Surrounding Amelia were hundreds of traitors hidden behind tents. They were once good knights, she lamented, and if there was a way for her not to have to kill them all… Ah, but there is one way, isn’t there? My apologies in advance, Kalender.
The traitors finally began their charge, their war cries seemingly making the flames around them glow brighter. So it begins, she thought.
She launched a purple flare upwards, one that exploded with a crack. This signaled her allied Maids to hit the ground and cover their ears; hopefully they did. After pausing for a second to give her allies enough time to hit the deck, Amelia raised her halberd, taking it into both hands, and leveled it parallel to the horizon.
She pirouetted like a ballerina, swinging her halberd exactly once around her, sending exactly one shockwave slamming into the tents and knights around her in a near-perfect spiral.
Tents were blown away, eardrums were ruptured, and the fires that once burned were snuffed out like birthday candles. Knights in full armor got picked up like kittens and thrown to the wayside. Boxes and crates turned into shrapnel and debris, and the Maids’ hard-washed laundry turned into party streamers that unraveled across the battlefield.
Amelia was sure that killed someone—hopefully not all of them.
She sent up another flare. The only thing left was to give the troops a job.
“Capture if you can! Kill if you must!” she shouted, and from beneath the tattered fabrics stood Maids of war, 49 in all.
The Maids were well aware that they were outnumbered, but they’d faced worse odds before. They were lucky this time, in fact, because the darkness and the Sentinel were on their side.
As fresh white laundry floated down like ghosts under the light of Amelia’s flare, the real battle began. The Maids outclassed the knights, and with the traitors scattered from Amelia’s attack, it was child’s play for the Maids to start picking off groups of knights with gunfire and snare traps before they could regroup and pose a real threat.
Amelia, however, couldn’t let her guard down. Firing plenty of flares into the night sky told both her allies and her enemies where she was—intentionally.
The flares weren’t just to help her communicate with her allies, but also to force the enemy’s hand, telling them that a person-shaped disaster was just a breath away.
Would the enemy dare move toward Harmony, where Arpeggio and a goddess were, or towards Regiment Quaternius’ camp, where she herself was? In both cases, they would sustain irrecoverable losses. Any self-respecting evildoer would think twice before needlessly expending resources that could be put to more effective use elsewhere, at a later time.
However, this plan hadn’t taken into account the godfall, nor Minimine’s order to send Arpeggio to fetch Cyrraia, and least so the ###### God’s wrathful, single-minded order to have Cyrraia killed.
The plan had assumed a rational enemy. That had been a bad assumption to make.
Amelia honed her senses, bit by bit tuning out the sounds of gunfire and magic from the battling Maids and knights. She looked for any disturabance in the wind that would lead her to find the enemy—the enemy that should have been retreating.
She heard something, but it was…strange. It was a mere whisper, but it was getting louder, not quieter, as if the enemy was not in retreat at all.
The plan had been flipped. She supposed she’d have to fight.
She honed her senses again, this time spreading it out to pick up the wind, the moonlight, the scent of blood, cigars, or anything else that could possibly shift among her five senses. The night sky could hide an adversary in flight, and the shadows provided tunnels for those blessed by the Shadow Goddess.
The enemy could come from anywhere, and if she was up against demons, then so too from any time—past, present, or future—and it was all she could do to haphazardly and randomly juggle her automatic counter-attack magic to return whatever would be thrown at her.
Her counter-attack magic wasn’t perfect. It was this focused little thing that was the magical equivalent of a small buckler that one had to precisely maneuver to reflect the enemy’s attack.
The night was eerie and silent, and it gripped her heart.
The grip on her heart strengthened—unnaturally so! Before she could think, Death magic? she’d already fallen to her knees. She clutched her chest, wanting to tear off her armor so she could tear off her flesh, just so she could tear away whatever thing was strangling her heart so savagely.
Even as she found it hard to breathe—hard to think, and hard to see–she still managed a smile: a vindictive, smug grin. She looked up to drink in the kneeling figure of her unfortunate assailant: a demon hidden under a black cloak, and who had taken the same pose at a distance too far to insult him properly, clutching his chest with one hand while propping himself up with a sword in the other.
