Oh, the poor girl from another world. Magicless, helpless, constantly dragged into battles against Overblots that should have erased you on sight.
No one warned them that her feminine energy is… quite literally otherworldly. Turns out, every monster is punchable if you try hard enough.
Dark clouds, the ground split open in several parts of the rose garden; the Unbirthday Party that Riddle so proudly proclaims with all its rigid, structural rules is an absolute disaster.
Trey is trying to reason with a completely deranged Riddle, who is swinging spears left and right; Ace and Deuce are only creating more chaos to distract him, too. Cater, on the other hand...
“Okay, okay, stay under the table and don’t move, alright, cutie?”
He leaves you under a table that has somehow magically remained intact, with its spotless white tablecloth still draped over it… as if you’re a tiny puppy. A wet, lost, terrified little puppy.
There is no poor, helpless, defenseless human girl without magic here. Well… without magic, yes. But defenseless? Never.
You scan the wreckage with your blood boiling.
Feral survival mode: activated
Aside from the table they so badly want you to hide under, everything is destroyed; the teacups are shattered; the elegant chairs are broken into multiple pieces, and several of them have splinters sharp enough to look useful.
One splintered piece of a backrest has a very suspiciously bat-like shape.
And while Riddle keeps going with his monologue, “OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!” here, and “I AM THE RULES!” there, you slip away like a sneaky little rat until you end up right behind him.
Solid wood connects with his skull… and he collapses like a puppet with its strings cut, completely graceless, all thanks to your immaculate strike with that improvised bat.
The Overblot ink dissolves, the monster disappears, and Riddle is left unconscious on the ground.
“…I didn’t kill him, right?”
Well… let’s hope not, sweetheart.
He’ll probably wake up with a lump the size of an egg and no memory whatsoever… though you absolutely are going to remind him of everything he made you suffer through these past few days. And if he tries it again...
Savanaclaw has become a death trap, sand flying everywhere, making it impossible to see and even harder to breathe.
It has turned even drier, even more suffocating, and with the monster at Leona’s back striking and roaring, everything trembles and breaks every millisecond.
Stopping your breathing seems like the most sensible option for now, considering you’re walking toward an Overblot with a lion-like monster behind him, whose ink creates hyenas and whose magic could turn you into golden dust.
The female survival instinct does not actually contain much survival, honestly.
Plenty of adrenaline, yes. Plenty of anger, too… but you’re not going for his back. You’re approaching from the side, in plain sight.
If plain sight can even count while Leona is unleashing a full sandstorm.
Well… oxygen is temporary.
“Pathetic. A tiny magicless herbivore, standing in my way…”
If there’s one thing you’ve learned from watching so many shows and movies, it’s that you never let the villain finish their monologue nor their transformation.
In this case, his monologue.
Between laughter and degrading comments… direct hit to the nose.
Maybe you break his cartilage, maybe you make him bleed, maybe you leave a bruise...maybe his nose ends up slightly crooked.
And maybe a couple of your knuckles break from the impact, too.
“I want ice, NOW!” you snap, shaking your hand like a maraca while completely ignoring the way Leona falls backward.
The ice arrives, the student clearly thinking it’s for his housewarden, but you snatch the frozen bag away and press it to your knuckles, abandoning the great lion on the floor.
The mighty king of the savanna… sprawled out on the sand.
Ruggie is on the ground beside him, lifting his head so the blood doesn’t make him choke, but he can’t stop laughing. He is not going to let him live this down from now on.
Leona probably won’t apologize when he wakes up… but he does put you on the same level of respect as the lionesses of Sunset Savanna.
Better to be safe and keep his distance than risk getting his nose broken again.
You should have seen it coming...
An octopus mage losing his composure, hysterical, with eight slippery tentacles moving everywhere…The perfect hentai scenario, and you don't want to be the tragic heroine of that genre.
But there you are, grabbed around the waist by one of those tentacles and lifted who knows how much off the ground.
In Azul’s twisted mind, you are not a threat. Just a simple, helpless land-dwelling human. A perfect little thing for his collection.
Well… he can tell that to your teeth.
