"It's getting close!" Joon says, not very helpfully.

He's using the void pistol, easier to shoot behind them while keeping a secure grip, and looking back at the road ahead to lean into Amaryllis' turns in the seconds it takes to recharge. 

Soon, the combined shape is visibly humanoid, racing after them in something between a crawl and a low run, tossing aside the wrecked cars that they have to steer the bike around. It's closing fast.

"Void bombs are in the sidecar if your chemicals don't work. I'll tell you when to arm and throw so we can put some cover between us and the blast. If you're going to burn it, do it while we have the lead to spare."

She waits until it is dangerously close. “Verbrennen” She commands it to burn in Imperial, yanking the trigger on her sprayer and dousing behind them with a thick mist of ethanol. She commands the oxygen to ignite and there is a loud ‘fwwwoomth!’ From the initial ignition and then a much louder explosion as she uses her new magic to drive the reaction to burn faster and hotter and bigger. The rush of magical sensory feedback from feeling the fire grow so quickly sends her cackling madly, in the same way dipping into the mana from Being X’s cursed orb once did. “Oh this is a much better power than I thought it was! Burn!”

The flames burn hot and fast and practically core the zombie voltron before very suddenly burning through the whole cloud of fuel and going out.

Cohesion disrupted, the greater umbral undead collapses. The undead whose hearts weren't burned to ash are now just a wave of individual bodies, flung tumbling across the road in a wave of flaming flesh from the lingering momentum.

Greater Umbral Undead Defeated!

Quest Complete: Comfort Zone!

Level Up!

Amaryllis had been looking over her shoulder to judge the effectiveness of Tanya's magic, and had been giving her an approving nod when Joon rises halfway out of his seat wreathed in a golden glow.

"We're going to figure out what you are. Both of you."

“He does that. Happened during the soul hunt too. Unfair that I don’t get that power. Wonder what gods scheme is for giving it to only him.”

"God, singular? There are five gods of Aerb, none of which have domains that would cover what you've described. Is the situation on Earth different?"

For now she's humoring them about their impression of Earth being real rather than a shared delusion. It seems like a more productive approach. 

Joon would prefer not to talk religion right now and so starts infodumping about the game layer instead.

"It matches up with the kinds of games I'd play with my friends back on Earth. The level-ups for defeating enemies or completing quests, allowing me to become more powerful. There's three superstats made up of three substats each, plus luck, and putting points into them makes me better at the things they cover. Then there's skills, which level up separately with use up to a cap based on the stats, and I can also see how loyal you are to me. For Tanya, that screen gave me a biography of her too, maybe because her score is higher."

"This world... A lot of it is taken from my games. My having the game layer is probably for the same reason, whatever that reason is."

“I don’t seem to have anything like that, or any connection to this world other than the backstory for the previous inhabitant Joon described being slightly familiar. Like being a child soldier. 

The thing pretending to be the ‘god’ of earth claims to be singular.” She makes heavy airquotes around the word god. “This might be Joons first time changing worlds, but it isn’t mine. I met and angered something claiming to be the singular god of earths major religions, he sent me to another, much more dangerous earth. Though from what I can tell me and Joon share our original earth, the history we talked about matches.” She looks over to Joon to make sure. “Did 9/11 happen in your world?”

"Sorry, you met God?"

“Something pretending to be him.” She makes it very clear she doesn’t buy Being X’s claims.

”I used to work in HR at a big company and an angry employee I fired pushed me off a train platform. When I died, time stopped and ‘god’ came to complain about how nobody believed in him anymore. I kind of assumed it was a hallucination brought on by blood loss and oxygen deprivation as I died, so I called him the devil, couldn’t be god because problem of evil, then berated him for doing such a bad job and designing such a bad system that he couldn’t meet his workplace goals.It felt silly that a all supposedly all powerful god would fail at basic HR problems. I said something like ‘what do people need god for? All their basic needs are met, and there is no magic or miracles to show you exist, how can you blame them’. So ‘god’ said if threats to survival and magic and miracles are what brought on faith, I would be reincarnated somewhere were I would need to rely on god, and this was to teach me piety. Something like that anyway. So I wake up as a baby in a 1910’s version of germany where magic is real. I join the army. Get constantly taunted and threatened by this ‘god’ who I called… I guess the translation with be Being X, just to deny him the satisfaction.” She flips off the sky again.

