The initial moments after they left Haveena City were heady and thrilling. Yuriko felt as if they had escaped a squalid prison. It immediately helped that the stench of horse dung, urine, and sewage, had been swept away by the breeze. Unfortunately, they were too close to the city, and the road they were on was also littered with horse dung and urine, which became immediately apparent when the wind shifted.

Wrinkling her nose, which she had thought numbed from the few days' stay in the city, Yuriko glanced warily behind. There was a steady traffic of people trying to enter the city, but there were barely any leaving it. In fact, they were the only group openly walking away.

The River Caradec was half a longstride to the west, and she could see barges and smaller pleasure craft moving along its currents. Down south, the river was much wider, by half again compared to at Faron’s Crossing, meaning it was at least a hundred and fifty paces wide. The banks were steep, though, and shored up by stones, so she suspected that the Haveenians had widened it rather than it being a natural occurrence.

The river current moved the barges faster than they could walk, though none of the others was a stranger to quick marching. So they did just that, going on a light jog that devoured the paces and longstrides. At first, they kept close to the river, following the road, but as they pulled away from Haveena City, the road degraded from one paved with stones, to a hard-packed earth.

The terrain grew drier, and even when there were no farms, trees grew wider apart, smaller, and more twisty than the usual straight pines and thick oaks of the north. Wild grasses grew to chest high or even above human heads, bending with the breeze, and serenading them with its wave-like rustling. The road, at least, had been cleared of the grass, though after a league beyond the limits of the stone road, the dirt road slowly disappeared. It took the rest of the day though, and they could only continue to follow the river.

The Caradec meandered south, then southeast, as they went on. It wasn’t a straightforward path, and there were tributaries that they had to cross, in a similar manner to how they crossed Barnabei Rill. Where the river turned on itself and formed oxbow lakes or levees, they crossed over it to save time and distance travelled. In such a way, Yuriko hoped that they slowly closed the gap between the prisoner barge and themselves.

At the end of the day, they set up camp a few dozen paces from the riverbanks. There was little choice of cover, not this close to the dirt road and the river, just a few bushes. Thankfully, the skies were clear. It was also growing a bit warmer, probably because the Season of Water was two-thirds of the way over.

Yuriko gathered water from the river into a pot to make porridge. The water was far from clear, and she knew that the runoff from the city probably contaminated it, but she had her ways. She used her expanded Anima to cover the pot’s mouth with a Radiant energy filter, poking at it to exclude anything that wasn’t water. It also warmed it enough that it shouldn’t take too long to boil, too. The water tasted a bit funny though.

She returned with the pot and let Sheamus cook the ration bar porridge. Today’s meal was a mixture of half the needed amount in ration bars, and the other half in Wayfarer’s bread. Asami pulled out a kettle and a packet of tea leaves. Yuriko trudged back to the riverside to refill it.

Normally, drinking water should have come from condenser canteens, but since they were sort of infiltrating, Imperial gear like that would stand out. One condenser canteen wouldn’t look out of place, but nine matching ones would.

Asami brewed the tea, letting the water boil over first then cooling it for a minute before she added the leaves. Yuriko wasn’t really used to taking tea without honey and milk, but Asami’s brew was aromatic, at least, if a bit bland.

The porridge was just about ready when Saki jerked up and looked away from the campfire, hand raised in a signal to be ready. Yuriko tilted her head and focused her senses, suddenly hearing the clip-clop of hooves. Dozens of hooves.

A column of horsemen galloped up the Haveena dirt road, each man and woman armed and armoured, their cloaks fluttering behind them like banners. The lead man spotted their fire from a couple dozen paces away and began to slow his horse down.

Yuriko frowned. She was tired from the day of running, they all were, and she had no wish to end their day in bloodshed. But from the looks of it, these warriors were either looking for trouble or to share a fire for the night. Either way, if they stopped and confronted them, there was no way Yuriko would let them leave and carry word.

Just as the lead rider was about to turn towards them, one of the other men, an older warrior who had grey hair, called out to him. The words were too muffled, for Yuriko to make out, but through her perception, she could see her companions tense, then relax as they readied themselves to battle. Yuriko’s poncho hood wasn’t on her head, so she subtly turned her face away from the fire.

A tense minute passed as the lead horseman argued with his leader, but in the end, thankfully, the column moved on. The men turned to stare back at her until they rode out of sight.

“Should we move, young mistress?” Saki asked quietly.

“We should,” Sheamus interjected. “That looks like trouble. They might return in the dead of night.”

Yuriko nodded thoughtfully. There was little to pack up, just their food and bedrolls. “Let’s finish eating, then move.”

They kept an eye out to the north in case the riders doubled back. It suddenly occurred to Yuriko that they could have attacked and subdued the horsemen then claimed their mounts to use. They should be able to catch up to the ship faster that way. Of course, she didn’t know how to ride a horse, and she doubted anyone else but Sheamus knew how.

