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“That’s the spirit,” Emily says, offering a shoulder to help Angela keep the weight off her injured leg. “Let’s head to the drone hatch, I want easy access to the outside so I can observe the storm while I work.”

“So that’s how you got out ahead of us,” Anton says in realisation, shaking his head and turning away. “I’ll leave you to help her and go monitor the situation from the bridge. We’ll sound the horn if we see anything out of the ordinary.”

“Good luck,” Emily says as he walks off, pulling Angela along and heading for the drone room.

When they enter the room, they find the hatch still hanging open, with a light haze of sand filling the air. Emily quickly casts a basic wind barrier, severing the connection with the air outside and causing all of the particulate filling the room to drop to the floor as it loses the force holding it up.

“Nifty trick,” Angela says, taking her arm off Emily’s shoulder and limping forward to peer over the edge into the swirling sands below. “Can you hold it for long?”

“Yeah, should be able to keep this barrier up for a while. It’s really weak,” Emily replies, pulling some cushions out of her belt and laying them down. “Now, please lie down here for me.”

“Do you have everything in that belt?” Angela asks with a confused stare at the cushions.

Emily doesn’t respond as she settles down and instead pulls out a spider and drops it out of the hatch, watching it vanish. It hits the floor quickly, so she has it unfurl and dig its legs into the ground, running its detection spell and sending the full results back to her. She sets two of her threads to the task of unravelling the cluttered feedback and turns her attention back to her patient.

“Hold still and try to relax,” she says, moving to sit beside her and placing a palm on her stomach. “This won’t take long.”

Angela grunts out a response as Emily releases a stream of machina into her gut. Thanks to her testing on Podrick, the scan goes quickly without her having to adjust her technique at all.

Interesting. A few of the differences between me and Pod were gender-based, but some look to be the result of my ascensions. They both share a few organs I don’t have. Hmm, I think I need some scans of more awakened mages next. I wonder if my changes will match theirs.

Drawing her focus out of the new diagrams in her notes on the human body, Emily withdraws her machina and finally takes her hand off Angela. The woman shivers slightly as the unpleasant buzzing finally subsides, looking at the white runes forming around Emily’s arms with curiosity.

“My scan’s done,” Emily explains, moving both hands to hover over the healing gash on Angela’s leg. “I’m moving on to healing you now.”

“Cool. Did you get what you needed?” Angela asks, her eyes widening slightly in surprise as a cold light pours into her leg from Emily’s hands, soothing the wound.

“Mostly. I’m still going to need to scan some more people to gather more data on structure, and preferably I want to do some stress testing on some living subjects to work out function, but I won’t be asking you to help with those… maybe.”

Angela can’t help the chill that runs down her spine in response to the sinister glint in Emily’s eyes as she speaks about stress testing living subjects despite being half sure she’s joking. Slightly unsettled by the topic, she drops her questioning and falls silent, focusing her attention on the light around her leg.

Emily gets the message and focuses on slowly knitting flesh back together, frowning slightly at the healing spell she stole.

I’m not sure if the spell is just terrible, or if I’m bad at using it, but there is no way it should be draining this much mana and taking this much effort for such minor wounds on an unawakened mortal. Understanding the body more has barely helped! I thought it would, since the spell works better on myself, but I guess I’m just better at self-repair.

Despite her frustration, Emily pushes forward while setting a few of her threads on the task of reworking the spell. It takes her a while, but eventually, the wound on Angela’s leg fades, leaving her tanned skin in peak condition.

“Woah,” Angela exclaims, sitting up and leaning forward to get a closer look. “That’s crazy. You can barely even tell it was cut open.”

“That’s magic,” Emily says with a sigh, sitting back and cancelling healing light. “That said, it seems I really am awful at healing magic. That should only have taken a few minutes for an unawakened person like you. The potion I gave you did most of the work.”

“Damn. Does this mean you don’t want to help with the rest?” Angela asks, gesturing to the cuts on her arms.

“Nah, I said I’d help so I will. Just give me a short break to work on a new spell and I’ll try again.”

“Go ahead. Now that I can walk,” Angela says, pushing herself off the floor and heading towards the door, “I’m gonna go check in with Tony and Anton quickly. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Sure,” Emily says, waving her off and crossing her legs, settling into a meditative position as her primary consciousness falls into the Spellweave to continue the work her threads have started.

As she’s in the middle of carefully blending runes, she notices a strange phenomenon in the feedback from her spider scout. Throughout the storm so far, there have been constant vibrations filling the spider’s detection range due to how disturbed the sand is. A few times while healing Angela’s leg she noticed and ignored denser clusters of motion that suggested creatures moving about despite the winds. However, the thing that actually grabs her attention and immediately draws her curiosity is the opposite.

On the edge of the drone’s detection range, a complete dead zone of vibrations starts approaching them.

Is that another ambush predator like the shadow boa?

Emily opens her eyes and stands up, walking over to the hatch. She pulls her scarf up to cover her mouth and steps out, dropping onto the sand beside her spider. The moment she leaves her barrier and feels the mana-charged air around her, she feels a familiar presence.

“Oh shit,” she mutters as the dead zone reaches her. The wind suddenly stops, and sand starts falling around her. “It’s an elemental.”

The ship’s horn sounds and Emily dashes forward through the eerie stillness, trying to get to the front of the ship as she starts calling on her connection with lightning. She shoots out from under the metal hulk the moment an electric-blue glow fills her eyes and looks up.

