Gamer Girl Isekai

"This information is fresh from the enemy's front, Fuhrer Kruger." Said the officer. Officer, not priest or warrior or any other such thing—

"This information is fresh from the enemy's front, Fuhrer Kruger." Said the officer. Officer, not priest or warrior or any other such thing—officer. A strange word, but then his was a strange position. A seat of command found far from the front lines of his own forces, where the very conflict he ordered around was made a distant and minor thing.

Kruger did not appear to have any issue with that, Aexilica had found him holed up underground after all, but his eye twitched as he was addressed all the same. Nonetheless, he made no mention of whatever irritated him and continued cutting to the core of the matter.

"And you're certain of the location?"

The inferior man, apparently given the odd name of Karl Krummer, glanced uncertainty towards Aexilica. Kruger spoke again, this time with a shade less patience.

"Yes, in front of her. Please."

Krummer did not need telling twice, in fact he seemed to have drawn the breath to enter his hurried explanation before Kruger even finished assuring him.

"The creatures—the ones calling themselves the Nocturnae—are holed up in a dark castle. Truly dark, the stone seems black and from my comparing it to historic records…It wasn't there a hundred years ago, or even ten."

"Constructed themselves." Kruger murmured, hands tightening on the tabletop before him. He glanced over at Aexilica, clearly reading her confusion. "This is the farthest we've ever cut into their territory in the year we've been fighting, it's our first real chance to get massed accounts of what the place is like. To have made a fortress, though…That's upsetting. I was under the impression the Nocturnae arrived only quite recently, two or three years at the very most. They must have formidable magic to have done that. More formidable than I've yet seen them employ in battle."

That was far from comforting. To Aexilica, Vari on the other hand seemed thrilled.

"We get to kill such beasts in glorious battle?" he asked, happily. "This will be a good day!"

Aexilica decided not to remind him of how he's scared enough of his brother to throw out Emma's fortune hiding in her trunk, that would just start another fight. And he'd probably enjoy it.

"I would recommend against engaging the Nocturnae themselves." Kruger frowned. "They are powerful creatures, have you ever encountered one of this world's Demigods?"

Vari and Aexilica went quiet and still at the same exact instant, staring his way. The tension had multiplied.

"I will take that as a yes." Kruger noted. "They're not quite on that level, not yet, but the three of them together could defeat a lesser Demigod, and they're growing more powerful all the time."

It was the exact sort of thing Aexilica went through her life hoping not to hear, practically on a day by day level at this point. That didn't stop it from gutting her by the syllable.

"So what's your plan then?" Aexilica asked, finding her voice now a lot smaller and weaker.

"Two parts, hinging on a handful of crucial elements." Kruger replied. "We have far less magic users than they do, our strength lies in the larger-scale efficiency of our soldiers due to technology and weaponry. But we do still have a handful who can contest the Nocturnae. Myself, for instance. The second…Is that they are vulnerable by day."

***

It felt strange to be sneaking towards enemy territory by day, but Aexilica barely noticed that for more than a few minutes. The feeling, along with more or less everything else she felt, was quite instantly swept away by the sheer terror of their choice of transportation.

A metal bird, a giant one. There was no other way to describe it. Aexilica had taken to the skies in Emma's contraptions of course, those strange shapes of translucent material that seemed lighter than the air itself. This thing was something else altogether—enormous, heavy, rattling even as it moved on strange, circular feet. Aexilica couldn't imagine it floating, let alone flying.

But Kruger and Krummer stepped towards it, confident as she'd seen any man in anything.

Aexilica thought about fleeing, then she thought about Emma. Then she thought about how Vari of all fucking people was getting into the creature, bit back her fear and followed. They set off quickly, slowly arcing upwards and into the air. Unlike Emma's creation, the entire thing was rather…Clumsy.

"How are you propelling this?" Aexilica asked Kruger, as they took off to a rattling, jerky flight. The entire thing seemed to be trying to shake them out of it, and with all the space Aexilica had in the metal room that stood for its bowels she was most concerned with striking her head on one of its walls.

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Kruger smiled, and answered her with a long-winded explanation of which Aexilica followed perhaps one word out of every four.

"I…But burning things, that would just make smoke, no?"

"Smoke and heat." Kruger corrected, reassuringly. "And that heat causes the air to become spread out, making it press against things if you keep it trapped in the same space. Have you ever trapped water in your hand and closed it? It's a similar concept."

"I see." Aexilica nodded, not seeing at all and deciding that she probably never would. Whatever this magic was, she had no more ability to grasp it than the kinds practiced by Cinta.

Despite the discomfort of the strange flying creature—the way it shuddered and trembled in the air, the sheer noise it made, the groaning of steel as it warped and strained—Aexilica had to admit its sheer speed was another thing entirely. Not even an hour passed before they were slowing and dropping in height, the landscape beneath them apparently now exactly where they needed to be.

