One moment, the pool was simply boiling. Then the next, it seemingly exploded. That was Yuriko’s first impression though, but a second glance countered it. The pool rose, almost like it was boiling over, but then, a second later, tentacles shot out and stabbed into the ground. Whatever that thing was, it pulled itself out of the blood pool, which settled just a bit lower into the depression.
The part crawling out of it became more viscous and opaque. The yellow darkened into a light brown, and the entire thing was about the size of a car, and the way it quivered invoked a deep sense of disgust and disquiet. For a long moment, nothing happened, but then…
Whoosh!
A long tendril shot out towards Yuriko but she had anticipated an attack. She leapt away from the attack—
“Ahhh!”
—only to squeal in pain as a line of fire struck against her perception aura. The pain nearly paralysed her, and it would have had she not been used to it. But it was magnitudes greater than anything she experienced before.
She reflexively retracted her Anima, only to realise her folly when the act ripped parts of her perceptive Anima off. She stared at the floating particles for moment, somehow still feeling the connection between it and the rest of her Anima, before it sparked and fizzled with Radiant energy.
The brown tendril swiped towards her, but with her perceptive aura now pulled into her condensed Anima, and her reflexes, it missed. The bursting Radiance was swiped by another tendril, and frighteningly, absorbed.
“What in the Abyss…” Yuriko muttered even as she allowed Radiant energy and distilled Chaos to flood the injured bits of her Anima to repair it. Since the thing only managed to hit her perceptive aura, the damage was miniscule. Barely even a fraction of an inch if it was her normal reach. But it still hurt!
Her leap had brought her a dozen paces away. Her hand on her sword meant her Metal sense was active, but unfortunately, the thing wasn’t made of metal. Just looking at it gave her the shivers.
It paused as it ate the Radiant overflow, but soon turned to her, if a formless blob could be said to turn, anyway. It compressed itself, then shot towards her. She dodged easily. It was fast, but its leaps were predictable. It shot more tentacles at her, but she danced away.
Her mind raced and her strands of consciousness struggled to come to a solution. This… thing, was hostile to her. Her instincts screamed at her not to touch the thing, and she wasn’t sure what could hurt it. Well, nothing for it but to try everything she could.
She drew her Defender and shot it. Her kinesis enhanced the bullets but as she expected, the mass simply absorbed the lead. If she could trust her eyes, the metal dissolved once it penetrated the thing by a few inches. The blob attacked her with more tentacles, but she had already moved away. Its perception seemed limited to a dozen or so paces from itself, or at least, its better methods of perception. It still moved towards her with frightening speed even if she was more than a hundred paces away.
It occurred to her to simply leave, but those same instincts screamed at her to kill the thing. If small bullets didn’t work, what about bigger projectiles?
She used her kinesis to dismantle the cages and used the steel bars as javelins. They struck the blob, and while it had been affected by the kinetic force, it seemed to do little else. She got an idea, leaped towards the thing at her fastest speed, stopped just before it could hit her, then retreated. The shockwave of her breaking the sound barrier rippled across its surface, but it did little else. And she almost got skewered.
She used broken down vehicles next. She would have lifted it with her Anima, but thought better of it and simply jumped behind the car, and shoved it as hard as she could. It flew at the blob, slammed into it, and pushed it back all of two paces. Then the thing wrapped itself around the car and continued towards her. It left the car behind though, and didn’t dissolve it or anything of the sort.
Was it slowly getting faster?
She used Sweeping Gale and launched a wind blade at the thing. It cut a tiny bit into the blob before the energy dissipated. She Resonated with other Elemental energies and flung them at the thing, before she clicked her tongue when she remembered that she could cast spells too.
She formed the spell components of a simple Bolt spell, and it used her Radiant energy to blast the thing. The bolt sank into the blob. It paused for a tiny fraction of a second. She thought she saw a brief flare of golden light behind where it got it. But then the light receded and the blob continued to attack her.
She could try other Elemental energies but could only muster enough from the ambient energies to do it. She’d have to convert her Animus to do so, and she hardly thought it would do much.
Half an hour of experimenting, and she could find nothing to harm it. She could try to fling Chaos at it, or perhaps open a rift? No, the canvas of reality was too firm here. It would deplete Fri’Avgi’s reserves to cut a rift, and she couldn’t be sure it would work.
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She had not gone unscathed. The blob grazed her three times over the past thirty minutes. Her condensed aura proved strong enough to resist being cut, eaten, or dissolved, but it somewhat felt like she got a layer of skin scraped off. It stung badly.
But the denser the aura, the less likely the creature’s blows could harm her, so she supposed it was fine. She could deal with a bit of pain.
One of her strands of consciousness pointed out an odd thing that had happened at the start of the fight. Part of her Anima had been cut off, and it dissipated. But for a moment, she could still feel her connection with it. Almost as if she could still move it as though it was connected.
