Yuriko sighed while the boys and Krystal argued over the Avos’ quest. Krystal was completely sceptical about the entire matter while Orrin was all for it. Mikel didn’t really know what to think, and he said as much, but he followed Krystal’s lead. Heron said it was worth a shot and certainly better than just waiting.

“What do we know of the Avos anyway?” Mikel asked. “There’s not much about them in our school lectures.”

“I’ve mostly encountered them in stories and legends. There isn’t exactly a class on how to interact with Avos in school,” Orrin offered, “but from what limited research about them I’ve done, they are somewhat related to Wyldlings or, more specifically, the higher tier Chaos dwellers. But instead of being hostile to us, they only want to live in peace.”

“Avos have generally occupied the land before us,” Yuriko added. “I remember a few stories Da told us. They are Chaos dwellers who’ve bonded with the land, thereby dropping their, er… chaotic selves and embodying the place they inhabit.”

“Would they keep their word?” Krystal asked doubtfully.

“Like the Chaos dwellers, yes,” Heron added. “But be wary of the actual words they say. At least that’s what Pops usually says.”

“What were the words Shillogu said when he gave the quest?” Krystal asked.

“Er, not sure about the exact wording,” Orrin said sheepishly. “But it goes along the lines of, erm, we’ll give him ten Chaos shards and he will lead us to a weapon that can stop the Will behind the Wyldling Wave.” Orrin coughed, “I haggled him down to three shards.”

“Nice,” Mikel said.

“He will lead us to a weapon that could stop the Wyldling Wave,” Krystal said with narrowed eyes. “Lead, not give. Hmmm. Well, I guess that makes more sense. No artefact is worth just three shards. But…” Krystal bit her lips in worry, “What would it actually take to get the weapon? He made no assurance we could take it?”

Orrin gulped. “Oh, you’re right. He never said he’d give it to us. Chaos! How stupid of me!”

“What’s more, I’m sure Shillogu has traded for this information with others, especially if he was talking about a treaty. Why wouldn’t the Empire claim this artefact if it was so readily available? This might be just a scam to get us to give that old pig shards!”

“Huh, you have a point there,” Orrin said glumly. “I don’t want to agree with you, but that’s a very valid point.”

“Hmph! What, you got so eager haggling that you got swindled?” Heron crowed.

“Yes, yes. You had to be there though. He was so huge even his breathing would have knocked me over,” Orrin groused. “You can’t blame me for losing sight of a few things. Speaking of, he said something about Yuriko, too, but I can’t quite remember.”

“Yuri?” Krystal asked.

Yuriko waved away the question. “It’s not important. I still say we should give it a try anyway. What have we got to lose?”

“Three shards?”

“That’s just a few gold marks,” Yuriko said.

“Just a few gold marks?” Orrin blurted. “Come on, that’s a lot of money!”

Yuriko blinked at him. “Didn’t you want to support completing the quest?”

“Ahem, uh, yes.” Orrin flushed and looked away. “Well, we already have two with us, so we only need to look for one more.”

“That’s still two silver crowns worth for each of us,” Krystal noted. “Per HiJin of shard.”

“You forgot the Watchtower’s tax. We’ll only get six silver marks per HiJin,” Orrin corrected.

“Wow, that’s highway robbery,” Heron muttered.

“Well, if we use up the shards for this quest and we succeed in defeating the Wave, we won’t lose money. Even if it doesn’t succeed we’ll only lose a few silver marks instead of gold,” Yuriko reasoned.

“Your arithmetic is a bit dubious,” Krystal snorted.

“Whatever!” Yuriko said crossly. “By the way, didn’t you use one to repair my Plasma Caster?” Yuriko asked with a frown.

“I only shaved off a little bit of the shard. I think it would still count. Besides, the one we got from the Hunter is bigger than the Wanderer’s.” Orrin pulled out the Hunter’s shard. It was a prism about half as long as his thumb, though one sharp point had been filed down. “It was six HiJin before. Now five.”

The Wanderer’s shard looked less like a crystal and more a pebble with sharp edges. Side by side, only the light-absorbing properties were the same, though if she looked hard enough, there was a swirl of multi-hued motes inside the Hunter’s shard.

“We only have to hunt down a single Wanderer and we could trade it in for the location,” Orrin continued.

“Well, I suppose it’s worth a try,” Krystal said hesitantly. “But for now, Yuriko and Heron must completely recover before we even try it. It’s too dangerous otherwise.”

