This would be the third time she stepped into the Chaos Sea. The first and second times were accidents and both led to her banishment to a strange place. Now, it was a willing step, and she knew where she wanted to go.

The edge of the Veil was over the planar boundary, meaning there was still earth to stand on. Once she stepped out of it, there would be nothing but what she created. Her flared Anima drew in Chaos and from it, she formed flagstones: squares of solid rock large enough to comfortably stand and walk on.

The stone bobbed as she put her weight on it, but held steady after a few moments. She felt the Veil fade away behind her. Even if she didn’t move, that didn’t mean the plane and the Chaos Sea remained still. Her Anima fizzed and popped, but held steady. In fact, it was as strong as bedrock in resisting the flows. Perhaps if she stayed in the Chaos Sea for centuries at a time would her Anima corrode, but with its current strength and the fact that there was only one iarvesh where she stood, meant that she was completely safe.

She let go of the breath she didn’t realise she held. Some part of her doubted that the level she was on wasn’t enough. She knew that Knights could walk alone in the Chaos Sea but she only had Damien’s word for the Actualisation stage.

Wait. She shouldn’t get distracted now! Already, her surroundings started to fuzz. She felt her body being drawn somewhere, but she resisted it simply by force of Will.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she muttered. Not yet, and not by something else’s whims.

The Chaos around her was like that of the skies. Streams of multiple hues that flowed, swirled, and sometimes collided and burst. She could see bubbles forming, of emptiness, and other things.

Fysalli, she thought. She’d learned about the proto-Waypoints in class. Or, well, they could be proto-Waypoints, but they could become something else.

The faded memories of her incarnations agreed. Fysalli were the beginnings. Fysalli were potential, but they could be dead too.

She could go into one, she realised. Despite Aunt Layla’s warnings, she knew she could find rest in the pocket realities. But sometimes, the Fysalli was more dangerous than the Chaos Sea, so it was a risk, either way. She should just move, though, and try to get where she needs to go. Most travellers tried to make the journey in one long stretch.

She took a step forward and another block of stone materialised by her feet. The one she left behind crumbled and sank deeper, towards the Abyss. Towards the Pure Lands. Shivering in both terror and anger, she pushed the thoughts aside, but made a mental note to ask Damien about it when she was back on a plane. She forgot about it, but being here now brought it back.

Every step she took materialised a block that crumbled and fell afterwards. It was deliberate on her part. She wanted something comfortable to walk on. Her ankle high boots were nice and comfy, and her overcoat apparently had temperature control runescript weaving. She didn’t realise until Ryoko pointed it out. Funny, that store clerk should have told her, but maybe he forgot.

Well, perhaps the cool wind had more to do with what she wanted than anything else though. She could feel her Will suffuse into the surrounding Chaos, carried by her Anima. Her outer reserves were about full, meaning that it had already been an hour or so since she started or the speed at which it refilled was enhanced here. She thought it was the second case, but she couldn’t discount the first. Time could pass faster than her thoughts could keep up with, sometimes.

One part of her focused on Coltherstone Fortress. Even if she didn’t know what it looked like, or that she barely knew where it was, just knowing the name was more than enough. Thousands of people lived there, and it was their certainty that provided anchorage. The Waypoint had also been built up by the Empire, and that fact more than anything else made it secure.

“How long?” she murmured.

It was the tenth Waypoint. The Chaos seemed to answer.

Travel in the Chaos Sea, without use of a ship, was divided into two parts. The raw, primordial Chaos where she walked now, and the intervening Waypoints that she had to go through. She could try to avoid the Waypoints, but if she did, there was no certainty how long it would take her to get there. The Waypoints were points of reference, to bring Order into the Chaos. And the dwellers either hated it, or filled it with their numbers.

The view in front of her had started to waver and shift even while those at her sides remained fluid. From one step to the next, she found herself staring at a boundary, a minor Veil that kept the Waypoint stable and the more corrosive aspects of the Sea at bay. She touched it, and was drawn inside.

In the blink of an eye she found herself in the midst of a forest. Trees reminiscent of the Shillogu Woods back home. Oaks, pines, and other species that she didn’t recognise grew tall, leaving her in greenish shade. Thick undergrowth covered the ground around her, save for a narrow game trail that stretched out in front. It curved to the right after a few paces, disappearing into the greenery. Behind her was the Veil and she could leave that way if she wanted to.

Of course, she’d be back where she started from if she did.

“Well, time to cross,” Yuriko sighed.

It was clear that the Waypoint wanted her to follow the trail. The bushes on either side were replete with glistening thorns. Why, the tips had some kind of whitish liquid, too.

Poison?

A white droplet fell from the thorn and hit the dirt, which hissed and sizzled.

Acid, then.

Seeing no need to ruin her clothes too early in her journey, she followed the game trail. Unlike Shillogu Woods, the Waypoint was eerily silent. There were no bird calls, no insects buzzing, or animal calls. She wasn’t even sure if life other than the vegetation existed here. Perhaps tomorrow the Waypoint would dissolve and another took its place, sporting a biosphere that held no sense or logic.

The hours went by as she walked. It always took at least a day to cross a Waypoint. Even if she ran it would still take that long. Aunt Kiyo said, in one of their catch up talks, that Waypoints expanded and contracted all the time. The mind-numbing march was more exhausting than anything else, really. So she actually felt relief when she heard the howling.

One moment, silence, and the next, a multitude of howls coming from the front. Wolves? It sounded like there were hundreds of them. No matter, as long as they weren’t Chaos Lords they wouldn’t be more than a bother. Still, she pulled out Fri’Avgi from her Anima.

The artefact sang joyfully in her hand as Yuriko moved her Animus into the patterns of the fused sword dances. Fri’Avgi still took her toll though, triple what she would have used without the artefact, or…hmm, a bit less than triple now. Two and a half times more?

