The oppressive feeling lightened when Yuriko pushed against it with her Anima, but the weight of attention grew instead. It continued for several eternal moments before parts of her Anima cracked and blood seeped out of the corner of her lips. Then, she felt the Will’s condescension, and dismissal, before the pressure disappeared.

“Rotter,” Yuriko muttered as anger and shame filled her heart.

It dared to dismiss her? To condescend to her? An Ancient in Actualisation? Her core spun and raged, and her Radiant Ennoia writhed. Pride, borne from Damien’s lofty past, as well as Yuriko’s Will, pushed her to strike back. To burn and consume this Chaos lake to fuel her ascension and to the Abyss with the consequences! It dared consider her beneath its notice, and a brief swat from its attention more than enough punishment?

She was going to destroy it, grind down its Will until nothing but ashes remained! And she would Shape those ashes into utter oblivion so that no trace remained for it to return to the cycle!

Wait…

Why was she so angry?

Because that rotter dismissed her so thoroughly as though it were superior. The only thing it had on her was time!

Anger.

Calm.

Damien’s anger, Fri’Avgi’s anger, and hers multiplied and fed on each other, but what she was doing now was foolish. She had something to do.

Pushing down her anger was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Harder than picking the right path during her Trials.

Damien’s mindset had sunk completely into hers, and it was only now when she felt such single-minded and destructive wrath did she realise how much of it affected her. She knew that his knowledge and wisdom had seeped over, but unless she wanted to be completely like him, she’d better learn how to separate those bits whenever she wanted to.

She must have spent a couple of minutes just breathing. Faeril wasn’t getting any better though, and she needed to bring him to Desire. But she needed to find Orrin and Asami first.

The Chaos lake’s Will wasn’t paying much attention to her now. She wondered what else occupied its attention.

The lake was part of the city of Cerkala, wasn’t it? Unless it was connected through Chaos flows to other lakes? Was the entirety of Rumiga’s underground filled with lakes and rivers, controlled by cities and fortresses? Each one built to control and harness the Chaos?

That was it, wasn’t it? Several underground cities surrounded Synkrasia and provided the power for the Warforged and the portals, she supposed.

Yuriko lifted Faeril using her kinesis and had him float just behind her. The boy wasn’t too heavy, less than she weighed, actually, much to her chagrin. But then again, Radiant Body Refinement along with her earlier Body Forging had raised her bodyweight to roughly a hundred Jin, even if it didn’t look like it.

She walked through the chamber while observing the other cocoons. She didn’t have the wherewithal to save everyone but she could help those she felt still had a chance. Another couple of people were there, from Sorren’s Hollow, but they looked too far gone to her. As in, most of their lower bodies had turned to goo, and only their torsos and heads were intact. From the lack of expression on their faces, they didn’t look to be in pain though.

Was this the ultimate fate of her friends if she left them? Shivering, she kept an eye out for Faeril’s grandfather, Vaeril, just in case the muscular Sha’ledras wound up here, too.

She looked at the familiar figures in the cocoon, her mind whirling as she struggled to come up with their names, only to realise a few moments later that she didn’t know simply because they never gave them to her. She’d met them during the welcome dinner when they first arrived in Sorren’s Hollow and had not talked with them since.

Well, now she had to decide whether to put them out of their misery or to leave them be. Of the first point, they didn’t look to be in pain, and of the second choice, it would probably be better to avoid the Will’s attention. She garnered it earlier by removing Faeril from the cocoon.

Now, the question was, discretion or defiance?

A greater part of her wished for the second, and she recognised the influences from Damien and Fri’Avgi, as well as the core part of her Ennoia. The Radiant did not submit, did not bend. To do so would mean that it was no longer Radiant.

Discretion…if she ducked out of this, she just knew that she would become lesser…

And so, despite knowing that it was the better idea to stay her hand, she fused Radiant energy into the cocoon, and into the bodies. She fed so much Radiant energy into them that it siphoned up into the tendrils, and probably burnt the Chaos lake’s Will in the process. And that thought gave her far more pleasure than she expected.

And just as she thought, the entire space quaked. A piercing scream resounded in her mind, of extreme pain and anger.

‘Bring your Will against mine, and I will face you head on!’ she thought as she grinned savagely.

Ah, but there was no reason to dawdle. She ran towards the chamber’s exit as soon as she was done, carrying Faeril behind her. The Will’s attention returned to her, but she suffused her Anima with so much Radiant energy that pressuring her probably burnt its mind, too. Heh.

Soon enough, the gaze receded, and instead, she felt the tunnels and chambers tremble with the beat of thousands of marching feet. And by the next turn of the tunnel, she was confronted with a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, formation of worker and warrior ants, all of whom seemed determined to bury her underneath their claws.

The memory of a battle back in Faron’s Crossing, when the Kadracki Rangers dogpiled on her to allow their allies to escape, flashed to the forefront of her mind. The Femorants were doing the same thing. This time, she wasn’t going to fall for it.