"Welcome to Gorgoschia." Krummer grinned, staring down at the ground whipping past below them. They were still terribly high, hundreds of feet—perhaps more. Like if a mountain's peak simply cut off to allow a sheer drop down to its base.

"Where are we landing?" Aexilica asked at once, realising only now that the vehicle had needed a great amount of space to even take to the skies, and that she didn't see anywhere near so much below them.

Kruger smiled, and Krummer laughed.

"We won't be landing, the plane is slowed as much as it can. From here-on-out it's up to our own bodies to insert us."

Kruger got to his feet as the opening at the back of the vehicle began to shake. "I will lead." He announced. "Krummer, help them follow." Without another word, he simply leapt from the flying creature.

Aexilica watched him disappear, almost screamed. Then she felt strong hands shoving at her back, flew forwards, and found that there was no metal beneath her feet anymore. Only thin, unresisting air. At that realisation, a scream really did escape her. But it was swallowed by the intense winds beating around her.

They've killed me. Aexilica had time for more thinking, for a great deal of recollection and reflection, but she did not have the presence of mind for it. She just screamed, screamed, and screamed as she fell excruciatingly faster and slower towards the ground. Then she impacted it hard, and everything went dark.

But not with unconsciousness, Aexilica found the world literally dark. And suffocating. She gasped, felt something thick and sludgy forcing its way down her throat and up her nostrils, panicked, kicked out. In moments her head burst up into bright light and she realised she'd been lying face-down in mud. Mud which was now caking every inch of her. Lovely.

She spat out about a pound and a half of the muck, her eyes streaming with tears, and looked around. Kruger was just a few yards from her standing already and not looking nearly as filthy.

"You did well for your first drop." He told her, with a smile. "Though try to scream less next time, it's unlikely to give your position away more than the wind but just wastes energy."

Her fury was boiling up to displace the panic in moments, and Aexilica's hurried march towards the bastard was interrupted only by something impossibly fast smashing into the ground between them.

It was Vari, falling hard and disappearing feet into the soft ground before exploding mud in every direction with his impact. He seemed as disoriented as Aexilica must have been, taking long seconds to scrape his way out of the earth and claw the muck from his face.

"Bastards!" He roared, swinging his hammer in a way best compared to an animal whose slaughtering had been botched and left their spine only half-severed. Aexilica fell back, keenly remembering just how devastating a weapon was being whipped around, and watched as Kruger did the same.

"Calm down!" The stranger urged, hands up even as he retreated.

"You threw us from the skies!" Vari growled, and Aexilica found herself actually agreeing with him.

"We could have died." She spat. Kruger looked more baffled than anything.

"We specifically chose this point—" something hit the ground hard beside him, Krummer finally landing. He got himself up as Kruger continued.

—"We chose this point because the mud here is over a metre thick, that and your natural resilience all but guaranteed you would be fine. Which you are."

Aexilica realised only then that she wasn't in pain, despite the laughably great fall and fast impact. She looked down at herself, though it was futile to try and look for any wounds beneath all the filth. Nonetheless…She felt good. Perfect.

"Don't do that again, bastard man." Vari growled, and once more Aexilica snapped herself into reluctant assent with the Sculd.

They took perhaps longer than was ideal to finally get moving, after that ordeal. Kruger and, especially Krummer, seemed genuinely shocked to find that Aexilica and Vari were not used to hurling themselves from great heights. Perhaps Vari had a reason to have done that, but Aexilica's own resilience was rather a new occurrence. If nothing else, seeing it demonstrated so starkly was reassuring to her.

That reassurance didn't survive their first entry into the place now called Nocturnal Nation, however. She'd thought the place's war was at her limit of awe, the cities it built were apparently beyond even that.

Aexilica hadn't known how tall towers could be made before she saw the great constructions of this place, works of stone that jutted a hundred feet or more. She saw unnaturally uniform chunks of rock set into the ground instead of dirt roads, strange metal posts with heads that glowed a steady and constant light, and more buildings than she could possibly count.

The air was…Smokey, she thought, and yet there were no flames. And when Aexilica moved through clouds of the stuff it was cold and wet rather than hot and dry. The clouds above were grey, churning things that left the streets evening-dark even in the middle of day, and she didn't miss the beaten-down terror that seemed to ensnare every person they passed.

"This is horrible." Aexilica breathed, staring around. What was it about the place that struck her?

The artifice.

Every part of it was made by man, she thought, each inch of this city there on purpose. One could not set down a foot without touching something willed into being by whoever ruled this land. In Tepetlmoseua there was always nature no more than a sprint away, however tyrannical Cinta had been feeling. But here…

"There's no escape." Aexilica found herself murmuring. "Everywhere you go it's just…More city. Whoever built this place, whoever owns it…They own everything."

"Nature…" Vari murmured. "The wild things, they are nowhere to be seen. Starving, left to eat scraps at the borders."

"Such is modernity." Krummer grunted, not seeming at all fazed by it. Kruger remained silent, save to urge them onwards.

"We can gape at the horror of it all later." He announced. "There is work to do."