Groygar screamed, then the physical fighters reached him. Standing behind the Demigod, with his feet sinking increasingly deep in sludgy sand, they didn't find much resistance as they struck and tormented him. By the time he'd finally torn his feet free the damage to his back looked like a normal human would if some cat had gone wild clawing at it.
Worse, his front looked like he'd lost a knife-fight. At least a score of slashes from Milton's whip now littered his body, and unlike the weaker cuts from their other weaponry each one was bleeding still. Emma wondered how much of his arterial fluid was now dribbling out of the wounds, what volume it would all take up if someone collected and combined it. A pint? A litre?
Enough. She could only hope enough, because then Groygar was turning again and knocking Haruki out of the fighting with the flat of his axe. The man went flying and bouncing across the beach, stopping only another dozen metres away. For what felt like the millionth time, everyone except Emma disappeared in a blur of impossibly fast limbs and impossibly jagged violence. She just did what she always did and kept on supporting.
Aexilica went down next, then Vari, then Storm-Eye, then Thyra. Then there was nobody left to be beaten. Except Emma and Milton.
By now the Demigod had been ravaged by their attacks. Whipstrikes had cut him deeply enough that most of his body was crimson with sticking blood, and flaps of skin as big as palms dangled and fluttered with every movement. Emma's contributions had been similar. The more the Demigod was hurt, the more reliably she'd been able to hit him. Several energy lances had since matched the damage of her first, and she didn't miss the hisses of pain Groygar let out every time he moved in such a way as to fold the skin around them and squeeze out more blood.
But he was still mobile, and still strong. The moment Thyra went down, the Demigod froze and so did Emma and Milton.
They all stared at each other, panting, twitching. Emma felt her mana supplies and was chilled to realise that they were three-quarters gone. If Groygar stood still she could kill him before they ran out entirely, but he wouldn't make it so easy. If she missed as much as she had been, would he be able to weather her into exhaustion?
Milton seemed to be doing a similar calculation, insofar as he was capable of calculation.
"You are powerful." Groygar snarled, but without any of the humour Emma had seen in him before. "Both of you, so very powerful. I think I'll eat your hearts."
She didn't really know how to reply to that, so she didn't. Just waited. There was blood still oozing, if slowly, from most of the serious cuts on Groygar's body. If the dumbass wanted to stand around and talk while his veins got emptier then Emma would certainly not interrupt him.
Unfortunately, he soon interrupted himself. Turning to her, snarling, and leaping.
When they'd first encountered him, immediately after he left the painting, Groygar could've jumped the five metres between them fast enough that Emma wouldn't have even reacted before he landed. He was slower now, weaker. His huge body seemed to impede motion in all the ways such a great amount of mass ought to have. He landed just short of her, though still within arms' reach.
But more importantly, he landed after enough time for Emma to prepare a defence. Just as Groygar's axe swung, a great pole of hardened energy stabbed down into the sand between them. The handle of his weapon struck it, dragged the material through the sand and ended up snapping it with the resistance. It slowed enough in the process for Emma to duck beneath the attack.
This time, her energy lance hit him at point-blank range. And right in the bloody burn where her first one already had.
Groygar didn't fly backwards, because he was simply too heavy to do that. Emma did feel the concussion where energy exchanged mediums from air to flesh, and she did see his feet leave the ground. A normal man would've kept moving until he touched sand ten or twenty metres back. Groygar barely travelled one of his own body length before he dropped down, but Emma hadn't been banking in launching him anyway.
As he got up, she saw the blood. Tons of it, practically a river running down his chest, his belly, his legs. It soaked into the sand, making crimson mud beneath his feet as he got to wavering feet. Now the Demigod was breathing hard, every exhalation misting in the air as if his body were some great furnace on a frigid mountainside. He turned to glare at Emma like no creature or person had ever glared at her before, hatred distilled to something beyond purity.
Then one of his knees buckled, just for a second, and he almost fell again.
He might have stayed like that for a while, just wheezing and bleeding and maybe staying still enough for his strength to trickle out and clot the sand instead of his wounds. But Milton's whip came down hard, opening another gash and bringing urgency to the Demigod once more. With a roar of outrage he lept to his feet, swung his axe and…
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Took to the skies.
Flying? Yes, yes! Not well, Emma thought, not with any great degree of control. It was like his weapon were shooting on ahead and he simply held onto its shaft to be conveniently dragged along in its wake. She watched nonetheless as he slowly disappeared towards a horizon, growing smaller by the second.
Every moment, Emma felt certain he would turn around. Maybe do some strafing run with magical lightning or, if he lacked such abilities, just drop down to keep fighting. She was closer to one fifth of her mana than one quarter, now, but she thought she could still kill him if he made a mistake like that in his current condition.
