Crossing the Norrinth Empire, from the northwest part of it where they made landfall, down to its border to the Sanctus Kingdom, where they were to meet with an intelligence agent, took about ten days.

At first, slogging through the snow was exhausting. Yuriko ached to fly and carry everyone with her, but doing so would probably alert every Confederate Warlock on the continent. Right now, everyone else was using an obfuscation spell card. She was the exception since, well, it wasn’t just her Mien that didn’t want to be covered up, but also her Anima and Ennoia. Radiant light seeks to be witnessed, to be worshipped. And the only way Yuriko had to not broadcast her position was to retract her Anima completely inside her body.

Yes, she had to empty her Outer Animus reserves. The first time she did it, the runescript weaving crumpled and broke. That was nearly a Season ago. She did spend quite some time idle, so she worked on mastering her runescript pattern weaving, marrying the Imperial method, the Karcellian method, as well Damien’s unnamed style that she inherited from his memories.

The Imperial method focused on steady efficiency. It was a balanced mix, which allowed the same pattern to work properly even if it was outside of its rated iarvesh environment. For a time anyway.

Karcellian, or perhaps Irvallan would be more apt, focused on extreme efficiency. Reactive malachite only gave a tiny bit of Animus reliably after all. And Damien’s style focused on overwhelming power, at the cost of efficiency. It made sense, she supposed, and the style was most relevant when the man was at the peak of his power. She knew he used a more conservative style in his youth, but that one had been thoroughly forgotten by now. Both methods, but mainly the Karcellian one, had runescript patterns to break down materials for Chaos and Animus.

She wasn’t able to fully understand the patterns and runescript lines yet, but they were there. Theoretically, it should allow her to burn any old rock to turn it into ambient Chaos, and from there, power the runescript weavings. It wasn’t that simple, of course, and she hardly needed to do something like that, but the possibilities were…daunting. Was Damien able to sacrifice planes for power? Was that how her Destroyer incarnation was able to strengthen herself while rampaging through the Chaos Sea?

Anyway, what she finally figured out after comparing and contrasting the three methods used to utilize runescript was a method of allowing her to fold and unfold runescript weaving in her Anima. Actually, it was already there in Damien’s style, but it needed more than a bit of adjustment to be useful to her.

She could now retract her Anima back inside her body fully, provided that there was no Animus stored in the outer reserves, and once she flared her Anima back out, they would begin to refill again. She could keep a reinforced layer just under her skin, which made her much tougher than she looked, but still less than when she deployed her condensed Anima, and of course, her perception aura. After so long, and even while she determined not to expose other people to her Mien through her perception, she just couldn’t quite live without it. Most of the information she gained through her aura wasn’t all that useful, so her conscious mind shunted it off. But some part of her still took note that the snow was twenty inches deep and that it was hard-packed and almost like ice. Or that Orrin was scratching at the base of his antennae and he was shivering from the cold.

Her perception handily bypassed the obfuscating spell cards while not annulling the effects, so it was an easy way to keep track of everyone. With most of her Anima retracted, and with her tight control over her Animus, she didn’t show up as an occult resonance source. At least, not unless they were close enough to see her.

She didn’t want to fight unnecessary battles though she wouldn’t avoid them. Hence, why they were walking instead of flying.

But only until they reach the nearest town. Or more specifically, the railways just past the town. There, they waited until a locomotive and its long train passed. They hid in the bushes until the passenger cars were no longer visible, then, they hopped into one of the freight trains. It was a rectangular car, and the door was locked shut, of course, but Yuriko used her Animakinesis to unlatch it and lifted everyone on board. It was a risk she determined was worth taking, as otherwise, they would have to spend much longer walking or running to the border. A single train wasn’t enough to bring them south, of course, but it did bring them to a hub of some sort.

The signs were written in the Norrinthian language, which was similar enough to Karcellian that Yuriko felt she should have been able to decipher it. It was different enough that if Douglas or Darren weren’t here, they would have definitely gotten lost. That allowed them to find the correct railway line to board.

They spent about five days doing that before the rails eventually went south to unoccupied Norrinthian territory. The Treaty of Shiras had split the country in two, with the Richmond Confederacy occupying the northern half of Norrinth, while the southern half was controlled by a puppet government. Not that going through the central border was easy. They did it in the dead of night, but they still had to kill a border patrol that got too close.

Still, it was easier travelling in the south than north. At least they could openly board the trains there. It still took three days to reach the town near the Norrinth-Sanctus border. It was actually the same town by the Kamwick Sea where they boarded the Wheelwright and escaped the main continent, Barda.

As for why they were here…

“Miss Davar. It’s been too long.” Edison Matthews bowed to her, sweeping his hat off his head and extending out to his side.

“Edison,” Yuriko answered with a smile. Barda was no longer as crowded as before, and they were able to secure rooms at an inn easily. “How are you?”

