Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

As soon as she stepped through the gap, Yuriko felt the timestream grow turbulent. Her anchor was her true body and that would have been a good thing, normally. Interstitial Space flowed with a difference in time dilation, or compression, but she never expected both to happen within subjective seconds of each other, nor for the switching to be so disorienting.

The moment they stepped through, she felt the dilation ratio to be one to two. Two seconds passed in Interstitial Space for every one that passed in Astoria, or to be more accurate, in Shangria.

She adjusted almost immediately, as she did that time, she and the other actors got trapped. It still took her that moment, though, and this time, the dilation flipped over to compression, at roughly the same rate. Then back again, with a slightly higher ratio, then it flipped the other way with a slightly lower value.

In her true body, Yuriko stumbled over her own feet and nearly faceplanted if not for Carina's timely hand.

"Are you alright?" Carina asked while the others turned to look. It was just past breakfast, and they had just finished packing up the camp.

"Yuri?" Gwendith rushed up to her side.

"I'm…well, not completely alright," Yuriko admitted with a cough. Her head spun, and she felt nauseated. The rapid changes in time did more than make her head throb; it disoriented her and threw her strands of consciousness into turmoil.

Her incarnation body staggered as something hit her. Her Anima had reverted into a condensed aura which blunted the blow, but nevertheless knocked her off her feet.

"Lily!" Scarlett cried out, but Yuriko was too dizzy to focus. She curled into herself as more blunted blows rained down on her body, none so much as touching her flesh. The density of her incarnation's Anima reach strengthened her defences enough that attacks—claws, hammering blows, and attempted bits—fared little better than a bug bite against an armoured panel. Yet Scarlett's distress shone through the haze.

Her true body and incarnation body were desynchronised in time. A simple shift was easy enough to adjust, but this daemon nest seemed crafted to hinder. Ancients, and perhaps other beings, who operated through incarnations might not be common, but ways to counter it had long been developed. Damien's memories unfolded, though they didn't present a solution. Rather, they gave her a summary of what desynchronization meant and how they were typically countered.

Daemons, it turned out, were just one of the foes that the Ancients had. Further study would have to wait, considering everything that was happening. She had a hundred and six strands of consciousness split between her true body and incarnation, and ten were dedicated to the latter. The rest of the strands she used to control her true body, pay attention to her surroundings, and ruminate on varied subjects, chief of which was how to merge her two sword-related Ennoias into an overarching whole. She freed up twenty strands of consciousness occupied with seeking enlightenment and focused them on creating a partition between her bodies, and then a set to interpret and counter the desynchronisation.

A moment later, she sighed in relief as the burgeoning migraine faded away. Then, she cursed as she took in what was happening in Interstitial Space. "Scar!"

Scarlett was in bad shape. Her left arm was broken, her face covered in blood, and there was a gash across her torso that revealed her cracked rib bones. There was a bone spike stabbed into her thigh, and it was the only thing keeping her from gushing blood like a fountain. She had been driven a dozen paces from Yuriko's side, and there were six blows about to strike and fatally wound her.

Yuriko saw red.

She was on the ground, surrounded by daemons. Crimson Apes. Giant spiders that were trying to inject venom. Some stretched out humanoids with abnormally long fingers that had silk extruding from the tips. Tiny pentapods were attempting to worm their way through her Anima, and she saw a couple on Scarlett's wounds, halfway inside her flesh. The other girl's Anima flickered and was on the verge of being extinguished.

Yuriko clenched her muscles. Arms, legs, back, chest, jaw, neck, eyebrows, and eyelids. Before she touched the Ennoia of the Bladeless Sword, she could turn any part of her body into a blade. During the initial touch, she moved and turned the air around her into swords. She did the same now, though she didn't infuse the blades with Intent. That would have taken longer.

Animakinesis blocked the blows to Scarlett. The slight amount of wind generated by her clenching muscles became tiny swords that cut the daemons around her. They weren't enough to slice through their bodies, of course. The only time she used wind-generated blades was against the pentapods, and those things were tiny enough that the mini swords were enough to kill them. Instead, the wind blades sliced at sensory organs—eyes, eyestalks, nose, ears, fingertips—and made the crowd flinch.

She hadn't fully recovered from her disorientation; otherwise, she would have used Invisible Edges to kill. Even so, she sprang back up to her feet and met a Crimson Ape's fist with a vicious punch of her own.

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Puchi!

Anima reinforced knuckles cleaved through the ape's forearm, and Yuriko infused the blood spatter with Intent and the Bladeless Sword. The spray of blood droplets carved through the giant spider and another Crimson Ape behind the one she hit, as well as perforating the first ape's torso in the process.

At the same time, she sliced with a knife hand towards Scarlett's assailants and sent a wide Invisible Edge to sweep through them. She reached into Scarlett's wounds with Animakinesis and dislodged the invading pentapods. The girl's Anima had weakened to the point that Yuriko's perception easily bypassed it, and she used a couple of strands of consciousness to press together the edges of her chest wound.

