Jessica tried to avert her gaze but the damage was already done. Sensing something was off, Mercy turned to look at what had drawn her attention.

  Riza leapt from Naga’s back and in the blink of an eye the handle of Mercy’s rake slammed into Riza’s stomach and blew her back into the cave wall. The wake of the swing rocked Jessica over. A second slower and the lizard girl’s head would have looked like Petra’s.

  In the same moment Naga whipped her tail at Mercy’s legs and the adventurer jumped over it.

  Like a dog leaping for treats, Naga shot upwards and bit down on Mercy’s leg with her crescent fangs. With the leverage of the bite, Naga slammed her to the floor and piled on top, snapping at her face. The adventurer fended off the onslaught with one hand while clutching something to her neck with the other.

  Jessica watched mesmerized as the cuddly, lethargic lamia she knew gnashed at the adventurer. She was broken from this trance by fingers picking at her ropes.

  “Are you okay, Jessica?” Riza asked, her voice wheezing.

  “Are you!?” Jessica replied in a harsh whisper.

  “A rib might have cracked but I am no stranger to pain. I will have you free in a moment.”

  While Riza was freeing her, Mercy wormed her feet under the 3000lbs. lamia and kicked upwards. Naga writhed in the air to keep her tail between her human body and the rake. She barely got it under her before the tines sliced two inches off her tail.

  “Forget me, help Naga get rid of that rake!” Jessica said.

  “But my debt—”

  “It’s an order!” Jessica said.

  Riza nodded and left the rope half unknotted. From the belt at the waist of her tunic she drew a set of darts. As Mercy rounded on Naga writhing in pain on the floor, she hurled three darts. The first two bounced harmlessly off Mercy’s arm as though it were made of steel. The third dart nearly clipped the sprout necklace around Mercy’s neck but the adventurer jerked at inhuman speed to avoid it. Rage flashed across the girl’s face.

  “Riza, duck!”

  Riza followed orders and the rake’s tines barely clipped the end of one ear. Then, just as quickly, the girl’s fury was gone.

  “Wow! Your harem members are a lot more slippery than his,” Mercy said, pointing at Petra’s decapitated body.

  “Please stop! I’ll go willingly, just don’t kill them!” Jessica screamed. “No one will believe them either! They can’t testify about— about any of this!”

  Mercy pouted and in a cutesy voice said, “But they hurt me! So I want them to die.”

  If it had been a good idea she would have told Naga and Riza to run. Now it was too late. Either they dealt with Mercy or her rake would dismember all of them.

  “Attack from both sides, she can’t—”

  Jessica saw a gleam in Mercy’s eye as she said this.

  “Wait, pull back!”

  “Spiral Till!” Mercy yelled.

  The rake lengthened and Mercy twirled. The teal-colored afterimage of her rake formed a helical cone. Dodging its outer perimeter, Riza and Naga were both peppered with slices from just the force of the wind.

  Mercy stuck her left foot out to break her spin and slowed to a stop. “Aww, I thought I hadja! You’ve got good instincts, Jess! If ya didn’t get the Morkal treatment you coulda been pretty good!”

  “H-How do you know—?”

  “Pffbt. It’s obvious! You’re not the first to get it ya know. Just the first in a while.”

  Jessica would have killed to ask the girl all kinds of questions. As an Original Eight she probably knew almost as much as Magnus.

  “Wait, who else—”

  “You’re not gonna distract me,” Mercy said. “But nice try!”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Suddenly, she whipped the rake at Naga’s head. Jessica’s heart stopped. Inches from her neck, however, the rake slowed to a quivering halt. A ray of successive black and green diamonds projected outward from a glowing band across Naga’s eyes. Mercy clucked her tongue and drew the rake back.

  “I hate snakes,” Mercy said. “I hate, hate, hate, hate snakes!”

  Jessica grunted as she pulled at the knot Riza left half untied. “They grow on you.”

  “Not on me they don’t.”

  Mercy flashed to the side of Naga and thrust the rake at the spot on her waist where her snake body blended into her human one. At the last second Riza jumped on the haft to divert it. Two tines lodged themselves in the lamia’s hip like meat hooks, dragging Naga to the floor as the rake slammed into sheer stone. Mercy pried Riza off the haft and drove her fist into her stomach hard enough to curl the lizard girl into a fetal position.

  “Honestly, Jess, your harem members are fugly and gross!” Mercy said, making a fake retching sound. “Do you have a thing for reptiles? That’s so weird!”

  With one final pull, Jessica tore her wrist from the chair’s arm and began tugging at the other. Mercy didn’t bother to stop her. Instead she giggled and stomped on Naga’s side, plunging the rake tines further in.

  Mercy flipped her fluffy green hair. For a split second the crystal around her neck sparkled in the light of the bioluminescent lichen. The same crystal-clad sprout she had protected with one hand instead of using both to throw Naga off.

  Jessica bit her lip. She had a plan, but it was going to require an enormous amount of luck.

  “How— how about a trade!?” Jessica said.

  Mercy squinted. “Huh? What couldja possibly have that I want? If it’s dirt on Min-woo I’ve already got plenty, trust me.”

