Emma was trapped, like a rat in a cage. No, not a rat. Like…Like a princess, yes, like a glamorous, tall, big-breasted princess. In a cage. Fuck.

She paced. Emma always paced when she thought, and she'd been pacing a lot more since arriving in this horrible shithole of a world.

"Are we fucked?"

She and Aexilica were, of course, alone. Even Emma wouldn't have said that out loud otherwise, somehow they'd become the leaders of their little band of scraggly resistance fighters. Probably around the same time they'd gone from organised military to fucking resistance fighters.

"I don't know." Aexilica usually spoke with a lot of certainty. A lot? More certainty than anyone else Emma knew, at least discounting males. But here she seemed wavering, almost…Fragile in her convictions. It was somehow even more disconcerting than the situation itself, and did nothing to calm her.

"I do know." Larry piped up. "Yes you are."

Emma didn't even have the energy to reply with her customary glare, and even if she had it'd just be the sort of rise the stupid asshole was looking to get out of her anyway. She kept pacing, tried controlling her breathing. Didn't do a very good job of it. She wasn't doing a good job of controlling anything, really.

Shut up. Stop panicking, think. There's a way out. Think. Think. Think.

She was thinking, but she wasn't finding anything. Emma had had this problem before, of course. She'd always been a smart cookie, smart enough to find the exact minimum of effort required for anything and then apply it. But there was no effort here, just a question of could or could not.

Emma could run over to Hagor and throw down for round two, but she could not be certain she'd beat him even with a full tank of mana. Emma could attempt to flee the fortress altogether, but she could not escape from the city any better than immediately after Ragni took her and Aexilica in. She could keep referencing Pirates Of The Carribbean to herself, but she could not reference any actual solutions to her problems.

Aexilica and her left their private little meeting with little progress made, and Emma headed off to be by herself for a brief period. She had work to do, and needed to be without distraction. Because if strategy wouldn't avail her anything…Maybe bullshitting up a few new tricks for her bag would.

One thing Emma had noticed during her fight was how shit her amulet was. Or, rather, how unoptimised. It had saved her life, objectively. Emma appreciated that, just as she appreciated that it was a "minimum possible amount of effort" sort of creation, and that having such a thing be the main bulwark her skin had against all the world's pointiness was just asking for trouble.

There were, as Emma saw it, two major flaws in her original design. The first was that it continuously drew on her reserves of mana. Not ideal, not when she might need those reserves for, just to name a random example, killing a fucking draugr.

She'd passed out yesterday because, among other things, she'd not had any choice in the matter on how much power her amulet drew out while it was active. Emma tightened her eyes for a second.

Fundaments:

Energy 2, Matter 2, Force 2, Entropy 1, Cognition 1, Space 1, Time 1

Crafts:

Alchemy 1, Talismans 2, Enchanting 1, Animacy 1,

Cores:

Attunement 14, Mastery 6

No real improvements in the immediately useful areas, if Emma had the potential to conjure magma or call down lightning with higher levels of Matter and Energy she wouldn't be finding out for a while. What she had improved, though, was her skill in Talismans.

That demanded investigation, actually, because she'd not made any new ones. Did simply using the one she already had cause her abilities to widen? Not enough information, and far too many questions. As per usual. She got back to things more likely to widen her knowledge.

What could Emma do that would keep this Talisman from exhausting her mana mid-fight? Well, nothing really, not if she wanted it to keep functioning. But there were certainly better and worse times to feel a drain on her reserves. Emma fiddled around for a while, playing with different shapes and patterns to the magic, touching and probing it with her will. It was an interesting experience. She didn't get any hard sensory input, exactly, but sort of just…knew what was being done, what changes she was making, what they'd achieve. Instinctively. It felt almost like brushing her teeth, awareness of everything aided by some other sense. The interconnectivity of task and body.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Which did not, of course, make it easy. Because nothing with magic was.

Eventually, Emma found a solution. Or at least an optimization. She couldn't have the armour simply stop drawing on power without sacrificing some other function, so she made it so that it wouldn't do so automatically save for the power needed to keep it sustained and flex as she moved.

If her armour were damaged, Emma would need to consciously order it to repair itself. If she didn't notice the damage…Well, that would suck for her, but at the very least she'd have more magic available to her in the meantime. She tested that out, even, and was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Emma hadn't really noticed her power grow from most recent usage, had thought the improvements were just coming too slowly and slightly for her to appreciate. Now she knew better. When she waved her hand, shatter-pattern cores of stone poofed into the air near instantly. At another wave, they were encased in hardened energy, and when at last Emma sent the volley forwards she grinned at the sight of it smacking hard into a stone wall and driving each of the projectiles inches deep.

