The biggest challenge over the next day and a half was balancing Astrid. Emma needed to make sure that the girl stayed angry, stayed stupid and stayed impulsive. If she let her thoughts settle, or sensed doubt in Emma's own party, she'd inevitably realise that there were better people within her price range to be sending after a damned Demigod.

It wasn't that Emma was incompetent at magic. Green, sure, but at this point she'd gotten something of a hang over her powers. There was just no competing with a lifetime of familiarity in a handful of months. She had plenty of tools in her tool box, but none of them were instinctive yet, none of them came naturally to her. Raw power compensated to some extent, but Emma didn't doubt that a region as big as Astrid could reach with her resources would turn up more than a few Hagors when shaken. Probably people more powerful than him, too.

So she made sure Aexilica and Vari both knew to put up airs of confidence and competence, because if Emma ended up going to all this trouble just to end up not getting paid she was going to fucking scalp herself.

Or someone else. Hopefully Groygar, and she was looking into the beginning of that delicate procedure too. That would be the second biggest challenge. Emma kept working at her powers, kept pushing them, and kept finding her frustration grow as she failed to unlock any new game-changers.

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 20, Mastery 10

It was something, she had to remind herself. It was, technically, something. But Emma didn't have her hopes up about doing anything with this something. And the time for their attack came closer and closer, her search for the perfect opportunity drawing to its end.

Emma had been searching, in her downtime, for local toughs. Monsters, of the highest power she could find. Her chief disadvantage was a head-start and likely faster travel speed on Groygar's side, her main edge was that Astrid's family had ridiuclously in-depth documentation of the region. The Skarpa trading family apparently made quite a great sum by having hits taken out on monsters in one region and transporting the loot to another. There seemed to be a weird level of technological and magical asymmetry in this world that Emma still hadnt' figured out the cause of.

But that was a problem to be considered later, when she was rich and licking champagne out of some hot stripper's cleavage.

"Here!" She called out to her band of heroic misfits, all the while mustering as much cognitive dissonance as she could to not piss herself as the looming threat of actually fighting Groygar came closer. Vari and Aexilica crowded around her quickly, peering at the spot she was highlighting. Astrid was there also. Unfortunately.

"That's the Giant's Mountain." Astrid frowned, and Emma nodded so hard her head almost hurt.

"Yep! Care to tell everyone what lives there?"

"...A giant." The girl replied, and Emma rolled her eyes.

"A very fucking dangerous giant with a reputation for erasing entire military forces."

"Exactly!" Emma laughed. "So I think it's pretty much inevitable that Groygar will try and fight it, given his obsession with worthy opponents or something. And if he does that, it means that he might actually have a tough fight, which means that if we just stick around and wait for it to end we can jump out and finish him off while he's weakened!"

Emma hadn't expected everyone to jump on her plan exactly, there really was no way to frame 'let's go and kill a Demigod' that would incur enthusiasm among most people, but the total lack of reassurance she saw in their eyes after sharing it actually took a notch out of her own confidence too.

"Bring the painting." She told Vari, deciding to try another direction of maybe-molifying everyone. He blinked, thinking.

"Do you think that will help us?"

"It might, right?" She shrugged. "If nothing else we can bluff him with it, I know I'd freak out if some unknown magic user started waving around the thing I was trapped in for ages."

That, luckily enough, did restore a bit of confidence to the room. A bit.

They continued their preparations while Astrid readied their journey for them, which was to say found the most filling amount of food Emma was sure she could transport on the glider given that inventing that had made every other kind of travel she had access to utterly worthless.

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It was almost tempting to find new shit to do, to give herself new distractions. Every minute spent in Astrid's big, comfortable mansion was another minute not spent racing towards an early grave.

But then, the girl was already getting impatient. Asking more frequently when they were leaving, starting to loudly talk about hiring someone else. Emma gave herself another day or two, max, before getting kicked out altogether, and if she was going to get forced from the safe haven, she decided she'd do so in a way that saw a shit ton of money coming into her possession.

Besides, Astrid didn't even seem to have that strong a control of her own father's assets. They were being whisked out from under her, and despite Emma outright telling her as much the girl didn't even seem to care. There was no future here.

Maybe no future anywhere, but if that was the case Emma might as well get herself beaten, killed and possibly cannibalised rather than finding out the nasty way. Somehow instant oblivion was more appealing than a lifetime stuck fighting for her own survival on a day by day basis. She missed her relatives, at least on earth homelessness had been a battle of wills she knew was winnable.

Their time ran out, and Emma took them all to the skies.

