Tessa had fought and killed many things since a young age.

Strength brought safety, while bringing more dangers.

The curse of the spires.

Fighting monsters was different from fighting other sapients.

To her, it was like a sliding scale of difficulty in the emotional sense.

Monsters, humanoid or otherwise, were easy.

They existed to kill and maybe eat her and the people she cared about.

Thus, they had to die.

Fishmen occupied the same spot on the scale.

Although they were just as sapient as she was, they were monstrous in appearance and behavior.

Thus, they had to die.

Bad humans, like the Scions of the Deep Azure cult, were higher on the scale.

The more evil and more depraved the less she cared about them.

The latest sapients she had fought and killed were the Inheritors. The twisted side of the coin to the unique Threnosh, who were her friends.

The Inheritors hadn’t been difficult to fight by virtue of their monstrousness.

The native men of this world sort of slotted themselves in that same evil category.

Rapist bastards.

She was of the mind that there was no excuse for that.

Were they at war with the ‘elves’?

It didn’t matter to her.

If it was war, then they could’ve just kept them caged up as hostages or bargaining chips or whatever dumb crap people in war did to each other.

The rape and beatings served no legitimate purpose.

The evil perpetrators just wanted to get off on their cruelty.

Thus, she didn’t feel bad about putting a tiny ultra-dense ball into each helmeted head of the sentries in each watch tower.

She dashed across the bridge as silently as she could manage.

The plan was simple.

Get to the other side of the fort undetected and create a diversion.

Johnny would sneak in and try to locate the leader to mark him for Mads, who was perched in a tall pine on the other side of the river.

The rest would storm in after.

That was the extent of their coordination.

She really wished they hadn’t been forced to strip the communications system from their armor.

The fog of war really sucked.

Wooden walls meant jack shit to someone with her level of superhuman strength.

She hopped to get eyes over the wall.

A quick peek showed her that the soldiers or mercs or whatever hadn’t noticed their sentries were down.

One last hop to get the right angle and she shot her kanabo like a missile from her hand.

Ultradense metal punched right through the wall and into the dirt.

She landed and surged, lowering her shoulder and crashing through.

They were slow to act.

Too busy getting drunk and raping women.

Remember that, she told herself.

The closest group of men surrounded an above ground fire pit. The silvery tub stuffed with burning firewood reminded her of the one her family used back home.

They blinked at her, mouths agape like stupid fish.

She looked past them.

Nothing but more wall in the distance.

Tiny balls of ultradense metal accelerated from her hands to supersonic speed in an instant.

Sonic booms drowned out the laughter of men and the cries of women.

The knot of men vanished into red mist.

Their weird greenish yellow breastplates might as well have been paper.

Tessa sprinted, snatching her kanabo.

Men began to emerge from their tents and the other campfires, heading toward the sound.

Bright flashes erupted from a treetop on the other side of the river.

Heads, helmeted or otherwise, exploded into splashes of wet red.

The strongest lights were provided by a handful of large gems or crystals, she didn’t care to differentiate, strategically spread out throughout the small fort.

She shattered each in turn with a single shot, plunging them all into darkness.

The lack of enhanced visual modes in her helmet wouldn’t hurt her as much as a normal human since her natural night vision was better.

She picked a random direction, clubbing men as she sprinted down a narrow row between tightly-packed tents.

“Mark Our Foes!” a deep voice boomed.

A red glow outlined her body.

She glanced back toward the other side of the river.

No red glow around Mads up in the tree.

So, the Skill had range limits.

She hoped that Johnny’s rogue-ness would help keep him hidden.

Then again the easiest way to stop a Skill was to take care of the user.

The voice came from somewhere to her left.

She sprinted, leaping over several rows of tents only to land face to face with a handful of men pointing what looked like guns.

“Halt! Surrender or die!”

The man responsible for the highlighting Skill helpfully revealed himself.

Big guy.

At least a foot taller and twice as wide as she was.

Taller than the line of gunmen standing in front of him.

She planted her kanabo in the ground with a loud thud that made a few men flinch.