“Fine, if you can consider one such as I, amidst his work, as such.” He grinned. He was alone this time, and the boy he called his assistant had probably been left in Karcellia. Then, his grin faltered and he sighed. “The Kingdom is a mess. And what I saw of that place…” He shook his head. “Madness. The Confederates are mad.”

“Why?”

“They unleashed the daemons. Those monsters once plagued Irvalla, and now they’re doing it again. It’s not just the apes or lizards, but other species too. Living dolls, monstrous ants, unliving swords…” He shuddered, “I saw all of that leaving the fort they built on that hilltop you came from.”

Yuriko frowned. “More daemons, huh? I’m surprised that they would willingly bring themselves under Confederate command. In Karcellia, one of the daemon apes negotiated with the Archons.”

“I don’t know either. You said that you need to control the area where you portalled in, right? They built the fort right over those ruins. It’s guarded by a host of infantry, machine gun bunkers, cannons, and even a few tanks. And, I felt the occult resonance of Confederate Warlocks. Will you be able to take it without support?”

Yuriko nodded. “We don’t have the time to waste. We’ve left important matters behind.”

“I see. Well, I’ll help you as much as I can.”

“Thank you, Edison,” Yuriko said with a smile, which caused the older man to cough and splutter, muttering that it was his pleasure.

The next day, they drove towards Sanctus Kingdom in a landcraft that barely fit all three dozen of them. The driver was Edison, of course, and the landcraft, which he called a bus, had been borrowed from one of the lots where discarded cars had been left after the evacuation a few Seasons ago.

And, well, even though he was driving, the bus didn’t have enough petrol to reach the Sanctus-Richmond border, even on a full tank. Still, after the fuel ran out, the bus could still be pushed and would serve as a mobile resting area and luggage carrier.

Sure enough, they ran out of petrol in the middle of the mountains, so Heron and the marines, as well as the beastkin, pushed. They still managed a respectable clip, and when they went downhill, it was an exhilarating ride, ehehehe.

It took another couple of days to reach the old border where they first crossed into Sanctus Kingdom. The country itself was oddly desolate, at least the northern part, and it turned out that they had been invaded by daemons too.

Blam! Whoosh!

Rifle fire from Izna and Armin, as well as the marines, peppered the rampaging daemon apes. They came across the rogue daemons as they were crossing a valley, and those cretins were crawling all over the snow-capped mountains too.

Still, a single bullet overcharged with Animus was more than enough to pierce their flesh, though a second or third was needed to kill them. But they didn’t bother to cleanse the kingdom’s territory of the monsters. According to Edison, most of the populace had evacuated to the capital and had holed up there. They were calling up mercenaries to fight, but since the hostility between Richmond and the rest of the continent was there, few sellswords were available.

“Karcellia was asked for aid,” Edison continued, “so pay it no mind.” Still, his countenance was pale. Despite his current loyalties, he had been born and raised in Sanctus after all. So Yuriko didn’t mind wiping out the daemons in her way, and if they destroyed the Confederate fortress, it would cut off the supply of monsters anyway. So what she was doing was the best help she could give.

If she remembered correctly, the ruins with the portal were a few days' hike from where they currently were. The outpost was deserted and in disrepair. While there were no bodies remaining, she could still see blood residue on the stones underneath the snow cover. Most other tracks had been worn away by time and inclement weather, but the bloodstains remained.

She spotted the lake they had rounded, and the hill they needed was just past it. On their bus, it would take a couple of days to travel, maybe. But they were so close.

“We’re rushing,” Yuriko finally decided, impatience warring with caution. Well, the latter lost. The others didn’t argue, not that they would, anyway. Everyone was eager to leave.

They retrieved their gear and luggage from the bus’ luggage compartment and stood around Yuriko. She unleashed her Anima, allowing the folded runescript weaving to return to its original configuration. Almost at once, the regeneration lines activated and began pulling ambient Chaos out of the air. It was denser here than she remembered, but only by twice over. Meaning, it was still a fiftieth of one iarvesh. As it were, it would take more than a minute for her to recover one lumen if she let things be, so instead, she sorted through her Radiant motes and picked out a few. Most of them were in groups of three which only converted to one lumen. It took her about a second to convert a single clump, and though she was sure she’d be able to handle multiples eventually, she hadn’t had the wherewithal to practice over the past couple of weeks. Anyway, it would only take her a few minutes to fill up, so she did just that while the others got ready. Once she was reasonably full, she enveloped everyone with her Animakinesis and flew.

Hmm, it took a bit less Anima reach usage than she expected while lifting everyone. She had determined that she could move 5 Jin of weight at a pace per second per inch of reach when she first thought of Animakinesis, but she was sure she was using less reach compared to the speed and amount of weight she was carrying. She was certainly still flying faster than the bus did when it still had petrol, and they came within a league of that hilltop in about an hour.

The area was now denuded of trees, and there were walls, bunkers, and cannons out in the open. And almost as soon as she came within range, they started shooting.