Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP Chapter 413: Everyone Wanted a Turn

The battle dragged on, and both sides paid for every minute of it in bodies, the numbers thinning out a little more with each one that passed.

On one end the dragon woman was tearing through the entire academy by herself, while Claude’s order was on the receiving end of the same treatment from the demonic army and the hulking generals driving it forward.

And in the middle of all of it, Jax stood face to face with Zia.

"I’d rather not force you into this," she said. "So look at the gap between us, understand what it means, and come with me. Say yes, and I pull my army off this field within the minute. Every friend you have at that academy walks away without a scratch."

"So tell me, my love. What will it be?"

Jax never got the chance to answer, because a dozen lances came screaming down out of the sky at her.

"Get your filthy hands off him, he’s mine!" Astrid hung in the air above them, shrieking it loud enough for the entire battlefield to hear.

Zia hissed, weaving between the lances and shattering the ones she couldn’t avoid.

Her hand came up to punish the girl before she’d even finished landing beside Jax, and then something tore clean through her palm. Needles of blood, a whole cluster of them, and the burn they left behind ran deeper than the holes did.

Her eyes snapped toward the source, where another girl was strolling across the battlefield without a care in the world, sucking the blood off it as she came.

Elira.

Zia’s teeth ground together, and the dark clouds gathered thicker overhead. Then a ball of blue fire and a purple beam caught her in the ribs at the same moment and put her into the dirt.

Jax followed the attack back and found Seraphina and Lilith standing at the far end of it.

Zia pushed herself up, and a boot met her face on the way. Roxana, swaying pleasantly, and the kick sent that beautiful cheek skidding back into the ground.

"Sorry about the kick," Roxana said, wobbling. "I have honestly no clue what’s going on here. But everyone else was hitting you, and I didn’t want to be left out."

And that was the thing that finally broke her.

Every kick, every insult, every ounce of humiliation stacked onto her while she lay in the dirt. And every second of it happening in front of the one person she had spent months dreaming of standing before, not as this, but as somebody worth the weight of his eyes.

She flicked her hand and Roxana went sailing off across the field.

Then she started walking toward the girls closing ranks around Jax. She walked slowly, and the fury walked with her, in the thunder tearing open the clouds above and in the dark mana dragging along at her heels like something kept on a chain.

The girls saw her coming and threw everything they had.

Zia did nothing about it. She kept walking while the wounds on her body sealed themselves shut, and the slashes of darkness circling her ate every attack before it reached her skin.

Not one of them mattered. Then she snapped her fingers, and behind every girl her own shadow peeled itself up off the ground, threw its arms around her, and locked her in a grip nothing was getting out of.

Overhead the clouds split apart, and a meteor came down through the gap wrapped in black flame.

"Move aside, Jax." Zia grinned up at it. "I’m going to bury these bitches so deep that their screams won’t remember the way back up."

Jax didn’t move an inch, and he was smiling. "No need. Look up."

He pointed at the sky.

Zia looked, and the sky was gone. Thousands of arrows, lances, and spellfire covered every inch of it.

They hit the meteor together, and the burning rock came apart into a storm of fragments that rained down across the battlefield, though most of it fell on the woman who’d called it.

Boulders, fire, and behind them every arrow and spell in that volley, all of it curving to follow her.

Zia turned to answer the sky, but two magic circles opened at her sides before she could, each one pushing out the head of a banshee that screamed directly into her ears.

She fought through it and crushed both faces, and by the time she’d finished, a swarm of crows had gathered under her feet. They detonated together, and the ground went with them.

The field caved into a pit and she fell with it, tumbling, unable to find anything solid to push off. Then a wooden hand closed around her body and held her exactly where she was.

By the time she tore free, the arsenal had arrived, and the explosion that followed shook the battlefield down to its roots.

When the noise finally settled and the smoke thinned to nothing but a few thin trails, what was left of that spot was a coffin.

Zia lay at the bottom of it under hundreds of arrows, the shafts still burning, the tips melting down onto her, with boulders piled across the whole thing.

And while she lay there, the ones who had put her under all of it finally walked onto the field.

Seris with her wood arts, and beside her the one who had done most of the damage, Duchess Sianna, with her whole order at her back.

She and Delphine headed for Jax, while Cleenah went straight to work burning the shadows off the girls they’d pinned.

Astrid rounded on him with murder in her eyes. "I thought you were up here doing something heroic. But I forgot that a pervert like you only ever puts on a show for pretty girls, so they’ll fall for him. And this time you crossed the line."

She hummed, folded her arms, and turned her face away.

Then Sianna moved, putting herself between Jax and the pit, and whatever she’d just sensed took every trace of warmth out of her voice. "It isn’t over."

The coffin answered her. Zia rose out of it, drifting up into the air, and her voice came out shaking with everything she was holding back.

"...One."

"...Then another."

"...Then another..."

A vein stood out across her forehead. "How many more pieces of filth does this rotting world intend to throw between us before it finally lets me reach him?"

Astrid stepped up beside Sianna to shield him, and the rest of them fell in one by one until every girl on that field stood in front of Jax.

"And if you still want him," Astrid said, "then get this through your head. Before you put one finger on that man, you’re going to have to walk across every last one of our corpses."

Her grin sharpened as she turned her head from the girls to Zia. "Which is never going to happen."

Zia breathed out, and the shaking went out of her voice. "Fine. If this world and everything crawling on it insists on standing between us, then I’ll erase all of it."

And then the fight began again.