“The Chaos Lords are gone,” Sheamus muttered even as he shot a swarmling trying to climb Kalla’s hastily created frozen barrier. Pavo, their fifth member, shot a beam of coherent light through the barrier, which separated the light into varied colours while still retaining some of the deadly Animus he poured into it. It caused the swarmlings and Wanderers to burn as long as they stood still.

The hilltop was bare, but there were hundreds, if not thousands more of the Wyldlings on the slopes.

“Clean this up, then we ready ourselves to fight the Chaos Lords,” Lucinda grunted as she lobbed a fist-sized ball of flames over the barricade. It was a pity that none of them could manipulate the earth, otherwise, they would have dug a trench beyond the wall. The effectiveness of such simple fortifications couldn’t be ignored, especially against the nearly mindless swarmlings.

Ah, yes, he could switch Ethan’s ability, but five minutes out of the fight would be dangerous. Also, most Chaos Lords would probably just jump over whatever they could manage.

He sighted down the barrel and squeezed the trigger, drawing more ambient Chaos from the atmosphere and feeding that into the weapon’s runescript lines instead of his personal Animus. He would have already run dry otherwise.

The next ten minutes were a cycle of repetitive attacks. Each blast killed a swarmling, and several more took down a Wanderer. He could conceivably focus more of his Animus to take care of the stronger Wyldlings but he would run dry too quickly. Sustainable and enduring, that was the goal.

The odd Hunter was taken care of by the scythe-wielding Nathan. A warscythe was quite different from the farming implement, with the blade sticking straight out rather than to the side. It cut swathes out of the attacking swarmlings though, much like reaping wheat.

Lucinda threw fewer fireballs now, having overdrawn her reserves. But Kalla was the one who was most exhausted. She constantly repaired the ice barricade and her conversion rate of ambient Chaos to Animus wasn’t enough to cover her expenditure. They probably still had an hour of juice left, and then they would burst into a final stand.

He looked worriedly at the surrounding hills. Where were the Chaos Lords?

And just as that thought completed, they were back. Sheamus cursed under his breath. They were rushing down the slope! Eh, they weren’t headed here.

It was then that the skyline was suddenly lit by a bright, Radiant light. And a silhouette enshrouded by towering flames burst out behind the Chaos Lords, wielding a ridiculously large greatsword.

It came up behind one of the lords and slashed down, cutting the thing in twain. Then, a large greenish blob was ripped out of the body and sucked into the giant sword. The figure froze for a moment, just barely enough for Sheamus to make out its–her features. It was a girl, and from the expression on her face, she looked like she was in the throes of passionate release.

Sheamus swallowed.

The girl looked familiar, and it took but a moment to realise why. In truth, he shouldn’t have even remembered her as he had been in a drunken stupor, but her face, and her luxurious golden hair, had been a denizen of his dreams of late.

She shuddered in ecstasy, but then, a wave of something came off her. It wasn’t the light she gave off, or at least, not just that. No, it was an emotion. And he could feel his heart hammering and his instincts screaming at him.

Run! Escape! Or die.

Crunch!

His teeth nearly sheared through his bottom lip as he bit himself to shake off the mortal terror. His temporary companions were quivering on the ground, and even more incredibly, the Wyldlings were doing the same.

Sheamus kicked Kalla’s shin.

“Get up, you lump! Kill the Wyldlings!”

He followed his words with action, shooting at the nearby swarmlings. They were still cowering, even while their fellows died. The fear he thought to have fought back came slowly rising from the depths of his Anima, but he could somewhat force it back just by avoiding looking at her.

Whatever she was, he would apologize for his crass actions. Though he hoped she wouldn’t kill him in the process. If they lived through this anyway.

_____

Yuriko shuddered as Fri’Avgi dumped three more Chaos Lords’ worth of power into her Anima and her Essence. Her Anima had started to grow stronger again. From a hundred and twenty-one inches, it had grown by another ten. Slow going, but each inch beyond encompassed far more volume than the inch before. Her pained lessons in Arithmetic had made that clear. So any expansion was more difficult than the last and gave more strength, too.

She needed to expand to ten paces, according to Damien, to reach the next stage, Transformation. But the expansion of her Anima was the easier requirement. As for the rest, Damien said that the name of the stage said it all. Honestly, Yuriko felt that was too far away to bother with at the moment, so she refocused her Will.

As soon as the Chaos Lords fled, she’d been seized with the instinct to chase. She killed the weaker ones as soon as she caught up with them, but the stronger ones, the spearwoman, the tree girl, and the singer which Yuriko still hadn’t gotten a good look at, managed to keep their composure.

The spearwoman kept gathering power and launching her spears at Yuriko, but each time she deflected the attacks with her kinesis, and sometimes with a slap of her palm. Fri’Avgi drove her to kill the escaping ones quickly before they left the Waypoint, and it was only when she finally got a good look at the Chaos ship below, and the struggling people fighting for their lives, that she snapped back into sanity.

“What am I doing?” she murmured.

