The next morning, well before dawn, Yuriko continued her journey. The Arclight Sword was strapped to her waist and Eli’Theria was back inside her Anima. Unlike Fri’Avgi, she couldn’t summon the Colossus from elsewhere, so she either carried her or was inside the piloting core.

She had an inkling that if she progressed through the layers of the Orb of Authority, she would eventually be able to do so. Perhaps if she unlocked it completely? Either way, she was completely incapable of even lasting a couple of seconds in the fourth trial. The orb was stored inside her backpack at the moment since it could not be carried within her Anima while Eli’Theria was in there. It didn’t fit in her hip satchel either.

She made easy progress by the time dawn’s light covered the land. There were quite a few trees with colourful flowers in bloom, which she gazed at and admired using both her eyes and Anima perception. About a hundred paces away, another barbarian patrol was just packing up their campsite. They were behind a hill, but her perception noticed the thin smoke coming from their cooking fire and when she moved closer, they came within range.

Her hand drifted to her Arclight Sword’s pommel. Perhaps her practice last night felt useless since she was only doing the forms. Perhaps she needed opponents to really get into the swing of it. Decision made, she drew the blade and condensed her aura to protect herself. She used the rest of her prodigious Anima to restrict her physique as she wanted to rely on her skill with the sword rather than overpowering them immediately.

While it was satisfying to squash bugs now and then, it was ultimately a disgusting matter.

As she strode forward, she drew the Arclight Sword. The morning sun glinted off its edges, sending a beam of sunlight straight at the barbarian patrol. There were twenty of them, five of each kind. Grey-skinned and large-framed. Those with antlers that sparked with lighting. Those with long digitigrade legs tipped with sharp claws. They were taller and lankier than the grey-skinned ones. And the last set was the bulkiest, nearly wider than they were tall. Their physique was muscle-wrapped in a thick layer of fat, but there was no softness to be had.

The lead barbarians saw her and froze for a long moment. She swished the Arclight Sword in front of her and raised it into a front guard position. The arming sword was made for one-handed use, and the hilt was barely long enough to accommodate her hand. Its balance allowed her to easily swish the tip any way she wanted with just a flick of her wrist. Animus was stored in the pommel, holding a maximum hundred lumens of uncompressed Animus. Ten lumens were needed to create an Arclight crescent, though it would only be a basic one. She’d long learned how to do that without resorting to the runescript weaving of the relic. She could even form a knife hand and send out an arclight crescent by slashing with it.

The first barbarian to charge at her was one of the grey skins. Yuriko frowned. The man’s face was blank, and even when she allowed her Mien to run free, nothing in his expression, or actions, changed one bit. The feedback she got told her that there was nothing inside the man that her Mien could latch on to, and instead, it was as if something else was controlling his body. She hadn’t noticed with the barbarians she squished the day before, but then again, they died so quickly that it would not have mattered.

A second barbarian, another grey-skinned, charged just behind the first one. Both carried axes and each was raised high above their heads. Yuriko did not activate her sword dances nor did she consciously use the Four Phases. Instead, she deliberately moved her body, holding back instinct and muscle memory.

She stepped diagonally to her left and swung the blade fast enough that the tip slid across his throat even before he could bring his axe down to bear. At the next moment, she stepped back just enough so that the second barbarian’s slash missed her by a fraction of an inch, and then she stabbed his eye with the tip of the Arclight Sword. She felt the metal ground up against the bone at the back of his eye, then she angled the blade sideways so that his reflexive jerk back caught against the side of his skill and cracked it open. The man tumbled down, yelling and grasping at his eye before she put him out of his misery with a stop thrust at the side of his neck. The first barbarian had also collapsed, grasping his throat in a futile attempt to stem the flow of his lifeblood.

The next three barbarians reached her afterwards. She moved just fast enough that their attacks missed by a fraction of an inch, and her counterattacks opened their throats, or she stabbed at their heart or lungs. Two of those barbarians were grey skins, while the last one was the one with fur and digitigrade legs.

A moment later, she sidestepped a lightning bolt from one of the antlered barbarians, only to move towards the path of two more. Grunting in annoyance, she caught the bolt with the blade and absorbed it with her Anima. It felt weaker than storm lightning but was still potent enough to tickle.

Her Anima strength had grown nearly tenfold compared to the last time she encountered lightning, and she was somewhat surprised at how little it bothered her. But then again, it might be that the antlered barbarians were just that much weaker.

She ignored them for now and chopped up the last grey skin while twisting away from a wolf-legged barbarian’s slash. A chunky attempted to tackle her to the ground, but kicked his knee from the side, broke it, then moved out of the way of his deadly tumble. From the following snapping sounds, he broke even more joints in the process.

