Yuriko’s golden light flared out threateningly as soon as her feet landed on the mud. Her kinesis formed mud shoes so that she wouldn’t sink, leaving wide footprints behind. A tinge of red lingered at the edges of her light, not reaching a bit more than seven paces away.

The battlefield seemed to freeze when she stepped onto the field, and she saw the warriors shudder as she took a single threatening step. On her second, they broke and fled.

Blinking in surprise, it was all Yuriko could do not to gape. Only the presence of nearly two dozen Chaos barons allowed her to keep her head. Instead, she sprang towards them, her sword dances circulated within, and ramped up to twenty lumens a minute.

The first Chaos lord she came near seemed stunned at their warriors’ cowardice and could barely react even until Fri’Avgi cut him in twain. The red gem flared as the artefact slurped up the Anima and broke the Corpus into Chaos dust. The brutal attack woke up the other barons, and in a flash, all twenty of them rushed at her, growling like beasts with their pupils dilated and mouths slobbering.

She cut down the second, and the third. The fourth fought no better, but the fifth onwards seemed to have awoken from their berserk rage. They split up to encircle her, but it was then that she summoned her sunshards and sent them against the barons.

Even one against many, as long as she fought Chaos Lords, and armed as she was with both Radiant energy and Fri’Avgi, Yuriko prevailed. It might have taken a bit more time than usual, but twenty was not an insurmountable number. Even more so when none of them used ranged attacks, energy blasts, or even weapons.

As she cut down another Chaos Lord and waited for Fri’Avgi to feed, she fended off a flanking attack, using the sunshards and her fist to knock two barons back. Her condensed Anima was enough to protect her, allowing her to shrug off several blows without issue. But soon, the rest of them crowded on her.

Three jumped up and tried to land on her head, she would have stepped back and avoided them, but another two came at her from behind. All the while, five others surrounded her and attempted to grab her with distended claws.

She pulsed her Anima outwards, blasting the ones within inches of her back. While the ones on the ground were knocked back, the ones jumping on her only froze for a moment, mid-air, then landed just in front of her. She ducked under the attack, but one sharp claw grazed her side. Her Animus Armour stopped it from hurting her, and she punched one in the jaw and knocked him reeling into his companion.

Sunshards stabbed at the ones she knocked back. Fri’Avgi was still feasting, stabbed into the Corpus of another Chaos Lord. She began materialising a sunblade but was interrupted when one baron tackled her.

The Animus Armour and her condensed Anima prevented contact, but the baron’s momentum still pushed her back. For all her bodily strength, she was still lighter than they were. She dug in her heel, and slammed her elbow on the baron’s back, breaking it with an audible crack. At the same time, she pulled a ball bearing from her pouch, used a pace worth of Anima reach to accelerate it, then flung it at the group of barons. As before, the air shattered and a shockwave swept across them. It didn’t harm them due to their Protective Fields, but it did disrupt their momentum.

At that moment, the sunblade manifested and she stabbed another baron. The one that had his spine shattered fell at her feet, and she stomped down on his head grinding it into blue-tinged dust. Then she flew a sunshard into the Corpus for good measure.

Half of them dead, and Fri’Avgi finished absorbing the first crop. She called the artefact to her hand and pulsed her red-tinged golden light. For once, the terror it caused didn’t affect the Chaos Lords one bit, but they were so weak it hardly mattered.

With a happy growl, she sheared the greatsword horizontally and triggered an arclight that flung nearly a hundred paces back. It decapitated one, bisected another, and de-limbed another.

The survivors backed up, not retreating but seeking a better position. Yuriko stalked towards them, her footsteps thunderous.

__________

“She’s a monster, alright,” Frederik sighed as he watched the brawl through a looking glass. The Golden Terror massacred their Chaos Lord reinforcements. Ah, were they really Chaos Lords?

His thoughts wandered.

These ones were unlike the ones he’d seen before. Barely capable of rational thought, and acted more on instinct than anything else. Barely a step up from Wyldlings. But they had the same level of power, and their blows could rupture Protective Animus of the Adept level easily.

The first two dozen came a couple of days ago, with the first wave of reinforcements. Aside from a small elite squad led by the new force commander, most of those were raw conscripts. They’d disgraced themselves even before they engaged a single elite warrior, but honestly, he couldn’t blame them. Even as far away as he was from the battle, he could feel terror grip his Anima.

“I wish to fight her,” Zagara of the Manifold Blades said excitedly. “She is a worthwhile foe.”

“Not now, my dear,” Commander Lyra Henders said placatingly. “We must draw out her secret weapons and abilities.” The petite commander gazed at Frederik. “You say she is a Sorceress and a warrior of great skill. Are you sure? Sorcerers rarely fight like that.”

“No Knight of the Empire is able to blast something strong enough to melt a Steam Cannon from a league away,” Frederik said dryly. “Besides, I saw her cast Flight of the Obsidian Cranes.” He shuddered. That spell slaughtered several companies, nearly three hundred men and women. “And she has an Anima Telum. A powerful weapon and Sorcerous Implement that I suspect is a pre-Shattering artefact.”

“Oh?” Zagara hummed. “A powerful artefact, you say. We must liberate it for Garamus.”

“Only if you manage to kill her.” Commander Henders shook her head. “Let’s see if she has any more surprises in store. Release the rest of them. Make sure they lure her from the walls. Then send in another detachment. I want to see how well their responses are.”

