Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

Phillip Keisinger yelled into his helmet microphone, “Imperator grant mercy!” his voice rang in his ear even as he heard his second, Juna Schiff, echo his words. He felt his stomach rise to his throat as he dropped altitude while twisting backwards. The glowing travesty of a sword swiped above, nearly beheading him, but from the way it subtly slowed down, just enough to give him that hair’s breadth of space, he knew that the anomalous empowered human was toying with him.

Abyss, she had toyed with the scout squadron before dropping them when he and Schiff arrived. The sword circled around and slashed the last of his mirror projections and he cursed soundly. The projection focus was a new requisition upon his return with the prisoners and already, it was drained. Thankfully, all it needed was time to regain power, but it wasn’t exactly helpful now.

Schiff blasted the golden sword with her arm cannon, and deployed her micro missiles. The thing spun out of the way of the first, and cut through the missiles before they could detonate. A second fusillade followed and Schiff detonated them before the sword could neutralise the swarm. Unfortunately to little effect.

His eyes darted wildly about, but he’d long lost sight of the anomaly. That woman’s power was far afield of what Astoria’s empowered humans had. Reports had come in from the Network over the past couple of days, and the Field Marshall had directed them to capture her. It was a pity that the local resistance’s subspace projection had so many exits. Those people were rather tricky to fight, and quite tenacious. Still, things would change within the day, at the latest. The 201st Battalion had completed their primary objectives and the channel would open soon. There also wouldn’t be a single beachhead, and while that might make defending and coordinating a bit more complicated, it also meant there wasn’t a single point of failure. The Imperator’s Will be done.

Phillip shot away from the golden construct and fired bullets of his own. Fire. Cold. Vortex. Spatial Freeze. None worked. Even when he detonated the latter before the sword could cut it up, the small sphere of temporarily frozen space was simply consumed and the glowing light intensified.

A rather familiar golden light.

Images of the Palace of the Rising Sun flashed into his mind, and he couldn’t help but gasp.

“The Anathema.”

_____________

The forest near the hospital’s exit wasn’t so much actual space and was instead, more akin to a theater stage’s backdrop. That wasn’t the case farther away, but the initial direction Yuriko chose to withdraw to had defaulted towards the only exit she knew. As such, when her perception aura slammed into the dimensional veil, she was slightly surprised, but didn’t hesitate more than a split second.

She followed the edge eastwards, with Scarlett at her back. They flew beneath the canopy, not too high up, just a couple of paces above the underbrush. She didn’t move too quickly and she controlled the air around her such that sounds wouldn’t propagate beyond a pace from her body. Half of her attention was on her flight, the other half was focused on the battle above, and roughly a longstride away by now.

The massive greatsword shaped sunblade was just as agile in that for as it was in a smaller, more compact shape. But agility wasn’t much of a factor as opposed to the amount of Radiant energy such a shape needed to function, and the only advantage of doing so was a greater surface area as well as the inherent toughness that came with there being more of something than less. Still, having only one sunblade to control with multiple strands of consciousness did have its perks.

For one thing, the sphere of awareness she had around the greatsword was orders of magnitude greater. Whereas a mini-blade had only a perception aura of about a pace in radius, the greatsword was at ten paces. That wasn’t really enough for an aerial dogfight though, and if not for Yuriko tagging the flier with her Intent, she would have lost sight of them already. As it were, when they were beyond ten paces away, she could only follow a bump of direction.

The greatsword swung as it shot towards the flier, and Yuriko took in there—his features. Not that there was much to see, considering how the armour covered his entire body.

Well, the powered armour was certainly beautiful. The articulated plates were coloured bluish green and it shimmered at the edges with the refracted light of a rainbow. The wings on his back looked stationary from a distance but were actually a pair of narrow, gossamer wings that beat so quickly as to give the illusion of stillness. It allowed the flier to maneuver in the air with the grace of a dragonfly. Which, she supposed, made sense considering she read the label stencilled on one shoulder plate as ”Azure Dragonfly Mk 2”.

The man kept shooting elementally charged bullets at the greatsword but they were easy enough to parry or counter cut. She didn’t use Invisible Edge for that as each application would drain the reserves of Intent and Will she infused in the construct. She used the Ennoia of the Bladeless Sword to cut using the wind instead. It was enough to divert the bullets anyway. Besides, even the odd hit or two didn’t really matter. The energies were consumed by the Radiance and allowed to replace the damaged bits of the construct. She couldn’t just let the sword take every hit, however, as the absorption and conversion process still took a fraction of a second to happen, not to mention the reconstruction which took a full second. It also drained the Will reserves of the weapon. Minutely, and nearly insubstantial, but droplets of rain inevitably turned into a flood.

