. YOU HEAR THAT HIND BRAIN! NOT THE TIME TO THINK ABOUT IT! I needed to work on myself if every time I met an attractive person, my first thought was, ‘Hey… maybe I should sleep with them.’

It had happened before on the Tsarta and… And…

One of the wires in my head crossed over another in the right way, and I was reminded of how Mindy, a pleasurer, was able to hijack my hindbrain and make me need multiple cold showers and some extra private time to get over just being near her. About how she was a diplomat for a man who acted like a cartoon villain, a cartoon villain that could have totally used her services anywhere they went. Even while in transit.

And here was a woman who was doing something similar. Similar vibe, similar intrusive thoughts, similar to an effect that would be used in diplomacy by a legionnaire currently in the form that was supposed to be used for diplomacy.

My heart quickened, veins restricting as my mind changed from possible friend to possible foe fast enough to give most people whiplash. I started to replay everything she had done at double speed, checking for possible signs of betrayal. I kept myself loose, but I made sure a holster was within reach.

I spoke calmly and even, “Hey, are you messing with my mind? Amping up your sex appeal? I don’t want to sound crass, but it's distracting.”

She perked up, “Yeah, but how could you tell? It shouldn’t work on you unless… Ohhh… You don’t have everything online… That would make sense. Yeah, I do. Sorry about that, I use it to stun people. Lemme just… There we go, it's off now.”

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

It was a bucket of cold water. One moment, she was the kind of woman who could make people's heads spin while their eyes popped out, and the next moment, she kind of faded.

Nothing changed, she didn’t suddenly become ugly, but the stupidly powerful aura she gave off, whatever pheromone bullshit that made her sex appeal skyrocket, dissipated. She was still gorgeous, still buxom and still pink, but I could see her properly, and it was like putting on a pair of glasses.

I relaxed my hand from the holster as my hindbrain sagged and started to focus on the fighting and the death around me. It encroached back in as if I had been in a bubble that held the worst of it back. You could only do one at a time properly, and my mind whirled, changing gears from one of the four F’s of survival to another. The chill of the change soaked deep down and let my brain get to how to get the fuck out of there.

I breathed a sigh of relief, “Thank you,” I told her automatically, my stupid mouth giving me the runaround, “How are your wounds? Because we need to get out of here before one of the sides stops acting like gentlemen and starts using explosives.”

“They wouldn’t use explosives… That would be unnecessarily destructive,” she said, waving it off.

I looked at her in actual fucking shock at just how dumb she sounded.

“Dear Sol and all his archangels… You are aware that these guys are terrorists and have already used bombs… right?” I asked her, jabbing a finger toward the three dead men, “They are a literal black-clad group of terrorists… You do realize that, right?”

She had a sudden look of horror.

“No… I thought they were protesters.”

“Protesters?” I asked her, almost shouting. “What? Fucking what? What kind of fucking protests do you get here?”

Her face changed into a shit-eating grin, her eyes getting a flinty look I did not expect her to have with the innocence I had come to expect in the short minutes I had known her.

“The kind where ten thousand people die and a quarter of the prefecture ends up on fire,” she told me before murmuring, “I remember the last, I had to kill six men all on my own.”

“Fuck me, when was that?” I asked her, shocked.

“Hmm? When I was ten.”

I looked at the bubbly, carefree, quite possibly high woman before me and noticed something in her eyes.

“Your fucking with me, aren’t you?”

“No way. What makes you think I would yank your chain like that? I totally killed six armed, fully grown men as a ten-year-old,” she told me with enough sarcasm in her voice to bludgeon the most socially inept into comprehension.

“Fucking… You know what, if you’ve recovered enough to mess with me, you’re recovered enough to help get us out of here.”

“Ehh… Sure, I think I can walk now. But what makes you think I can help? How are we going to get out? My sword could fly… but I mean, it's going to need a little more than a buff.”

“Well, for one, you know your way around here better than I do-”

“And what makes you think I know my way around here?” she asked lightning quick, “Just because I’m from the prefecture? Because most people don’t come to the voidrome you know.”

