Using her Anima to fly, or simply to travel faster down the tunnel, was a fool’s errand, Yuriko decided. Touching the bare walls would hurt or distract her, and probably the only reason the floor didn’t sap her energies was because of the layer of sediment. The raiders might only be ahead by a few minutes, she thought, so if she ran, she should be able to catch them up.
“Woof!” Fluffers barked encouragingly behind her. He hung from her shoulders, his bottom secured by the backpack, and a combination of their Animakinesis. Come to think of it…
“Fluff, you wanna try using the rifle?” Yuriko asked even as she eased up her restrictions and boosted her physique.
The wolf pup looked at her oddly, then tilted his head. ‘I can?’ he thought.
‘Why not?’ Yuriko sent back. ‘All you need to do is use your kinesis to aim and pull the trigger.’
“Woof!”
Yuriko grinned and pulled out an assault rifle from her backpack, loaded it, and gave it to the wolf. His kinesis control, which he’d been honing for a while now by stealing food off the fridge and the table, was more than sufficient to manipulate the rifle.
‘Don’t fire unless I tell you to,’ Yuriko admonished, ‘and make sure you aim. Your eyes should follow along the sight lines.’
She gave the wolf pupper a rundown on how to shoot, then half wondered if she should be giving a gun to what amounted to a toddler. Well, Fluffer’s claws and fangs were just as deadly as the rifle bullets, and to someone like her, the unempowered lead bullets were nothing more than a distraction. That might not be true with their foes, though, and at least the rifle would keep the wolf pup away from the melee.
She ran down the large tunnel. Every stride caused the sediment to explode beneath her soles, and she crossed more than a dozen paces at a time. The tunnel was large, but not straight. It wound left, right, and even sloped up and down, and it was the reason why she didn’t push her stride, otherwise, she would have crossed a hundred paces with a single, powered bound. She had no wish to make direct contact with the usurping walls, though.
Care made her slower, but safer. Even at her speed, it still took nearly an hour before she caught up with the trailing edge of the raiders: she only realised it when she was suddenly greeted by a hail of lead bullets.
She immediately drew her straight sword and fell into her sword stance. Metal Sword pinpointed the bullets and their trajectories. Her Flowing Water told her which way to deflect so that the bullets would strike the others out of her immediate reach. Each bullet so parried blocked another two or three, but the fusillade was more numerous than that. She took part in the assault with her condensed Anima, which took the attack easily. She enveloped Fluffers with her defences and kept him safe.
It was only when she detected metal with her new sense did she realise that there had been no raiders attacking her, but a fixed turret with a light machine gun.
Yuriko scowled at it as she approached. It ran out of bullets by the time she closed in, so she simply cut it apart. The gun bits of it were too big to stuff in her backpack anyway, and why was she now keen on guns?
‘It’s not a Plasma Caster, but it does fulfil a certain need,’ she thought to herself, but Fluffers must have overheard her surface thoughts because he barked happily. Shrugging to herself, Yuriko moved past the turret, though she warily scans ahead as far as she could. While she could reach triple her normal reach with tendrils, she had some trouble manoeuvring around bends if she stretched too quickly. It wouldn’t have been an issue if the surfaces didn’t try to siphon her Anima…
She did spot three more turrets placed down a straight after a bend, so anyone following would be peppered with bullets before they’d know what hit them. They were little voids in her normal perception aura, but pressing harder into it allowed her to detect, and more importantly, use her Animakinesis on them. She simply tore them apart. She was close enough to the turrets but still not within range. The things had been set to fire after someone moved into the straight lane, and not when someone had just rounded the corner. Technically, that was still within range though.
Her active kinesis was not subtle, unlike her perception aura which was thin enough to fade into the ambient lighting, which still somewhat works underground. Actively manipulating stuff imparts a golden glow around the object in question though, and the more ‘reach’ she puts into the kinesis, the brighter the glow. It had not been that obvious back when she first used kinesis considering she was still reckoning in inches back then, but now, with paces worth of Animakinesis, anything she handled with that much force glowed like a bonfire, at least.
Well, there was another way she used so that the object wasn’t wrapped up in her Anima, though it was no less obvious. Simply put, she condensed her Anima into the shape of her hand and used it to manipulate whatever she wanted. It wasn’t as glowy, but it was still a floating, golden hand. Hands, since she could now create as many as she wanted. It only took a cubic pace of Anima to create a hand that was as strong as a regular hand. Not her hands, unfortunately, since she was much more powerful. There wasn’t much difference in using either technique to use kinesis, but congealing hands was more intuitive, at least. Ah, if she just wanted to crush or implode something, then it was better to exert force directly, rather than making an analogue hand. The pressure would be even on all sides too, though she could alter it. That was actually a good way to capture someone, come to think of it. Just surround them with her Anima and press down until they can't move. She had to be careful though since she was just as likely to stop them from being able to breathe. And these people with their ‘chronian gear should be somewhat resistant to her direct kinesis…
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
They passed by another three turrets, though this time, she used an aura hand to dismantle the guns. The turrets’ ammunition were actually identical to what the assault rifles used, so she looted each turret she found, gaining roughly a couple of hundred rounds each. Ammo was expensive.