  “How about your necklace for…”

  Jessica didn’t have anything to exchange but her fake trade wasn’t the point. She was fishing for a reaction. When Mercy’s hands shot to her chest to cover the necklace, she knew she’d gotten it.

  “Your filthy hag hands will never touch my Bisuko!” Mercy screeched.

  For a second after she said this Naga stopped squirming and Mercy stopped twisting the tines in her flesh. Naga grabbed onto a rock and yanked herself free of the rake, leaving a chunk of herself behind. Her tail whipped around Mercy’s legs.

  The adventurer’s face scrunched in snarling fury. “You foul, disgusting, slimy, fuc—”

  Before she could finish, Riza bolted forward and snatched the necklace before dropping into a roll. Mercy’s eyes shot wide.

  “Let it go,” Mercy said calmly. “Let it go now and I won’t use your bodies for fertilizer.”

  Grunting in pain and leaving a trail of dark green blood across the floor, Naga slunk to Riza’s side and took the crystal between her fangs. Mercy’s breath hitched.

  Jessica pulled her other wrist free. “Here’s the trade: Your necklace for letting us go.”

  Mercy scoffed. “You still don’t realize who I am or what I’m capable of, you ugly hag.”

  Naga tightened her jaw and her fangs scraped against the crystal.

  “Okay! I’ll let you go! Just give me Bisuko back!”

  “When we are safely back in Elsifeya Castle I will leave it with the steward,” Jessica said.

  Mercy fixed Jessica with an unnervingly neutral expression for almost a minute straight before sighing and shrugging. “I guess it can’t be helped.”

  “And you stay in the cave until we’ve left,” Riza added. “If we catch even a whiff of you, Naga will chew Bisuko up like rock candy.”

  “And if there’s so much as a scratch on that crystal when I get it back I’ll kill every last one of you and make a new necklace from your shrunken heads. Even you, Jessica. Do you understand me? It won’t be about the reward money,” Mercy said, cutesy tone gone.

  Riza helped Jessica untie the rest of her bonds as Naga waited with the crystal in her fangs. The lamia went first while Riza brought up the rear so she could smell if Mercy was coming.

  Once they were back out in the light of day Jessica could see Naga’s injuries more clearly. Her tail ended in a bleeding stump with the tip of her spine visible while a section of her side had been torn open in two clear chunks. The amount of blood she was spilling would’ve sent a normal-sized human into shock.

  “Oh my God! Naga we need to— to bind that, o-or something!” Jessica said.

  Naga replied with a pained smile. “Usss lamia have a healing factor. I have lossst a lot more than this and survived. Do not worry about me.”

  Jessica watched the fringes of the open wound in her side bubble with pale green froth.

  “I’m taking your word for it, so please don’t die because you were being stubborn,” Jessica said.

  “I would never,” Naga said as she puddled into the deck of her kidnappers’ sailboat.

  Glancing at the rowboat she and Riza had come on, Jessica understood why they were requisitioning this one. She was amazed they hadn’t sunk coming to rescue her.

  As Riza unfurled the sails, Jessica looked on her two retainers with a mixture of admiration and guilt. She didn’t feel like she deserved them risking their literal tails for her. If she had been more attentive, if she had taken the threat of other adventurers more seriously, all of this could have been avoided. Kagezora, Ebony, Jared, Petra, and Molly would still be alive.

  What rattled her most, however, was that Mercy had confirmed what Jessica feared all along: Naga and Riza were her weak spots. For so long as Jessica had a bounty on her head they were targets. There was a certain irony in the fact that they had only escaped by exploiting someone else’s valuables. In this metaphor, they were her Bisuko.

  As dangerous and overpowered as adventurers were, most were ready to die. They had already died once after all. The only way a fight between adventurers could have stakes was if something an adventurer valued was threatened.

  The practice of killing another adventurer’s party was even more insidious than she first thought. Her initial impression was that adventurers killed each other's party members because no one cared about them. She now realized it was because they did.

  At the back of the boat, Riza turned the rudder with an adorable look of focus. In the middle of the deck, Naga was squeezing the mast in her coils to keep from moaning in pain. They mattered to Jessica. They mattered a lot. And as she thought this, she was reminded of Ritva again and shuddered. Mercy would not be the last adventurer to come after Jessica and her companions. When that happened, she wasn’t sure what she would do.

  ? Overpowers: Magical Girl Crossover [Grimlight Psychological/Genre based Power System] ?

  by Moawar

  He, Life, had a simple job.

  His responsibility as an Overpower was to make sure that fiction stories and the characters in them follow their dictated path. He always did his job well enough, not more or less than was needed.

  His latest assignment, however, would, in retrospect, prove to be his most challenging one of all.

  He would find himself in a unfamiliar world. There he'll have to quickly adapt to guide Nozomi.

  The strongest magical girl with the potential to accidentally destroy those she seeks to protect in her fight against evil.

  What to Expect:

  -If you like the psychological aspects of Madoka Magica and the mixing of different genres a crossover story brings then this story is for you