Gamer Girl Isekai

Emma threw a wall of blue hardlight up before her, watched as it buckled and cracked where the gargoyle hit it. Most of the thing's momentum seemed to die in the collision, but it kept coming. So big, so dense that sheer mass seemed to give it a magic just by moving. That it could move at all, she supposed, was magic, so maybe that checked.

Magic was something she could match, at least. By the time her wall was fully gone and her enemy approaching again, she'd already readied another shot from her "cavitation gun". It missed, of course. The damned gargoyle twisted right before the projectile came and…

…It hit one of the fucking plane's wings.

The good news was that it probably wouldn't be going down in enemy territory now, because it was going down at that precise moment instead. The entire wing just blew up on impact, half of it ripped clean away and the other half mangled to the base by the forces brought to bear.

Clearly heartbroken by the loss of its soulmate, the remaining wing began quivering and shaking. Emma was sure this had everything to do with a spiritual connection between the two things, and nothing at all with the fact that it was now experiencing a very rapid change in inertial forces and their relative balance with the ever-deteriorating structure. Grief won out, and the widow gave way a moment later. Stupid piece of shit plane.

About to be more of a piece of shit, Emma watched it nose-dive. Then she ran out of time and the gargoyle finished closing. Her next shot rang out and grazed its side, tore a chunk of stone the size of Emma's head out of it in doing so, and she yelped as a thousand—maybe more like nine hundred now—pounds of dark granite smashed into her.

Emma didn't have mass of her own, not really. The meagre few dozen kilos belonging to her armour and body could be rounded down to no kilos at all against an impact like this. The gargoyle was forced to split its momentum between them, and lost maybe a tenth of its speed in doing so. They were tight against one another, stony claws digging into hardlight armour and gripping Emma with a crushing pressure. She heard the heavy plates of her apparel groan and pop with the force.

Not good. Emma had a hard time gauging the gargoyle's strength—such things were difficult to estimate when you were separated from the source by an inch or two of magic—but she knew anything able to make her strengthened hardlight shiver like that had to be fearsome. Better not to give it too long to crush her.

At this range an energy lance was no choice at all, and Emma wasn't sure what her cavitation gun would do either. Armour or no she couldn't afford to even risk a serious injury with what the stakes were—so she improvised. It was annoying how much of that she'd been forced to do of late.

More annoying was how hard it was to improvise anything of use against this fucking thing, Emma was forced to think fast. She started with water, conjuring a metric fuck-ton of the stuff and letting it splash down over her and the gargoyle. It didn't reveal any supernatural weakness to moisture, that would have been too lucky, but it did mean that her enemy was now trying to grip something with a lot less friction.

Claws already digging into her armour made that something of an easier prospect, so Emma took a really big risk and deactivated her armour Talisman. She seized the armour, mentally, taking a hold of it with will rather than the automated amulet and carefully dispelling only the bits of hardlight immediately surrounding her enemy's claws.

With Emma's mind directly touching it, the rest of her armour remained active and in place. That was good, because the gargoyle flailed as its claws suddenly unstuck and she knew for a fact that even the handful of glancing hits its thrashing limbs scored against her would have crushed her body like rotten fruit were it not for the protection. As things were the hardlight plating cracked and buckled even as Emma dropped control back to her Talisman, the moments she spent doing that were almost enough for the gargoyle to get another grip on her.

Almost, but not quite.

Emma bought herself another second by pelting the gargoyle with iron balls, watching them ping off its stony skin with far less cracking and crumbling than she'd come to expect. Magic was going a long way for this thing, it seemed. Not long enough. Emma threw out another wall of hardlight, but this time she pinched a thick layer of yellow between two sheets of harder-to-make blue. The gargoyle smashed into it like the first, probably hoping for as easy a time smashing through as before. Instead it fractured the outer layers and found itself stuck fast in the gluey yellow.

There was probably about fifty gallons of the stuff stuck to it, but that didn't seem to slow the gargoyle at all. It did, however, give Emma an idea, and she soon started conjuring big clouds of gravel to shoot out at the yellow mass with just a slight exertion of Energy. Not fast, not at all. No, nice and slow. Slow enough to stick.

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By the second, more mass piled onto the yellow sludge and made everything heavier, heavier. Heavier still. Soon enough, it was too heavy for even a magical beast to remain aloft beneath it all and the gargoyle started dropping down out of the sky. Emma didn't get her hopes up on it landing too hard, but maybe it'd be crushed.

She got to enjoy that thought for all of a second before the other one slammed into her.