She leapt back from the turn by several paces, just enough so that she still had her perceptive aura active around the corner, and then, as soon as the Femorants crossed, she struck them down. They came crawling on the walls and ceiling, while simultaneously rushing from the ground. Each needed two or more strikes from her sunshard, or an extended foray inside them to kill. That actually took longer than just piercing their heads though. Actually, decapitating them seemed the quickest way to kill, considering that their necks were rather thin compared to a human’s.

That wasn’t to say that they were easy to hit. The worker’s necks were quite vulnerable, but overlapping plates of chitin made hitting them with weapons trickier. If she were using a sword or axe, the angle to avoid the plates meant she would have had to strike from above, and closer to the creature than would be comfortable. A frontal strike by a spear would have been blocked by their mandibles too. However, her sunshards were agile and could strike easily from any angle without endangering her, so their natural defences were a moot point.

The warrior ants were actually able to retract their heads close to their torso, locking their vulnerable necks behind thicker plates of chitin, and impossible to actually strike. The position disallowed them from turning their heads though. For them, Yuriko simply struck at their vulnerable eyes, as even with a nictitating membrane, it was much easier to pierce than chitin. The Chaos lake was under a runescript formation that made them so much tougher, and the few times she was unable to deal a fatal blow, she witnessed the ants retreat, then visibly regenerate their wounds within less than a minute. Any attack that didn’t finish them off meant that same Femorant would be back in the front line a minute later.

The tunnel was able to field more Femorants than she could defeat with her sunshards alone. Gritting her teeth, Yuriko secured Fri’Avgi with her kinesis and created a sunblade, then wielded the Arclight Sword with the other. Using her artefact effectively meant having to use the sword dances, and without being able to recover her Animus usage easily, she dared not splurge. Fighting without spending Animus for the dances felt awkward, and she had to focus on using the Four Phases. Well, Sweeping Gale at this point in time, even if she was using dual swords rather than a greatsword.

With the width and height of the tunnels, she’d be constrained to remain in the middle to make proper use of Fri’Avgi.

Glimmers of wind elemental energy swirled around the Arclight Sword, while fire elements did the same for the sunblade. The Resonance was weaker than she expected, however, but since it didn’t cost her Animus, she supposed it didn’t really matter.

A single thrust from the sunblade was enough to kill, but the Arclight Sword wasn’t sharp enough to do the same. Or rather, she could use her greater strength, but she was wary of cracking the blade. So, she decided to use it to defend rather than attack and carved up the nearby ants with the other weapon. She pushed them back, and it didn’t take long for the tunnel floor to be covered in blood and decapitated heads.

She pushed against the tide, carving through them with her Radiant blades. Most times, the wounds were cauterized, but the blade left big enough wounds that the life-giving fluids burst out anyway. Her movements and strikes felt clumsy at first, but she quickly got used to being without the dances’ guidance. She could almost mimic the effects without using Animus…

And while the ants were tougher, they weren’t that much stronger. Any attacks that slipped through her defences were deflected or blocked by her condensed aura. None of the blows was able to crack her Anima, and she used her excess Anima reach to form shields like Heron’s Facet technique, though hers were of condensed Anima rather than air.

She used them to block, deflect, and push the ants rather than just as extra defence. She had to group up some of the sunshards to free up consciousness threads to work the shields though. She must have fought for an hour or so, but eventually, the flow of suicidal Femorants stopped, and she was once again able to proceed. The following dozen chambers were empty of ants, but not bodies. Nearly all of the humanoid ones were barely alive, but she managed to rescue another that was fairly intact. A nearly naked young man who was barely skin and bones.

And then, she arrived in a bigger chamber, and all at once, she saw them. Orrin and Asami, both cocooned with the same white threads. The only reason she recognised Orrin was because she checked underneath the cocoon and recognised his clothes. His body was covered with distilled Chaos, and he was writhing in pain. There was a tendril pierced into the cocoon and was pumping in something goopy. Asami was lucky, she was only unconscious.

And then, there was the creature that was on a throne beside the two of them. It was definitely a Red Femorant, and like mundane ants, was probably the nest’s queen considering the elongated abdomen, not to mention the egg laying. Worker ants tended to the displaced eggs, while hundreds of warrior ants stood guard. She spotted hybrid Femorants, with varied insect and animal parts near the edges of the cavern. Asami and Orrin’s cocoons were right next to the seated queen, and aside from the abdomen, the body, head, and face looked nearly humanoid, if not for the carapace covering her, and the compound eyes that took up a major part of her head. The queen even had hair, though Yuriko suspected those were really some kind of carapace instead.

The queen’s upper arms were crossed under its chest, and as soon as Yuriko entered the chamber, she turned to look. Her mouth was humanoid, and she smirked.

“Intruder. You’ve come here, at last.”

Then that self-same pressure from the Chaos lake’s Will blasted out towards Yuriko, and she staggered at the palpable weight.

Yuriko felt a chill run down her spine as her instincts screamed at her. The Femorant Queen was far stronger than that Master Spirit Binder she fought.