“We don’t have to go that way,” Tiernan insisted. “The Horizon’s that way.”

The silhouette they saw was nearly three hundred paces away, but according to his reckoning, heading in a straight line towards the Horizon would bypass the shadowy thing by more than fifty paces. They could circle around to make sure they weren’t spotted, too.

But Yuriko was curious. Who lived in this grey plane? Or Waypoint. Hmm, she wasn’t sure, really. Her experience with the things was limited to the Tidelands between Kogasi and Bella, as well as when the Ebon Horizon had been stranded on the island.

The density of the ambient Chaos was thicker here, more than Kogasi by two orders of magnitude. At least. Cracks continued to form at the edges of her Anima, especially now that she had it fully flared. Thankfully, Fri’Avgi’s well of distilled Chaos didn’t look like it would run dry soon. She wondered where the artefact found that much Chaos.

As for the silhouette, it was roughly humanoid in size but the outline was blurred. In fact, its colour was the same as the rocks all around them, grey and lifeless. If not for the fact that stuck out and there were no other landmarks, she was sure she would have missed it.

“Who knows if there are more of them in whatever direction we take?” Yuriko said absently.

She felt Tiernan flinch, open his mouth to protest, then stop, swallowing his words. He bobbed his head, deferring to her decision. She wasn’t sure why he was so deferential though, he was older than she. Well, perhaps the fact that she was his only way to survive had more to do with it. Shrugging to herself, she continued to observe the silhouette.

It hadn’t moved an inch and since the outline was so blurry, she wasn’t even sure if it breathed. For all they knew it was a rock formation that happened to look like a man. But still, their surroundings were flat. Why would something like that pop out of the blue?

Well, standing around wouldn’t satisfy her burning curiosity. She spun her Animus blade in a lazy circle, patted her Plasma Lancet to reassure her that she still had some ranged capability, then took a step forward. Tiernan drew his Lancet and held it in both hands, though he kept it pointed to the ground. He also adopted a hunched over stance that felt weird to Yuriko.

“It’s a dual Lancet,” Tiernan said when she glanced at him. “Fires engraved stone slugs and plasma. The solid slugs make the Lancet recoil.”

“Oh.”

Solid projectile weapons weren’t in much use in Rumiga, since most of their foes were Chaos dwellers. Huh, if they had those kinds of weapons when they fought the barbarians, maybe the camps wouldn’t have suffered so many casualties.

Shaking her head, she said, “If you extend your arms out fully, your weapon and hands will stick out of my Anima.”

“Oh.” He took a step back and adjusted his positioning. “You mean your Protective Field.”

“Ah, yes.”

They proceeded at a cautious walk, though Yuriko took care not to focus solely on the silhouette in front. There may be others in the periphery, possibly prone to avoid detection.

Despite how obvious they must be, with her Anima throwing golden light that should be visible for at least a longstride around, the silhouette didn’t move. The closer they came to it, the stronger the sense of wrongness came to Yuriko. Once they were less than fifty paces away, the blurriness of the outline resolved, and she could see that it was indeed a person. In grey robes that practically concealed everything else. The hood was facing a different direction; towards the Horizon, Yuriko thought.

The sound of their footsteps echoed oddly and it wasn’t until they were merely twenty paces away that the figure seemed to hear them. It slowly turned its body towards them, as though the air around it were mud and it had to fight to move.

She didn’t know what she expected to see. Perhaps a human being, maybe a beastkin from Bella. But when the hooded figure turned completely towards them, its face was covered entirely in shadow. Her Enhanced Sight couldn’t penetrate the darkness at all.

It watched them wordless, making no other move. Tiernan glanced at her, but didn’t say anything. He did raise his Lancet a bit, ready to snap up to firing position at the blink of an eye.

“Hello?” Yuriko called out. Her voice was louder than she intended, and it thundered across the grey plains. Tiernan jumped in surprise, but the figure did nothing.

Oh.

It raised its hand and pointed at her, and now, she could see flesh. The hand was human, but it was blackened and covered in fine cracks. Flakes drifted off from its skin, even as it pointed at her.

