Book 17-17.1: Raid
Yuriko watched with some interest as the layer guardian literally transformed. From a glorified snail-crab thing, it shed its conical shell and transformed into an armoured decapod. Massive pincers with serrated teeth, equally massive spikes for legs, and an oddly diminutive head, though only in comparison to the rest of the body. The layer guardian’s maw opened, vertical and surrounded by smaller protrusions that served both as graspers and teeth, and emitted such a high-pitched screech that most of it ranged beyond mortal comprehension.
Her Anima caught all of it, of course, and protected her physical ears from harm, though in truth, it would only mildly inconvenience her, judging from how the sound waves interacted with her aura. Still, the screech’s impact against the forces arrayed against the monstrosity was rather telling.
Her party wasn’t spared from the effects.
She noticed Ilvara, Ryoko, and Carina all stumble from the sound. Each woman clutched at their ears, though thankfully, she detected no blood from ruptured vessels. Her Anima had been condensed to her surroundings, and her full reach was only covered by her perception. A mistake, perhaps, but her instincts didn’t give any warnings about potential lethality—nothing more than discomfort. She was relieved to find herself correct.
The people in those ships weren’t affected, but the ground troops staggered. The group of five martial artists on one of the pillars weren’t affected as far as she could tell. Her perception aura didn’t touch them, though it was more by her choice than actual inability. Her aura did brush against someone familiar in the former group, and…actually, the martial artists were familiar as well. The pair of warriors that included the archer who caused such a precipitous change in the boss monster didn’t give much of a reaction. Well, that probably meant that anyone at the Knight level was unaffected or resistant.
Ah, it looked like the archer and the duelists were in trouble. The creature’s shell fell apart, but its screech propelled the fragments towards the pillars. The biggest chunk that was just as wide as the surface of the pillar fell towards the duo. Before she could intervene, the man swooped next to the woman and scooped her over his shoulder, then leapt out of the way.
Boom!
Dust rose from the crash, and from the void in the dust cloud, Yuriko knew that the two had avoided injury. Already, the archer was cussing loudly while she drew and shot her materialised arrows. They left the dust cloud so quickly that they left contrails. Not that it did much to the boss monster as the arrowheads didn’t penetrate more than an inch into the carapace.
Yuriko pushed her perception into the monster, but as she expected, encountered quite the resistance. At a similar level as the Bronze Bull, come to think of it. Ah, what secrets could she wrest from its fighting style and corpse?
The monster continued to roar for a few seconds while it ignored the archer’s attacks. Yuriko tried to slip her perception into the maw, and she tried to follow the arrows that were stuck, but the carapace itself was replete with dense esoteric energies. She was sure they were formed into some kind of pattern, but she could only examine the cross-section she could perceive through the arrow. Even that wasn’t easy because the archer filled hers with Intent. Not that it was intact once it hit the boss. There were remnants and they were quite interesting…
The monster didn’t stop wailing. It did begin to move with deceptive slowness, but objectively, the thing was fast. It crouched against the pillar’s side, then jumped. Did the pillar sway?
Oh!
Animakinesis slammed into the beast and it veered off from crushing her Handmaidens and allies. Saki did a mirror of what the duelist did to the archer, while Devotee moved Carina and Ilvara. At the same time, Gwendith and Heron struck. Her lovers opened with solid chunks of their Ennoia elements, ice and wind. Gwendith’s attack didn’t strike that hard, but a spot of carapace was covered in rime. Heron’s wind wasn’t sharp, but rather a hexshield that slammed against one of the creature’s legs, knocking it off its footing.
A pity the beast had seven more to keep it stable.
Oh, she spoke too soon. Heron’s hexshield, upon striking the leg, split in twain then careened off towards the two nearest legs. They smashed against it with equal fervour, before doing the same thing again. Four hexshields rushed towards four legs, but at that point, the beast sprang away. The force of its movement was enough to shatter parts of the obsidian surface and now, her lovers were occupied with deflecting the black shrapnel.
Yuriko caught the bits that would have flown towards the more vulnerable members of her team.
The boss monster was unexpectedly jittery, considering the glimpse she saw of it in its first phase of combat. She might have spent some time in Astoria playing strange games on her phone and computer…ehehehe. The parallels between Shangria and some of the bits of fiction she’d consumed there were quite interesting, and she wondered if the two realms within the Tower of Eternity were connected subconsciously…oh. They probably were. It was evident enough considering how her two bodies were connected. She’d be tempted to call it quantum entanglement based on popular sentiments in Astoria, but when she idly researched the term, it turned out popular fiction wasn’t quite the same as scholarly fact.
Anywho, the boss jumped out of her companions’ pillar and landed on the one with half of the ships and marines. The mounted cannons spoke, and not all of them used solid shells to hurt. A couple shot out streamers of lightning, another used coherent light to transmit heat. That might work better than kinetic force, Yuriko thought. The boss monster’s carapace was specialised against it, from what she could make out.