She sent another couple of Invisible Edges at the incoming daemons and cleaved them in twain, while she jumped to Scarlett's side. She kicked a Crimson Ape that weathered through her first Invisible Edge away, then scooped Scarlett into a princess carry. At this point, she materialised a sunblade, draining half of her Radiant reserves in the process, then sent it into a sweeping orbit around them. Her perception spread out to cover their surroundings, and she finally took stock of the situation.

The number of things happening strained her strands of consciousness, and with the desynchronised time, she couldn't devote any of her true body's allocation to the help. She pulsed a kinetic wave to push the daemons away and gave herself some breathing room.

Three seconds since she regained her equilibrium. And about twenty seconds since they entered the nest.

Well, she called the entry point a nest, but it didn't really look like one. Quite quickly, her perception touched the edges of the space, roughly two dozen paces across, and rectangular in shape. Well, she could only sense three walls, and the dead end was to her back. The place looked more like a cavern than a building… no, actually, there's no ceiling, just a grey expanse. Now that she had a look at it, it felt more like a cloudy, misty sky than anything else. Her perception stopped at the edge of the grey, however, which was what made her think it was a ceiling.

Scarlett's wounds were slowly closing due to her Altered power. Minor regeneration didn't sound like much, but it also meant she wouldn't die unless she was hit with something that would immediately kill her. Her pupils were dilated, and Yuriko wondered if she had a concussion or something, and she didn't know how her power would interact with unconsciousness. Either way, she didn't know what to do other than try to manipulate Scar's Anima to mimic Recovery. At the moment, she couldn't spare more than a passing thought.

There were four other Crimson Apes, two more Giant Spiders, a single six-legged chameleon thing, and about a hundred pentapods that were still capable of fighting. Her sunblade had slain a couple of spiders and apes, but the pentapods had been spared by the simple dint of being too small. Taking out the bigger threats was more logical, even if the threat of the tiny critters was significantly higher. A glance at the dead end had her revise her opinion on the situation.

Her perception didn't catch it—and the fact that she had such obvious blind spots was quite galling—but the wall wasn't blank. It hosted an oval portal rimmed in a black so dark that it made the bright red of the portal terminus look dim by comparison. That terminus spat out a Crimson Ape even as she took stock of the situation. It was also there that she spotted the original gap they used to cross into the Interstitial Space.

'Does it lead deeper towards the Abyss? Or does it lead to the daemons' homeland?' She couldn't say, but the energy was achingly familiar. The problem was that she wasn't sure going through the portal would lead her to Kato, and her instincts warned her from crossing the threshold.

A couple of seconds later, Scarlett had lost consciousness, though her breathing was somewhat stable. She had to wipe the other woman's nose and mouth clean of blood, though she had to use her Animakinesis to do so, since her hands and arms were occupied. The sunblade danced amongst the daemons, and she had little choice but to rush towards the only opening.

She pushed against the hard stone ground, spun around and kicked the giant spider's pedipalps as it tried to bite her. Her foot didn't actually make contact, but rather, her condensed Anima that was wrapped around the limb. Half of her reach was devoted to boosting her physique, and thankfully, her mind was blessedly quick after she partitioned her incarnation body from her true body. The information was one-way at the moment, but the connection between her bodies never wavered. She just got shut down by the sheer amount of conflicting data.

The spider was sliced in twain, then she kicked off against the air. She couldn't afford to use her Animakinesis to fly, not when most of it was devoted to protecting her and Scarlett, as well as keeping her friend from bleeding out, hence further slowing her recovery. A Crimson Ape roared as it lunged to intercept, but Yuriko sent a flying spin kick, augmented with a blade edge that sliced off the ape's right arm. The spray of blood sluiced off by her Anima armour.

She kicked off the air again, at a lower angle, and rocketed away from the daemons. The sunblade continued its slaughter, and since it was infused with both Will and Intent, it could operate far beyond her reach. She moved it to clear the daemons in the way, and another half minute later, they exited the cul-de-sac that was the nest.

She had a better look at the ways and the floor. It was only their initial landing point that the ground was bare. Otherwise, every surface seemed to be coated by an odd, pulsating layer or spongy material. Fungus?

She spotted a cluster of tiny orbs secured to the material, and shivered when she witnessed one hatching. Pentapods. The body controlling daemons were being bred and cultivated here.

Since the pentapods were relatively weak, she sent wind blades to cut up every pentapod egg she could detect. One of the blades cut into the spongy material and revealed a network of blood vessels that connected to each egg. Bluish fluid seeped out of the wounds, but the layers quickly stemmed the bleeding.

She had traversed about a longstride's distance before the spongy material disappeared, and once she had time to breathe, she realised that Desire wasn't even close to where they emerged.