She brought her hands in front of her, open, non-threatening.

The guns looked different from what she was familiar with. They had barrels and sights, but they were reddish in color, like rust. In fact, the whole gun was made out of what looked like one piece of that metal. No wooden stock. No trigger guard. No trigger for that matter.

She cleared her throat.

“No. You.”

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The big guy scowled. “Shoot her.”

Trigger fingers squeezed… the grip?

They definitely didn’t squeeze a trigger. At least that she could see.

Superhuman reflexes allowed her to beat them to the shot, so to speak.

She activated her power.

Bullets zipped from barrels suddenly aglow with faint blue-ish light with the sounds of a sudden, sharp gust of wind.

She repelled them back the way they came before they touched her hands.

Half the gunmen dropped.

The big officer ducked behind one, using the man as a human shield.

Not a problem for her.

One ultradense metal ball pierced through two men despite their armor.

It was weird.

They had fancy, magic guns, but wore paper-like armor.

“Corrupting Coils of Chaolar!”

Well… that didn’t sound fun at all.

Coruscating red tentacles rushed across the ground, tearing through tents and ripping up dirt.

She shot a handful of balls in that direction as she dived.

“Fu—”

The tentacles winged her, slapping across her armored legs.

Pain bloomed.

Though she didn’t feel particularly more corrupt.

Perhaps, it corrupted flesh or spirit, which manifested as the painful spikes radiating up her legs.

She rolled right into a charging group of armed men.

No guns for these lot.

Strictly melee.

Polearms with an axe and hammer head, along with a spike on top.

No better weapon to cover a good chunk of the physical damage types.

They shouted Skills, charging forward as one.

She swung her kanabo one handed in a horizontal arc.

Superhuman strength overpowered their Skills, smashing their polearms out of their hands.

Sub Level 30 in their classes then going by how they compared to her friends.

Olo would’ve held on to his weapon.

She stepped into the return swing.

Bones snapped, crackled and popped as she swept the men aside like bowling pins.

“I Challenge You!”

A young man with long, dark hair, that did seem to shine a bit green in the moonlight swept a rapier into a salute.

She wanted to hit him with some balls, but her hand wouldn’t obey.

Damn Skill.

This guy had to be over Level 30 to affect her even slightly.

“Fine,” she muttered.

If they had to duel then maybe the rest of them couldn’t interfere.

It was still bad because it’d give them time to regroup.

She pointed her kanabo.

The young man blurred into a lunge covering an amazing distance in one step.

Rapier tip glinted for her neck.

She met it with an open hand, using her power to push the steel violently away.

Her eyes narrowed.

They did need intel on the world.

Thus, she brought her kanabo down on the side of his knee.

The crack was only surpassed by his scream.

Two light taps with the tip of her weapon rendered his wrists incapable of wielding his rapier.

“Get me some lights or I’ll send you to the golden angel’s halls myself, you damn bug eaters! Call To Arms! Sober Up!”

Now that sounded like someone in charge.

She kicked the young duelist wannabe under the chin.

Just a light tap, but she remembered they were rapists, so some ivory went flying.

Didn’t need teeth to talk.

She grabbed the rapier and bent the blade just to rub it in.

Spells streaked out from behind the tents to her right.

No Chaolar coils or whatever that was.

Probably a higher level spell that the mage couldn’t do more than once in quick succession.

Magic Missiles were familiar.

They fizzled off Threnium armor like usual.

She moved away from the leader’s voice and the spell fire, staying low as she sought to circle around to a flank or something.

A sudden flash in the sky created a large glowing orb of yellow light.

Mads shot it to no effect.

“I want a squad over the bridge yesterday!” the leader roared. “Take their snipers! Alive! And get me shields!”

Magic and physical.

Shields sprang up to block Mads’ shots.

Tessa could see the blue glow rising above the tents.

Made it easier to target some people she couldn’t see.

More balls elicited shouts and screams.

A deep hiss echoed over the sounds of battle accompanied by the sound of a hammer smashing on an anvil rapidly.