The bullets, cannon shells, beams, blasts—plasma or otherwise—deflected off the carapace’s angles. Most of the solid shells bounced, but some of the energetic projectiles had some effect. Plasma burst onto the surface and delivered its heat. Lasers did the same, but at a much less efficient rate, considering the beams were either deflected by the smooth surface or, worse, reflected back to the cannons. The ships’ energy shields sputtered as they blocked the beams from slagging the laser cannons, and the gunners stopped using them before the beams poked through.
There was little Yuriko could visually observe with the monster’s defence, but she did pick up hints through her Anima perception. They were little more than knacks and tricks, though, and her own condensed aura layering was either just as good or better already. There were some differences that she could see, but to improve, she’d have to experiment. Certainly nothing so dramatic as instant enlightenment. She was tempted to kill the boss already, but her companions needed the training.
She exchanged glances with Devotee, who had also done nothing other than safeguard the weaker trio during the battle. He rolled his eyes at her and huffed. Yuriko smirked, and he just shook his head. He was diligent in his duty, however, and she wondered if she should reward him for it…
Oh, there goes the boss…jumping again. This time, it landed on the muscle…martial artist group’s obsidian pillar. They didn’t even attempt to attack and spent the next couple of minutes running around. Eventually, the boss was driven off by the archer’s deadly shooting. Given a minute to charge up, her arrow actually went through the creature, which had apparently not been the plan, considering the annoyed “Tsk!” that Yuriko heard.
Boom!
Yup, the arrow was meant to explode inside the boss monster. She couldn’t make out bits of the archer’s Truths from that single attack, but some elements were familiar. It resonated with the Bladeless Sword, actually. Slightly.
Huh. Perhaps she should watch those two instead of the boss? Or perhaps…spar a little?
Her gaze was on both of them now, and with focused attention. Hmmm, those were siblings, or at least cousins, Yuriko thought. They had similar features…and they look familiar for some reason. Not the individuals, of course, but the mix of traits, and she felt…something.
Yuriko frowned. What was that? Something was drawing her attention to those two, though she couldn’t detect anything overt. She opened her Chaos Sight, but that revealed nothing more than the usual ambient levels in Shangria. Chaos was thicker around Devotee, but that was it.
The dreamscape? Dare she avert her attention to actually reach it? Perhaps not with this body, but with the other one. Doing so with a single body meant she couldn’t really explore her surroundings…
Ah, how ironic that the ability to reach the dreamscape, where she could explore and see many different planes and reality sub-layers now imprisons her.
In Astoria, Yuriko, Scarlett, and Desire were seated in the first-class section of Astorian Air. They’d taken off an hour prior, and the flight to Neo Prism City would last another five or six hours. The commercial aeroplane moved at a brisk nine hundred longstrides an hour, and while Naradon wasn’t at the republic’s extreme western border, it was but another two or three hundred longstrides from the western coast of the Endless Sea. Neo Prism was on the eastern coast and was also several hundred longstrides north of Naradon. There were enough travellers between the two cities that direct flights happened twice a day. She might have been more interested in taking Astoria Railways, but that journey would have taken days instead. Well, it would have also taken her through dozens of cities, too.
At the moment, she readied herself to reach for the dreamscape. Her attention had been piqued by her true body’s discoveries and concerns, and so, in a rare moment when both of her bodies focused on the same events, she sank into a meditative trance. She wasn’t in a proper seated meditation pose, which slowed the process by a couple of seconds, but when she opened her eyes, she was deep within the dreamscape, floating amidst the mists and her Anima. All around her were the millions of threads that were composed of emotional bonds. Most of them lingered beyond her reach, pregnant with Quintessence.
And as she expected, she couldn’t see anything strange. Threads connected to her dreamscape body, but none that were unknown to her. Familial bonds, oaths of fealty, and the thicker chains she willingly entangled herself with that represented her two lovers. Thinner threads represented Scarlett’s bond, as well as Ilvara, Saki, and Ryoko. And there were the two newest bonds that she’d first mistaken for a single one. They were entwined with each other enough that they could have been a single thread, but at the edges of her reach, the separation between the fibres was clear. Children. Hers, somehow, though she only had an inkling of how it happened.
They weren’t direct copies, she knew, so she wondered who the other parent was. It still filled her with mixed feelings as she was nowhere near ready to be a mother. But she wouldn’t abandon them. She could have, since she had nothing to do with their existence, but the bonds remained. So it was her responsibility, in the end. Now, if only she knew how to get to them. They were too far from Shangria, but were closer to Astoria. Not the same realm, though.
She returned to the material plane and glanced at Scarlett. The smol woman was staring fixedly at the in-flight entertainment while Desire was dozing. Would she have to leave her new friend to go look for her kids?
The thought was troubling, and there was a bit of reluctance there, but what could she really do?