“Master…” Desire murmured as Yuriko fed her a droplet of distilled Chaos. It had taken Yuriko nearly a couple of hours to produce one through painstaking meditation. It would have taken her just under a minute otherwise at 1 iarvesh, but the ambient Chaos of this realm was so thin that most of her efforts had been to gather what little there was from the air. She half suspected that most of that actually came from what each of them shed naturally, and it was a process she’d rather not think about.

Desire needed ten droplets a day, minimum, to function normally, though the single one she produced should be enough to allow her Chaos Lord to survive. She certainly couldn’t spend the greater part of each day meditating to produce distilled Chaos. As it were, she needed to shore up Fri’Avgi’s stores too. So, that meant she could use up four hours or so to do that task.

Her runescript weaving in her Anima normally produced distilled Chaos too, and at 1 iarvesh, that was about four droplets an hour. The problem was that the pattern cost her Animus to keep going, and at her current rate, her Animus recovery was nowhere near what it had to be to support that kind of use.

“I…” Desire struggled to sit up. Her Chaos Well was dangerously low, as she’d spent most of her reserves to heal the wounded.

“Shhh.” Yuriko pressed her finger on Desire’s lips. “Rest. Don’t spend your Chaos. Don’t use your techniques for now and you’ll be fine.”

“Master, I…” Desire gulped. “I can abandon my Corpus and hibernate in your Anima? You won’t need to waste resources on me then.”

“No,” Yuriko said firmly. Desire wasn’t useless and she wouldn’t tolerate her friend thinking like that. “You’ll be fine. I’ll keep you safe.”

Gwendith and Heron could produce distilled Chaos, too, and so could the others, really. Although it would take too much time that they should devote to recovering their Animus reserves instead. But her two Squires could help in an emergency. She sat beside Desire and continued to meditate for another two hours, though it took less than that to create the droplet. She fed it into Fri’Avgi, who was still dormant inside Yuriko’s Anima.

The blood-furred simians had not been creatures of Chaos, otherwise, she would have felt Fri’Avgi’s hunger. If she could find such creatures, then it would be of immense help in recovering her stores.

Also, it took a mote of distilled Chaos to produce water and to keep the ration bar fabricator active. Without those, they were once again troubled by supplies. There was enough in their backpacks to use for a few days, but water was an issue.

The condenser canteens required Animus to use. It would take about a lumen to fill up the half Ren canteen.

“Tsk.” She clicked her tongue. It had taken just a bit longer than six hours for one of the marines, all of whom were Journeymen, to recover a single lumen while in deep meditation. They might as well just sleep. And that meant after a full night’s sleep, they’d each recover a couple of lumens, at most.

She spent the rest of the afternoon going through their gear. Her backpack’s cleansing function consumed several lumens to clean a bag full, the cost varied with the density of the fabric, but her clothes and underwear cost around three lumens.

Forceweave clothing normally sustained itself by absorbing a little bit of ambient Chaos, but now she worried that its protection would be subpar at best. Her Animus Armour guzzled Animus, and whatever charge it had now was what she had to work with. It was a bit too sensitive in its activation trigger, so she had to switch it to manual mode.

Siderious was far more trouble than she expected, and she still hadn’t figured out what to do. She could just follow her intuition and head over to where it was trying to lead her. But she also knew that it wouldn’t be as easy as walking there.

After the midday meal, she decided to help with the scouting efforts. The ruins were on a hillside, not quite at the top, but about three-fourths of the way up. Trees and shrubs covered most of the hillside, but she could see clear game trails crisscrossing the slopes.

The six-legged lizard monster hadn’t shown up at all. She returned to the portal chamber a couple of hours ago, thinking to eliminate a potential problem. What she discovered there were the inert portal rods, as well as a hole in the stone wall that looked like it’d been made with acid. That led to a tunnel that was too low and narrow for her to wiggle into, but hopefully, it meant that the creature had escaped and run away rather than sticking around in an attempt at revenge.

Still, as she made her careful way down a steep slope, she kept a wary eye out for it. Her perception aura was in full range, thinned out so that there wouldn’t be any eye-catching light.

Burble.

A stream. It was merely a pace across and only a couple of inches deep. She traced its headwaters and found it originated from a small spring tucked under a couple of boulders. The stream bed was fine sand and looked refreshingly clean. At least they had a steady source of water now. Next was food.

She didn’t really recognise the trees. They looked like oak trees but were darker in colour than those she expected. There were no fruit trees either, and the game was scarce. The animal trails were mostly abandoned, too. Perhaps the only way to find supplies was to head for a town. Or maybe in one of the farms surrounding one?

When she came back to the ruin, she and the other scouts reported their findings. One of the marines, a woman named Selene Nimdahl who had short cropped dark hair and silver eyes, and possessed a physique that rivalled Heron’s, said, “I saw some farmsteads towards the north. Livestock and crops. Wheat, I think. Or maybe barley.”

“Think they’d be open to trade?” Yuriko asked.

Seran, the marine scout leader, said, “Nobody says no to coins.”

“I suppose not. Did you see any of the farmers?”

“Yes, of course. Mostly the womenfolk, however,” Selene said. “I didn’t see a boy older than five.”

