Even with their armor on, Nora, the New Tyrant of Red Mountain was a good seven or eight inches taller than the tallest of the knights. Clad in the same outfit worn to her ancestor’s funeral (although it was currently missing the mourning veil), Nora towered over the armored psychopaths in front of her with fury in her eyes. The Tyrant stared down the knights for what seemed to be minutes until someone broke the standoff. As if a spell had broken, one of the knights tried to rush her with a swing of his longsword, only to have her catch it mid-swing and snap it like an icicle.

“Pathetic.” Nora growled as she looked on with contempt at the stunned knight. “Your steel is weak and brittle. But that is what happens when you not only ignore the knowledge of the other Races, but also actively work counter to it. The Dwarves mastered the art of metalworking and taught it to any who would attempt it; the complete lack of respect you have for the knowledge and hard work of others shows in your equipment and construction.”

“You! You BITCH! You DARE say that WE, the superior, Master Race have inferior technique to those stunted bastards?!”

Nora scoffed at this remark.

“Yes, I do. And your martial prowess leaves much to be desired as well. Without Werean in your nation outside of mere property, who will teach the art of combat? Who will teach martial techniques? I’m guessing that you had some ‘Masters’ back in the day, but they and their schools died out, leaving only the memory of them and nothing else. I’ve seen your attempts at using Martial Arts and Martial Skills, and they are laughable. It’s like watching a child scream out Skill Names it has heard while swinging its toy sword without understanding what the words mean or how to execute said Art or Skill. You are all absolutely fucking adorable in that regard.”

After mocking the knights (and by proxy the whole Trelawney Kingdom), she gave the knight with the shattered sword a boot to the chest and sent him flying towards the mob that had encircled them.

“Tear him to shreds.”

Nora made a motion of running her finger across her throat and laughed as the mob dragged the unconscious knight away and poked him repeatedly, painfully and thoroughly with many pointy implements of death and destruction, including but not limited to pitchforks, knives, swords, fire pokers and spears.

“Damn whore! Gut her like a fish! Make her end as painful and drawn out as possible!”

The leader of the remaining 28 knights (not including himself) shouted out his orders and the group attempted to surround Nora.

“『 Escapist Reversed Spiral Spray 』”

Nora spun upside down as she backflipped out of the encirclement, firing her crossbows wildly as she twirled. Several knights were hit by the bolts, and despite the bolts being smaller and lighter than the ones fired by two-handed crossbows the usage of a Skill made them hit nearly as hard. Some of the knights were wounded by the attack, while others were morbidly thankful that they were protected by the bodies of their comrades.

“Spin Strike!” The knight closest to Nora shouted as he tried to emulate the move wielded by an elf swordsman in a green tunic he had slain. All the courage in the world couldn’t save that brat from his end, and now that this knight knew his secret technique, he could easily take down-.

Nora stopped his spin with a roundhouse kick to his face and mocked his attempt.

“Like I said; children playing pretend with toy swords! None of you actually know any Skills, do you? Let me show you all how it’s done…”

Nora holstered her crossbows and drew her twin handaxes.

“『 Spin Strike 』”

Nora spun once and a blue and white wave of energy flowed outwards from her handaxes, forming a quickly expanding ring of death around her. The ring cut through the armor of the closest knights like a hot knife through butter. Worse still, their armor immediately above and below the cut shattered like glass, proving just how little their smiths knew about making decent steel armor.

Nora saw the fragmenting metal and couldn’t hold back her laughter.

“That is beyond hilarious! How the hell does someone make steel that brittle? Is it even steel at that point? If it weren’t for your nation’s obscenely absurd levels of blatantly evil acts I would wonder if you people were clowns! Hell, maybe you are just evil clowns! What, was armor made of pottery too cheap, so you settled for a metal equivalent?”

Even as the five knights that had been cut down by Nora’s Skill breathed their last, their comrades stepped over their bodies and tried to take on the New Tyrant.

“『Twin Dis-Arm-ing Strike 』”

Nora brought down her handaxes onto the shoulders of one of the knights, thoroughly ‘dis-arm-ing’ him. His upper limbs fell to the ground and he screamed as he looked down at his bleeding stumps.

“Don’t worry.” Nora joked as she continued her assault on the now (h)armless combatant and lopped off both of his legs at their attaching point. “You’ve just been dis-arm-ed and de-feet-ed. Nothing to be concerned about there. Although, now you need assistance as your competition has a Leg up on you! So, let me give you a Hand!” She then gave the limbless wonder a backhand strike as if to complete the mockery of the now dead knight.

She then turned and grabbed the short sword at the waist of another knight after tossing one of her handaxes into the air. With a swift motion she drew it from his waist and slashed open the throat of another knight.

“Good fight. We’ll call it a ‘Draw’. Now, 『Blade Throw 』!” She joked as she used another Skill.

Throwing the short sword like an anime ninja would throw a kunai at another knight and impaling his head through his visor, she caught her falling handaxe and yelled at the knight with a short sword in his head.

“Catch! Oops, too late.”

A few more swings of her handaxes and shots from her crossbows later and there was but one knight left, the leader of the now-dead bunch. Nora stared down the knight captain. He had been smart, or at least thought he had been smart.

“Whatever is the matter, Tyrant Bitch? Did my men wear you out? Oh, don’t worry, I’ll give you the option to be my fucktoy for a while. Submit to me and I swear that I will let your men go. AFTER I have had 90% of them killed in front of you, of course. Really, you should consider this a favor. I know you are-.”

Nora walked up to him while he was monologuing and gave him a heavy kick to his unmentionables with her metal-tipped boot.

“You talk too much…” Nora muttered as she proceeded to make a certain anime boxer proud and Dempsey Roll’ed the knight captain’s ass into near unconsciousness. Unfortunately, there were no jet engine sounds to accompany the beatdown, but the metallic crinkling of the knight captain’s helmet being dented by the mailed fists of the Tyrant and the whooshing of the air her fists made as they flew towards their target made for good sound effects, nonetheless.

Pulling back a bit, the knight captain barely held to his senses. He tried to raise a finger as if to say, “Wait just a damn moment,” but Nora wasn’t having it. She rushed back in and gave the knight captain a powerful uppercut to the jaw which lifted his body a good three feet off the ground. Then she really got into it.

A furious flurry of blows kept the now nearly dead knight captain in the air for a good minute and a half, or as Vaile would have put it, “She gave his cadaver seven full-panel pages worth of punches.” By the time Nora gave the final blow that sent the dead man’s body ragdolling through the air and into the burned-out husk of the town elder’s house, not a single major bone in the knight captain’s corpse wasn’t thoroughly shattered like logs in an industrial press.

Nora straightened up and spat on the body of one of the knights at her feet. Giving the body a good, hard kick to the gut to make sure it wasn’t faking it revealed that the ‘corpse’ was, in fact, just pining for the fjords. She grabbed the groaning man and tossed his sorry ass to one of her lieutenants as she marveled at the weakness of the Trelawney Knights.

“Fucking lightweights…” she mumbled as one last display of contempt before walking back to the main camp. She would have words with the poor bastard who tried to pass himself off as a corpse. What did he expect them to do? Did he honestly not expect them to strip him down to his skivvies and burn his body?

“Ah, well. I guess they are just that dumb. Centuries of inbreeding does tend to do that, now doesn’t it?”