Trevor resisted the urge to scream in frustration. Why couldn’t they all just die?

The crack of the sniper firing echoed in his ears as the bullet smashed into his face. His head cracked to the side from the impact, his cheek itching from where it had struck.

You have been hit by a Sniper Rifle. The bullet struck your skin and inflicted 10 HP of damage after damage reduction.

He curled up, putting covering the back of his head with his vambraces. A bullet ricocheted off, and then the fire stopped. It was a solution.

But only, he realized, until other Scales happened upon them. The sound of gunfire would attract them, and honestly, he was lucky none had shown up yet. He needed to get out of here, and that meant dealing with the sniper.

Turn his head to keep it away from her and just tank the shots? As bad as being blinded was, he didn’t want to risk a crit on the brain, which would be the viable option firing at the back of his head. As debilitating as having a destroyed eye was, a wounded brain would be worse.

His hand reached for a rock. He turned around, flinging it. As the rock sailed through the air, his eye burst into pain.

A Sniper Rifle critical hit has hit you for eight points of damage to your eye after damage reduction. Initial damage was 89. Your eye has been destroyed.

Screaming, his hand went to his eye. To his horror, all he could feel was blood and pain and patches of skin that burned when he touched. That bitch.

Trevor grasped for another rock. He’d take her head off. There wasn’t any time for anything slower. Another bullet hit him in the head above his right ear. The sound of the shot overpowered everything else.

You have hit your target for 20 damage to their right knee. Their right knee is critically injured. Their right femur is broken. Their -

Forget the rock, the spear. He stretched, reaching. A bullet hit his hand as if trying to slap it away. A second shot scraped along his nose, tearing at the tip, fresh pain blooming from it. He had to ignore it.

Something rammed the back of his head, slamming it into the stones of the street.

Critical hit received from same target source, Head has gained the weakened condition and you have received three damage to your skull. You have received the concussion condition.

His vision was blurry now. He couldn’t feel his legs. The tips of his fingers felt numb as they scraped across the ground.

His fingers gripped the spear.

***

Even one-eyed, the Lancer was far too accurate with a rock. Her knee was likely never going to recover, and it was going to make getting off this roof an issue. If she ever did.

Her latest shot had rammed his head against the ground. Not good enough to cripple him. She’d hurried the reload and returned to her scope as soon as a fresh magazine was in.

He’d turned to face her, good eye glaring, hand outstretched. She didn’t stop to think about it. Aim for the last eye. Squeeze the trigger. Her rifle jerked back.

Pain pierced through her throat, her entire body jerking backward. Something had smashed into it.

She was stuck, pain racing through her, stuck to the tiles of the rooftop. She couldn’t move her head. She couldn’t move at all without the pain in her throat lancing a thousand times worse than it already was. Something hot and wet fell through her uniform across her skin.

Her vision was fuzzy, and in the corner, her health was dropping precipitously. She managed to focus, noticing something long sticking out. Eventually, it came to focus—the haft of the Fighter’s spear.

“…no,” she managed to whisper, all she could through her impaled throat. She tried to yell for help but failed as blood spilled past her lips. She grabbed the haft and pulled at it, and her vision darkened as it felt like her neck was being split in two.

Gurgling, she tried for it once again.

***

Lisa turned in the sky, watching as windswept boulders and rocks flew through the air, scraping the rooftops free of those damn rods the Scales were using. She’d been at it for what felt like hours between dodging AA fire from down below, and just now, she’d finally cleared enough of them that lightning would be useful again.

A good thing, too. Keeping her shield fully supplied with mana to counter the assortment of shells flung her way and using winds to carry rock weren’t the most mana-effective methods.

“Lisa,” a voice whispered near her ear, barely audible over the storm's roar.

She was already turning, lightning forming in her hand before she recognized the voice. “Rebecca?”

Someone tried to speak, but their voice was eaten by the winds, so she turned down the amount of mana being fed into the spell. Winds blew just enough to keep incoming shells off-target while the clouds began shrinking.

A patch of air shimmered next to her as Rebecca flickered into view.

