Yuriko's flight was just as fast as running, but it had the added benefit of being able to bypass the twists and turns of the zigzagging mountain road and whatever other obstacles stood in her way. Radiant sunshards allowed her to finally triumph against the regenerating lionesses, but the way she managed to defeat them left a sour taste in her mouth. Well, there was also how odd they reacted to the Radiant energy. Their flesh simply ignited and was consumed much more quickly than normal. She spared a couple of strands of consciousness to mull over it while she finally exited the camp's vicinity and was on the road.
"Hmm?"
She tilted her head as her Manifested sunshard caught something within its perception range. Animus constructs such as her sunblade normally only allowed her to perceive a couple of paces around them, but if she infused Will and Intent into it, it became a Manifestation, a hallmark of Knights Commander and the next level of the Ancient's Way. It was like a small incarnation, actually, though it only lasted for as long as Animus, Will, and Intent held out. If she put it on Astorian terms, it acted as a relay station for her signal.
One of the rescued staffers had shakily pulled out her smartphone and dialed the emergency numbers. She was sobbing hysterically, but still managed to convey the circumstances. What caught Yuriko's attention was how the woman labeled the attackers.
"It's the Unfettered…they killed everyone! Someone rescued us but left us alone after fighting off the Pride. Please, we're helpless here!"
That wasn't all that occupied Yuriko's attention, however. Her sunshard hovered above the lake and she had it set to patrol around the survivors. She could project a perception field around it to about ten paces away. A few minutes after she left them, she spotted another lioness coming in from the woods. Little distinguished it from the ones that came before, and the humanoid cat took one look at the survivors and then stalked closer. The staffers were too preoccupied or in shock to notice.
A sunshard infused with that much Intent and Will would last more than a few blows, and considering just a smidgen of Radiant energy worked against them, Yuriko sent the miniature blade careening towards the hostile cat. The lioness' ears twitched and her head snapped towards the incoming strike, but Yuriko angled her attack to put the sun behind it. The lioness reacted a bit too late, and she cut the cat's flesh and allowed a mote of Radiance into the enemy.
Because she didn't have a Radiant Core, she couldn't do anything more than create and funnel Radiant energy. She couldn't sense through it, nor could she control its consumption, which was why she didn't put too much of it in her constructs. If she was in her true body, she wouldn't even need to form sunshards to attack with Radiance and would simply blast beams from her eyes or fingertips, or even seize control of ambient Radiance and use that instead. Alas, she didn't want to mirror her progress and the incarnation body was her way of experimenting, and in the future, hopefully fuse her insights into a cohesive Truth.
The Radiant mote flared inside the lioness and expanded. It consumed the lioness' flesh and blood and made more of itself. In less than a second, the entire lioness had gone out in a puff of light, smoke, and ashes.
She allowed the diminished sunshard to continue its patrol and she estimated that it could fight another six or so lionesses in quick succession, but she had another trick up her sleeve. Her Intent and Will were infused into the sunshard, hence, she could try to absorb more Radiant energy into it as opposed to just letting it dissipate. She had the shard move up and away from the shade of the trees. The Radiant Sun, pale as its reflection was during the Season, shed more than enough Radiant energy. And while the sunshard wasn't as efficient at gathering motes as her body naturally did, it could generate enough to replenish what she spent in a few minutes.
Back to the matter at hand, Yuriko flew over the road, but hesitated at blatantly flying once she exited the valley. She didn't have anything that would conceal her identity, and she was wearing an above-the-knee skirt. Her windbreaker didn't have a hood, so with some reluctance, she lowered herself back to the ground.
She paused for a bit to track down Scarlett's thread, but it remained muffled. Hmmm, no, it wasn't that it was just muffled, but there was something else between herself and her friend. That same sense of distance she felt when she tried to sense her parents, as well as her connection with Eli'Theria, though she intuited it wasn't just distance, but rather, which layer of reality she currently was.
She blinked in surprise. Now that she thought about it, the way she felt through the connections to the people in the Myriad Planes was different if she did it through either body. Or rather, it was different. It felt more similar now considering both her true and incarnation bodies were one level removed from Dragon Fall City, and even so, she wasn't sure that place was in the same layer as Bresia. She guessed it wasn't, but since she didn't leave anyone that strongly connected to her back in Bresia, she couldn't test it. In fact, the only thing she had a strong connection to was her 'daughter'.
'Hmm, daughter?'
She frowned as she idly scanned that thread. It had…split. It still led to the same general direction, but somewhere down the line, just before it became too obscure for her to sense, the thread split into two. Yuriko shook her head and pulled her attention from the mystery. She could revisit it later, for now, her friend was in danger. Well, every member of the two clubs were in danger and it was probably because of her…although, given how the lionesses didn't give up on the staff members, and considering what she knew of the Unfettered from the news…they abducted people, and more often than not, they were never heard of again.
