While her design was being sent to the capital and they awaited her amour’s delivery she was wearing a spare set from a female knight who’d recently died. The soldiers brought her up to the actual front lines once she’d made enough minor adjustments to make sure the armour was firmly in place as she moved about in it.
When she arrived, she began doing some stretches and mimicking her master who seemed to check his range of motion when she’d first made him clothes. Similarly, she got a feel for what she would and wouldn’t be able to do as she moved.
Once they arrived at the front, they saw crude portable walls had been constructed to defend themselves from enemy arrows. Once they’d gotten to a relatively safe position the highly decorated man began summarizing the briefing he gave earlier.
“As you can see as much as it pains me to admit it the knife-eared scourge is great when it comes to long-distance combat. We can’t get near because they’ll concentrate fire and whoever charges will be stuck in a rain of bullets.”
“So, get me a tower shield.”
“They’re very accurate if you charge in with a tower shield, they’ll aim for your ankles.”
“So, I’ll break theirs.”
“How much real battle experience do you even have?”
“I ate a bear and crushed a couple of bugs on my way home.”
The man’s eye twitched as he heard her explanation.
“They don’t have anyone who can fight at close range right?”
“Not that we have seen.”
“Then if I can get close to them, they won’t be able to shoot anymore. Besides, I’ve deflected things faster than arrows before.”
From her position languidly reclining against the crude wall, she sprang up and rushed out into enemy fire. Though walls of arrows rained down she sidestepped the wall of arrows entirely causing a confused shout to be raised on both sides.
As the frightened sounds of enemy archers hurriedly knocking back new arrows began, she covered half the distance, and the enemy fire became focused on her giving her startled allies a chance to advance the walls forward.
When the fastest archer in their ranks was about to let fly his arrow at the fast-approaching girl she poured her magic into her weapon intentionally strongly to blast a thick pillar of fire from the blade momentarily startling the archers and causing them to miss.
Once she’d closed the distance, she began massacring the enemy soldiers, everyone who aimed for her was killed, and everyone who threw down their arms and surrendered was incapacitated. The enemy soldiers left a group of about 100 hundred and retreated their main forces back into their nearby camps to switch to a defensive battle instead of an offensive one.
Ten of the enemy soldiers left behind survived. All women none seemed to want to be there. She quickly bound them with torn clothes from dead soldiers and brought them back as prisoners of war. There were all of three arrows sticking out of the gaps in her armour when she brought back her prisoners.
“How’s this for actual combat experience?”
She asked the dumbfounded astonished military commander. After the fight, the human army gained a few weapons a fair supply of arrows and a couple hundred meters of ground. The elves seemed too afraid to leave their camp and simply hid while keeping snipers around their perimeter.
That evening when the rest of the soldiers were celebrating the victory they had in battle, drinking, and partying the military commander was talking her ear off.
“You’re just as reckless as the previous hero, charging straight into battle and not waiting for an actual plan.”
“I did have a plan.”
“And what plan was that? Why didn’t you tell us your plan before charging in?”
“The plan was to scare them so I could have enough time to take the artefact back to master and he can fix it.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“That’s not a plan that’s an idea. A plan is carefully thought out not just thrown out at the last second.”
She turned away and drank her mead. Her prisoners were awake stripped of their armour and weapons down to the clothes they wore under their armour and in proper chains and shackles huddled up scared and mumbling incoherently in the corner of their barracks. As He screamed and complained in one ear and out the other. She ended up hearing the words she wanted to hear.
“I’m taking you out of the fight until you learn to listen to orders.”
“I know how to listen to orders it’s just that your order was stupid. Do you want your gun fixed or not?”
He began glaring at her but soon relented and handed the gun he was wearing over to her. She also took her prisoners with her, all eleven of them. She reasoned to the commander that her master was so ancient perhaps he could understand what they were trying to say… that or she could use them as emergency rations along the way.
He laughed at her joke though she didn’t appear to be joking and nervously gave her leave to repair the weapon. After she left, they noticed the paranoia of the elves in their campsite increase. They began firing off shots at anything that moved outside their walls and tension seemed to rise whenever someone moved a torch behind their walls.
For over two weeks the elves were too afraid to move from their impromptu fortifications. In that time, the army began surrounding their camp and attacking food deliveries to their settlement. During that time Mia had returned to the cave and was astonished to see who greeted her.
“Did you break the sword already? Or did you just want to bring me these lovely gifts?”
“Gifts? … No, a friend of the previous hero told me his artefact was broken and wanted to get it fixed… Archive why are you talking like master?”
She handed over the gun and the woman at the entrance ushered them in. as Mia said the body was the one, she formerly saw Archive in, but the mannerisms and speech were closer to her master; that, and the walls weren’t echoing her every word.
She wore short denim shorts a black lace bra and an open white flowing jacket, with a slit up the middle of the back, that went down as far as the backs of her knees. And over her shoulder was slung the halberd. The sleeves were overly long and wide. Moreover, her irises were a different colour.
“No, it’s me your master. I have the ability to take over other people’s bodies provided the body has no soul; Archive was borrowing one of my extras because it would be difficult to explain her existence otherwise to a girl with very limited knowledge of… well… this”
Her arms spread wide, and she gestured to the long metal hallways that surrounded her. The elves began speaking amongst themselves in elvish angrily. To which the girl responded in kind.
“What did she say?”
“She said you’re a whore.”
The sound of Mia’s hand passing through the air to smack the elf was accompanied by both the sound of the elf hitting the floor and her master’s laughter passing through a woman’s vocal cords. She then walked up to Mia and put a finger on each of her temples.
“Here, here let me help you out a little.”
After pressing her forehead against hers she felt a searing hot pain in her head and fell to the floor. After about a moment she heard the voices coming from the elves as though it was spoken in her own language.
“Why’d you have to tell her what we were saying.”
“Why’d you have to be so vulgar.”
Her master replied.
“Wait, I can understand them.”
“Yes, I planted the seed of knowledge in your head the moment you arrived… Ah! Is that why you stayed for training? You didn’t notice I gave you the capacity to learn everything on your own? Ah, what a stroke of luck to come across such a student in this generation.”
“Besides that, where did you get your clothes from.”
“I made them. They’re nice right?”
“They’re still ignoring us but, in our language, now.”
“Why’d she even bring us anyway.”
Two of the elves began complaining. They arrived in front of a door Mia vaguely remembered from a long time ago and they entered into it. Inside a rectangular glass tank was the body Mia recognized as her master’s naked and floating just below the surface of the waters she once found herself waking up in.
The memory confused her and the fact they were brought to this room specifically confused her. He soon happily guided each of the elves to a seat in the room and began undoing their chains. The large halberd over her shoulder, as well as the girl who captured them, seemed to be deterrent enough, but they still stared angrily at the two a look of fear in their eyes at the sight of the submerged man.
“Archive.”
As the word was spoken each of the elves was stabbed in the back of the neck with a needle and fell asleep instantly. She clapped her hands giddily and began removing all their clothes and preparing to seal them in a few empty tanks of greenish fluid that appeared through an opening in the back of the room.
“Um… master… I know being able to possess these soulless creatures might be useful to you, but I brought them here thinking to interrogate them.”
“Help me strip and clean them, we can interrogate them after.”
After rinsing off the girl he was holding he threw her limp body into a tank of fluid and sealed it. Shortly after entering the fluid the girl inside began thrashing about, her body completely disintegrated, a bunch of letters and symbols the girl didn’t recognize covered the monitor in front of the tanks and after the symbols stopped appearing the girl inside the tank reappeared... but different, calm, as though her body never woke up.