“Are you even listening?” Yuriko asked crossly as she manipulated a pebble, picking it up from the ground just in front of her toes and flinging it at Lorcan’s forehead. The thirteen-year-old Davar boy had been staring fixedly at her, at her bosom, while she spoke. He didn’t even react until the pebble struck his forehead.

“Ahh!”

He clutched at the sore spot, fell to his knees while tears seeped out of the corner of his eyes. He glared reproachfully at her. Some sympathy might have surfaced, but Yuriko noticed his eyes dropping from her face and back to her chest.

“Hmph!”

Pew, pew!

“Ahh!”

More pebbles.

It had been four days since she arrived in Ulmira. It was the 12th Day of Fire and the Arkship that would take her to Delovine plane would leave on the 14th. In the meantime, she’d taken to helping the freshly Awakened kids to get ready for their training camp.

There were six of them this year, three boys and three girls. All of them lived in the Homestead for the moment, though that hadn’t always been the case. The Davar Homestead was less of a residence and more of a resthouse and hub for the family. Most members weren’t in Ulmira but scattered across the Empire or beyond. But no matter where they went, the Homestead was…home.

Lorcan and Mason, along with the four other kids, Rian, Sophie, Cara, and Jana, had been deposited to the Homestead to prepare themselves for Ulmira City’s training camp. Their parents were busy people and more often than not, had transitory jobs like Aidan, and Riley did. The Elders of Homestead, Grandpas Weis and Arlan, and Grandmas…er, Aunts Jewel and Kisha were nominally in charge.

The residence looked more like a rustic mountain cabin than anything else, as if several dozen cabins had been connected by stone and wood hallways. Aside from the Davars, farmhands from the surrounding families also lived here to tend to the cattle and sheep housed in the barns.

Yuriko figured out that the boys had been the ones to wake her up the first day, and all three of them got an eyeful. Ryoko, that rotter, had only laughed when she complained.

“Flaunt what you have, now that you’ve got it.”

She also refused to dress her in anything else for bed, at least until Yuriko sat on her and tickled her to submission. It helped that her Anima gave her more than a dozen extra hands. Rian, the third boy, had been quicker on his feet, so she didn’t catch him then. Not that any of this was their fault.

Yuriko could see them begin to show signs of Aspiration. She tried as hard as she could to suppress her Mien, and she was met with limited success. Constant exposure could deepen the connection, but it also could allow others to build up a resistance instead.

For the past three days, her task had been to train them in melee skills. Their marksmanship was better than hers in terms of pure skill, much to her shame. Lorcan could shoot accurately at five hundred paces, using a specialized Plasma Caster. His precision was less when he used a regular one though. All six of them received the Davar Heritage directly from a parent. But of course, not all of them had inlaid their Facets yet.

Since the Davar Heritage inevitably involved hitting things from far away, it left them vulnerable when their enemy came up close and personal. Well, she decided to teach them the same thing Da taught her, which was the Flowing Water Style.

The kids faced off against each other under her gaze, and once in a while, she would spar with them. They used a side-blade, a spear, and a combat knife to train with. She thought about having them learn unarmed combat too, but she had limited time. In truth, three days wasn’t really enough to earn a weapon skill, but she managed to convey the basics.

As for what she was lecturing about now, it was still about the necessity to learn varied skills. All six of them would rather rely on their Facets and hadn’t even learned how to use the Empowered Strike technique! Just because the Davar Heritage often bypassed that need didn’t mean that they should ignore it completely! They didn’t even have to inlay it.

“But Big Sis Yuri, we've got teammates to hold the line for us!” Sophie complained in an annoyingly whiny tone.

“And what if you wind up alone? Die?” Yuriko said derisively.

“That’s unlikely until we reach Journeyman!” Sophie rebutted.

“Better safe than sorry,” Yuriko insisted. “Now, come on, all six of you can attack me now.”

“No way! We don’t have a chance!” Several of them said at once.

“Oh come on! You can’t give up in the face of overwhelming power!”

“No, we should run then!”

“Er, yeah, good point actually,” Yuriko muttered. “Fine, I’ll give you a handicap.”

