Chapter 135 – Unstable

The moment Emily’s earth-shattering kick connects, the twisting vortex of wind dominating the space disperses, revealing the elemental within. It appears frozen in its attacking stance, the motion of its upper torso halted, with all of the sand within its body half-cooked into a solid mass that leaves several gaps.

Emily capitalises on the opening she’s created, kicking off the air with her other leg and releasing all of the charge stored in it. She rockets down past the elemental, sliding one of her Claws into a gap in its body and connecting with the core with a satisfying crack. The clear sound rings out, filling the clearing as Emily slams into the hard, cooked sand below.

She looks up and sees the winds making up the elemental’s body slow to a halt before its sandy corpse falls to the ground beside her. Almost immediately, the storm begins to close in around them, seeking to cover the ship completely.

I guess the elemental wasn’t actively creating this sandstorm then, only living in it.

Emily grabs the elemental’s corpse, shattering the hardened sand with a single punch to pull out the cracked, fist-sized, glowing orb within. It’s mostly pale green with a few small streaks of swirling sandy-brown light.

A wind elemental with a small dual affinity for sand. I wonder if I can use this to add another element to my repertoire. It feels like a sub-category of earth.

She’s forced to pull her focus away from the core as the stormy gusts reach her again, so she stands up and races back towards the ship. She slides under the drone hatch and launches herself up into shelter easily, dropping her electrified state and letting out a sigh as she moves to shut the hatch behind herself, her face back to a calm mask with all signs of her combat-high gone.

“Using elemental connection to cast sky step seems to be a sure-fire way to drain myself if I’m not in the middle of a mana-dense region,” she mutters with a glance at her dwindling mana reserves. “Luckily, I still had plenty of machina left if I really needed it.”

The hatch rises up to seal off the room and, as Emily raises a hand to conjure some wind to clean up the sand scattered across the floor, the door bursts open. Podrick races in, followed closely by the rest of the crew, bar Anton.

“That was incredible!” Podrick cheers, rushing over to Emily but halting in his step and hesitating when he sees the blood trailing down the centre of her face. “Are you okay?”

“This?” Emily asks, ignoring the dirty room for now and reaching up to cast cleanse, wiping away the blood on her forehead to reveal a scabbed-over cut, healing at a visible rate. “It’s nothing. My natural healing is very good. As long as my mana keeps circulating, it’ll be gone without a trace in a few minutes.”No?v(el)B\\jnn

“So, you don’t even need healing magic yourself?” Angela asks, drawing Emily’s focus to the healing cuts still lining the pilot’s arms. “If only you could transfer that to me.”

“I -“ Emily pauses, Angela’s words setting off a spark of an idea in her mind, “Might be able to?”

She immediately throws the idea to her secondary cores, restarting their work on a new healing spell from scratch.

“Give me about ten to twenty minutes and I’ll have something to test,” Emily says to Angela before turning her curiosity on the rest of the group. “Anyway, why are you all here?”

Only Angela and Podrick remain unfazed by her gaze, while the other three all flinch slightly as her cold eyes pass over them.

“W- We wanted to come check you were okay and ask what that thing was,” Ash explains after a slight stutter, pressing down their obvious discomfort much faster than the other two and glancing at the pulsing core still in Emily’s grasp.

“Well, as you can see, I’m fine,” Emily says, raising the cracked orb before her. “As for what this was? An elemental. They’re a pretty rare creature formed when concentrated elemental mana gains sentience.”

“How rare are they?” Tony asks, surprising Emily that the quiet man would come forward. “We’ve never run into something like that before. If you weren’t here, it would have ripped the ship to shreds.”

“Rare enough that it doesn’t surprise me you’ve never seen one,” Emily says as she turns back to face the open room, raising her free arm and weaving a few quick hand signs to conjure a light, twisting breeze to gather the scattered sand in the centre. “I also suspect it wouldn’t have come near the ship if I wasn’t here. Elementals are normally very intelligent, and I wouldn’t expect a wind elemental to show such outright hostility for no reason. I think that one was unstable, and it was probably drawn towards my mana signature.”

