Emma wasn’t stupid, despite what most thought. Intellectually lazy? Sure. Physically lazy? Absolutely. Generally lazy? Maybe laziness was over-demonised, how about that?
The point was, she wasn’t dumb, and she could tell a play when she saw one. Larry had given her something, a little bit of something at least. A tidbit of knowledge, a whiff of information.
She prodded him, subtly, as she settled into her room, and succeeded in figuring out that it was, in all likelihood, intentional. He’d been hoping to pique her curiosity, to draw on more questions and gain an edge when she started to grow eager for them being answered.
So she didn’t bite.
And then it was Larry’s turn to get angry. Oh, he played the mysterious, higher being, but Emma had gotten a read on him by now. To some extent, at least. Most of what he said was bullshit, and almost all of what he implied was. The anger he’d spat out when she first beheaded him was real. Granted, a man getting angry at having his head detached was something of an extreme case, but it at least showed that he was subject to emotion, and that those emotions spilled over when they grew strong enough.
Which she could use.
But not now, maybe not for a long time. Larry had talked of patience and lengthy lifespans. Emma, for that much at least, had believed him. He’d be worn down eventually, that much she was certain of. He was simply too prone to rage and hurry to be even one tenth of the way honest about his claimed tolerance for waiting.
So she would wait, and perhaps keep waiting until a great many other things had happened. But in the end she’d get what she was looking for. Say one thing for Emma, say she was good at that.
“What even was your job?” She asked Larry, sitting back and kicking her legs up. The question was direct, obvious and, she hoped, enough to make him think that she wouldn’t bother with any subtler methods of figuring him out.
Larry tensed. Or at least she thought he did, if there was one advantage to having most of one’s anatomy removed it was that body language became a lot less reliable.
“I told you.” He said evenly.
“You told me something about guiding people into their new lives, then something slightly less bullshitty about scamming us in some 4-D chess game for the multiverse.”
He didn’t even blink at that. “Yeah, well, it’s all you're getting.”
Emma pretended to look pissed off, jumped to her feet, swore something at him and turned away just as Larry started to look smug.
Of course, he’d think she was turning to avoid looking at that smugness. It was to avoid him looking at her performance long enough to see through it. There was a secondary advantage to the motion, too. It meant that Emma was staring right at the giant fucking skeleton as it leapt through her window.
She thought fast. Or, rather, she didn’t think at all, just acted. Mind lashing out with animal speed at her amulet, drawing out a layer of thick energy armour to encase every centimetre of her body. It came just in time for Emma’s arms to raise and guard against the monster’s swing.
The axeblade missed her. Maybe it was luck, maybe the thing was just shit at fighting, but Emma caught the handle instead and had one moment of relief to enjoy before her feet left the floor and she went rolling across her chamber, barely even coherent as she sprawled.
It really was a big creature, she saw now. Dazed and freezing as it lumbered after her.
No, not lumbered. Bounded. Eight feet tall, maybe more or less, and clearing half its own height with every stride. It was desiccated, skin tight against bones, body covered in frosty, rusted armour. All of it, somehow, felt hard nonetheless, and Emma felt a sudden chill on the air as the creature closed in.
“Oh a draugr!” Larry chimed in, uselessly. Emma was just barely climbing up to her knees when the axe came for her again. It didn’t seem like it’d miss this time.
Emma didn’t give it the chance to. She splayed her hands and blasted out a nice wall of dirt.
She’d learned a few things about her ability to summon matter. Among the most important was that it seemed to come down to factors like density and, perhaps, hardness in terms of how hard something actually was to bring forth. Emma could bring about a lot more soil than she could stone, maybe ten times as much. If she’d been trying to stop the swing then that wouldn’t have helped.
But all she needed now was mass.This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
The sand provided it, and her will—her magic, her whatever—provided the speed. Emma watched the draugr slow, stop then stumble back as probably a ton of material slammed into it like a charging horse. Then she was out of sand, conjuration worn away and enemy quickly righting itself. Emma had the chance for one move.
Not an energy lance, so she got clever.
Stone could do its job too, of course. Little flakes of stone encased in spherical crusts of energy that provided the resilience needed to put all their kinetic energy to work as they hit.
It sounded like hailstones falling on corrugated iron; which, Emma realised, it probably was. Fast hailstones, it had to be said. She felt splinters of her own hardened energy spraying across the room, heard Larry swear as a few of the shards pricked his skin, and watched as the draugr fought for balance. As far as momentum went, this attack was nothing to the blast of sand. But it cracked the armour a bit, little pits and fissures worming their way across it where particularly clean impacts left a mark.
Emma enjoyed the reassurance of seeing her enemy damaged for all of two seconds, then it was moving.
