Chapter 4: Chapter Two – Valuable Organs

Chapter Two - Valuable Organs

“I don’t care how valuable their organs are, I’m not going to let you kill them,” Veronica snapped. Her hand reached to the side and the air filled with thin white vapour as the temperature around her dropped.

To anyone looking from the outside, the world past her magic’s effect would suddenly seem warped. Straight lines were broken, the air filled with a strange haze. It was like looking through the sorts of poorly crafted glass one might find in a smaller settlement.

It scared the people cornered behind her, but they had no choice but to press themselves closer to the hillside and hope.

Before her, looking on with something between annoyance and frustration, were her teammates. Former teammates, maybe.

“Come on, Veronica,” one of them said. Frederick, who was always the placating, easy-going one in their group. He was something of the group dad. A big man, with a big heart who would step in and put down disputes.

He knew her father; had worked for the baron once or twice, either as favours because he was a daemon-fed in the baron’s own territory, or for pay. Frederick was an adventuring guild mercenary, as were the rest of her companions.

“Don’t patronise me, Frederick,” Veronica said. She didn’t want to fight. He was a good man. He had insisted that she be left alone, had watched over the very few women in the crew to make sure nothing untoward happened, and when that weasel Michel had grabbed Andrea to do gods knew what to her, he had walloped the man something fierce for his uppityness.

The truth was, she shouldn’t have been here facing off against scattered daemons. She was the daughter of a baron, she should have been in some keep somewhere, taking care of the finances or pining after some noble knight.

But she was a daemon-fed too, and she wasn’t going to sit back and watch her kingdom fall without doing something to help.

This... this didn’t count as that. Chasing after peasants and threatening to put them to the knife? It was unspeakable.

Michel sighed. “Come on, Fred. Just slap her aside. There’s six of them back there. That’s six gold. Even split amongst the twelve of us that’s enough silver to visit every brothel in Lindenburg for a week apiece.”

“You’d know how much they cost, wouldn’t you?” one of the men in the back said. She hadn’t bothered to learn his name yet.

The crew had travelled to Oberschield from her home city, picking up a few hands as they went to pad out their numbers. They were twelve in all now. Most of those were ‘green’ with only a ring or two on their guild-issue daggers but they had four daemon-fed in their number, Veronica included, and that counted for a lot. Her house guard only had three.

Their mission was simple: travel to Oberschield, which was half a day’s ride by cart from Kircken, then clear out the daemons around the area and bring their meat back to be processed. A single daemon head, both intact and fresh, was worth a few gold, and that was for the most common and weakest. The greater and rarer daemons could fetch a king’s ransom. They were in high-spirits as they left, the promise of wealth keeping the mood up.

Then they arrived and found a region filled with other mercenaries and hunters, daemon-fed and normal, all looking for riches and opportunities.

Which led to this. Her crew hunted down a lead, and that lead turned out to be six or so half-daemons. People who had started to turn into monsters, but through divine providence, sheer luck, or incredible will, had kept their humanity.

Their heads were worth less than an ordinary daemon’s, but they’d still be bought.

But they were innocents, just unlucky, poor people who had been at the same time both fortunate and not. Veronica glanced back quickly. The people there were a mess. Some had scaly skin, others had too many limbs. One looked exactly like a monster except for their very human eyes.

They would all have daemon magic, of course, but they’d held back on using it so far. Or didn’t know how.

“Look, Frederick,” Veronica said. If she could persuade him, the others would follow. Her part in the group was over though, she couldn’t trust them and they couldn’t trust her. “Just set this aside. I’ll take care of them. My father will take them in, I’m certain. You find some other daemon to hunt down and go on living with a clean conscience.”

Frederick shook his head. He wasn’t going to say yes.

He was a brute, a man able to punch like a landslide and take hits like an unbendable oak. That’s what his feeding had given him. It was a common power, but strong all the same.

Michel, that constantly-smiling ass, had a strange ability. Nearly perfect aim with a power that let anything he threw move lightning-quick. She’d seen him snipe a bird out of the air at three hundred paces with a pebble.

The last of the daemon-fed was near the back, with the others. An older man who could shape the earth at will. But his ability was slow to work. He mostly built little forts for them every night and smoothed out the road as they marched. He wasn’t a big threat.

Frederick and Michel were. The others too.

She could slow down any bolts fired her way, and they knew it. None of them had pulled out their crossbows. They’d come at her with spears and Michel with his throwing knives.

“She’s got some fight in her,” Michel said as he reached into a fold in his gambeson and pulled out a short, sharp knife. He spun it between his fingers. “I’ll take out her arms and legs. We can tell the good baron she got taken out by a daemon. Careless, you know?”

“We won’t kill her,” Frederick growled.

“Well, not immediately,” Michel said.

The few women in the group and some of the men gave him dirty looks. He was just a peasant who’d gotten his hands on some uncommon daemon meat and had ended up with a decent power.