She finishes cleaning the floor, leaving the sand piled up on top of the closed hatch as she turns back to the crew, finding them looking at her with a mixture of twisted expressions.

“Woah, that’s weird,” Angela says, moving the bound arm around. “It barely feels like there’s anything there but it’s kind of tingly.”

Emily nods at the expected feedback and takes the woman’s other arm to wrap it as well. A quick glance at her remaining mana, as she applies the treatment, causes Emily’s eyes to widen slightly in surprise.

Damn, that’s expensive. Four thousand mana just to wrap both arms.

“There you go,” she says after the second wrap is in place. “Those should stay for about ten minutes, then when they fade your arms should be spotless.”

“Thanks, Emily,” Angela says while pushing herself up to stand.

Emily nods and waves her off, remaining seated and placing both hands on the glowing core in her lap as she shuts her eyes again. Angela hesitates in the doorway, glancing back at Emily with a conflicted expression before she continues out into the corridor.

I wonder what that was about.

Emily stops paying attention to her surroundings as the door clicks shut and focuses on the task at hand.

Time to see if I can learn a new element from this core!

She pours a stream of mana into the orb, trying to connect with the turbulent flow she can feel within. The moment her raw mana enters the core, it’s torn from her control and scattered. A frown creases her brow as she adjusts her approach, now attributing her mana with wind before sending it in. Her mana holds together as it enters the solidified mass of mana, but it also gets drawn into the flow within and soon leaves her control as well.

Okay, no injecting mana for now I guess.

She changes tactics again and focuses on trying to draw out the mana from the core. Cycling Technomancer’s Breath, Emily directs her body to draw in mana through her palms and waits. It takes a few minutes, but eventually, a light stream of mana is pulled from the core and into her body. However, the moment it happens, the core suddenly shakes, growing warmer as the glow within lights up the cracks on its surface and a stronger flood of mana rushes into Emily. Immediately, she releases the orb, dropping it into her lap as she doubles over in pain.

“ARGH!” she grunts through gritted teeth, her eyes shooting open.

Looking down, she sees her arms shaking, the veins on the back of her hands bulging from her skin with an unnatural green and brown glow. She instantly tries to turn off her pain receptors to allow herself respite to observe calmly, but despite her command to her body working, the pain lingers.

Shit.

Without wasting a moment, Emily floods her arms with mana and machina. A light mist of mana slowly rises from her skin as the foreign element is forcefully flushed from her system and, the moment the mist stops seeping from her pores, the pain subsides.

“Haaa,” Emily lets out a sigh of relief, flexing her fingers and running machina through them to make sure they are unaffected. “Okay. Maybe don’t try pulling mana from a half-broken, dead elemental’s core.”

She turns her gaze to the item in question and watches as it stops shaking, the glowing light pouring from its cracks slowly reducing until it returns to its inactive state. She picks it up, finding it once again cold to the touch, and places it in her belt for now as her machina confirms she suffered no lasting damage, before leaning back and letting herself fall flat on her back as she tries to process what just happened.

That pain wasn’t normal. It continued even after I turned off my pain receptors. I didn’t think that was possible. Was it some form of contamination from trying to pull in an element I can’t use? Or was the mana in the core as unstable as the core itself? The flow within feels abnormal, so that’s a possibility. Maybe it’s just not possible to cultivate using an elemental core like that. I have only read about them being used to fuel arrays and artefacts. Maybe that water elemental was doing more than I thought to connect with me safely.

After a few minutes of throwing ideas around in her head, Emily lets out another sigh. Unable to come to a conclusion without more testing, she adds the core to a slowly growing list of things to research later.

“Whatever,” she mutters, gathering her cushions back into her storage and standing up. “Preparing the ship’s upgrades takes priority.”