Eirik's mansion—or rather, Astrid's mansion now—was unsurprisingly the largest building in Salagrin. This was a very good thing, as Emma figured she'd need the space to test some of her new tricks. That, and she'd need a whole lot more workspace to really start munchkiningmunchkinning things.

Until now, she'd suffered from a lack of stable living area to work her Talismans and Alchemy. Now she had it. Astrid took swift control over her father's assets—mostly by yelling at his accountants—and promised Emma whatever she asked for.

Emma had started with a laboratory. Or rather, a spare kitchen cleaned out and filled with cauldrons. She plopped Larry down next to the counter and got to cooking.

"You're going for a strength-enhancing potion?" He guessed.

"Yes." Emma's lip curled. "Which means blood and sweat." Lovely.

"You'll want a healing vial too, so look into picking up some medical supplies." Larry was being oddly…Helpful. She frowned at him, suspicious now.

Agave sap didn't grow near Salagin, but it was a common import. That took care of Emma's secondary liquid component for her healing potion. For the solid, she fell back on makeshift bandages. It really was convenient how easy healing potions were to actually make.

Convenient in more than one way, because it also let Emma experiment. She put several cauldrons on brewing at a time, all mixing the same ingredients in, and waited for them to complete. When they were finished, she had…A single healing potion, and several cauldrons full of useless, non-magical sludge.

"Fuck." She growled, before repeating the process twice more for her next two healing pots.

The one good thing about potion brewing was that Emma could, apparently, do it without continued focus. The bad thing was that it drained her mana. A lot. By the time she'd finished the next two pots, she was pretty much out entirely. Gliding had emptied her tank a fair amount, it seemed, and she supposed she'd never brewed three in such rapid succession before. Reluctantly, she settled into her temporary living quarters and slept the fatigue off.

As soon as she was up, Emma got back to work.

She put off the potions for now, and looked in on Aexilica and Vari. They were sparring. Sparring fast, faster perhaps than ever before. Vari still seemed to be fractionally better, though Aexilica was improving at a rate he just couldn't match. A lifetime of having nobody to really train with would do that, Emma decided.

"It's annoying that I can't make them Talismans." She thought aloud, still holding Larry under one arm.

"Maybe not so annoying. I've seen Untethered get tortured because people didn't believe them when they claimed to not be capable of that." Emma blinked, then glared at him.

"Which means that I still might be tortured, and they won't stop because I won't be able to do what they're convinced I can!"

He grinned.

"Eugh, why can't I anyway?" Emma snapped.

"Because Talismans rely on your own power, that's why they draw on your reserves of power and why they can only do stuff you can."

"I fucking hate magic." Emmag rumbled, even as she got back to practicing it. As much of her effort was put to testing herself as anything else, though she wasn't banking on getting any great leaps in power over a few days. She felt like Matter and Energy were becoming more familiar still, even while she knew that everything else was going neglected.

But really, there wasn't a lot she could do about that. Larry had told her outright most Fundaments took a lot of familiarity and learning to become combat-practical, and it was combat she needed to be good at now.

Emma hadn't really played around with her power's limits yet, and a big part of her new learning curve was doing just that. She discovered a minor new trick, reducing external sources of energy at the cost of tiring herself out, but nothing too groundbreaking on its own.

Her Matter powers didn't have anything new at all for Emma to discover. Other kinds of metal she could conjure, all in impure and shitty forms, but none particularly rare or exotic. She'd been hoping to maybe uncover the power to summon magnesium, or something. That would've been helpful in a fucking fight.

But no, she had to take her time with this. It wasn't enough to just use her powers with improvised weapons anymore, Emma had to be smart. It was not a state of being Emma was accustomed to entering, even now.

"My Talisman." She blinked after a few moments, eying Larry. "I should make a new one."

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Oh, how come?"

Emma could think of many reasons, but couldn't be bothered to share them. She'd let the results speak for her. It didn't take long, after sending word to Astrid, to be presented with both a chain and a decently made dragon scale, nor to verify that the chain was, in fact, fashioned exclusively from links which had seen use in real chain armour. That was an interesting tidbit, it seemed the metallurgy in this region was a good deal better than in Scurlga. Interesting, but not hugely relevant. Not compared to what Emma could have done with either.

She made this Talisman to set up her armour as the old one had, at first. Thick plates of blue hardlight like before, made to soften and give around the edges so that her flexibility wouldn't be reduced too much. Less so than before, because the lower layers were made of yellow hardlight. Springier, softer, and prone to deformation. The main function of this wasn't mobility though, it was acting as a decelerant. Emma had spent far too much time unconscious lately for her taste, and she was starting to get paranoid about actual cognitive decline. If this saved her a few broken ribs down the line, it'd be worth it.