There were half a dozen Chaos Lords left, three of those were running away, while the initial three were gathered around a largish orb half sunk into the hill and were working to bring it up. From the way the Chaos flowed, Yuriko was certain that it had been that artefact that caused the monolithic flows outside.

Shouldering Fri’Avgi, Yuriko kicked off from the hillside. Her leap brought her over the valley and she landed on the slope fifty paces away from the spearwoman, the tree girl, and the one she assumed was the singer. Even now, a faint melody drifted from her parted lips.

Huh, she looks familiar…

Snorting in annoyance, Yuriko pushed aside her distracting thoughts and propelled herself up the hillside. The giant spear was flung at her, but she easily batted it away. Her body felt strong and oddly hot.

As she came closer, a tree root speared out of the ground, quickly followed by a dozen more. She intercepted the points with her sunshards then leapt over when they didn’t do more than burn the tips. The shards didn’t do as well as she expected, perhaps she should put more Radiant energy in them?

The denser Chaos Lord Animus that coated everything they did absorbed the heat of the Radiant and ablated it instead of allowing her shards to pierce. It was worse when her shards encountered the tree’s leaves. The shards lost all Radiance then, and the greenery grew bigger, or fuller. She couldn’t quite describe the view. The sensation of her sun shards getting drained was more annoying though. It wasn’t a painful break, but more like a natural passing on of energy from one form to another, which was somehow worse. Fri’Avgi didn’t have any problems with cutting leaves, so there was that.

Yuriko carved her way towards the huge orb, while the tree-vine girl sent more tendrils toward her. But she was approaching faster than they could unearth the sphere. Maybe if they turned it off first, they would be faster? Either way, in a couple of minutes she had fought all the way to the orb and the spearwoman attacked with ferocity.

Yuriko dodged, parried, and counterattacked. She would have been victorious in a few exchanges since her power had grown more than what the ten extra inches would have indicated. She was slightly faster, struck harder, and her Phases resonated quickly with the ambient Chaos. Radiant energy burned the woman’s weapons and as long as Yuriko kept it from the other woman’s leaves, it was more than enough to threaten.

The wordless hymn from the third figure, a woman from what Yuriko could glimpse, replenished the Chaos Lords’ reserves. It closed their wounds and healed the burns Yuriko’s weapons gave them. Perhaps she should focus on that person first?

If only it were that easy. Any of the sunshards she tried to send around the two were quickly intercepted with leaves. Ah, only as long as the leaves were attached to the tree were they capable of draining her Radiant light. So she had the shards attack the branches and the trunk, but like before, they weren’t able to quickly penetrate through the bark. The internal wood was even harder to damage, and it looked like Fri’Avgi would be needed to cut the tree.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a stream of Wyldlings running towards the Veil. She swung her sword directly at the tree trunk as soon as she came within reach, but it swayed back, so she missed it by less than an inch. She took another step, arrested the momentum of her swing and reversed it.

Ptang!

The large spear interposed at an angle, diverting her slash upwards. Yuriko sent the sunshards at the spearwoman’s eyes, and with her kinesis, she grabbed a pebble from the ground and sent it careening at the tree trunk.

The tree-girl barely managed to sway the tree away, but why would Yuriko focus on the tree when the controller was right there? A second pebble smashed into her torso, right at the clavicle, and with a spray of blue blood and gristle, the tree-girl collapsed.

Fri’Avgi pulled at the escaping Anima, but the spearwoman smashed at Yuriko’s side, knocking her to the ground. Yuriko let go of the artefact, rolled to her back, and managed to get her foot under the spearwoman’s centre of mass. She kicked upwards, hoping to throw the woman off her, but she twisted her hips, deflecting Yuriko’s kick-off.

The woman weighed more than a MiJin and she used it to her advantage. With her musclebound arms, she grabbed at Yuriko’s wrists, pushing her limbs over her head. Yuriko glared up at the woman, who gave her feral grin, before she rammed her forehead down at Yuriko’s nose.

A hastily condensed Anima prevented her nose from breaking. With a growl, Yuriko bucked her hips, remembering the few grappling lessons she’d taken in Martial Sciences. She was outweighed, but she wasn’t pinned. Her kinesis pushed at the woman’s side, in time with her thrust, and the shifting momentum knocked the woman off her mount.

Her sunshards stabbed at the spearwoman’s back, creating puffs of blue steam as blood vaporized at the extreme heat. Fri’Avgi flew to her hand and she swung at the woman’s legs. She jumped over the swing, but they kept forgetting that Fri’Avgi’s momentum and weight was completely in Yuriko’s control. The blade stopped dead in the air just below the woman’s jump, and with a quick twist of her wrist, Yuriko changed the orientation and swung upwards with all of the speed and weight she possessed.

Fri’Avgi cut the woman in two, from crotch to the crown of the head. The red gem flared and swallowed the woman’s Anima with an audible slurp.

And now, there was only one left. Yuriko turned towards the survivor, eyes blazing and with a wide grin.

Then, when she saw the last Chaos Lord’s features, Yuriko froze, her jaw going slack with surprise. She recognized the face, even if the body looked somewhat different.

“Ah…Ashley?”