The man in the black suit was bald, heavily muscled, and, for some reason, wearing sunglasses indoors.
Hmmm, no, those weren’t ordinary sunglasses now that Yuriko extended her perception over them. They had electrical circuits and were powered by a miniature battery mounted on the temples and the rims. It made them look a bit bulky, however, and…were those speakers near the end pieces?
The man was taller than she was by about half a head. He had a square jaw with a respectable goatee around his mouth and down his chin. He was broad, easily more than twice her width. He appeared quite intimidating if not for the fact that, despite the minor bit of hostility she sensed from him, he posed absolutely no threat to her. Perhaps it was the nonchalant way she regarded the man and the relaxed, tensionless state of her shoulders, but the man might have detected her disregard. Aside from a brief frown, he didn’t show any reaction.
“Lead the way, then,” Yuriko said.
He nodded and said, “This way, please.”
He spun on his heels and strode down the hallway. The Patriarch, or Grandpa Benjie, had left his throne as soon as the dancing started, so Yuriko had no idea where he was. This place was Daublin Hotel, so they could be anywhere in the building. Well, buildings, actually, as the hotel compound was more than the tall main building.
She followed Muscle Baldie down the hallway, then around some twists and bends, until they reached the lift. He waved a card across the panel and the doors opened. There were no buttons to press inside, and the lift just started moving as soon as they were inside, but from what she could feel through her Anima, they went all the way towards the penthouse—
—which turned out to have three levels. Some merged to form tall function rooms, and some separated into floors for the suites. One of the function rooms they passed on the way to what she guessed was the presidential suite, had a couple of guards present. A couple presented their invitation cards but they had an extra symbol that had not been in Yuriko’s. They also sported a mask that covered the upper part of their faces, both glittery and had feathers and other decorative thingies sticking out from the side. When they were allowed through, the inside was lit with a low reddish light, and soft music wafted out. Before the door closed, the couple had started taking off their clothes.
The black-suited man, whose skin colour was close to Heron’s bronze but just a bit darker, glanced at her craned neck and smirked. She turned back to stare flatly at him and he wiped his expression off his face. What was his problem, she wondered.
Eventually, they arrived at the presidential suite. He knocked a two-bit pattern then they were let in. Yuriko immediately recognided most of the occupants. Well, aside from the bodyguards, anyway. It was Lilibeth’s parents, siblings, the fiance, and the Patriarch, pllus another group of cousins, aunts, and uncles.
A few glanced at her when she arrived, but most of their attention was on the Patriarch and Emma, who were seated across from each other and talking. Emma’s perfect smile was missing, and her face was blank. Grandpa Benjie’s was stern, but Yuriko caught a hint of approval behind his eyes. Both of them glanced towards Yuriko but opted to finish their discussion.
“...concluding, you’ve met the requisites, so congratulations, you’re at the next step. You may take control of one of the subsidiaries starting tomorrow. Well done, sweet Emma,” Grandpa Benjie said as he reached over and patted Emma’s hand. That was the only time Yuriko saw Lilibeth’s sister give a genuine smile, but it vanished all too quickly. Then she looked directly at Yuriko, eyes beginning to blaze.
“Well, the prodigal child returns,” Grandpa Benjie said in an amused tone. “I must say I didn’t expect you to come back willingly. And look at you. You’ve Altered. For the better, I think, Lilibeth.”
At the mention of her former name, the others’ attention snapped to her. The word “Altered” stiffened more than a few backs, but Yuriko noted that it was not about bigoted fear or anger, but wariness.
Yuriko hummed. “You are mistaken.”
Her words sent a ripple of shock across the room, but the Patriarch simply smiled.
“Ungrateful girl…”
That came from Lilibeth’s mother, Cynthia Castro-Lawson, whose red hair was the colour of leaves during the Season of Air, and whose eyes were the green of cold emeralds.
Yuriko glanced at her, eyes cold, then she dismissed her and returned her gaze to the strongest individual in the room.
With her continued silence and intense gaze, the wave of discontent rose. Anger and irritation. She noticed Emma’s fiance was only looking around in confusion, and his eyes were wide at the revelation.
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A moment later, she felt a sudden pressure wave descend on her. Nobody else seemed affected, and the weight pressed down her shoulders and head. Laughable.
If she was a mortal, the pressure would have flattened her to the ground. But her incarnation body was somewhere in the midst of Actualisation and Transformation, about four and a half levels above baseline mortal. The difference between each level, on average, was about half again as much. A Novice Imperial was about fifty percent stronger, faster, and tougher than their mortal selves, provided they trained themselves well. For an Ancient like herself, the difference was closer to twice as much or more.
But the pressure that bore down on her grew in intensity while she showed no outward sign. The Patriarch started to grin, and the light behind his eyes sparkled with amusement and interest. Before it got to the point where she would have had to use her Anima to fend off the weight, he stopped.
