Emma's energy lance tore out of her hands and hit the far wall. She'd grown stronger, wasn't actually sure when it had happened. Sometime be

Emma's energy lance tore out of her hands and hit the far wall. She'd grown stronger, wasn't actually sure when it had happened. Sometime between her rematch with Groygar and killing that tank, but it was impossible to be more specific than that. Emma had only thought to check her stats after settling into the Legion Nocturne's castle.

Fundaments:

Energy 4, Matter 3, Force 3, Entropy 1, Cognition 3, Space 1, Time 1

Crafts:

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

Cores:

Attunement 21, Mastery 10

More Attunement was always nice, if small-scale. It was easy to appreciate the difference now as Emma saw the resultant energy beam strike a solid stone wall and just sort of obliterate it.

Dust filled the entire side of the room which Emma had blasted, and flecks of stone shot out quickly enough that she felt them sting her skin on impact. Isolde was standing beside her, watching the shot and grinning. When the debris finally cleared, they were both staring down a metre-wide crater in the wall.

"Amazing!" Isolde laughed, clapping her hands vigorously. "Incredible! They have artillery here, had it before we arrived, but you seem to be a match for the biggest pieces!"

Emma thought back to seeing some of those pieces on the walls outside, giant things. The barrels had been three or four times longer than her body, wide enough that Emma could've crawled into them with room to spare.

"Felt like those things would've done more." She frowned. Isolde just laughed.

"There is a reason stone is used for castles, you know. It's tough stuff. The blackstone of our castle in particular is tougher still, even Curgundry's artillery can't get through it easily."

Emma didn't know enough about military history to really have context for how impressive that was, but it seemed like the hot goth woman was hoping she'd be surprised and a little awed. She obliged her.

"I can make other things, too." Emma told her. "Potions that strengthen people's bodies or heal them, maybe other stuff." Some instinct told her not to mention the ring. Useless as it had been against Groygar and Thrudvarg, it was at least an advantage in some cases. Even if enough power let someone simply see through its durability, that didn't mean Emma wouldn't be served by sneaking by guards.

Isolde moved in closer at that, bringing a hand up to Emma's waist as she stared into her eyes. It was really quite hard to focus when she did that, almost hypnotic. Emma found herself forgetting whatever she'd been thinking about a few moments before. It couldn't have been that important, right? Right.

"How can we use these powers of yours?" Isolde asked, now close enough that Emma felt breath hitting her face as she spoke. It was…Oddly cool.

"My potions take a while to make, but I can prepare a few in as many days." She volunteered quickly speaking so fast her mouth was almost struggling to keep up. "Also, I'm working on aerial combat more. Next time I plan on levitating over the enemy and basically just bombing the shit out of them from the air. The tank armour should be weaker on the roofs, too, right? So I might be wrecking them per hit that way."

"That sounds good." Isolde grinned, then winced. "Ah, but I need to sleep soon."

Emma frowned. "It's day."

"We called this the Nocturnal Nation for a reason." Isolde smiled weakly. "All of us—the ones from earth I mean—are night owls."

"Alright then." Emma felt a stab of disappointment as the woman pulled away, but she was soon patting her cheek again.

"Just get to work on those potions, will you? My people have been instructed to bring you whatever you need for your magic. Surprise me with something spectacular when I wake up?"

"Of course!" Emma grinned, reinforced by having been given so clear a purpose.

True to Isolde's words, the servants were very eager to help Emma, and she sent them running around on errands as she got to work on a new batch of potions. This time, she wanted to try out some other elements about them however. Larry was propped up in her laboratory to help as she did.

"So," Emma began, "mana-boosting potions? More magical power?"

"Nope." Larry told her flatly.

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

"Why?!" She groaned.

"Because—"

—"Fucking magic is so lame, I can't do anything!"

"Would you let me finish!?" He snapped, patience even more limited than usual.

Emma groaned again, but nodded.

"You can't make magical effects that directly work on other magic, as far as I know." Larry told her. "Just doesn't work."

"What about my Talisman?" Emma frowned. "You told me that works by making me use my magic subconsciously."

"It does." He confirmed. "Because that's your own magic, that you can already control. The Talisman isn't doing anything there except taking over for a part of your own consciousness, it's not directly changing your magic. Also, you took until now to think of whether you could buff your own magic?"

His grin was, as usual, infuriating, so Emma ignored it rather than giving him the satisfaction of seeing her infuriated.

"Okay, so something else then." Emma paced, thinking. "Wait, hold on, wait. Talismans…They do stuff I can do, right?"

"That is the combination of words I just said to you, yeah." Larry eyebrow-nodded.

"Okay." Emma was grinning now. "So then I could make one that just suspends me somewhat in the air with a thought?"

"Oh, I see where you're going with this." Larry was smiling too, despite himself.

