The smell of wet mud, woodsmoke, and ozone hangs thick over the ridge overlooking Oakhaven.

Goddess Astraea didn't drop you in a marble cathedral. There are no trumpets, no bowing priests, and no legendary sword. Just a churned dirt trail high above a mist-choked valley, the distant iron clang of a medieval supply caravan down on the road, and a column of black-armored Demon Vanguard troops marching out of the treeline to slaughter them.

And right beside you, four women ripped out of four different realities are already ruining the scenery.

Behind your left shoulder, the tall girl with the black raven wings—Utsuho—isn't even looking at the army below. She is squatting in the wet bracken, poking a shiny stag beetle with the rim of her massive, concrete-encased arm cannon. Every time the heavy cylinder hums, the frost on the weeds six feet around her boots flash-boils into steam, scorching a black ring into the hillside. Beside her, the petite girl in the oversized wizard hat and eyepatch is already standing on a boulder, staff raised, muttering under her breath as she practices throwing her cape back against the wind for maximum dramatic angle.

Bambietta isn't practicing anything. She kicks a chunk of gravel straight off the cliffside, her white military coat flaring as crimson sparks of Reishi snap between her gloved knuckles.

"Hey. Ground-walker. Eyes up." Bambietta's boot heel digs into the mud as she rounds on you, chin tilted high, reddish-brown eyes sharp and pissed beneath the gold peak of her cap. " That tacky blonde broad in the sky said her spell links our tether to you. Which means you're the idiot responsible for dragging Sternritter 'E' into a pile of horse shit. So start talking—where's the nearest town with a hot bath, and why shouldn't I blow up those ugly bastards down in the valley just to clear my head?"

"Oh, relax, Princess Sparkler! You're gonna pop a vein before we even get to the good part!"

Jinx drops down from the crooked limb of a dead pine tree, landing boots-first in the mud between you and the cliff edge. Her ankle-length blue braids whip around her waist as she hoists her shark-jawed rocket launcher onto one bare shoulder, grinning from ear to ear with manic, sleep-deprived glee. She leans her weight back against your arm like she's known you for ten years, sighting down Fishbones's iron barrel toward the tight, tidy phalanx of demon heavy infantry below.

"Look at 'em down there, Boss. Marching in little gray boxes. Grey shields, grey mud, zero color." Jinx clicks her tongue, thumbing a heavy brass switch on the side of the launcher until the warhead inside starts whining with a high-pitched neon-pink glow. "Fishbones says we shoot the fat one in the front and see if the rest domino. Or—ooh! Watch the bird-girl! I bet five bucks if you point her at that hill, the whole thing turns into glass!"

Down on the valley road, the Demon Commander raises a spiked mace to signal the ambush, completely oblivious to the glowing pink warhead, the crackling crimson Reishi, the gathering scarlet runes, and the rising Geiger-counter hum on the ridge above his head.

Past midnight in Oakhaven, the drizzle turns the cobbles slick and black, but the top of the northern stone watchtower looks like a chemtech crime scene.

While Utsuho, Bambietta, and Megumin are crashed out down at the Iron Shield Inn, the three town guards who were supposed to be holding the night watch up here are hogtied together against the weapon rack with bright pink ribbon, fast asleep with painted blue mustaches drawn across their helmets. The gray medieval battlements are covered in dripping neon-pink and electric-blue paint—grinning monkey skulls, jagged crowns, and arrows pointing toward the powder magazine.

Sitting cross-legged atop a crate of trebuchet bolts is Jinx. Her long blue braids hang over the edge into the dark drop below, swinging in time with the frantic, off-key carnival tune she's humming through her teeth. Spread across her lap are cracked vials of dwarven alchemist fire, gutted crossbow quarrels, and a half-assembled warhead leaking purple Shimmer fumes.

CLACK-CLACK.

She snaps the brass jaws of a Flame Chomper grenade shut right as your boot hits the top step of the stone stairwell.

"Took you long enough!" Jinx doesn't even flinch, spinning around on her heels atop the crate and kicking her boots against the stenciled wood. Her magenta eyes catch the torchlight, wide and wired in the dark. "Don't give me the furrowed-brow look, Boss. Those tin-cans over there were snoring so loud I couldn't hear Fishbones think. Plus, this whole town is fifty shades of mud. Somebody had to fix the lighting."

She hops off the crate, closing the distance between you in two fast, restless strides. She smells like wet leather, sweet gunpowder, and ozone. Without asking, she hooks her chin over your shoulder from behind, pointing a paint-stained thumb past the stone parapet toward the black expanse of the Ashen Plains. Two miles out, the red watchfires of a Demon Lord supply depot sit in neat, disciplined rows.

