That evening, Yuriko sat in a meditative pose on her bed and continued her experiments. The afternoon had been spent shopping at the Provisioner’s Lane with the Foster twins, who arrived at the gatehouse waiting area a few minutes after she’d completed her quick practise.

The trip there was mostly spent with her deep in thought, while Braden and Orrin nattered between themselves. She left it to Braden to haggle on her behalf, allowing her to pick up several bottles of common spices and a couple of Rumiga City Special Mix. The bottles cost about five Sovereigns each, though purchased in bulk, Braden managed to lower the price by about half. Afterwards, they bought enough ration bars to last each of them a week.

She treated both of them to dinner at Mama Blu’s as thanks for helping her. Braden tried to pay for the meal but she didn’t let him. Afterwards, they parted ways at the Academic Roundabout, at the midpoint between the two dormitories.

After a lengthy bath and an equally long session petting Hunter Cat, she found herself wrestling with her Animus.

The mote of distilled Chaos flitted about in her Anima, though she was careful to keep it inside. It took a third of a third of her Animus to distil a single mote, so about ten lumens worth? The exercise hit two goals, she supposed. Damien did say that she needed ambient Chaos for her Anima to rebuild itself after she strained it.

Well then, time to strain her Anima. She sunk into a meditative trance, coursing as much Animus as possible into her palms. She was tempted to do it with two discs but held back her eagerness.

It took about ten minutes for the Pure Animus to stain with ambient Chaos and about the same amount of time for her to distil it. So after an hour and ten minutes, she didn’t have enough Animus left to continue.

Eight motes of distilled Chaos spun around her core, looking much like fireflies above a campfire. Afterwards, she practised Master Alfein’s braiding techniques and for the first time, managed to braid five cords of five strands each.

“Huh.” Yuriko blinked in surprise.

Shrugging to herself, she got up to pick the skill cube and, while holding it, demonstrated that she had achieved the requirements for the next level. The moment she was finished, a red dot appeared in the middle of each of the cube’s faces and Master Alfein’s voice appeared in her mind.

“Well done. The next step is to bring the braids outside of your Anima and manipulate them as far away from your body as you can. Begin with strands filled with your Intent. Once you can control them from at least as far as twenty-four inches from your skin, you will have completed this level.”

The recording ended and Yuriko put away the skill cube. However, she was pretty much done for the night, so she grabbed the cat and hugged him until he squeaked, giggling as he flailed out of her arms and angrily glared at her as she settled to sleep.

She was tempted to spend the rest of her Animus to activate her Facet. Then again, if she did, her core would be empty for a while.

The next couple of days were much the same. She trained her body in the morning, her Animus manipulation techniques afterwards, ate, bathed, and generally stayed inside her room. From her window, she could easily see the darkened skies and the colours of the Chaos streams. It was mostly dark blues and purples, and she really couldn’t discern if they were flowing in one direction from the lack of contrast.

The sun’s rays barely touched the earth, though she enjoyed the little that came through as much as she could. When she woke up, two motes of distilled Chaos had disappeared. She wasn’t sure where it went, but she didn’t feel much different. Still, she supposed it was a good way to train. But she didn’t feel the strain, and that made her somewhat worried.

Damien hadn’t spoken in her mind, nor visited her in her dreams. When she used her Facet, nothing much changed, except that the Golden Silhouette demonstrated the techniques she came up with and Master Alfein’s manipulation exercises too.

The difference was that the silhouette moved the braided cords mostly around her core, and created the spinning disc on her back instead of over her palms.

“Wider area of coverage?”

Following suit, she found that making the disc on her back allowed her to make it bigger without leaving her area of control, thus making the conversion process more efficient.

As for the braided cords, spinning them around her core first made it a bit easier to control when she brought them out of her Anima. Progress on using the braided cords with the sword dances had stopped since she didn’t have enough Animus to do both exercises properly in a day, but she knew that neglecting that wouldn’t be good either.

She came up with a proper training rotation, with sword dance, distillation, and manipulation exercised in sequence.

The morning after she bought spices, Krystal had sent her a messenger crane apologising for the lack of a response. Apparently, she, Mikel, and the rest of the Agaza students had been drafted into civil work. They were making rounds in the Upper Ring and the Mid Rings, helping shop owners and residents ready themselves for the storm.

They mostly made sure that windows were secured, there were no loose fittings that could get blown off, and hunting vermin.

So it went until the 31st Day of Air. Days when she spent most of the time indoors, working on her Anima strength and struggling through reading textbooks. That morning, the skies were a beautiful blue and the Radiant Sun shed heat as though it was still the Season of Fire.

It was a serene moment, that morning, with Hunter cat gnawing on a bird at the corner of her bed. Then, in a movement so slow that it looked completely surreal, black cracks appeared on the eastern border. It crawled up to the sky, comically slow, but it built up speed until the cracks reached up almost to the apparent position of the sun. Then green mist seeped in.

“Ancestors!”

A furious ringing of the bells broke the silence, jolting Yuriko out of her fascination. She was still in her pyjamas so she hurriedly changed out of them, took her grab bag of necessities, scruffed the cat and tossed him inside her sweater, shuttered the windows, then ran out the door. The hallway was filled with dormers hurriedly walking to the lounge area. Most of the older kids had serious faces on, while the freshers had pale and sweating faces.

Yuriko joined the crowd, the cat’s head popped out of the neck of her jacket, though he was content to stay there. At the lounge, the dorm mistress directed them to another hallway that led into stairs that led down into the ground. The path was lit with pale yellow panels shaped like arrows.

Down they went, the beat of their footsteps echoing in the confined space, and the susurration of hundreds of girls was nearly deafening. What must have been at least ten flights of stairs eventually led into a largish cavern and there they were to stay until the storm abated.

