“Stop following me!” The warrior called back over her shoulder, shooting a glare Emma’s way.
“No.” She replied.
Emma wasn’t entirely sure why she’d started following the woman. Actually, no, she was. She was hot, and everything else around her was either plant matter or a dangerous animal. Also the woman would probably be heading back to civilization, which would be ideal for Emma since she didn’t think starving to death or getting eaten by giant scorpions would be a very interesting end for her own personal Isekai story.
Larry grumbled up from beside her, glaring as intensely as ever. He was good at glaring. Good thing, Emma supposed, as being a severed head meant he had precious few other things in his toolbox.
“You know,” The head began, “When I saw you, I was excited. I thought; ‘wow, a woman, what a lovely change from all those sweaty, perverted nerds I usually shepherd across dimensions. She’ll be so much more normal and respectable.’ Can you believe that?”
Emma frowned at him.
“What are you getting at?” She asked.
“That you are somehow worse than any other I’ve ever ferried into one of these worlds!” Larry snapped. “Just look at yourself, you’ve spent the last half hour ogling that poor woman like she’s a piece of meat!”
Emma looked ahead at the warrior, and shrugged.
“Not like there’s anything to ogle, it’s all hidden behind that armour.”
“Creep.” Larry snapped. Emma frowned again.
“I don’t know why you’re saying this, you made a career out of tricking recently-deceased teenagers into doing your bidding in some fantasy land.”
Larry fell silent at that, and Emma felt a stab of triumph. So her guess had been on the mark. Whatever reason it was Larry had for doing what he was doing, he was serving his own means through the process. That seemed about typical for a figment of Emma’s own particularly nasty imagination.
The head moved past the remark fast.
“At least I have reasons for what I do, beyond just drooling over people like some degenerated cavewoman.”
Emma lowered the head down, dragging him face-first through the bushes and foliage growing thickly a few feet above ground level. His curses and gasps of irritation were music to her ears. But not as much as what came next.
“S-Stop!” He yelled. “I can explain your powers!”
Perhaps more quickly than was dignified, Emma dragged the head back up above the foliage. “Do it.” She demanded.
He gasped, panting, face now red where it had been scraped almost raw, eyes affixing her with his most impressively crafted glare yet.
“You…” The head gasped. “Are an Untethered.”
“If you’re just going to insult me-”
“-No!” Larry yelled. “No, the name for beings of your powers is Untethered. Untethered from reality, from the rules that govern others. Your magic is…Different. Everyone else must study and learn, or act within narrow fields, but you…You just warp the world around your own will.”
Emma liked the sound of that very, very much.
“So I can do anything?”
“No.” Larry said at once. “Or, uh, not yet. Truth be told I actually don’t know what the limits of an Untethered are. They’re rare enough that even I’ve only seen a few, despite all the worlds I’ve examined.”
Emma chewed on that. Well at least she had the ridiculously overpowered ability down.
“How do my powers work then?” She asked. “I just think of something and it happens?”
Again, Larry sighed.
“Maybe one day, but for now you need to be more…Precise. They can be broken down into seven basic tenets, Untethered tend to call them Fundaments. Energy, Matter, Force, Entropy, Cognition, Space and Time.”
“That’s dumb.” Emma frowned. “Energy and matter are basically the same thing, so are space and time. Also entropy is just a product of time, right? And force and energy are-”
“I don’t make the rules.” Larry snapped. “I’ve just figured out what they are.”
Emma shrugged at that. “Fair enough.” She could hardly blame one figment of her imagination for living in a hallucination with rules she herself had thought up, if nothing else this was simpler than a more accurate take on the basics of reality.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“Alright, how do I go about learning these Fundaments?”
“You don’t.” Came a new voice, Emma, surprised, looked ahead to see the warrior was speaking now, looking at her with something between a glare and a sigh. “You have no magic. Sorry, but it’s just how things are.”
“And how would you know?” Emma frowned back, ignoring the little leap in her chest at having the pretty lady speaking to her again.
“Because I’m looking right at you, and I can see that you don’t have a scrap of it. No divine magic, no sorcery, no wizardry. And that enchanted puppet of yours can’t change that just by lying.”
Larry shook in Emma’s hand. “Enchanted puppet?” He growled. “Bitch. How did she even overhear?”
Emma had more important things to concern herself with than that.
“You can see people’s magic?” Emma prompted, which earned her a frown.
“Everyone can.” The woman replied.
Emma nodded at that. “I see. Well, everyone in your world maybe, but I’m not from your world.”
The woman rolled her eyes, and Larry called her an idiot. The walk continued in silence for another minute or so before the head started talking again.
“You are…Taking the existence of all this rather well.” He noted. “Usually the first few days after being dropped in another world, people are left panicking and disbelieving.”
“Oh.” Emma shrugged. “Well this is all just a hallucination I’m having after cracking my head open in the shower, so.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Larry groaned.
