And then the restraints are released, and the prisoners inside the plane are dropped out of the sky.

There's no obvious unifying theme to the falling convicts. Most look terrified.

Some have distinctive pink hair, tilting their bodies to direct their falls with purpose. 

Where they get the chance, they immediately start murdering the others in mid-air with their bare hands, before anyone can even hit the ground. 

The first thing Tanya notices is the man was speaking english. This is obviously not a mission for imperial high command. Then as she falls she instinctively tries to run a flight spell, she is missing her flight boot and orb and her magic feels wrong. Her body flashes with an almost painful heat when she tries to access her magic. Then the murders start.

Is this part of the mission? Is fighting to the death part of this? Should she also be taking out the competition before they land? No. Not until she has more information.

Tanya is going to angle herself away from the pack and the murders. Hopefully whoever threw them out of this plane had a plan for landing and this wasn’t an elaborate execution, because she doesn’t feel a parachute on her back.

If this was Being X this was strange and elaborate even for him. He hasn’t even come to gloat and offer her a way out by praying to him. Still probably his fault though. Damn you Being X.

A panicking teenager from Kansas would struggle just to orient themselves in mid-air and control their fall, let alone notice anything more than the ground rushing towards them. 

An experienced aerial mage and artillery spotter would be able to observe the following:

- The approximate landing area being a small settlement in the middle of former farmland at the intersection of two roads, with patches of taller buildings at one end and a cluster of close-packed low-rise ones at the other. 

- Something like a gas station, except with pillars of dark jagged crystal where the pumps would be. 

- Something like a mechanics or car dealership, with multiple damaged vehicles in the lot and more scattered around the nearby roads.

- Several towers or grain silos, with glowing glyphs hovering in the air above them. 

And, as the landing nears:

- A puddle of parachute fabric in a color that almost matches the field it landed in, fallen on top of what is presumably an air-dropped crate. Several of the pink-haired killers are aiming their descent towards it. 

- A large number of figures already on the ground, roaming with the aimless shamble of walking wounded returning from the front lines of trench warfare. They don't wear uniforms or carry weapons, and some look up with pinpricks of red light in their eyes. 

She can have her pick of landing destinations. The killers seem to be leaving her alone.

Red eyed shamblers.... Zombies? She was culture aware enough in her first life to know what zombies looked like. DID BEING X REALLY HAVE HER AIR DROPPED INTO ZOMBIES?!?

Whatever, rage wont help. Tanya aims for the gas station lookalike. SInce the murder squad seems busy gearing up she needs somwhere to scavenge too and the mechanics shop feels too obvious.

A short distance off the ground, a marking on Tanya's hand that she hadn't noticed before flares into a bright glow and her fall decelerates to a gentle enough speed to land without injury. It's not the same experience as a parachute, the force seems to be applied evenly across her whole body.

The gas station is made of cheap cinder blocks and corrugated metal, with clear barrels stacked outside and fading adverts for fresh frongal legs on the walls. The cars outside it look more like those of Tanya's second world than her first, with the bonnets oddly swollen. Two of the windows are broken, shards of glass scattered around them.

Inside, the shelves are almost bare, and a scent of rot permeates the building. It looks like it has been repeatedly looted of anything edible or wearable or usable as a weapon. Broken down coolers stand in the back.

The feet of a prone body are visible poking out from behind one of the shelves.

She has vague memories of the first Few Resident Evil games. That's definitely a Zombie playing dead. It's even in a gas station like in Resident Evil 2. Can Being X be more original for once? Now he's just ripping off famous games.

Anything even remotely wieldable as a club? A fire extunguisher? A particularly sturdy piece of timber? Anything to increase her (sadly tiny) reach and to add wieght to her blows.

There's a greetings card rack?

The handle of some kind of weapon is visible beneath the body. Some of the shards of glass from the broken windows are large enough to be usable as improvised knives, and some of the bare shelves look like reasonably sturdy pieces of wood but might make a noise to remove. There are also a few empty glass bottles from where some previous scavenger appears to have decided to get drunk instead of trying to escape.

Card rack it is, its long enough. She will lift it with some difficulty. She hates being so small and not being able to run her ususal enhancement suite.

She uses it to poke the corpse that is definitely going to wake up and prove that Being X is an unoriginal hack.

In defiance of originality, the corpse rises! Its eyes glow a baleful red, and it unsteadily gets to its feet then lunges towards her with outstretched hands.

DIE YOU RUSSY BASTARD! She bashes away at the Zombie with the feral strength of a child soldier. Now it's moved away from where it was laying, is that weapon that was under it any better than a card rack?

The card rack gives way before the risen corpse does, though her blows do help to keep her out of its reach for the moment.

How does a rusted and bloodstained machete sound?

Fucking Perfect.

She dives for it then hacks at the zombies ankle, severing the tendons. 

Decaying sinews are cut through by the blade, and the body topples to the floor. Even so, it is already awkwardly twisting around to try and grab her. It'll crawl after her if it has to. 

Resident Evil has trained her to go for head attacks. Tanya calmy hacks off the head from the neck as it crawls. Honestly this is less gross than half the stuff she saw in the trenches.

It's at least less bloody, the bodily fluids have half-congealed inside the corpse and its circulation has stopped so there's no messy arterial spray. Getting a clean cut through the neck is harder, because the corpse keeps struggling to grab at her in defiance of physiology and genre convention even after she gets the knife between two vertebra.

Cutting the head off entirely extinguishes the light in the eyes, but the rest of the body continues its now-blind flailing and grasping.  

"Sheisse" Don't these things ever give up? She proceeds to hack off its hands too. Rendering it harmless.

*Authors note: (Tanya thinks in German, there is no Harmless Armless homophone pun here. But harmless in german does sound like arm loss in english.)

It is somewhat more manageable without hands to get a hold on her with, though it's swinging the stumps with enough force to break a bone if she got hit. 

"Try stabbing the heart," a voice behind her says. It's an ordinary-looking teenager, out of breath, in dark civilian clothing. He looks simultaneously disgusted and fascinated by the spectacle. 

She comes in behind it and gets the blade in under the shoulder blade and stabs it in the heart. The zombie finally slumps. She replies in perfect, if german accented, english. "Thank you. Are zombies not supposed to die if you cut off their heads?" Tanya never played that many zombie games in her first life or watched any horror movies, but she was very sure about the head thing.

(Psst, if you had to put a number on it, how loyal would you say you feel towards this guy right now?)

(Out of what scale? She feels gratitude for the assist but she doesn't know the man. Or owe him any real loyalty. Barely more loyalty than a stranger. 1?) Is what counterfactual Tanya would reply if she had actually been asked this question. But she has not.

Noted.

The teen looks aside for a moment, distracted by an errant thought or something.