Her magic was better than theirs, but Michel nearly countered her. They had experience that she lacked too. Michel had been part of a mercenary group in Kircken before an entire section of the city was turned into a crystalline grave.

She was going to die, or worse.

She shifted to the side, falling into a well-practised stance with the tip of her rapier pointing towards the group.

“I said I won’t let you.” She tried to sound intimidating. Instead, she sounded like a frightened young woman barely on the cusp of adulthood. Her father had once told her that there was no bravery without fear.

If that was the case, then her bravery would be well fed.

The moment held, like people posing for an artist to paint them.

Then it was interrupted from somewhere behind her. “Ouch, oof, owie, ow ow.”

You are reading story Magical Girl Crystal Genocide at novel35.com

Rocks scattered and dust came rushing down as something large and with a foul tongue came rolling down the side of the cliff. She--for she imagined it was a girl from the voice--rammed through a bush. There was a glint of something, metal perhaps, or glass, but she didn’t dare give her more than a glance.

And then the figure rolled down and into the space between Veronica and her former comrades.

They all paused to stare. The girl was dressed in a pale blue dress of a strange make. A foreigner? It was hard to see much of her clothes though, for she was wrapped in a tattered cloth filled with rips and tears.

It gave her the appearance of some nightmarish creature of the night.

Or perhaps just a homeless beggar.

She sat up, then looked around herself.

The girl’s hair was yellow. Veronica’d never seen the like, though some daemon-fed could change their appearances, or gained strange anatomical quirks from their feeding. Veronica herself couldn’t feel cold after gaining her power.

“Sorry about that!” the girl said with good cheer. She untangled her limbs. Somehow, she was unhurt after the tumble, though there was a coat of dust on her. She laughed as she climbed to her feet. “You wouldn’t believe what happened. Just taking a nice stroll when out of nowhere this boar shows up. Chased me right to the edge of that cliff over there. Think it’ll follow me?” She pointed back up the way she came.

“Who in all the hells are you?” Michel asked.

The girl paused, then shrugged. “I’m... just a normal girl. Pleased to meet you all. Sorry for the entrance.” she looked around, at Veronica on one side with the lost behind her, and the mercenaries on the other. “Am I stepping into the middle of something?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Michel said. “Now leave.”

“Hey, hey, I said I was sorry!” The girl raised her hands and smiled at the mercenaries.

“She’s a half-daemon,” he said.

Veronica thought she couldn’t be cold any more. She was wrong. Her heart froze. Another person they’d try to slaughter?

The girl paused, then glanced around again. “What? Sorry, I really don’t know what you’re talking about? Hey now, why’s everyone looking at me weird?”

The mercenaries didn’t look certain anymore. She could see them putting things together. The people behind her were peasants. This girl looked like a foreigner. There was a difference between going after a nobody and... a somebody.

“Move along, stranger,” Frederick began. “Just step aside and we--”

There was a loud crack.

Michel had thrown one of his knives. It was a straight throw, hard and fast. There was a small ring in the air before him where the knife passed.

The knife clinked off a thin sheet of glass, no thicker than a hair, which hovered before the girl’s face. Veronica flinched as the bent weapon ricocheted off into the treeline.

“Oh,” the girl said. “Well, that was a bit on the rude side.”

The man twitched.

She looked to Michel, a pouty glare marring her features. “Hey, could you apologise, please?”

“Michel,” Frederick warned. The man was overstepping, a lot.

Another knife went flying, and this time Veronica almost saw the pane of glass appearing to intercept it.

“Michel!” Frederick snapped.

Matter creation. One of the more powerful sorts of magic. Instantaneous, and almost reflexive. Tough, too, if it could stop one of Michel’s knives with so little effort.

The air next to her rippled. “Oh, come on, really?” she complained before an angel ripped itself into reality. A figure of crystal and glass, perfect proportions that hinted at sharp femininity. It was no bigger than a person, but that didn’t matter. It felt immense, as if god had deigned to glance their way and found them wanting.

Michel screamed. Daggers flew through the air at the angel and bounced off of crystalline shards that appeared before them and disappeared just as easily.

Some of the more cowardly members of the group were running already.

Then the angel twisted and the world flashed red.

Michel, or rather, the burning stumps of his feet, fell to the ground. There was a chasm seared into the earth behind him. Trees were missing half their trunks in perfect, curved slices that steamed.

That was enough to break the resolve of the others. They turned and ran.

They were here to fight daemons, the monsters that terrorised the world and who killed thousands of unprepared souls every day. They were not ready or equipped to deal with this one lonesome girl. But then, was she really a girl, or was she a magi?

“Aw, man, that’s just not good,” the girl said. Then she turned to Veronica. “Hey, you alright?”

***

You can find story with these keywords: Magical Girl Crystal Genocide, Read Magical Girl Crystal Genocide, Magical Girl Crystal Genocide novel, Magical Girl Crystal Genocide book, Magical Girl Crystal Genocide story, Magical Girl Crystal Genocide full, Magical Girl Crystal Genocide Latest Chapter