Trapped in Another World With No Magic

When Hekate was little, she would play with her straw doll, tucked away in her small hideaway hole in the gulpoxen stables of Shialvalgarro’s Hoard, dreaming of exploring the world out beyond the mountain where the ancient fortress is located. She had no idea the world was far larger and more beautiful than her imprisoned young mind could comprehend. Hills roll gently as waves of grass sway in the wind. Trees creak and groan as they whisper to each other, watching over all who pass through with passive, unjudging gazes.

Even now, Hekate looks up at the leaves fluttering lightly in a gentle breeze; what little wind manages to penetrate this deeply into the treetops. Bugs and birds are making noise in the distance, and she can feel only a slight tension in the air.

She’s currently stalking quietly through the forest on a solo-scouting mission. It’s a small place to start, but she got Daniel to trust her enough to handle it on her own; without Doephluev or Ryuogriar watching over her shoulder. She has even checked behind her, and all of her companions’ mana auras are still providing a light pressure behind her. Even Doephluev, who is keeping hers hidden for the most part, can be detected now that Hekate learned from her how to seek out suppressed mana. Unless she’s really careful, it’s still easy to miss.

For now, Daniel is keeping his word and letting Hekate handle it on her own. She shouldn’t be very long, or they’d likely have split up. The main goal is to be ready to fight if something big shows up, since the Mattarglos citizens have experience with fighting many species of monsters, and Hekate’s allies have weapons that can take down almost anything under the right conditions.

Hekate has a lot of power in a tiny package, so she feels confident. She did her best in the Citadel when Morthybargaron sent her in to conquer it or die trying, and she was struggling against malnourished and barbaric feral goblins -now known as ‘dumgobs’ by the Fievegal-. She doesn’t know if she could face Lugrae as she is now, even if she has more mana than him thanks to the Devourer. His mere presence, appearance, size, and mana terrified her. She can still feel the overwhelming pressure coming from him clawing at her soul, though thankfully it’s just a memory now.

The young feldrok empress clutches gently at her chest as she walks. No one addresses it, mainly because she hasn’t let anyone see her naked, but there is still a brand on her chest. The owner of that brand is dead and annihilated, but she still hears his voice surrounding and suffocating her.

Morty was weak, Hekate. Er… M-Maybe… No, definitely, Daniel is just strong.

She looks at her ice blaster’s muzzle, which is visible to her at her left from behind her back where it’s slung.

I’m stronger than Morty now. I just… I wish I could prove it… But, he’s dead now…

The ravenette clenches her fist in front of her to pump herself up.

That’s right! Daniel trusted me to scout. So, I’ll just need to ask him to give me more important missions from now on. And, next time, I’ll fight the big monster alone! Hahahaha!

The young feldrok snaps out of her inner thoughts as she walks into a strange part of the forest. The air ahead is hazy, and the leafy smell of soil and decaying foliage making up the forest floor has given way to a different smell. It smells more distinctly like rot, and it makes the teen scrunch her nose in disgust.

“Blegh!” she whispers. “What is that?” She cautiously looks around, listening as carefully as she can. Her helmet protects her hearing at the cost of her highly sensitive directional perception of sounds.

And, there’s a strange creaking noise that startles her a little as it echoes through the ground. She quickly draws the ice blaster, aiming in the direction the sound came from, but there are just a bunch of trees with a rippling texture to the ground, which is mostly covered by a blend of brown and green with the leaves mixed with a grass-like moss.

The haze is heavy like a stifling fog, and she can feel a stickiness working its way into her armor and helmet.

The petite girl keeps her gaze sweeping back and forth. Something feels odd. She is still learning to detect mana when things aren’t visible, so she can inherently sense something is present, but she can’t tell what or where for certain. Hekate has dedicated most of her energy learning on how to push her substantial mana into attacks to end Daniel’s enemies before they can ever pose a threat to him. She has to command the battlefield with overwhelming power, since she lacks a variety of techniques or experience.