After dinner, they cleaned up the campsite and walked a couple of longstrides farther south, and camped near a small hollow that covered them from the road as long as they lay down. With the watch rotation set, Yuriko settled down into her evening meditations to consolidate her Radiant Body Refinement and her musings throughout the day about the Radiant Ennoia.

She also began distilling Chaos, half of which she intended to feed to Desire. But just when she was about to, she noticed Gwendith doing it instead. Dee sedately drank the droplets Gwendith placed on a saucer and accepted the head pats afterwards. She then looked up at Yuriko, who had gathered some of the distilled Chaos in her palm. Desire scooted up next to her and drank it down.

“You need the distilled Chaos too,” Yuriko said to Gwendith with a frown.

“That’s the excess,” Gwendith answered. “If I don’t force my Anima, I don’t need that much distilled Chaos. It’s only when it cracks that I need a lot.”

“Hmm, that’s true.”

Left unsaid was the fact that Gwendith’s progress would slow if she didn’t strain her Anima. Her pale blue and pink Anima had only grown by half an inch in the last couple of weeks. Then again, they weren’t at a safe place where extreme training measures could be taken.

The next morning, they ate cold bread and meat jerky. They spent an hour or so doing their varied morning ablutions before they continued on their way. This time, they didn’t move faster than a walk. The risk that they could get embroiled in a fight meant that they shouldn’t exhaust themselves. Yuriko also realised that there was no way they could catch up to the barge, not without going on the river themselves. The barge could continue to go with the current at night, though she understood that was seldom done since the risk of hitting a sandbar or a shallow spot rose when the pilot couldn’t see as clearly as during the day.

But, unless the barge intended to go all the way to the ocean, they would eventually stop and disembark. Anyway, they still walked faster than a leisurely stroll, covering several longstrides an hour.

It was just before noon when she felt an awful trembling. The ground seemed to shake, and a moment later, she heard a roaring from behind them. All nine of them paused in confusion once they heard it, and they instinctively looked towards the river.

The roaring continued for several minutes, a dull, low-pitched hum that made her teeth ache. She used her condensed Anima to shield herself from it, but noticed immediately that her friends had no such luxury. Since her Anima reach was more than eight paces from her skin, she could easily encompass all of them, which she did after gesturing and nudging for them to come closer.

Then, she condensed her light to shield them from the awful vibrations. Thankfully, the bright light of the Radiant Sun somewhat masked her own light.

A couple of minutes later and the source finally came into view. A brown wave of water, nearly four paces high, barreled down the River Caradec, carrying large debris within.

“What in the Abyss!” she yelped, but her voice was dulled by the noise such that she could barely even hear it. She saw Heron yelling and gesturing, then he started pushing those nearest to him, which happened to be Asami.

The difference in elevation between the river and the ground they stood on wasn’t even three paces. Eyes widening in fright, they all began running directly away from the river, but the torrential wave moved faster than it seemed.

In less than a blink of an eye, the flash flood was upon them and battered at Yuriko’s expanded Anima. Instinctively, she used her kinesis to pull everyone close to her, and since the floods weren’t invested with Animus, not a lot anyway, she only needed to condense a thin shell around them to keep the water away. However, while she and the others were protected, the earth they stood upon was not.

The water engulfed them even as she squeezed everyone close, managing to compact them within a space of two cubed paces. Her condensed shell, spherical, caused the flowing water to bypass them, but in the process, it tore away the dirt. Soon, they weren’t standing on the ground but were rolling along as the flash flood dragged them downriver.

“Kyaa!”

“Urk!”

“Eek!”

“Hurkkk!”

The current spun them round and round, and it didn’t take long before someone projectile vomited from nausea, which then prompted the others to hurl. Yuriko pinched her nose and ignored the puke covering her poncho, focused as she was on their protection. She belatedly extended stabilising fins outside the sphere, which stopped them from spinning head over heels. She extended tendrils towards the ground, too, and pushed them away from the river’s centre and towards dry land.

Thud! Bang! Swoosh!

Heavy things hit her Anima. Debris from upriver, large flagstones, and broken wooden planks. It took them ten minutes to push herself out of the current, by virtue of using her kinesis to latch on to boulders, the ground, and finally, into the water itself. Blocks of ice tore from around the sphere. Gwendith’s attempts at helping them stabilise helped as much as it hurt, unfortunately, but she eventually managed to create a big enough chunk that Yuriko used to push them away.

Perhaps it was more the flash flood ending than her efforts, but eventually, the sphere breached the surface even as she tethered down into the deeper rock. She pushed them towards the tree line, and eventually, they were out.

And she was covered in filth. Ick.

So was everyone else, and most of them were green in the face, but they survived, and it looked like they'd been pushed a fair distance towards their goal.