“But...” Yuriko started protesting until Krystal poked her finger into Yuriko’s side.

“Recover. Completely,” she said firmly. “You’re our striker, without you at full capacity, we’ll have a hard time bringing a Wanderer down. Let’s focus on that first.”

Aside from their usual patrols, they’d also spent time improving their living conditions. While Yuriko mostly spent her time wandering in the forest, the boys and Krystal worked on building up their supplies. They now had a collection of clay pots lined up along one wall--misshapen gourds that held water and an assortment of wild vegetables. They’d gathered enough to last them a couple more days without having to use up their ration bars.

The boys had also built a makeshift smokehouse over the campfire using broad leaves and branches. The meat was hung on spits with the smoke from the fire trapped under the roof. It was what Krystal used now to prepare their dinner: the usual stew with meat, tubers, mushrooms, and wild onions.

Yuriko watched as their meal started coming together, running her Golden Recovery all the while, and her tummy soon began growling furiously.

With an amused look, Krystal ladled some stew into a bowl for her before doing the same for the others.

“Thanks.”

That night, Krystal wanted to exempt Yuriko from watch duty but she refused. In fact, Yuriko prefered first watch simply because she liked sleeping straight through the night and, well, her sleep schedule matched the end of the first watch.

The evening was quiet and her watch ended without incident. Before she turned in, she activated her Facet.

The Golden Silhouette, in its female form, showed her an entirely different pattern this time. It built off Recovery and Boost and Yuriko suspected it was the next step in the Strengthen Physique technique set. If she remembered correctly, the third and final technique involved a semi-permanent boost to her physique, though it also meant a good quarter of her Animus reserves would be tied up in maintaining the pattern.

One of the main advantages of the techniques the Golden Silhouette taught her was that she didn’t need to inlay the patterns to make use of it effectively in combat. Sure it was a bit slower to start-up and it involved having her split her focus several times, something that wasn’t easy to do, but with her practice of dividing her Animus into strands, it was doable.

After the silhouette finished and as she drifted off to sleep, she wondered why such circulation patterns weren’t in common use. Although the subject of inlaying patterns had not been in their curriculum before the Atavism Ritual, she and the others had asked Armsmaster Byrne during the early training classes.

What was taught was that a technique had to be honed until it’s pattern could be inlaid, which would take up a portion of their Animus reserves but in exchange, the technique could be executed as fast as they could feed their Animus to the pattern, much like how Facets worked.

Yuriko’s Facet took up a tenth of her reserves, about ten lumens worth out of her hundred and five from the measurement done immediately after the Atavism Ritual. If she unlocked more of her Heritage and inlaid another Facet, it would give her another technique as well as all the experience her ancestors had on using it. Theoretically anyway. That her Facet wasn’t like that at all was worrying, though the techniques she learned from the Golden Silhouette were incredible. Still, she had mixed feelings about the entire thing. Why didn’t she awaken the Davar Heritage instead?

When she woke up the next morning, all of her wounds had closed and the shallower cuts had all but disappeared, not even leaving a scar.

“How?” Krystal muttered as she examined Yuriko’s skin in their shared bedroom. Krystal ran her hands all over, checking where each of the scratches had been. The bandages were still in place, of course, but the wounds they were supposed to be covering had nearly vanished. Only the deep puncture on Yuriko’s thigh remained but as a scabbed over wound that looked like it was several days old. The bruises had disappeared too.

Yuriko shrugged. She was feeling much better, of course, but she was ravenous. Her tummy growled loudly enough that Krystal was startled out of her inspection.

“Hmmm, well, I guess your body needs fuel after all that healing,” Krystal muttered. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What did you do?”

“Recovery.”

“Yuri, Recovery isn’t this fast, especially with open wounds. Just look at Heron! Even if there’s no scarring, it's never this fast! Unless you’ve reached Knight level or higher which you clearly aren’t. Well, spill the beans!”

“It’s my Facet. It changed how Recovery works for me. And it changed the pattern, too.”

“It changed the pattern?” Krystal yelped. “Are you sure that’s safe?”

Yuriko pointed at her wounds, or lack thereof, and gave her childhood friend a pointed look.

“Right. Of course. But we don’t know if there are any side effects.”

“Well, I can’t do anything about it now,” Yuriko shrugged. “I can’t use the old version of Recovery after I learned this one. I wanna eat!” she groaned.