Another creaking sound echoes through the strange, foggy mire. She can feel the sound through her boots, which is strange, as if she’s standing on a carpeted hard ground, instead of the relatively ‘soft’ ground of a typical forest. That said, she can feel soft spots as well, and some of her steps even squish and squeak. She’s not entirely certain what terrain she is walking on. She spent most of her life in Shialvalgarro’s Hoard, trekked through mostly mountains and rolling fields to get to the Citadel, and then the few battlefields they’ve been to other than the Citadel.

The feldrok girl knows deserts exist, as well as rainforests from what Daniel has talked about. But, this area doesn’t feel like a rainforest, and is obviously not a desert.

The closest she can think of is mud, but it’s not pulling her feet in. The soft spots have the same grassy-like plants that almost seem to have the texture of carpet.

Briefly curious, Hekate glances over her shoulder. As far as she can tell, everyone is still holding position, with a few exceptions working out wider to scout around the group.

For now, Daniel is trusting Hekate, and it reassures her. She takes a breath, regretting it almost immediately when she gags on the heavy, stinky air.

The teen somewhat instinctively pulls off her helmet in hopes of reducing the stifling feeling of the oppressive, foul-smelling air. It doesn’t help much, but at least she can hear a lot better, and she feels a little less hot now that air can flow across her big triangular ears and head.

Knowing she can’t avoid it forever, Hekate takes a few deep breaths, bracing herself against the humid, odorous atmosphere around her. She feels briefly nauseous for several long moments, but she keeps her search going. Thankfully, she can pivot her ears and use them to their full, sensitive prowess now.

She can hear something else strange thanks to her ears being free of the helmet. It’s a quiet slurping sound coming from somewhere deep in the fog that she can’t see through. It sounds low to the ground, and it’s little more than a gurgle like when the Princesses and Princes are hungry, with their tiny little stomachs essentially inaudible to anyone other than Hekate, Treia, and Gwenesphia.

The gurgling also seems to be coming from various places, and it’s not quite like a hungry stomach. If anything, it’s like blowing bubbles in the water, but muffled.

Squish.

Hekate looks down. Among the first things Daniel did once he conquered the Citadel is improve the boots and footwear options of all of his companions and citizens. Hekate’s boots have cute, pink and purple flower patterns on their dark black leather at her request, but more importantly, they’re waterproof up to the middle of her shins.

Thankfully so, since the entire top of her left metatarsal is submerged in water as her foot sinks on the spongy, rug-like foliage of the forest floor.

There was no obvious water until she stepped in this spot, though she has had the slight squishing and squashing of water.

Having a sudden realization, Hekate crouches down -mindful to keep her tail up out of the water-, and she pokes her finger around the small sinkhole.

The net-like plants under her feet are holding her weight, but she can’t feel much solid material directly under her foot, and when she finds where her weight is being suspended from, it feels hard, like bone or some other hard, smooth material.

Hekate slings her ice blaster on her back again, setting her helmet down in a carefully chosen dry area -crown-down-, so that she can find and extract a dagger from her void bag. 

With it, the feldrok empress cuts away some of the tangled plant life, and she can feel her own weight shift, so she withdraws her foot from the sunken puddle. The green living carpet seems to relax back to normal, and the water vanishes as the ‘ground’ smoothes itself out. Something is peculiar about this place, and Hekate is doing her job as a scout to figure out what it is.

When she separates some of the matted plant life, she finds a pale, off-white tendril that has a rigid structure, and hair-like strands are digging into it as much as coming out of it.

It takes a second, since the thing seems rather solid, and Hekate is learning something new every single day; and most days, it’s many somethings. But, having a sudden realization, she glances in the direction the slick, hairy, somewhat soft ‘bone’ stretches. Rather unsurprisingly, now that she has actually thought about it, the rigid part is a large root extending from a tall, knobbly tree nearby. Unlike the titanic Behemoth Maple trees, this tree is much shorter, but has a large footprint thanks to a wide base of insect-like roots that go into the ground, and then branch out.