“You are not Pure,” the voice hissed.

It was no language that she knew, but she understood it. Her mind suddenly pounded with a headache, as if something hit the back of her head. She flinched, but didn’t blink.

The hooded figure didn’t move or say anything else, but his hand didn’t waver. “You are unclean. Leave!”

“I–” she started to say.

“Leave! Or forever stay.”

The robes suddenly collapsed, as though what held it up disappeared. In fact, the hand turned transparent before vanishing.

“Ancestors!” Tiernan breathed.

His voice trembled and his hands shook. The moment that finger had pointed at them, he had snapped into a firing position, but now, the Lancet’s muzzle wavered so much that she doubted he’d hit anything close to what he aimed for.

Yuriko frowned, thoughts churning.

Pure? Unclean? What did that thing mean? And she intended very much to leave. She had no reason to stay. The robes were still there. She took a couple of steps towards it before Tiernan yelped in both surprise and pain.

He scurried up to her Anima and gave her a reproachful look.

She shrugged. “Sorry.”

Tiernan just grunted, but that seemed to have jolted him out of his stupor. “What was that?”

“Who knows?” She continued towards the robes, but as soon as she reached them, and as soon as she bent over to touch the fabric, it disintegrated to dust.

“What…what was that?” Tiernan repeated, clearly terrified.

Yuriko didn’t feel too sure of herself either. There was just something about the oppressive air of this Waypoint that was clearly at odds with her.

Her Anima sizzled and sparked, cracks formed and healed. A powerful pressure made itself known, pressed down on the edges of her Anima, but was thrown back by her stubborn Will.

‘I will not bend. I will not bow.’ The words rose from within, a mixed voice between hers and Damien’s. Her Ancestor definitely would not have bowed down to anyone. ‘Not even the Empress?’

She didn’t know. She certainly wouldn’t give up just because of a spectre spouting strange and nonsensical words. She gritted her teeth and got up.

“Let’s continue,” she said to Tiernan, who visibly gulped. They oriented themselves back towards the Ebon Horizon and continued to walk. Yuriko’s gaze swivelled to and fro, determined not to be blindsided. Her Anima’s glow was too strong to hide, she knew, and anything within this realm would see it long before she could spot them.

Half an hour, an hour, two hours. They walked unimpeded, despite what was said. The edge of her vigilance had long worn away, and even Tiernan had stopped feeling scared. Not that he said anything, but she could hear his heartbeat, and it had slowed to a respectable level an hour ago. So he took that long to calm down. Well, she wasn’t relaxed yet. She couldn’t. Who knew when something would appear?

Ah, that would be now.

She held out an arm and forced Tiernan to a stop. The boy’s head snapped up from the ground and his eyes grew wide.

“What? Oh!”

The grey rocks undulated as though they were water, not ten paces from them. Yuriko lifted her Animus blade up, keenly aware that she didn't have much room to manoeuvre. Perhaps she should bring out Fri’Avgi now and hang the magnified Animus expense?

The undulating earth didn’t last long before something emerged. It was as grey as the landscape, and the creature that emerged looked like a spider, if one was the size of a landcrafter, and was made entirely of grey stone. The eyes were made of darker stone, obsidian, she thought, though she was no expert on rocks.

Its legs ended in razor sharp spikes, and it was covered in fine hair. Its mandibles and pedipalps worked and rubbed together, creating bluish sparks that jumped from each limb. If there was any hope that it wasn’t hostile, it was gone when it turned towards them. The eyes changed colour from black to blue, and a moment later, it screeched and lunged at them.

Ptang!

“Ah!” Tiernan yelled as he pulled his Lancet’s trigger, making the weapon spit out the solid slugs. The kinetic force it imparted caused the creature to hesitate, but the bullets didn’t even break the surface of its carapace.

Yuriko knew at once that her piddly Animus blade wouldn’t do anything, so she dropped it and summoned Fri’Avgi to hand, filling it with the third and fourth dance.