But Emma wasn't done there. One of her higher level Matter powers let her temporarily enhance the mechanical strengths of a material upon contact, and she'd already verified that it both worked on hardlight and, like all of her powers, could ignore the need for physical contact while targeting specifically hardlight made by Emma.

It was tiring to do, on one hand. But it would quite literally multiply the resistance of her armour on the other. Emma didn't think too hard before applying the effect, though she had plenty of time to reconsider as she did. It took fucking hours.

"The more complicated you make this stuff, the longer you'll need to spend on it." Larry reminded her.

"Fuck off." Emma snapped, and kept working. She was ready to sleep again before finishing, but pushed the urge off. Then kept pushing it off. Hours passed before, at last, she was forced to succumb. It was a nervous rest after that, not knowing if her progress would still be waiting for her when she woke. Fortunately she was, and another half-day saw her new Talisman perfected.

Or perfected-ish at least. She had to give it a bit of testing before she'd be willing to run with it into battle, and Emma immediately noticed one feature that she was not fond of at all.

Every moment it remained active—fortunately something she could now toggle to and fro with only a thought—was a continuous drain on her mana. Not a rapid one, but…more than nothing. Emma's sense for time was, fortunately, still enhanced by her measly one-point in the corresponding Fundament. By her estimation, a solid hour of maintaining the effect would exhaust her mana completely. Assuming she did nothing else.

Big assumption there, and not one she'd be relying on. Emma would virtually always be doing something else if she needed her armour.

She had more raw power than she used to, Emma knew. When she'd first arrived the idea of throwing hardlight against steel was impossible. But now…

Nope, still impossible. The ingots of metal she'd ordered brought through held strong as she tested her material against them, as did the shitty iron. It seemed, despite the thickness of her armour, that Emma wouldn't be shrugging off any anti-material rounds for a while.

That was about as close to a limit as she could think of though. Practice, experiments rather, with Aexilica and Vari showed that they were barely able to scratch her new protection using mundane weapons. After some convincing, Emma allowed them to try smacking her with the magical ones and was pleasantly surprised to see her hardlight put up a good deal more resistance than the stone walls they'd been showing off with. Granted, not enough to avoid damage, but if centimetres of the material would equal inches of stone then it was a good start. She barely even felt the hits, yellow hardlight deforming and dispersing her impacts across such wide areas that, combined with the resistance of the harder blue sections above, Emma didn't get hurt at all.

With a defence which would now hold up moderately well against her own weaponry, Emma got to work on some better weaponry. She did like the idea of burning people with magnesium fireballs, but that just didn't seem plausible yet. What could she do with that idea and her current tools?

Emma was an idiot. The dumbest woman on earth, she was…Playing around as if she still didn't think this was real. Didn't she? Was she holding something back, still? Treating everything like some RPG she'd ruin the fun of by unbalancing things?

She pushed that thought aside, and started work on a new technique. This one was difficult, different from what she was used to and so more tedious to get down into instincts and reflexes. Emma started it normally enough, a burst of Matter to conjure roughly-spherical iron cores, then a burst of Energy to surround them with blue hardlight. After that, though, came the heat. Energy on paper, it was a different kind and one she'd practiced far less. It was slow-going to use it at first, but she got quicker with practice.

One second was an age in combat. Maybe Emma could get away with it in a one-on-one and with decent distance, but even a normal man could cross several metres in a single damned second. A superhuman, or several at once? No. Fortunately, she'd halved that delay before long, and reduced even that by a sizable fraction shortly after.

That was combat-practical, at least. Though even then…Emma sighed. Even then death could come a hell of a lot faster than half a second. The more she fought in this world, the more she realised the limits of her own damned body. The potion would offset that, to some extent, but Larry had been more than a little clear about the dangers of over-indulging them. It took at least two days for an Alchemical mix to leave her system, and overdoses were common. Best not to chug several per fight.

Emma let that grim mood stick with her, and felt it linger right up until she shot her first globule of fucking molten iron into her first target. A straw dummy. Not the best idea on her part, everyone in the house became quite panicked when the whole thing just caught fire.

That was embarrassing, but fortunately Emma was able to pretend she'd meant to do it. She had a few other targets lined up after that, ones that she hoped would prove more educational.

They did, too! The one-ton bull carcass, in particular, gave a very detailed simulation of what might happen when Emma shot something a bit tougher than usual and with flesh that could soak up more heat. The sheer mass of the thing meant that she needed a few shots to actually start charring it, but it gave in the end. Emma watched it erupt into flames and fall apart, grinning.

Now what to make next?

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.