“Ambush or rush for it?” She asks while trying not to gasp for air.

Damn her stupid tiny body. It feels like she had to take three steps for each one of everyone else’s. She is basically wilpowering trough the exhaustion, because her stamina without enhancement spells to boost her is much lower than what she is used to. Maybe the previous inhabitant was also less fit than her old body.

"Rush for it." Even Amaryllis' composure is suffering. 

"Joon, void bomb."

She lets the others pass, tinkers with the void bomb for a moment, then activates it and sets it down on her current step. 

"Should have a dozen seconds on the timer," she says, rushing to catch up and put as much matter between them and the blast as possible.

"No 'defeated' message," Joon reports.

"Not the point. You can't parry a missing flight of stairs cutting you off from the next floor."

Even their current flight is feeling unstable underfoot from the matter carved out from its underside.

(Well, maybe with Parry 100 and a couple of extra degrees of reasonableness... Good thing Quills has neither.)

“Keep moving, they still might have brought rope.” If she ever gets her hands on him, she swears to rip Being X’s dick off for putting her in such a tiny body. For the millionth time.

Fuck she misses being 6 feet tall and muscular. She definitely took her first body for granted.

"Do you, uh, want me to carry you?" Joon asks awkwardly. He can pick up on her annoyance with his higher INS, even if he's not sure how best to address it, and has the PHY to pick her up too.

“I can handle it!” She is not a child. She will not be carried! Thats so demeaning.

(Depending on if the age of majority is the same as the US, she might, in fact, still be a minor in this body.)

(If loyalty worked like that, it would have gone down.)

"We made it," Amaryllis says, as they reach the top floor. With Joon's rise in skill the undead here pose no challenge. "Tanya, shoot out the locks on these cabinets with the void pistol. Use an angle that won't damage the contents."

God, she could use some non moving targets and time to catch her breath. If she wasn’t forcing herself to stay composed, she would be stumbling towards the lockers.

fwip fwip there go the locks.

Amaryllis follows her, opening the drawers and collecting any valuables. Fenn joins in the looting, using her knife to prise open other containers. 

"Found it." A couple of minutes in, Amaryllis presents a small golden disc with a glowing green center. "Everyone join hands."

They have to hold hands? Ugh, Whatever. She joins in awkward the group handholding session. But if anyone starts singing she is throwing her knife at them.

Then the disk starts spinning, the green glow brightens into a flash that fills the whole field of vision, and there's a timeless instant of extraordinary pain as the teleportation takes hold.

Achievement Unlocked: Tutorial Complete!

The city of Barren Jewel lies at the heart of the Datura Desert, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of miles of sand dunes and rocky cliffs. It's a city of cutthroats where the guards either turn a blind eye or are in on the take, a place of powerful magics lurking in the shadows, with just enough of a veneer of civilization over it that the rich can still still sit on the backs of the poor.

"... That's how I described it in my games. How much of that is correct?"

"All of it, though that could equally be explained by residual knowledge retained through your skewer. We'll need some way to get inside."

She's teleported them just outside of the high city walls, a lot like those of Silmar City but here made of umber sandstone. 

“Joon… that’s just the first star wars planet but with magic. ‘A hive of scum and villainess’ or something. Your writing needs originality.”

At least she knows this reference. The other kids expecting you to know pop culture references was one of the worst parts of her first time in school. Honestly when it came to that, the second life where almost nobody in the empire could afford media except the classics they learned in school, was better.

What are these people talking about. Did they watch a performance of The Star War that was set in real Aerb locations or something? 

If Tanya doesn't like pop culture references she's going to be in for a bad time. 

"It's a classic city of adventure set-up, for good reason! Weak institutions mean there's no authorities you can hand a plot hook over to, rich assholes in charge provide quest-givers and bosses to beat, and being in the middle of nowhere limits how far the players can get from anything I've prepared."

"We can discuss this in the privacy of a hotel room. There's information that each of you should be brought up to speed on."

She takes the void pistol and starts shooting handholds into the wall. The logistics would be so much less convenient if anyone here was too injured to climb.

"...You're registering a prediction that we'll be pulled into vigilante action or involvement with the local powers?"

“If there are game tropes involved… I don’t know If I completely buy everything being based on Juniper’s games thing, but if things are based on games in a generic way…. And given Joons level ups that’s not improbably to me. I didn’t play very many games growing up but adventure hooks like that were common.”

”Wait, you are the power that’s hiring us, we’ve already been pulled into that plot. So it’d be weird for the same plot hook to happen to us twice right? So we should be safe from that If game tropes apply. Big if.”

The one possible time a literature degree would ever have come in more useful than her economics one is in a world run by story tropes, maybe Being X is just making things as weird as possible so Tanya’s rationality is less useful. Being X is a fan of mindless faith and an enemy of rational incentives after all.