Bearings. Ball bearings, steel ball bearings travelling at, if Emma wasn't mistaken, about mach three. She'd have been shredded instantly if she hadn't thrown up an extra hardlight barrier before the mine detonated. Even then, she felt a few of the projectiles lodge uncomfortably close to her skin and let pulped yellow hard light leak out through the cracked blue.

She went down of course, even with all her armour on she didn't weigh much more than a hundred pounds. For that matter, she was probably easier to throw around while wearing it just with how big an area her body exposed to any blast waves. Centimetres of armour plating and yellow padding meant a good few inches of extra breadth in any given direction.

Still, it kept her alive. Emma rolled onto her front, got up and grinned as she began to speak to her new allies—

—who were all dead, basically in pieces. Right. They hadn't had magical armour to protect them from the landmine. Behind her men were moving again, so Emma spun and charged her mana. It really was a lot quicker to form energy lances now, and she wasn't waiting much longer than her turn took to play one's beam across the row of men. They stopped existing more completely than if they'd each had their own claymore go off underfoot personally. More were behind them though, and all armed of course.

They didn't take long to start shooting. Emma threw herself down behind another barricade and returned fire, letting little holes open up through her wall of hard light and accelerating bullets through them in tiny clusters. Once out, they expanded out into clouds of millimetres-wide baubles that hit with, she hoped, almost as much speed as the actual bullets being flung her way.

Emma couldn't have tried this on anything with significant armour, more than scale mail and she'd have found such tiny projectiles stopped dead. But these men didn't seem to have any kind of protection at all save for a steel helmet.

She wasn't aiming for their heads, unfortunately for them. But there were so fucking many of them that Emma found even her powers struggling to keep up with the flow of bodies. The debris and shockwaves she was throwing through the air over on their side was pretty much all that kept her alive, because if even half of the enemy had been able to gather their wits and draw a bead on her for aimed shooting Emma's lifespan would be measured in seconds.

Join an offensive to force back nazi soldiers, what the fuck was I thinking?

In all likelihood, she hadn't been thinking. Emma was having quite the emotionally tumultuous day.

That day got a lot worse when she caught sight of the man a few hundred metres back, laying prone and setting out a rifle bigger than Emma was. It had a wide barrel, a tripod, and looked heavy enough that he'd have struggled to even carry it.

An anti-tank weapon?

So she was fucked then. Oh well, Emma had had a good run. It had been cool to see how well her shielding stood up against ordinary bullets, but there was no question about how this would go. She was just hurrying to her feet when she saw the man beginning to level his barrel her way.

Then help arrived

Emma thought, for a moment, that it was Aexilica and Vari. Her wonderful, glorious allies with their incredible strength and twelve-pack abdominals. It wasn't though. It was actually even better. A trio of people dropped down from the skies to land in the moonlight, and landed hard. They were tall, pale, dark faced and darker clothed in pitch blacks and bloody reds or bared muscle and sweat alone. Every one of them was among the most attractive people Emma had ever seen, and were it not for the adrenaline already rushing through her she might have felt her body reacting to that in the appropriate ways.

As things were, her appreciation of their beauty was somewhat undercut. But still there. And actually enhanced rather than reduced when she saw them go to work.

Well, "saw" was the operative term. Emma watched them literally blur into motion, moving fast enough that their bodies appeared like out-of-focus mirages to her vision. They whirled around like blades in a blender, falling on the soldiers ahead of her and scything them to pieces. Gunfire rang out, but as far as Emma could tell not a single shot actually found its mark in any of them. Within one minute a hundred men or more had been cut to pieces. The rest seemed to decide that living to fight another day was the better part of valour, and promptly fucked off.

Emma watched as the trio turned back to her, approaching with strides more graceful than any cat. They didn't quite move the same way she'd come to expect from any superhuman, it was more than simply an ease of handling their own weight. Each motion seemed perfect, without the slightest waste. Their feet looked to be coming down into the mud with millimetre precision, and Emma realised none of them seemed to be sinking into it. Not even the big man in heavy armour.

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The other two were women. The first of them, which was to say the one closest to Emma as they approached, had bright crimson skin, pitch black hair and the kind of face you normally needed photoshop to get. She was smirking somewhat, which did interesting things to Emma's belly, and wore a tight-fitting dress rather than armour. Robes which did fascinating things to her figure. Beside her was a paler woman dressed in wizard robes, red haired, beautiful but not bafflingly so and with brown eyes. Both of them were smirking, as was the giant blonde man rippling with seemingly more muscles every step to their side.

The first woman was the one to speak once they were within conversational range.

"Hello there." She smiled, plump lips seeming to dance before Emma's eyes. "I don't think we've had the pleasure of meeting, and yet you just saved my people."

Okay Emma, play it cool. You get a do-over this time.

