Sheamus Dorn cursed as he ducked out of the way of an errant crystal shard. The projectile smashed against the wall behind him, creating a small crater as the crystal shattered. His Protective Field was strong enough that he wasn’t harmed, thankfully.

What in Chaos was he doing here? He just woke up one morning in a holding cell, told that not only had he been charged with a public misdemeanour, but he had also apparently sexually assaulted someone.

Who? He was sure as the Abyss, the minor gods and goddesses, and his Bound Spirit, Ethan, that he’s never touched another woman without her consent. Besides, gone were the days when he’d paid for favours directly. Well, now he gave gifts, and maybe a visit to pleasure houses once in a while when he didn’t feel like making an effort. Yeah.

So, then, when, who, and how?

Either way, the authorities had him put in a cell, to await formal complaints and a trial. The public misdemeanour was easy enough, he just had to pay a fine of five silver crowns for the first offence. Well, in Coltherstone anyway. The sexual assault awaited an actual complainant and formal charge, but after a couple of days languishing in the cell, no one had followed up.

Afterwards, the arbiter said that since there was no formal complaint, and that the victim had retaliated by placing a compulsion on Sheamus, his sentence had been commuted to service. There was a draft for irregular scouts and he’d been picked right out of his holding cell, stuffed into a uniform, placed into a Chaos ship and sent through Delovine and into the Chaos Sea towards Rumiga plane, which apparently had been the victim of an insurrection and an invasion at the same time.

He still didn’t remember the incident, at least until somebody told him that he had pawed a woman’s hair while he was dead drunk. Horrified, Sheamus wanted to apologise. The drink wasn’t an excuse and his actions had been wrong. Unfortunately, they didn’t know where the poor woman had gone.

If he knew what she looked like, at least he’d be able to watch out for her if he ever saw her again, but no, he couldn’t remember. But now, the circumstances he found himself in had driven every other thought and consideration away.

Irregular scouts were basically sent out to find alternate paths to a plane. There was a high mortality rate if the scout was below a certain level, but since Sheamus and the rest of his team were all at the Verdanian Knight level, they should have a decent chance of making it back alive and receiving the hefty pay they had been enticed with.

He’d bonded with his fellows, four other disparate warriors and adventurers that made up a basic Verdanian squad. They had taken a Chaos skiffer, which could take a single squad over the Chaos Sea comfortably, and they’d headed towards the plane. But not three days later, they had been pulled out of the Chaos passage and into a Waypoint where they were beset with hundreds of Wyldlings and a powerful squad of Chaos Lords.

The Chaos skiffer was damaged, brought low by a barrage of converted elemental bolts. It was a lucky strike to the propulsion runescript etching and several crystal spears aimed at the reinforcement nodes. They had to come out and defend themselves.

Sheamus kept his technique set at its original state, a protective amulet. It reinforced his Field but gave him little to really work with. He used the provided Plasma Casters to make a dent at the attacking waves. His teammates were more geared towards attack. One, a woman named Lucinda, flung fireballs that exploded in the Wyldling’s midst. A warrior named Nathan sheared through swarmlings and Wanderers that came too close.

Kalla, a blue-haired woman who could easily control shards of ice, pointed at the distance. Chaos Lords watched them from a ridge. There were nearly a dozen of them.

“Oh Ancestors and land gods, how do we survive this?” Sheamus moaned.

But then, Ethan transmitted that they could only do one thing to survive. Fight.

____

The Songstress of Heartfelt Desire watched impassively with her subordinate Chaos Lords as the assault on the human scouts progressed. She had nearly a dozen newborn barons, and three others barons who were more…experienced. They were designated as her honour guard, but she could tell that they chafed at the bit.

After the battle at Witton Hold, a few weeks ago, or maybe a few days ago, Desire wasn’t sure. Anyway, after that battle, she and the newborn Chaos Lords had been tasked to act as a screen of sorts, between Rumiga and the rest of the Chaos Sea. Now that the Courts had succeeded in removing a tether anchor point, the Imperials must be boiling over.

She was thankful not to have been placed in the main warzone as she had no stomach for slaughter. Her leaders recognised it, too, but she was too young and too lowly to hold a permanent place in either court. So, she’d been given a mission to intercept, and eliminate, scouts. Once the Chaos Interceptor Orb got to work, every traveller within five Waypoints of where they were would find their paths inevitably curved, and they’d end up in their trap.

So far, five Chaos Skiffers have been drawn in. Each of the small ships had a single squad of scouts, all of them were at the Chaos Baron level, of course, but they weren’t in the planes. They were in the Chaos Sea, and here, true Chaos dwellers had the advantage.

They had to batter down their defences, of course. And drain their reserves. A weakness to the humans’ strength. Their Animus may be stronger, but it was limited in quantity. Dwellers like Desire merely needed to breathe in the Chaos to generate power for their Wells. And with Desire’s peculiar skill, she enhanced her comrades’ regeneration almost faster than they could spend it. None of the humans tried Chaos Shaping though. Desire wanted to try her skills against a human practitioner. Oh well.

They were hardly foolish enough to open themselves to it. By keeping themselves closed, their inherent resistances protected them, but if they tried to shape the Chaos, they opened themselves to being shaped in turn.

Not that using regular Animus to fight was wrong or ineffective, just that Desire was bored. Chaos was change and repetition was the worst kind of movement. Cycling change without real change.

