"You could work for me," the woman told Emma, "leave Larry—he's crippled already, you can see—and come serve a truly powerful Cognitive Spirit. You could be a woman of great might, under me, you know. Untethered are rare, incredibly rare. I could find a great many uses for power as world-breaking as yours."

Emma thought about that, making sure to take her time. She had a tendency to jump into big decisions, Emma knew, and historically speaking that tendency had been…not good. So she really made herself think.

"What exactly would I be standing to gain from this?" she asked.

The woman, Suzanne, reached into her clothing and removed a bra. Removed a bra she had been wearing seconds before. A bra that just happened to be the biggest Emma had ever seen by no small margin.

"I'll do it," Emma replied.

"Would you stop and think about this for a second!?" Kruger's voice rang out, suddenly loud and suddenly angry. Angrier than she'd ever heard it, maybe. Emma turned to him and found his glare hitting like a freight truck. She actually felt a little bit ashamed.

Emma did think about it, but…God damn, why did she have to? She'd already dealt with so much bullshit in this world, couldn't she just—

—"What's going on here?" Aexilica asked, stepping out onto the broad balcony with Krummer and Vari in tow behind her. Emma sighed.

"The answer is no," she told Suzanne, "...sorry."

Suzanne looked at Emma for a second, then Aexilica, then Larry, smirked, and then looked back to Emma.

"You're sure?"

"Yes," Emma actually felt more confident the second time. Bridge burned. There, now she could stop whining about what could have been, right?

Yeah, right.

"Then I'm afraid you really don't know what sorry is yet," the woman sighed.

None of them waited for the ominous statement to become an attack, of course. The violence that had been dangling over their heads suddenly found its feet and exploded out in all directions. Literally exploded, in Kruger's case, as the propellant of several shotgun shells turned into uncurling flames from his gun barrel.

Of course, it didn't work. Emma saw the pellets bounce off their target as little slivers of deformed lead, and a moment later the being called Suzanne was leaping high and splaying her arms wide. Magic washed through the air, as thick as any Emma had ever felt. Thicker. Then the portal emerged.

Portals, plural. Fuck.

A power ranger came from the first, which was actually one of the more normal things Emma had seen lately but still understandably freaked her the fuck out. He landed in some weird anime pose and started yelling anime noises while gesturing and throwing kicks at the air. He had a helmet and full leather body-suit on, so she couldn't make out anything of his features beyond average build and height.

Emma did not have time to formulate a response to his…existence, not before others were emerging alongside him.

The next to come was a tall man with long blonde hair and…he was a fucking cowboy, a blue-haired cowboy with an unironic blade of grass sticking out of his teeth and a pair of stupid fucking revolvers by his hip.

He looked around, frowned, blinked, then his eyes fell on Aexilica.

"Fuck's that Injun doin' here?"

"Holy shit," Emma squealed, conjuring up an energy lance before Aexilica could so much as overcome her surprise and blowing half of the balcony apart as the man leapt from her attack's path and the hardlight armour wreathed itself out around her. Guns barked, Kruger's and the newcomer's both, and everything became lost in a frenzy of sudden violence.

Through it all, more people kept coming through the portals.

Next came a tall woman, covered in muscle with long-blonde hair, blue eyes and a few pretty looking scars across her, clearly visible along toned flesh from how much skin she was showing. Emma lost higher cognitive function for a few seconds after seeing her, but snapped out of it as the woman drew up some massive hammer and took it to Vari, who barely parried with his own weapon.

A fatass came threw after that, genuinely one of the more obese human beings Emma had ever seen and bald as an egg. Emma heard him screaming something that sounded disturbingly like 'expeliarmus', pretty much telling her exactly what sort of confrontation she could hope to enjoy from the idiot, when the last one dropped down in front of her.

Emma had just enough time to soak in his dark skin, darker hair, darkest eyes and horribly handsome features before he punched her, sending her stumbling back into a bit of the balcony's stone railing, which promptly collapsed under her weight due to having been weakened by the energy lance's explosion. She fell.

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But not for long. Emma could fly after all, and she was starting to get the hang of actually using her powers when they were needed.

She got about two feet up before a brick landed on her head. It didn't hurt much, Emma would've died about fifty times if that was all it took to get through her armour, but the sheer mass of the brick—maybe more of a boulder really—drove her down and broke her orientation enough that she started spinning. By the time she'd righted herself, everything had been consumed by the sudden chaos.

Wherever she looked, people were fighting. Everyone seemed to have, either by silent agreement, coincidence or sheer convenience, gotten themselves into a one or two-on-one with a particular enemy.

…Except Kruger, he was fighting three-on-one and losing hard. Emma reckoned that about made him her priority.

His opponents were the power ranger, who was throwing stupid fucking air-kicks and yelling about "the Red Ryder", the cowboy and the fat baby-wizard. Emma actually had a really hard time deciding which one she most wanted to stop talking first, and ended up just firing an energy lance into the centre of their group in the hopes that she'd take them all out.

