The Chaos swordsman's waveform attack struck again. It was nearly an hour after the first time Yuriko faced it, and while the damage to Eli’Theria’s thigh had been patched over, it was nowhere near closed. However, the damage affected their mobility far less than what could be inferred. Yuriko simply used her Animakinesis to move them rather than the Colossus’ and her body’s sympathetic resonance.

Over the past hour, Yuriko and the Chaos Lord simply exchanged blows. Eighteen sunblade pairs against six curved blades. She was certain that he was just stalling for time, and whatever he was waiting for became clear when he went on another rampage. And this time, she was wise enough not to block his attacks directly. She used spare sunblade pairs to defend against the waveform, but by the second attack, simply touching the crimson light was enough to break her constructs. Thankfully, she had more than enough to spare, and by the time he finished the pattern and was completely winded, she was still in good shape.

The Chaos Lord’s waveform attack was an extreme upgrade of the first sword dance, she realised half an hour ago. It was logical. The first dance she used focused on opening a weak point and striking it. His waveform attacks forced the weak point open through sheer brutality. Ah, it was probably fused with the third dance, in that case.

That was interesting since it meant that the fusion of her dances wasn’t the only result that could happen. Fusing two of the four might have different results, or perhaps even the same two dances mixed would create differing techniques depending on the intent.

Yuriko couldn’t help but laugh even while the Chaos swordsman bore down on them. She had thought that the three fused dances, as well as the Golden Silhouette’s perfect strike, was the culmination of swordsmanship, but perhaps they were mere facets of the greater whole. Perhaps there were steps that she could take to reach that perfect strike since the gap between what she could do now and what she had been shown was so wide it was unimaginable.

As the waveform attacks missed, Yuriko struck back while trying to mimic the same attack. She struck with one, followed closely by a second, then a third.

As winded as he was, the Chaos swordsman easily blocked her attacks. The force she could bring to bear, even through the sunblades and her Animakinesis, was just barely enough that he had to move backwards to shed the kinetic force since he was blocking directly instead of deflecting or parrying.

But once he stabilised himself, he returned to dodging and deflecting. Her initial attempt was pitiful, of course, with none of the charm of his technique. He showed it twice already, and she could somewhat dissect how he did it. It wasn’t just continuous blows, the movement of his Chaos flames also had something to do with it.

Deciding that copying what she could see was the second step she could take, she brought six sunblade pairs next to Eli’Theria and imparted Animus into them. Empowered Strike was the most basic weapon enhancement technique she knew. Actually, it was the only one she knew and one she didn’t use often since the sword dances’ Animus circulation pattern was what covered her blades with empowering Animus normally. Still, since she was looking to modify her technique, she opted to use the basics first.

Hmmm, his Chaos was in the form of crimson flames but he condensed the aura into the weapons before striking. Her Animus didn’t have a flame component so she simply condensed her Radiant-infused Animus around the blade. Then, she waited for an opportune time to launch the attacks.

Blam! Twack! Whoosh!

Two blades struck consecutively but didn’t do more than usual. She certainly didn’t feel the attacks were stronger.

She could see the Chaos swordsman smirking at her, but she didn’t relent. It was only after a few minutes of such that she wondered why he was so winded after the attack. Was it because he put a lot of Animus into his weaponry?

Her current reserves were…hmmm, she didn’t keep track anymore, actually. Ever since she modified her Anima runescript weaving, she never really ran out of Animus. She had separate storage for liquified Animus though, and she thought the denser the better, yeah? It would probably help if she infused her Intent into the lumens too.

Normally, her sword dances consumed less than twenty lumens a minute. It was less than that before, but she found that bolstering the cycle made her more sensitive to the nudges the dances gave her. Three lumens into Empowered Strike was the standard too, growing stronger when denser Animus was used. She added a hundred lumens of liquid Animus into a sunblade pair, imparting the need to strengthen the next linked blow. She added another hundred each to the next five too, and bided her time.

When the next opening came, she struck. But while the blows were definitely more powerful, they did not build up the way the Chaos swordsman’s waveform did. They were strong enough that they wiped the smirk off his face as he weathered through the attacks. By the end of it, Yuriko’s liquid Animus storage was empty, but was regenerating at about a lumen per second.

“You think me a fool to let you use me as a whetstone,” the Chaos swordsman growled. “I will not sit while you grow stronger. Farewell, may you rot here.” He deflected her attacks and began to retreat. Not that she would let him!

“Oh no, you don’t!” She yelled as the Chaos Lord took his distance. He glanced back with a sneer, but his face paled when Yuriko brought out a sunshard tipped with the Trinity Cycle.

“What’s that…?” He gasped as Yuriko chased after him, using her sunblade pairs to harry him from all sides.

“Tsk!” He dodged what attacks he could and parried the rest, but even the act of avoidance forced him to slow or stop altogether. The desperation to escape was quite clear on his face and Yuriko suddenly felt that his earlier speech wasn’t what prompted him to run. Still, she wasn’t about to let him loose.