A few minutes later, another lioness attacked the survivors. She managed to intercept it before it could get close, but this time, they noticed and were screaming up a fuss. Yuriko clenched her teeth. There was no sign of the bus and she also suspected she'd overshot where they were attacked. She turned around and flew back,
A minute later, she cursed as she came upon a torn-up part of the road. The concrete underlayer was broken through and there were bits of asphalt embedded on trees. There were metal fragments and rubber burn marks on the road, but no buses. No drag marks either, or blood trails. Just a blasted up portion of the road, shrapnel, and some broken branches.
However…
She furrowed her brow as she spread her perception across the entire space. The fabric of reality seemed a bit warped here. That seemed to track with her suspicion that the buses and the club members had been taken to a sublayer of reality or an interstitial space that was only accessible in the vicinity. She wasn't sure what was worse, but her major problem now was that she had no way to access it.
If she had enough Radiant energy, or rather, if her incarnation body was as strong as her true body, she suspected she'd be able to tear a hole right then and there. But the problem with holes was that they were likely to remain open, and she didn't want a repeat of what happened at the Chaos Fortress that her carelessness caused back in Rumiga. If she had Fri'Avgi with her, she'd be able to cut a self-sealing hole in reality, but the other problem was that she didn't know which layer they were in.
Pacing impatiently, Yuriko considered her options. Fri'Avgi couldn't be brought here, and though she was an Anima Telum and could also be absorbed into her incarnation Anima, she couldn't cross the vast distance between them. Hmm, maybe if she mastered the use of the dreamscape threads? The Ambrosia she squeezed from Quintessence could be brought to the material plane by either body, but once they were out of the dreamscape, there was no way to bring them back there. She tried it the first few times she wrote Ambrosia into existence, and determined that her true body had better use for it in the near future. She was short only by forty or so droplets for a hundred, which was what she needed to convert Saki or Ryoko into the Ancient's Way.
But Fri'Avgi wasn't truly out of play yet.
The Ennoia of the Bladeless Sword pulsed in her mind. The nature of that Ennoia was that it could cut more than what was physical, even if she hadn't quite got the hang of it yet, not completely. She could cut sweat or drool away from skin without harming who it came from, but that was still a physical use. If she observed Fri'Avgi cutting the canvas of reality, then she could conceivably do the same with the Invisible Edge.
She poked a hole into the mental partition and forced the synchronisation of her memories. Almost all at once, a flood of enlightenment suffused her mind and she was tempted to sit in meditation and add her incarnation's strands to ponder them, but her Will clamped down on the desire. She brought out Fri'Avgi from her Anima and woke the artefact spirit.
Seasons of hibernating and exposure to varied energies had refilled Fri'Avgi's stores. The spirit came out with a yawn and a curious look.
'Something's different about you, mistress.'
Indeed. Yuriko answered, I need to study one of your functions, it's a matter of life and death, and every second counts. I need to learn how to cut through the layers of reality to reach another layer or a smaller, hidden space within.
'That's easy, mistress!' the spirit said. 'You just have to shift your aim a little bit, hit the fabric instead of what's on it!'
That…wasn't really all that helpful, Yuriko thought ruefully, though the act was probably instinctive to the spirit. Still, there was nothing to it but to try. She noticed Gwendith walking down the hallway and used her perception to check in on her. Yuriko sent a pulse to her lover, impressing that she needed focus to work on something urgent. Gwendith sent concern and a query if she needed help, but Yuriko sent back that she didn't. After all, Gwendith and Heron couldn't go to Astoria to help.
She followed Fri'Avgi's lead and slashed a small hole into the fabric of reality. She opened it to one of the safer sub-layers, the Realm of Ideals. A small spurt of varied energies came through, but none of it was anything truly foreign. Either way, her Anima encompassed the cut and she fed the excess energy into her Radiance.
Apparently, it was that simple for Fri'Avgi to make the cut, but mimicking it with Invisible Edge was difficult. It was the difference between paddling up river with an oar as opposed to doing it by hand. Still, she persevered and tried to get the knack of it, but spent all too much time doing so.
Her incarnation body, on the other hand, had a more pressing task. She had to know which sublayer Scarlett and the others went. She tried tracing the threads and powering through the muffling, but couldn't really get anywhere. Finally, she tried Arcana Weaving and used the True Connection spell.
Gathering the necessary Elemental energies took just as much time as it took her to get the hang of cutting the canvas of reality with Invisible Edge. Doing so without the aid of an artefact needed quite a few things, Intent, Will, and Swordlight.
She moved off road while she experimented, but she was well within perception range. Thus, she noticed the Protectorate vehicles careening down the road, followed by a couple of flying heroes. Too little, too late for their intervention, though.