Gamer Girl Isekai

The creature—because it was not a woman, no matter how much it resembled one—lunged backwards as if it had been fired from a bow. Aexilica heard the sharp crack of metal staves as fire hit the air and impossibly-fast projectiles smashed against the stone floor, right where she'd just been standing. Too slow.

Aexilica had almost no knowledge at all for this fight, what she'd learned from Kruger had been scattered and incomplete. But she'd managed to glean two things— the Nocturnae themselves were supposedly weaker by day, and they fought like nothing human. Instinct guided her more than thought, throwing her forth to close the distance between herself and her enemy. She had no great strategy behind this move, only the knowledge that her enemy had seemed eager to do the opposite—and that denying what the foe attempted was rarely a bad idea.

The problem with simple, common-sense tactics was that the enemy tended to think of them too. Aexilica found herself lunging towards a great wall of fire. One moment it wasn't there, the next it was. She felt the hairs curl on her arms as she stumbled to a halt just as the flames reared up, then crashed down.

Everything in the chamber—solid stone, all of it—became chaos and destruction as pure rock heated, crumbled and liquefied amid the heat. Aexilica knew even she would not survive direct exposure to that sort of extreme, and yet it closed on her all in a great wave.

Emma could have stopped it, she knew. Done something clever with a barrier or water or any number of other things. Aexilica just wasn't suited to countering attacks like this.

Luck was on her side, though. Just this once. Because Aexilica didn't need to rely on her physical powers today. Just as the flames looked close to reaching her, they halted. Not on their own, something was pushing back against them. Sheer, gale-force winds blasting through the chamber. She felt a wave of hot air wash across her as the heat was dispersed in all directions, and glanced back to see Krummer splaying his hands and frowning in exertion.

Clearly, the rarity that was Curgundry's magic could still be found from time to time amongst its elites. Clearly, this rarity was not nearly so powerful as a similarly uncommon gift of magic might have been in Aethiq or Scurlga. Aexilica could see the exertion in Krummer's features as he strained himself, lips peeled back and whole body trembling with the mental force needed to pin back the monster's attack. He didn't have long, which meant she didn't have long.

Which meant Emma didn't have long.

Aexilica threw herself across the room with a cry, stooping down to stab the tip of her sword into a puddle of bubbling stone and flicking it forwards. The liquid shot forwards, thick globules popping and sizzling and glowing redder than blood as they hurtled across the room. Her aim, or at least her luck, was good. They hit the monster right in her chest.

It wasn't a great amount, just a few splashes. Maybe enough to hide in a single closed fist. It was shocking to Aexilica just how effective the stuff was in spite of that, clinging fast to its target's clothing and, in barely a second, fully igniting much of her torso as fabric absorbed the screaming earth-heat and protested with flame.

The larger flames—-the magical flames engulfing the room as a whole—subsided with the woman's distraction, and Aexilica closed while she backed away. Screaming, beating at her chest, clawing away burning fabric and rapidly-solidifying stone, her distraction was buying precious moments. And those moments would have been enough, had they remained alone.

A major flaw to ambushing the enemy in their own home—the major flaw, it might be said—was that it was, at the end of the day, their own home. They'd hardly been quiet in their combat, and so Aexilica was not the least bit surprised when men came pouring in from a corridor behind the Nocturna. Their hands were filled by those curious staves, and all were bringing them up to fire.

She threw herself to one side as the air erupted with screaming flame and smoke. Aexilica felt impacts run along her side, two—maybe three. Hot, sharp. They knocked the wind from her, almost spun her. She landed, rolled, got up and felt a twisting barb of pain deep in her waist. No time to check the damage, not now.

More shots rang out and Aexilica raised her sword on instinct, then winced as something too fast to see struck the metal. Sparks shot out in all directions like she'd smashed it against another sword, and whatever had rebound from the blade whipped by her ear with a barely-audible hiss. She didn't have time to marvel at it, more shots were ringing out.

No, not from the enemy this time. Aexilica blinked as she heard a sound so very similar to the barking staves that it gave her pause, then watched men begin to just…Come apart.

It was like seeing some invisible hand reach down to pluck their bodies into pieces, every one seeming to fall open and drop to the ground in three or four pieces. She blinked, turned back to the sound of the new barking stave and found it was Kruger. Kruger, wielding a…It wasn't a stave of his own, she thought, or rather it wasn't nearly so staff-looking as those wielded by the others present. Squatter, with a broader barrel and a strange fixture built into its centre. Between the grip at its back and the section right beneath the front where Kruger's hand gripped it all.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

What is that? A box, of sorts, protruding from the bottom of the staff. The thing jumped and bucked like a wild animal in his grip, spitting out tongues of flame and cries of rage so rapidly that Aexilica almost heard them blending into one another. And with every burst of heat and light, another man came to pieces.