Is it sand or wind? Maybe dual?

In a large radius around the elemental, the air is completely still. However, glancing around, Emily sees the storm raging on, barely held at bay.

Without wasting a second, Emily leaps up into the air, pouring out flowing lightning and forming it into the magic circle for sky step, adding a hint of normal wind mana to complete the spell. The crackling magic circle forms platforms of sparks beneath her feet as she rises up to meet the approaching creature.

It worked! I can cast runic spells using my elemental manifestation for extra power. Though it looks like it’s overpowering the wind mana in the spell completely. I can’t completely get rid of the discharge with each platform like I normally can. I can only adjust it.

Wreathed in greaves of lightning, Emily freezes in the air a few metres in front of the elemental, waiting to see how it reacts.

Maybe I can get another boost in intelligence. My cultivation has slowed down considerably since leaving The Glade.

Well, maybe I can use its core after killing it instead.

The elemental fires into motion, both its legs kicking out with two large bursts of wind that send waves through the surrounding storm as its body flies towards Emily. A wild grin stretches her lips as her legs twitch, launching her up and out of the way of the violent charge, narrowly dodging an extended arm-blade.

“A speed type that uses arm blades!” Emily shouts with glee, flipping upside down and extending both her arms with her Claws at full extension. “Ha!”

Emily slams into a platform of sparks, bending her legs to full compression and pouring out charge before releasing her tension and rocketing forward. The platform bursts behind her, sending arcs of lightning out into the storm. She sails past the elemental, cutting at it and narrowly catching the edge of its torso as it shunts itself sideways with a burst of wind to dodge her attack.

Her blade slides through the swirling air without meeting any resistance, causing Emily to click her tongue as the blunt burst of wind knocks her sideways. She kicks off another platform almost instantly, flying off at an unexpected angle towards the floor to dodge a blade of wind sailing after her back.

Emily twists, getting her legs beneath herself, and kicks off again as she slams into the sand. She glances at the elemental as she flies past, confirming her worry when she sees no damage left by her attack.

I’m slightly faster than it is, but I’ll only be able to hurt it by attacking its core.

Emily kicks off another platform, trying to build more charge before attacking again. However, the elemental also seems to realise their gap in speed as it doesn’t bother chasing her. Instead, it locks itself in place and shudders, making the winds in its upper torso go crazy. The torso, along with the roiling arm blades connected to it, starts to rotate, and each time the blades pass in front of it, a new, arcing blade of wind is flung towards Emily.

Emily twists, pivoting on a crackling platform to push herself out of the way of the first unexpected projectile. Another platform allows her to leap over the second, and a third allows her to cut all of her momentum and let a blade miss on its own.

The fourth and fifth blades come at almost the same time as the creature reaches full speed, its rapidly spinning blades pulling the calm air around them into a raging tornado. Emily charges her blades with machina and lightning before cutting down the two incoming projectiles, getting knocked back but taking no damage.

Her eyes narrow at the living storm pulling in a stream of sand with its twisting vortex, and through the distortions in the air and the dusty particles flying about, she spots a glowing green light.

The core! It looks to be inside the spinning torso, but that vortex will rip me to shreds if I charge into it.

Emily is forced to break eye contact with the core as more blades of wind shoot towards her. She bobs and weaves in the air, dancing between the blades and slowly circling the elemental, building up the power in her legs to a hissing crescendo and leaving behind sizable platforms of sparks floating in her wake.

If I want to hit the core, I’ll need to create an opening. I’ll run out of mana before it stops spinning at this rate.

With a quick scan over the battlefield, taking in the floating lightning waiting for her command and the maelstrom of wind churning in the centre, Emily quickly formulates an attack plan. Dodging another projectile, this one resembling a spinning, sandy saw blade, Emily continues moving.

She flies around, placing platform after platform of crackling sparks, filling the space as if they’re stars in the night sky. A few of the bundles of energy are ripped apart by stray blades of wind, but the number grows quickly with each sudden movement from Emily, soon surrounding the elemental on all sides.

With her armour covered in small gashes, left by narrow escapes, and a thin trail of blood running down her forehead, leaking into her mouth and dying her lips a crimson hue, Emily finally decides she’s prepared enough. She suddenly drops to the floor and launches herself underneath the ship she has been avoiding throughout the engagement.

The elemental sends a blade after her, but it bursts against the ship’s hull, shaking Calypso and cutting a deep groove but not penetrating its armour. Emily clicks her fingers, her mouth stretched into a bloody grin, as one of the platforms on the opposite side of the elemental bursts, sending a single bolt of lightning towards the creature. Its screeching howl sounds again, and the moment it diverts its focus from her to respond to the attack, Emily launches herself over the ship.

She steps off the air repeatedly, driving herself up as fast as she can until she comes to a stop high in the air directly above the centre of the twisting winds. She turns, angling herself for a kick towards the ground with her whole body, before calling upon her scattered power.

Every single crackling platform of sparks seems to come alive, suddenly growing in size and ferocity before launching a beam of plasma into the sky. Each beam connects with Emily’s fully-charged leg as she swings it down, channelling the force. A harsh thundercrack sounds, like the roar of a raging lion, as a devastating pillar of charge tears through the air, connecting the ground to Emily’s leg in a burning flash of scorched air.