The fireball was pretty fucking big, but Emma was fortunately better equipped to deal with it now than she'd been with the last one. It wasn't even halfway between the dragon's face and hers when the defensive barrier Emma had put up met it.

Blue hardlight, brittle and hard, shaped into a hollow wall. It was filled in with water. The frontal section of hardlight burned through quickly, exposing the liquid to bubble and boil. Before the heat could eat through the back, and thus reach Emma's coterie, the water simply poured out through the now-open front and dissipated it in a sizzling puddle. Emma let the rest of the wall collapse as she took a step forwards, speaking before she knew what she was doing.

"I am Emma!" She called out. "Untethered, I can shape reality just by thinking about it. And these are my fucking friends you're threatening. Think hard before picking this fight, you won't be finishing it."

She'd been talking mostly from her ass, not really even planning out her words on a syllable-by-syllable basis, but to Emma's surprise Astrid seemed suddenly uncertain. Her dragon roared, growled, then calmed as the girl put a hand on the side of its head.

"Hold on Kallvindr." She ordered, and to Emma's amazement the dragon actually listened. The thing halted its circling and started hovering instead, wings beating slower, more deliberate. It was like watching something tread water, almost. Emma let out a breath she'd held without realising it, and became suddenly aware of just how tense her whole body was.

There was a limit, she thought, to how many life-or-death struggles a person could get into in such short succession.

"Okay, thank you." Emma croaked, having gone for a more impressive tone and promptly failed to capture it.

"You tried to kill us with a dragon." Vari growled, aiming his axe at her as if he expected bullets to shoot from the end. "Whore!"

Vari's stunning and intellectual diplomatic strategy was interrupted as Eirik stepped forwards to speak, apparently no longer paralyzed by fear.

"Astrid, what are you doing with that thing? It's dangerous, please get down from it!"

If nothing else, Eirik did a good job of distracting from Vari's diplomatic kamikaze attack.

"You don't tell me what to do anymore!" She cried, raising her chin and throwing her head back. Emma got the impression that she thought she was some sort of rebel, that she was flaunting her independence. Actually, she was just making herself look like a massive asshole.

"Astrid, it's a dragon!" Her father roared, looking angry now.

"I love him!" Astrid shot back. It was one of those magic sentences, the ones that conveyed, in a single instant, just how much of Emma's time was about to be eaten by the current discussion.

"You…You love…A dragon?" Eirik, poor Eirik, seemed more baffled than anything. It was one of the more appropriate responses Emma had seen from him to anything, though Astrid seemed to disagree.

"My soul mate!" She shot back.

"It's a fucking dragon!" Eirik snapped. "Astrid that's…This is insane!"

"You don't see him as I do." His daughter growled, eyes full of fire. "You don't know the gentle, loving soul behind all the scales and talons."

The gentle, loving soul in question was currently cleaning its own genitals with its tongue. Emma considered pointing the fact out, but she figured it wouldn't be well received. And Astrid was getting angry enough already.

"Enough of this." She spat. "I should've known you wouldn't understand our love, it's why I ran away from home in the first place. Kallvindr, kill daddy!"

The dragon must've been better with words than most animals of its intelligence, because it perked up quickly at that and glared at Eirik. Emma watched its mouth open, nostrils flare, throat glow. She reached out once more with her magic and threw down another barricade.

Just barely in time to stop Eirik from getting flash-cremated. The entire plateau heated up, so hot and expansive was the fireball.

"FUCK!" Astrid screamed over the inferno, glaring at Emma now. "Fine then, kill the stupid wizard Kallvindr!" The dragon turned around fast. Impossibly fast, unreasonably fast. As if its body hadn't yet been told how heavy and cumbersome things so large were meant to be. Emma didn't have time for another barricade, not one as complicated as her composite of water and hardlight. Fortunately, she didn't need that now. Unfortunately, it was because the fucking dragon chose a physical attack instead of a respitory one.

Kallvinder's jaws opened wide enough to swallow Emma whole, or take a sizable chunk out of non-petite people. Vari, fortunately, put himself between them and retaliated with a swing that might have cut a normal human in half, armour or no.

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It didn't break through the scales, but it did make the dragon wince enough to close its mouth and stop Vari from getting turned into two halves of a Vari. That was when Emma's matter lance hit the thing hard in one flank, and broke apart just as the last one had.

But, just as the last one had, it broke the skin too. Scales splintering and blood misting around the gash. Emma had about half a second to feel good about herself before the stupid fucking dragon reached her, flew past and clipped her with a wing. Up became down, and sideways too. Emma hit the ground, slid. Everything good about hardlight became bad. The lightness, letting her get launched faster. The lack of friction, letting her slide along the ground without slowing. The stiffness letting her feel every inch of her jarred even with the slight amounts of give she'd had her new Talisman give the stuff.

Emma couldn't have slid for more than a second before she was over the edge and falling. That brought a whole new problem to her attention.

She tried to anchor herself back up in the air with Force, but Emma was spinning so quickly that telling up from down was impossible. She banished her armour, letting the sensation of dragging air against skin let her know, and then did so.