Manifestation? Or a key component to getting that technique? A hint, at the very least, though she wasn’t quite sure if cutting bits of herself was the right way to go. If she infused the cut-off bits with Will and Intent, would it stay coherent? She did the same with her sunblades after all, though the latter was held together by an Animus construct. Well, experiments for another time, perhaps. She used that strand to remember.
In the meantime, what should she do? The only thing that gave it pause was Radiant energy, but it almost looked as if it digested it rather than got harmed by it. How does one kill a regenerating, all absorbing, blob of brown slime? It could perceive her, and she had no doubts that the escaped armoured man, who was likely a Dragon Blooded, had sicced on her.
If she fled, it would keep hunting her, and she didn’t want it to hurt her lovers and companions, not to mention the other people caught in the crossfire.
So, what could she do? Bury the thing here?
The blob thing suddenly increased its speed threefold and caught her completely by surprise. She yelped as a tendril wrapped around her waist, then it tried to engulf her. It tried to pull her close, but her heels dug in stubbornly, while her Anima kinesis stabbed into the ground. The circuitry underneath attempted to pull at her, but her Anima was so condensed at that point that the process had slowed down and was ineffective.
The blob then reversed tactics and launched itself at her and immediately enveloped her body. She would have screamed if she wasn’t gritting her teeth. The pain…wasn’t as bad, actually. Now that she thought about it. A memory of the earlier hurt magnified what she expected. It was still painful, but it more on the level of a cat licking at a patch of skin over several minutes. The rough tongue took off a bit of skin, until it breached the dead layer, leaving the surface somewhat tender. That kind of pain only accelerated. She remembered the sensation from her cat, Hunter, back in Sharom Academy.
Shaking off that bit of nostalgia, she groaned and pushed the blob away, it had wrapped itself around her already and was weighing down on her. She was more than strong enough to bear its weight but had trouble getting any kind of leverage. She barely pressed her heels down on the sediment to prevent it from uprooting her stance altogether.
She pushed with her condensed Anima, but adding volume necessitated losing some density, so it made the pain worse. Why had she been so distracted? That could not have been right… She was in battle. Why?
Unless it was what had been needed to prevail? She had been contemplating how to kill the thing, and the only thing that affected it had been a dose of Radiant energy. Well, other Elemental energies worked too, but she had access to practically an unlimited amount of Radiance. And if this thing fed on energies, then there should be a limit.
Grinning, she allowed her Radiant energies, her core, to let loose. Her body and Anima held on to her infusion and controlled it tightly, otherwise she might have already ignited the air around her simply by breathing. All of her cells contained Radiant energy, and more importantly, all of her cells produced it. It was simply a matter of loosening her hold.
Heat, golden light, and glory burst from her body and shot straight into the blob. She felt warm, happy, elated, delirious…
She giggled at the heady feeling as she watched impassively as the blob’s brown colour slowly lightened to gold. It greedily ate all the Radiant energy, and it occurred to her that if she had faced such a foe before she refined her physique and Anima, this would not have been possible.
Fluffington whimpered at her shoulder, and Yuriko adjusted the flow of energy to sweep around him. She created a film that insulated him from the heat, and he settled down, his emotions calm.
How many Radiant motes had she delivered to her foe already? She could also use her Elemental Body, but that lasted a fraction of a second and was just as likely to exhaust her as anything else. It was one thing to overclock her Radiant core and quite another to transform flesh into energy.
But her cells were filling up with too much Radiant energy. She was generating more than she could vent, and she couldn’t regulate the process well enough. The feelings of glory and purpose, confidence bordering on arrogance welled up in her mind, threatening to overwhelm everything else. Laid out like this, she could feel the emotions imposed by the nature of Radiance clearly. Radiance was power. It took everything around it, combined with it, devoured it, and created more of itself. The amount she was pouring out… she could have looped it around and created a self-sustaining orb, one that would inevitably consume everything around it and grow stronger and bigger until it rivalled the Radiant Sun. And why shouldn’t it? Radiance was power, and it must express itself as so. All-encompassing. All-consuming. Power.
It was her body and her Mien that pulled her back. The urge to convert fully into Radiant energy and burn gloriously for eternity called to her, but instances of life, love, and lust anchored her Anima.
She shuddered. The blob had evaporated moments after she unleashed her Radiance, and she had been burning the chamber. The blood pool, the floor beneath her, and the equipment behind had all been consumed. Underneath the sediment and circuit-covered floor was something she hadn’t quite expected, but maybe she should have. Parts of it had been melted along with everything else, but the rest were still solid. It conducted the heat and Radiance away and limited the effect of her hasty action.
Underneath the ground were filaments of the same bone that covered the Scourge. Yuriko staggered away, having no wish to touch the bone plates. Her body was weary from exertion and the sudden mental burden.
Fluffington licked her cheek, and she rubbed his head, feeling slightly better. But perhaps, it was time to return.