No mistake came of course, and soon enough the Demigod was entirely gone from her sight. A memory, not a picture.
For a second, Emma just stood there and panted. She looked around at her allies.
Not good, she had to say. All of them were alive, she could tell as much from the rise-and-fall of breathing chests, but only the Battle Bitches seemed even somewhat mobile. Milton, for his part, looked pale and worn out. Emma recognised the appearance from what she'd been told had overcome her features when she exhausted her own mana.
She was about to say something about it when he cut her off by speaking instead.
"Why did you not use your secret abilities?" He asked, between exhausted, rattling gasps, "Why did you let him almost kill us? You had cards up your sleeve, right?"
Emma frowned.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
She was stupid. It was unlike her to miss something so important, to put pieces together so slowly, but exhaustion and fear had left her mind sluggish, clumsy and simple. She missed it, and the disaster was already started by the time she even realised. Why had Milton tried to sneak by her group rather than engage? He might've had decent odds of winning given his own party's strength.
Because she thought Emma's was more powerful than it was, almost as if a certain someone with a vested interest in bluffing him had done so.
Milton's eyes widened, his features twisted, his jaw stiffened. His hands came up and his whip re-materialised in them to cut her fully in half. Emma had already started moving before any of this though, and her own attack landed perfectly in his centre-of mass.
Bullets, not a javelin or lance, but deadly enough all the same. They punched him off his feet and squeezed blood to explode from ruptured tissue as Milton's body went suddenly limp and landed suddenly hard. He cried out, thrashing around and wheezing…
Not at all like a man who'd just been shot ought to have moved, Emma thought. But then she'd seen Milton's physical powers demonstrated enough that it was hardly surprising. He wasn't so tough that near-sonic projectiles did nothing, at least, and she gazed down at him as he remained twitching and spasming in agony.
"I'm dying!" He groaned. "You've killed me!"
Emma examined the bleeding, compared it to the extremes she'd seen in other people she shot and Groygard respectively. It didn't take long for her to decide that Milton was not actually dying, but then if he thought that then he'd probably be a good deal more manageable.
"Shouldn't have attacked me." She shot back.
Milton said something Emma didn't even really understand, practically mewling it out as he rolled around. Actually crying, she saw, tears welling in his eyes. God, it was one of the most pathetic things she'd ever seen.
Of course, it went from pathetic to soul-crushingly terrifying when Emma caught movement in the corner of her eye, and turned to see Thyra and Noelani rising to their feet. Both the Battle Bitches had hard faces on, looking variably between Emma and Milton. Neither was armed, but Emma had seen enough from them both to know that they didn't need weapons with her. Their sheer strength would be enough to kill her eventually, armour or no.
Soon, Milton noticed them too. His voice rang out with the sort of manic, hopeful desperation Emma thought ought to be reserved for those who were actually wounded.
"Battle Bitches!" He called out. "Destroy her, your master—your senpai—he's in danger, you need to protect me. This is where you can—" Milton got no farther than that before they both moved, one a blur of white hair and pink armour, the other of black and black. Emma could barely follow them, injuries or not, and knew it was all over.
Because they came down on Milton, not her.
"You fucking disgusting pig!" The black-haired one, Thyra, cried out. She kicked Milton, metal-clad boots stomping down on his arm and head like the pistons in some great steam engine.
"Perverted fucking animal!" Shrieked the black haired Battle Bitch, working over the other side of his body in much the same way. Neither of the women was, Emma thought, quite as strong as Aexilica was now, but either of them must have had more physical strength than she had when Emma first met her. If anything it was impressive that Milton remained conscious for as long as he did while both of them attacked him at once.
But Milton wasn't a fighter, and he didn't seem to even have any of the basic instincts for covering up and protecting himself that most random people did to boot. It really didn't take long for him to stop moving, his supernatural durability doing nothing more than delaying the inevitable. He didn't live so long after that, despite all the toughness his isekai had brought.
By the time they were finished, both Battle Bitches stood panting and gasping. They looked like shit, beaten up, bloody, clearly exhausted…But Emma didn't think she'd ever seen people grinning so broadly or intensely as they were now. Storm-Eye when they first saw the money room, perhaps.
Panting, both of them turned at once to Emma. It was, somehow, one of the more frightening things she'd experienced lately. Emma decided to hide how arousing she found it too, figuring that such a thing would probably piss them off even more.
"Okay, you've taken out Milton, as far as I know you didn't have any issue with us specifically right?"
The women considered that, then slowly nodded. Emma forced a smile.
"Then…Looks like we're all on the same page, right? We can…Divide the treasure equally, go our separate ways, and all will be good."
"We could do that," came a new voice, Asgrim's voice, "But…I have a better idea." The captain grunted as he climbed up to his feet, and grinned.
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