Ah. Perhaps she should have hurried instead of doing that. She had already crossed dozens of longstrides when her perception probes ran into voids in the air. Dozens to hundreds of them, just around the bend. Yuriko stiffened but didn’t move to hide. Though the tunnel was huge, roughly fifty paces across, there was nothing to hide behind.
And when the raiders came into view, she realised that they had already parted ways with their abductees. As soon as she realised that the haulers were basically empty, she struck. Not with guns, or an Animakinetic burst, but with a straight lunge towards the nearest raider.
Her straight sword whistled in the air, and the edge was reinforced by Animus techniques long unused, but not forgotten. Empowered Strike had been the very basis of Animus combat, but the Golden Silhouette’s techniques had incorporated it into the sword dances she taught. Yuriko’s desire to expand her mastery of the Sword and the Ennoias associated with it, made her dissect those techniques back to its foundations. The sword dances were what was called Intent-based swordsmanship while the Four Phases were Form-based. The former had no specific stances but was driven by instinct and Intent, while the latter followed a formulaic method. Swordmaster Kinohara, an instructor that taught her during her stay in Realmheart’s Academy, told her that her learning method had been reversed. Traditionally, Form-based styles were learned first, which then evolved into Intent-based swordsmanship.
It was too late to remove everything and begin as a blank slate, but snippets from Damien told her it wasn’t actually hopeless, just necessitated a different method. Intent-based swordsmanship had served her well in her early years as she couldn’t have lived through those tumultuous times without it, and while she had learned to merge both styles into her Ennoia, she could attempt to form a different subset, then merge it with what she already had. It was why she was attempting to form new Phases of the Sword after all.
Snikt! Thud.
Her sword, guided by her Metal sense, barely hissed over the subdermal armour that the nearest raider had. The edge cut just above it, and handily slit his throat. He gasped, but couldn’t scream. And while Yuriko was far from sneaky, she was fast enough with her full physical boost that the raiders probably only saw a blur, if that. She was cutting the throat of the next man in line before the first one even realised he was already dead.
Moving at such speeds brought about an inherent trouble. The air couldn’t move around her fast enough. A shockwave would have formed if she went about it with brute force, similar to what had happened when she threw a pebble with her Animakinesis as strong as she could. But she altered the shape of her condensed aura so that it allowed the air to flow around her more easily, and just as useful was Sweeping Gale Style, which allowed her to resonate with the Wind Elemental energy in the air, sparse though it may be. The presence of air meant that there would always be a smidgen of that elemental energy, enough so that the Style could affect the winds slightly. She wouldn’t be able to create wind blades, but she could prevent the shockwaves from forming. Or from the weight of the wind preventing her from moving as fast as she could.
In the blink of an eye, she killed a dozen. With the next blink, she actually allowed the shockwave to form as she dashed past the front. The raiders had been mounted on their motorbikes and cars, and when she passed, the wave made the things jostle and swerve.
In the middle of the convoy, she slammed a fist into the hood of a hauler, and the vehicle crumpled around her. She leapt away, but she was disappointed to see that the thing didn’t explode, nor did the fuel catch fire. Stupid movies lying to her!
Still, the blow caused the driver and passengers to slam against the windshield and probably cracked their noggins. Fool gangsters didn’t believe in using seat belts.
Screams of panic interspersed with shockwaves and crunching sounds as Yuriko easily demolished the convoy. A minute later, she was done. Nothing was left intact, and she smirked in satisfaction.
“Woof!” Fluffington complained. He barely managed to shoot his rifle.
“Sorry,” Yuriko chuckled, not really all that apologetic.
Still, while the bout of brutal violence had been satisfying, it was only a momentary pleasure. Honestly, being made love to was better, and lasted longer.
She was just about to walk past the carnage when she noticed something more than a bit jarring.
Blood. All of the bloodshed from the dead moved unnaturally. They were pooling into the centre of the tunnel, and even where the sediment was uneven the blood rolled over it.
She dared not probe the area with her perception, but nothing stopped her from clearing the sediment with her boot. Or with the butt of a rifle, for that matter. She condensed several Anima hands, grabbed knives, guns, and some tools from the haulers and cleared the space. There wasn’t a drain to explain why the blood was focused there, and why the level was slowly depleting, but when she shovelled the blood out of the way, she caught a glimpse of the same circuitry that had tried to absorb her Anima.
It would probably take awhile for the blood to all be absorbed, and she supposed there was little need to watch the entire process. But why would tunnels underneath a mountain want for humanoid blood?
Pursing her lips, Yuriko shook her head and ran towards where the convoy had come from. There should be answers there.