A shockwave flashes outwards, emitting a flash like a lightning bolt summoned from the hands of a magically-upgraded human from another world. The ground cracks in protest and spits dust into the air as if coughing from a sudden strike in the back. A girl worth decades just claimed a life worth centuries.

  Zuzia clenches her off-hand fist. She can do nothing but lament in frustration, anger, and sadness at the powerful and brave life she just silenced. She tried to warn him, yet Larven, or rather, Neith, a noble and kind dragon, refused to heed the threat she posed.

  There is likely one person in the world now that can kill anything with a single punch, and he failed to dodge. She felt it. The impact was brief, light, and in spite of his fancy armor, possessed no greater resistance than Serrentuk’s chest did.

  “I’m… so sorry… Neith.”

  Without warning, a limb the thickness of a thigh, but scaled with metallic grey reptilian scales sweeps out of the heavy smoke-like debris. Neither Zuzia’s true mind nor the enslavement-spell instincts hijacking her body can react in time, and she is slammed upwards into a high and lazy arc into the air.

  Zuzia is stunned. The height she is soaring up into the sky doesn’t even register as overtly as the fact that she was just clubbed into the air with massive force.

  Force that could only be delivered by a living dragon in his human form.

  She would know. She has received several such impacts already. There’s a slight daze and a light pain from the tail slam that would have turned her body into paste if she was still her regular self from Earth.

  But… that’s impossible… I… I know I connected…

  As she starts to sail downwards toward the ground shoulders first, Zuzia tries to crane her head to find the truth. Because she’s so stunned, she doesn’t even remotely brace for impact.

  Of course, Amalaskae made the Polish woman nearly invincible, and terminal velocity means that there’s no way she could fall as fast as she was launched into the air, which was a steep upward arc that didn’t cast her very far across the ground laterally. A twenty story fall is little more of a threat to her now than simply tripping and falling directly onto a mattress. She probably should still be afraid, but her heart wants to know about Neith more than worry about her own safety right now.

  And, as such, she hits the ground like a human meteorite. Her durable body smashes into the dirt, ejecting debris in every direction as the grassy open terrain ‘cushions’ her fall.

  Once more, Zuzia wearily sits up, looking in the direction she came from where a weary humanoid with a moderately long, reptilian tail and the heavy armor of a knight is stumbling back into a standing posture favoring his left arm, which he is dangling limply. He takes a breath and exhales, noticeably in pain.

  Even so, the dragon makes eye contact with Zuzia and smirks at her.

  She can’t believe it. If she were to fantasize about his survival, she would have envisioned him knocking her punch off course or teleporting out of his armor or something.

  Instead, he seems to have somehow blocked her strike with his forearm, given the crippling dent in the metal of his armor.

  The dragon manages to pry the bracer from his forearm, gasping out in pain.

  Zuzia flinches, but she can already feel her body gathering unconscious will to stand and continue the attack. She is only briefly delaying it, and unwittingly so, because she is still wholly convinced that the dragon guarding the Empress is already dead. It should have been impossible for him to survive a direct hit, even if he survived his forearm to do it.

  Neith coughs as he drops the forearm plating to the ground, showing how his human-like forearm is forming an unnaturally un-straight shape. “Sharmelkolle is supposed to be indestructible, Lady Zuzia. You have my admiration.”

  “H-How…!?” croaks out the brunette, still stunned by his apparent survival. It has to be a delusion. A maniacal fracture of Zuzia’s mind because of the crushing guilt in her heart.

  “How? I’ve told you already, have I not? My liege and brother is none other than the Harbinger of Calamity.”

  “Th-That doesn’t make sense!”

  “No?” Neith withdraws something from his magic bag, and he drinks it down quickly. He casts the phial aside like he’s some sort of fictional magically-mutated monster hunter originating from her own home country. Though, rather than a decoction or mutagenic potion, whatever he drinks grants him visibly noticeable healing. Scratches on his face heal before her eyes, since she’s only about ten meters away from him, and his seemingly ruined forearm starts to straighten.

  While his arm is noticeably healing from the drink, it does seem to cause the dragon pain, and he forces his arm straight himself.

  He finally finishes his answer to her disbelief. “Thankfully, you don’t have to believe it.” The grey knight rolls his shoulders and does his best to loosen back up. He seems more stiff than earlier, but with his arm recovered, he’s ready to fight again. “Daniel probably can’t yet break sharmelkolle, since he hasn’t focused on trying. But, when that day comes, I intend to be able to withstand it.” He grins, adding confidently, “After all, I have adorable nieces and nephews to get home to.”