"Up!" Kruger roared, snapping her from her stupor with that word alone. There was still a wealth of killing to be done, however much had happened already. The air was thick with it, spilled blood and burning stone scents meeting and merging to fill the molten charnal house. Aexilica dove through the reek of it so fast that she felt the tainted air driven clean up her nostrils, eyes watering as she found her targets. Her sword found them first, jumping ahead eager and hungry as a trained hound. Edged steel made its fangs, and they bit deep. The first two men Aexilica just cut completely in half, the third caught her blade only when it had sunk halfway into his skull. Sunk too deep, because Aexilica found herself dragging the whole body back as she tried to draw the sword away for another slash. The fifteen stone of added weight delayed her by precious moments, let a stave move sluggishly up to level itself at her face.

So she punched its wielder instead, which was almost messier than the swings had been. At least steel cut cleanly with her strength, hard knuckles just pulped. The skull gave like rotten fruit, breaking open, breaking apart, seeming almost to open up like a blooming flower as great folds of skin peeled back to expose liquefied brain matter. The sheer impact of it actually freed Aexilica's sword, and she brought it around to hack both the legs off a man who'd tried to blast her from behind.

That motion, a full turn, came too quickly. It jarred the wounds in Aexilica's side, left her spasming and still for one instant too long. Another shot rang out, and this time the staff's output thudded hard into the centre of her chest. She felt the skin and flesh of her torso give instantly, then the hard, sharp clatter of something solid hitting a breast bone that was more solid still. Solid enough? Aexilica wouldn't be doing much fighting with a broken bone there of all places, it would be her death.

She inhaled, almost winced at the very thought. And didn't feel the shifting of sundered bone. She was still alive.

For now. More staves were aiming at her, and Aexilica exploded back into motion.

She was not the only thing to explode, for Kruger's mysterious weapon was barking all over again. The results were just as devastating the second time. Limbs came free from bodies, heads opened in half or disappeared entirely. The air became thick with blood falling slowly enough to almost seem suspended by the speed with which Aexilica fought, and she found more than one crimson sheet breaking apart against her skin as she moved through them.

But the men were pouring in faster than she could kill them, seemingly inexhaustible. Whatever chamber they were draining out of must have been the size of a lesser fortress itself, she decided, because every killing swing of her sword seemed only to make the room another man needed to storm through. There were too many for them to even fight her as they doubtless wished to, numbers compressing them in to within the reach of her blade despite every one being equipped with a staff made for long-range combat.

It was then that the woman they'd first encountered made her move, and she did not do it alone.

Another wall of flames descended, falling down onto Aexilica herself. She took a stunned moment to realise the attack was coming even as she stood surrounded by her enemy's allies, then desperately scrambled to shield herself from it beneath their very bodies. Even through a foot of meat and skin, she felt the heat of the flames. Not natural fire, not even close, the energies at play were such that Aexilica found herself hiding beneath chunks of burning charcoal in only moments.

She didn't stop of course, couldn't stop. If an object touched by the fire was so hot, the flame itself would be a hundred times worse. Blisters were better than death, so she tolerated them.

The flames abated, and at once Aexilica shoved her now-smoking, unrecognisable chunk of withered man-fuel away to free herself from its encumbrance and dart back to the protection of Krummer's magic. Her body ached, eyes stung, lungs throbbed from where she'd inhaled too much smoke. Were she as she'd been even just a few months ago, Aexilica suspected she would already have found herself burned to death. Skin sloughed off from the outside, lungs blistered and burned from within.

As things were, she was powerful enough that her concern was the great blonde man falling down at her from above.

He was a large man, and might have registered to Aexilica's eyes as a giant. At six and a half feet or more, he certainly passed that threshold by most standards. Compared to Groygar, however, his was a small and withered body, lean rather than bulging and altogether shrunken. In the time Aexilica took to decide as much, he had already cleared the five paces between them. She barely lunged aside in time to have him hit the stone floor, rather than her own body. By the way she saw hard tiles split and long cracks sprint across the surfaces for paces in each direction, she felt certain it would have been the end of her fight otherwise.

Aexilica fell back, scrambled to her feet and raised her weapon to parry an axe-swing that felt very much like a house was collapsing behind it. She stumbled away, then turned her stumble into a full-retreat as the man chased after her, still swinging. He was tireless, but undefended. Not so much as raising his guard and with none of the skill she might have expected to find in so strong a swordsman. Aexilica's blade found his unprotected chest and bit into it, scraping through skin and muscle to stop just shy of bone. A good swing, but one that suffered from the simple disparity between her strength and this enemy's durability. Ten more, though, and—

—Before her eyes, the wound began bubbling and shifting. It took only moments to close up entirely. Perfect.