“Oooh.”

Yuriko groaned as she stirred awake.

The incessant waves turned out to be a potent enough lullaby to knock her out. The warmth of the afternoon sun didn’t help either. Plus, her body ached. It was as if someone had beaten every inch of her from the inside out. Dull sore points. Some sharp, shooting pain, and general malaise.

Using Boost for so long didn’t help. She’d drained her Animus reserves down to twenty percent in an effort to escape the water. With a muted groan, she activated Recovery.

“Argh!” Yuriko toppled over when the pain intensified a hundredfold. “What the--?”

Was she that wounded?

Cautiously, she activated Recovery again, though this time using far less Animus than she normally did. It worked in lessening the pain, but the speed of healing slowed considerably too. Shaking her head, she stood up. She wasn’t really incapacitated so she was better off conserving her Animus. She envisioned her reserves to check.

“Just a quarter empty?” she exclaimed.

Sure, she had a nap, but even so, Animus didn’t recover that quickly. She shouldn’t have slept overnight either otherwise her reserves would be full.

She relaxed her hold on her Anima, and just as the golden flames started to manifest, she was rewarded with another blast of pain. Her muscles twitched and she felt as though she couldn’t get enough air to breathe. With a gasp, she retracted her Anima.

What was wrong with her? Or maybe the better question was what wasn’t wrong? She survived a foray into the Primordial Chaos Sea intact. It wouldn’t be surprising that she had some injuries to both her physical body and her Anima.

Grrrgl!

Yuriko reached into her satchel and took out a ration bar. The seawater made the waxed paper stick to the bar, but Yuriko was almost too hungry to pick it off. Well, a few bits now and then wouldn’t harm her. The bar was saltier from the dip, which improved its natural flavour threefold.

After her meal, she got up and dusted the sand off the seat of her pants. The nap had dried out her clothing, though her camisole was wrinkled something fierce. She hoped the cotton weave didn’t degenerate from the abuse she put it through. Who knew how far she was from civilization.

She brushed her hair away from her eyes and looked around. She was somewhat thankful that nothing had taken a bite out of her while she slept. Aside from the sound of the waves, she couldn’t hear much of anything else.

She didn’t see any birds in the sky and neither did she see any of the local fauna. She once read that beaches often had crabs? Maybe some turtles?

The sands were undisturbed save for the waves, and where she was at, the sand was white and dry. And scalding hot, for that matter. Not that that bothered her much.

She was in a cove, now that she got a better look around. It was about a few paces shy of a longstride wide. The waves were calmer now, and she could see the sandbars just outside of the enveloping tree-covered land.

The tree line was just about fifty paces away from her, with thick underbrush and vine-covered trees. There was a group of palm trees a couple dozen paces away, each tree was at least a dozen paces tall.

Yuriko trudged over there, kicking up sand with every step. Pins and needles went up and down her limbs. She needed a safer place where she could focus on using Recovery, and the version Damien taught her that soothed and helped refine her Anima.

The space between the palm trees was just enough that she could lie down and have a space to build a campfire. The winds that blew from the sea were cool, and she thought that by the time evening came along, the temperature would drop.

She left her backpack against the base of a palm. She left her Plasma Caster there too, though she took her combat knife and Plasma Lancet. Then she headed towards a pile of driftwood near the waves.

The woodpile was taller than she was and fairly damp. She grabbed the top ones and tossed them further from the sea until she uncovered a relatively dry pile near the bottom. She gathered a handful and returned to her camp.

The Radiant Sun dropped steadily towards the western mists, which was in the direction of the jungle. She was too sore to hunt or forage. She had to heal as many of her wounds as quickly as possible. Hopefully, Damien will be able to talk by tomorrow.

The fear that she was lost and there was no way back… That particular emotion she rammed into the back of her mind.

The breeze was picking up by now. Yuriko dropped the firewood outside of the copse. She picked a couple of logs to start her campfire though. The first one she lay perpendicular to the wind. The second one she shaved with her combat knife for tinder, wincing when she channelled a bit of her Animus to protect the blade. Then she broke up what was left into small twigs. She placed the tinder next to the windbreak log and leaned the twigs over it. Once the campfire was ready, she focused on her Animus, channelling the desire for heat into her extrusion. She touched it off against the tinder, though it took a minute before it started smouldering.

Soon enough, she had a good fire going, and she felt relatively secure enough to begin her meditations. Still, just to be safe… She walked up to the nearest tree trunk and carved a relatively simple line of runescript with her combat knife. The sequence was at the last page of the Neophyte Rune Scribe, and was a simple proximity alarm. All told, it was about five words long, and should anything approach the ward, it would send her Anima a pulse of warning. She filled it with her Animus, both to key it to her and to power it. The absence of materials meant that the runescript ward could not be self sufficient.

Satisfied, Yuriko settled into a seated meditation pose and channeled Recovery. Even with the Golden Silhouette’s version, she felt as if ants were crawling under her skin, biting her every now and then. Her muscles spasmed, clenching painfully and twitching. Her breath came in gasps, and even still, she felt as if she couldn’t get enough air no matter how hard she inhaled. The suffocating feeling wasn’t that bad, yet, but it stopped her from sinking fully into a meditative trance.