And, as she inspects the roughly leg-thickness root, she notices that water reaches up to the bottom side of the root, though she can’t see very far into the water thanks to the darkness from the fog and the mat of roots and tangled grassy-plants.

Having some suspicions, though, Hekate jogs over to the nearest stick she can find, which is already somewhat soft and brittle thanks to the high humidity promoting rather rapid rot.

Still, she hopes it’ll be enough for her test. She makes her way back over to the hole she was investigating, and she pokes the stick down past the root, feeling for the deepest it can go.

Working through the tangle of roots and macro-moss of some kind, Hekate finds that the water is at least a couple of feet deep, with very little resistance other than the carpet of foliage.

She’s not entirely sure what all of her clues mean, but there is a lot of water beneath her, by all appearances.

Just as she’s letting her hand sink into the water a little bit, the stick is suddenly ripped away from her, startling the feldrok empress. She yelps and kicks backwards, panting as she watches the hole. Her ears are rigid, twitching back and forth as she listens intensely, and her tail is puffed up as big as it can get, nearly doubling the volume of her body, even if it’s just the fur of her big tail.

The ravenette pants heavily, glancing around for any signs of movement.

Whatever it was, it has to be in the water beneath her, and it was immensely strong with how forcefully it yanked the stick away from her.

Several more creaks and cracks echo through the ground, and Hekate starts to realize what is wrong.

The cable-like popping is echoing deep without losing much of its tone. She can even sense the distortions to the echo, nearly defining the depths below her.

Something is very wrong with this part of the forest.

Is it some kind of digging monster? But where’s all the water coming from? But, how… What am I standing…?

Before Hekate can fully establish her thoughts into complete ponderings, she can feel the ‘ground’ beneath her start to flex upwards, and in a start, she dives forward. “Yeep!” is the embarrassing noise that comes out of her mouth, but she can’t worry about that now. Just because she is monstrously durable, that doesn’t mean she is invincible, and she spent the better part of her life as a frail and weak punching bag of a slave.

She can hear the snapping and popping of the roots and mossy grass carpet as something bursts through the floor of the forest, flinging foul-smelling water and sloppy mud in every direction.

The thing coils once like a gigantic, swooshing hand, and then vanishes below the water once more.

Even with the apparent destruction of the surface of the ‘ground’, the spongy and net-like matting made of some kind of grassy plant seems to constrict just as quickly, almost completely obscuring the hole that should be several feet wide. The dilated ambush trap is little more than a foot-wide hole revealing water beneath, like an insignificant puddle that hides its true depth.

Hekate starts to see the foggy area for what it is. The macro-moss growing along the forest floor doesn’t need much sunlight, but it does create an illusory ‘solid’ ground beneath which a monster awaits its prey. Even the ambush attack, meant to capture her as a primary goal, came from an angle that drove Hekate further into the heavy fog.

The feldrok girl notices her helmet a few yards away; she totally forgot to put it back on, and now it sits exactly where she left it.

Where she prodded the water with a stick, she kicked away from it once, and dove even further away. Now, its shape is barely visible to her, had she not known it was there.

Daniel will be a little upset if she leaves her helmet behind, mainly because it endangers her to not be wearing something to protect her hearing, if nothing else.

Her ears twist and twitch urgently, listening in every direction as she avoids making a sound.

Her hunter knows she is present, and it’s much larger than she is. It is lurking somewhere beneath her, and it knows how to make use of the terrain.

That said, Hekate knows how to use the things she has, as well.

She quietly maneuvers her void back, cycling through the display to find a frag grenade.

She’s going to regret using it, but it’ll buy her some time to escape. Without submerging herself, she won’t be able to see the monster’s full form, and she’s not equipped to even try to dive into water as she is. The diving helmets made for Roeta and Magnir in their dragon forms were cobbled together quickly, so the Citadel is working on producing helmets for everyone else starting with Daniel and Neith.

The feldrok teen takes a slow and quiet breath. Her ears are still listening, but she’s not hearing any signs of the monster. It must be lying in wait to ambush her by her sounds. She’ll have to be extra careful.