For a second time, Emma was sent spinning back. Now she was a bit nervous, keenly aware that the handful of seconds her fight had lasted were more than enough time for her allies to do plenty of falling. Had they hit the ground yet? No, no time to check, focus on living first. Then help them after.

The gargoyle had made one mistake, it was in close with her. Emma extended her mind to its body and tried to soften the stone with Matter, then promptly found her magic resisted by whatever force was animating the statue. Okay, not a mistake then. Shit. It was scrambling for a grip on her armour, but hadn't yet stabbed its claws in like the last one did. Emma tried her water trick, and found that this gargoyle was ready for it. Its claws dug in, grip tightened. She swore.

Out of time then, fine.

With all the will she could muster, Emma conjured a spray of iron balls and blasted them hard into the gargoyle at point-blank range. A regular statue would've been destroyed, cracked, then shattered, then blasted apart. This one stopped at the cracked stage, and even then only for a particular section of its body. Emma felt the claws digging into her armour as a sudden resistance against her magic, and grit her teeth. She conjured more iron, this time in a single, long strip with a jagged end.

It dug in hard to the cracked section, hard enough that Emma actually felt the waves of impact run through both the gargoyle's body and her own armour. Teeth rattling, she watched as chunks of stone bigger than her fist smashed away and left a great crater exposed in her enemy's side. Its claws dug in deeper, almost nearing the skin now. She produced a blue hardlight rod, then more layers of blue to seal its tip inside the cavity her attack had left.

Come to think of it, Emma had never tried to produce an energy lance from something other than her hand before—or rather, not intentionally. She supposed she did that every time she used the technique while covered in her armour. The tip of her hardlight staff channeled her magic well enough, and though she found the effort far clumsier and slower than usual it was only a brief few seconds before Emma's power reached critical mass. Just as the gargoyle's claws finished digging through her armour, the energy lance went off inside it.

Emma discovered then why people gave so much clearance to explosions, and why tiny little amounts of the stuff could split boulders if they went off inside. The gargoyle pretty much stopped existing between the time taken for light to suddenly dazzle her and Emma's eyes to reflexively close. She didn't wait to see again, just started flying downwards.

It took a few seconds for her eyes to clear up, and when they did Emma immediately realised that she'd let the falling plane get too far ahead.

The thing hadn't landed, yet, but it looked like there were easily kilometres separating it from her, and maybe one between it and the ground. She'd be cutting this uncomfortably close. Fortunately, she was flying fast. She zipped past the first gargoyle—still bound and falling in thick yellow hardlight—a moment later.

Emma flew faster than ever with gravity helping her, and she was on the plane in moments more. Moments, unfortunately, were enough time for it to have dropped very deep indeed. It was maybe a few hundred metres above the ground now—she had seconds before impact at best.

Seconds was plenty of time, though. Right? Right. Emma reached the plane and looked inside, found it already emptied.

Of course she did, her allies would've wasted no time in extricating themselves from the giant slab of metal trapping them downwards. Had they already landed below? No time to check.

She pushed off the plane and watched it careen down to the ground. It hit hard, smashing to pieces. Emma had expected an explosion, too many movies probably. There was none. Just an eruption of metal and canvas as the whole thing burst at once. Emma got to look at the mangled wreckage for a few seconds longer.

Then the gargoyle landed on it. She actually laughed, seeing that big block of yellow smack down into the ground. It didn't hit nearly as fast, probably travelling less than half as quick thanks to the added drag from all that ultra-light hardlight.

Harder than it might have, thanks to Emma dispelling the hardlight at the last moment. The gargoyle landed without protection from the soft, springy material Emma had used to save her own skin from so many impacts. She watched it embed itself into a crater.

Emma drifted down, stopping at a hover just ten or so metres above the gargoyle and reading another cavitation shot as she waited for the dust around its crater to clear. There was no need, the gargoyle was in bits once she finally got a good look. She let out a sigh of relief.

That lasted all of a second before something whipped by Emma's head. She blinked, turned to the direction she thought it had come from and was promptly shot in the face by a sniper rifle.

Fortunately, she was wearing her armour and the rifle wasn't made to knock out tanks. It still hurt like a motherfucker. Emma dropped out of the sky like a small woman who'd just been shot in the head and landed right on the wreckage of the plane, fortunately finding hot metal about the least deadly thing she'd encountered of late.

Emma heard the sounds of something rattling against that metal as she kept rolling and tumbled off the plane, realising right before impact with the dirt that it was more gunfire smashing into the ruined vehicle. Her head was still ringing, but feeling returned to her limbs quickly.

Something else was on her more quickly still. Hands as strong as any grip Emma had ever felt, tight around her head. Squeezing, dragging, hauling her body off like it weighed nothing at all.