The corpse’s explosion took Yuriko completely by surprise. Its concussive force knocked her over and she tumbled head over heels across the bridge. She only managed to stay on it by using her kinesis to hang on to the edge.

Orange and red flames blossomed from the body next, even as fragments of scales, bones, and bits of hardened flesh rained down on her. A charred scent filled her nostrils and made her gag.

After a few moments, she flipped herself back on top of the bridge, eyeing the darkness beneath warily.

Her sunblades were scattered across the ground, but they floated to her hands like eager hounds after she called for them. The sunshards, an even dozen, floated behind her back.

Just in time, too.

The next beast was only a dozen paces away. It roared and charged. Yuriko’s tactics remained unchanged. She ducked under the blow, carved up the beast’s vital points, then went in for the kill. Except this time, she moved out of the way as soon as she killed it.

The corpse bloated up and exploded into a fiery blast.

More shuffling steps. More beasts. More death. More explosions.

After the first couple of them, the battle became monotonous. At some point, after fighting them enough times, she knew roughly where the scales were thinner and she targeted those with her sunshards. At that point, the inch long Radiant swords pierced inside and turned the beast’s innards to mush. The explosions were a bit more muted then, and sometimes, they didn’t explode at all. That was when the shards pulled the creature’s abdomen.

The odd thing was that the beasts didn’t have a single lumen of Animus or aspected Chaos. Nothing. They fought her through sheer muscle power and toughness. However, she was tougher than they were, and her strength, once she used proper leverage, was actually on par.

After what seemed like hours and nearly a hundred kills, the flow of creatures stopped.

“Am I done?” Yuriko murmured.

This must be another Trial. But why? And for what? She was too far from reaching Transformation and unlike during her Actualisation, she didn’t trigger this one. However, she was sure this was due to the Celestial Refraction, and probably had to do with her Actualisation too. If it was due to the Ancient’s Way, then she should have been drawn to this realm back when she was still thirteen years old.

The unexploded bodies served as barricades, and once she figured out how to take out a specific organ below the thing’s intestines, they never exploded again. Of course, some kind of greenish-red liquid seeped out of their abdominal cavities along with their dark blood, and she was sure that was flammable.

In the first place, what were these creatures?

Nightmarish and brutish. That’s how she would describe them. Their facial features were disturbing. They had no noses, just slits. Their eyes were small and beady, and their mouths were wide. Bulging muscles around thick and dense bones. Retractable claws. Long arms, short legs.

Oh, wait! The portal behind her! That could lead her back to the surface, and hopefully out of this place. She spun on her heels and froze.

The portal was gone. Did she dream of its existence? Well, she was in the dreamscape…

Her eyes widened. She could just Will it into existence!

She was set to try, except the world around her rippled. She rippled, too, and her mind twisted and groaned. She felt bile rise up her throat but she forced it down. The next moment, she was elsewhere.

She was back on a flat, circular piece of land, except this time, it was about twenty paces wide. It floated over a sea of water and rose up and down with the waves. Strange. She was sure what she was standing on were dirt and stone, so why would it float?

There was a sourceless light that was just bright enough to perceive colour. Her own golden glow cast a brighter hue and the nice thing about being the source of light was that she cast no shadow.

Skreeee!

A beam of red light coated in darkness lanced down from the skies faster than Yuriko could react. It slammed into her condensed Anima and cut through it, though it lost a large fraction of its power. The remnant energy cut into her left shoulder and burnt a hole into it.

“Ahhh!” Yuriko screamed, but despite the tremendous pain, she maintained a clear enough head to just roll away from her position. Another beam, orange wrapped in blue, sliced into the ground, leaving an inch long gash.

At least the pain wasn’t as bad as when she first used Strengthen Physique. Yuriko used her kinesis to apply pressure on the blood vessels and circulated Recovery, though she had to stop immediately since it disrupted her sword dances.

Above her, a strange abomination floated. A gigantic eye, which was at least a couple of paces wide, surrounded by an amalgam of green scales and grey flesh, tentacles, and eye stalks. A jagged gash underneath the giant eyeball turned out to be its mouth, and a long, prehensile tongue lolled out, sodden with saliva.

“Fresh meat…” it sneered.

Its two eyestalks oriented to where she crouched, and only the flash of light warned Yuriko of what was about to come. She pushed off just as the two beams lanced down, which carved into her island.

“Rotter!” she yelled at it, but it didn’t deign to speak again. Instead, its giant eye stared fixedly at her, and suddenly, she couldn’t move.

Eyes widening in horror, the eyestalks charged up and blasted down at her.

Adamant Guardian Seal!

Mandalas of golden light appeared above her head and blocked the blows. More rained down, but Yuriko fed more of her Animus into the Seal to keep it active.

Fifty lumens. Sixty. Eighty. A hundred. A hundred and twenty.

Every second, twenty lumens. She could only recover one lumen every three seconds up in Equilibrium, but she was in a place that was at ten iarvesh. Her recovery rate was more than ten times faster. But it still wasn’t enough. How many seconds did she have before she ran dry? The Arithmetic made her head hurt even more.

Regardless, it only took a few seconds before she recentered herself. Her thoughts whirled as time seemed to slow. She could practically see the light beams as they moved…

The enemy was above. Too far for her to reach with a sunblade or shard. Fri’Avgi could not be summoned. Damien’s annoying but wise voice wasn’t available. Even if there were pebbles, she didn’t think she could throw it fast enough, or with enough Animus to hurt the abomination. That left only one thing. Radiant Lance.