  Zuzia scoffs, still not entirely believing her eyes. Her feet start to move as it sinks in; the more convinced she is that Neith is alive, the more power the compulsion has over her. Unfortunately, the battle is far from over, and if they’re comparing their battle endurance, Zuzia is still far ahead. Her Angel-granted strength is far higher in ratio to his defense versus what he can do against her. With devastating hits, he has barely made her feel sore. Meanwhile, she broke one of his bones through some kind of apparent fantasy metal, if his claims of its indestructibility are true.

  “Neith, you really should retreat! You got lucky this time-...”

  Her body launches itself at Neith again, but this time, he does focus more on parrying her attacks with more deliberate deflections, rather than hard blocks. Her strength isn’t as useful if she can’t land a square hit, and the dragon is moving more with technique than brute force now. If he was testing his own strength against her earlier, he wasted a lot of time and energy doing so, and he risked his life in the process.

  Zuzia’s body tries to get more desperate, clawing and swiping at Neith. The problem is, her body is reacting on a one-on-one basis, but the dragon often makes use of his tail, and he even headbutts her a couple of times. Even if she does manage to get a light grasp on him, he twists and moves swiftly to slip free of her grip before she can lock him down.

  He isn’t using his wings as much this time, and the hits he lands are a fraction as powerful as those he was using before. That said, he does also spit fire at her several times, though mostly for distractions.

  Wait… Is he… holding back because of my dress?

  She realizes that his attacks are blunt and focused on trying to wear her down or knock her unconscious. So, naturally, he does aim for her head a lot. But, he does grapple her, nor does he unleash his full fire breath.

  “Neith, are… are you holding back… for my dress!?” asks the Polish woman, her tone becoming somewhat accusatory.

  “I didn’t want to be made into a cheeseburger,” jokes the dragon. They’ve covered a lot of ground, and Zuzia’s reckless attacks have destroyed a lot of the barren landscape. She doesn’t feel exhausted at all, while Neith seems to be slowly losing steam from exertion.

  “Just light it on fire! I give you permission! If you insist on being this stupid, then just stop me! Kill me if you have to!”

  During a brief, momentary lull as Zuzia’s over-commitment on a particular strike grants him a second of retreat, Neith seems to cock his head as if listening to something else.

  “If I kill you, my Lady, then you’ll have to join my harem. I’ve heard that’s the rule.”

  “Huh…!?” growls the brunette. Though she’s not trying to resist her body’s movements, it does coincidentally do a sort of stumbling shift in posture that suits her irritation at the dragon’s most recent joke. He has to be joking, of course. She can do a lot worse to him than break his forearm. Especially if Daniel keeps the promises others have made on his behalf and frees Zuzia.

  Maybe ‘not resisting’ isn’t quite right.

  She wants to punch him in the face, but softly. Just enough that it hurts. Maybe knocks some sense into him.

  Just a little punch. That’s all.

  Zuzia growls as she launches forward. “I’m grateful to you for trying to save me from the Grand Psycho, but I’m serious, Neith! I will kill you!”

  While he dodges skillfully during a bounding backpedal that she can barely keep up with, he seems to chuckle a little more uneasily. “That… didn’t sound as much of a warning and more of a threat this time, my Lady.”

  “Prepare to be paste, ty Jaszczurze-sikusiu!”

  Zuzia doesn’t care as much anymore. She doesn’t hate Neith, of course. Far from it. But, if she gets into it, maybe she can ‘make mistakes’ more often than her zombified ‘compelled’ body can. For all she knows, she’s actually just having a weird out of body experience to hide from the fact that she’s just reacting to the pain of the collar, but it’s really her. Naturally, she doesn’t want to think about it that way. If it’s the collar, then it’s not her fault. At least, not entirely. But, if it’s actually just her trying to cope with what she’s doing through denial…

  Zuzia plants her right foot awkwardly as she’s dashing forward, and she trips over her own feet.

  Ha! Take that, me-“Waah-oof!” Mid-thought, her plan against herself seemed better in the planning stages, emphasized completely when she eats dirt. She coughs and spits up grass, but a tight grip wraps around her ankle.

