Emma wanted to scream, her rage was boiling inside her like the magma chamber of a volcano. It needed an outlet. She screamed. Not the most inventive solution, she had to admit, but it did its job of venting her rage. Some of it, at least. There really was a lot in need of venting.

By the time she was finished, her throat hurt. Emma didn't give a shit, her everything hurt. What was one more bodypart added to that list? What was anything, really, compared to what she'd lost? She had to go back, to tear apart Astrid's shitty cave and the mountain range around it. She'd get lucky eventually, she'd…

Be searching a mountain range for hidden stashes of loot behind false walls and boulders.

Emma screamed again, this time turning her face to the skies. "WHY!? WHY, GOD!?" She was trembling, crying again. She felt her own snot clinging to her face and didn't care. God…Gods. There were Gods in this world.

"If any of you are listening," Emma said slowly, "then please, bring her back, or tell me where her stash is, or—" something dropped down from the skies, starting small and distant then growing before it impacted the stone just ten metres ahead of her. The sheer force of it blew Emma onto her back.

She just lay there for a moment, staring up at the sky and pondering life. Emma didn't like it, horrible fucking affair all things considered. She sat up, groaning, and felt her blood run cold as she laid eyes on…

A nine foot tall man, rippling with muscles, and carrying a weapon that weighed several times what she did. Not Groygar, but so very similar to him that there was no doubt as to what he was. Fuck.

"Where is my little brother?" He asked, in a voice that was deeper and louder than any human lungs could have produced. Emma felt suddenly, intensely aroused. She pushed that rather inconvenient feeling to one side and gathered her wits to form a more constructive response.

"What little brother?" Lying to the fucking Demigod seemed like a bad idea, but telling him the truth definitely was. As long as Emma could keep him from finding the painting, this might be a situation she could crawl out of with her life.

He turned his head and saw the painting instantly. Fuck.

"Ah, Groygar." The Demigod smiled. "Convenient, I was just coming here to seal that little shit away again but it looks like he already got himself trapped. Excellent." He turned back to Emma. "Did you do this? Lie to me again and I will rape and eat you."

The way he said it was so casual, so trivial, that Emma took a moment to register what she'd just been threatened with. She blinked, frowned, and then hurried up in answering to avoid the self-professed rapist with superpowers from getting impatient.

"I…Did." Emma resisted, barely, the urge to wince as she said it. At this point if the Demigod wanted her dead, she would die.

Fortunately, he did not seem to want her dead. Just grinned, then laughed outright.

"Ha! That'll be annoying him for a while then, getting bested by a pack of mortals and a single giant."

Emma glanced over at Thrudvarg, suddenly remembering the giant upon hearing her mentioned and fearing that she'd find her dead. She did not. Certainly, Thrudvarg wasn't in good condition, but her chest was still rising and falling with breath at least.

"He got unlucky?" Emma's statement came out as a question, because everything tended to come out as a question when one was staring down a creature like this. Fortunately the Demigod did not seem to take offence. He just laughed harder.

"Unlucky to be born such a weakling, perhaps." He grinned, turning back to the painting now. "Ah, I think I will stash this back in the tower it was originally left, let him wait a few more centuries before being freed."

Emma did not like the sound of that, not when she was one of only a few people who knew how the Demigod might be freed in less than a century.

"So, uh, we'll just be…Going now?" She tried a smile, but it probably ended up coming off somewhat queasy. Given the circumstances she was proud to have even managed that much, and the Demigod didn't seem to care anyway. Fortunately.

"Aye, you will be going now." He replied, rather less amused now but not outright violent.

"Right." Emma got back up to her feet, shakily and awkwardly, and quickly sifted around in her clothing for Larry. He was not only still inside her baggy attire, but still alive too. Emma quickly conjured a ball of yellow hardlight and pressed it into his mouth, knowing full well that he could very likely get her killed by firing off with his usual snark.

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His eyes bulged, face turned red, rage mounted. But he couldn't talk, which meant none of that was Emma's problem.

"Thank you, uh, sir." She nodded to the Demigod, as she began taking her leave. "I'll just be going now…Uh, bye."

"Hurry up." The Demigod said, all good humour now gone. Emma did hurry up, though her wounds were already aching and the fatigue of fighting only added onto that. Evidently, she didn't hurry up enough. Because the Demigod's face tightened with irritation.

"You're too slow." He growled, then waved a hand. Emma could taste the magic blasting out of it.

Everything stopped being solid, and for one moment she knew how Groygar must have felt when the painting shot out those tendrils of light to engulf and drag him in. Sheer, primal panic ran through her body. Then she was somewhere else, falling, twisting, landing hard. Emma screamed.