The speed of it was a little shocking, but I slipped out automatically, “That might be true, and I don’t mean to assume, but an assumption is not necessary because you were flying around as well; you should have been able to see the area.”

The explanation was both not entirely true and also far better than what I would have said if it hadn’t kicked in. I counted my blessings for not sticking my foot in my mouth. Noted, she didn’t like people assuming stuff about her.

She looked at me, and her face ran through a series of micro-expressions so minor it was damn hard to follow along at all, and it ended up leaving me more confused than not confused.

“So? Do you know your way around?”

She sighed, “perhaps,” like it was a great burden and then, at my glare, pointed.

I peeked out of cover to check the direction she was pointing and found only twenty fighting men and a machine gun nest between us and escape.

I turned back to her and asked, “Any chance you can use that war form you talked about to cut through a fuck load of guys?”

“Eww, no. I look ugly in war form, and I don’t have enough energy to transform, even if I did. I used all of my juice.”

I looked at her, staring, my hands vibrating a little as I held back the urge to gently take her neck in my hands and suffocate her. She was so casual. So flippant. As if being in the middle of a warzone and getting shot at was just Tuesday.

This was a Tuesday for me, and I was taking it more fucking seriously than she was.

“You used up all of your energy… and didn’t enter your warform… because you think your ugly in warform?” I asked her, my voice strained.

“What? I get in fights all the time, and I’m way better at range anyway. I have nothing that gives me any bonus to fight up close.”

“You have a sword! IT’S A SWORD!” I shouted at her, gesturing at the fucking sword that was impaled into the ground.

“Hey! Don’t yell at me. It’s a sword, but I can’t use that thing. All I can do with it is ride it. It’s a sword-shaped flying… thingy!”

I didn’t know what about her was more infuriating, her lassie fair look at everything. The fact that, at least by reading between the lines, she had run out of energy mid-air and crash-landed because of it. Or how she seemed peachy and implacable about being shot at, which both impressed me and made me question her sanity.

I was only a little disappointed that she wasn’t manipulating me, because that would make more sense. At least I didn’t need to shoot her; she was too dumb and adorable to put lead-in. I wouldn’t lie that she had a charm about her, her personality was the kind that made me want to reach out and pat her on the head, which was really weird considering how adult she was.

It was also infuriating, enough so that I wanted to throttle her at the same time. How she managed to do that, I would never know.

I moved quickly, getting up and grabbing the sword hilt and pulled, grunting with effort as my comparably noodly arms struggled to keep up with my legs, but I inched it out with some effort, wrenching it back and forth like a lever before it slid out of the stoney floor. My eyes whisked around, checking for incoming fire, for people pointing weapons, but it didn’t come.

Everyone was just… looking away.

I felt a tingle, but I couldn’t tell from where. Probably nerves.

I took my unlikely luck as I hefted the blade out of the ground and ducked back down.

She was staring.

“What? If you're not going to use it, I sure as hell will. These idiots have no armour, and I don’t want to fight like a fucking barbarian.”

“And using a sword is any better?” She asked, obviously not convinced.

“Yes.” I told her with finality, “Now are we heading that-a-way? Or are you going to fuss some more and hold us here where we're bound to get slammed at some point?”

A look of calculation filtered through her face, whatever faculties the woman had at the moment overclocked. She nodded, and I reached over with a hand.

“up on your feet then,” I told her, “Get your magic laser hands ready if you can use them.”

“My particle rings are as ready as they’ll ever be,” she told me, nodding.

I didn’t know what those could do, but I didn’t have time to ask. Quickly, I made sure that everything I had was secure, including one of the fresher guns, which, by some miracle, could click to the battery pack instead of needing its own holster.

Once ready, I counted down.

“On one. Three… Two… One,” I said and pulled myself up and over the piece of cover, the sword trailing with me as I started my sprint to the next cluster of rubble.

The blade was heavy and long, far too heavy and long to properly wield. The thing was longer than I was tall, broader than both my forearms put together and heavier than I was. It didn’t even have a grip that was designed for two hands, though it could be held that way, the grip wide enough for both hands.