The Implement appeared next to her hand, much to her surprise. Ah. It was tangible in the dreamscape. The Radiant Lance looked more like a javelin than an antique weapon. It was just a few inches shorter than she was tall, and a single line of runescript wrapped helically around the shaft, terminating just at the tip.

Animus wasn’t really needed to use this thing. What it needed was ambient Chaos, Radiant energy, and Will. However, the amount of Radiant energy it needed was far more than what her Essence contained, by at least a hundred times. She needed to convert ambient Chaos to Radiant otherwise it would never ignite.

And in this place, drawing out the Radiant from the inert ambient Chaos was nearly impossible.

But she had touched the Radiant Ennoia. The lattice around her core and Essence glimmered with potent light. If she couldn’t convert the ambient Chaos around her, then maybe taking it inside her and bringing it next to her Essence would allow it to do so!

She breathed it in, ambient Chaos. A vortex of green formed in front of her mouth, and she gulped it all down. Her Will galvanized her Essence, and by shoving the extra ambient Chaos next to it, it started to ignite. She drew it all inside, even the dross. Let it burn!

Radiant energy flooded out from her Essence and into her Animus circulation paths. She directed it to her hand, to the Implement. The runescript lines glowed as it filled with mote after mote of Radiant energy. Her Animus drained as the Adamant Guardian Seal fended off dozens of light beams. The runescript lines slowly filled with Radiant energy.

Her Animus nearly empty.

The final runescript word filled.

The Radiant Lance burst with golden light.

Just before she ran out of Animus, she flung the Radiant Lance with her kinesis. It flashed through the skies and the air screamed as the extreme heat caused a corona of red light to surround it.

The abomination’s giant eye widened at the projectile. It blinked, and at that moment, the strange paralysis was gone. Another blink and several screens of light appeared in between the lance and the giant eye.

With a high-pitched screech, the lance’s tip collided with the screens. It punctured through it, but in the process, was diverted from its flight path by a mere inch. The tip struck the abomination’s flesh rather than the pupil. The lance burst, a shaped explosion of Radiant light that washed over the rest of its body. Its shrill screech shattered the space around it, black cracks spiderwebbed across the skies. The fragments of sky crumbled and fell into the void behind it, taking the abomination.

And then…silence.

Yuriko collapsed to her knees, breathing heavily. Ignored pain lashed her shoulder, and she couldn’t help the tears welling out of her eyes.

Her body felt as if she had been burnt from the inside out, and her core trembled and spun unsteadily. The glowing orb of golden flames had been reduced to embers, and her Radiant Essence looked like a shadow of its former self.

But her Ennoia lattice… It grew denser. Another layer started to form, but only at certain parts. Would another layer over the first change things?

Where in the Abyss was Damien?

Her Animus reserves slowly refilled, but she warily kept an eye on the skies. The fragmented void had healed over quickly, but the sight of the unending darkness still sent shivers down her spine. If she hadn’t been injured, she would probably be more concerned about it. As it were, she spent half of her recovering Animus into her technique.

Finally, the skin healed over, though she still felt a bit of bruising inside. And was her bone fractured? Her Anima perception did notice a few cracks, but Radiant light quickly covered it and returned it to full health.

Ten minutes. Half an hour.

She got back to her feet. Her reserves were full and her shoulder was fine. She needed to move. Back to her body in the material world? Or further into the dreamscape? Did she even have a choice?

Questions upon questions.

She walked over to the edge of her piece of land. The sea had stilled and now, the water was crystal clear. Even so, she couldn’t see the bottom.

“Hmmm?”

A few hours seemed to pass, but nothing happened yet. Shouldn’t she move on to a different place since she defeated the abomination? Or perhaps whatever was happening was already over and she should try to return to Equilibrium? She was in the dreamscape, and this realm mirrored the physical in some ways. She also knew that she wouldn’t be able to return to her body from here.

Wait…did she really defeat the abomination?

She had hit it with the Radiant Lance, but she didn’t see it die!

She summoned her Radiant weapons and then formed her Anima into wings. She pushed herself above the island and rose up in the sky. The abomination entered the void at a certain spot…

As soon as she crossed the threshold where the cracks in reality lay, she felt it. The plane seemed thin and brittle, and she knew a simple push by her Anima would shatter it. Wait…she was in the dreamscape, and her body right now was her Anima-given form. If she left the dreamscape without returning to her body…?

She pushed herself away from the thin planar fabric and returned to the island. Cold sweat covered her back. Her eyes darted all over the place. Now what?

“That was a good choice, my child,” a sultry voice said, out of thin air.

Yuriko’s heart jumped to her throat, but a moment later, she felt her hackles come back down. Who…

Progenitor?

A cat walked out of thin air. She had tawny fur, with a tabby pattern. Yuriko stared at the cat, mute and frozen with shock.

“Oh,” the cat said. Silvery light emerged and spun around her, and when it disappeared, a voluptuous woman replaced the tabby. Yuriko’s eyes glazed over, and she felt her Anima calm. Her golden light folded back into her body, and her knees felt weak. Her consciousness began to fade.

And then, her Mien rebelled.

“Huh,” Yuriko gasped. The woman was still there, with an odd smile on her lips.

“As I expected. A different path…” She shook her head. “I suppose it was inevitable that you were drawn here. You’ve followed the Ancient’s Way, after all. But you are too young and too weak. If not for Ellana and I, you would have been overwhelmed by the Breakers.”

She gave a casual wave, and Yuriko was flung up into the sky, careening towards Equilibrium.

“..try not to join the True Refraction next time. Not unless you’ve reached our level.”

And then, the sea, the island, and the frightening void were gone. Everything faded away, and when she blinked, it was to see that she was back in her room.

She was on her bed, her bed sheets soaked in sweat.