The first thing that struck her was it didn't hurt, despite the torture she'd put her poor vocal chords through. Actually, nothing hurt. And she wasn't tired, or even drained of magic anymore. Whatever method had just been used to transport her seemed to have fully regenerated her, too.

The second thing she noticed was the fucking tank.

It wasn't moving that fast, but it was, in fact, a fucking tank. Metres tall, metres wide, solid steel, kind of boxy and, of course, with a giant fucking gun at the top. A gun that, Emma saw, was aiming towards her. She had about half a second to move, and did so with a sudden burst of Energy that flung her to one side right as the cannon fired off. She landed hard in wet mud, and was caked with it instantly. Emma swore, felt it go in her mouth, up her nostril. Larry came loose from her grip and rolled away into the filth, but she didn't even have time to concern herself with that. First her armour, everything else was secondary.

The process felt agonizingly slow, taking precious moments longer thanks to the influence of her Matter magic toughening the hardlight and raising its protectiveness. When it fully encased her, though, Emma let out a relieved sigh at knowing she was as protected as her current expertise could make possible. That relaxation—mild however it was, given the circumstances—was enough for Emma to look around and actually take in her surroundings.

She was in a fucking battlefield.

The ground was churned up mud everywhere, she saw barbed wire actually rolled out across great lengths of it, and men were screaming and shooting from craters and trenches. There were more tanks, too. Primitive, rackety things that looked about a half-century out of date from the sleek modern designs she was used to seeing, but nonetheless tanks.

That was the one side, the one she was facing. Behind her Emma found…Fucking who knew what, monsters? Some people, at least. Pale people moving fast enough that she struggled to follow them—oh good, her potion had worn off—and seemingly ducking and dipping around the fire of semi-automatic rifles while retaliating with magic. She saw what looked like skeletons and zombies around them, too, which might have been a bad sign were it not for one simple detail about the enemy.

Grey uniforms, German accents, the guns, the tanks, the surroundings…Emma went cold as she found herself caught between, on one side, a bunch of fucking nazis, and on the other a horde of undead.

Her choice was obvious. One of them was a pack of mindless, destructive monsters which essentially existed for the sole purpose of worsening human life. The other looked weird, and had probably decomposed a bit, but were still just generic-seeming undead. Emma would take her chances with the zombies. She turned on the tanks and got to work.

The one which had shot—or at least near—her was turning now, but away from Emma. That was good. She surveyed her surroundings one last time, realised, in the frenzy of everything, that Aexilica and Vari were nowhere to be seen, and then finished charging up her energy lance.

She aimed it at the vehicle, of course. Almost as much out of curiosity as any tactical precedence.

Emma wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, firing an energy lance into a fucking tank, but she found herself pleasantly surprised. The actual armour held strong enough, though it was left glowing red and dented the steel proved more than she could blast through. The vehicle itself, though, was tipped over. She laughed watching it hit the mud, practically engulf itself as it sank a foot or more down into the muck.

Then she stopped laughing as she heard the whizzing pas by her head. Emma took long moments to realise she was being fucking shot at.

She freaked out, which was perhaps somewhat irrational, given the quality of her armour. But then, Emma hadn't tested it against supersonic projectiles yet. As far as she knew, going by the rudimentary experiments of having Aexilica smack equally-sized chunks of Matter-hardened hardlight against mundane stone, her protection was a good deal stronger than equal thickness rock.

But she hadn't tested it against a bullet. How could she? Emma started sprinting before she really knew what she was doing, and mere moments later the first round struck her.

Strange, being shot. She'd not have expected it to be such a hard impact. Not from a tiny little thing like a bullet. The whole hit happened faster than Emma could really register, so all she was reacting to was the aftershock as her body stumbled forwards and struggled for balance. Wet mud and low-friction hardlight boots were not a good combination. She went down again.

Emma slid a few more feet before righting herself, then felt more impacts at her back. Pain, too, where something bit through the armour. She panicked all over and threw up a barricade behind her. It didn't do anything to actually stop the projectiles of course, just a few inches of un-strengthened Hardlight, but it seemed to slow the gunshots down as marksmen took longer to draw a bead on her. That let Emma throw herself over to a crater.

Something dropped down beside her, and Emma flinched as she recognised a gunman only for him to raise his hands in a placating gesture.

"Relax, hold on, we're on the same side." It was, she realised, one of the men fighting alongside the undead. Emma did relax, but only by a little bit.

"What the fuck is going on here?!" She snapped.

"The Unified Order is attacking, and until you showed up that tank was about to crush this part of our defence. Can you keep doing what you were doing if we cover you?"

Emma thought about that. She really didn't want to throw herself into another fight, but she wanted to not be in nazi controlled territory even more. Reluctantly, she nodded and started charging up her magic.

Her life fucking sucked.

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