Even so, Yuriko had not been able to sense any energy moving in the atmosphere. It was just as if the world just decided to heed the man’s command on its own. Strange.
“In what way am I mistaken?” Grandpa Benjie asked mildly.
“I do not return, nor do I ever intend to. I simply received an invitation to a party and accepted it. Nothing more, nothing less.”
The old man’s grin widened. “Is that so? Well, fine. I’ve seen you. You may go.”
Yuriko met his gaze for a moment more, then sniffed, spun on her heels and left. The muscle baldie opened the door for her but didn’t escort her to the lift. She went back down to the ground floor and left the hotel. She noticed a few more men in black suits kept an eye on her, but since they didn’t come any closer, she didn’t really mind.
Thankfully, the hotel’s lobby had a service to call a cab, so she waited a few minutes for one to arrive and she left in it. All in all, a rather boring and disappointing evening; not quite a waste of time, but it did shed some light on Lilibeth’s past circumstances. Emma didn’t even come to talk to her. But then again, she might not have been able to.
The judging gazes of Lilibeth’s family had simply washed over her like a stone in a river, but the little bit of her that had inherited Lilibeth’s psyche had quivered in nervous tension.
The revelation that Grandpa Benjie was a powerful Altered had tickled her fancy, but then again, it was said that one in four humans were Altered, while one in three had Alterations that made it blatantly obvious or turned them inhuman. The odds of being in the same room as one in a crowd of a couple dozen meant that he wasn’t the only one. It was probable that the bodyguards were also Altered Humans.
That presented an interesting conundrum considering many hated the Altered, especially in the halls of the senate.
The cab drove her home though it took her fifty Torries to pay for it. By the time she arrived home, it was rather close to midnight, so she simply took a quick bath, and slept.
The next morning, she was up early to train. Sunsday was a dog walking holiday so she was able to pick up speed, and she didn’t have to return Nessa to her home before she could do her calisthenics and sword training.
A thousand lumens for a strand of Swordlight wasn’t easy to accumulate, and she wasn’t sure how to go about creating an external reserve. She needed to invest the entirety of the cost to create the Swordlight in the first place, otherwise, she would have just stretched out the conversion over a longer time. No, the entirety of the lumens must steep in the Ennoia of the Bladeless Sword, otherwise it wouldn’t be a cohesive strand. A thousand was the minimum, come to think of it, perhaps she could create a bigger strand later. The process of steeping didn’t last longer than a few seconds, from what her true body discovered, so that side of her was still usable in battle. The Ennoia seed inside her had a single strand of Swordlight. She could use it, and if she fed Animus into it in dribbles, it would regenerate. However, she could not add more strands without the first process, meaning she would be stagnant without developing her outer reserve technique.
“Heron made tattoos, Gwen created Frostscales. I made runescript lines from my Anima to hold and regenerate Animus…” she muttered. “I’m not quite sure I want to tattoo this body, certainly not to the extent Heron did to his. Nummy though, heh.”
She grinned, then half muttered a curse as her true body pounced on Heron’s morning wood. Well, she observed his tattoos too, as reference.
“How would I go about making Frostscales when I can’t even control ice?”
Yuriko sighed. Or maybe she should just stick to what she knew and etch runescript lines inside her Anima. If she kept it inside her body…
No, that wouldn’t work. No more than two hundred lumens could fit within the core…
But what if it wasn’t in the core? What if she etched runescript lines on her bones, muscle, and flesh? Either it would cause her body to fail, or it could work? Maybe it would lock up her Animus inside her body.
Or maybe she could just weave runescript lines in her outer Anima only for the express purpose of forging Swordlight and unravelling it once she was done?
Yeah, that’s probably the answer. Yuriko chuckled to herself. A simple solution that took her most of the morning to come up with. The only problem was how long it would take to gather the Animus. The ambient Chaos here was thin, so she’d have to absorb Radiant energy and convert those motes to lumens.
She didn’t have enough time to experiment since she had an appointment with the Protectorate. She dressed herself in her usual attire but hesitated. The hoodie wasn’t enough to hide her face, but maybe one of those masks that the partygoers used would do. Personally, she didn’t really care if they saw her face, but the local convention was for ‘superheroes and supervillains’ to conceal their identity, even if it was only from the common folk. She was sure those in power knew. Especially considering the access to recording and surveillance technology here.
For now, she took an old scarf and put eye holes in them, then wrapped them around her head. She wore jeans and a hoodie, and she put on a pair of sneakers. It would do, for now. Ah, and she shouldn’t take her scooter. It was a pain to keep track of and would only make it easier to connect her identities.
Well, this plane didn’t restrict her from grasping the underlying fabric of reality and her Anima was strong enough to hold her weight. So she flew towards Winderfield, climbing halfway to the clouds in the process.
Ah, she wasn’t alone in the sky.