She'd made a few adjustments to this glider, using some of what she'd learned from her long hours of practice. Now there were a few measures to reduce turbulence, Energy effects with conditional triggers built around the tips of the wings to soak up a small fraction of the kinetic energy imparted during what would otherwise have been some pretty bad shaking. It didn't do much, if anything, for speed, but it was very nice to be travelling as fast as she could manage and not forced to concentrating on making sure she didn't bite off her own tongue.

Astrid, who had insisted on coming with them, did not seem to notice the difference. Her bitching picked up minutes into the journey and didn't stop. It was actually almost relieving though, another thing for Emma to focus on beyond her own fears. As they approached her destination however, a mile slipping out beneath them every thirty seconds or so, she began to feel less and less certain about what was coming. It was, Emma decided, a good thing they'd set a swift pace in their approach, because she couldn't have willed herself to stay the course otherwise.

It wasn't at the top of some giant peak they were headed to, this time. Instinctively that sounded good, but in practice it just meant Emma didn't have the luxury of landing on a single location separated by hundreds of metres from all the potential crash-points around it.

On the other hand, she wouldn't be landing hundreds of metres in the air either. She knew now that she could survive a fall like that with only an idle thought to defend herself, and Aexilica and Vari might have actually just straight-up tanked the impact even if Emma couldn't help them. Still, it was best not to risk it. Especially when their chief money-giver had insisted on endangering herself by accompanying them all, the dumbass.

Emma circled the location only briefly. It was set in something of a shallow ravine, crested on all sides by tall, jagged rocks and looking almost like a big, stony sarlac pit. From in the air she caught a few glimpses of what looked like signs of habitation—drying clothes, an extinguished fire. It wasn't doubtful they were in the right place, at least, they just needed to reach it.

In the end, Emma's solution for doing so was somewhat simple and, contrary to Astrid's entitled screaming, entirely safe.

She aimed the glider high, neutralised all of its current momentum by just killing the kinetic energy, and then disintegrated the whole thing instantly. The hardlight fell apart, then crumbled to dust, and then the dust became nothing as they all plummeted. Emma had, of course, prepared everyone with a secondary hardlight parachute each. Yellow, rather than the stiff and unyielding blue, to unfurl and catch the wind currents as they fell.

It was then that she discovered why parachutes had that little hole in the tops, as all four of them were turned into the world's screamiest spin-tops and the world around them turned into a ferris wheel of terror.

Emma actually felt sick as they fell, and her head was pounding by the time they approached the ground. Also, she'd misjudged how much drag force was actually needed to properly slow a falling person. Vari landed first, and hardest. Aexilica was a second or two behind him, Astrid five seconds after her. Emma came down last, or rather she would have come down if an unexpected gust of wind hadn't caught her parachute and basically thrown her at one of the rocky walls surrounding the ravine like the world's screamiest slingshot. It hurt.

"Everyone alive?" She groaned, sitting upright and checking to see if she still had all her teeth.

"Fuck you." Aexilica snapped.

"Insane idiot!" Astrid growled.

"Damned witch whore." Vari groaned, Emma took a brief pause to conjure a soft-ish ball of yellow hardlight and hadoukenhaduken it off his head before getting up. Nothing was broken, as far as she could tell, but…Landing would still need a fair amount of work before she employed this technique again.

"You making notes?" Larry grunted, sounding somewhat muffled from inside her clothes.

Huh, she was. Emma was almost proud of her new diligence. Another stab of pain went out from where her ass had bounced off the wall, and the pride quickly vanished.

"Alright, we made a fair amount of noise there but it doesn't look like this giant has heard us?" Emma looked around, and found that there was not, in fact, any sign of such a creature bounding towards them with its tongue lolling out. That was a pretty good thing in her books, though given her luck it probably meant she was due to be hit by a meteor soon.

"Let's be quiet then." Aexilica suggested, lowering her voice, drawing her weapon, and closing in on the rest of them slowly. Her armour rattled with every movement still, not nearly as quiet as Vari's, but she was doing her best. And still somehow more silent than Astrid.

They made their way as a group through the crevice, its towering rocky walls feeling closer and more crushing with every step. Emma kept her magic ready, her wits jittery, even as she saw Vari and Aexilica moving to surround her on both sides. That was oddly comforting, and not just for the purely practical reasons of being protected.

Like we're going on a dungeon-run. I'm the DPS, and they can tank for me.

Put like that, everything felt a lot more familiar. Emma licked her drying lips and continued.

The closer they got to the jutting cavemouth, hidden from the sky by its angle in the rocks, the less Emma's newfound confident held. It wasn't really anything particular that tipped her off about fearing it all, more like a lot of smaller things adding up together.

If she had to pick just one, though, it would've been the mangled human bones.

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