The slimy, salty, suction-cupped appendage gets caught between your two rows of teeth, your canines sinking deeper than the rest of your pearly whites.
It’s like he’s being bitten by a mangy dog.
It is a wild, vicious bite, your head jerking as you try to tear even more of that awful rubbery texture apart.
Don’t even get me started on the coating of slime and squid ink. Gross, gross, disgusting. Blegh
And with a high-pitched shriek, Azul releases the tentacle, flailing it through the air. It writhes and curls into itself, trying to seek comfort in its owner’s hands.
The fall to the floor is not glorious, but at least you don’t break anything. What you do need to do is spit out whatever you managed to tear from that tentacle… and brush your teeth a thousand times to get that taste out of your mouth.
Floyd is smacking the floor with his hand, completely falling apart with laughter. Jade is already plotting the coming days and exactly how he is not going to let a single second pass without bothering his boss about this.
Meanwhile… Azul is still holding the tentacle in his hands, staring at it with tears in his eyes, soothing the wound with his palm.
You can hear sobs when he turns his back, choosing to cry with the last scrap of dignity he has left where no one can see his face.
For a loooong while, they stop serving takoyaki or anything with octopus at Mostro. The mere idea of seeing you eat seafood makes his skin crawl.
He still has teeth marks… a perfect souvenir
Jamil’s Overblot, that serpentine figure like a naga, dark and dripping with ink and years of suppressed resentment. His snakes writhe from side to side, like Medusa, and his eyes are filled with cold, calculated fury.
He could easily pass as a mythological creature from Ancient Greece.
If not for the massive ego and more specifically targeted resentment… but hey, villains never really go after the people they should.
That is what makes you angriest.
Not the fact that Kalim is crying while dodging attack after attack, or the fact that Grim is clawing at one of Jamil’s snakes with his little paws.
No, it’s the fact that this boy is being a complete dumbass, blinded by his pent-up rage, incapable of recognizing his own weak points.
A couple of snakes spot you as an easy target, because obviously the only woman in the whole dorm has to be the party’s weakness.
Intention: unknown. You don’t want to find out, either.
With some effort, you grab them with your bare hands, each head in each fist, and pull, as if you’re yanking on a rope with treasure at the other end.
In this case, you are dragging Jamil directly toward you.
He stumbles, thrown off-balance, completely shocked by your brute strength and by the fact that you somehow managed to capture two of his snakes.
That surprise is what costs him when your knee slams into the area beneath his sternum.
Direct hit to the stomach and part of the lungs… let’s hope you don’t leave bruises on his organs.
The air bursts out of his mouth, and he folds in half, curling pathetically in on himself and wheezing with thin strands of saliva clinging to his lips.
You are not in the mood to watch him vomit all over Scarabia’s beautiful marble… but you do hear his tiny groans and sobs.
A kick to the balls probably would have hurt less.
“Ironic that you’re more scared of insects than snakes”
He’s already on the floor, don’t humiliate him further
The best apology Jamil can think of is leaving you cups of coffee. Good coffee, coffee from Silk City, not the burnt sludge from the cafeteria or Ramshackle. A cup always waits for you before class and after a veeeeeery long day.
And every time, he leaves it near you, but that doesn't mean he stays close. He steps back a few paces, covering his stomach…just in case.
The stage is in ruins, the screens shattered… the perfect setting for the most beautiful man in the world, Vil Schoenheit, to look this ruined.
Ruined… but beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. Golden radiance and black rot, perfection and poison; the combination of gold, violet, and black suits him like it was made for him.
Rook is trying to reason with him, leaving the poetry for another moment… which means everything is truly going to hell.
Epel and the others are trying not to breathe in too much of the poison slowly contaminating the air.
And there you are… a tiny little thing, defenseless, probably the most ordinary and ugly thing on the stage by Vil’s current standards.
“I WILL BE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL!”
The most logical thing to do is make him uglier.
And there you go, climbing him like a monkey scaling a tree, pulling yourself up from the hems of his refined dress or robe or whatever the hell his Overblot version has put him in, while he tries to smack you away like an insect.
More than once, he scratches you with his long nails, but nothing stops your path toward his golden hair.
“GET OFF ME… YOU IRRITATING INSECT!”