Balinkons are patient predators, and Hekate is still surprised to hear Daniel’s telling of how he survived an encounter with one after it grabbed him. They strike so quickly that Hekate’s only defense when she was weak was to carefully look for the movement of their eyes or ears and to listen for the near-silent sound their claws make when they brace their rear nails more firmly against the structure of their hiding spot. She only had to avoid one, thankfully, and it was somewhat dumb-luck that she noticed those signs.

And, a hapless animal proved it was there when it walked into striking range.

With this monster, it is almost completely unnoticeable until it’s too late.

Now holding the grenade, Hekate grips the spoon and pulls the pin. The metallic ‘clink’ seems like it should be innocuous and unnoticeable. But, a faint noise like a deep-sounding wind passes through the forest, masked quickly by another creaking twang of the roots and moss floor flexing.

She can’t screw around, and she didn’t expect the pin to alert the creature stalking her. Hekate throws the grenade overhand, intentionally hitting the ground with a noticeable thud.

The teen counts in her head, One! She lowers to run. Two!

She can hear the tearing and ripping of roots and stringy foliage forming a thick, naturally-occuring fabric, and she kicks into a run as quickly as she can as her count reaches Three!

The ground ruptures once more where the grenade landed, with the ambusher pouncing out to try to grab again. In that moment, thunder erupts, and Hekate keeps her hands over her ear openings as tightly as possible, flinching in her run towards her helmet from the powerful blast. Something squeals behind and below her in surprise and pain; something big.

The young empress is focused on reaching her helmet, and she releases her ears as she’s getting close. As long as she keeps running, she should be able to dive out of the way if it tries to get ahead of her, since she now knows its basic strategy.

Of course, knowing its basic strategy assumes she has the right idea what kind of creature she’s dealing with.

The ground swells ahead of her right as she’s reaching her helmet, and she stumbles, trying to redirect her momentum. She’s willing to abandon her helmet if she needs to, and she probably has enough information to report back to the group. It may be better to simply teleport away at this point, but she’ll need to chant out loud, and the spell takes between twenty and thirty seconds to cast, depending how quickly she can intone the words.

Even if she whispers the words, the monster seems capable of finding even quiet noises.

The feldrok girl scrambles away from her helmet towards the right, using her broad tail to balance. The massive form of the monster spears out of the water and forest carpet, splashing a fountain of foul-smelling debris and detritus in every direction as it sweeps through the mess to try to grab her.

Hekate uses her magic to strengthen her body and muscles -a partially natural process like breathing-. It happens on its own, but she can focus deliberately on it to improve the function.

Doing so gives her greater strength and speed, and she squeezes every bit of her strength out to dive clear of the massive creature lunging at her.

If only she fully understood what kind of creature she is dealing with.

The ground ahead of where she is now sailing through the air just above the ground swells, and her heart skips a beat.

Another one!? Why can’t they just eat each other then!?

Not having time to find an answer to this panicked query, the ravenette spears her hand down to try to adjust her momentum by hitting the ground. The squishy carpet of macro-moss dulls the force she is trying to capitalize on, and she barely maneuvers at all.

Given what happens, she’s not sure if it would have made any difference.

Hekate understands now why she somewhat thought it was a head diving out of the ground and retreating, like a massive fish or a colossal worm. The second one spearing out of the water has an eyeball-looking organ at the center of the underside of a three-pronged, webbed ‘head’.

Or rather, a three-fingered and webbed hand, each ending in a small, sharp claw used to pierce out of the growth of the forest floor.

Both of the massive things close in on Hekate, slamming downwards with no regard to the matting of the ‘forest floor’, if it can truly be called that. In a dizzying and disorienting tumble of impacts and breaking plants and roots, followed by a breath-stealing splash of dark, tea-colored water, Hekate finds herself being crushed by an all-encompassing pressure and coldness.

She’s underwater.