Watching the bastard try and fail to get up emboldened her. It was a dizzying feeling: being so weak and out of breath, yet feeling utterly superior to person in front of you.
Anyway, time to kill that guy.
As she planted the butt of her halberd in the ground and hoisted herself up, she whispered a spell to fix her broken heart. It didn’t matter that it had been physically and thoroughly crushed; something just on that level wouldn’t kill her.
{Mana, become my heart.}
This spell had been invented by a Combat Medic—and oh girl did she take the Combat part seriously.
It didn’t just materialize a heart, but it infused blood with mana, making it flow all on its own. As a side effect—or as some say, a feature—one’s blood would not gush out of cuts and wounds, and would instead form a network of laminar flows suspended inside the body. Indeed, for a brief moment, it was entirely possible to surgically remove every single vein and capillary, and the person’s cells would still get their regular oxygen deliveries through nothing but hemokinetic blood.
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Amelia never expected to have to resort to this spell. She had always thought that getting chopped or exploded into fine bits was a more likely way for her to go. After all, anyone aiming to actually kill her would have quickly come to the same conclusion: if they didn’t go all-out, they’d lose.
She and the sturdy bastard over there stood up at the same time, but she took pride in the fact that she stood up slightly faster—and made the first strike.
Rocks and debris in a hundred-meter radius floated, then shot forwards from every direction, all converging onto a single point. The cannon-like blast of a single spot getting shotgunned by a thousand pebbles and boulders suggested utter annihilation for anyone caught there, but when the sand and gravel of the collision rained down, Amelia found it difficult to ascertain whether she’d actually killed anyone.
After all, that kind of power should have turned anyone into fine mist—not even a blood spatter, but just fine mist that would quickly evaporate with the wind.
Well, there were really only two possibilities here: that the demon had, indeed, turned into fine red mist…or was a sly one who turned into fine black mist.
She took no chances.
There was a ringing in her right ear in one moment, and she replied with a swing of her halberd around her in the next. There was no sensation of cutting flesh, so she shot an explosive fireball upwards with one hand and slammed her heel into the ground: these were the next two places where these types of opponents normally appeared.
The ground beneath her cracked, while the air above her exploded. The fireball had exploded much sooner than its maximum detonation range; it had managed to hit something after all.
She turned around just in time to see the demon land on the ground—and sink through it.
She dodged to the side, because “sinking into the ground” was such an obvious wind-up to his next attack.
Her instincts were right, as not one, but four demons later reappeared where she had been, each one slashing up, down, left, and right, all in sync.
She levitated more projectiles and shot them at the demons in the same moment, punishing them for thinking they could ambush her like that; three of them disappeared with a poof.
Image clones? Amelia took notes. Autonomous magical clones had such bad MP consumption that it was almost never worth it. However, this demon wasn’t doing that. His clones were just pre-recorded images of himself being played out as mana constructs. Interesting…
The demon’s hood had been thrown backwards by Amelia’s attack, and she got to see his red skin. She enjoyed seeing the demon’s bewildered face, and how he must be so furious that his killing blow killed nothing but some time. The demon had realized by now—she knew—that she was far more adaptable than anyone he’d ever fought.
How does it feel playing at your level? she thought, even flashing him a smile. It was just so easy to tell that this guy was a bottom feeder. He may have been powerful, calculating, and ruthless, but the way he underestimates the enemy’s intelligence was his own brand of arrogance.
Naturally, Amelia was superior, and she wasn’t about to make the same mistake.
The fight continued for the demon, and yet the shock still hadn’t settled in for him. His mission here was to maim the Sentinel. It wasn’t the tallest order he’d ever taken, but now he realized that he had walked into this particular fight with far too much confidence.
Adapt. Kill. Survive. That had always been his creed…and yet, somehow, he was being outdone by a resident of such a peaceful world!
Adapt. Survive. That was his new creed now.
His humiliation didn’t stop there as one Amelia turned into four in front of him—she’d stolen his technique! When did she even have the time to record her images? He only barely dodged her attacks, Amelia’s halberds cutting up, down, left, right, nicking him each time. Was she doing that on purpose? No, she didn’t have the disposition to play with prey. He quickly learned to dodge the moment the enemy so much as breathed differently.