“The state of our supplies gives us enough leeway to wait,” Saki said. “I’d suggest we recover as much of our Animus as we can before we leave. There's no telling what’s out there.”

“Alright.” Yuriko agreed. There wasn’t really much else they could do, and haste could lead to mistakes.

Come twilight, they had their ration bar dinner and as the Radiant Sun sank down into the western Veil, she gazed up at the Luminous Moon.

But the skies were darker than she expected. There were no Chaos Flows to light up the night sky along with the Moon. Instead, there was only darkness and odd pinpricks of light that grew more prominent as the night wore on. Yuriko couldn’t help but stare at the skies, and nothing quite drove home the fact that they weren’t in Rumiga, or anywhere in its vicinity that the yawning void up above.

__________

Having spent the night at the bivouac, Rorn Dussel and 2nd Company were now waiting near the locomotive station for the asset to arrive. He couldn’t help but tap his foot impatiently. Just this morning, the newspaper had proclaimed the Confederacy’s inevitable victory. The Norrinthian Empire’s troops had been overrun by their sudden strike, from the bowels of the Derrian Woods, where it had been thought that the terrain was too difficult for an army to pass through. The Confederacy had done it, nonetheless, and this was another step into dominating the Irvalla Region.

And here he was, not being part of it.

“What’s so important that a full company’s needed in the backwoods?” He muttered sourly. He had little to go by and only the cryptic messages from the telegram to go by.

Tooooot!

The whistling of the locomotive train’s horn brought him out of his reverie, and he watched it pull up along the station. The carriages disgorged their passengers, and just as many crowded their way in. The locomotive would circle towards the north, then back east, going through towns and villages. Just a few years ago, it carried civilian passengers, though now, it held mostly war materiel.

A couple of men in uniform alighted from the caboose. They raked their eyes across the station and centred on Rorn’s company. He glanced at the rank and service insignia, finding the older man to be a Section Leader, but of the Warlocks rather than any other respectable branch of the Richmond military.

“Figures.” He spat to the side. He would have to work with the spooks, and it was they who caused his withdrawal from the front! What did they need a full company of Mechanized Infantry for? Were they expecting an outbreak of monsters?

He couldn’t help but snort. Monsters hadn’t appeared in the Irvalla Region in centuries. The last one was a blood-sucking fiend and its brood, which terrorized Vedia country’s rural folk. Ah, but then, one hears of special regions and mines where reactive malachite could be found. Maybe they found a source? That would increase the Confederacy’s war coffers substantially if so.

The two spooks were men in their prime. The Section Leader was blonde and blue-eyed, while the senior rifleman had brown hair. They approached him, glanced at his insignia and offered a salute, “Glory to the Tyrant!”

Rorn returned it easily, and the Section Leader introduced himself, “Axel Voight, of the Magicka Obscura Observation Department. This is senior rifleman, Nicklas Stinger, my aide. Here.” He handed over a folder.

“Chief Storm Leader Rorn Dussel, 2nd Company, 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division. Well met.” He received the folder and leafed through the contents. He stopped at the second page, squinted, then returned to the first and read carefully.

“Storm Leader Dussel, I believe time is of the essence,” Voight said.

“Ah, apologies. Let us head to our vehicles and depart,” Rorn didn’t ask for the destination, even though it wasn’t printed on the page. They were still at the locomotive station and one never knew if there were spies about.

The armoured car and the transport trucks were parked just a block from the station, and the rest of the soldiers were there. Rorn led Voight and Stinger into the car, allowing them to stow their luggage in the compartment behind the seat. As soon as they boarded, Rorn commanded the driver to head south.

“Our destination is the hills near Mistlow,” Voight said as soon as they got underway. “A persistent Occult Resonance is there, and who knows what we’ll find. We’re the vanguard, and whatever our findings, High Command will send a follow-up group in a couple of days.”

“Mistlow?” Rorn frowned. It was near the border of Norrinth, roughly fifty kilocubits from the border. “What’s there? Wasn’t that part of the old country?”

“Yes. We don’t know. It hasn’t been inhabited by more than farmers since the turn of the century.” Voight handed over another set of papers which contained protocols and possible scenarios. “The level of the resonance can mean a return of monsters, or it could be reactive malachite finally surfacing. Either way, we must secure the resource for the war efforts.”

“Agreed.”

There was little else to say. They travelled down the paved roads until they turned to dirt and mud. It took only half the day to reach the town of Listhorne, from which it was less than twenty kilocubits towards the hills. They bypassed the town and rode through the fields. There was no road towards the hills, and even if a track of wheat had been driven over, it could still recover with time and effort.

The vehicles stopped just shy of the woods. “The resonance comes from there.” Voight pointed towards the hillside, near the crest. The trees and the lay of the land stopped them from seeing too far.

“Well, lead the way,” Rorn said.

Voight nodded and the 2nd Company formed a loose wedge formation, each soldier three or four cubits apart. The terrain eventually forced them into a file once the undergrowth got too thick, and the constant upslope meant that the two Warlocks were huffing and puffing after an hour. Weaklings.

It was on the second hour of their climb that Rorn felt it. Amidst the sound of crackling leaves, someone…or perhaps something, was watching them.