TheBookofEndsEndFightingDogs

The New Dark Lord: Book 3- Chapter 35

Being dead had been strange. Arion actually wasn’t sure, now, whether he had been dead. He’d been conscious, sort of. And sort of not. Everything was…Muddled. Abstract. The experience had been on him only hours ago, he believed, and yet already the memory felt years old. By comparison, he knew that the real world—the world of the living—felt almost painfully solid. Everything was starkly defined, sharp edges, vibrant colours. Yes, he was in muddy, temperate Aoakanis surrounded by ru...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 31- Bastard

Ragni’s voice was not quiet. 

“You do not speak to me like that, ever.” He growled. “You do not talk back to me, you do not disrespect me.”

It occurred to Emma that he spent an awful lot of time telling her what she could and could not do. More, perhaps, than a man with the means to show her would.

“Alright, you’ve pushed your luck too far.” Emma told him plainly. “I can blow people up with mind-beams, I can create shields, rip off limbs from afar, I c...

Author's Nightmare: Chapter 172

Beam POV: Day 155

Current Wealth: 170 gold 21 silver 6 copper

I’d been having a very “Solitairish” afternoon. Which was to say, I’d been listening to a voice in my head and going where it told me to with the intent of hurting someone. In this case it sent me to some fighting ring, not a proper amphitheater like the one I’d competed in though. A smaller, derelict and shittier place that smelled of grunge, blood and sweat. I’d have calle...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 30- Bitch

Emma’s time in Vichin was not, unfortunately, reserved only for having fun with her cool new powers. It turned out her incredibly powerful political position actually had work attached to it, for some reason, and the doing of this work dragged her away from furthering her experiments. Right when she was in the middle of making a breast-enhancement potion, too. 

Fortunately, she wasn’t required to actually do anything yet. The summons she received was about a social affair. Ragn...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 29- Boss

Fundaments: 

Energy 2, Matter 2, Force 2, Entropy 1, Cognition 1, Space 1, Time 1

Crafts:

Alchemy 1, Talismans 1, Enchanting 1, Animacy 1,

Cores:

Attunement 13, Mastery 6

Emma’s new “statline” following her few days in Vichin as an actual resident was pretty nice to see. A point here, another there. It was progress. Helpful. Everything was helpfu...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 28- Mosh

Earl Ragni did not seem to be having a very good day. He was being swarmed, most of the allies around him already dead and his own neck seeming next up on the chopping block. He was backing away, eyes darting around and body twitching with the frenzy of anticipating a deathblow at any moment. And despite it all, he was moving fast.

Emma knew, of course, that the Sculds favoured personal skill in combat among their leaders, and she knew that with several thousand warriors under him Ragni...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 27- Oops

The newcomer was not, in the end, a rescue. And he was only the first of many who came pooling into the building to, apparently, leer at Emma while she kicked and jerked as the blood went out of her. That seemed about right, given how things had been going so far.

As far as Emma could tell, most of the people watching were higher in social standing than the warriors she’d been spending most of her time among Sculds around. Better dressed, warmer dressed, and carrying some sneering, sm...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 26- L

“Dumbass. Dumbass. Dumbass. Dumbass. Dumb—” Emma groaned, stirred, sat up. Or…Tried to. She got halfway before something snagged her, something else rattled, and she found herself half-wrapped in…Chains. Leading to shackles, around her wrists.

Oh shit.

Larry was beside her, looking pleased. He was the one who’d been speaking.

“Oh you’re up.” He called out, eyes rolling back in the way Emma had learned they always did when he was trying to look behind him. �...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 25- Spine

Aexilica was surrounded in moments, and now bereft of her armour. If the enemy had been swinging swords and axes, or thrusting with spears, Emma had no doubt she’d have been hacked apart in moments. They used blunt weapons instead, and those were barely better. 

A hammer caught the woman’s back with spine-snapping force. It didn’t snap hers, but Emma saw the way she moved after. The sluggishness, the weakness. Knew she was hurt. Her own magic had already been building before ...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 24- Job

They arrived in the city of Vichin by foot, rather than river. This was very much against Emma’s will, but unfortunately she could not decide what the terrain around her was or how far a river would extend.

Yet.