"Look at that. Four hundred spiky losers sitting around campfires, and nobody's even throwing anything." Jinx slides around your side, hauling her shark-mouthed launcher off the stone floor and shoving the nose of a freshly painted, neon-striped warhead inches from your chest. "Packed three flasks of that dwarven Boom-juice right into the nosecone. One pull, and that whole depot goes up like a hundred-foot pink smiley face. Come on, Chief—tell me you didn't climb all those stairs in the rain just to tell me to go to bed."

Two thousand feet up the jagged pass overlooking Ironcrag Fortress, a blizzard is trying to freeze the mountain solid—except for the fifty-foot circle of tropical heat radiating around your camp.

Jinx, Bambietta, and Megumin took the lower trail an hour ago to loot a stranded demon munitions wagon, leaving you alone on the ridge with the tallest, heaviest-hitting problem in your squad.

Utsuho is sitting on a frost-split boulder beside an empty firepit, her black raven wings fluffed wide against the gale. She didn't bother gathering pine branches. Instead, she has a baseball-sized, white-hot miniature star balanced an inch above her left index finger, humming a simple three-note tune while holding a charred marshmallow on a stick near its corona. The radiation turns the falling snow into warm mist before it ever touches your shoulders.

At the crunch of your boots on the shale, her ears twitch.

"Unyu?" Utsuho's head snaps around, her red eyes lighting up with instant, tail-wagging warmth. "Leader! You're back! Look, I got the brown part on the outside without—"

She waves her hand to show you the stick, completely forgetting about the other hand. The miniature star rolls off her finger and drops into a ten-foot snowbank to her left.

FWOOOM.

A blinding flash of crimson-white light and a geyser of superheated steam rip across the shelf. When the mist clears three seconds later, half an acre of ancient glacier is gone, replaced by a bubbling, glass-rimmed crater of boiling mud and steaming spring water.

"Ah." Utsuho blinks twice at the crater, then beams at you like nothing happened. "I made a bath! Way warmer than the inn, right?"

She hops off the rock, heavy boots thumping against the stone as she trots right into your space. The inside of her green cape shimmers with a deep, moving void of stars as she drapes one side of it over your shoulders to block the mountain wind, pressing her warm, solid side flush against yours. Her body heat radiates through her white shirt like a furnace.

Down in the valley below, the iron gates of Ironcrag clank open as a column of demon siege-beasts lumbers out by torchlight. Utsuho glances down the cliff, and the vacant, sweet smile on her face sharpens into something vast and haughty as the concrete cylinder on her right arm begins to whine with a deep bass tremor.

"Those bugs down there are really loud tonight," she says, her voice dropping an octave as glowing red atomic rings begin to spin slowly around her ankles. "Want me to clean the valley out before the others get back, Leader? Takes three seconds. Or... unyu, my marshmallow fell in the dirt."

The heavy oak door to the luxury suite on the top floor of the Iron Shield Inn isn't locked—mostly because its iron lock-plate is blown out and the door is leaning crookedly on one hinge.

While Jinx, Utsuho, and Megumin are down in the market square picking a fight with the garrison quartermaster, Bambietta spent her first twenty minutes in Oakhaven evicting a local viscount from the best room in town.

Inside, the fireplace is roaring, three empty wine decanters are rolled across the rug, and Sternritter "E" is sprawled on her stomach across the four-poster velvet bed. She's kicked off her white military cap and unbuttoned the collar of her Wandenreich capelet, swinging her black thigh-high boots lazily in the air behind her. Half a dozen marble-sized spheres of glowing crimson Reishi float in a slow circle above her upturned palm, humming like angry hornets.

"Look who finally remembered who's actually carrying this squad."

Bambietta doesn't get up as you step past the splintered doorframe. She props her chin in one hand, reddish-brown eyes narrowing at you with a spoiled, expectant smirk.

"This whole kingdom is a dump, you know that? The wine tastes like horse piss, the sheets scratch, and if that midget in the wizard hat brags about her one-shot magic trick one more time, I'm gonna stuff her staff down her throat."

With a lazy flick of her thumb, she snaps one of the crimson Reishi spheres straight through the open casement window. Across the street, a hideous stone gargoyle jutting from the roof of the town barracks flashes bright red. It doesn't crumble—the stone itself converts into raw explosive matter, detonating in a sharp, synchronized burst of crimson-and-white sparks that lights up the dusk sky and rains warm ash over the shouting soldiers in the street below.

"Hmph. Better." Bambietta rolls over onto her back, sitting up against the piled pillows and crossing one white-stockinged leg over the other. The playful curve of her mouth turns sharp, demanding, and territorial as she pats the mattress beside her hip. "Come here and kick that door shut. Watching peasants march around in tin cans all day gave me a massive headache, and since your stupid tether won't let me leave this dump, you're on stress-relief duty. Don't make me ask twice."

The late-afternoon wind smells like scorched heather, ozone, and freshly turned earth.