In the next moment, time seemed to slow as she breathed very differently.
The four Amelias unleashed precise and powerful attacks with four different elements: rods of metal, blinding beams of starlight, plumes of toxic volcanic gas, and streams of boiling tar. It was all that the demon could do to pop in and out of shadows so often that he was spending more time in the shadows than in the real world.
Tar and metal splashed against the earth in his wake, and as he circled the Amelias, he realized the area was quickly turning into a microcosmic hellscape made of rusting metal bars sticking out of the smoking, sticky ground, and when the rusty metal bars were hit by starlight, the temperature was hot enough to make the metal itself burn like sparklers.
Safe to say, the only reason why the demon hadn’t died yet was because Maids were incredibly expensive to train, and Amelia had to make sure to keep the hellscape concentrated near the center of the camp or else she’d feel bad to have anyone caught in it.
What could the demon possibly do in this situation? There was not a single paradigm shift he could conjure up on the spot. His only chance laid in doing more of the same…but different.
Soon, the sulfurous fumes settled, forming a three-inch-thick yellow carpet over the ground. Holding onto an inkling that the enemy wasn’t dead quite yet, Amelia’s eyes swept left, to a pile of burning tents, then right, to a crucifix of burning metal stakes sticking out of the ground. The enemy was nowhere in the darkness, not even after an information spell.
That was when a similar sensation of something gripping her internal organs assaulted her, and this time, it was her lungs! Air couldn’t enter nor leave. She moved her counter-attack magic to intercept, but the enemy released his grip before the two magics collided, leaving her lungs completely collapsed. Was this going to be how she went out? Suffocating in open air?
Obviously not. With barely a voice, she cast a spell:
{Mana, become my lungs.}
Thanks be to the suffering of that Combat Medic who had gone through a great many different injuries to come up with just as many responses.
Even with air filling her new “lungs,” that attack had been the decisive blow. With Amelia panicked and preoccupied with chanting the spell, the enemy gladly took the opening he needed to attack from right beneath her.
Both her ears rang, and she threw herself aside.
It was a strange thing to see one’s arm still attached to her halberd, but not herself.
It seems she wasn’t as good as she thought she was. She wasn’t even able to see the blade that did it, but she did see the shadow of the demon who did.
She rolled as she hit the ground, her hair and battle dress getting stained in smoking black tar as she did.
With just her one good arm, she drew a backup sword and slashed at the demon in one stroke, but the damned thing stepped back from the attack with a disgustingly satisfied look on his face. His blade was glowing, she noted—and she’d never seen him use that blade before.
The two eyed each other, but the demon considered his mission fulfilled. Time was of the essence, and though he stood a good chance of finishing off his prey, an 80% chance just wasn’t good enough to be worth it. He disappeared into the dark with a genuine grin: half because he’d won, and half because he’d survived.
Coward. That was all Amelia could think.
The first thing she did was reconnect her arm; there was a spell for that, too. The Mana-heart spell acted to keep her blood from gushing out of the stump, so that hadn’t been too difficult. The second thing she did was fire a red flare into the sky.
Although she’d fended off the enemy, she hadn’t won this fight. When the demon lopped off her arm, she felt more than just her arm get sheared off from her.
There was something missing. The world felt different, like today was the first day of her life.
Alas, the Blessing of the Throne wouldn’t allow her to die, neither in body nor in soul, and it called out to her, telling her that she wasn’t forgotten.
[Soul damage proliferation detected in AMELIA THRONEKEEPER. THRONE-LYRICA emergency soul care facilities activated. Transporting in 3… 2…]
“Good luck, Arpeggio,” she muttered. Her flare reached its apex and burned its brightest, drawing all eyes towards it—and away from her, who was whisked away from the battlefield in a brief golden flash.
With her red flare hanging in the sky, the cultists and the demons’ hasty plan had come to fruition.
If Lyrica wanted any hope of victory, Arpeggio and Cyrraia had to rendezvous with their allies in Harmony: the same place where Amelia’s challenger was retreating to, where Cyrraia’s pursuers herded them to—and where Manager and Kalender awaited.