Her descent slowed, and Emma halted it entirely with a platform of hardlight and a burst of kinetic energy to throw her back upwards. She conjured her armour back just as she reached the top of the plateau again.

The few seconds she'd spent gone had been enough for everything to degenerate.

Aexilica was lodged in a wall, actually in the wall. Apparently thrown into it hard enough that the stone had broken and left her sticking into it. Vari was somehow doing worse, lying in a heap and bleeding profusely where he'd been raked by the dragon's talons.

The dragon was still in the air and circling, roaring and jetting out little bursts of flame in what looked like some kind of victory lap. Emma assessed the situation quickly, and just as quickly decided that the best course of action she could take was to just quietly fuck off before it could try to fight her too.

But Aexilica was there, Vari. Both staring down a fucking dragon with instructions to kill them, both helpless. They couldn't defend themselves from it.

So Emma had to. She made to slip her ring on, realised it wasn't possible without undoing her armour temporarily, and decided to make do without.

It was luck, not skill, that sent her matter-javelin smashing into one of the scaleless spots Emma had already hit. The projectile went in deep, cut deep, drew a cry of pain from the dragon and a nice spurt of sizzling blood. It turned to Emma, eyes hot and fiery. She realised in an instant just what sort of mistake she'd made.

The dragon's mouth opened, and it breathed fire again. Emma's barrier came up and met the heat with water again, but now there was a physical attack coming right after the thermal one. She lunged aside and felt the flying creature barely miss her as its body smashed through the space she'd just been occupying and its talons raked clean through the stone underfoot. Emma rolled about five times farther than she'd intended to, came up to a clumsy knee and shrieked as another fireball wrapped itself around her.

Emma hadn't had time for a full barrier this time, just a reflexive conjuring of water. Pints where she'd needed gallons, blunting the edge of the attack but little more than that. Her armour took the rest, burning up and eroding. The fireball couldn't have lasted more than a second or two, but it felt like hours. By the time it dispersed Emma felt like every scrap of skin on her body was aching.

She dropped down to both knees, actually heard steam hissing up around her where the water had been flash-boiled. The stone was glowing. Glowing. Cherry-red patches like someone had blowtorched them.

Someone had, she supposed. Very, very quickly, and all at once. Emma fucking hated dragons.

"This is it?" Astrid growled, lip curling where she sat atop her stupid fucking pet. "This is it!? This, THIS, is what you send to rescue me?" She was, Emma realised, addressing her father, glaring at him with a face of pure rage. Pure offense.

"I…Only have so much money." Eirik replied, frowning and taking a nervous step back. He looked as defensive as he did scared. Which was fucking ridiculous considering the circumstances.

"How much did he offer you?!" Astrid asked Emma. Emma coughed, took her time responding so she could recover more rather than less.

"A hundred pounds of silver." She replied.

Astrid's eyes narrowed.

"That's it? That's it? You could've offered ten times that!"

"And left us with what after getting you back?" Eirik frowned. "Darling what would leaving us impoverished fix? I'd have to sell one of the mansions, maybe even some of the ships—"

—"Kallvindr, burn him!" The man's daughter screamed.

Then it was Eirik's turn to scream as the flames curled around him.

He didn't stay in pain for long, fortunately. Emma looked away as the ruined corpse fell blackened and hissing to the ground. She felt oddly…Sorry for the old shit.

"I'm free…" Astrid whispered, not seeming to remember Emma and the others were even there. "I'm…I'm free—"

Something hit the top of the plateau from above, hard. Hard enough that Emma, at least ten metres from the point of impact, was bounced a good metre into the air as a shockwave ran through the ground. Dust covered the entire plateau's top in billowing clouds, rushing outwards faster than Emma could run. Almost as fast as someone with normal-sized legs could run. Something swept through the air and sent out a gust of wind that blew Emma fully onto her back. By the time she scrambled back up, the dust was clear.

And Groygar the fucking Demigod was standing in a crater.

"I have come for your blood, maggots!" He roared, actually making the air tremble with the sheer strength of his lungs and swinging his ridiculously oversized axe around for emphasis.

"Who are yo—" Astrid's words were cut off as the Demigod lunged for Kallvindr. He was fast, faster than before. So fast Emma couldn't even see him move before he'd already cleared the five or ten metres between him and the dragon. They smashed together like wrecking balls meeting in the air.

Emma heard the dragon scream, and heard Astrid scream as she was thrown off it. Kallvindr and the Demigod grappled, twisting high into the air amid blasts of flame and shrapnel of rended scales. One of them almost clipped Emma, and might've killed her if it had. Her armour was still reforming.

Moments passed, then the dragon came down hard against the stone. The Demigod landed beside it, laughing as the creature twitched and mewled weakly on the ground.

"A warm-up, nothing more!" He roared, swinging his axe down hard. Astrid screamed as the creature's head came free, boiling blood pouring out to steam on the ground. The Demigod looked around once more, shaking his head.

"Wounded rats, no fight at all." Without another word, he took to the skies and disappeared.

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