Emma landed hard on her face, felt dirt go up her nose, into her eyes. She scowled, coughed, hacked up muddy, sludgy spittle and coughed some more. Tears appeared in blessedly high volumes to scrub her vision of debris, and blowing air from her clotted nostrils undid the majority of their blockages. Still, her mood was a lot less manic and a lot more pissed within a minute of her landing.
So much so, that it took her that long to even look around.
A forest sprawled out about her, lush and green, impossibly thick. Forest? More of a jungle, Emma decided. The foliage looked tough enough to blunt a machete, and the trees reached surprisingly high. Streams moved through its undergrowth, insects buzzed through moisture-clotted air, and everything smelled faintly of life and heat. Sweat was beading on her skin almost instantly. Emma was a city girl, tropical heat was certainly not her natural habitat.
Even without the harsh screeching coming up from just beside her.
Emma turned to the source, looking down, then grinning as she recognised it. Beside her, lying maybe a half-metre away, was a head. A rather animated, lively head that was perhaps one fifth its previous volume, but compensated for its reduced scale through sheer energy. It was the now-severed head of the being which had greeted her in that strange space between worlds.
It was pissed.
“You stupid, stupid worm!” The head roared. “Do you have the slightest idea what you’ve done!?”
She ignored it, tilting her head, examining the thing from every angle. The helmet was gone, somehow, and hair now spilled out at what would have been shoulder-length on a creature with shoulders. Emma studied its neck as the thing spoke, seeing everything move as it normally would despite having been severed from the lungs which ought to have made speaking possible.
“Very realistic, aren’t you?” She hummed. “But then I’m probably in no state to notice any weird differences between this and real life, I’ll bet my frontal lobe’s been turned into mashed potatoes.”
“Stop ignoring me!” The head screamed, doing its best to shuffle over and, Emma suspected, bite her, but failing. “You insane bitch, you killed me!”
She rolled her eyes.
“I beheaded you, which, obviously, did not kill you. Don’t be so dramatic.” She stood up, looked around. “Where are we?”
“In hell!” The head shrieked. “Or else you wouldn’t be here!”
Emma nudged the back of the head, tipping it over to lie face-first in the mud. It was right beside a stream, and the dirt beneath it was particularly moist.
The head screamed, or tried to, but its mouth was suddenly muffled, filling with muck whenever it opened to say anything at all. Emma left it there for a moment, then straightened it out.
“Feeling calmer now?” She asked. The head glared at her, spitting a bit of sludge at her face but only reaching halfway. It said nothing, which she took as a positive sign.
“Let’s do this properly.” She beamed. “My name is Emma, what’s yours?”
The head took its sweet time in replying.
“Larry.”
Emma laughed for a good thirty seconds as the head glared at her.
“Anything else?” He spat. Larry, such a funny name for a magically talking head. It was amazing the things a person’s subconscious would mash together.
“Where are we, Larry?”
That drew a look of concern from the head.
“I don’t know.” He admitted. “Not where I meant to send you, I think you interfered with the portal somehow. You know, when you tore my head off. Because you’re insane.”
“Shut up, you’re fat.” Emma retorted, bending down to grab the head by his hair and hauling him up off the ground as he cursed at her. “Let’s go and take a look around then.”
As far as jungles went, Emma rated the one she was in as roughly average. That was to say, out of her updated sample size of one, it seemed as expected. The terrain was rough, air humid, atmosphere uncomfortable, foliage thick, animals disturbing. She made her way through it in a sort of haze. On Earth, or in life rather, she’d have probably been scared. All sorts of toxic nasties dwelled in plenty of the world’s jungles, let something so much as rub against you and you might shit yourself to death the next day.
But she was already dead, so what did it matter? Emma pondered the danger of such a mindset. Then giggled at the obvious irony of a deliriously injured woman fearing danger. Larry the head continued grumbling as they went.Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
An hour passed, roughly, before Emma found her study of the jungle disturbed. She was just starting to write the place off as monotonous and dull when a distant sound reached her ears, and she tilted her head to listen more intently.
“That’s metal.” The head pointed out. “Metal hitting something hard.”
Emma had never actually heard metal hitting something hard, so she decided to take his word for it. Maybe this was her brain’s way of giving her a guide through this fairy-land delusion of hers. Emma started stalking ahead towards the source, stepping softly and doing her best not to swear as her clothing snagged on the various vines and branches. She’d not been Isekai’d in the towel she’d worn upon death, thankfully, but the random jeans and shirt from her usual wardrobe were hardly travel gear.
But making noise wasn’t a great concern, not next to the din she was approaching. Another few dozen strides brought Emma close enough to see that, just as Larry had thought, metal was ringing against something very large and very hard. A great chitinous creature covered with armour plating, slashing out with pincers, hissing and twitching. Insectoid, or arthropodic, and making Emma shiver with each move. She’d always hated bugs, just her luck to imagine one so realistic. And the size of a car.
