Emma screamed and beat her hands at the iron grip around—oh it was Aexilica. She relaxed and let the woman drag her farther, marvelling at how quickly they crossed the muddy ground and scaled a churned-up mound of earth to finally rest on the other side. It was no surprise that the rest of their team were waiting there.

"Stop struggling," Aexilica growled. Emma froze. Hearing those words from that woman, while being physically man-handled no less, had a very particular effect on her. Aexilica didn't seem to notice, but Larry definitely did.

"Oh for fuck's sake, let her go before we end up kneeling in a puddle."

He was cut off by the sound of more bullets smacking the earth around them.

"We should leave," Kruger cut in, "they'll have artillery aimed our way soon. You did enough obvious magic that they know we're a valuable target."

That added a touch of urgency to Emma, she didn't trust her armour against a shell bigger than her head. She didn't scramble along on the ground like everyone else did, just took to the air—only a few metres above the dirt of course—and flew after.

Fortunately, Kruger and Krummer seemed to know where they were going. Or at least she hoped they did, they were certainly moving confidently.

They were, Emma realised, about a mile away from the line of men dotting the distant trenches ahead of them. It took only a few minutes to cross that distance, despite it. Without Emma on the ground and slowing them down, each one of the superhumans could run at their full, ridiculous speed. A horse would've been left in the dirt.

Unfortunately, bullets were a lot faster than horses. They were faster than people who were faster than horses, too. Emma turned to see more than just rifles taking aim at her group—big fucking heavy machine guns were being levelled their way as well. She had seconds, maybe, before they started firing.

Several ideas flashed through Emma's mind. Could she block the bullets with a hardlight shield? Fuck no. Maybe for one person—maybe—but certainly not while making the shield wide enough to cover the entire group, let alone from multiple firing angles. Catching the bullets with Energy was untenable too, she just couldn't track and use her magic on objects that small and fast.

Her solution was a simple one, which actually made Emma more confident in it. She conjured stone. Lots of stone, but in tiny little pieces diffused across as large an area as she could manage. A quick blast of Energy-mustered wind left the dust cloud billowing out in her allies' wake.

Not a second too soon, either. Gunfire started tearing up the cloud of dust, about twenty rounds cutting into it every second. Emma saw the occasional blur of tracers scything through air and started letting herself drop down into the cloud, realising quickly that she'd not last long against sustained fire from weaponry like that.

Someone on the other side must have heard Emma's thoughts and decided to substantiate them, because a heavy round bounced off her pauldron right then. She felt the hardlight crack, and was more than a little pleased for the spongy yellow soaking up most of the impact. She was less pleased by the subsequent rounds zipping around her.

Emma didn't escape unscathed, but she wasn't exactly hurt. Only a few more stray bullets struck her and the damage each one did was minor enough that she was more worried about the added drain on her mana reserves from repairing each section of armour than the notion that it might actually be penetrated.

Then they were at safety. Or, rather, at a spot where danger came more accidentally than anything. They reached the trenches and leapt down into them, Emma diving to take cover alongside her allies. They came up with rifles aimed at them, but one look at Kruger had the guns dropping fast.

"Fuhrer!" One of the taller men, wearing a cap rather than a helmet, was the first to greet Kruger. He saluted with so much enthusiasm and force that it was little more than a karate-chop to his own forehead. Emma suppressed a snicker as she watched the show.

"Sir, we…We thought you were dead. Your plane went down and—"

—"I am alive," Kruger cut in, "and we don't have time to dwell on the hows or whys. Status report."

The man paused only briefly before giving it, falling into the same mechanical manner of speech that Emma had gotten used to seeing in all of Kruger's subordinates.

Kruger just soaked everything up and nodded once, sharply. He didn't seem to even consider that anyone else ought to be given more time—either not caring if they had followed everything, or genuinely not realising that they might not have.

"Our situation is dire, it seems." His face was hard with conviction as he said it, while Emma just felt like running away.

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"I've got about half my mana left in the tank," Emma volunteered, "where are the vampires at?" She felt a sudden stab of excitement at the thought of running into Isolde, but managed to hide it well enough.

"Did you just moan?" Krummer asked her. Emma ignored his disingenuous, loaded question and focused on the tactical discussion.

"We need to engage quickly then," Aexilica cut in, "right? Emma's the one who's going to be dealing most of our damage to the enemy, if she's low on power then we can't afford to waste more of it fighting the Noucturnae's soldiers. We have to find them and get stuck into the fight sooner rather than later."

That sounded awful to Emma, but then there wasn't exactly a non-awful way to run around picking fights with vampires.

"We shall squeeze the blood from them with our hammers!" Vari roared, raising his hammer high overhead in some demonstration. He quickly lowered it once a sniper round pinged off the glinting metal.