She had to move. She met the creature’s charge with a mighty overhead swing. The creature didn’t dodge, perhaps it was confident in its carapace’s toughness. Overconfident.

Fri’Avgi smashed into its head and back, the Animus edge didn’t cut, but instead, the weapon’s weight seemed to magnify thousands of times over.

Splat! Crunch!

The creature…shattered.

“Ah!” Tiernan rushed back into Yuriko’s Anima, his skin and hair smoking.

Yuriko frowned. That was too easy, wasn’t it? The creature’s body was made completely of stone, and the only thing left intact were the legs. But even as she watched, the fragments melted into the earth, and the next moment, the ground once agains undulated as though it were made of water.

Worse, more patches of ground did the same, and things started rising out of them. The spider thing reformed and was already starting to crawl out of its burrow.

“Tsk.” Yuriko clicked her tongue, then grabbed Tiernan’s arm. “Get on my back. Hurry!”

“Huh?”

“Now!”

“Ah, yes!”

Yuriko leaned forward so he could ride her piggyback. He clambered on, though he fidgeted and hesitated on where to hang on. Well, it didn’t matter much.

Yuriko took off at a run while holding Fri’Avgi by her side. She jumped over the emerging spider, even using its back to springboard out. Her legs devoured the paces while Tiernan grabbed her neck in panic. She shifted his grip so that he didn’t choke her, though in truth, his strength wasn’t really enough to depress her windpipe.

“Ahhhhh!”

“Stop yelling in my ear!” she yelled.

With an audible click, he slammed his mouth shut, but his grip tightened for a moment.

The run felt good to her. The added weight of the boy at her back, who was honestly just a bit heavier than she was, nothing compared to what she had to bear in the Kogasi plane, made for good exercise. If she weren’t in a grey Waypoint with monsters literally popping out of the ground, she could imagine herself back in Rumiga, at the Academy grounds.

Thwack!

She swatted one of the creatures, a giant multi-legged creature that was nearly ten paces long, with huge mandibles dripping with greenish fluid. Like the spider, it shattered to bits. A swirl of Chaos rose from the creature and Fri’Avgi lapped it up, the gem glowing happily in reaction.

Did she kill it?

No. She shook her head when she glanced back. The long, multi-legged creature’s burrow started to churn, and the creature crawled out of it.

Once she was more than twenty or thirty paces from the pool, the creatures stopped chasing, so she only had to get far enough from the burrows and they should be safe.

Tiernan’s grip tightened, both his arms around her shoulders and his legs around her waist. He trembled, and every now and then, he squeaked. He had his face buried into her hair, too. Why was he so scared? It wasn’t as if they had any close calls.

She felt a connection within her mind snap, and she stumbled on her feet, nearly falling flat on her face. With a desperate gasp, she used her momentum to make a forward flip, dropping Fri’Avgi in the process. Tiernan’s grip didn’t slacken but he screamed in terror.

“It’s fine,” Yuriko murmured, as though to a child. Rami had been afraid of the dark when he was four or five years old and it had been up to her to settle him down. She used the same tone of voice, and somehow, it managed to calm Tiernan down. A little bit, anyway.

She called Fri’Avgi back to her hand before she got too far. The snapping connection had been the one between her and the Animus blade. Unlike her earlier efforts, the blade hadn’t disintegrated when it left her Anima. Maybe it was the structure she imposed? Whatever it had been, something broke that connection.

She risked a glance back, but the greyness covered everything. So she continued to run anyway. She wasn’t even sure she was headed to the right place, given that her companion was a hair’s breadth from fainting in terror. If he did, she would have to use her arms to carry him, or sling him over her shoulders.

“Stay strong,” she murmured and felt him nod. Good.

It took an hour of running, but eventually, there were no more of the liquid rock burrows. Breathing easily, Yuriko prodded Tiernan off her back. He did so somewhat reluctantly and he collapsed on his knees. He was gasping for breath and his face was quite flushed. He also wouldn’t look her in the eye.

She let him recover for a couple of minutes, taking the chance to survey their surroundings. Not that anything would have changed, right?

Huh, so what was that there then? A mountain?