The Furnace creature roared in pain, the first time it did in the battle. A moment later it carved out the piece of torso that had the mandala stuck on it, and flung it away. A chunk a few inches to a side bounced off into the distance, all the while trailing disintegration dust.

Yuriko pursed her lips, both happy and disappointed at the same time. She managed to see how the runescript pattern worked, but she instinctively knew that the efficiency and placement was horrible. The slowness of the disintegration was evidence of that.

Clicking her tongue, Yuriko moved to destroy the other creatures before focusing on the Iron Furnace. The creature was tougher than she expected, and she wondered if she'd have to dump hundreds of motes of Radiant energy into its body to destroy it.

The Quicksilver thing slithered out of the heap and lunged at her, repeating the same kind of motion and attack. Yuriko leaned away from the strike, moving just an inch farther than its reach. Then, she slammed the remaining sunshards into its body, in an effort to boil away its life. It tried to avoid the strike, but was unsuccessful. The shards sank into its body and unleashed Radiant energy within. Quicksilver’s tendrils dug at its torso, attempting to dig out the shards. Yuriko kept them within its centre mass, however, and it shouldn't take too long to kill it.

She slammed down on Wires with her Anima kinesis, grinding it against the hardened Chaos ground. More sunshards formed around her and scattered across the thin fragmented Shattered Glass, melting it and returning it to its constituent parts. The Greaseman had completely boiled away, and only the Iron Furnace was left. She stabbed her great sunblade, as well as the other two sunblades into the remnants of its body, and the creature trembled. She wasn’t sure if it felt pain, but she knew it felt fear. Her Mien could feel it. Strong emotion directed at her fed it, whether it was love, lust, or hate. Fear, madness, anger. Each one carried a different taste, and here, in the dreamscape, she grew ever more sensitive to their presence. She could feel her Mien, and though she often treated it as a separate part of her, it was intrinsically bound into the fabric of her Anima and body. By strengthening either, through the Ancient Way or through Radiant Body Refinement, it, too, was strengthened.

The revelation was disheartening, but Yuriko believed that she was coming to a point wherein she could accept it. And that sentiment frightened her. Was it her own feelings or one engendered by her Progenitor’s bloodline? After all, it turned out she was descended from a God-Monarch and a Primordial. How long ago and how far was that, she didn’t know. She abruptly remembered Avos Shillogu’s words to her so long ago. That she was only mostly human.

With a shudder, she reined in her train of thought. The Iron Furnace construct had melted down to slag, but it consumed all of the Radiant energy within her swords. The Animus constructs, once their core of Radiant energy was gone, simply collapsed into its constituent lumens. The Iron Furnace creature shuddered, then completely became inert. The body made of metals sloughed away, leaving something behind.

Yuriko frowned as her Anima examined the thing. It was part of a spherical structure, but had so many missing parts that the only reason she got its shape was because of the wire frame. She felt drawn to the thing, and she took it with her. The other creatures left fragments behind too, after everything else sloughed away. The things quivered when she brought the sphere close, and with a flick of her thoughts, the fragments flew into the fragment device and slotted themselves in. That didn’t complete it, but filled roughly ten percent of its volume.

Shaking her head, Yuriko muttered, “Does this mean I have to destroy more of these things to complete this?” The dreamscape never created anything by coincidence. Whatever it was, she felt that Eli’Theria needed the completed structure.

She noticed a heap of scrap metal a couple of dozen paces away. The creatures’ presence had blocked her perception, but now, she could scout ahead.

“Heh, if more of these things come, they can’t hide from me.”

Even if she couldn’t make out their appearance using her perception, the void their presence created gave them away. She strolled towards the scrap heap, and found that they were mounds of discarded metals, tubing, glassware, and fluids. There were so many of the things that they actually formed walls and passages, as though it were a hedge maze.

Yuriko’s perception aura couldn’t penetrate the pieces at all. She could feel the walls because of their resistance, and her thirty paces of reach allowed her to see over the walls, though not enough to scan the ground beyond. Not unless she floated a dozen paces above the ground.

That wasn’t the worst idea, so she pushed off the ground with her Anima, though almost as soon as her feet left the ground, she felt the weight of the ambient Chaos above pushing down on her. She sank back down almost immediately, but before her toes could touch the hardened Chaos floor, she glared at the skies and flared her Anima, pushing against the pressure and allowing herself freedom of movement.

