Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

Boom! Boom! Kaboom!

Yuriko flinched at the sound of artillery shells speaking. She looked up from her current slaughter, absently noted the disintegrating dust, then flew above the building line.

Thankfully, it didn’t look like the Irvallans were shelling the city. She certainly couldn’t see any craters or thicker smoke plumes. Huh, the sound of explosions was actually fainter than the sound of sirens.

She shook her head and sent out a ranging pulse of her Anima perception.

An hour had passed. She’d slain hundreds of daemon apes, rescued half as many fleeing civilians, and cut down the sneaky lizards, but she’d yet to encounter the actual Irvallan soldiers rather than the swarm fodder. Ah, there were a bunch of people under a collapsed building.

In the basement parking, a chunk of the building’s support pillars had been broken when a rift opened nearby and the apes smashed into it. Most of the residents on the upper floors escaped…probably. There was more than enough evidence of bloodshed that it was likely most died instead. There were only four warm bodies underground, and they must have been caught there before the collapse. With how the beams and stones were groaning, it didn’t look like they had much time left.

Yuriko considered the problem from different angles. She deliberately kept things distant so as not to be emotionally affected, but even so, she couldn’t just watch them get crushed and die. Or suffocate, as was just as likely to occur.

Her Animakinesis wasn’t nearly strong enough to hold up the weight of the building by itself, but with the proper leverage, she might not need to. She borrowed strands of consciousness from the true body and calculated where she could leverage her power. She needn’t move the debris; she merely had to prevent it from shifting unfavourably.

She mapped out a path she could use to carry the survivors out of the ruin and began clearing it. A couple of minutes later, there was a path barely wide enough to bring the smallest one out, though since she stabilised the rubble above, there was no need for that kind of rush. Another couple of minutes later, and she had a good enough path. She enveloped and protected the mortals with her kinesis, then carried them out.

All four were semi-conscious, and Yuriko decided to bring them to an evacuation rally point about four blocks away. Over the past hour, several intersections had been fortified with barricades built from damaged cars or concrete traffic barriers. A small squad of police or armed volunteers manned the barricades. Paramedics and an ambulance or two were on standby near them. Travelling on contested roads was dangerous. Shortwave radios were used to coordinate, but they were ill-suited compared to the Network or smartphones. A pity that the communication towers had been broken. Network coverage was sporadic, but at the very least, they came up now and then.

“Over here!” The paramedic, a middle-aged man with rumpled clothes and deep bags under his eyes, yelled when Yuriko arrived. He gestured towards a triage space next to the ambulance. “What happened?”

“Rescued from collapsed rubble,” Yuriko said shortly. She glanced towards the militia and eavesdropped on the radio, but nothing important had been said over the past minute. “Can you take care of them?”

“We’ll get them back on their feet,” the paramedic said, though it didn’t look like he believed his own words. He grimly continued his work, however.

“Uhm…Miss Regalia?” A volunteer defender approached them and held out a portable radio transceiver. “They’re calling for all the Altered…uh, Capes to gather by Central Station. In Winderfield?”

“What for?” Yuriko asked patiently.

“They’re, uhm, coordinating a concerted push against the terrorists.”

Yuriko raised an eyebrow. Terrorists? Guerilla fighters? She examined the label and couldn’t quite make out what the young man meant. By the term, she assumed that it meant those who would sow fear and terror? She tilted her head and hummed. Yes. The daemons were shock troops, meant more to harass and disorganise the opposing forces.

“Did you find where the, uh, terrorists are headquartered?”

“Not as such, miss.” He shrugged. "I'm just relaying messages to all the capes who came out to help.”

He gave her a sideways stare, but didn’t say anything else. It was a marked difference from how people would react when she was in her actress/model persona, though it was probably more because her costume covered her up. Even if she wasn’t wearing a motorcycle helmet, her materialised mask covered most of her facial features and obscured the actual shape of her jaw, leaving only her eyes, part of her lips, and her chin exposed.

He left once Yuriko took the transceiver. Yuriko flew up to survey the city. Jackstone was filled with warehouses along the bayside and riverbanks, but the interior was either tenement apartments or small gated communities full of near-identical houses. The most rifts appeared near the tenements, with a smattering near the warehouses. There might have been one that opened inside a community, but none were open now. The rifts collapsed almost as soon as they delivered a platoon of apes along with their attaches, so there was little chance of counterattack through them, but at least there was no need to shut them down.

Yuriko sighed as she alighted on a nearby rooftop. ‘Dee?’

‘Master.’

‘What did you find out?’

‘The entire city opens rifts every two to three hundred paces. The permanent portals aren’t here. This was meant to distract. Fort Hampstead, which is the Astorian Army’s base camp nearest the city, is besieged.’

‘Is that where the cannon shells are landing?’

‘Yes, Master. The permanent portals are to the north as well. Near where we entered interstitial space to confront the Unfettered.’

