Herag had, apparently, changed his mind regarding sacrificing Emma and Aexilica. There wasn't any direct confirmation of this on Emma's end, she couldn't exactly ask the bastard. It was nothing more than a deduction.

Given that said deduction was on the basis of him and Guldin sprinting after her down the hallway with murder in their eyes, she was pretty confident in it regardless.

"Where to?" Emma gasped, wheezed, panted. Running was hard enough with all the weight on her back, talking on top of it just added salt on her wound.

There was, in all fairness, a great deal more salt on Aexilica's wound. Or rather a great deal more weight on her. The chest in her arms was much larger, and filled with more than her own mass in silver. Emma was almost surprised not to hear it jingle with every stride. Then other concerns took prominence. Namely, that they were both drawing closer.

If there was one advantage to running, terrified away from her enemies, it was that Emma found the activity far more instinctive and natural than actually fighting them. She barely had to even think before calling on her magic and putting it to good use, leaving it in her wake as mounds of sand.

Some of their persuers were stopped or slowed by that, but it turned out a few feet of sand wasn't really much of an obstacle for any of the more athletic ones. Herag vaulted it, Guldin threw himself over with a blast of wind, and the other bersekers—of which, Emma was displeased to see, there were multiple—simply followed their boss' lead and jumped over without even breaking stride.

The lead she and Aexilica had on their enemies was shrinking by the step, so she got thinking quick and came up with a new plan. This time Emma left a fully-made wall of energy behind her, hardened to force people back and channelling all the thermal energy she could direct to it while still moving. Herag reached it first, barged into it and hissed as his shoulder was burned on contact. Emma got to enjoy that smug, petty victory of hers for about a second before his axe split it open from head-height to almost the base. More axe swings followed, and then some more still from his subordinates. By the time Emma and Aexilica turned their first corner, most of the wall was already in tatters and their enemy had started picking up pursuit again.

Escape was a difficult prospect, with all a city's leadership turned to killing you. Even Emma could really think of only one way they might go about doing it.

The river.

Not the one they'd floated on before, a different flow moving from the mountains with which Vichin slightly overlapped in its construction to the ocean nearby. Not particularly fast-flowing, not particularly close, not particularly free of prying eyes and pointy spears. It was by no means a good option, merely their least-worst. So they sprinted for it.

Idly, Emma noticed how much more decisive she seemed to be in this world than she ever had in her old. Who knew that threatening to gut a person would make them so much more proactive? The army, she guessed, but probably not many others. It also left her trembling long after the fact, but that would be a problem for when she actually had the luxury of being after the fact.

Something whipped by her head, clattered off the wall before her. An arrow, Emma blinked. Felt more fly, felt some hit her. Her armour did its work. Broadheads and bodkins—that's what she thought they were called at least—dug into the layers of hardened energy at her back. Emma's magical shielding was growing stronger as she did, but it still wasn't nearly as hard as stone. She could imagine the little pits and dents being left in it by the iron tips, winced as she thought of how much precious protective material was being eroded with each hit.

Of course, that was a pretty good deal compared to Aexilica. Three times, Emma saw arrows miss the woman's armour plates and thunk straight into the flesh between them. On each occasion she felt certain her friend was about to die. Aexilica was made of tougher stuff, however, and only one of the arrows—the one lodging itself around her elbow—even stuck into her body. The other two penetrated skin, and drew blood, but were deflected a scant few centimetres into their path through her musculature.

Had she always been that durable, or was the few days of frenzied physical training saving her life? Emma didn't know, and for the time being she didn't particularly care. The arrows were picking up in volume, firing from closer, travelling faster as they hit and doing more damage with each impact. Her own armour was still hanging in there, but the moment one made its way through that Emma would be dead. She didn't have even a tenth of Aexilica's natural toughness, digging through her skin and muscle would give no more challenge than…Digging through skin and muscle.

So it was time to think fast, and Emma exerted every ounce of her will to divert her thoughts away from frantic worrying in order to do so more productively.

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She'd coined a few new tricks after beating Hagor of course, or rather polished those new ones she'd improvised at the time. Emma decided it was time to give one a try. She conjured an open-ended tube of hardened energy and filled it with a wafer-thin shell of more energy, then filled that with a few dozen spheres of energy that were cored with bits of stone as evenly distributed as she could manage. None were more than two centimetre across, none were less than ten grams. Emma then extended the main cylinder—the barrel— out to a few metres behind her all while carrying it along in her run, and applied the strongest Force effect she could to the shell inside.

The moment acceleration started, she threw her will in behind it with a bolstering mass of Energy too. Turned out you could use as many Fundaments as you wanted on the same target, and as long as they were doing the same thing the effects would just add up. Who knew?