She felt every second crawl, every minute that passed like hours. All while tiny insects danced inside her flesh. Sweat broke out on her forehead. It dripped down into her eyes, seeping inside though she had them closed. “Ancestors.” She muttered, annoyed almost beyond endurance. But she kept at it. Cycle by cycle, she could feel her body recover.

Grrrgle!

By the time she was done, her tummy was growling loud enough to drown out the waves. She fished out another ration bar and wolfed it down in three bites. Then, before she could think of it, drained the contents of her canteen. Only when the last drop splashed against her lips did she realize that she’d effectively used up all of her drinking water. “Swarm fodder.”

She wiped her lips and looked around. There was plenty of water, but it was too salty to be safe to drink. She dug out the small pot from her camping kit and trudged to the water. She waded into the surf and bent down to scoop some water into the pot, except the first time she did so, she got sand into it. Grumbling, she waded into deeper water, all the way up to her knees and filled the pot.

When she returned, she placed the pot next to the campfire and scaled up the tree, plucking a couple of leaves from the top. There were greenish fruits just below the tree that were about the size of her head, so she plucked a couple too. The leaves she let drop to the sand, but the fruits she carried down with her.

She propped the pot over the campfire and arranged the leaves so that the steam would condense on it then drip down into the bowl she placed over the side. That was the idea anyway. Except she placed the leaves and the pot too close to the fire which subsequently burned the leaves.

Muttering imprecations under her breath, she climbed up and plucked some more leaves and rebuilt her distillery a bit further from the flames. By dusk, she had a couple of mouthfuls of water on the bowl that she transferred over into the canteen. She gathered one more potful of seawater to distil. She also added a couple more logs to her lean-to fire. Who knew that Natural Science class was actually useful?

She took a swallow from the canteen. It was still slightly salty and had a strange aftertaste, but it was potable.

The Chaos streams from the sky were oddly muted. She also couldn’t see the Luminous Moon, but maybe it hadn’t risen yet? It couldn’t be the Dark Moon, right? She would have seen the black circle at night in that case. It had been the Full Moon when she was in Rumiga, if it was the Dark Moon now, then two weeks must have passed.

Kato was right, the Chaos Sea dulled her sense of time just like the Celestial Refraction did. Strangely enough, the breeze blew in from the jungle now, instead of the water, making her lean-to campfire practically useless. She had to place another log that served as a windbreak so that the meagre fire wouldn’t go out.

Graaaaahh!!! Awoooo! Raaaaah!

Yuriko stared at the jungle where the howls came from. The sound didn’t come just from directly in front of her but was spread out across the entire expanse. Well, at least that meant that there were other living things here.

She took hold of the large green fruit she got and tried to open it. It was mostly fibrous, and she must have dug away at half of the entire thing before she got to a spherical shell.

“Huh.”

Yuriko had never seen such fruit before and she hoped it was actually edible. Shrugging, she cracked it open only for the water inside to spill over and soak her pants.

“Water?” she muttered.

About a third of the liquid remained, along with a pale white…meat? She took a careful sip, then gulped down the entire thing. She scratched at the white stuff and nibbled on it while her tummy growled in approval. She finished the entire fruit in less than a minute. Sated, she wiped her chin with the back of her hand and settled down for her evening ablutions.

She had her toiletries, of course, but the supplies wouldn’t last her more than a couple of weeks at most. So she simply rinsed her mouth with some water and salt, then settled down to rest. The waves, the breeze, and the occasional howls accompanied her until she slept, and then, it was dreams.

When she opened her eyes, she knew immediately that it was a dream. For one thing, she was staring out from behind Damien’s eyes, and for another, she was in a grand hall dozens of paces wide. The ceiling was covered in elaborate paintings of patterns, though she couldn’t remember what they looked like as soon as she looked away.

In front of her was a long table laden with food. A whole roast suckling pig, platters of roasted vegetables smothered in butter, sliced beef. The people around the table weren’t eating though. Instead, it looked like they were arguing. Yuriko didn't understand the language they used, though it was tantalizingly familiar. Damien, for his part, was leisurely drinking from a jewelled goblet.

A beautiful woman was right across Damien, face twisted in annoyance while the others around her argued. She had long honey-coloured hair, an elfin face, and smoky eyes. Every now and then, she looked at Damien and winked. Yuriko could feel the man chuckle but otherwise didn’t react.

Beside the honey-haired woman sat another with bright green tresses. Her face was covered with white powder, but there were two red runes on her face. As with the ceiling, Yuriko couldn’t seem to hold on to what those runescript looked like once she looked away. A man sat beside her, his physique rivalled Damien, but he looked several inches shorter. His silvery hair was cropped short, but he had a luxurious moustache. His face was red with anger while he gesticulated fiercely.

The arguing went on for several minutes, while Damien simply watched. There were a dozen others, but other than the two women and the moustachioed man, Yuriko couldn’t get a good glimpse of them.

Finally, Damien stood up and chopped his hand down. The other eleven people settled into silence and looked at him expectantly. She could feel Damien grin. Feel his pulse start to race. Whatever it was he was about to say, he very much anticipated the repercussions. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak a word, the dream dissolved and Yuriko found herself with the dawn’s light stabbing into her eyes.