“That isn’t right…” Yuriko complained. “They should stay dead.”

She glared out into the field of battle, finding nearly every last opponent she killed to be back in action. Not that it was easy to distinguish the squidships apart. Their hulls, or skin, could shift hues after all.

The Behemoths were more easily distinguishable and she saw those killed, like the three-headed snake thing, back up. Thankfully, or perhaps unfortunately, they didn’t reconstruct right where they’d fallen, but rather, close to where the Diviner of Secrets had enacted her ritual. That put the shapers almost out of view again, but she could see the ambient Chaos flows growing heavy towards that direction.

After that stutter, the Imperial Navy continued their assault. Large blobs of Plasma Carronade fire streaked towards the squidships while the Colossi retreated to their carriers, probably to rearm and repair. Many of the Koinos and Certus Colossi were in ragged shape.

‘I wonder if that woman could repeat that performance,’ Sadeen murmured half to herself. ‘We’ll have to see what its limits are.’

‘Aren’t you upset?’ Yuriko asked in confusion.

‘Hmmm, oh, not really. Child, battles at this level are rarely straight-up fights. Once you’ve reached Knight Captain onwards, a whole host of methods and abilities are on the table. Different Ennoias can do different things. It's just that yours is so focused towards overwhelming power that…’ She broke off and chuckled. ‘Well, something the Progenitor used to say, if violence isn’t solving your problems then you aren’t using enough of it. Although she always had a sour look whenever she said it.’

Yuriko blinked. Misha? She wasn’t like that, wasn’t she? Not in her memories. If anything, that quote actually seemed like it came from Damien. The man was silent now, though she felt him stir at the back of his mind, as though he was itching to say something but was holding back.

‘The Asheron Court has three Marchionesses, while the Solamnus Court, our supposed allies, only has one. The Telurian has the Duke, and the former She Who Whispers in the Light.’ Sadeen said, and Yuriko nodded. It had been part of the talks between them and the Legion Vagaris. ‘That was one of the Asheron Marchionesses. Now where would the other two be? From past intelligence, all three of them might as well be one being.’

Yuriko nodded idly as she scanned the battlefield. The squidships numbered in the thousands… just a bit less than three if her count was accurate. How many were there at the start? What else could they do except keep fighting?

Sadeen left control of Eli’Theria to her and she decided to create sunblades rather than sunshards. The smaller constructs dispersed too easily when confronted with raw Chaos bolts, but perhaps something that focused more Animus and Radiant energy could last long enough for her purposes.

Eli’Theria’s powerful Animus engines gave her a glut of usable Animus which she easily shaped to dozens of sunblades. She wove Radiant energy into them just before each construct finished, which ironically meant that it was her Radiant energy reserves that was the bottleneck now. As it were, it took her several minutes to form a hundred sunblades. Each one of them should last an hour…

Her zone of control was nearly a longstride across so she took up a good fraction of the Planar Suppression Formation. The squidships and Behemoths attacked almost as soon as they revived, showing no sign of fear.

Yuriko thought to tip one of the blades with a Trinity Cycle but hesitated since she was sure it would react to the raw Chaos in unexpected ways. If it exploded and took out the Chaos dwellers’ forces, then good, but there was a chance it could affect her allies, too.

She sent most of her sunblades ahead, striking at the squidships while grouped by ten. Eli’Theria struck at the Behemoths, carving through their tough flesh easily. That the edges of the wrist swords were covered in Radiant energy helped a lot in piercing their defences.

As she expected the sunblades weathered through the Chaos dwellers’ counterattack well enough to plunge into the squidship’s sides. Once inside, she set the materialised weapon to spin ruinously before erupting on the opposite flank. Bluish blood sprayed out of the exit wound as the squidship floundered and its second life came to a swift end.

Yuriko lost a few sunblades after eliminating several squidships. From the feel of it, there were pockets of raw Chaos within the creature and when her sunblade hit those, her Radiant energy blades simply combusted. It killed the squidship, but the Animus construct wasn’t able to hold up against the explosive increase of Radiant energy.

There was quite a bit of leeway when it came to the ratio between Animus and Radiant energy for her sunshards and blades. Most effective was actually a one-to-one ratio. No Radiant energy didn’t matter since the blades could exist without it, but once the ratio went the other way, to say, one to three Animus to Radiant, then the construct was consumed. Sometimes it was only one to two, especially when she used smaller constructs. In the same vein, if she built larger Animus constructs, they could contain even more Radiant energy. That was something to push the limits on, though she hadn’t pursued that line of experimentation yet.

It hardly mattered inside a plane, since Radiant energy often burnt out before too much could accumulate, but here in the Chaos Sea…there was too much Chaos to subsume. She glanced towards the Firmament. The Radiant Sun and Luminous Moon were not visible, though sometimes, they could appear. Instead, illumination came from the Chaos flows themselves. She wondered if an accumulation of enough Radiant energy could set the entire Sea on fire…

All of a sudden, she felt the urge to do just that…

Shaking her head, she freed herself, though only when Eli’Theria slowed down. The Behemoth in front of them, a mangy wolf with seven heads and twenty tails, tried to savage her Colossus, but Mum intervened. She could feel the touch of the Mishala Mien penetrating the creature’s mind, though it wasn’t given the death command.

“Go eat ten squids,” Mum said, and the multi-headed wolf bounded away.