Their walk lasted a good few more hours, in which Emma got far more answers about her new powers. Yes, she could use any one of the Fundaments more or less instinctually. No, not to any great degree. Yes, they improved with time. No, not fast. Yes, Time and Space were included in these rules. No, they didn’t start out powerful enough to teleport or slow down time or anything else that would let her cheese her way to world domination. It was actually pretty comprehensive, as far as the hallucinations of a dying mind went.
The basic fact of it came down to willing magic to do one or more things at once, and being very deliberate about what those things were. Emma had already seen what happened when her intent was limited to “throw blast of kinetic energy out”, and it had been a fairly underwhelming wind which wouldn’t have done much more than send normal humans a single step back. But she experimented as she went.
If she built the energy up in her arm, and focused on compressing it into a coherent beam right before she sent it out, she could get a lot more coherence out of it. Instead of a great wind aimlessly raking dozens of square metres, she’d fire a tight beam. It was satisfying to see her power smash a tree so hard that head-sized volumes of wood just exploded into pulp. Almost as satisfying as it was to see the warrior woman’s shocked stare as she beheld it.
No powers my ass.
Of course that wasn’t as simple as a flat upgrade to her powers. In the time Emma took to carefully compress her energy into such focused blasts, a lot could happen. It took two or three seconds to make a properly-formed “energy lance”, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever had that much time to focus while fighting the scytheshell.
After a bit more experimentation, she found that there were other applications that came easier. Picking a rock up to throw, though, proved the only thing she could do in well under a second. As far as magic powers went it was a bit mundane, but then it worked well enough and she didn’t have the luxury of going for style over substance. Not yet at least.
Looked like this was going to be one of those “progression fantasy” stories, Emma could appreciate that. As long as it didn’t take her too long to start frisbeeing mountains at people.
“Of course there’s more to Untethered magic than just will and Fundaments.” Larry added. “You need to learn the Crafts too.”
“What are those?” Emma pressed, eager for whatever edge her currently-quite-shit powers could get.
“Alchemy, Talismans, Enchanting and Animacy.” Larry replied confidently. “Just to name a few. It’s the art of carefully infusing your power into physical matter, to create things of magic. It takes time, preparation and careful study, but-”
“-don’t care.” Emma interrupted. “That sounds lame, how do I cast fireball easier?”Larry stared up at her, as far as a severed head could stare without shoulders to aim itself.
“What? Y-you’re turning down the power of gods, because…You…You think it’s lame? What? I don’t- that’s, you’re…What the fuck?”
Emma just tuned him out and got back to focusing on her magic.
She made a little more progress, shaving maybe a tenth of a second off her casting times before the forest ahead yielded to flatter plains and revealed a small town seated maybe a mile from them. Emma’s focus was soon redirected to that. The architecture was interesting, looking foreign in its inspiration- though Emma couldn’t tell which culture, if any, it was derived from. A lot of it was symmetrical in its geometry, with a surprising amount of well-worked stone. At the settlement’s centre was a towering, rectangular pyramid with great steps leading to its top. Around that were a few smaller buildings, made from more stone and supported by high pillars that let them reach maybe two stories. Otherwise, most seemed to be made of mud bricks and wood, but with a fair amount of consistency.
At an eyeball, she’d guess there were about a thousand people in the place assuming five or six to a house.
“Huh, so this is our destination?” She called ahead, the woman Emma was following didn’t bother replying. Just kept on towards the settlement, and Emma kept on after. They were maybe a half-mile from it when the warrior turned back, stopped right in front of Emma and handed her a bag.
“Put your pet head in that.” She ordered. “Hide it, you’ll get in trouble if you’re seen with it.”
“Pet?!” Larry snapped. “It? Fuck you, you dirty-agh!” Emma stuffed him into the sack with no great effort spent on making it comfortable, then pulled it tight and slung it over her shoulder. She had no intention of leaving him behind of course, there were far too many questions she had for the head. Not just about her magic either. But those could wait.
Once inside the settlement, Emma followed the warrior up to the base of the stone pyramid and watched her scale it quickly. She was back down a few minutes later, looking suddenly fatigued and, somehow, not in the physical sense.
“I just spoke with the Priest.” The woman told her. “And I’ve gained leave for you to stay, temporarily, at my quarters, so I can stop you from…Dying.”
Emma beamed, then considered her words. “Priest of what?”
The woman stared at her. “Of the Irethani Pantheon. Rulers of Aethiq…?”
“Aethiq is…The nation we’re in?” Emma guessed, figuring she was right by the woman’s response, then realising she was showing a lot more ignorance than would be normal. Fuck it, she’d already admitted she was from another world and it wasn’t like anything could actually hurt her here. For all intents and purposes she was just playing a very realistic game.
“Come with me.” The warrior sighed at last. “My name is Aexilica, I’ll be…Taking care of you for a while.”
She said it like Emma was some village idiot who couldn’t survive on her own. Awesome, she wondered whether Aexilica could be persuaded to bathe her as she followed.