That had the effect of making the rest of the chunky barbarians wary but also gave her time to finish off the other wolf legs. Their attack patterns were simple and repetitive. They slashed from top to bottom and followed with a horizontal swipe with the other claw. She took advantage of the slight gap between the attacks to thread the sword blade into their torso. She stabbed a side, wrenched the blade sideways to open a gash, sidestepped and stabbed another right at the heart. The third one she disembowelled, but that turned out to be a mistake. The barbarian didn’t even care that his bowels spilt out, making absolutely no effort to catch it or keep it within his abdomen. Instead, he lunged and managed to score a hit across her belly. His attack wasn’t even remotely enough to pierce her condensed aura, but the mistake annoyed her to no end.

Anyway, the disembowelled barbarian fell over when she kicked his groin. That one elicited a response, even if it was only a reflexive one. Then she ran the Arclight Sword across his windpipe, putting him down. Now, it was only the antlered barbarians left.

A cascade of lightning washed over her but she was unaffected. She headed towards them at a stroll, letting her sword swing freely. When she came within striking range, she ran each of them through. None attempted to escape, but the rumble of thunder from their lightning reverberated across the hillsides. Perhaps it alerted more barbarian patrols.

In fact, it did. While she continued heading north, she detected a couple of patrols converging towards her. And while it would take a couple of minutes to reach her, she contemplated her battle.

She had been so used to the sword dances and the Four Phases that she actually hadn’t fought without for a long time now. The brutal attacks contrasted with the elegant and flowing movements of the dances and weren’t the formal movements and postures of the Phases. It was liberating.

The visceral appeal of striking, of killing directly, over the past years, she’d moved her fighting style from up close and personal to distant and disengaged. Her sunblades and sunshards, as well as her Radiant Lance and Trinity Cycle, meant that she wreaked havoc from a distance. She was safer that way too, but she didn’t realise how much she missed fighting like this.

Unfortunately, doing this wasn’t really anything more than a passing fancy…

The two patrols reached her and she fought and slaughtered them. A few times she had been careless and was struck. But none of them was powerful enough to pierce her defences. They were roughly at the Journeyman level, with an odd Knight-level warrior from the second group. Not that it made much difference. She’d been able to match Knights back when she was still a Journeyman, and now they were no different from civilians as far as she was concerned. Halfway through the fight, she used her sword dances and almost immediately, she felt her fighting style shift. She parried or deflected attacks she could have dodged. Struck a couple of times instead of just once, or put far more force than was needed.

The disconnect didn’t last too long, however, and her sword dances adapted to her current strength. By the end of the fight, the dances had become efficient and brutal as well. Hmmm.

She fought another ten patrols on her way to the Chaos Fortress before she took a break for the night. She plopped Eli’Theria into a gully and made her camp there. She could feel that the animating spirit was bored, but her armour was slowly fixing itself up. Time within Yuriko’s Anima was just as good as returning to the Chaos Sea or the Silver Tiger, she supposed. Tomorrow, she could pilot Eli’Theria to battle again. Not that she intended to. Not unless she faced Grandmaster Spirit Binders, Primal level Geists, or Chaos Earls.

The next morning, she continued on her way. A part of her demanded that she rush towards the fortress. To look for and rescue her brother. But another part of her knew, somehow, that she was too late. He was alive, but he probably wasn’t there. She didn’t know where he was, she didn’t know where her future sister-in-law was, and the trail she was following was too old. Still, there was another reason for her journey. It was to destroy the Chaos Fortress.

And to do that, she had to find her Way. She stared at the Arclight Sword. Unfortunately, while fighting up close had been enlightening, she knew that it really wasn’t the way she would fight in the future. Her sunshards and sunblades’ range was just too useful. Instead of a reach and zone of control of only five paces around her, the Radiant weapons allowed her to control and affect roughly three hundred paces around her. Even if the most she could do now was fling the shards and blades at her enemies in the distance, that was still better than forcing herself to close in on them before she could fight in earnest.

Well, she did apply the sword dances and the Four Phases to her sunshards, but lately, she’d been manifesting so many of them that she had trouble controlling everything. She could divide her thoughts to control a single shard, or a trio of them at a time, but she could only divide her thoughts into fifty streams at once, and she had to reserve quite a few to her own body and her perception aura. Actually, with the great expansion of her perception, it took more and more focus to keep a proper lookout. She would be overwhelmed and miss things otherwise.

She conjured a single sunblade and had it fly in front of her. Perhaps she had been trying to run before she could walk. She focused on controlling a single one for now, in her upcoming battles.

And when the next set of barbarian patrollers came, she only fought with the single sunblade, keeping her distance at the same time.

She couldn’t help but grin. It was actually quite enjoyable to play like this.