  “Sorry, m’Lady!” shouts Neith urgently. He’s capitalizing on the opening she gave him, which was intentional, but also, she has many regrets.

  As if she’s little more than a doll in the hands of an angry child, Zuzia is whipped up into the air. She feels a dizzying loss of direction as gravity distorts in an uneven spin, and with lightning-fast brutality. Her face smashes into the ground with a stunning explosion of dirt and deep crunching of the ground itself as it shudders.

  The Earthling’s average human mind can barely process that she was just used like a hammer or a flyswatter against the solid ground before she is slamming the ground a second time with a supersonic crack preceding the thunderous BOOM!

  Neith mercilessly swats Zuzia against the ground, and her daze wears off after several impacts. He rattled her at first, but he’s wearing himself out trying to keep the force so high, and Zuzia’s surprise has worn off.

  She manages to twist during one of the upward arcs, and as if sensing her inevitable escape, Neith releases her. Zuzia is catapulted through the air from the release of the centripetal force that was the dragon’s grip on her ankle, and her momentum carries her several meters away as she yelps in surprise. It would have been the same outcome if she had successfully escaped, but like her flight from the castle she was originally summoned to by magic, Zuzia is just flying by the seat of her pants for this battle.

  The Polish woman manages to dive into a forward tumble. Though the softening of the shock isn’t strictly necessary, the control of her landing allows her to recover quickly.

  And, there is an old, felled tree like a dead timber decimated by gypsy moths that finally toppled. Even so, the solid trunk is nearly a meter wide at its base and twenty meters long

  Oh geez… thinks Zuzia as her body moves on its own.

  “[Batter up!]” calls out Zuzia in English.

  This causes Neith to briefly pause, but he shakes his head quickly. His reply isn’t as worried as it should be with a massive length of ancient tree sweeping towards him. “[Swing, batter batter batter!]” He taunts her in a surprisingly appropriate manner for a dragon on a world where, even if a United States of America exists, the sport certainly wouldn’t have been invented yet. Not unless Daniel is a fan of baseball.

  Regardless, even as he makes his joke in turn, his mouth ignites with flames once more. But, this time, magic concentrates the hot-burning flames of his fire-breath into a ball, and he ‘spits’ it forward with high-velocity just as the tree is reaching centimeters from him.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The extreme temperature difference explodes the end of the tree, and the dragon shields his face and neck from the shrapnel. The blast does counteract Zuzia’s strength, making use of that pesky thing known as ‘leverage’, and she stumbles as the momentum of her titanic ‘baseball bat’ counter-swings almost as quickly as she had started.

  Zuzia lets the end slam down to the ground, and she grunts as she exhales and takes a breath.

  “You know, Neith, this battle is just going to go on and on like some sort of anime if you don’t come up with a plan.”

  “Perhaps,” replies the dragon as he wipes what appears to be an especially dark-colored saliva from his mouth. It leaves a slightly rainbow-colored sheen on his hand, similar to petroleum, but not quite as sinister in color. He continues, “But, at least you’re not a… how does he say it… ‘shōner crown’?”

  “A what…?” asks Zuzia.

  “I just mean that I don’t intend to just watch as you get away, since I’d have to be a moron to do that. Oh, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to let my partner cut in for a bit.”

  Zuzia is still confused by Neith talking past her, since he’s not making sense.

  As she’s trying to make sense of it, the ground and air lights up around her with a distinct and eerie multi-color glow.

  The source of the illumination itself are hologram-like patterns formed of otherworldly symbols floating in midair or spinning unnaturally on the ground around Zuzia’s feet. Blended within the three-dimensional field of symbols and patterns, ethereal energy is swirling like a variety of fog, mist, smoke, and lazy, non-threatening electrical arcs.

  At nearly thirty years old in that grey area that gets claimed by Millennials and Gen Z, Zuzia grew up with an abundance of media of all kinds, from live action movies and shows, to hand drawn cartoons and anime, up through 3DCGI that straddled in between all of them. She’s far from unique in her ability to recognize what’s happening, especially with the months she has spent on Zenkon at this point.

  Magic circles, each different and thus possessing a unique spell effect, have been cast around her, and almost certainly, aimed directly at her such that she can’t escape.

  Just as her muscles start to tense, the first spark starts from the circle slowly orbiting directly in front of her, and Zuzia screams as she is engulfed in a flurry of various spells that hit her with the force of a lightning bolt.

