The second border fortress, Featherwood Stockade, was roughly twenty leagues northwest-ish of Twilight Hold. Yuriko simply had to follow the edge of the Sodden Plains to get there. At the moment, she was sitting on her heels next to a stream. From what she saw above, it would eventually join the multitude of rivers to the Conflux.
The sight of the Sodden Plains, even through the Elemental Mists, was breathtaking. The shallow waters reflected the light of the Radiant Sun as well as the mountains nearby. There was actually a large one, snow-capped and with a perfect conical shape, right smack in the middle. With the reflective water, it was mirrored along with the clear, blue of the skies.
To the south, the Great Erithmus Lake dominated the view, and she could see storm clouds forming…well, travelling, across it. She wasn't sure if it was heading north, but that was the first storm she would likely experience. It probably was not a Chaos Storm considering it didn't originate from the Chaos Sea, but she wondered if it would match the ferocity of a maelstrom contained in a Fysalli.
She soon spotted Featherwood Stockade. Unlike Twilight Hold, this border fortress was built entirely above ground. The buildings were arrayed in a circle and it wasn't difficult to determine that the walls and shapes were an actual spell rather than plain architecture. Why else would they be arranged in such an inconvenient manner? Also, this fortress was completely whole and undamaged. The Elite Strikes had been ineffective because of the defences in place.
She didn't imagine she could do any better if she simply bombarded the place. There were a few more people in the fortress, though it couldn't fit the entire two battalions that the Ishodirians left. In Twilight Hold, roughly two-thirds of the soldiers had been bivouacked, while the rest were in the fortress. Here, there was only space for five thousand inside. That meant that fifteen thousand soldiers lived in hastily constructed barracks outside the fortress's defensive warding. That didn't mean they were unprotected, however. She activated Chaos Sight, attuned to the ambient Elemental energies and examined the spell signatures. The wardings weren't as tough, but would still resist a hasty attack.
She mulled over her options but ultimately decided to back off. She could go down there and attack directly but the risk of getting bogged down by numbers and anti-elite formations was too high. She also couldn't detect the enemy elites, and her mission also stated that if there were no clear openings, she wasn't to risk herself. Reluctantly, she flew farther north to the last border fortress, Shadewatch Bulwark, and true to the name, most of it was shaded by the shadow of the mountains.
Any attack she made would be obvious, and upon closer inspection, Shadewatch was also in the midst of repairs so now would be an excellent time to disrupt them. Grinning to herself, Yuriko cast her two Radiant Lances and flung river stones infused with Radiant energy and her Terror Mien down. After a minute, she stopped and fled.
The longstrides flew underneath as she soared across the clouds. Her speed as she passed through the fluff caused it to disperse, but when she looked back, it formed a trail behind her. Huh, that was bad. It would point to where she was going.
Yuriko dipped lower beneath the clouds as she headed southwest. The Radiant Sun was falling beneath the western horizon and sunset came earlier in the east due to how high the Kerromere Mountains were. Endless plains abutted farmlands and orchards. Roads crisscrossed the countryside…and there were no single travellers daring to brave the warzone. Only small groups of cavalry, on Steelds or those reptilian mounts used by the Ishodirians.
She was tempted to strike the few groups she saw and, normally, she might have taken a target of opportunity. But she didn’t feel like it today. This was the second round she went after the border forts, the last one being a couple of weeks ago, and yet, here they were, persistently holding ground. What was the republic doing? If she was going to make the effort, shouldn’t they try to capitalise on it?
Shaking her head, she almost missed the disturbance in the ambient energies. But soon enough, it grew too fierce and affected her perception aura.
“...what?”
She muttered as she activated Chaos Sight. The energies condensed beyond her perception range, roughly a longstride away, and were close to the ground. She stopped, curious, but also wary. She should have just left, but she had not seen her fill of Arcana Weaving, not when the process was so similar to Shaping and Sorcery.
The energies condensed to a point when the distortion in the air could be seen with the naked eye, and some spell circles, inverted, appeared naturally around the point. She moved a bit closer, but the clouds above her suddenly darkened. A bolt of lightning struck down, hitting a point in space not too far from the centre point. Then another bolt struck and hit some kind of beast. Its scream was squelched even before it could begin, and nothing but a burnt husk remained.
“Built-in defenses?” Yuriko wondered.
She couldn’t read the spell nodes, not from so far away. So she watched the energies turn into a black ball and suddenly expand into an oval disc. A moment later, something, well, somebody walked through.
It was a Khuni man carrying a heavy rifle across his chest. His ears twitched to and fro, and immediately oriented towards Yuriko. His crimson eyes narrowed as they met hers, and she blinked. There was hostility there, she was sure, but also something she wasn’t quite sure of. No, it wasn’t her Charm or Terror Aura either, as she should be too far away to affect him. Hmmm, although she wasn’t really sure of her Mien’s range. She always thought that its greatest effects were with those within her Anima reach.
