“Where the hell are you, you damn healer?!” Lyrhea yelled as she spun around another of the members of the enemy party and slashed the buffing-mage with one of her knives. “Come out and play! I won’t bite much!”

“Mary! Stop fucking around and HEAL US!” the tank roared as he rose and lumbered over towards the mage Lyrhea held by the throat from behind.

“Which of you is Mary, and which of you isn’t?” the angry snake-human growled. “Tell me so I can put all of us out of my misery!”

“Stay away from him!” yelled a person a fair bit away. On instinct, Lyrhea released her grip and bent over backward to the point that her bent back formed a near-perfect ‘U’ shape. As she did and moved out of the way, an arrow flew through where the base of her skull would have been mere moments prior and lodged itself into the shoulder blade of the mage.

“Nice shot, bitch!” Lyrhea mocked as she twisted away as another arrow almost hit her. She sped across the ground and then catapulted off of the floor with her hands, spinning end over end in the air before impacting a Ranger and knocking her to the floor, her hands around the archer’s throat. “So, are you Mary?”

“Olga!” yelled the buff/ debuff machine as he yanked the arrow free. “Get away from her you bitch!”

Lyrhea cocked her head at an angle and narrowed her eyes. “Not Mary, then. Oh, well.” at which point she twisted harshly and the sound of a spinal column snapping sounded out from inside the body of the fallen Ranger.

“OLGA!” the mage in charge of buffing and debuffing screamed. Lyrhea flipped over backward and stood up, marveling at how the vengeful Asian guy, who looked to be in his early 20s at most, was rushing to try and avenge and/ or save his girlfriend. The man swung his rod around like a man possessed, with neither any martial skill on display nor any pattern of any kind.

“Oh, was she that important to you, you damn pedo bastard?” Lyrhea asked, her monster side now fully in control and trying to drive the ‘knife’ even deeper. “What, did you love her? She was, what, twelve? And you, what are you, like, 20 or so?”

“YAAAAAAAARRRGRGGRHH!” the man screamed as he swung like crazy until he finally lost his breath.

“Haruto! Get a grip, man! Mary can get her back, just focus!”

Lyrhea swiveled around the gasping person who may or may not have been Japanese and yanked the 20-something pedo to the ground as she did. “And you?” she asked with one of her fingers in an almost beckoning, underhanded pointing motion. “You also are a pedo?”

The obvious leader of the group lowered his sword and raised his shield before pulling his blade up and above him with its pointed tip aimed at Lyrhea’s general direction. “Love, as the God of Lustful Couplings has said, is without any restrictions, so long as all parties consent and are Human. Such is the way of our people.”

He neglected to tell her that their God did not, in fact, support such behavior, and that it was only the sin of his party, and this would be what ultimately doomed him, his party, and many, many others.

“Ha!” Lyrhea laughed angrily, unable to keep it locked up. “That’s disgusting. That God is disgusting! YOU are disgusting! Damn groomers! What, did he start when she was around ten years younger to make sure she would ‘love’ him and consent?! You people make me sick! I’m supposed to be the monster, and you’re doing that bullshit to kids?!”

“The Apocalypse was only five years ago, beast, and you know it! They’ve been in love since a few weeks after.”

He spoke the truth, though not entirely. Olga only ‘loved’ Haruto and the other people in the party because of some nasty magic and a bit of manipulation, but the party leader had no reason to tell Lyrhea this, and thus inadvertently dig his people an even deeper grave.

And so, Lyrhea began to laugh.

And laugh harder.

And harder.

And it was a manic laugh, too.

Not laughter of joy, but of anger, rage, and disgust that could only be expressed with this kind of wrathful mockery.

Then, suddenly, she stopped.

“Where is your village?” She asked, her eyes filled with unimaginable hate and her lips twisted into a sickly sweet smile. “Tell me, so I can go there and give your people the Darwin Awards they so justly deserve for their adherence to such a twisted dark God’s tenets.”

