Wek knew her way around a maul.

She’d been using a sledgehammer for years as a construction worker before she went into the Service, and there she’d learned how to move in armor and use many other things—axes, picks, saws, and a cookpot, mostly. As someone with experience building things she’d been placed in an engineering unit, but she’d taken every opportunity to train in how to fight.

That was, after all, why she’d joined the Service. To fight, to kill, to glory in combat. To feast metaphysically upon the mana of her righteously destroyed enemies, and also, she supposed, to defend the civilians of Jejuna against bandits, monsters, and invaders.

She’d done… a fair bit of that in the three years she’d been hanging around the Halls, taking odd jobs here and there, working either solo or with rogues. She hadn’t been a good fit for any of the established teams, since they tended to be more interested in a shieldbearer than in a hammerer, but she’d made her way in the world regardless and kept healthy while she worked on getting wealthy.

Because that was also part of the plan. A piece of muscle could make a stone or two with a quick in-town job that didn’t have all that much risk, working through the Hall. Sure, she might only do one or two a week some seasons, but when someone got enough gear and capability to run the real work, she was looking at pulling in ten, twenty, maybe fifty stone each job on a team for a couple of days’ work.

A woman like Wek figures that she can do that kind of work for a little while, and she starts looking at pocketing away a crypt or two sooner rather than later, before the trickle of damage that’s left behind after healing starts slowing her down and making her take a support role. And with a crypt or two in her pockets, she can write her own ticket—a nice house, magic to do all the tedious shit, someone to do the cooking, pretty boys and girls in her bed who’re saving their own stone or two a week to try to be who Wek wants to be.

So by the time she met Nathan, Wek had been swinging a big hammer of one sort or another since she was old enough to heft one, a couple of decades all in all.

And Wek, therefore, knew her way around a maul.

The first elemental-spawn tried to swim its way through the wall and just slammed into it. She smirked at the sound, but then her smirk turned into a frown as there failed to be any additional impacts.

“This is not good,” she snapped. “They’re smart enough not to make the same mistake twice.”

“Confirmed,” Nathan said, and that was all.

Well, she thought to herself, guess I’m doing all the dirty work, then.

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Planting her feet on the cobbles of the road, she swept her stance into Open The Halls. It was the obvious choice, building up a spinning momentum in her maul to while away the time until the elementals showed their non-faces—but she hated it, hated the way that it left her open to attack. Still, she followed her training and committed to it, starting to spin her maul above her head with her feet planted wide.

It was Luna Orbits The World, the opening move of one of the more basic maul sequences. She fed her power into the concept, letting it fall into the lines and traceries of the series of actions which thousands of people before her had done thousands of times, and her maul accelerated in its spin as the burn diminished in her muscles.

And then the first of the elementals popped out of the ground inches away from her teammate.

“YOU DIDN’T WARD THE FUCKING FLOOR!” Wek shrieked as she brought the maul around, sweeping the spinning arc to smash into the thing’s torso. “GET ON THE ROAD!”

The elemental was six feet tall and plated with obsidian, opening a maw in its otherwise featureless head that had three nightmares’ worth of serrated teeth which seemed to go all the way down into infinity, and her maul blasted through it and shattered its core. It dissolved into a rain of mud amidst an explosively spreading cone of dirt, and the next elemental rose in exactly the same place and absorbed the mud and a fair amount of the dirt.

Wek didn’t hesitate. She body-checked Nathan out of the way, sending him sprawling onto the cobblestone of the road. It was a perfectly judged shoulder-slam, leaving him with probably only bruises and getting him as close to exactly in the center as she could. In the meantime, she brought her maul down in front of her body as its haft intercepted the strike that would have pulverized Nathan’s chest.

She grunted as she flooded the haft of her hammer with power, feet bringing her stance to Ready To Accept Critique as her hands moved through Statue Intercepts Judgment. The transition out of Luna Sequence into halfway through Devotions robbed her of most of her sequence’s strength, but there was enough to take the blow awkwardly on the haft without it snapping.

Then she was backpedaling in a perfect Consequences Deferred as her maul came back up and around. The elemental thrust a spear-hand out of its torso at her, extending out and out as she grew the distance, and she brought her lower hand snapping outwards as she used it as a fulcrum to thrust the spike topping her maul-haft into and through the elemental’s hand—Cleanliness, That Sweeper.

She twisted to bring the weapon around in a full circle, letting the weight of it spin her around as her feet pivoted with her in a not-quite-perfect Well, If It Isn’t The Consequences Of My Actions. And then she brought the hammer down diagonally through the elemental’s body in her best effort at the out-of-order finishing move of the Devotions sequence, Interruptions.

The core cracked, but to her severe annoyance, it didn’t break. Still, she’d completed enough of both sequences to make do—she stepped forward and grabbed the core out of the reforming, mostly pulverized body of the elemental, breathing in the dust and grit and grime and knowing that she was a dead woman if she didn’t get the next thing perfectly right.

Her body lined up with her hands in the concrete, perfect ideal of Got You, Fucker, she put every bit of power she could muster into gripping and twisting just as the elemental speared through her torso in more places than she could count.

SHATTER, she commanded the core.

And she felt the world shift around her as a new sequence began to form