Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

The next day, Yuriko and her companions hurried through the biomes instead of spending time hunting. She was eager to reach the end of the first layer and delve into the second, and even more so, she was eager to face the Gate Guardian. Or Guardians, if they were lucky.

Or not.

Carina's information and background research told them that the guardians were meant to be challenges and weren't impassable walls. How much of a challenge they would be, considering how much stronger she was than the usual delver, remained to be seen.

In the meantime, she thought of what happened the night before, and couldn't help but snort in both amusement and exasperation. Desire hadn't quite been condescending to Scarlett, but perhaps the smol woman saw it, or projected it to Desire.

The two of them had a cold war for quite a while. Yuriko couldn't just expose Desire's origins, even while she was friends with Scarlett. Not the full truth, anyway. Lying outright was impossible, Yuriko knew.

Gwendith, Heron, and her other friends made it clear years back that she couldn't lie to save her life. She could deceive with partial truths or lies by omission, but saying anything false made her feel awful. It was bad enough that even with her enhanced body control, something would always slip out. If not on her face, then her body language, or more likely, her Anima. Falsehood made her Anima writhe; even if it were invisible or retracted, people around her would still feel the disturbance.

So she learned to conceal and deceive with silence—by letting others come to their own conclusions and simply not speaking up about it. It still made her feel a bit icky, but better than brutal or compromising honesty.

But perhaps she could just tell Scarlett the truth? Her friend was her disciple now, not quite a Squire, but she was learning how to be a Mystic.

Perhaps later.

Either way, Scarlett didn't quite question why Desire needed to stay in the apartment with them, notwithstanding the fact that there wasn't a guest room. The Chaos Lord was dressed frumpily, come to think of it. The baggy trousers and a dark green coat looked like military surplus, which, she found out upon confirming through mental conversation, it actually was. Desire had been stuck in the interstitial tunnel for a while and she stole clothes from the soldiers who backed up the daemons. And she finally knew who those people were.

"Irvallans," Desire said.

"Are you sure?"

"A mix of Karcellians, other mainlanders, and Confederates. But," Desire shook her head, "decades had passed since we were there, master. They have no recollection of you, and the Great War was almost eighty years ago."

"I see. I guess the time distortion was greater than we expected." It had only been two years or so since they had been stuck there, and if she remembered the conversion properly, they'd spent a couple of Seasons there while only one passed in Rumiga. "But the question is why they're tunnelling through interstitial space with the daemons."

Desire shrugged, "Conquest. I guess the Richmond Confederacy won the Great War since their Tyrant won the war."

Yuriko winced. She had hoped she left Irvalla in a better state, but considering she received a shard from Damien there—and lost about a dozen more—the current situation there…oh rotter, it was her fault, wasn't it?

Damien's lost shards? She thought they got lost in the Chaos Sea, but if Irvallans are using the interstitial subspace to come here to Astoria, then they might be closer to the Great Continent and the Eternal Tower than the Myriad Planes. Which meant that there was no way the shards had been lost, and there was a bigger possibility that they'd been scattered to the winds. What was in those shards other than memories?

A fragment of the man's Anima? A consciousness? Was that what the old pervert wanted to warn her about in his last moments? Fragments of himself that weren't tied to her mind? Fragments of himself that moved to fulfil his ambitions? Ambition that saw the world Shattered?

Ice ran down her spine as she truly considered what kind of threat a God-Monarch had, even if they were only fragments and had but a fraction of their original power. She didn't truly know what his goals were, other than broad strokes, but it might not be good for everyone else.

Yuriko sighed. Yet another burden to bear. An intuitive leap brought the idea that a shard was likely in Irvalla, and whoever had it must have been overwhelmed by Damien's ego.

So what were her choices now? She could stay in Astoria, fight when they finally arrive, and perhaps seek out the shardbearer and defeat them. The problem was that whoever had it had held on to the shard for eight decades, and undoubtedly, was much stronger than she was. She was only in her incarnation body, so did she have a chance?

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Would she abandon her life here? Not if it wasn't necessary. So who did she have on her side? A Chaos Viscount and those she managed to train. That was only Scarlett, Kyra Hays of the fencing club, and Richard Walters of the HAMA club. She caught up to them and excised the parasites in their brains. They lost memories like Scarlett did, and managed to increase their Anima reach by an inch. She only gave them a few pointers, mainly because she didn't live with either of them, and they were still traumatised by what happened. But if there was going to be an invasion…

No, she wasn't thinking of everything properly. There were literally thousands of empowered beings in Astoria. She wasn't truly certain how they would fare against daemons, but hopefully, they'd be a match for the invading army? Too much to hope for and less than a year to prepare…

Did the government know? Why else would they start heavily recruiting soldiers? Why else would they encourage Altered Humans to come out of the woodwork and practice using their powers? Why else would they not keep those captured in jail? As long as they don't cross the line, was it better to just let them loose? Why not recruit directly?