Three miles down the valley from your grassy ridge, what used to be a fortified Demon Legion forward watch-camp—complete with black-iron palisades, ballista towers, and two hundred elite high-orc vanguard—is now a glowing, half-mile-wide bowl of vitrified red glass. A towering, perfectly symmetrical mushroom cloud of black-and-scarlet smoke is still climbing into the orange sunset sky, dragging a warm vacuum draft back down the hillside.

And right at your boots, the self-proclaimed greatest Archwizard of the Crimson Demon Clan is lying face-down in a patch of flattened clover.

Her oversized pointed hat has rolled three feet away. Her black cloak is tangled around her shoulders, her wooden staff lies dead and dim in the grass beside her limp fingers, and she hasn't moved an inch since the shockwave finished rattling your teeth thirty seconds ago.

"Nngh... th-the resonance on the secondary ring..."

Megumin's voice comes out muffled against the dirt. With a heroic amount of effort, she manages to roll her head two inches to the left, blinking up at your knees with one bright crimson eye peeking past her crooked eyepatch. Her cheeks are flushed pink from the mana burn, her breathing shallow and completely spent.

"Did you see the initial compression, though?" A tiny, smug grin tugs at the corner of her mouth despite the fact that she can't lift her own chin off the weeds. "That spiky-haired Sternritter woman thinks throwing fifty little firecrackers at a wall is 'art.' Amateur. Ninety-eight points today. Easy. If the wind hadn't drifted east at the apex, it would've been a clean hundred..."

A cool evening gust sweeps across the ridge, rustling the grass and making her shiver once inside her thin witch's dress. The grand chuunibyou bravado slips right off her face, replaced by a sudden, awkward clearing of her throat as her gaze darts from your boots up to your face.

"Ahem. Well. As you can see, the price of supreme magical perfection is total cellular exhaustion. Not a single drop of mana left." Her fingers twitch uselessly against the clover. "And the mountain wolves come out after dusk. So... don't just stand there admiring the crater. Pick up my hat and turn around. I call dibs on the back before Utsuho gets any ideas."

Brass trumpets blare across the mud of the Royal Alliance's forward war camp, loud enough to drown out the rain.

A mile north, the obsidian walls of Ironcrag Fortress loom through the fog. Down here in the staging trenches, two hundred mud-caked royal spearmen scramble out of the road as four white warhorses pull a gilded carriage to a halt right outside your squad's scorched supply tent—splashing dirty puddle water straight across Bambietta's boots.

Bambietta freezes. Her right eyelid twitches.

Before she can vaporize the horses, the carriage door swings open and Kaito Renji steps out onto a portable wooden footstool. The Kingdom's officially summoned "Chosen Hero" wears mirror-polished mythril plate that hasn't seen a single scratch of combat, a snow-white cloak, and the glowing Holy Sword Caliburn belted at his waist. Behind him step his three hand-picked vanguard elites: Saintess Celia in her gold-trimmed vestments, the high-elf ranger Lyra Silverleaf with her yew bow, and the six-foot-tall shieldmaiden Freya Ironheart.

Kaito doesn't even look at the fortress. He spots your four girls lounging around the supply crates, checks you out from head to toe in your plain mud-splattered gear, and lets out a loud, theatrical sigh.

"Man, the logistics in this army really are a mess." Kaito strolls forward, resting one gauntleted hand on Caliburn's pommel as he flashes a practiced, pearly-white grin at Bambietta and Jinx. "Don't worry, ladies. Your transfer came through—well, I'm making it official right now. I'm Kaito, the Chosen Hero. No idea why the Guild stuck four top-tier beauties in a ditch with a nameless baggage-handler, but you're with the main character now. Stick behind Freya's shield when the battle starts, and I'll let you watch Caliburn split an entire boulder in half."

Behind his back, Freya closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose beneath her visor. Celia offers you a tiny, mortified wince, while Lyra frowns at Jinx's shark-shaped launcher, muttering under her breath about undisciplined irregulars cluttering the front line.

Silence hangs for two seconds. Then Jinx snorts so hard she nearly drops her wrench.

"A boulder!" Jinx wheezes, slapping the side of Fishbones's iron jaw as she leans over your shoulder, pointing a greasy finger right at Kaito's nose. "Did the shiny boy just brag about cutting a rock?! Oh, Boss, please tell me we get to keep him! Look at his hair! It's like a porcupine mated with a chandelier!"

"Forget his hair—he splashed mud on my boots." Bambietta steps off the crate, a ring of crimson Reishi spheres snapping into existence around her wrists like live mines as Kaito's grin falters. "Hey, tin-can. Take your little toothpick and your three babysitters and walk away before I turn your breastplate into a crater."

Before Kaito can puff his chest back out, a deep iron horn bellows from the ramparts of Ironcrag Fortress. The drawbridge slams down across the trench, and three thousand Adamantite-armored Demon Vanguard troops march out onto the Ashen Plains in lockstep.

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