The swarmlings flooded the sinkhole, attempting to breach the survivors’ defences. The scouts had someone with a Destroyer speciality, judging from the cones of freezing air, the shards of penetrating ice, and the frozen wind. A Controller and Destroyer hybrid, Desire thought.

Huh. Those were purely Imperial terms, weren’t they? The Tellurian Court didn’t classify it that way. For them, it was merely how well something could project power.

The Interceptor pulsed at her and she glanced at it. The orb was nearly half her size, just under a pace across. The surface shimmered with differing hues, which mirrored the conditions of the Sea around them. At one point, somewhere close to the entrapping Waypoint, another victim had been identified.

But, what’s this? It wasn’t dense enough to indicate a Chaos ship. A lone wanderer? No matter. No one must get past here, whether it was a loner or an entire battle group.

Though realistically, if an entire legion came, Desire and her group stood no chance of survival. What would she do then, if she found herself in such circumstances?

She didn’t know and she wasn’t eager to find out.

_______

Yuriko hurried along the path. Whatever it was, it didn’t allow her to divert her trajectory at all. The Chaos streams flowed faster and faster, and even her shaped stone blocks were quickly eroded to dust as soon as they left her protective Anima flare. She could feel it too, like a tailwind pushing her onwards.

But when she tried to turn to leave, the weight of the flows prevented her from moving. Oh… she could probably impose her Will onto the streams right? It was all Chaos.

She did just that. It was an instinctive use, but the root of it was probably the suppressed memories of her incarnations. She knew that, as a Shaper, manipulating Chaos was as easy as breathing. She could even remember being able to expand a plane by creating land out of the surroundings. The how of it escaped her though, but maybe if she focused on it, she could do it?

Her Anima flared to its maximum reach of three paces and an inch. Her Will permeated through her Anima and was how she manipulated it. If she only transferred her focus to the Chaos… there!

The rushing streams quieted around her, but only the space within her Anima. The rest of the streams still pushed her onwards. She would need to expand her control to get out of this. She was just about to do that when Damien interrupted.

Didn’t you want to see what this was about?

Huh. Oh, yeah, she did.

Escaping now won’t solve the issue. Go take care of whatever’s making the anomaly.

Nodding to herself, Yuriko retracted her Will then condensed her Anima for protection. Then she hurried down the path, and when the Veil revealed itself, she touched it.

Once she did, she could feel that the Waypoint beyond wasn’t a simple proto-plane, but a complex bubble of Reality. A Fysalli within a Fysalli, and even as she touched the Veil, a new one formed behind her. She could also tell that the Chaos streams converged into the Waypoint then funnelled through the next layer and out of the other end. In other words, she needed to go through the entire thing to move on.

Well, nothing to it. The layer that she entered was small, for a Waypoint. It was a couple of leagues wide and Yuriko could see the next Veil over. The terrain was…strange.

Thud!

Her feet produced a visible cloud of dust even though the ground wasn’t arid. She was much heavier than she was used to, too. Gritting her teeth, she marched towards the other end, keeping an eye open for enemies. She wasn’t disappointed.

Swarmlings and Wanderers. The smaller critters walked on six legs and were heavily muscled while the Wanderers were massive, hulking brutes. They made a beeline for Yuriko who snorted in derision. Her Anima picked up several pebbles which she flung towards the nearest target, imparting a tiny bit of Animus from her outer reserve to keep the stone’s integrity.

It pierced through the swarmling’s head, then through its body, and then into the ones behind it for a couple more kills before the Animus was used up. Then she started to fling more pebbles, and she even squeezed down on dirt and coated that with Animus when she ran out. It wasn’t as effective as the stones, but it killed at least two swarmlings as long as they were lined up. As for the Wanderers, their Protective Fields were more than enough to handle her pebbles. It took a dozen shots to penetrate the Field, though only a single one to kill.

Yuriko let them come closer even as she drew her side-blade and ran her combined dances. While she flung pebbles at the swarmlings, she began a Roaring Volcano form and dashed at the Wanderer. Fire condensed around her, far more than what she could manage back in Realmheart or Ulmira. In fact, it was so much that she needed to use her Anima to keep the fires contained around the blade.

When she thrust the metal into a Wanderer, the Animus coating her weapon pierced easily through its Field, and the fire erupted inside. It wasn’t strong enough to kill, but the creature was left burning and disoriented. A follow up blow severed its head.

At the same time as it died, her Anima covered the body and easily found the shard. She cut at the torso, flaying the muscle and bone apart, then plucked the shard with her Anima manipulation.

Cleaning up the rest of the filth didn’t take more than a few minutes, and by the end of it all, she had a sizable cache of portable wealth on her hands. She didn’t bother to wrest the Chaos dust from the swarmlings as it would have taken too long. She had the feeling that whatever created this Waypoint wouldn’t let her do what she pleased.

Feeling a bit of danger, Yuriko sheathed her side-blade and drew Fri’Avgi out her Anima, feeding her enough Radiant energy to form a dozen sun shards in the process. She crossed to the other side and touched the Veil, which brought her into the inner Fysalli. Which turned out to be just another layer.

However, right across the barren, wind blasted landscape, was another army of Wyldlings. This time, of Hunters. She almost didn’t recognise the breed, but why would there be nearly a hundred of the things? They blended into the terrain, becoming nothing more than distortions in the air. Yuriko flared her Anima, then charged into the horde, sweeping Fri’Avgi and sending sun shards into a path of destruction.