“Sure! Keep your eyes closed when we spar,” Lorcan yelled.

“Hmm, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Oh, how about a forfeit if we win?”

Yuriko’s eyes narrowed. “Why, what do you want?”

All six of them grinned at her. “Come with us to the Harvest Field. We need the advantage!”

What was the Harvest Field? Oh well, she’ll find out later. That’s if they could even win.

“Fine, I accept. Begin.”

Yuriko closed her eyes. She didn’t flare her Anima either, as that would be cheating. She kept it close to her skin, but sensitive to the movements of the wind. She used her ears to determine her foes.

From the sound of their footsteps, three of them had started to circle around her. She activated the second dance but only used a single side-blade. Then she started the motions to use Jade Mountain, the Phase that matched the second dance. As soon as she completed the opening forms, her awareness expanded. Not through the air but through the tremors in the ground. She could feel the roots of the grass, and through that connection, how the blades swayed with the wind. Or how they were flattened by footsteps.

The whistling of a training blade through the air, and from the sound of grass being trampled, coupled with the instincts conveyed by the dance made her shift slightly to the left, lean down a bit, lower her knees, then swing her blade behind her. The reverb of the wooden blade striking against another weapon gave her all the feedback she needed to pivot around. She kept her blade pressed against the other, moving a couple of steps as the kid retreated, and once she was in a good position, she slid the blade down, twirled around the guard to push the top against the other’s body.

Then she ducked a careless swing at her head and kicked backwards. Her heel caught the side of someone’s knee, eliciting a squeal of surprise. She didn’t hit hard enough to bruise, but she applied enough pressure to make the other fold. A quick tap ended that particular threat.

Then she leapt over an attempt to tackle her, twisted in midair to avoid a grab attempt, thrust to the side a couple of times, then landed on her tiptoes. She leapt up almost immediately and deflected a blade, but the reverb told her it had been thrown at her. When she landed, someone nearly grabbed her leg, while another grabbed at her waist. She kicked the one on the ground and smacked the one behind her. Then she twirled and tapped the one sneaking up from her right. He had the right idea but his soft footsteps brushed too hard against the grass.

When she opened her eyes it was to a gaggle of thirteen-year-olds with incredulous looks on their faces and gaping mouths.

“Not too bad,” Yuriko grinned, “but since you didn’t win, I guess we won’t go to the Harvest Field, whatever that was?”

“It’s a controlled Tideland,” Mason said ruefully. “It only contains swarmlings and is used for training the militia reserve or freshly Awakened kids.”

Yuriko shrugged. “Sounds interesting. But even if you’d won, we’d need to get permission from the Elders first.”

A chorus of ‘awws’ came from them as they got back to their feet. They didn’t protest the continued sparring and drills. They kept at it until it was close to noon and afterwards they returned to the Homestead for lunch.

Afterwards, the kids went to the shooting range behind the barn for some target practice. Yuriko watched them for a few minutes, somewhat tempted to join in. She did a couple of days back, but afterwards, she didn’t feel all that happy. While her swordsmanship had improved far beyond what she started with right after her Atavism Ritual, her marksmanship had been stagnant.

It was probably because she didn’t practice it anymore, and she was thankful that her skill hadn’t regressed instead. And probably because she had no suitable Animus techniques for it. Wait, didn’t Damien say he would teach her when she reached Knight…or Actualisation?

She moved away from the kids and headed towards the orchard. She sat beneath an apple tree and meditated.

‘Hey! Aren’t you going to teach me ranged techniques now?’ She demanded.

Hmmm? Oh, do you really need it?

‘Yes.’

Alright. Pick up a pebble with your Anima, condense as much of it as you can, then use it to throw the pebble.

‘Alright…’

Yuriko frowned as she did as he asked. An inch retracted and condensed from her Anima flare allowed her to form a hand that could move five Jins at a pace per second. A pebble probably weighed about a HiJin or an IJin, a hundredth, or a tenth of a Jin. Did the speed also increase?