Your hands grab a fistful of his strands… and pull.
Those classic hair-pulling yanks from women fighting, grabbing each other by the scalp and painfully ripping at the roots
And his scream is so high-pitched that it echoes through the entire coliseum, piercing and completely undignified. How dare someone like you, with those filthy hands, touch his immaculate hair?
His monster shrieks with him, mimicking his twists and his frantic attempts to throw you off his shoulders.
If your life weren’t currently at risk, Epel would probably take out his phone and start recording the whole thing. It’s too ironic
The great Vil, defeated because someone pulled his hair.
On the stage floor, ink, makeup, and sweat decorate the ground… and a few golden-violet strands are floating through the air.
His hair can recover with enough treatment; his ego, on the other hand, is going to take a little longer.
STYX is about to collapse if this keeps going.
The screens are falling to the floor, panels are breaking apart, and Idia’s Overblot ink is consuming everything in its path. And poor Ortho is there like a puppet of his brother’s despair.
Ortho, the gentlest humanoid you have ever known, is now a lifeless shell, mechanical and precise enough to kill.
Run, run, and hide. Run, hide, and survive; that is what your subconscious is screaming at you. Let the others deal with fighting that robotic figure Idia has become.
You focus on his little brother while you keep running.
“Please do not resist. My big brother says you are not to be hurt”
“But I must immobilize you for your own safety,” he says, cannons ready.
“Why?” he asks, tilting his head, unable to understand why a simple, helpless human is apologizing to an android.
With one elbow strike, you hit his sensory matrix, destabilizing him, and then you slam into the left side of his chassis, right where there is a small weakness you saw Idia repair a few days ago.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry
Hurting little Ortho causes you more psychological damage than anything else, but it is absolutely necessary that he be neutralized first.
Because the moment Idia realizes his little brother is out of the game, his attention goes straight to you… and to the broken piece of chassis that fell off Ortho.
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BROTHER?! YOU, AN INSIGNIFICANT PERSON, WITHOUT ANYTH—”
You launch the metal chassis piece like a frisbee. It spins and spins and spins, and it hits the target: his technologically creepy mask.
The mask cracks in two, and Idia is thrown backward, falling hard to the floor.
“Your brother is fine… though he does need better repairs”
Ortho is going to be mad at him when they both wake up, and you are probably going to become his favorite.
Respect levels: maxed out
Pray for your life if you want to come out of a battle against a dragon unharmed.
So many romantic medieval stories talk about majestic dragons, enormous dragons, fire-breathing dragons, and yet none of them prepared you for having one right in front of you.
Especially because his green fire is infused with magic that the fantasy stories from your world never even bothered to imagine.
Try not to shit yourself while dodging flame after flame, and the occasional piece of debris when you pass under his claws.
Even in his normal form, Malleus is huge… but as a dragon, he is completely imposing.
And once again, you find yourself praying to every god you know from your old world and this new one when you stand in front of that obsidian-colored creature.
Shouts, so many shouts, and with very good reason. What sane person stands in front of a dragon that is a thousand times their size?
But there is that tiny little worm of hope, believing with absurd faith that Malleus would never hurt you, not even in this form.
His great head lowers until it is only a hand’s distance away from you, those enormous green eyes staring directly at you, his hot breath surrounding you completely… your heart on the verge of bursting while you pray he does not open his mouth and swallow you whole.
His snout opens and closes, smelling you, recognizing you as his friend from late-night walks.
“Please… don’t take this personally”
You punch him right on the tip of the snout.
That impact… pure and incomprehensible audacity.
HOW DOES IT EVEN OCCUR TO YOU TO PUNCH A DRAGON? DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH STRENGTH YOU WOULD NEED FOR THAT TO ACTUALLY HURT HIM?!
Well… it doesn’t hurt him, exactly, but it absolutely makes him stumble from the shock.
The finishing blow is delivered by the others, and the battle ends, making Malleus return to his original form while you stand there with a hand completely reddened from the punch.
Malleus, heir to Briar Valley, will remember this day. He will remember the tiny magicless human with enough nerve to strike him in his dragon form.
“Everything is punchable if you try hard enough.”