“Fine, fine. Let’s go.”

After chowing down more food than the three boys combined, Yuriko leaned back against her makeshift chair and let out a satisfied sigh. Krystal giggled to herself while the boys gaped at her with their spoons frozen halfway to their mouths, the contents long since spilt back into their bowls.

“I was hungry,” she said, rolling her eyes at their shocked faces.

“Huh,” Heron grunted then shoved his spoon into his mouth only to frown when he realised it was empty. Krystal’s giggles had, by then, turned to peals of laughter.

After they finished cleaning up, they planned their next move.

“We have to find a Wanderer first,” Orrin insisted. “I suggest we have Krystal scout one out and give us word when she finds one.”

“Right, I’ll send a messenger crane back here.” Krystal pulled out a messenger sheet and started imprinting it with her Animus. “Yuri, you imprint as the recipient.”

Yuriko channelled her Animus into a fingertip and touched the sigil on the paper. Krystal then tapped the ready sigil and the paper folded itself into a crane. She then kept it in a pocket. The crane only needed a fresh infusion of Animus to home in on Yuriko. The messenger crane’s range was about a league but in the forest that might be cut in half.

“Don’t scout alone,” Yuriko said.

“I’ll go with her,” Heron said firmly. “I can hold off a Wanderer long enough for you to get to us.”

“How are your injuries?”

Heron undid his jacket and undershirt, to show scabbed over wounds. There was a bit of red surrounding each puncture but they weren’t swollen. He flexed his arm and only winced when he stretched too far. “I can handle it.”

“Try not to get spotted,” Mikel reminded them. “You can lure the Wanderer back here or Yuri could snipe at them.”

With Heron and Krystal hunting for a target, Yuriko, Mikel, and Orrin made plans for how to barricade the campsite and prepare fallback positions. Most of the buildings in the village had long since collapsed, and even their campsite was more a collection of broken walls than anything else. So the first order of business was to shore up the walls.

Using some clay from the lakeside, Mikel’s firepower, and Orrin’s Facet that allowed him to push at things, they managed to repair the walls of their building well enough that it would take some effort for a Wanderer to break through. Probably.

The morning passed with the three of them hard at work and by the afternoon, they had completed most of their preparations.

Krystal and Heron returned near sunset. Heron had a bunch of rabbits with broken necks hanging off his backpack.

“No luck,” Krystal sighed. “We went south but all we saw were corpses. I think Shillogu destroyed every last Wyldling he could find.”

“Well, I suppose that’s good, too,” Yuriko said.

“Yes, but we won’t be able to complete the quest.”

“I’ve completely recovered, so I’ll help scout tomorrow.”

“She also finished off all our meat,” Mikel grumbled. “I thought we had enough for the week. At least you got more.”

“Ehehehe.”

They shared a quick dinner and afterwards, Yuriko held the first watch. She stared up at the sky. The Chaos flows were barely visible tonight. The moon was close to full and its silvery light drowned out everything else.

During the day, she had examined the skill cube her Da had given her and she had remembered the next set technique correctly. The last technique wasn’t something she could practice without inlaying the first two techniques as it built off the patterns of both. Using it would make the effects of Recovery and Boost permanent but at the cost of occupying most of her Anima. The Strengthen Physique technique gave only a fraction of Boost and Recovery’s effect, but it didn’t cost any Animus to keep going. It also meant that most other techniques cannot be inlaid at all. It was basically a trade off between specialized techniques and a general boost.

By this time, it was honestly a moot point since she couldn’t even practice the old versions anymore. She settled into a meditative pose and circulated seven strands of Animus in the pattern taught by the silhouette.

‘It's a circulation pattern, so it shouldn’t be permanent,’ she thought.

She was still on watch though, so if the meditation took too much of her attention, she’d stop and continue it after. But to her surprise, after the first circulation, the pattern practically ran itself. With a hiss, she suddenly realized that it consumed a tenth of her reserves in that first run, and consumed another tenth in the second.

She couldn’t stop it; it swirled in her Anima then in her physical body again and again, dropping her Animus until she only had a tiny fraction left. Exactly seven circulations later and it was done. She collapsed in a heap, breathing heavily. Her body was sore. Even her bones hurt and she could barely move or speak.

It took Yuriko a few minutes to regain her mobility and she staggered to her room and woke Krystal up by collapsing on top of the other girl.