"How are we doing this?" Emma asked, "we going in fast?"

"Do you have a way for us to do that?" Kruger replied, "that won't leave us too open as we advance on them?"

Emma gave that a bit of thought. A few minutes later, they received word of the Nocturnae's position. One minute after that, all of them were shooting through the air on a giant version of the gliding machine she'd made to reach the stupid dragon.

Compared to Emma's own flight with the mechanism, this one was a great deal rougher. For one thing it was a lot harder to balance the weight of a whole group than it was her own body, which she was connected to and had instinctive mastery over. Also they were being shot at by anti-air cannons.

Fortunately these were Victorian anti-air cannons, which killed aeroplanes about as well as Vari with a sack of bricks. Unfortunately this was a ramshackle Emma aeroplane, made out of unreinforced blue hardlight rather than metal and not made to withstand anything as much as delay its own inevitable demise just long enough to crash its occupants somewhere useful. Naturally, its lifespan extended no farther than the first glancing hit.

A shell took one wing clean off, after that their flight became a shade less horizontal. Mud met the hardlight glider moments later as its entire structure broke apart and spilled its human cargo out as one. Emma was hovering, and thus saved from a hard impact.

Everyone else was too durable to care.

They hit the ground running, or at least stumbling in a useful direction, and everyone was flat-out sprinting within the second. Maybe fifty yards separated them from the enemy trenches. A suicidally long distance, normally. But then they were anything but normal, and it was less than a dozen strides until they found combat.

Emma hung back and watched everybody get stuck in, feeling vaguely queasy as she did. It felt a bit mean, really, how easily they made mulch of all the enemy soldiers. Vari in particular was killing people to such a ridiculous excess that she doubted they could've been identified without dental records.

Once Emma had read about how submachine guns went a long way in trench warfare, something about concentrated killing power and sudden attacks…She didn't remember the rest, she'd heard it all on a T.V she wasn't watching while baked to the point of illiteracy and using some girl's face as a rocking chair.

The only reason she even thought of it now was because it suddenly occurred to Emma that any one of the people she was watching carve a path through the trench could have been replaced by five soldiers armed with submachine guns, and the result would have been a profound loss of lethality.

It didn't take long for them to force through the trenches, like watching a flash-flood carve through marshland. Those few points where there was any real resistance didn't last lone after Emma got the signal for a strategic energy lance to soften things up a bit, and in only minutes they'd cut through to what looked a lot like the Nocturnae's command centre.

This was the real plan, now. The chance they'd gotten themselves shot down twice to pursue—a decapitating strike against the enemy's leadership. All of them, no matter how massive their cans were…Emma found herself losing focus, and quickly prodded her mind back into behaving.

Fortunately, she did not need to try very hard to keep her focus from slipping again. Eric literally fell out of the sky to land amid her allies in a massive explosion of mud and dirt, sending several of their feet and swinging a sword bigger than Emma was right for Kruger. Emma was quick in helping, conjuring a solid bar of iron and throwing it down to stick into the dirt right between the man's neck and the vampire's weapon.

Granted, Emma didn't do that much. The blade cut clean through the shoddy metal and sent the man flying anyway. But by then Aexilica and Vari were on their feet, closing fast. That was when the other vampires showed up.

Isolde showed up at the back of course, where tall, dominant leaders belonged. Emma watched her very carefully, because she knew she was the biggest threat. And for no other reason.

"Bitch! Bitch!" She blinked, looked down to where Larry was strapped to her hip. "Other fucking vampire!" He snapped.

That, at least, dragged Emma out of her goth-induced stupor long enough to see Marceline had peeled off to engage Kruger one-on-one.

Emma's potions had been saved from the wreckage of the plane, fortunately, and everyone had downed one before engaging the enemy. That was about the extent of their advantages. On the other hand; the vampires were more powerful now due to fighting at night, behind their own lines, and apparently aided by a swarm of gargoyles slowly approaching from the east.

On the scale of "encounter balancing" Emma rated this somewhere between 'her GM is probably an amateur' and 'her GM is probably an incel', but she had actually been in tighter situations before. Krummer and Kruger made for one hell of an addition to their side's fighting power at least.

Still, best not to chance it. Emma swiftly conjured a cavitation gun and started firing on the gargoyles. Little distractions could be the difference between winning and losing, she'd learned that much so far, and the vampires were all tough enough that killing any of them would be annoying given how fast they healed. Better to dispatch as many weaker enemies as she could before things hit a crescendo.

Emma had never shot clay pigeons, but she imagined doing so would feel like sniping the gargoyles now. Every hit from her weapon took off a limb at worst, and in the more extravagant cases left entire bodies blown to pieces. She caught a smile forming on her face.

Right up until Isolde started flying her way.

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