It was really not that big of a place, despite the fuss that’d been made about it by everyone Emma had asked. It felt like a long time ago, her ride in that wagon. Thinking of it brought back unpleasant memories of travelling to her death, facing it. Then it brought ba...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 23- Splash

The impact was jarring, but, Emma knew, not nearly as jarring as it could’ve been. It could have been with a rock, and that would’ve been all she wrote for Emma. Instead she landed on nice, soft water and had the privilege of feeling her shield crack open. But not completely. No, it remained just intact enough to start filling up with water and sinking.

Emma didn’t want to drown. She’d thought breaking in half on impact with a rock had been scary, but it was nothing to drowning....

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 22- Second Draft

Emma struggled against her restraints, and found that they were, in fact, more than sufficient to hold down the tiniest girl she’d ever met. She struggled more, anyway. There wasn’t anything logical to it, nothing of cleverness or strategy or thought. She was just about to die, and the bonds around her wrists and ankles were what kept her from escaping.

So she struggled. Like a bunny in a beartrap, desperate, fearful, mindless and feral. There was nothing but death and the urge to a...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 21- Bad

Aexilica managed to last all of a day before she did something stupid. What was it her dad had always said?

Just like your whore mother, go on. Leave.

No, not that—the other thing. Ah, yes. She never could leave well enough alone, and one of these days, she was going to get her nose cut off shoving it into places it wasn’t wanted.

Well, it seemed increasingly likely that she was in that special day. Emma was gone, Aexilica had chosen to let her be captured rather than fi...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 20- Oh

The journey only got less interesting as Emma continued her being subjected to it; the sights more familiar, the novelty more scarce, the chafing in her ass more uncomfortable as yet more hours of consecutively riding the same shitty wagon added up. She didn’t complain of course. Not out of some stoic tolerance for adversity, merely because the one time she had complained one of the guards had hit her. The prick. 

Chuckles the Jolly Sculd was only marginally more talkative than h...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 19- Chair

Emma woke up with a headache. That was nothing new, she’d spent most of her adult life in varying states of sick and enfeebled for one reason or another. A lifetime of living off mac and cheese tended to do that to a girl. 

Granted, it had never been quite so bad as it was now. What had she been doing the night before, anyway?

Ah, yes, getting my head stomped on by a bunch of angry vikings.

It was all coming back to her now. Painfully, sharply. Emma heard the sound of...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 18- Idiot

Emma was on fire, but fortunately her armour was keeping the worst of it from reaching the skin. She still panicked, dropped down and rolled in the dirt until the magical flames extinguished. She scrambled up, stared ahead to see some glaring, one-eyed old man already chanting bullshit and waving a big, rattly stick around in the air. She smelled ozone, felt goosebumps, heard static crackling in the air. If she hadn’t been so wired already, and superhumanly strong on top of that, she’d pr...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 17- Will

Something hit one of the walls. It was fast, bright. It exploded on impact. 

Did someone just cast fireball?

Emma had precisely enough time for that thought, then the explosion grew and a piece of wooden debris caught her in the head. She went down hard, the debris snapping on impact and her head jerking back like someone had tied a rope around it and yanked with all they had. She fell, gasped, got up and…Felt nothing. A sore spot, maybe, fading fast. The pain wasn’t just...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 16- Holding

Aexilica refused to let Emma up onto the roof, no matter how much she asked or how nicely. She claimed it was dangerous, stupid, insane. Emma suspected she was just jealous of her cool new shield, and taking it out on her. In any case, she did find a way to test her durability in the end. Emma sprinted around, throwing herself into walls, down slopes, smacked into rocks. She tossed her weight against every big, hard thing she could find and basked in the results.

They impressed.

E...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 15- Grinding

The first thing Emma did after her potion kicked in was go outside, and find something really heavy. There was a great deal of choice, but sadly most of it belonged to other people. She skipped those picks over, suspecting that whatever she used in her little test would be somewhat the worse for wear afterwards. 

A boulder ended up satisfying her needs, maybe half a metre across and vaguely semi-spherical in shape. Emma squatted down beside it, dug her fingers around its base, and ...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 14- Gasps

As it turned out, finding things other than hot water to treat illnesses really was harder than it sounded. At least when one was surrounded by pre-industrial medicine. Emma tried a lot of different things, and grew increasingly frustrated at each failure. By the time she stumbled onto even the first of her two mandatory ingredients an hour had already passed, and her shoulder was starting to kill.

