“Go! I’ll hold them back. Divert them!” Yuriko yelled at Gwendith and Desire.

“No, Yuri! We should stay together!” Gwendith protested, panic written all over her pretty face.

“Master…” Desire murmured. The petite Chaos Lord moved to grab Yuriko’s sleeve but a glance quelled the girl.

“We won’t be able to outrun them,” Yuriko said, carefully not looking at the freed women. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see their lips twisting in distaste and shame. “It’ll be safer if I hold them back. I’ll return to camp as soon as I can, but if I’m not back in a day, move farther west. I’ll catch up.”

“No!” Gwendith grabbed her wrist tightly. Her fingers were callused and rough but were stronger for it. A marked change from how they were a couple of years ago.

“I’ll be fine. If worse comes to worst, I can always go over the cliff.”

A look of horror dawned over Gwendith’s face and Yuriko chuckled.

“I’ve jumped off cliffs before. Fell from the clouds, too. I'll be fine. Now hurry, every second you hesitate is a second I’ll have to keep holding them back!”

Gwendith bit her lip and Desire lunged into a tight hug.

“I can sustain myself for a day, but afterwards I’ll have to feed. Please return before then.” Desire whispered. Wordlessly, Yuriko extruded another mote of distilled Chaos and fed it to Desire. The smaller woman’s face lit up as she devoured her meal.

In the meantime, Yuriko flared her Anima, breaking the remnants of Desire’s illusion that clung to her clothes. She hastily wove the storage and recovery runescript, though she doubted they would be quick enough to matter in the coming battle. It would be useful later on. Her Animakinesis quickly crunched down on the snow, forming as many ice pellets as she could. The area near Ouera Bo’s entrance tunnels was flat, so there wasn’t much cover to be had. But by the same virtue, none of the barbarians should be able to sneak past her.

Gwendith, Desire, and the freed women hurried away, with her friends giving her a lingering glance as they did. The barbarian horde was still milling around, but she could make out a few figures moving toward her. Her golden flames were too eyecatching to ignore. She debated moving a bit closer to the Veil, to divert them away, but perhaps the risk of them simply bypassing her was too much. She just had to kill any who came at her.

The speed and ease at which she decided to kill vaguely surprised her. Well, she’d been in many battles, and from Gwendith’s stories and her own experiences, these filth who don’t even deserve the term human, were better off dead. Her blood boiled in anger. The captives… Gwendith said that there had been hundreds of them at the start. Now, a mere ten survived to be rescued.

Every minute that the barbarians didn’t move was one where she could create more projectiles. Her external reserves slowly filled up, increasing by a lumen every few seconds. To use Empowered Strike on the pebbles required an investment of at least three lumens to make sure that they didn’t shatter or melt in midair. Her hand caressed the pommel of her side-blade, but she knew it would be foolish to use the weaker weapon. Either she used Fri’Avgi or she formed a sunblade. Her reserves were only a fifth of what was possible so she couldn’t afford to be wasteful. A sunblade slowly materialized on her hand. This would have to do.

They gave her more than five minutes to prepare before a smaller party moved toward her. The majority of the horde seemed more intent to watch than anything else. A dozen approached at a leisurely walk, supreme confidence oozing from their stride.

She let them come closer until they were around three hundred paces from her position. From this distance, she could see the whites of their eyes.

Wsst! Wsst! Wsst! Wsst! Wsst! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!

It was the sickening pop of their skulls breaking and their brains splattering on their companions’ chest. Five ice pellets, fifteen lumens out. Her external reserves barely had enough to power three more pellets and there were seven of them left.

Wsst! Wsst! Wsst! Plop! Plop! Plop!

Now there were five left in the advance group. Would they retreat or would they attack? Oh, they charged.

She held her sunblade low as she started the fused dances’ circulation. Their faces had twisted to anger and hate. It took them less than half a minute to get to her, just enough to let fly another ice pellet.

Wsst! Plop!

And then there were four.

She kicked off against the ground, creating a puff of snowy powder behind her. It should have been too soft for her boots to get proper traction, but she instinctively used her Animakinesis to support her movements. She condensed it around her body now, to both act as an armour and magnify the strength of her body. Her perception of time altered to match her speed, and it seemed as though everything around her slowed down while she moved normally.

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The barbarians' faces were frozen in a rictus snarl, limbs moving as though immersed in mud. To the first one, a lanky man with small horns growing above his eyebrows, she whipped her sunblade across his throat, going just deep enough to cut the windpipe. As the blade passed his neck, it blossomed into a ghastly smile. The stench of burning flesh rose from the charred wound, and Yuriko sidestepped to the right, twirling to preserve momentum.

She ducked under the second barbarian’s outreached grasp. This one was an Iron Skin tribesman, and perhaps the heat of her sunblade would be ameliorated by his thick skin, much like how plasma bolts from a Caster were ultimately useless when fighting them. But no, the sunblade’s heat was magnitudes more than a Plasma Caster’s projectile, and it was backed by a solid blade behind it. The blade whispered across his thigh, digging inches deep and cutting into the bone. A spray of blood and smoke followed the direction of her slash and right into the eyes of the third barbarian who flinched and blinked the smouldering droplets away from his eyes.

