Plugged In: I got Isekai'd into a Sexbot (Now I Must Save The World)

Chapter 163: If Last Words Could Kill

The team gathers slowly around Syraleth as she sits up in the mud, black ichor oozing thick and slow from a dozen scorched, cracked wounds around her body. Her mouth slick and bubbling with her own blood. One wing bent in a way no wing should ever bend.

And then, without warning, the baroness throws her head back and cackles. The sound comes out high and hysterical and completely unhinged. A sound with no business coming from someone who’d just been rendered through the earth, had her body shattered and blown into a crater.

It startles the whole battered, bruised group where they stand propping each other up, weapons still half-raised out of pure, exhausted instinct, staring down at the broken baroness like she was also on fire.

Vexena strides in among them, boots sinking into the churned earth beneath them, lip curling with open disgust as she rounds Syraleth and plants one foot firmly against her forehead, pressing her flat back into the wet earth with a slowly, drowning groan of protest that cuts off into a bubbling wheeze.

"Any last words?" Vexena asks, flat and emotionless, the question landing with all the warmth of a headsman sharpening their axe moments before execution.

Syraleth spits out a glob of black blood, sputtering as she tries to form words. "Y-Yes... actually...L-Lots to... say." She coughs. "First... that was completely... excessive. Tasting the inside of her mouth and finding it much to her disliking. "It really fucking hurt."

"That was the point." Vexena scoffs and grinds her boot down harder, pressing her deeper into the mud.

Syraleth lifts one finger. "One more thing..."

She gestures weakly around at the ring of Vexena’s assembled soldiers. "I’m honored... you thought me worthy... you brought your whole army out... for me."

Vexena sneers, "And it was a waste of my time,"

She keeps pushing down on Syraleths head until mud starts closing over her face entirely, muffling whatever she had tried to escape her mouth, turning them into an unintelligible mumble.

Then Vexena suddenly stops.

Syraleth sputters upright out of the muck, gasping for air, eyes wild and Virelle bursts out laughing beside Veena at the sight of the Baroness. Mud dripping from every feature, her hair a caked-in mess, she was a caricature of the powerful, untouchable magical and political force she had been known to be for many years.

"What did you just say?" Vexena demands, bending down slightly to better hear Sylareth’s pour from her blood soaked mouth. "It sounded like—"

"I asked," Syraleth groans, catching her breath as she spits out mud, "whether you’ve considered where my army actually is right now. This very second. While you’re here, with yours."

Vexena’s eyes narrow in slow, silent consideration before shooting wide with deep, dreaded realization.

She snatches Syraleth by the throat in an instant and hauls her completely off the ground, mud and blood dripping over her hands as she throttles the baroness’s neck.

"You wouldn’t dare." she snarls, fingers tightening on Syraleth’s throat.

Syraleth just shrugs, dangling, gasping for air, yet seemingly completely unbothered by the whole situation. "Desperate times," she sputters over Vexena’s grip, "calls for desperate measures. And your Prince has left me very desperate."

Vexena calls out, sharp, voice cracking across the field like a whip: "Krysil! What’s the status at the keep?"

Silence answers her instead. Not even the wind seems to stir the moment she waits for an answer.

"KYSIL!" She calls again, louder, her words edged with something that isn’t quite fear, not yet, but inching rapidly closer to that direction.

Still no response to her summons.

Her eyes flare with sudden, sick, dawning awareness that rolls over into abject fury as she rounds back on Syraleth, fingers tightening even further around her throat. "You scheming, conniving bitch!" Vexena barks, her words now dripping with venom. "If you’ve touched my heart-crystal—"

"If I die," Syraleth chokes out, grinning through it, "your heart-crystal shatters long before you ever set foot back in the Demon Lands, Your Grace. Please keep that in consideration going forward."

Vexena sweeps one hand through the air, summoning a portal home with the same effortless gesture she’s used a hundred times before today.

Her heart drops as her magic simply fizzles, sputtering out into nothing more than a few weak, dying sparks, like a candle guttering in the wind as she realizes the link between her heart-crystal was already being severed.

She tries again, jaw tight, hand trembling slightly with concern.

Nothing.

She stares at her own open palm, eyes wide with something dangerously close to genuine panic, an expression none of the team has ever once seen on the Demon Queen’s face before, not even Veena.

Vexena hurls Syraleth to the ground and wrapping her in thick, glowing coils of magical chain, binding her wrists, her ankles, and finally sealing even her mouth shut with a final, vicious twist, staring at the baroness with a gaze or baked in wrath that would set lesser beings on fire instantly.

She turns to Eris instead.

"They’ve infiltrated my castle." she says, low and clipped, "They’re going after my core-crystal. I’m already being cut off. This was all—"

"This was the plan the whole time," Eris says grimly, flipping her scythe over her back. "The Pleasure Prince probably wasn’t even the point. He was the distraction. Bait, dangled just far enough away to draw you out of the Demon Lands, away from your fortress, army and all."

"So someone else could walk in through the front door while it stood empty." Vexena hisses through gritted teeth, fists clenched hard enough to draw her own blood. "And I... I was stupid enough to fall for it."

"My queen, you couldn’t have known." Eris implores.

Vexena’s gaze flicks toward Veena and Virelle, the sisters still standing together, Virelle wrapped around Veena’s leg, looking at her mother with the untroubled pride of a daughter who completely believed her mother was invincible.

Vexena softens for one brief, unguarded moment, something raw and grieving passing behind her eyes before hardening right back into fury, the mask sliding back into place with swift, brutal efficiency.

"This is what softness gets me." she snarls, "What being gentle earns me."

She turns her back on them all, jaw set, and stares down at the bound, chained shape of Syraleth writhing weakly in the mud, looking up at her with a broken, bloody smile.