Strips of cloth for the solid component. It was a stupid thing for her to overlook bandag...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 13- Monoxide

The ride back to Tepetlmoseua was uneventful, as far as desperate flights for survival went. Aexilica said no more than usual as the sledge carried them down the mountainside and, unlike before, Emma felt no inclination to fill the silence. She was exhausted, in more than one way. Her shoulder throbbed, her body felt like someone had squeezed the energy right out of it. It was all she could do to keep herself focused on maintaining the Force effect that left their vehicle shooting off so fast...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 12- Waking

Emma had never seen anything alive move as fast as the Grai charging her. Not Aexilica, certainly not anything she’d fought. Maybe horses on a level road compared. Maybe they didn’t. Twenty or so metres separated them, she barely had a second before they disappeared to nothing. 

Her hands came up, magic flared out and the shield hardened between them. The Grai smashed into it with a swinging axe that split clean through the barrier, sent cracks creeping across its entire face a...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 11- Burns

Aexilica was in a bad mood. It was actually sort of hard to tell, her face seemed perpetually locked in a scowl regardless of circumstances. Emma though, perceptive girl that she was, managed to note that the depths of her frown had grown by no small amount since the meeting. 

No surprise there, the Priest was a prick.

At first she ignored the other woman’s discontent, but soon enough it started to piss her off too. Emma didn’t like the sight of unhappy people, they alway...

Author's Nightmare: Chapter 171

Shango POV: Day 155

Current Wealth: 170 gold 21 silver 6 copper

I was in an office, and I had to say…It was a nice one. Actually smaller than mine, thanks to the historic wealth of the Velaharo family, but far better furnished and maintained. The rug was thick and warm, entire room heated by  perpetually crackling fires. Despite the large windows, which must have been vacuuming in heat from the frosty air outside, it was actually pretty toa...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 10- Fire

It was hard to think. Aexilica’s mind felt foggy, slow. Her own panic was strangling her thoughts. It felt like all the pathways in her brain were being filled up with straw. It felt like the whole thing was going to burn down.

And Emma did not help. 

“So these Sculds,” She prattled on, practically skipping now that they were going downhill and seeming to have had her own mood raise exactly as much as Aexilica’s had fallen, “They’re dangerous right? Like ancestral...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 9- Smoke

Emma didn’t waste her mana on wind, she just threw out a big cloud of spinning blades and watched as they caught one of the men from five paces away. She’d seen a liveleak video of a cartel execution once, some guy kneeling down while five or six others just unloaded shotguns into him. This was a lot like that. It was hard to see where exactly he was hit or wounded, because his whole body just came apart as one.

Again, queasiness. So silly, so ridiculous. Emma’s own mind was makin...

The New Dark Lord: Book 3- Chapter 34

Silenos did not appear upon the ground, this time. That was a surprise, and not a particularly pleasant one. By the time she had re-oriented herself, located Hexeri and Ensharia falling beside her, the opposing forces of gravity and air resistance had already agreed upon a compromise of seventy metres per second for her velocity. It took her the remaining kilometres downwards rather fast.

The first thing she did was look to her allies. Ensharia, she knew, would be fine,...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 8-Questing

“Fuck is a muki?”

Emma grunted the question more than said it straight, struggling with the terrain. Tepetlmoseua was covered in plains, surrounded by them for at least a mile unbroken in each direction. They’d gone a good deal farther than a mile from town, however, and plains these areas were not. The incline wasn’t so steep, the ground not so unsteady or uneven, but with all traits combined it became an exercise in tedium to traverse it. And one in futility to do so at an...

Gamer Girl Isekai: Chapter 7- Progression

It was, Emma thought, fairly natural that her powers as an Untethered be so extraordinary. She was the main character after all. Putting aside the not-inconsiderable benefits to her ego, which was growing by the minute, she found herself enjoying the purely practical results a good deal as well. Being able to see her own stats, digit for digit, meant that she could track her own progress to exactance. Push her abilities, know how they were coming along. It got all her dopamine receptors gushi...

Author's Nightmare: Interlude 11

Phelia was spending a lot of her time in the library of late. It was hardly something to complain about, of course. For several reasons. The library was where she found herself most relaxed most days anyway, and, if she were being honest, there were far worse tasks a woman recently married to an ambitious man might have expected of her. 

Her hand moved up to rest upon her belly absently, and she felt her lips dry a second. Shango had said that he wouldn’t make her…But then, men...