  And, it hurts.

  At least one of the spells, from the sound and painful silencing of Zuzia’s hearing and the surge through her body, has to have been a lightning bolt or some other similar electrical attack. But, she can tell that other elements hit her as well.

  By the time she comes to her senses, she is laying on her back several yards away, steaming. She coughs, spitting up some amount of water, and she wearily inspects herself. Again, because she does effectively want to ‘lose’ the fight, she isn’t so much worried about who attacked her as she is to surveil how effective her new ‘escort’ is.

  Her dress is completely ruined as far as wearing it ever again. The battle so far has torn the skirt to ribbons, with several chunks missing. Her hiking boots look like she’s been wearing them for thirty years now. And, on her chest, there is a charred hole that partially exposes the underside of her cleavage centered a little to the right of her sternum. It is almost perfectly spherical and fused, almost like burnt plastic, with charred, crack-like webbing extending away from the hole.

  Since she’s soaking wet, and her whole dress isn’t burned away like that, it was likely a lightning bolt that the newcoming mage used in conjunction with a water spell to simultaneously keep Zuzia from igniting and to concentrate the spell on every surface of her skin, maximizing the impact of the electrical arc.

  Zuzia coughs and spits out a little more water, grumbling with a gravelly voice, “I’m just a tax accountant who likes to hike occasionally. Isn’t this all a bit overkill…?” Her question is both rhetorical and sarcastic, since she knows far more than this is going to be necessary to stop her.

  When she does finally scan her surroundings to find her new ‘partner’, her heart skips a beat once more.

  She thought for certain that she had killed someone trying to help her this very day already, yet Neith managed to survive only a ‘little’ worse for wear. She would have been screaming if her arm looked like his, yet he did his best to grit his teeth, laugh it off, and used magic potions of some kind to recover.

  But, worse was the person she spent a few weeks getting to know, as far as she could tell. They played games, told stories, and otherwise just hung out to ease the boredom of Zuzia being trapped in a timeless void.

  But, even then, he was a ghostly apparition hiding from his own husk of a body committing atrocities under unavoidable orders.

  “S-Serrentuk…?” asks Zuzia softly.

  The elven sage is almost unrecognizable as he descends to the ground like an angel, illuminated from the sky itself. His magic staff is glowing, though unlike the ancient, living branch of the world tree granted to an equally timeless-seeming sorcerer, as one might expect, his staff seems more mechanical. It is made of metal with faintly blue-glowing black strands woven around it and an array of crystals at its head.

  Likewise, he is wearing glasses and a lightly armored outfit that makes him look every bit a type of combat mage that is atypical for RPG games, where they are often limited to robes and other magical fabrics because they are powerful in mind, not strength.

  Regardless, the elven sage touches down calmly, saying with the same unmistakable voice Zuzia could never forget, “Yes, my Lady. As we hoped, I have been granted a second chance to return the favor.”

  Zuzia’s eyes begin to water immediately, though her body demands that she climb to her feet and continue the assault on the dragon. “S-Serrentuk… Please, you have to take Neith and run. I can’t stop myself, and I am compelled to…”

  “Please do not fret, my Lady,” replies Serrentuk reassuringly as he steps up alongside the knight in question. “Sir Neith and I can handle one wayward human.”

  “No you can’t!” cries out Zuzia, her body lumbering to her feet with unstable footing. She takes control of her motions enough to focus on them, pleading, “I was granted stupid amounts of power by Amala! You won’t be able to stop me!”

  “Have you forgotten, Lady Zuzia?” Serrentuk spins his staff skillfully before tapping the base to the ground. “I have caught you once already.”

  Zuzia winces in agony, since neither of them will listen to her. Serrentuk captured her while supported by an entire contingent, and she was centimeters away from killing him then, before she knew what kind of person he is. She was desperate to escape, and she would have grieved taking a life either way, but it would have been preferable to being captured. Regardless, he had soldiers who were throwing themselves at Zuzia just to drag her into the spell, wholly believing that they stood a better chance of survival once they were in Serrentuk’s gate, since he would then just let them back out.

  The Polish brunette clenches her fists, saying angrily, “At best, I can only pull my swings a little. But, it hurts. If you end up a stain on a faraway mountain side, I will…” She sniffles, wiping tears from her eyes as she feels the compulsion growing again. “I w-will say I told you s-s-so.”