“What the— monsters? Here?” the leader roared.

It took her a moment to realize what the sound was.

Not iron on iron, but ivory on ivory.

Teeth.

Guinea pigs hissed and clacked their chisel-like front teeth together when angry.

Scale that up by a factor of… a lot… and—

Black-furred thunder crashed against the western wall.

At least that was what it sounded like to Tessa since she wasn’t in a position to see.

She had to fix that.

It was a perfect distraction for her, after all.

She broke into a sprint.

Would’ve left old Olympic sprinters in the dust had she raced them.

The rapists had gathered around their leader outside the largest tent in the fort.

A circle formation with ranged-types inside and shields, magic and mundane, on the outside.

Most of the attention was pointed away from her.

The few guys in the circle facing her cried out a split-second before she turned them into red mist.

Neither magic shields, nor weird-looking metal armor would stop her supersonic, ultradense balls.

The thought made her want to giggle.

A bit of a coping mechanism for dealing with the whole killing other humans thing.

Twinklestar charged out of the darkness like a looming shadow beast.

Vee clung to his fur with one hand, while pointing a finger gun with her other.

“Bang! Bang! Bang!”

Men dropped to the ground and went into seizures from the electromagnetic pulse she set off inside their heads.

“Where are my counterspells!” the leader snapped.

Tessa laid eyes on him for the first time.

He was even bigger and more brutish looking than that earlier big guy.

Oddly enough, his armor looked like normal steel, even had some chainmail covering the parts the plate didn’t.

“There’s nothing to counter!” one of the mages, a thin, weasel of a man in padded cloth armor, said.

“Kill them!”

The mage blasted a bright red beam.

A sudden blue shield appeared in front of Twinklestar to block it.

Gene, longsword in one hand, struggled to keep up.

“On Me!” Olo a half step behind despite carrying a large, rectangular shield of solid Threnium banged the haft of his mace on the edge.

The taunt pulled most of the rapists’ aim toward him.

Before they could fire, Vee rose up on Twinklestar’s back and roared into the night.

The remaining men dropped, limbs contorting, frothing at the mouth.

Tessa suppressed a wince as she heard bones breaking, ligaments and tendons snapping, and even muscles tearing.

There was one exception.

The leader rose from one knee and pointed one of those rusty-looking magic guns.

Too slow.

Twinklestar was on him with quickness that belied his massive bulk.

Not so little paws stomped the leader into the dirt.

She supposed the man wasn’t high enough level to handle a few tons of angry giant guinea pig.

“Don’t let him up. And get down from there, Vee. You’re a target.”

“Mads will shoot anyone that tries to take a shot,” Vee said.

“Sure, but why risk it.”

The others hustled over.

“Where’s Johnny?” Gene said.

“He’s somewhere over there,” Vee pointed toward the large tent.

“Did the devil say something?” Johnny appeared next to the entrance. “Got the leader. It was an epic fight, but I won… barely.” The matte gray surface of Johnny’s armor was covered with scratches and scorch marks. “Magery.” He shrugged. “So, there’s a thing…” he hesitated. “You have to see, but, maybe Vee stays outside, yeah?”

“Alright. Tessa?” Gene glanced at her.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, Olo, Bastien and Vee, you guys secure the perimeter and these guys. Mads will keep overwatch, but stay on guard. We’ll see what this ‘thing’ Johnny has to show us before we deal with those…” he eyed the cage wagons kept in a tight group near the center of the fort.

Tessa could see the eye shine of the ‘elves’ shrouded by the darkness.

It was eerie how they had remained silent the entire battle and even now seemed to watch her like owls.

“They don’t blink a lot,” she muttered.

“Should I?” Bastien gestured toward the broken men.

“I know you want to, but no healing, bro,” Gene said. “Sorry, but you need to save your mana. Maybe once we’ve got them secured.”

“Let’s go,” Tessa pushed past them into the tent.

The quicker they dealt with whatever the quicker she didn’t have to be in the same air as rapist filth.