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The Khuni man moved aside and another exited the portal. A Sha’ledras male, taller than the Khuni man, but not if his long ears were counted. He wore a long, white leather coat that had silvery fur on the collar and hem, and hovering behind him was a metal staff topped with a pink crystal.
The gate remained open, but the two men already made their move. The Khuni raised his rifle and depressed the trigger. The thing spat out dozens of bullets at the same time, each one infused with a strange but familiar Elemental energy. The bullets crossed the longstride in the blink of an eye and struck her layered Anima defences.
The moment they sank into the layers, they lost momentum, and by the time the bullets came within a dozen paces of her, they would have stopped dead in the air. Or at least, that's what should have happened.
Instead, a couple of inches into her layers, the first couple of bullets exploded. She felt the ripple of kinetic force, and they left minute cracks across the layers. The next bullets penetrated through the damaged portion and exploded once they drilled into the intact layer. Wave after wave of bullets did that, digging into her defences inch by inch.
Her Anima burned from the explosive energy, and the pain from the fissures stunned her for a long moment. The sensation had been that much of a surprise. She only managed to react when the bullets had carved a pathway nearly halfway through her one hundred and seventy paces of reach. She twisted her Anima and shifted the layers so that a fresh side was the one hit with the volleys. She glared at the Khuni man, who smirked at her and winked. He hadn't moved more than a couple of steps from the portal…
The Sha'ledras, on the other hand, had closed the distance within a couple of seconds to two hundred paces from her. He slapped his palms together as soon as she turned to look at him and was blasted straight in the eye with a blinding white light.
Most of it was negated by her Anima, and the remaining brilliance was nothing to her Radiant Physique. As such, she was able to see what he was trying to do. A stream of rime frost slithered from his feet and circled her. She was several paces above the ground, still flying, but the rime frost creeper entered her reach in the blink of an eye. It erupted into jagged icicles that flew towards her body. Her layered defences easily resisted the onslaught, but again, to her immense surprise, that had only been the opening movement.
Where her Anima reflected the icicles away, parts of the air cooled down. From there, the Sha'ledras clapped his hands again and created frost right from where those spots were.
They invaded her space, coming closer and closer every moment. The patterns the frost created as it spiralled inside made her thoughts sluggish. Her eyes couldn't look away, and her Anima perception being active meant that even if she managed to, she would still be enthralled.
It didn't take long for her Mien to respond to the mental attack. A massive force within her uncoiled and lashed at the frost, shattering it and driving it away. She flooded her Anima with Radiant energy and wiped out the low-temperature zones the Sha'ledras set up, then she pushed herself away from them.
A volley of bullets met her where she moved, but she twisted away and avoided the trail. Sunblades materialised around her and she spun them in a defensive pattern just outside her defensive layers. They took the brunt of the bullets, and though a couple of them shattered, the resulting explosion of Radiant energy then wiped out the follow-up bullets and the rimefrost.
The growled as she closed into her engagement range. The Sha'ledras didn't try to intercept her but instead built up more and more rimefrost. She could feel the increasing density of the Elemental energy, so similar to Gwendith's that her heart ached. She sent a dozen sunblades spinning towards him, even as her strands of consciousness continued to conjure more weapons.
The Sha'ledras stepped back, and with each footfall, walls of ice emerged from the ground, each one curved backwards into a dome and protected the man from her attacks. The sunblades that hit the dome created plumes of steam as they sank into the ice, but the melting was slow. Unlike how her fights normally progressed, her Radiant blades didn't cut like a hot knife through butter, but like normal steel against a wooden beam. She could keep chopping at it, but it took effort and time to deal enough damage to break the beam.
As for the Khuni, he continued to shoot, and when she closed to five hundred paces, the underside of his boots gave out a loud bang and flung him dozens of paces away. Another bang erupted, accompanied by a flash of whitish light, and it flung the Khuni to one side, making sure that he didn't leave in a straight path.
Her sunblades followed the bunny man, but he proved more than quick and agile enough to avoid getting surrounded. And when she focused too much on him, the Sha'ledras attacked her from behind.
The back and forth continued for several minutes, and Yuriko enjoyed herself so very much. She realized that she wore a wide grin and her cheeks were flushed red. Sunblades swirled around her, now numbering in the hundreds. And she was slowly pressing them back. The initial encounter had surprised her and put her on the back foot, but she was regaining ground. Er, not that she was running around. She was still flying after all.
She decided to focus on the gunner as he had been hurting her Anima all the while. Some damage was good for growth, but too much was detrimental to it instead.
She was just about to get him within her sunblades' reach when a violent rip in the fabric of reality opened mere inches from her side.