”Then he manipulates things so I’m ordered to test this dangerous experimental magical orb that only works when I pray to him, So if I didn’t want it to explode during use I’d have to kiss his ass verbally. Then he manipulated fate to throw bigger and bigger threats at me that forced me to pray and use the orb to survive. He’d show up to gloat most of the times he did it too. I am honestly surprised Being X hasn’t shown up to be all ‘blah blah blah do you see how great I am, how you should worship me and then you shall be saved’. I went through the great war without giving in, being taken to a new world a second time certainly won’t be enough to make me give into that bastard.” Telling someone finally is such a load off her chest. And it’s no crazier than Joons Isekai and videogame powers. So she won’t be locked up in an asylum like she worried would happen in her second life if she told anyone. 

"I thought you were being figurative this whole time... I'm with you on the problem of evil. If God's an asshole, that would explain so much."

"If your deity does present himself here, tell me immediately. I'd say that qualifies as an existential emergency."

Something like a malevolent Pathist that can also send people to different worlds? It sounds like a horrifying foe, but Uther defeated worse. If it's had decades to work on breaking Tanya and yet to succeed, that implies limits on its ability to understand or influence people.

(And if it exists, its transfer of people to other worlds on death can be scaled, and it can be negotiated with by someone more diplomatic than Tanya? Almost everyone on Aerb would gladly offer worship to any entity that could promise an alternative to oblivion or the hells. Not that she'll share any of those plans while she needs the volatile dream-skewered child soldier on her side.)

“The fact this world has 9000 hells doesn’t even surprise me. He craves to be called good and all powerful, and yet, all those hells. It’s in character for him at least.” She turns to Joon. “So how do you think you pissed Being X off enough to get sent here? The thing about punching that guy for talking about something being in gods plan? He probably is that petty.”

"...Maybe unlike you, I was raised to believe there was a god. Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent."

He looks to Amaryllis to see if she needs those defined. She nods in comprehension.

"I was ten when I realized the incompatibility. Lying awake in bed, having my crisis of faith," listening to Mom and Dad yelling at each other and hearing only silence when I was praying about it, "thinking about all every shitty thing happening in the world, all the pain that you could experience firsthand or watch on TV or read about without end, and the platitudes that god 'has a plan' or 'works in mysterious ways'. I was convinced there was a god, and the part that seemed weakest was the goodness because someone had to create the world."

"I grew up, and stopped believing. My best friend -- died, a stupid pointless accident and a drawn-out anticlimactic end, and all those same platitudes came out again. I... didn't deal with it well."

“Well, I’ve dealt with him before. If Being X wants to mess with either of us, I’ll make sure to foil his stupid little manipulations of fate. And for some reason you have videogame powers. I didn’t play all that many games growing up but in some of them the final boss you killed was a god. And we are working for Amaryllis, a princess, instead of the germans who were destined to lose the great war. This situation could be muuuuch worse. We can deal with this.“

Honestly, for a plot by Being X, this isn’t even that terrible. Sure losing her entire career and reputation as a soldier, her men in the 203rd, and mage powers is a setback, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being reborn as a baby again. Plus this time she has a fellow victim with his own powers.

(Loyalty will tick up again with tanya realising this.)

Weird, how Loyalty for Tanya ticks up more easily and more when she's talking. Amaryllis' increases have been fewer and in response to things he's said. Is it a bidirectional measure? He doesn't feel three times as loyal to Tanya. 

Game mechanics and their implications are a welcome distraction. He'll expound on them all the way to Silmar City.

Silmar City is a large settlement next to the river Sarkan, appearing matte and dull when viewed from a distance. Its skyline is dominated by the half-dozen stone corporate castles, with the twenty-foot high stone walls that are typical of cities built during troubled times on Aerb.

Wide roads lead into the city, but they meet thick metal gates glowing with sigils.

"Those will block most forms of force," Amaryllis says. "Shit. If all of them are closed, we'll need another way in. And the millions of undead inside won't have had the chance to diffuse out into the fields around us."