Her fellow Traveler looks like she’d been ripped to shreds. One of her arms was broken off at the elbow. The other was just gone, fleshy coverings sealing off the wounds. Her legs were just…skin clinging to bones, nothing but bone and skin there.

“Rebecca, what happened to you?” She reached a tentative hand out only for a fresh blast to echo as another shell exploded a few meters under both of them.

She swiftly gestured, mana flowing and forming a shield underneath them both. The shockwave hit it and parted, shrapnel glancing off toward the ground below. Irritated, she increased the MP flow to her shield.

More shells punched through the surrounding clouds. They were testing now.

Lisa moved closer, now able to be heard over the winds. “They’ll heal in the morning when Lewis gets a chance to make a request from his goddess. But we can’t hold back anymore. I don’t know where the townsfolk are. Maybe the Scales killed them, maybe they’re stashed in the tunnels below, but the point is you-”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Can strip the town bare,” Lisa finished for her. “Tunnels?”

“They have a network of them. They must have spent a week or more digging them all out. Probably longer. I didn’t spend much time there. There are even more traps and explosives down there, and they’ve got an earth mage who seals them off seemingly at random. They nearly got me. I didn’t want to end like….” Rebecca hesitated, concern and worry on her face.

Lisa's expression was stony. “There’ll be a reckoning for that before this is done.”

She’d kept her winds away from those gallows. They’d take Jake’s body back when this was over and hopefully bring him to a high-level cleric before the resurrection timer ran out. She didn’t care if he was an ass. He didn’t deserve to die. Hopefully, they could bring him back quickly enough.

Or they could just have Lewis kill enough Scales he leveled up and gained the ability himself. He did have that oath about not harming those captured or surrendered. So capturing them all and having him mace them to death wouldn’t work. They’d have to figure something else out.

Rebecca nodded, then seemed to consider saying something, but then just turned on her shroud once again, leaving Lisa alone in the sky.

Even with its slow recovery along the trip and all she had spent on casting so far, her mana was still enough to level the town. Her laziness had paid off in that regard. Trying to avoid using magic at Trost led to her having a decent amount of mana left.

She let her mana connect to the many storm clouds she’d collected throughout today, altering their composition. The winds she’d maintained as part of that grew.

Your mana investment in Weather Control [Sustained] has increased. What additional effects would you like to utilize?

Beneath her, Scale AA weapons continued to fire as the wind picked up, trying to snipe her through the clouds. She’d wrecked a few earlier, mainly focused on taking down those damn lightning rods. Now that she could let loose, there was no need to worry about them.

Down below the clouds, roof shingles shook, tree branches swayed, then began to snap. Scales ran toward buildings as gusts of wind threw their AA gun barrels off-target. Vehicles shuddered, then began to tip. Individual bodies were flying only a few feet before falling to the ground again, but this was just the beginning.

***

The second time hurt just as badly as the first. Trevor screamed, hand reaching for where his other eye had been. He touched around his eye, and it felt like he’d put molten metal into his socket. Screaming, he scrambled about him at a landscape he couldn’t see.

He fell completely against the ground, gasping for air. He dug his hands into the stone, trying to dig himself out. Pulling again and again and again

You are at risk of inflicting damage to yourself through your actions. Risk of losing fingernails is increasing-

Shut up, he snarled mentally at the UI. He needed to get out from under here.

He heard a sound from far off, something hitting the ground. Possibly the sniper on the roof, having finally fallen off. Trevor braced for another sniper round in case they were alive, but as the seconds stretched on, none came. He must have either killed it, or it’d run off after blinding him.

Trevor couldn’t tell. He had never bothered to pick up Blindfight. He tried to move his legs again. Nothing. They still had a few tons of stone on top of them. Luckily, his strength and armor were enough to keep the collapsed building from crushing them.

If he could see, he could start working some loose. He tried to feel his way around, but it only gave him a partial picture. For all he knew, taking one of these stones out would just result in even more collapsing on top of him.

He could still see the UI, which didn’t help him much either.