The light barely pierces through to this creepy dark cavern, forming rays of false hope where one would still need to escape the canopy over the water formed by the roots of the huge trees that hide their mighty size beneath that same canopy, and the plants that have adapted to soak up every bit of sunlight remaining.

All at once, as the darkness closes in, Hekate feels her heart tighten and a deep voice growl in the deep recesses of the shadows of this foliage-shelled hollow oppressed by dark-colored water.

“Slave… You will never escape… You are nothing more than a little wretch… A disgusting and ugly creature spared only by my lack of interest in killing you…”

She is being dragged into the depths of the water by an unknown monster, and yet, a voice she would trade her own to never hear again seems to surround her.

The feldrok girl’s pulse quickens, and she struggles just to keep an eye on the light, barely able to find the monster’s flesh to push against.

She wasn’t dodging the heads of a large creature.

She was desperately avoiding the hands of a titanic colossus.

One she still has yet to see, thanks to the oppressive darkness of the strangled aquifer.

“Look at you! You are so weak! I could kill you at any time, whelp. Do something useful, or I might just kill you out of boredom.”

She wants to scream, but she is submerged, and her panic is clouding her judgement. Hekate has no business being a warrior. She has no business being a scout. She has no business being an Empress.

And… She has no business being with Daniel.

Enough of that, child… states a voice that startles her. Unlike the oppressive voice of Morthybargaron, which can only be a hallucination, this one is more gentle and feminine, though with deep tones. You are strong. You are strong of will, and you have strong allies. Focus, and you will overcome this challenge.

She tries to make sense of the voice, still struggling just to keep the pressure of the massive webbed hand from crushing her in addition to the squeezing weight of the water closing in on her. She can tell her submersion has slowed, and it’s likely the monster is inspecting her or preparing to shove her into its mouth. But, she still can’t see it.

That’s right, child. Solve your problems one at a time. Not all of your spells need to be chanted. Think quickly, but rely on your instincts. You are the apex predator of this world for a reason.

Hekate closes her eyes briefly. All it really does is close out what little light she could see only by virtue of how dark everything else is, but she is running out of time.

In addition to her heart racing, her lungs are starting to burn. She hasn’t even been brave enough to enter the bath without someone with her, since she never learned how to swim. Many of her instincts are for being a feldrok, which she has never in her memory been in her true form. Doephluev was the one who recently explained instincts to Hekate, and how they are ingrained into one’s very soul the moment they are created as a way to bring them forth into the future. She used it as an excuse for why she does what she does; she has to be Empress to protect the archoneldwyn race, even though she’s the first to admit that she has very little attachment to the idea of worrying about such things.

I don’t know who you are, but you’re better than hearing that dragon’s voice. So… first… What do I do?

This time, Hekate isn’t asking for advice, but to force herself to think. She doesn’t have much time.

I can’t see. I need to see. That’s it!

Hekate creates a small opening for her to form the needed hand gesture with her right hand, channelling her mana into a carefully curated flow through her hand. From there, she presses with her legs as tightly as she can, feeling the immense strength of the monster trying to crush her. She’s burning through her mana, but she has lots of it. What she’s running out of it is air, but to obtain more, she needs to make sure she doesn’t get eaten first.

She blasts her mana inwards intensely, creating an orb of pure magic that flashes brightly, creating a magic light. This orb of light sustains itself on the mana she just provided, and it glows with the brightness comparable to the flashlight on Daniel’s phone, which is tiny, but extremely bright. 

Hekate’s magic light is immensely bright, and the eyeball in the palm of the monster’s hand is illuminated for her to see, burning red and yellow in a somewhat sinister pattern. Her boots don’t seem to bother the ‘eyeball’, but it seems it might actually be one, just with a special eyelid over it, because the intense light of her magic orb causes it to recoil with a loud shriek in the water emanating from further away. 

The monstrous hand that caught her finally releases her, and Hekate drifts in the water, sinking thanks to her armor, but slowed a little by her hair and tail creating drag.

The teen watches the figure that she is finally able to grasp now that she is sinking away from it and the light is illuminating its shape.