Yuriko spun in the opposite direction, getting around the second one. She thrust backwards and felt the blade sink into his back. She drew the cut sideways and felt it sever more bones. The barbarian started to fall, and she kicked off from the back of his leg.

Fighting in midair was foolish, but only if one didn’t have the means to alter her path. Her sword dances had prompted her to jump so that taking the last barbarian’s head would be faster and more efficient. She slammed her fist into the man’s nose and felt cartilage and bone snap. His head rocked back and she followed the blow with another, using his cheek to propel her back to her starting position. The sunblade left her fingers and slammed into the third barbarian’s chest, puncturing hide, flesh, muscle, and bone before the tip poked out of his back.

She landed back on her feet, exactly where she kicked off from, and the movement of time returned to its normal flow. The sunblade pulled out of the barbarian’s corpse and returned to her hand like a trained dog.

Thud!

All four fell to the ground at the same time. All dead…oh, no. One of them, the one she slit the throat of was rolling on the red snow clutching at his throat in pain. He wasn’t bleeding much since the cut was cauterized but the pain must have been immense. She squashed his skull to put him out of his misery.

A dull roar rose from the horde but Yuriko simply waited. The Animus gathering runescript weaving in her Anima worked to convert as much ambient Chaos as it could as quickly as possible. She stopped using the fused dances for the moment since the rest of them were too far away.

It’s only been a few minutes and when she glanced back, she could see that Gwendith and the others were less than half a longstride away. She waited for the barbarians to approach, noting that half of them circled to the north to flank her. Or perhaps to cut off the others.

“Tsk!” She clicked her tongue.

Her range with the ice pellets wasn't too far, even if she adjusted the shape of the Animus coating to allow it to reach farther. The ground pulled at the projectiles too quickly and even at her best, she could only accelerate the pellets to…uh…

“Rotting arithmetic,” she muttered. Her flare was at one thirty-six and she needed at least a pace to accelerate the pellets, so she could only use up ninety-six inches of Anima. An inch moved an object five Jins heavy by a pace per second, and the ice pellets were about a half a Jin. So that could be accelerated ten times faster. So, uh, with all of her Animakinetic force she could accelerate a pellet about nine hundred sixty paces a second. If she fired straight at about chest height, the planar gravity at Equilibrium pulled the pellet to the ground in less than a second. Meaning she could expect the pellet to reach about half a longstride away. Hmmm, maybe she could add tiny wings to make it fly farther?

She did just that and aimed at the nearest barbarian about six to seven hundred paces from where she was. It took about five lumens to empower and she shaped the wings like a messenger crane’s.

Whoosh!

The sound of the man’s exploding flesh was too soft to be reliably heard. Ah, and she missed her target and hit someone else in the chest. It was still fatal though, so the Animus wasn’t wasted.

She didn’t have enough Animus to snipe them all, so she had to settle for stalling them while Gwendith and the others escaped. She took off towards the flanking units, which numbered about two hundred. The main force changed directions towards her so it seemed they were more interested in chasing after her.

She held off shooting more pellets and focused on the dances. She created half a dozen sunshards too. Once she drew close enough, the barbarians started to throw hatchets and javelins, even stones, at her. About half flew wide, landing where she had been a second ago when she juked aside.

Three of the sun shards careened to intercept a javelin and two hatchets, then she used her kinesis to slap another out of the way. Huh, maybe she didn’t need the shards for defence?

They’d started throwing things when she came within fifty paces and in less than a second, she was already amidst the flankers. Her perception sped up again and everything seemed slow. She stabbed, slashed, kicked, and punched her way through them, and by the time she went past the horde, she’d taken down a good dozen of them. Her Anima flare had red streaks around the edges now, and she felt her Mien pulse and change. Now, they took one look at her, paled so much that their faces looked like the bellies of dead fish, spun on their heels and scattered.

Frowning, Yuriko went after those headed towards the west, cutting them down ruthlessly. The main body of the horde caught up too, but they took a long look at her, watched her slaughter more of their fellows and seemed to lose their courage. After half an hour of fighting, the barbarians had gone back to Ouera Bo.

“Disappointing.” She muttered. Oh, there were still a few in the distance, but they made no move to approach. She walked back to the west, keeping the barbarians in view. Some of them followed but kept their distance.

Those she killed were probably the unblooded warriors. They were too easy to defeat, and looked to be her age, or maybe younger. Where were the blooded warriors? The Chaos Lords?

The second dance screamed at her, telling her to dodge. She jumped away from the cliff edge even as thick spears stabbed into the snow. From the edge, a barbarian man climbed up. His chest was bare and there were nearly a dozen marks across it. Blood red. More of them crawled up from the cliff, and the air around their shoulders shimmered with manifested Geists. So, here were the stronger barbarians.

A grin tugged at the corner of Yuriko’s lips, then she kicked off, sunblade pointing straight at the lead barbarian’s heart.