Okay, he was stuck under a ton of rubble still, no way out. He strained against it again, and the rubble refused to shift once again. What felt like hours stretched on as he pulled before he collapsed, worn out.

Other sounds now, closer. Feet on the street, rubble moving as some walked on top of it. He hesitated, wondering if he should call to them. The chances of being one of the others were slim.

Then again, it wasn’t like he was hard to find.

“Lewis? Rebecca? That you?” He yelled out. No response, only a hurried pace from whoever was walking. Not good. “Get me out of here, quickly. We are leaving this-”

Something hit him in the face, hitting him all across while the roar of a shotgun echoed through his ears. He cursed and opened his mouth to yell at the Scale, only to feel something long and metallic being shoved into his open mouth. The Scale had put the-

Another roar and his head jerked back and his mouth and throat were filled with pellets. They didn’t inflict much HP damage, but this wasn’t exactly pleasant either.

You have taken 13 damage from a Shotgun. Your innards have been filled with Buckshot. Internal damage may occur soon.

As his ringing ears began to recover after their most recent assault, he could make out a voice yelling. “Carso, Melit, go find another platoon, anyone. We need to finish him off before-”

A faint pop, followed by the sensation of having his face only a foot away from a blazing grill. The smell of cooking flesh was only a second afterward. Lewis was nearby, good. The shotgun barrel went limp, and Trevor could hear its owner falling to the ground below with a crash. He hurriedly moved his head to get the gun out of his mouth.

Lewis must have summoned the miniature sun close. Maybe even inside the Scale to ensure they’d die fast. The ringing in his ears from both shotgun blasts had almost completely faded now. He could hear Scales yelling, guns firing, and then faint pops and the sizzle of flesh roasting.

Eventually, all he could hear was the clack of boots on the street.

“Jesus Christ, Trevor, what did they do to you?” Lewis asked, and Trevor could feel him gingerly probe his eyes. The burning pain in his sockets grew to the point he could feel his consciousness fading, and Trevor moved his head away.

“Could you fucking not?” He hissed, and the pressure on his eyes withdrew.

“Sorry, sorry. I'm just trying to examine the damage. What did they do to you?”

“They collapsed a building on top of me. Then some sniper started crit-fishing to take out my eyes. Pretty sure I got them with a spear at the end there. How badly did they mess up my eyes?”

Lewis was silent until Trevor growled and tried to move once again. “Hold still. One’s…there’s no easy way to put this, it’s straight up gone. The second, some of it’s still in your socket. The rest is uh…scattered on the ground.”

Trevor had probably scattered them when he’d been scrambling for a way out. He tried to force down the bile rising in his throat at the thought.

“Please tell me we don’t need to wait till next dawn to fix up my eyes?”

“Unfortunately, individual body pieces being restored to full health-”

“Is a specific boon that must be requested,” Trevor finished. “Just our luck. Where have you been anyway? She was plinking away at me for minutes on end.”

“Working my way through the houses. Trying to figure out where they’ve put all the townspeople. Then I found Rebecca crawling her way out of a tunnel.”

“Crawling?”

“They got her too. They’ve got an entire tunnel network down there. They trapped her in a room with a load of explosives and set them off. Then, a pair of mining drills. Her limbs are crippled.”

Trevor was silent for a half-second. “This is what I warned you about. We should have left the moment we realized they were here. Heal me, please, and we can start fixing that by either leveling this place, or leaving. And before something inside me starts fucking bleeding.”

A hand cupped the side of Trevor’s cheek, which felt awkward but Lewis did need direct contact in order to restore HP. A soothing feeling arose in his eyes, across his back, the pain fading as Lewis' hand cooled against his skin.

Thunder suddenly echoed in his ears, followed by shrieking and the firing of anti-aircraft guns.

“Rebecca must have reached her. Come on, Trevor, we need to get you out of here.”

Trevor lay still as Lewis moved the rubble off him from above, slung him on Lewis’ shoulders, and began to leave. As they did, a final notification showed up on his UI.

You have killed Hasha Yarrow, Peasant level 2/ Soldier level 3/Marksman level 8/Scout level 6