The other flier took potshots at the sword, and thankfully, neither of them attempted to chase after her and Scarlett. The second one didn’t even come close enough to her sword’s perception aura and she only knew they were around from the bullets, physical or energy, that came in from another angle. Since she didn’t tag that other one, she couldn’t be sure of them staying close to the first, hence her caution.

They were now a couple of longstrides away, but from how fast either flier was, they were no more than a few seconds’ pursuit. Still, the canopy was thick enough to make being spotted from above unlikely. It would be better to hide in the underbrush, but she judged distance to be a better defence. Or she could try to herd them towards her and ambush them that way.

She shook her head. No, too risky. They had a way to communicate quickly with their allies, considering how fast the reinforcements came. She wouldn’t be surprised to find more soldiers, or daemons for that matter, in the forest soon enough. Also, they’d need to move out of cover eventually, and them being on high alert would mean she might have to fight her way through to her friends.

If she were in Astoria in her true body, she wouldn’t have hesitated to just bull her way through, but her incarnation body only had the strength of an Actualised Ancient, even if she could use her Radiant Physique and her Colligia, and Ennoias. She also didn’t have a proper Animus core within, since Lilibeth didn’t have one. She still distilled it from the dregs of Chaos she could find and created satellites around her Swordlight core, since she used it to form her constructs, after all.

Either way, she couldn’t create outer Animus reserves without giving herself away. In the Chaos Sea, the background Chaos concealed the external reserves, and in Shangria, her true body’s Anima was powerful enough to overshadow the signs. That wasn’t the case here, not unless she devoted an excessive amount of reach to do so. Not that she needed much Animus anyway, so she didn’t have a point to do so. The other reason she had Animus reserves in her true body was that they were necessary to advance in the Ancient’s Way.

But she wondered if the Ancients of the Conclave did the same thing…

The possibility that they didn’t meant that there was more than one path she could take to ascend, and now, she worried if she was taking the best one. Then again, what defined the best for her? Speed? Power? Maximised potential? Damien had directed her to the last one, and she could only guess that it would matter a lot once she advanced far enough. She just hoped that he hadn’t done that to fatten her up for something instead.

“Since when could you make glowing golden swords?” Scarlett asked, which jolted her out of her reverie.

“Um…”

“Hmph, you and your secrets, Lily.”

“Sorry…ehehehe.”

She could feel the redhead roll her eyes and Yuriko could do nothing but chuckle sheepishly. Her relationship with the other girl was a complex one and was inherited from the original body. She felt Lilibeth’s last wishes buried within her mind; she knew that Lily had cared for Scarlett more than she cared for her blood sister or her family. But some Truths would be too hard to swallow. For all intents and purposes, she was Lilibeth now, despite the fact that most of the other woman’s life had been erased by her death. Small things remained, bits and bobs of memory, emotion, and attachments that surfaced every now and then.

The most egregious being the lingering attachment she had to Evan Andrews, Lilibeth’s erstwhile paramour, and all-around abuser. Yuriko didn’t know why Lilibeth had been so attached to the sordid man. Even though she had cut him off early, she recognised deep-seated biases had still influenced her actions and her thoughts. She also knew that if she didn’t watch out, she was likely to let the man have his way with her again.

Something to watch out for, and if she was being honest, she should probably eliminate him. If not by her hand, then by a borrowed knife. But…she couldn’t bring herself to do so.

Tsk. She shook her head and banished the thought. She had a feeling that if it were her true body in Astoria, she wouldn’t have any such troubles.

Perhaps, the next time she split off an incarnation, she shouldn’t be taking over freshly dead bodies and identities. Lilibeth’s situation helped a lot to establish her new identity, and being in a place like this world, having an official identity was necessary, but what if she wound up someplace that wasn’t so discerning?

“So, will you tell me what that was about?” Scarlett continued.

Yuriko shrugged. “It is…enlightenment.”

“What’re you? An Aralian Monk?” Scarlett groused.

Yuriko shrugged. “Enlightenment is not limited to a nation, people, or race.”

Scarlett stared at the back of Yuriko’s head for a long moment, then shrugged, “I guess that’s true. But do you mean it’s not your Alteration? It’s something you learned?’’

Yuriko chuckled softly. She wasn’t an Altered Human at all and she didn’t want to lie to Scarlett. When she didn’t say anything, the redhead asked, “If so, can you teach me?”

Yuriko snorted. “What do you think all that training is for?”

“Oh,” Scarlett tilted her head, “but when did you get the chance to do that?”

“Here and there,” Yuriko said evasively.

“Uh huh. Fine, keep your secrets,” Scarlett huffed. She glanced at the canopy, then said, “Are we safe?”

“Nowhere truly is,” Yuriko said philosophically, and when Scarlett slapped her shoulder, she added with a giggle, “For now, yeah. We’re far enough from those people and I think we can take a breather or two.” She landed on a clearing that had a game trail going through it. Although…did she actually hear any game animals, insects, or birds ever since she exited the laboratory?

The silence was deafening.