Yuriko appeared on top of a hill, and she took in the Chaos below her with a single glance. That was the only time she had before the Chaos Lords struck.

Fri’Avgi appeared in her hands and with the second dance in ascendance, as well as the beginnings of Jade Mountain Style, she deflected the thrust of a spear. It was an overly large weapon, proportionately much like her artefact compared to a regular spear. The spearhead was as thick as her wrist, the blade as wide as both of her palms laid side to side.

A normal looking spear snaked around her block, plunging towards her cheek. Her Anima condensed, putting up a resistance, and at the same time, she used kinesis to nudge the attack up and towards the side.

The sunshards careened towards the attacker, a hulking woman that was taller than Yuriko and was more than twice her width. The woman’s biceps were as thick as Yuriko’s thighs and she could see ropy veins crawling down her iron-grey skin. One of the woman’s hands held on to the smaller spear, but the bigger one seemed to move on its own. The shards smashed into her torso and deflected off the silvery armour underneath. There was a spot of orange where the shard struck.

Before Yuriko could strike with Fri’Avgi, a silver-green orb smashed towards her head. She ducked under it, again using her Animakinesis to nudge the strike over her head. The attack came from another woman who had five more orbs circling around her.

Vines rose from the ground and wrapped around Yuriko’s ankles, but her strength was enough to allow her to snap them off when she moved. But it did slow her sidestep enough that an orb smashed into her side. Dampened by her Anima, all it did was knock her out of the spearwoman’s reach. At least, that’s what she thought.

Instead, the spearwoman reared back and thrust. An explosion of dust erupted behind her even as her body charged at Yuriko who was still midair. Another orb, or perhaps the same one, fell on her from above.

With a click of her tongue, Yuriko spun, knocking the orb out of its trajectory with Fri’Avgi, and she scooped a couple of pebbles from the earth, stretching her Anima into a tendril to do so while keeping the rest condensed.

She smashed Fri’Avgi’s flat side onto the incoming spear, but couldn’t block the other spearhead. It creased against her sleeve, parting the forceweave as though it were made of cotton. The edge skidded off her skin and the woman yanked it back, making sure to keep the entire thing pressed against Yuriko’s arm. The backwards-facing barbs along the spearhead caught on a thread and yanked her towards the spearwoman. A line of fire, pain, came along with a shallow gash, but the denser Anima prevented the weapon from sinking in deeper.

Yuriko flung pebbles and sunshards towards the woman’s eyes, while she sent a single sunshard at the orb wielder. It was intercepted by an orb, but she controlled the shard to loop around the block and scrape at the other’s side.

At the same time, the spearwoman twisted away from the shards, but again, Yuriko took active control, having the shards curve to follow the dodge. One of them struck the eye. The spearwoman must have blinked and jerked her head at the last minute since the shard didn’t penetrate inwards but bounced off to the side. Blue blood spurted out of the eye, making Yuriko certain that she faced Chaos Lords.

A wordless hymn permeated the air, and as if time wound back, the blood returned to the woman’s wound which sealed itself closed. If not for a slightly burnt spot, Yuriko would have thought the other fully healed. The spearwoman growled in pain and anger, and she couldn’t open her right eye at all.

Out of her peripheral vision, Yuriko spotted another Chaos Lord nearly fifty paces back. And perhaps there was another one on the next hilltop. The brief clash had moved them towards a valley, but she still remembered the scene from the top.

There was a battle nearly a longstride away. From this distance, and without using Enhanced Sight, the combatants looked more like moving dots than actual figures, but she was sure she saw a small Chaos Ship there. Perhaps Imperials?

The brief respite was broken when the spearwoman threw the smaller spear at her and the orb wielder did the same, except with half of her orbs. Jade Mountain and the second dance directed her to deflect the spear towards the orbs and the first dance running beneath the second prompted her to take a diagonal movement and strike. She followed her instincts and Fri’Avgi struck the bigger spear, which she diverted towards the earth. The point dug into the stone, sinking halfway into its length.

She set the shards to harass the orb woman, and in the same breath swung with Fri’Avgi. Part of her attention was on the ground around, and her Anima caught the point at which roots suddenly grew into existence and several razor-sharp blades of grass pushed through the earth.

Kinesis slammed into a circle of earth nearly a pace wide, flattening the emerging grass. Yuriko leapt off it and slammed Fri’Avgi into the spearwoman, who had been busy trying to pull her weapon out of its bind. But an orb interrupted her strike, slamming into Fri’Avgi’s side. The altered momentum spun Yuriko around, but she used it to accelerate her counter swing. This time, the spear wielder ducked out of the way, releasing her grasp on the bigger spear’s haft.

Instead of returning to retrieve her weapon, she shoulder checked Yuriko, whose condensed Anima took the blow. In that instant, Yuriko didn’t let her Anima negate the force of the blow and allowed it to send her flying. Straight into the orb wielder!

That woman, who didn’t have any hands, grimaced in surprise. She still had three orbs to protect her though.