For the first time that she could remember, it actually landed. The power ranger wasn't that hurt, as evidenced by him doing a stupid fucking pose as he flew back, but the baby man screamed like he was having a leg amputated with someone's teeth, while the cowboy landed hard and rolled about twenty metres. It bought Kruger some breathing room.

"Thanks!" He called out, as Emma drifted down to land beside him and glared at their opponents menacingly.

Or as menacingly as a four-foot-nine woman wearing neon armour could glare, at least. Her party clothes had been about shredded by the forcibly-fast motions she'd already made, but that was more helpful than anything. The torn fabric allowed for a lot more mobility than it had when intact.

"Wow, looks like you're pretty strong!" screamed the power ranger, right before throwing himself into a standing position as if he were on moon gravity, "HYA!"

Emma just stared. This man was not real, right? She was in a fantasy land, sure, okay, and yeah she had just killed three vampires a few weeks ago, but…this guy wasn't real, right?

"Listen," she began, "look, we don't need to fight—these Cognitive Spirits, they're all assholes. You guys can just—"

—the bullet smashed into Emma much like all the others she'd been hit by, except this one smashed clean through her armour and sent her flying back. She landed in a heap, ten fucking metres away, and felt her mouth fill with blood. Through bleary, tear-clotted vision she looked back and saw the cowboy, smoking revolver aimed right where she'd just been standing. It was practically throbbing with magic.

"Sorry miss, but I don't rightly think we can afford to do that. Got work to be doing here."

***

"Haha, wow, you're fast huh?" The man was doing…something as he fought Aexilica. She wasn't sure what, exactly. Some bizarre magic, distracting her. She forced herself to focus, reading the shifts of his balance and twitching of his limbs while she backed away, fought defensively.

Clearly, he was from Emma's world. It would be an awful coincidence if he wasn't, from the snippets Aexilica had gleaned of that conversation with the mysterious being who'd summoned him. And he had all the power Aexilica had come to expect from someone of Emma's people. He fought with a strange sort of spear that twisted in ways she found hard to predict, harder still was the way it produced and trailed water.

The spear slipped one of Aexilica's parries and came for her shoulder, she twisted aside—barely—and felt a jet of water hit her like it had been flung from a sling. Lots of water, more than any sling she'd ever seen could have propelled. More than her body could match in weight. She stumbled back, fell, rolled, exploded back onto her feet and barely guarded another stab which would've run her through at the belly. The man's face remained just as infuriating as ever, eyes wide with shock and genuine approval.

"You're amazing!" he grinned, "pretty too."

"Shut up!" Aexilica snapped, not even sure where her anger was coming from or what, exactly, was mixing with it to have her so…confused.

"Sorry, I will now." The man did look apologetic, guilty even. It made his face look all…Odd. Aexilica wanted to say cute but why would she…

"Don't stop!" She snapped, suddenly, "keep being nice to me." By the Gods, what was going on in her belly to make it squirm and churn so much?

Magic, it had to be magic. The man just laughed more and kept pressing her, his strength briefly making Aexilica forget about his…everything else.

***

Vari would have lost fast if the newly-made vampire, Krummer, had not aided him. Though he was fighting a woman, and thus was innately superior to his opponent in every way that a person might count, he was still losing because…she was just more powerful.

Time spent travelling with Aexilica and Emma had been an unpleasant wake-up call about the innate weakness of femininity, that was perhaps a good thing in this case because his opponent now was dangerous enough that he doubted he'd have survived underestimating her. She moved like lightning, parrying every swing Vari made despite her hammer being perhaps twice the weight of his.

And that hammer was more than just greater in size. It was a thing of power enough that he felt it, just from proximity, and only a few swings and clashes were enough for him to recognise the weapon.

"That is…Vaskryn!" Krummer actually declared it before Vari did, his shock sounding, if anything, deeper still. It must have been unfortunate for him, having lost his magic by transformation into a vampire, because it meant he was forced to engage that most legendary of hammers up close and personal.

The woman grinned as he named her weapon, then swung it for him once more. Had Vari not recognised the hammer he might have tried to parry or block, instead he sidestepped and let its head bite into the stone underfoot. It was devastation. He had seen Curgundry's largest weapons, the things they called 'howitzers' fire into the ground and not cause so much destruction. In an instant he was stumbling back from a newly made crater that measured wider than he was tall, its stony epidermis obliterated and exposing a deep wound in the dirt below.

"It's nice to fight a Sculd, and have my weapon recognised," the woman grinned, "my name is Thoress. Now take it with you to the grave."

Vari realised, then, that for all her terrible speed and power, she had been holding back before. He raised his enchanted weapon up and cried out as her attack came on like a whirlwind made of steel instead of air. Krummer fell back right alongside him. Two on one, and one of them a vampire. They were a great force together.

But could they win? Vari did not know.

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