In the meantime, the ground shook, and a sudden pressure came down on Yuriko’s back, almost driving her to her knees. The girls around her gasped and fell, there was a scream, and the lights flickered, growing increasingly bright, until with a loud buzz and crackle, the panels shattered and they were left in the utter darkness.

_____

“Big brother, I'm scared!” Kiruna shivered against Lukas’ arm while they huddled in a small room not too deep inside the mountain wall. Their new residence had been too exposed, Lukas thought, and a Chaos Storm was nothing to sneeze at.

The moment the skies cleared had been the signal for them to move. Most of the people living in the Lower Ring simply shuttered their houses. The winds, rain, thunder and lightning was bad enough, but nothing a well-made house couldn’t weather. Instead, it was the inevitable aftermath that was the most dangerous.

Well, since they had a choice, Lukas brought his sister over to Mazer Emporium’s Shelter that was accessible through the warehouse. It took an hour to get there on foot but there was a Chaos Storm every year or so and Lukas knew how much time he had between the clear skies, the breaking, and the maelstrom. So they made it quite easily, though the lamp lights had already started shutting down from oversaturation.

When it grew dark, Lukas held out a finger and moved a lumen of Animus at the tip. His finger shone like candlelight, though the shade of his Animus was orange, just a few shades off from yellow.

“Waaaah!” Kiruna giggled and clapped her hands, bringing a smile to Lukas’ face. He couldn’t keep this up for very long; there would be a few minutes of illumination before the lumen was consumed, but that was fine. In the intervening weeks since he’d drunk that first vial of Zoi Elixir, he managed to raise his reserves by ten lumens, fifty percent more than what he had initially available. He needed another ten lumens to advance out of Novice. Of course, ten lumens out of his current forty had been permanently used to inlay his Facet and upon advancing, he would have to inlay another ten lumens, which would eat up whatever he gained.

Becoming an Apprentice was worth it though. Not only will the density of his Animus increase, meaning he’d be able to achieve more with less, but his body would also grow stronger. Not by much, if he was being honest with himself. Training to build up his body took time, dedication, and resources, but potential would be there, ready to be brought out.

His hand absently rubbed the pommel of his combat knife. It was hidden under his coat, but quite easily accessible.

Light from another person’s Animus soon lit up the chamber. The room was mostly bare, having only thin bedrolls for comfort. The walls were etched with draining runescript that would siphon the excess ambient Chaos the storm brought over. There were about a dozen small families in the chamber, each with a backpack filled with food. There was a water line at a corner and a partitioned area where they could relieve themselves.

The entrance wasn’t closed yet, since the storm hadn’t descended fully. It would only take moments to shut and bar the steel-reinforced doors to the hallway. The shelter was one of many under the mountain.

Lukas had been here quite a few times in his life, back when their parents had been alive and they were allowed access. The hallway outside led to many of these chambers, but they also led deeper into the natural caverns, which eventually led to the planar barrier.

Technically, it was just as dangerous here as it was outside since the force of the storm could be funnelled into the narrow corridors but since the Legion had most of those pathways blocked, it wasn’t much of a danger.

Under the light of Lukas’ Animus, Kiruna started weaving a lanyard out of a pile of cloth strips she’d kept in her pockets.

“You’ll ruin your eyes that way.” He said.

“It’s fine, the house isn’t much brighter.”

“Ah.”

The minutes seemed to flow so slowly. As with anyone who’d gone through the Atavism Ritual, Lukas had a natural body clock that was accurate to the second, but he was still surprised to realise that it had only been a few minutes since they entered the shelter.

With nothing better to do, and since it was just an hour or so after dawn, Lukas sat in a meditative pose and started envisioning his Anima. His training had paid off and he could deploy an Empowered Strike in a couple of seconds instead of the near half minute it took him the first time around.

Aengus had advised him to inlay it but that would permanently eat up five lumens for the first tier. Of course, that meant he’d be able to use the technique almost at the speed of thought, but he wondered if he even needed that speed.

It wasn’t as if he was going to fight other Awakened. At least, he hoped not. For defence against the rare Wyldling, basic knowledge of the technique was enough. Still, he performed the exercises prescribed.

He touched the pommel of his knife though he didn’t draw it. He focused on his Intent. He needed to cut. He needed to slice through whatever his edge touched.

A tendril of orange Animus formed, pulled from the motes in his core. It stretched and narrowed, forming a thin wedge. He moved it up to his shoulder and down to his fingertip, and into the blade. He could feel a tenuous connection with the steel. He could taste the coppery stench of spilt blood. He could feel it. Though it was as though he saw it through a veil. A suggestive outline but the details obscured.

With a breath, he pulled it out of his weapon and moved it to his other hand and along his index finger. A thin glow came out of his fingertip, though it was much different from the one he used before. That one had been bulbous and soft, this one, narrow and hard. He could cut something, or someone if he ran his finger along it. Not very deep, but enough to draw blood. Or cut the strings of a purse.

He released his breath and the Animus lost its shape and dissipated in the air.

“Waaah! Do it again!”

Lukas opened his eyes to see Kiruna’s face but a few inches away. Cold sweat ran down his back. If she had touched his hand, she would have been hurt!

“Kiru, don’t do that,” he hissed nervously.

“What?”

“Don’t get too close. You could get hurt!”

“But you’d never hurt me.” Kiruna grinned up at him.

“No,” he sighed, “I won’t. I’ll keep you safe.” Lukas ruffled Kiruna’s hair and she giggled.

The next moment, the air grew heavy.

“Ah!” Kiruna tipped over and her face pressed on the bedroll. Lukas could barely move.

“Close…the…door!”

A chorus of moans answered him, and he realised…nobody else could move. The runescript on the wall started to glow. Then to smoke.