No, that wouldn't work. Public perception of Altered Humans was downright bad, and any attempts at conscription would only see a mass exodus from Astoria. There were other nations on the continent after all, and Southern Astoria was just as large as the northern half of the continent.

Still, this felt like too much of a game to be sane. Why did it feel like that, though? Was there a puppet master? One who had enough influence to move everyone?

An image of a bunny man came to the forefront of her mind, and she grunted. The Progeny, of course. The guardian who held the shards, who had the arrogance to declare Irvalla as their playground. They were probably here, too, and she wouldn't be surprised if this were just a game to them.

After a while, she was just stuck with her thoughts going round and round. If there were Progeny in Astoria, she had no idea where to find them. She wondered if they were guarding something like Damien's shards, too, but circumstances here were different enough from Irvalla that she didn't think it would match. For now, she could only do what she was doing and keep an eye out for the outliers.

When Scarlett finally retired to her bedroom, Yuriko and Desire entered hers. The Chaos Lord wasted no time in glomping her, and soon enough, both of them were clad in nothing but moonlight. It was then that she realised that Devotee wasn't the only one who could change sex. Desire could do it, too, but she didn't turn male. Rather, she manipulated her body in such a way that she had the advantages of having a male member without the weaknesses, while keeping her feminine form. Afterwards, she went about proving to Yuriko how pleasant that could be.

She was sure that sometime in the middle of the night, she lost control of the sound-dampening barrier, but hopefully, Scarlett had slept through the moans and the meaty slapping of flesh.

The last ten biomes in Shangria weren't quite on theme with the rest of the layer. Rather than the open fields, valleys, and hillsides, the land slowly became barren, and for lack of a better term, volcanic.

The monsters they faced were more scaly than furry, even if they had the same body type. Wolves and foxes, even rabbits and oxen, had lizard or snake-like scales rather than hair, though it mattered little to the party. Carina's plasma rifle required two shots to kill the scaly, horned rabbits, and about three and a half to kill the scaled cattle. Two and a half for the wolves, though if she managed to hit the same spot twice in a row, that would be enough for a kill.

Ilvara held a tablet in front of her, safe at the centre of the group, while the others systematically wiped out the monsters on their way to the southern doorway. Yuriko retrieved the shards as they fell out of the ashes and let the others enjoy the fight. Carina was right next to her while she directed Sir Blue to cover their right flank. The Lightning Wisp's bolts did as much damage as a plasma bolt, but since the familiar could fire them in quick succession, he proved more than able to kill quickly.

A few days ago, she asked the greenette how she and Sir Blue made their bond, and the young woman said, "He just came to me one day. Here on the first layer."

"So how do tamers and summoners actually gain their allies?"

"Well, summoners simply use a device to capture a monster, then they imprint themselves to the creature. It's more about forcefully overwriting Shangria's influence to use the monsters to fight than any kind of partnership." Carina showed her a dagger linked to a chain. "Capture Chains." On the opposite side of the dagger was a cuboid that was covered in runescript enchantment. "A thousand credits for one of these," she indicated the cuboid. "The Prison Cube costs about the same, and is destroyed when the monster bound to it dies."

"An expensive way to fight," Yuriko said.

"A rich man's game," Carina nodded. "As for taming, that's when a monster that's more 'real' than most is enticed by the tamer. Methods vary, but I've only got Sir Blue. I can't afford more than a single Prison Cube, which is why I'm not using it to fight."

Touching the Capture Chain gave Yuriko the shivers so she returned it and didn't ask again. She doubted she'd see summoners in action on the first layer, considering the risks and the costs, but apparently, she'd guessed wrong. The fifth day bunch of biomes contained several summoners, who, according to Carina and Ilvara's research, were using monsters captured in the second layer. They were scaled monster versions just like the ones they were fighting now.

Second layer monsters were tough enough that none of the middling first layer denizens were able to put so much as a scratch on their dull scales so clearly, the discipline was more than viable. She just wondered how they would strengthen their Anima if they relied on what amounted to slave soldiers. Or perhaps they didn't, and summoning was just a side branch. The process of summoning was interesting enough that she'd watched the delvers with her Anima perception for a while.

"We're almost there," Ilvara said. Ah, that' right, they were on the ninety-ninth biome.

Yuriko noticed that the doorway looked more ornate than the ones they went through before. She glanced at the others, then shrugged as she stepped through.

She came out on the lip of an active volcano, and right in the middle of the caldera, atop a pool of gleaming lava, was a red rimmed portal hanging a few inches on top of scorched black ground.