It came without much of a warning. They were about halfway through the forest, with Veil already visible. The sky cracked.

The earth shattered, and the trees swayed then fell. Both of them froze, but the Chaos Lord didn’t stay that way for more than a moment. His blades all went to their sheathes and he dove right into a crack on the ground.

Yuriko’s Anima perception warned her of the increasingly high concentration of Chaos, and the pressure suddenly spiked from 3 iarvesh all the way to 10.

‘Brace yourself!’ Eli’Theria yelled as they lost footing. Yuriko’s Animakinesis slipped from grasping the air around them and they fell to the ground.

A moment later, the Fysalli crunched down, imploding from the outside pressure. The skies, the ground, the trees, all ruinously smashed into a singular point, and Yuriko was right in the middle of it!

Her Anima condensed, all one hundred forty-nine paces of it, into a protective shell. A perfect sphere that she kept pressurized and strengthened with Radiant energy, Animus constructs, and spires. The vast reach compared to before made the shell tough beyond belief, and the collapsed Fysalli squished down around them. Then, they began to degenerate into Chaos dust. Yuriko couldn’t tell what was happening outside as she dared not weaken her protection by extending her perception. All she knew was the horrific weight and pressure, as well as the sudden shaking and movement.

The entire ordeal lasted a few minutes though it felt like hours. At the end of it, all of the Chaos-formed materials around her finally disintegrated and she found herself right where she expected herself to be, in the Chaos Sea.

But she wasn’t that far from Rumiga, in fact, she was right next to it. They weren’t at Equilibrium, but somewhere deeper. And what was most unusual was there was an odd growth stuck right next to the Veil, which she assumed was the Chaos Fortress. It was as if a Fysalli had grown out of whatever rift had torn in the fabric of reality. The only odd thing was that it was situated deeper into the Sea rather than at surface level. Parts of the growth had disintegrated, leaving a lopsided look to the place. Which probably meant she should push herself and Eli’Theria inside before it healed over. Then, they’d be stuck out here.

The Chaos flows pushed against the Colossus, but Yuriko's shell withstood the pressure and the current, allowing them to stay put. When she pushed against the Chaos, they were propelled easily back into the Chaos Fortress’ Veil, and while it resisted their entrance, the damage the disintegration caused made it far more porous than usual. So it was only a matter of pushing slightly harder.

Still, as soon as they were shunted inside, she felt the Fysalli attempt to direct their entrance to a defined point, and Yuriko wasn’t willing to allow it to bring them to another kill zone. She could feel some kind of resonance elsewhere and she pushed towards it instead. She felt Chaos eddies rip and tear against her Anima, but it wasn’t all that strong. Soon enough, they emerged inside a stone corridor that was much too small for Eli’Theria. The Colossus could only stay down on one knee here.

Sighing in annoyance, and with Eli’Theria cautioning her, Yuriko pulled the Colossus into her Anima and readied herself to fight with her own body. She pulled Fri’Avgi out and asked, “Can you control defensive sunshards?”

‘Of course!’ the animating spirit said cheerfully. She conjured a couple dozen sunshards and gave them over to the spirit’s control. At the same time, she had eighteen sunblade pairs hovering around her. She expanded her perceptive aura as far as it would go and mapped her surroundings. The stone corridor went on for fifty or so paces before it turned into a split intersection. She traced the path on either side but it simply continued on until it went past her perception range. The stones were quite resistant to her probing, and when she tried, she found that it was two paces thick. The walls anyway. The floor and ceiling were stone for about twenty paces, which was the limit her perception could reach. Beyond the stones along the walls was another corridor, and when her perception expanded there, she found something.

Or rather, lots of people. Barbarians.

They were standing in rows, much like the soldiers she saw in Karcellia. Barbarian men, all of them, and from different tribes or lineages. Their faces were blank, and there was something attached to the back of their necks. A strange tubular thing, bone white, and pulsating in a rather disgusting manner. Ah, it wasn’t a corridor actually, but a square room. There were roughly fifty barbarians there.

Shivering in disgust, and recalling her foul experiences with the cretins, Yuriko was nevertheless disturbed by their predicament. No one deserves to be treated like that, not even misogynists like them.

Alright, maybe it was simply their comeuppance. Huh. It only took a moment for her vindictive side to take over, but that one quickly receded when she saw what was in the next room. Barbarian women this time around, and they were treated the same. Except Yuriko knew that quite a number of barbarian women were those captured in raids.

The worms at the nape of their neck were doing something else to their bodies, and they were in varied states. Some were gaunt and skeletal, while others were beginning to bulge in odd places. And only some of them were emotionless. One at the very back had tears covering her face, her expression twisting and changing, but her body was immobile no matter how she tried.

Yuriko punched the wall and shattered a portion big enough for her to step through.