‘As expected.’ Yuriko sighed. Of course, it was there. Those rotters escaped her vengeance again and managed to open up the country to invasion… No, that wasn’t quite true.

The Irvallans had been planning the invasion for longer than she knew, probably. Why they wanted to do it wasn’t clear, however, and it wasn’t as if she managed to ask them. Desire’s reconnaissance and information gathering only hinted at imperial mandate as the reason for this, but little else other than that. The soldiers behind the daemons seemed apathetic to anything other than obeying their ruler’s command, though she hadn’t tried to influence them with her Mien quite yet.

Either way, she wasn’t about to abandon this district just yet. There were more people in need of help, and as long as the daemon apes kept popping out…

At the extreme of her perception range, she noticed a rift tear through the layer of reality. She quickly sent an Invisible Edge to intercept, and she caught it before the opening stabilised. The Edge tore through the border, and the rift burst apart in a shower of esoteric energies. And body parts. Blood and gore sprayed out and painted the wall and asphalt crimson. Thankfully, the blood started to disintegrate into daemon dust, though it did so slowly. It might take a couple or so minutes before the blood spatter vanishes.

Well, that was rather fortuitous. She reconsidered the need to coordinate with other Altered, mainly because she was making a difference here, in Jackstone. But what about back home? Nobody was there, though, other than neighbours she barely knew. What about college? Trinity town? She pursed her lips and shook her head. There were too many in the city to abandon for a less dense area, and she was sure there were Capes there to hold down the fort. She was also certain the Irvallans weren’t targeting locations that didn’t have any military value. A college town was hardly a fitting target. But what about the five districts of Neo Prism City?

She came across the result of more rifts. Sometimes, the apes were still there, but most times, they had already hit a few places before they ran into stiffer resistance. She was by no means the only empowered individual fighting in Jackstone. She noticed several cape gang members who fought more fiercely than the law enforcement officers or cape heroes.

She killed the apes when she could, but focused much of her attention on the lizards. They were too sneaky, and they were ruthless. Where the apes settled for property damage, the lizards went for kills. And they were prone to entering buildings as opposed to the other daemons, who stayed on the streets.

Yuriko could scan the outside of a five-storey tenement in seconds, but inspecting the inside took at least a couple of minutes. Thankfully, her perception aura could slip under the gaps of doorways rather than force her to push through the material. It would have taken ten times longer in that case. She caught twenty-four lizards over the past hour, and only half of that before they started the slaughter.

An hour after she received the transceiver—which she had only been paying a bit of attention to—it emitted a piercing squeal.

“Emergency call, all heroes to Central Station! Heavy assault in progress!”

Yuriko blinked but had to acknowledge the sheer panic of the voice on the radio. She was somewhere in the middle of Jackstone, but it wouldn’t take more than a minute or so to reach Winderfield. Where was Central Station again? Presumably near the middle of the island, right? Neo Prism had a network of underground railways for intra-city travel…

She shook her head and flew above the building line, then rocketed towards the island. She kept an eye out for more daemons, but she didn’t spot any while on her way across the river. Most of the remaining Crimson Apes were blocked at the barricades. It turned out that taking on a fusillade of bullets was enough to overcome the toughness of their fur, not when they did nothing to avoid getting hit. The pentapods apparently cared little for the well-being of their hosts.

She didn’t detect any more cloaked lizards, so she crossed the river with little hesitation. As soon as she crossed the quays, she noticed that the citizenry of the island didn’t opt to evacuate. Instead, she noticed most had holed up in their apartments or taken shelter in bunkers underground. She only noticed them because her perception scan caught one with an open door. From the stench of blood, it seemed they were infiltrated by cloaked lizards and killed.

After she scanned road signs and a handy map displayed along bus stops, she found out where Central Station was, though the commotion would have eventually given it away. It was at the southern end of the mid-island park, and the curated green was now a battlefield.

Gaping rifts that were ten paces wide and tall sliced through the landscape. Hundreds of daemons marched out, and they were met with concentrated gunfire, and expressions of Altered Human power. She noticed Brilliance zooming above the canopy, raining beams of kinetic light down at the monsters to lethal effect. The jittery way the girl flitted about had Yuriko concerned, and she reached out just in time to deflect a thrown boulder that would have clipped the younger hero. Her Animakinesis had not gone unnoticed, but only by her friend. The golden light was just one of many hues flying about.

“Regalia!” Brilliance yelped as she darted closer. “Glad you’re here!”

“What happened?”

“Beyond the obvious?” the girl grumbled sarcastically, though she did take a deep breath to regain her composure. Yuriko blocked and counterattacked any who aimed at the two of them. “The holes just popped up a couple of minutes ago. We—ah!”

Whsss! Boom!

This time, red plasma balls shot towards every Altered flyer in quick succession, and when Yuriko blocked those aimed at her, they exploded into blinding light. Well, neither of them was actually affected, so she immediately saw the new threat.

Rows upon rows of one-eyed daemons.