Just from reading and studying with Erimaya, Hekate recognizes the monster as similar to the Strylak, possessing a large, serpent-like head that is shouldered by ten long, flexible prehensile arms, each ending in the strange hand-like appendages with three webbed fingers ending in sharp nails and a sinister looking eyeball on each palm.

The snake head of the monster has a pair of eyes as well, though much smaller than the ones on the palm. Hekate still isn’t certain the palm-eyeballs are for seeing, but she could see the monster using them to see the surface.

For now, the feldrok girl has a higher priority. She looks up at the surface, and she channels her magic again, focusing this time on a much more careful image in her head, since she needs a specific outcome.

She pulls a stream of air down from the surface using magic, bringing it to herself while sustaining the light that is causing the monster to recoil away and back into the dark depths of the strange underwater forest. It’s not completely open like a cavern, since there are sporadic trees growing through the deep water, and the monster uses its massive limbs to ‘climb’ out of view.

With the air stream, Hekate creates a bubble around herself, gasping in a breath just as she’s losing the last of her strength to hold her last one. Naturally, she is hit by the stink of the environment, but she has never been so relieved to ‘suffer’ something like a sickening odor.

She keeps pulling air down using her mana, catching her breath as she sinks the rest of the way to the floor of the veiled lake.

She has to be careful, though. She notices that the lingering magic light is relatively tiny compared to the vastness of the darkness around it, and there are a lot of blind spots thanks to the massive tree trunks penetrating the surface layer and reaching down to the lake floor as they fan out into a tapered root structure.

The monster is still out there. She knows it’s not the Strylak, since the legendary titan is said to be as large as a major Eastern castle. Using Fort Twilight as her point of reference, this creature is a small fraction of that size. It’s roughly Magnir’s size when he’s in dragon form, which is a bit smaller than Neith, but larger than the female dragons.

She didn’t see most of its actual body, since its arms have a large silhouette and it retreated quickly.

What does something that size eat? thinks Hekate to herself. Thinking about it as she searches the area, she remembers what Senn and the others discussed. Ah, right, if it’s a monster, it doesn’t need to eat.

She snaps her gaze towards the right when her mind convinces her there was motion. She has decent night vision, but true dark vision is limited. Additionally, the creature is adapted to this darkness and the strange shadows created by uneven light sources.

The bubble of air around her head is also distorting sound and her field of view. She can attempt to teleport out, but she’s not sure she knows where they are to return to the group so easily. Returning to the Citadel is easy, but teleporting to places she is unfamiliar with is much more difficult.

But, she doesn’t really know how to swim as it is.

Your instincts will kick in, child… whispers the voice.

“Who are you?”

You do not have time. Just know, we are on your side. Your true form will…

“No!” snaps Hekate. She doesn’t recognize the deep voice speaking to her, but one thing she is certain of; she will never, ever choose to take her true form.

“I would guess your coolness will exceed anyone else’s as well.” Daniel’s words return to Hekate’s mind. He was speaking of feldroks, and specifically Hekate if she were to ever take her form.

Okay, maybe not ‘never’... But,...

It is returning, child. You must act.

Hekate braces herself. She can’t see it, and she won’t be able to fight it very effectively in the water. She needs to train in more areas of battle. In fact, she needs to take fighting training more seriously and make Neith teach her.

“Grrrrr… RAH! Fine! Help me! But you better help me turn back!”

I will. Repeat after me,... replies the voice. What needs repeated isn’t in a language like normal speech, but Hekate is able to emulate the sounds. She has heard the same from the dragons when they change form, and the magic circle appears under her feat. She braces herself, and she can feel the magic in her body swirl and tumble out of her.

She’s committing a personal taboo, but she needs to get back to where she has control of the fight.

Or rather, since it’s just scouting, she needs to get back and report her findings so they can deal with what she found more appropriately.

She looks down at her hand as it starts to twist in shape, and her fingernails become dark black, sharpened claws.

The feldrok girl’s heart begins to race, and she has to close her eyes as she prepares to face one of her gravest nightmares.

***