She felt that if she practised more with the weapon, she could reduce her Animus expenditure to normal, and even lower. But that would mean hundreds of thousands of hours of practice. And since she had her outer reserves, she probably wouldn’t run out anytime soon. Well, unless she used the fourth dance.

Even while she mused to herself, she kept a wary eye out. The trees and the ground trembled. She could hear the bushes getting crushed. She set her stance to the opening moves of Jade Mountain and spun the second dance into ascendance. At the same time, She condensed her Anima to a pace around her while she used the rest to pick up three pebbles from the ground. The three were the only ones within reach that didn’t weigh more than an IJin.

The wolf bounded into view. A single creature the size of a troop transport and with nearly a dozen heads. From the front, anyway. She could see that the…abomination had more heads sprouting from its back. Each head was of a normal size and there wasn’t a central head. Eyes dotted its flesh, peering out from grey fur all over the body. It howled, all the heads at the same time, and the sound wave clashed against her Anima, causing it to ripple wildly. But the force was easily dispersed even while she goggled at the thing.

When it pounced her, she snapped out of her daze, yelled and sent a single pebble careening at the center of its mass. It shattered though, since she forgot to coat it with Animus. But by then, it was too late to try again. She stepped back then slashed, changing her ascendant dance into the third and using a stance from Raging Volcano. Flames started to form, but it was too slow to be of use. Fri’Avgi’s blunt blade, coated in the jagged edge the third dance gave it, skewered the thing, and with a grunt, she slammed it to the ground and wrenched the greatsword sideways. It was torn in half, but from the way its flesh wriggled as it tried to reform, it wasn’t quite dead yet.

Now she smashed a pebble coated in ten lumens worth of Animus into its body. She didn’t let go, instead, she spun it inside even as she smashed, stabbed, and thrust the weapon into the body. It took a few minutes, but there was nothing but minced meat left by the time she calmed down.

The all pervasive silence returned.

Shivering, Yuriko continued on. But instead of following the twisty game trail, she decided to walk the path the giant wolf left behind. About an hour later, she was once again at the Veil.

Yuriko touched the Veil, and in the blink of an eye, she was standing outside. She floated for a moment, her body drifting with the Chaos flows, before her Anima reinstated her Will upon her surroundings. Her boots landed on the stone block. A stray thought created a silver backed mirror in front of her and she frowned at the blood spatter on her grey overcoat. She moved her Anima to scrape off the filth. The blood dissipated into particles and she continued on.

Fatigue tugged at the corners of her mind, but she couldn’t stop now. She was only past the first Waypoint. She walked for a few hours before the Chaos in front of her coalesced into another Waypoint. When she went past the Veil, she sneezed.

Mist formed in front of her face and she shivered as the cold pierced her Anima. A world of white unfolded in front of her and beneath, ice cracked at her weight. She hurriedly moved, quite unwilling to find herself submerged into an icy sea. The wind blew snow across her vision. The cloudy skies didn’t conceal a beacon of green light shining in the distance though. Instinctively, she knew that the exit she looked for was there.

So began another long trek. Blessedly, there weren't any hostile creatures here. Or perhaps she should consider it unfortunate? She hesitated to take a break to eat or rest, but it had been more than a day already.

She ate a ration bar, unmodified since she couldn’t stop to mix it with the spices she brought. The cold also made it harder than a rock, but her teeth were stronger than ever. At least her condenser canteen was full. The same runescript lines that took water out of the air also prevented the contents from freezing solid, though if she spilled any when she drank, the droplets didn’t even make it an inch down her chin before it turned to ice.

Radiant energy was thin here, and she consumed the reserves she had inside to keep her body warm. It was difficult for her Anima, to keep her warm at such temperatures, and the overcoat’s weaving wasn’t strong enough. She found herself pouring more Animus into the clothing that she could recover, but thankfully, her outer reserves lasted long enough to reach the other end of the Waypoint and she gratefully left the frozen wasteland.

Again, she walked the Chaos Sea, keeping Coltherstone Fortress at the forefront of her mind.

She managed to go through two more Waypoints, the first was a sandy desert that was crawling with snakes, lizards, and scorpions. Thankfully, they were of the regular variety rather than those of monstrous proportions. The second was of caverns and tunnels, with dank musty pools, fearsome looking stalactites and stalagmites. Oh, and there were those burrowing beasts that attacked her in Kogasi. The paired things that swam through the earth. Killing them was easy, especially when she used Jade Mountain and the second dance. She could literally feel them moving through the earth and it was a simple matter to avoid them as they surfaced. Unlike Kogasi, they didn’t have any of the red vertebrae, the Ivory, that the Bellans wanted. She did manage to harvest a couple of Chaos shards, nine HiJin in total, which could sell for nine gold marks.

At the fifth Waypoint, she was so sleepy and tired that she decided she’d rather risk sleep than continue on while drowsy. The other three Waypoints before the fifth one were just too risky to sleep in. The desert didn't have a night cycle, and she didn’t want to risk getting attacked by more burrowers in the cave. Perhaps there was an Animus technique to hold exhaustion at bay. Oh, there probably was. She should have tried to learn it. Perhaps Coltherstone had it.

The fifth Waypoint had forests, too, and it was easy enough to find a secluded nook that she secured using alarm stones. She made a shelter using branches and leaves to form a wall. Then, following her instinct, she summoned Fri’Avgi and stabbed her to the ground before she curled up in her bedroll and slept.

She was awakened a few hours later, with the alarm stones blaring in her mind, to find her shelter surrounded by grey skinned humanoids carrying spears tipped with flints. They had surrounded her nook and looked rather…hungry.