This one was hard to recognise by species, it had pincers at the front but no scorpion’s stinger. Broader than most, and bulling ahead like an out-of-control truck. The person fighting it was a great deal smaller, faster and, for now, luckier. But Emma could see their ever-closer demise. Covered head to toe in strange wool-and-stone armour as they were, they were already bleeding.
“Oh shit.” Larry gasped, and Emma had just enough time to realise how much more he was swearing now that all the pomp of sending her to another world was gone before the insect and warrior spun around to bring her clear in the monster’s line of sight. “Oh fuck!” Larry roared again.
For now, the creature was still fighting the warrior, who ignored Emma and continued focusing on their battle. That gave her time- minutes, maybe moments. Too little either way.
Emma started turning to run when Larry called out again.
“That’s a scytheshell!” The head hissed. “You can’t outrun it, and it’ll follow you for a hundred miles. You need to fight.”
She stared at the dumbass head now giving her suicidal orders.
“How!?” Emma snapped.
“The same way you tore my fucking head off, you have magic powers, use them!”
Emma had barely heard him when the warrior was blasted off their feet, and the monster started towards her. She spun, tossed the head to one side and, acting without thinking, drew her hands up splayed and tensed.
Nothing happened, she wasn’t sure what she’d imagined would. Emma turned and ran, thirty metres ahead of the creature. Within seconds that distance had been cut by a quarter.
“Energy!” Larry roared. “You can produce energy, control it, throw it out. Force, heat, electricity. Do that! Imagine it leaving you.” Emma roared, aimed a hand back as she looked over her shoulder and did. To her surprise, she felt something shift in her arm and saw the air shimmer and coil as an unknowable something ripped clean through it.
The wind hit the scytheshell like a cannon blast, and…Did more or less nothing. Branches were torn off, or stripped bare, centimetres of dirt was skinned from the surrounding forest floor, but still the creature barrelled on after her as if it were moving through a light breeze.
You can produce energy, throw it out into the air and all you get is wind. This thing’s too heavy for that, moron.
Emma forced herself calm even as she kept running, could she try producing heat? Hot air didn’t seem like it would do any more than fast air, but…
She bent down, snatched a fist-sized rock out of the ground, and threw it. At the exact moment the object left her grip, she concentrated on shooting that same energy out of her arm, this time willing it directly into the projectile rather than randomly dispersing it in one direction.
The results were…Considerable.
Emma heard the sound of stone meeting shell, even though there were still at least a dozen metres between her and the monster. She watched the projectile just disappear into it amid an explosion of shattered chitin and liquefied meat, drilling in, making the beast stumble and slowing it. She reached down, scrambling for another rock and making do with a handful of smaller ones that she threw all at once. Half missed, the other half struck home and dug new, smaller wounds in the scytheshell. It actually hesitated, charge slowing as it seemed to grow wary of her. Yellow blood was seeping out of its injuries in several streams, dropping down to stain the dirt underfoot, almost colouring the thing’s entire front.
A human who bled that much would be just about dry, but then a human who weighed as much as this monster would kill a pickup truck’s suspension. Emma had no way of knowing how close to death the animal was.
So she just focused on bringing it closer.
She needn’t have bothered, the armoured figure came down on the scytheshell as silent as a diving hawk and brought a great two-handed sword down into the back of its head. Emma actually winced at the sound of metal meeting chitin, watching a great crack run down the thing’s head, bleeding profusely as the one responsible ducked back. She threw another rock, this one finding the insect’s right flank and disappearing into its guts.
There must’ve been something important under the section she’d hit, because the scytheshell went stiff instantly, swaying on its great feet and giving the armoured warrior just enough time to bring their sword down again on the same spot they’d already weakened. This time, the animal’s chitin was too weak an obstacle to turn the blow aside. Emma watched its head split open, hot blood bubbling out while its entire body went into convulsions.
It took a long time for the insect to die, even after it dropped to the ground and started twitching. Limbs, pincers and legs, were jerking out at random, like it was being tasered. Slowly, the spasms got weaker, then weaker still. Even when it had finally stopped moving entirely, Emma wasn’t sure it was dead.
Evidently, neither was the person in armour. They swung one last time and pretty much took its head apart with the impact.
Panting, grunting, they turned to Emma at last and started walking her way.
Emma froze, panting herself now, and waited for them to draw near. When they were just a few strides back, the figure took their helmet off and revealed the head below. Emma’s breath caught in her throat.
She’d not been expecting a woman to be the one she saved, and didn’t bother suppressing her grin. Not a bad start to her harem, her subconscious did know what it was doing after all.
“Thank you.” The woman breathed, “I think you just about saved my skin there.”
Alright Emma, play it cool, you’ve got this.
“I think you got some of that thing’s blood in your cleavage.” She began. “Want me to lick it off?”