‘You alright?’ Sadeen asked, ‘your thoughts turned strange for a moment there.’

‘I’m fine. Just odd notions.’ Yuriko sent back, though she realised that all of her threads of consciousness had frozen.

She regained control of her sunblades, made a few dozen more, and sent them to kill squidships and Behemoths both. She only moved to fight Behemoths when they came close to her as her sunblades were attacking at her extreme reach.

‘I’ll begin casting,’ Mum said. Mandalas of Luminous light started to form around them, though unlike the first time, there were only three of them.

The sight of Mum casting seemed to drive the nearby Chaos insane. The flows crashed towards Eli’Theria, but aside from breaking against the border of the Planar Suppression, it did little other than make it a bit harder to see.

Instead of silvery serpents, the mandalas churned out obsidian cranes. Yuriko couldn’t help but stare at her Mum’s spell. It was something that was both familiar and foreign…

Obsidian cranes was the spell she used to defeat the Seeker of Delights the first time she fought him, but it was Damien controlling her body and mind then. But why could she remember it clearly now?

Huh.

The cranes spread out towards the squidships and Behemoths. It wasn’t a powerful spell, and the cranes weren’t that strong on their own. But the mandalas churned them out by the hundreds every second.

The Chaos dwellers protecting the squidships tried to shoot the cranes down, and they succeeded for the most part but enough made it to the squidship hull to pierce the multihued flesh. And when enough cranes landed, the squidship was eventually rent asunder.

As for the Behemoths, the cranes weren’t able to penetrate their hides, scales, or feathers, but it got in the way of their eyes and other orifices enough that the Koinos Colossi fighting them had an easier time bringing them down.

It took far less time to shred the Chaos dwellers’ numbers, but Yuriko tried to keep an eye on the ritualists. And sure enough, just when the squidship numbers were halved, the ritual casters finally finished another round, and another portal opened. This time, a girl in a frilly black dress stepped out.

Yuriko glared at the Chaos Marchioness, who had a smirk on her face. She spread her hands out and released motes of green light, and where these motes touched, the wounded and dying squidships regenerated. The Behemoths absorbed the corpses of their fellows and grew larger and stronger. About half of their forces remained, but they were a magnitude tougher than before. Still, it was better than the fallen coming back to life.

The Planar Suppression Formation pressed towards the Fortified Waypoint and the Chaos dwellers bunched up to repel the Imperial advance. It had taken hours from the revivification to the regeneration, but it shouldn’t take all that much longer before they could strike at their base.

The dwellers fought with renewed ferocity and it didn’t take long for Yuriko to notice the difference. The squidships took far too many sunblades before they exploded, and her constructs rarely lasted the strike. The Behemoths were getting the better of the Colossi, and they had to double up to fight them evenly again.

The Imperials began to lose men and ships again as the dwellers rabidly fought ignoring their own defences. A dozen merchant ships were torn down, and a couple of destroyers were heavily damaged enough that they had to limp to the rear. Yuriko tried to rescue the sailors and marines thrown out by their capsizing ships, but she only succeeded once every ten or so wrecks. She was just too far from them. If the ships were actually near Eli’Theria, then they were normally safe from attacks. Mum’s mandalas simply drew too much attention even if she was casting from the safety of the formation.

Several hours went by in the continuous slog of slaughter. Yuriko wondered briefly if she could be more effective fighting outside, but Eli’Theria boosted her Anima reach by so much that it was simply too effective not to do so. Sure she couldn’t use Fri’Avgi independently, and she wondered if her artefact devouring Chaos dwellers would have ensured that the first Marchioness couldn’t have revived them…

Already, this battle had lasted longer than any other fight she’d been a participant in before. She noted that the merchant ships and the Imperial warships continued to fight consistently, but she supposed their crews rotated shifts. The other Colossi frequently returned to their carriers and now that she took notice, only about half of the current roster was fighting. So about forty-five Colossi were back in the three carriers resting.

Mum was continuing with her pace and didn’t seem exhausted at all, while Yuriko’s Anima was feeling a bit strained. She cycled Radiant Anima Refinement to fix the cracks and that seemed to help…

Finally, after the toughened Chaos dwellers had been cut down to less than a thousand squidships, another wrinkle in the fight happened. Those rotting ritual casters finished another one and a portal opened.

This time, a masked woman in a dress that was black on the left side and white on the right came out. She carried a sceptre with a skull by the crook of her elbow, and she gazed imperiously into the battlefield, though since the mask didn’t have any eyeholes, Yuriko wasn’t sure where she was looking exactly. Then, the woman waved her sceptre, and every last squidship imploded.

Yuriko’s jaw fell in surprise, but before she could make sense of what happened, the collapsed ball of black energy shot towards the Planar Suppression Formation, broke through the border, and was just about to crash into the warships when the field shimmered.

Discs of water condensed in front of each warship, each one was taller than a carrier, though as thin as a hair. The black beams smashed into the water disc and…simply vanished into it.

Yuriko couldn’t help but grin. The Chaos Marchioness’ last gambit had failed.

“No…” she gasped as another woman walked out of the portal. The one in white, She Who Divines Secrets. And with a cheeky grin, the infuriating woman intoned her spell.

And the dead and destroyed Chaos dweller forces materialised out of the Chaos to continue the fight.