"If I don't need to focus on holding myself up, then I can put more energy into steering myself with magic, right?"

"At the cost of a constant drain on your so-called mana, yeah." Larry noted.

"Right." That was a concern, and demanded some more testing.

It turned out, more Attunement meant more magical stamina too. That actually did make sense with Emma. She wasn't exactly getting heavier—minus a few extra kilos from her stupidly-light hard light armour—which meant that, at least in theory, gravity shouldn't have been working any harder to drag her down. Forty kilos had never really been exerting for her powers, mind, but she realised now that, several improvements to her Attunement later, it had become essentially nothing.

Essentially. The issue with prolonged levitation had always been the "prolonged" part of course. What was the amount of energy needed to hold something up in the air for one minute? Emma had no clue, but she'd be willing to bet it was sixty times as much as would hold that same weight up for one second.

Emma experimented, and found that she could go more than just one minuteminutes. Close to an hour, really, before she even started to feel an absence in her "mana bar". It painted a grin across her face, and gave her a new set of problems to overcome.

The first was steering. So far she'd been making do with little bursts of kinetic energy to just kind of throw herself one way or another. Very effective and great, apart from the fact that it sucked actually. The problem with that was her body just wasn't good at adjusting. She never flew evenly, always ended up flipping herself over and getting disoriented. Practicing to overcome this didn't bear any fruit either, unless one considered the half-digested bits of apple in Emma's vomit to still be fruit.

Once again, the limit proved to be her puny human flesh. There was something appropriate there. A mind able to warp reality, and Emma was stuck directing it through a body that died if it slipped getting out of the shower. But bitterness would avail her nothing, so she directed her thoughts to more productive ends.

Could Emma simply use her Energy really well to not flip herself at all? No, not after a few hours of practice at least.

Could she change the shape of her armour to be more evenly-distributed in how it caught the air and stop drag force from turning her over? Also no, not without making it misshapen enough to actually limit movement.

Could she set a secondary effect into her new levitation Talisman that sensed the effects of air resistance on her armour and automatically weakened them?

…Actually, yes. Using a conditional effect, and at the expense of a fair amount more mana, Emma could do just that. It literally tripled the cost of levitating to leave that active at all times, but twenty minutes was hardly more likely to become an issue mid-fight than sixty. Right?

Well, only time would tell, and she could always nyx the effects mid-fight if she needed to. For now it was good to finally be taking to the skies like…A hang-glider, she supposed. One with a lot of updrafts. Progress, at least, even if she'd yet to truly make the air hers. One day, Emma promised herself. One day.

"Congratulations." Larry grunted. "You've replicated all the powers of a dead leaf, your parents must be so proud."

"How was leg day?"

"FUCK OFF!"

Emma cackled as Larry fumed, and moved onto other things.

What else about her powers was she leaving unexplored? What other bullshit might she pull out of nowhere? Ugh, she had to be experimental. And not in the cool, fun way that got dad to kick her out.

Conjuring. Emma knew she could summon various materials to her, and she'd played around with which ones. Wood, soil, stone. Those had come easy. Water, coal and certain shitty ores were a later development. Experimentation showed that she had not, unfortunately, expanded her repertoire just yet. No hosing people down with molten magma for her.

That line of thinking did give Emma other ideas, though. What was magma, exactly? Stone, pretty much, right? Just stone in very specific parts of the planet's crust, to be kept hot and liquid and bubbly. But stone wasn't the only substance that benefitted from that kind of flux.

After some testing, Emma found that it wasn't. Not only that, she could actually call on water from variable depths as she wished.

Emma found this much out by conjuring a piece of water from, she thought, about ten kilometres beneath the ocean's surface—or whatever oceans existed in this world. Apparently pressure and potential energy still worked as scientific principals, because the tiny bead of liquid promptly blew up and sent miniscule droplets flying in all direction. Some of them hit Emma's skin, feet away, and stung slightly.

She immediately, perhaps inadvisably, conjured a bigger piece, this time erecting a barrier of hardlight as she did. The litre-or-so of water appeared, and Emma learned several things very quickly.

Firstly, it was harder to conjure water from that specific depth than it was to simply call on "generic water" from wherever she wished. Secondly, the explosive effects were…Well, not exactly explosive. But not exactly not explosive, either. Emma had deliberately made her barrier thin enough that when the droplets smacked into it, she saw them leave cracks before bursting apart.

Interesting, that. Very, very fucking interesting.

"What are you planning?" Larry asked her, and Emma just grinned back at him. What was she planning? For one thing, a better kind of attack.

Emma got to work on weaving together hardlight, experimenting with thickness and shape. It was exhausting, as actual work always was, but if there was one benefit to getting dumped in mega-hell by Larry, it was that Emma had been given one fuck of an incentive to actually knuckle-down at last. Good thing, too. Because there was a lot that could've gone wrong with trying to make a gun.

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