  Serrentuk and Neith give her the gentlest smiles they can in the moment. The dragon replies, “Have a little faith in us, my Lady. We’re your friends. It hurts us to see you cry.”

  This breaks her, and she begins sobbing. But, her body starts to ache, and whether it’s herself trying to ‘steer’, her subconscious trying to avoid pain and separate her consciousness and conscience from the act, or she’s just a plain old magically-steered zombie, Zuzia starts to move once more.

  The advantage is that she is not compelled to attack Serrentuk, meaning she should be able to avoid hurting him entirely. She only has to do her best to overcome the pain of the collar during the absolute most unavoidable moments in order to protect Neith’s life, if nothing else.

  “Don’t try to get too creative, Sir Neith,” calls out Serrentuk as the dragon leaps away from the elf, drawing Zuzia’s attention and possible collateral away from him. “I may be old and out of practice, but the glasses help a lot.”

  Just as Neith’s feet are about to touch the ground again, Zuzia’s feet crunch the ground. She is propelled forward like she was just shot from a cannon, her legs generating force that would make a battleship envious. Thankfully, Neith was watching for it, and a magic spell of wind propels him into the air with surprising speed, his wings acting as sails to ensure his timely escape. Zuzia’s failed attempted tackle tumbles her over her shoulder, and she manages to roll through to her feet, sliding to a stop. She scans the sky quickly, but an air blast hits her just as she whirls, capitalizing on the last of her momentum to stumble her. With the force of the air blast, which was cast by the elf, Zuzia was undoubtedly supposed to topple, but between her magic resistances and strength, it’s not going to be that easy.

  “You’re both idiots! Why are boys such idiots!? Debile! G?upie ?by! Skończcie to, barany!” Zuzia’s tears are flowing freely now, even as her body fights. Both Neith and Serrentuk are putting their lives on the line with the only reward being Zuzia’s possible freedom. She doesn’t even realize she had slipped back into her mother tongue to cry out her frustration at them.

  Serrentuk, skillfully weaving magic into various magic circles that have yet to show their effects, retorts a little playfully, “My sincerest apologies, fair maiden. The only Moon Runes I’m familiar with are of ancient elvish, fae, or feldrok tongues.”

  One of the spells activates, and a hailstorm of ice shards rains down on Zuzia in a diagonal direction. They possess a great deal of force, but have minimal effect on the brunette.

  Growing even more frustrated, she shifts her shoulders and slams her palms together as she yells. The clap generates a semi-directional shockwave that explodes any ice shards caught, but the real target is the dragon who seems to be preparing to launch another attack of his own.

  Even so, a magic barrier appears to intercept the concussive wave before it reaches the grey knight, having been cast by the elven sorcerer.

  Zuzia cries out, “That’s such a stupid joke! How can you joke at a time like this!? Why…!? Why do you know all the right things to say!?”

  Zuzia lunges far out of the line of ice shards, landing in a crouch. As if she’s standing in nice and fluffy snow, the brunette scoops up a fist-full of dirt, using her unmatched physical strength to compact it into a ball. There is crunching and cracking coming from her palms as she pivots in a circle to rise to her feet on the move, avoiding a longer-ranged lightning bolt that tickles her skin with its charge, but doesn’t connect like the first one. She catapults her newly formed rock with supersonic force, and the air cracks as a seemingly-instantaneous ‘line’ connects Zuzia’s hand to Neith for a brief moment.

  The ballistic shot casts sparks where it hits her target, but Neith remains airborne, only stumbled off of a steady flight path briefly from the impact with his shoulder pauldron or the rerebrace protecting his bicep, which he angled into position just in time.

  Neith casts a spell behind him, which seems to create a swirling torrent of air behind him, though it’s difficult to actually see because of the dark sky and it being air.

  Just as Zuzia is scooping up another fistfull of soil to make her next projectile, though, a spell circle appears underneath her. She leaps back, but the moment she’s airborne, a new one appears in her path.

  A separate torrent of air blasts Zuzia upwards. Her magic resistance dampens direct hits, especially ones that rely on the mana itself to do the effect, but she is still beholden to physics. As such, Zuzia is caught and rocketed up into the air where she has very little agency by Serrentuk carefully steering her into a spell.

  Less than a second of being airborne in her uncontrolled flip, Zuzia is tackled from behind and kicked into the ground. Her vision momentarily becomes a dark blur as the land itself shudders once more.