And it was at this moment that the party leader knew he fucked up and should have made it clear that he and his party were the only ones guilty of that terrible, twisted sin. His comrades, though, were a bit too overzealous and oblivious, and did not realize how fucked they were now.

“You’ll be there when we take your head, beast!” yelled the buff-bot boy.

“If I don’t burn it off, first! For our Olga!” yelled the previously hidden mage that had tried to headshot Lyrhea with a fire spell. He popped out from behind some cover as he roared that line and tapped his staff on the ground while glowing runes appeared around him.

“Everyone, stop! We can stop a massacre if we surrender!” the party leader yelled, having only just now realized the magnitude of the monster before him and how if they didn’t make things clear then the others they cared for would die as well. But it was far too late for that.

“Oh, you can’t honestly expect me not to take this chance, you dumb pedo bastards!”

Lyrhea twisted her body like a contortionist and reached down to the wraps along her lower leg, pulling free a piece of metal that itself had more wraps around it. The wraps on the metal object fell away and Lyrhea drew the throwing knife over her serpentine tongue before another set of bodily twists helped add extra force to her arm and hand as she threw the knife like a Frisbee at the mage.

Just as the final glowing rune began to fade and a fire began to manifest in the attack mage’s outstretched hand, his eyes shot open as a throwing knife lodged itself into his right eye. He screamed and lost concentration, and that, combined with his newly altered mental state, resulted in the Fireball spell exploding in his face, setting not merely his clothes on fire but also his skin, and hair and exposing his body to a severe and drastic change in air pressure.

“Kyle!”

The Tank watched as his comrade immolated himself and then turned to his leader.

“We need to bail, NOW! We can’t win this!”

“We need Mary, that’s all!” yelled back the team leader. “Where the fuck is… MARY, WATCH OUT!”

Lyrhea followed the gaze of the party towards where she had trapped the monkey-croc and saw a woman in her early twenties looking up with a look of shock and horror on her face as a snake roughly twice the size of any that she had ever faced before came down and swallowed who Lyrhea assumed was the healer in one bite.

At this, the snake-human burst out laughing and slapped her thigh as tears rolled down her face.

“Oh, oh, God, that was fucking hilarious!” she gasped out as the party leader sank to his knees in despair. “You just lost your healer because she wouldn’t help you and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your fight! She was too oblivious to notice it until you told her! God, what a fucking riot!”

The tank tried to run away, and the party leader followed suit, shortly thereafter followed by the buff-bot boy mage who princess-carried the dead girl while tears streamed down his face. Lyrhea didn’t bother to chase them, as she physically couldn’t due to the hilarity of the situation.

She did eventually stop, though, as the snake with pure, white scales tried to attack her, snapping her out of her fit of laughter. As she dodged away, she realized that she had failed to get the location of their home.

She would find it later, then, and introduce that commune of pedos to a bit of punishment. But, if they had chosen a bear as their mascot, then she would almost certainly need to take another break to laugh at the tragic ridiculousness of it all.

Either way, she would find them, kill them, cut them apart, and then burn their painfully-removed naughty bits. They would get, to quote a certain tragic villain, ‘what they fucking deserve’, so help her God.

With the party gone, the monster side of Lyrhea faded back into the recesses of her mind, and she found herself even more furious than before.

“Hey, Snake God. Any way I can bring that girl back and help her kick those bastards’ asses?” she asked with a seriousness that seemed to surprise her Patron.

[“Same way you’ll get that healer girl to join you. That is, if your luck finally turns.”]

Lyrhea smiled. Well, that was new. She hoped that this method would have better chances of success than the other one had.

“Time to roll the dice. For Olga, then.”

[“For the fallen little one, who was trapped within her own mind and forced to scream her ceaseless rage into her mind as she was pranced around like a dressed-up marionette by a puppet master.”]

“What?”

[“I mean, ‘For Olga.’”]

“No, seriously. What?”