Turned out, she'd been tying up a fair bit of her own power in repairing the damned armour mid-fight. No wonder putting things down had been so hard. Once again, the temptation to go and find Hagor was there, but…

No. Emma had stumbled onto their fight while he was already exhausted, too, and it'd been more luck than anything else keeping her from dying in it. Even with Earl Ragni soaking up the initial blasts. If she marched over to have her rematch with the old cock, it'd be the last one they had. One way or another.

Emma wasn't going to risk that until she was certain the victory was in her hands, and it was looking like she'd take quite a while to get there. Unless she exhausted her mana every day and spent the next week in a perpetual coma, she really didn't see how she could bolster her abilities enough to be doing that in any realistic timeframe.

Her pondering was interrupted as the door opened. It was, to Emma's surprise, Guldin. That did a lovely job of fouling her mood up of course.

"What do you want, asshole—" Emma's words choked off as the Priest sprinted across the room and grabbed her by the jaw and neck, driving her backwards towards one of the walls. She struggled, of course. It did nothing, of course. He wasn't big, but he weighed easily one and a half times what Emma did. And he was a man, with his big stupid body covered with big stupid muscles. Her fingers clawed at his grip and slid off it like water on brickwork. Guldin's eyes were almost frenzied.

Emma had a sort of realisation then, the kind that kills emotion in its infancy. She had been panicking, until a single, critical fact made itself known to her.

You have magic powers, moron.

She could've done that trick she did before, where her Matter magic seeped into Guldin's arm through her fingertips, weakened the skin and soft tissues until even Emma could rip them apart. But she didn't. For one thing, it wasn't exactly a pleasant thing to do, ripping someone's limb open. And for another…

She didn't know what was happening here, still, and wanted to find out. At best she could still get some use out of Guldin, at worst she'd get a few answers before ventilating his skull.

Emma's magic struck Guldin hard across the face, but not fatally. She'd channelled it into a relatively soft, relatively springy sphere of hardened energy about as big as her fist. Then she'd just thrown it at him, hard.

There were probably people back on earth who could've spiked the thing harder than she had, but it certainly came as a shock to the dumbass it hit. Guldin stumbled away, grip breaking as his hands reflexively shot to cover his face. The next ball, maybe twice the size and a good third faster, caught him in the belly. Emma wasn't so sure anyone without magic powers could've gotten as much speed from that one as she had.

Guldin just went flying, landing hard in a heap and rolling away from Emma mostly against his own will. He stopped, coughing and puking, twitching. She just watched him for a second, a grin on her face.

"How's that, asshole!?" Emma laughed, kicking him in the face as the excitement built. Her foot didn't do much, seemed more an irritant than anything, but if Emma had wanted to she could've bolstered it with enough magic to cave his head in, and knowing that turned everything she did now into another triumph. "Not so tough now, are you? Ha!"

"P…Please—" Guldin coughed up a bit more puke, still twitching, trembling and terrified. Of her. Well good, he fucking should be. Emma continued dancing around him, feigning occasional stomps and giggling as he flinched at each one right up until she pulled it short.

"Please what? Huh? Huh? HUH?" Emma kept stomping at him, kept stopping short, and noticed his reactive twitches were starting to stop. She actually stomped down on his jaw, just to remind him he might still get hit. While Guldin was still coughing and groaning at the latest hit, she spoke again. "What the fuck were you planning, grabbing me like that?"

The Priest shook his head weakly, mumbling something Emma couldn't make out. It didn't matter, she got the answer herself with a few moments of mental exertion.

"You wanted to sacrifice me before Hagor took me prisoner, didn't you?"

Guldin hesitated, then nodded his head.

"Asshole!" Emma snapped again, spiking another energy sphere into his face and actually wincing as this one left the stupid fuck's head bouncing off the floor. "Give me one good reason not to blend you into juice."

Thinking about it, Guldin probably didn't actually know what a blender was. He seemed to figure out enough, though, going by the mention of juicing. His answer came so quickly Emma found herself wondering why law enforcement didn't just beat secrets out of people back on earth.

Oh right, they do. And most of the time the secrets are bullshit.

Well, this one seemed to have some merit at least. She listened to Guldin with increasing interest. He prattled on, and on, and on. But she didn't interrupt, didn't hurry him. Because every new point he reached had Emma ever more intrigued. Eventually Guldin reached the end of his little bid for survival, and Emma had to admit he'd made a convincing show of it. No wonder he'd attacked her fearlessly, and without magic. He'd had this up his sleeve to buy his own life if she incapacitated him before he could smack her head off the wall.

"So," Emma began at last, "This other son of Ragni's, the non-idiot…Where exactly are Hagor's men holding him, and what sort of fighter is he exactly? As powerful as his father?"

Guldin actually grinned at that, apparently realising she'd bitten the bait.

"Not as good as his father." The Priest replied. "Better. Much better."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.