By noon, the Wind Darter had travelled roughly twenty leagues. Yuriko could have pushed faster, but not by that much. Maybe another ten leagues or so. She could fly faster, but pushing the Wind Darter took a lot of her Animakinetic strength. Even with the runescript weaving that allowed the Darter to hover, it didn’t negate the sloop’s mass, nor its inertia. Going too fast risked losing control too, and they weren’t hovering higher than carriage height.

The first few hours of travel were through relatively desolate terrain. Empty of people, mostly. The outpost contained nearly all of the people within the next ten leagues, and the surroundings had quickly turned to forestry and rolling hills. According to the map, western Bresia was covered in primal forests while the eastern side had more hills.

The road was hard-packed dirt outlined with stones. It was roughly six paces or so wide, and past a longstride from the village, it was covered in snow. Ten leagues away and there were finally signs of civilization. They were headed northeasterly, and on the right side of the road, parts of the forest had been cleared.

The fields were still fallow, of course, but there were herds of cattle, goats, or sheep in some of the distant pastures. There were farmsteads, too. Small collections of buildings protected by an earthen berm, and usually with a three-storey high wooden tower with a sheltered platform up top. Yuriko could see the watchmen and, more often than not, farm boys or girls, goggling at the sight of the floating ship. She waved at one of the boys, who hesitantly waved back.

By noon time, Ryoko had made food for eight people. She’d gone shopping in the outpost for food and managed to snag enough vegetables and dried meat to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week, on a budget of two hundred Sovereigns. A good turnout, Yuriko supposed, though their dwindling funds were a concern. The easy way to earn money was to hunt down and harvest Twisted Beasts for beast cores, but Nirlith was several dozen leagues away from the border.

“Cillian,” Yuriko asked the young man, though it was clear he was actually older than she was by half a decade or so. Probably.

“Yes, milady?”

“Hmmm, we’re in need of funds,” Yuriko said bluntly, not quite willing to hem and haw on that subject. She’d never really run out of coins, and even when she didn’t have any, she was always provided for. Now, she thought about it, her Mien probably had a lot to do with that. Aside from the funds the mission provided her team, she had withdrawn another twenty gold marks from her own account. But even with all of that gold, she still had to sell the beast cores to pay for the Chaos Lords’ toll.

“Oh! That shouldn’t be an issue with a magus of your calibre, Lady Yuriko,” Cillain chuckled. “Niria Academy would pay a stipend if you make yourself available to advise or teach students. If you’re so inclined, you can apply to delve Chaos Founts through the Adventurers’ Guild.”

“Chaos Founts?”

“Ah, places where cracks on the fabric of the world appear, and an unstable space expands within. It’s filled with ruinous Chaos, just like the Shattered Realm, and sometimes creates Twisted Ones. The Founts have to be cleared regularly, or plainly destroyed if they’re too troublesome, otherwise, monsters will emerge and terrorise the countryside.”

“Beast cores?”

“And others. Perhaps. It's a dangerous profession and adventurers are sometimes lost when they delve. Ah, sometimes, foreign adventurers pop out of a Chaos Fount randomly, and find that their home is millions of leagues away.”

“Does that happen often?” Yuriko asked quickly.

“Hmmm, once in a while. New Founts appear once a year or so, but sometimes, dozens of them erupt in the country at once. They go unchallenged for Seasons, then suddenly erupt in a monster tide.” Cillian, and Adan who had been eavesdropping, shuddered.

“That hasn’t happened in years,” Adan Ortiz said quickly. “It’s why the aerial scouts are well paid.”

“The Founts are easy to detect?” Yuriko asked.

“With the right spell, yes. But it takes a full Magus to cast that,” Cillian said.

“Hmmm, tell me about your magus traditions?” Yuriko prompted, shifting her Mien to Charm for a moment, to prompt him to speak and to allay any suspicions. His eyes glazed for a moment, then replaced by that fervour she had always come to dread. Oh no.

She blasted Tranquility in an attempt to overwrite Charm, and perhaps to an extent, it worked. Sanity replaced blankness in Cillian’s eyes, and he happily spoke. She also noticed Gwendith rolling her eyes, and Heron snorting in annoyance. Ehehehe.

“Of course, Lady Yuriko,” Cillian smiled. “You must be aware of the elemental specialisation branch of Arcana Weaving?” She shrugged and he continued. “Well, Niria Academy espouses focusing on mastery of a single element, one of the four primary elements of Fire, Water, Wind, and Earth. By mastering a mono-element, one can attain great power, albeit at the expense of versatility at the early stages. Briarwin School is the opposite. They claim that only by mastering the cycle of the five elements can true power be attained, but those…delusional scholars can’t even produce a single true master. None of them have completed a cycle and the most the headmaster could accomplish was tri-cycle elements.”

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“Five elements?”

“Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, Wood.”

“Huh, interesting.” Yuriko nodded along. She could see her friends listening intently. Ennoias were endless and encompassed all possibilities.

Cillian continued espousing the advantages of Niria and mono-elementalists for a couple of hours, though not really explaining the basics of their path. Yuriko supposed she could find out when they arrived at the school. The interesting thing was that they manipulated Ennoia energies out of the atmosphere, and did so even if they hadn’t truly touched the Ennoia. Though by his admission, Cillian and Adan were just a step away from becoming a Magus, which Yuriko thought might be equivalent to a Knight.