Yes, it turned out. It was proportional to the reduction in weight. So she could move the pebble, which weighed an IJin, at ten paces a second. It practically zipped along. She kept constant control of it too. She spun the pebble around her, hoping to increase its speed, but it turned out that it couldn’t move faster at all. And when she threw it, it only slowed down while it dropped to the ground. It barely reached five paces away before it bounced off the dirt.

Use more of your Anima.

She condensed as much as she could into an Anima hand, which was about twenty-four inches, and threw a pebble towards a tree.

Thunk!

The pebble smashed into the trunk.

“Eh?” Enhanced Sight showed her that the pebble had embedded a few inches into the tree and that it had practically shattered and only the core of it remained inside. The rest was powder and dust. “Wow.” She murmured while her mind spun on the possibilities.

So throwing a small thing at high speeds gave that much of a punch? Maybe she should find something tougher so that it wouldn’t shatter? Oh, that was against a mundane tree. How would this trick affect someone with a Protective Field? Huh, probably not as good as what happened now.

There was a reason why the militia in Rumiga used superheated plasma to fight against Wyldlings. Hmmm. The kids didn’t all use plasma weaponry. Mason used a Caster that shot solid bullets instead of plasma. It was more effective against human enemies, if she remembered correctly. The crossbow bolts used by the Lucentians and Vizugmonians were certainly effective.

Wait, wait! What if she coated the pebble with Animus like Empowered Strike? She hurriedly did just that, using some of her internal Animus to do so. She didn’t store any Animus in her Anima at the moment since that required having her Anima flared. It didn’t take too long to recharge though, so if she was on a battlefield, she could set up her outer Animus reserve quickly and easily.

She stared at the pebble that gave off a smooth, golden glow, then she aimed it at the tree. Then, after a moment, she changed her mind and aimed it at the ground a few dozen paces away rather than the valuable fruiting tree. She took a deep breath, then threw.

The pebble sank into the dirt with a ‘pfft!’ Focusing her Enhanced Sight, she saw it was several paces deep, and the pebble maintained its shape. Good!

Next, she checked for range. Unfortunately, since she released the pebble out of her Anima’s control, gravity dragged it down to the earth. The IJin weighing pebble soared out at two hundred forty paces a second and managed to reach a hundred or so paces away before it bounced off the ground. Maybe if she angled it up?

Oh Ancestors! Shooting pebbles required Arithmetic! Argh!

Shooting it up gave it more range, but it slowed down enough that it wouldn’t really hurt what she aimed at. The only way around it was to use a heavier stone, but that also meant it would be slower still. Perhaps if she used up more of her Anima?

After much trial and error, she managed to find out her limits. She needed a minimum of a pace of flared Anima to use the technique properly, and if she scrunched everything else down, she could use up eighty-one inches worth. An IJin pebble would then speed up to eight hundred ten paces a second, and as long as she shot straight, could hit a target within three to four hundred paces away with enough force to injure or kill. That was about the distance she was accurate with a Plasma Caster. Of course, she needed to imbue it with Empowered Strike, which took up a couple of seconds of focus. She was ashamed to realise that she’d neglected training that technique since it was redundant to her sword dances.

Every shot cost a couple of lumens, but with her outer reserves…

Why, she could shoot hundreds of pebbles with lethal results. At three hundred paces away. Huh. Maybe it was time to hone her marksmanship again, only this time, she didn’t need a Plasma Caster.

She whistled happily back towards the Homestead, content with the afternoon well spent. Two days from now, she and her cousins would board the Arkship and be well on their way to Delovine. In three weeks she would be back home in Rumiga.

Riley and Aidan’s look when she came into the dining kitchen made her freeze. They looked angry, worried, and sad at the same time.

“Yuri,” Riley started before he paused to swallow, “we’ve been drafted.”

Oh. She supposed they wouldn’t be able to come with her, huh? That…that wasn’t really a big problem, but what’s with that look?

“Rumiga’s been cut off,” Aidan said. “Almost untethered. The Chaos Channels towards Delovine is stuffed full, and Arkship passage has been postponed indefinitely.”

Ah, that’s why.