The axe escaped her notice as it moved, just vanished from sight then re-appeared in her shoulder. The energy armour of Emma’s amulet shat itself and died on the spot, and the sheer impact was greater too. She felt a sting of cut skin, the surge of changing directions and a sudden deceleration as her back hit a wall and cracked.
Was that it? Had Emma died, or was she going to spend the rest of her life crippled? Maybe Larry could teach her how to heal her spine with—
Pain, agony, fire. It ran right down her back, through the hips, into her legs. Emma landed in a heap, found her lower body still very mobile thank you very fucking much, and realised the cracking had been her armour caving in a bit of stone behind her.
She wasn’t left to realise for long. Her shield came up, an external one now and as big as she could make it. The axe came down to meet it, split the energy and cut clean through, hit her pauldron on the other side, dropped her down to both knees and let the draugr’s other arm come around.
There was no axe at the end of this one, just a fist the size of a toddler’s head. It smacked against Emma’s helmet and bounced it hard off the wall. She dropped limp to the floor, dazed, blinking, confused.
Not for long though.
This is where I wonder if I die, and dissassociate. Fuck that, fuck you.
“FLURGH!” Emma had meant to shout something a bit more articulate, but it seemed her lower and upper jaws were going through a rough patch in their relationship at the moment. She did, nonetheless, manage to unleash the energy lance she hadn’t noticed herself building in the meantime. It hit the draugr dead-centre and blasted it up into the ceiling.
Stone cried out, crumbled, rained down on her enemy even as it hurried to stand. Emma rolled onto her feet, then felt the floor turn into runny sludge and promptly fell down hard again. Fuck.
The draugr wasn’t nearly as affected by its own flight, of fucking course. Probably it was tough all the way through, and didn’t need to worry about pin-balling around inside its own armour. Emma ignored the challenge of standing up for the time being and just got to conjuring. The draugr rose as more stone-cored energy bullets pattered against its exterior, chipping the iron, thudding into the withered flesh around it. But they barely slowed her adversary. Emma was rapidly running out of tricks, and the enemy seemed to have an abundance of killing power left.
It was around then that the door burst open, revealing Aexilica.
She didn’t hesitate, just came flying at the draugr like a glorious lioness. No armour, clearly fresh from the party and lucky, Emma realised, to even have her sword. It was a tiny thing next to the monster’s weapon, barely longer than its forearm.
Less of a lioness, then, and more of a honey badger, but that worked just fine for the time being. Aexilica’s weapon flashed as steel caught light, then caught flesh. It hissed into the draugr, rebound, quivered and came back. This next swing was caught by the axe’s haft and sent wide, then a boot to Aexilica’s gut tossed her hard against the far wall.
A normal woman, Emma knew, would have died instantly. Even Aexilica was left groaning and twitching in a heap.
The draugr was lurching towards her, long legs eating the ground and long axe scraping it. Emma’s energy lance caught it straight in the back and sent the horrible fucking thing forwards onto its face. This time, Emma was thinking before it could get up. She couldn’t hurt it, at least not badly. She might well exhaust her mana and pass out before hitting it with enough shots to put the thing down, only energy lances seemed to notably wound it and they were among her least efficient weapons.
But she was on the third floor of the fortress.
It was up, running through a hail of bullets and right into a wall. It swung. This time the fucking axe didn’t do so well, getting about halfway into Emma’s shield before sticking fast in the sand she’d filled it with as an impact-absorbed. Her will shot out, and conjured more hardened energy around the back of the weapon to leave it trapped. The draugr tried to rip it free, succeeded only in dragging the entire shield back with it.
Emma’s energy, whatever it really was, was light. But it didn’t weigh nothing. It had mass. Didn’t float in air, provided resistance when she wore thick layers of it. Even now, as her damaged shoulder plate repaired itself automatically, she could feel the mass added onto her.
There was a lot stuck on the end of that axe, and the draugr went stumbling for balance at the effort of raising it high. Emma was tempted to open up distance, didn’t. Closed instead and kept peppering it with her improvised bullets of stone and energy while she did.
It took the draugr long moments to figure out its axe wasn’t coming free easily, and another few to finally drop the fucking thing. By then Emma had circled around it, and abandoned her bullets for another coiling blast of energy. The lance struck its belly just as it started forwards and, once more, the draugr was back. It landed hard on the length of energy Emma had dropped down behind it as she circled, and before it could rise she touched the thing and focused all her magic into pure Force.
The new blast of sand, of course, helped the makeshift sledge along as it shot across the room and cracked against the wall. The draugr rose just in time for Emma’s final energy lance to lash for it.
…Then it twisted aside, letting the blast blow out a wooden-shuttered window. Emma’s grin dropped off instantly.