Well Emma did now, which was bad fucking news if you happened to be a screaming, apeman viking trying to bury an axe in her. Her makeshift shotgun fired, the shell burst out of it, air resistance tore it apart and the volley of bullets just continued on flying.

They continued flying, even when the resistance they started facing came from flesh instead of air. Ripping through the bodies of a dozen men and leaving them to fall as tattered slabs of meat. Emma wasn't sure if her shots had broken the sound barrier, she couldn't see any confirmable exit-wounds in the enemies' backs, but they were certainly fast enough to turn biology into physics. Blood exploded outwards so thickly it actually obscured her vision for a second, the rushing Sculds faltered and she and Aexilica managed to widen the gap between themselves and their pursuit by another twenty paces.

Twenty paces. It should've felt like a lot, and maybe would have still if Herag hadn't ruined everything by pulling ahead of his own men and sprinting after them. Without needing to pace himself to match his slower subordinates, Emma felt the man's true speed come to bear. She had seconds, at best, before he was on them, and no illusion about what would happen then.

Alright Em, new plan time. What have you got?

As it happened, not a lot. Except the idle observation that they were running on smooth stone, and a really stupid idea. Emma blasted out a spray of conjured water to spill out over the floor just as Herag's foot came down. He slipped.

He slipped, the fucking idiot. Emma laughed as she watched the berserker's leg shoot out from under him, body fall, head smack against the stone. Oh she wasn't naive enough to think a few feet of gravity had somehow caved in his ridiculously tough skull, but the fall certainly bought them time. She dumped another pile of sand and shielding energy atop him for good measure. Ha!

There wasn't much time for amusement after that though, the enemy was firing arrows once more. Another corner turned, now Aexilica and her were out of the castle.

Cold air greeted Emma, barely registering through the centimetres of armour about her. More guards were staring up ahead, though not moving. She silently wished they'd have the basic decency to let their dumb stupefaction last until she and Aexilica were past.

They didn't, she killed them.

Blood steamed in the air as they continued their sprint, with just a few hundred more yards until the river was ready to meet them. Maybe a thousand, maybe slightly more. Herag was back with his men, of course, far behind them but catching up fast. He'd probably be on her first, even with the head-start enjoyed by his subordinates.

Emma proved correct, but only after the river came within sprinting distance. She and Aexilica put on a final burst of speed, saw they weren't going to make it, watched Herag come, and let out a cry.

Raw, molten power burst from Emma's arms in the biggest energy lance she'd ever unleashed. It clipped Herag, threw him down to the ground again and shot past him to obliterate one unfortunate man entirely out of existence. The air rung with the sound of it, like a bomb blast had gone off, and everyone but her and Aexilica was left reeling for the precious few seconds Emma needed to create an energy raft on the river's surface and apply her strongest Force propulsion to it.

The only concern as they took off was tipping and falling into the river. If that happened, Emma knew, she and Aexilica would have been fallen upon by the enemy and torn apart before they could replace the raft. And so she spent the first moments of their departure straining her mind to its utmost limits in the attempt of keeping the vessel righted, holding it up properly, overcoming the natural consequences of drag force and leverage to deny physics its prize and leave the thing properly seated atop the water. Seconds passed, and they grew faster. The churning waters reduced their attempts to tip it over, and Emma was able to finally relax some of her power.

Within half a minute, they were hundreds of metres downriver. Ridiculously, Herag was still gaining on them. Emma tensed, as she watched him. One hundred metres away, eighty, fifty…Sixty, eighty, one hundred… He slowly fell away in their wake. Of course he did. He'd been running for a long time already, and a minutes-long sprint was only possible in the first place thanks to his inhuman stamina. The moment he'd accelerated up to top speed after the boat, his time had been limited. They'd hit that limit now.

Emma made a few choice gestures as she watched the berserker slowly fade into the distance, taking only a few more minutes before he wasn't even identifiable to her naked eye. Then, at last, she let herself collapse onto the raft and gasp.

"We made it." Aexilica grinned, looking as tired as Emma felt.

"We made it." Emma echoed, laughing at that—actually laughing. "And we're rich." She reminded herself of the fact by giving it voice. No more struggling, no more flights of terror and death. They were rich. She got to her knees, opened the chest of silver Aexilica had hauled after them…

And felt her blood run cold. From inside it emerged a man. Tall, lean, sinewy. Red-haired, with oxymoronically handsome features and a terrified, jittery gaze.

"I'm sorry." Jarl Vari whispered, licking his lips nervously as he spoke. "You left me no choice."

The silver was gone.

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