"I think you got some blood in your—"

—No, idiot, don't, not again!

—"...Ass. Want me to lick it out?"

Emma's words dropped hard to the ground between them, spasming and dying. She barely kept herself from wincing at the silence that followed.

Then the woman in the lead laughed.

"God, it's been ages since I've heard anything like that." She ran her eyes up and down Emma, tilting her head, considering. "...You're from earth, aren't you?"

If words were electricity, that sentence would've been a copper rod attached to both of Emma's nostrils during a thunderstorm.

"Yes." Emma replied, without thinking. "So…Are you?"

The woman grinned.

"We are, yes. But I think there are better places to speak than in the middle of a battlefield, snipers you know?"

Emma wasn't sure whether a sniper could actually hurt any of these newcomers, but she was very sure they could hurt her, so she just nodded quickly.

"I need to get someone first." She added, as they began moving in entirely the wrong direction. She did not, fortunately, have too hard a time finding Larry. Cognition made it easy enough to locate him, though his mind was still odd. Hard, somehow, guarded and jagged. But no more difficult to locate.

"You fucking bitch!" Larry snapped, as Emma lifted him up. Apparently her makeshift gag had come dislodged. "Fucking asshole cunty fucking bitch! Toss me in the mud? I'll kill you! I'll explode in your hand, I'll…" He trailed off, blinking as he caught sight of her new friends.

"Larry, these are—"

—"Shut up." He hissed, sounding urgent suddenly. Not angry, not bitter, concerned. Emma felt a needling sensation of worry in the back of her mind, and heeded that. She shut up, and turned back to the newcomers.

"Well, this is my…You know, friend, who I needed to get. We can go now?"

They went, though Emma found a sudden uncertainty in the others. Apparently they'd picked up on something being unsaid. Not a great start to things, she could only hope Larry's caution was worth it.

"Can you fly?" The lead woman asked Emma.

Emma felt her face burn.

"I can throw myself through the air." She replied, not making eye contact. Odd thing to be embarrassed about.

"No matter." The woman smiled, reaching out and wrapping her arm around Emma's waist. Before Emma's circulatory system could finish the long and arduous process of returning blood to the top of her body, they were already taking off into the air and flying.

Her grip was strong about Emma, but careful. It felt almost like Aexilica's, though she sensed there was far more strength behind every muscle fibre than even the Aethiqi had ever boasted. Emma realised, then, how easily this stranger could kill her if she wanted to. Her armour was still on—they were flying through a warzone—but she didn't fancy its chances of keeping her head from being twisted and neck wrung.

Fortunately, Emma did not have her spine snapped. And the trip through the air didn't even take that long either. This woman wasn't quite as fast in flight as she was, not over shorter distances, but she was much more consistent about it than Emma. She'd have to ask how later on. She didn't tumble with slight differences in air pressure, or struggle to compensate for gravity and drag force. It was as seamless as any comic book character she could think of.

Intense jealousy overcame Emma. Jealousy at this woman's speed, her power, her flight, jealousy at her beauty. Then she thought some more about her beauty, and the jealousy bled away to something else entirely. By the time they landed she was resisting the urge to squirm in the woman's grip, and for rather different reasons than her previous fear.

Their landing site was a great distance from the battlefield Emma had been dropped into—some old castle. Old old, too. And ridiculously over-built, all gothic spires and black-stone walls. It looked like Dracula would've moved out of the place, finding it too stereotypical. The woman grinned as they set down on one of its battlements.

"Nice place." Emma noted, looking around and finding another stab of jealousy. She could be living in a place like this, now, if Bitch Astrid hadn't gone and died on her before sharing the location of her due payment. "Big…Classy."

"I always liked Vampire: the Masquerade." The woman noted, with a smile. "I guess the place suits me. My name is Isolde, by the way. Isolde Varney, but just call me Isolde."

"Emma." Said Emma. "Uh, wizard."

Isolde smiled, licking her lips. "Emma, listen, we really do appreciate the help you gave us back there."

But?

"...But, you realise we've had a lot of infiltrators from the nazis—"

—"So they are nazis?" Emma asked.

The woman blinked.

"Yes, you…Didn't know?"

"I suspected strongly." Emma shrugged. "Strongly enough to kamehameha a tank, obviously."

Isolde grinned. "Alright then. Well, again, thanks for that, but you wouldn't be the first spy our enemies have sent in to infiltrate our side. So before we do anything more than send you on your way, we're going to need certain…assurances."

Emma did not like the sound of that one bit, and didn't bother hiding the fact.

"What sort of assurances?" She frowned. "A test? What, do I need to slay a magic beast?"

"No." Isolde laughed. "No, nothing like that—what would that even prove, anyway? No…Don't worry, it won't be dangerous at all." She grinned. "No, we just need you to let us read your mind, is all."

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