I hefted it up to one shoulder, taking the weight with that as I got to the rubble and made my way up and into a nest of black-clad death squad mooks. Each of them were dotted near one another in a curve around the inside of the rubble.

All seven of them.

As I came up to the cusp of it, their crouching forms came into view, and we became aware of one another. One of them spotted me, but instead of going for him and crossing the group, I went for those with their back to me.

Two of them were close to one another, too close. I knew with a little work, a blade this long could hit both of them if I used it right. And it was all because of whatever force held me down that was absent in the concourse of the voidrome.

Gravity, or whatever it was, acted as I expected it to on a planet out here, and I was going to use it.

I got over the rubble and dropped down in line with them, both hands gripping the blade before I used the weight of the blade instead of the muscles in my arm as the main force, gravity, as strange as it was here, gave it heft as I used my force sparingly to guide its edge with fatal precision.

It didn’t have the edge I was used to, but it had more than enough mass to slit bone in two and leave one man a corpse in a moment and the other a casualty for life, what little time he had left as a double amputee with a broken ribcage.

The thunk of impact was harsh, glittering in my hands like a million pins and needles of light as it jittered to a stop, and the force travelled up my arms. It was enough force to hurt my bone, but I held on.

I move around, freeing the blade from its gorey sheath with a spin, and as I spun it free, I turn and stepped forward. Forward and into range of the next man. I hurled it into him, some seven feet from the first group, the blade carving through his body like a cleaver through a porkchop. The blade slammed into the rubble, clicking into the rubble where it stuck.

I tried to pull it out, but life didn’t care that I wanted it out when the physics didn’t agree. I could feel some give, but not enough to remove it from its housing freely.

I turned my eyes and took in the remaining four. Goons, just in time for the one who had spotted me before my first swing to squeeze off a shot. A blot of light hit me near the second he pulled the trigger, though I managed to angle myself away enough in the moment before the trigger clicked to clear the shot from my vitals. Instead, it burnt through my coat and into the metal breastplate I wore. It skirted off, a glancing blow. Part of it ripped through the back of my coat and into the skyline harmlessly, while the rest of it left my breastplate a delaminated ashy grey.

I didn’t have enough time to pull the sword out, but I could let go. The barrel of the goon swivelled, and I managed to let go in time for the second shot to clip my left forearm, the shot skirting less than an inch from my skin and burning as it passed.

I winced and shoved my hand down for my holster as the man clicked the trigger again, dead center on my chest.

It pinged out a red cylinder at his face as he tried to fire.

The tingle I felt left, my dumb luck or fate or whatever it was saving the day once, though I had the feeling it wasn’t going to save me a second time. Or a third, or a fourth, or a fifth, which would be necessary as the remaining mooks turned to me, their guns not miraculously heated enough to force them to reload whatever the blue capsules were.

I my handgun wouldn’t clear the holster fast enough.

I knew it. I had enough experience to know it in all of its detail, too. I was about to get clapped hard.

The first man levelled his gun, and I got ready to dive into a roll to try and clear the first set of shots, only for a noise to reach my ears.

A very tiny shriek of air, so high pitched I could barely hear it, as it whistled a foot past my head. It was a streak of pink light that moved so fast it was a line. It had a horrible feel as it passed, the feeling making my skin itch across my whole body. In truth it was a spec. Not a laser, but a simple particle the size of a grain of sand, flying through the air so fast it looked like a line of light from how it glowed as it passed, energetic and hatefull. It did not feel like something the world contained. A speck god did not welcome into creation, but man in its hubris had.

It hit one of the gunmen in the head, and his head exploded, cartoonishly blowing out into red gunk, bits of bone turned to shrapnel that sprayed around him, causing the closest gunman to flinch as they tore into him.

I flinched, the other gunmen flinched, and my newest companion, in all her empty-headed glory, charged in with a winded battle cry of, “Why... Are you so fast?”

I could have groaned. I could have done a whole lot of things. What I did was pull my gun free from my sheath and fan all of my remaining shots off in the direction of the three remaining gunmen.

“I’m not fast, your just top heavy, lets clean them up.”