By evening, the Wind Darter stopped next to a farming village. Adan had scouted the path ahead, as well as the forests to the west during the afternoon, and was completely tuckered out by evening. Cillian got his Steeld out to exercise it, which was strange since the mechanical construct was not truly alive, right?

Yuriko was a bit worried about the two men’s exposure to her Charm Mien, but the birdkin looked like he barely noticed. Cillian, too, though she noticed him turning to glance at her just a bit more often when he thought she wouldn’t be able to see. His expression didn’t change much, but when she checked the dreamscape, she noticed a faith thread connecting her to him. But then again, there were threads that connected her to everyone she came into contact with, including Captain Aeyra and the rest of the soldiers on Cillian’s patrol company. Cillian’s, and Adan’s threads were just a tiny bit thicker.

There were millions of gossamer threads swirling around her anyway, so another should barely matter. Still, that had been a foolish move, and she didn’t need any people obsessed with her.

That evening, Cillian demonstrated a few of the common spells he knew, in the interest of finding common ground. Yuriko observed his process and found it rather interesting.

First of all, he drew in elemental energy from the surroundings. He did not emit anything out of his body, or his core, but he did bring in a fraction of that energy inside of his physical body. Though tempted, Yuriko did not press her Anima perception close. He would feel it and there would be a bit of a pushback from whatever it was that empowered his Path. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t perceive anything though, as there was a vague outline of the man she could sense through her Anima.

Hmm, her Anima perception mainly worked through the sense of touch, didn’t it? She had to press the thinned aura against things to perceive them or penetrate through the structure. She could also taste, smell, and hear through the aura, though she normally turned those senses off. She could also conceivably use sight, on things that didn’t touch her Anima directly. She could already ‘see’ what her Anima directly touched, but the blindness when it didn’t was becoming a disadvantage. She invested a few of her consciousness threads to work on the problem while leaving the rest to pay attention to Cillian’s display. Ah, he was looking at her expectantly.

After he drew in the elemental energy, Fire in this case, which was adjacent enough to heat and Radiance that she could see a shadow of it, though not the finer details, the energy streamed out of his hands already shaped into a spell seed, and then, the rest of the elemental energy he gathered formed around it into a fully-fledged spell.

Well, a minor spell, anyway, compared to Yuriko’s Radiant Lance, or even a weaker spell like the Flight of Obsidian Cranes.

What shot out of Cillian’s palm was a small orb of compressed flame. It flew upwards and about fifty paces away, the compression unravelled and the orb turned into a fireball ten paces wide.

Cillian turned to her, grinning, and Yuriko nodded. “Wonderful.”

It was, actually. The runescript weaving she parsed while the orb formed was delicate and contained three times as many words in the same space as what she could manage. Runescript could be deciphered the same way everywhere, even if the writing could be different due to personal stylistics. Reading Cillian’s spellcraft was a bit difficult because of how fine the writing was, but if she really focused, and had enough time, she should be able to decipher them well enough. It was the syntax, the grammar, and the twists and turns of thought that truly made each person’s runescript work unique. And Yuriko enjoyed puzzling over the stylistic differences.

As Cillian preened over her praise, her thoughts wandered back to his earlier words. She wondered what elemental Wood and elemental Metal were, and how they expressed themselves. What did he mean by cyclic elements, and why was he praising mono-elemental focus to the skies?

If she thought about it in terms of Ennoias, it sort of made sense. She could not incorporate the four elements into her Ennoia of Radiant Flying Swords, but perhaps with greater understanding, she’d be able to.

Her main Ennoia of Radiance could accept any element, she thought, but it was just as likely for the Radiance to consume the other Ennoias to fuel its progress. The only reason her Flying Sword Ennoia took hold was because it was a weapon style and it incorporated Radiance within it too.

She was eager to get to that library at Niria Academy. Even if she’d get headaches for days, she wouldn’t really mind. Not that much, anyway. Ennoias could not be taught and had to be learned by oneself. But that only meant that she could not have been taught both Ennoias directly. If she studied the Republic’s collective knowledge…then she hoped it would help her advance her Colligia to the next level.

By the next day, the Wind Darter was but a few leagues from one of the larger towns along the way, Felbridge. It was named after a bridge, twice broken and twice rebuilt, across a deep ravine that separated the forest from the cultivated planes. From her vantage point, Yuriko could see the two halves of the town and the silvery bridge that connected them. They were coming up northwards from the west side of the ravine that stretched several leagues north to south. There was a river at the bottom, too, and from the sounds, its current was fast and dangerous.

“Lady Yuriko, do you wish to see a Chaos Fount?” Cillian asked just as they were a couple of longstrides from Felbridge. Adan just returned from his patrol and had landed on the railings.

“I am curious,” Yuriko answered.

“Corporal Ortiz found a wild one a few leagues from here, into the forest. It seems freshborn.”

“Hmmm, then lead the way, Corporal Ortiz,” Yuriko said with a smile.

“By your Will,” the birdman said and flew off. Yuriko turned the Wind Darter around and followed closely behind him.