Frederik rolled his eyes, though he did it away from her sight. He’d given her all of the intelligence he’d amassed but she insisted on prodding Faron’s Crossing’s defences on her own. Well, her command group did bring all of those Chaos Lords and Steam Cannons…

He wasn’t sure he approved of the alliance between the Telurian, the Asheron, and the Federation. The details provided by the First Councilor were scarce. Also, it was Garamus’ envoy who brokered the deal. Those from that city aren’t the most stable in the mind. Very few of them bound neutral spirits and preferred aggressive ones instead.

“Chaos Lords. Lead her to the southwest,” the commander said as a group of the barons arrived.

Frederik swallowed nervously. There were nearly fifty of them. Barely stronger than an Intermediate Binder, with just a toe over the line dividing it from the Adept level. Each was more or less human in shape and form, except for the feral light behind their eyes, and the unnaturally symmetrical shape of their faces. He would have thought they were from Haveena or Kadrac if he didn’t have his Chaos senses active. Each of them also had a brooch or an amulet on their chest, depicting a half-lidded eye with triangular pupils.

The lead baron hissed, like a snake, or a cat. Then, they loped towards the Golden Terror.

___________

It was strange, Yuriko thought. The distilled Chaos Fri’Avgi absorbed from the devoured Chaos Lords was minuscule. A hundredth of what she gained when she killed the ones in the Fysalli.

Muddy water splashed all over as she stomped on the ground. The broad pad her Anima created gave her excellent support, while the barons were sliding all over the place. She took advantage of their distraction and finished off the rest. Blue blood stained the mud and mixed with the rainwater.

“Huh?” she muttered as she saw a large group running towards her. From the way the ambient Chaos swirled around them, she suspected they were Chaos Lords, too. Chaos Sight confirmed her guess and she pursed her lips.

Would Fri’Avgi draw minimal distilled Chaos from them, too?

She half wondered if the reduced amount was because of Fri’Avgi’s low power state, but then again, this was the process to collect distilled Chaos, not as an attack against an active energy. Logically, the collection process should not be affected no matter how low the artefact’s reserves were. She was quite certain of that too, and with a start, she realised that her certainty came from Damien’s memories that had already seeped into her mind.

Shaking her head, she increased the number of sunshards surrounding her and rushed the group. They split up to flank her and the one she targeted spun on her heels and fled. Yuriko stopped immediately and sprang to the next closest Chaos Lord, only for that man to do the same.

‘Wolf pack tactics?’ she wondered. It would have worked, too, if her perception aura didn’t pinpoint and track the flankers and backstabbers.

She waited for one to spring at her, whirling only when he came within range of Fri’Avgi’s blade. She cleft him in twain, blue blood sprayed like a fountain and splattered across her condensed aura. The droplets slid down, leaving long streaks in their wake.

There were nearly fifty of them, but they couldn’t bring their numbers to bear. She danced agilely across the battlefield, cutting down those who sought to come close while using her sunshards and her kinetic throws on those farther away. She didn’t need to use her Radiant Lance and had no intention to.

A few minutes later she realised that she was quite close to the riverbank. There were a couple of dozen Chaos Lords left, and these ones knew how to fight using their Chaos. Shards of solidified ambient Chaos were flung at her, and if she blocked them they exploded. If she dodged them, they exploded too, and the shrapnel pinged off her condensed aura.

It took a focused attack with a dozen shards to take one down, and every time she charged at one, he or she would turn tail and run. Frustrating.

The light behind Fri’Avgi’s red gem was just a little bit brighter, but nowhere near the level she expected. And, when she finally paid attention to what was happening near Faron’s Crossing, she had a bad shock when she saw the Federation army shooting volleys of arrows or bullets at the Protective Dome.

Bursts of flame, shards of ices, and tentacles of lightning as well as chunks of rock came from a group of Adepts. Each hit sent ripples along the Dome, and Yuriko knew that the Animus reserves were depleting quickly. Coupled with the bombardment…

“Swarm fodder,” she muttered as she ran past the remaining Chaos Lords. Her battle had brought her nearly a couple of longstrides away. The Chaos barons harried her with their Chaos shrapnel so she had to zig and zag just to avoid stressing her Anima. Hairline fractures spiderwebbed across it already.

As she ran, she spun her sunshards around her, and warily kept an eye on the skies. The rain had intensified from a slight drizzle to a heavy downpour in the minute she was running, and it felt like what she stepped on was more water than dirt.

The rain also dampened the attack, and by the time she arrived near the walls, the enemy had already begun to retreat. The Chaos Lords didn’t follow her either.

A quick survey of the battlefield showed her no casualties. As she jumped up to the battlements, she didn’t see any dead, thankfully. Oh, there were a few wounded, but nothing more serious than an arrow to the gut.

Steam rolled off her body as her Anima evaporated the water that clung to her. She sighed and sheathed Fri’Avgi. The moment she did, she quickly found out that the absorbed distilled Chaos wasn’t even a fraction of what one Chaos Baron should have given her. What were those strange creatures then? She was sure they were Chaos Lords.

They certainly hit like one.

She observed the Federation’s retreat and wondered why there were so many weak Chaos Lords, and why their leadership was willing to sacrifice them to her. All the while, the cannon shells continued to fall.