The switch from Jade Mountain and the second dance into Roaring Volcano and third dance, was faster than the blink of an eye. The Animus edge around Fri’Avgi burst into jagged edges. Tongues of flame condensed around the artefact, gathering around the red gem in the middle of the guard, flowed down the blade and then burst into a fiery explosion right as the blade struck a deflecting orb. The force of the blast flung the orb out of the way, and the trajectory of Yuriko’s slash barely shifted.

The edge dug into the woman’s shoulder, carved down into the middle of the torso amidst a keening wail. Radiant sun shards pierced into the woman’s back. The woman burst into golden flames and turned to ashes. Motes of green light were greedily devoured by the artefact.

“Irons!” the spearwoman yelled in fury and pain.

Yuriko saw the other two Chaos Lords now. One sang a mournful song, while the other keened in pain and loss. There would be no coming back to life for them, Yuriko thought grimly, remembering how the Seeker did just that and harmed a childhood friend.

“To me!” the spearwoman yelled.

Yuriko spun on her heels and drove a vicious slash towards the other, hoping to finish off another Chaos Lord before reinforcements came. But the other woman leapt backwards, soaring over the hill and landing in a crouch next to the distant singer.

Gathering her strength, Yuriko sought to do the same, but just as she leapt up, she saw dozens of Chaos Lords running up the side of the hill.

A quick glance at the Chaos ship showed that it was still under siege by lesser Wyldlings. She could see the defenders shooting superheated plasma and shards of ice at the attacking horde. But there were no Chaos Lords participating in that battle.

One instinct was to run, but if Yuriko did so, then she doomed the Imperials to certain death.

Her Anima gleamed. Her outer reserves still contained twice what her inner reserves had. It took nearly two hundred lumens of her Animus, consumed by the dances and Fri’Avgi, and in creating the sunshards, to take one of them down. And there were more than a dozen left.

With a flick of her fingers, an unnecessary gesture but one that felt fitting, she opened the runescript lock on the weaving inside her Anima. It started to draw ambient Chaos and began to convert it to Animus. It was much faster than what she’d draw within but felt too slow anyway. Every drop counted though.

The Chaos Lord that manipulated the grass and vines seemed to have given up on trying a surprise attack. Instead, they started growing a tree right next to them. It began as a seed, but in a blink of an eye it had grown into a sapling, and in the next, it was taller than the figure.

Yuriko was not one to wait until her enemy was ready, though in this case, there were far too many targets heading towards her to focus on one distant threat.

The strange wordless hymn came from another to the distant Chaos Lords. The spearwoman had a red aura around her now and she started to grow even bigger.

Kinesis took several pebbles from the dirt at Yuriko’s feet, and she quickly infused each one with nearly ten lumens of Animus each in the Empowered Strike pattern. She flung one at the tree growing Chaos Lord, then flung the rest at the charging lords. The tree bent down and interposed a branch, which shattered as soon as the pebble reached it. It was sufficient to deflect the blow and save the other’s life.

A pebble struck a charging Chaos Lord, pierced through its Protective Field, and then into its head, bursting it like a rotten melon. The body staggered a couple more steps before it collapsed. Ambient Chaos whirled around the body and poured into the wound, and Yuriko could see flesh and bone start to grow back. The others who were targeted had their heads blown off, but the same thing happened. Still, that left four assailants.

Yuriko leapt forwards, swinging Fri’Avgi in a wide arc, meeting the first of the snarling faces. The Chaos Lord, a figure wearing robes and looking utterly human, materialized a longsword and leapt over Fri’Avgi’s swing. He must have thought that her momentum wasn’t easily changed. Yuriko dissuaded him easily, stopping the greatsword cold in the air. She shifted her footing and slashed upwards. The Chaos Lord’s eye widened in surprise and fear, and he didn’t manage to do anything before being bisected. The artefact hungrily sucked out his Anima, preventing him from reforming.

She would have thought the others would become more wary, but no, they charged mindlessly at her. They were worse than the Hunters, lacking in cunning and skill. Were they really Chaos Lords?

It took three attacks, one swipe each, and all of them had been fed to Fri’Avgi’s red gem. The artefact started to shed motes of distilled Chaos though.

“You’re full?” Yuriko muttered and felt Fri’Avgi’s agreement. Then a query was sent through their bond.

Eat?

“Er, yes?”

And through the bond, thick flows of distilled Chaos, along with a mixture of something, flowed into Yuriko’s Anima and into her core.

“Hey, wait!” She gasped before being flooded. For a moment, her thoughts were drowned by a wave of pleasure so intense she couldn’t equate it to anything she’s ever felt before! It was as if she were starving, didn’t know it, and then was suddenly presented with the tastiest looking parfait in the myriad planes! And it tasted even more divine than that.

Memories stirred. Of her incarnations. And in an instant, there were experiences that matched what she felt. During the second incarnation. And during the third. Heat suffused Yuriko’s cheeks.

Into the Radiant Essence! Damien shouted.

Blinking in confusion, she did as he asked, shunting the flow from filling her already swollen core into the mote of Radiant Essence drifting inside. It took it all, and pulled more and more until Fri’Avgi was spent and she hungered for more.

Thankfully, there were nearly a dozen more Chaos Lords left. Yuriko’s hungry gaze, and a shifting in her Mien, froze the charging Chaos Lords.

And then, they turned tail and ran.