  Neith just used his own spell to jet towards her like a missile, and he used the impact, his momentum, and his strength to jettison the Polish hiker deep into the earth of an alien world.

  Is it even still ‘earth’ if it’s another world? Ugh…

  Zuzia is deep in a bore-hole that has her somewhat pinned deep inside, rather than a crater.

  Wait… Did Serrentuk make a starter hole?

  The honey-haired adventurer does her best to move, but without making an immense effort, she is pretty well and truly stuck. Assuming she could have survived being put into such a position as a normal human from Earth, she would never, ever be able to get out of this position, let alone climb out of the four meter deep hole.

  No, wait… Maybe I can… Ah! My idiots!

  “Don’t come near the hole! I’m serious! I don’t know what’s about to happen for certain!”

  Serrentuk’s voice comes back from just beyond the edge somewhere, “I’m aware, my Lady. I intended to attempt to drown you, if that’s alright.”

  “Of course it’s not alright, dupku!” Though she protests, the Polish woman can’t help but admit that drowning might be one of the few effective ways to put her unconscious at the very least.

  Yeah… I guess it’s probably not going to get any easier than this…

  “Gah! Just do it! But, I’m giving you two a whole lot of trust, you hear me!?”

  She instinctively tries to squirm out of her compromised position, possibly through compulsion, possibly just from the instinct of being uncomfortable being folded nearly in half in a deep hole with one arm pinned in an awkward position.

  Given how the soil and rock shift around her, she’s pretty certain she’ll actually be able to move relatively freely if she tries.

  She adds before she gets a reply, “I don’t know if it counts as cannibalism to eat an elf, but if you don’t want to join Neith on a pizza or in a goulash, you two better hurry it up!”

  “Of course, my Lady. You have my word!”

  “Mine as well,” adds Neith from a little more distantly.

  Water immediately starts raining down on Zuzia in a powerful flood, and she starts to panic a bit, coughing and taking one last breath. She couldn’t help it if she tried. She knows now, thanks to her escape from Mornistae and her subsequent guilty rescue of the knights who fell into the canal, that her lungs start to burn if she holds her breath too long. But, what person would willingly just drown without trying to catch that one last breath?

  Not Zuzia, that’s for certain. She’s pretty sure she wasn’t race-changed to a mermaid during the course of her time on Zenkon, and Amalaskae didn’t mention anything about water-breathing, so the grim reality is that Zuzia just has to sit and wait.

  Of course, that assumes her instincts, magic slave compulsions, and own fear cooperate by being quiet.

  Which they don’t.

  Zuzia starts to strain and thrash as much as she can, and the compacted soil starts to give rather easily, especially once mud starts being formed. Air bubbles are being squished out of the soil and mud, rippling up through the water, while Zuzia’s body gains more and more freedom from her compromised position. Her struggling becomes more violent, especially as she slips bubbles out of her mouth. Her lungs are protesting angrily, in spite of being submerged. Her heart is racing anew and terror starts to sting her veins with the overdose of adrenaline she’s no doubt experiencing, if such a thing is possible.

  The pocket where Zuzia is trapped has grown larger and larger, and she scrambles to right herself and get her feet planted on the bottom. It’s a messy sludge of mud, gravel, and rocks that are below her, and what little light coming from above finally vanishes with a deep thud that resounds around her.

  Serrentuk and Neith just sealed off the hole with a big rock.

  Zuzia feels more fear than she has ever experienced in her life, and though she knew it was necessary to defeat her overpowered body enslaved to a psychopath, she underestimated how horrifying it would be, and how badly her instincts would kick in. Her heart, body, and soul are all desperate to escape in order to avoid drowning. She knows how inevitable it is if she doesn’t get a new breath soon, and her lungs are sending all of the warning alarms they can.

  She has seconds, and not a single intentional thought lingers in her mind. Everything else in the world is drowned out by her desperate need to get just one more breath.

  ***

  A/N 1: (Assuming I got it right) This should be a somewhat mischievous combination of Polish words for an insult, specifically for the exact kind of lizard she’s calling Neith. Dear Polish readers, please do correct me if I’m way off xD.

  A/N 2: (Again, assuming I got them right) Various and growing expressions of Zuzia calling the two idiots for risking their lives for her. Should be along the lines of: “Idiots/Morons! Stupid heads! End this, blockheads!”