It caused cracks in her Anima, and consequently, her Anima body. With a sigh, she landed back down. There was little point to damaging her body at the moment, not when she had things to do. Still, the first few inches over the ground weren’t punished by the pressure, so in defiance, she floated exactly that amount and went through the scrapyard maze that way. A hundred paces in, and she felt a resistant presence. She flung herself around the bend, and came face to face with a nightmarish construct of oil, scrap metal bits, and glass shards.

The creature froze in surprise but Yuriko didn’t. Newly formed sunblades stabbed into the creature, and it melted without even being able to struggle. A small fragment of the sphere remained and she allowed it to merge with the big one.

Yuriko smiled in satisfaction. She estimated that the sphere probably needed several dozen more pieces, but perhaps it would depend on the size of each fragment she recovered. The runescript patterns within it were incomplete and nearly indecipherable, but since it was Eli’Theria who called her here, she hoped it would be something needed to reactivate the Colossus.

She stalked around the junkyard maze and encountered more of the same. They were always a variation of the original five she first encountered, and none of them posed a danger to her, especially when she often found them alone or in pairs. As for what they were doing, the iron furnace type was shovelling bits of metal from the scrapheap into their maws, the grease and mud men slurped up oil and other fluids from the puddles. The wire and lightning creatures sat on top of the heap, and were sometimes struck by lightning from the skies. Otherwise, they were content to sit there. She would have left them alone if she didn’t need the fragments they contained within them.

As for the quicksilver constructs…aside from the first one, she hadn’t seen any more of them. The broken glass things were the most insidious. They lay amongst the debris, and were completely inert to her perceptions. She knew they were glass fragments,but until they roused and rejected her perception with their own auras, she couldn’t distinguish them from the rest of the junk. After a hair-raising ambush, she started grinding down on any glass she saw with her kinesis, and doing so, she managed to flush a couple of the constructs out before they could attack. Still, there were far more glass shards than there were constructs, and her preemptive measures slowed her down so much that she had to take a five minute break to recenter herself.

Yes, she got ambushed. No, they weren’t actually able to hurt her. They did crack a bit of her Anima, but none reached her body. Afterwards, she didn’t bother with the glass unless it moved. She had a split second to react when their auras pushed hers away so she had that much time to attack.

She must have spent six or so hours in the maze. It was larger than she expected, and it grew denser the closer she got to the centre. The way the mounds were arranged felt like a spiral too. She must have covered nearly a hundred longstrides…

Well, she was much faster alone. Her hovering movement allowed her to speed through the path, and she was much faster than a Karcellian landcraft. She wasn’t as fast as their fighter aircraft though.

All at once, the scrap metal mounds that had grown in size to fifty or so paces high, suddenly disappeared and she found herself in a large clearing. Beneath her feet was not only the dense Chaos ground, but also a thin layer of…oil? Water, too, but with a thin sheen of oily substance that refracted the light like rainbows.

Her Anima spread out to her full reach, and yet she didn’t detect a thing. The sphere in her hand was about three-quarters complete, and she wondered if this was the end of the maze, and if she’d have to return inside and hunt down every single one of the creatures.

Instead, she chose to check what was in the clearing. An odd trick of the mists prevented her from seeing too far, but sometimes, it shifted enough that she could see junk heaps on the opposite side.

Still, if there was a clearing in the centre of a maze, then there was something of note in the very middle. With such fuzzy logic, Yuriko flew straight to the middle, and a hundred paces in, she finally saw it.

She froze in surprise, not expecting Eli’Theria’s Colossus body there at all. But it wasn’t the one seated on the throne. This one was slumped against a junk heap and was in such bad condition Yuriko could see into the torso. Broken cables, dribbling oil and water, visible wires, and even the internal skeletal structure. She could see runescript lines etched on the inside of the armour plates, inscriptions that were used to regenerate the armour, but they were broken and inactive.

Yuriko swallowed nervously. Was this the animating spirit? The eyes still had a glimmer to them, so Eli’Theria was still ‘alive’. And one of the things she needed to activate the Colossus, and use her power to fight against the Chaos Duke effectively, was to gain Authority. Or in other words, the animating spirit’s acknowledgement and submission.

Her mind raced as she stared at the broken down body. If she helped Eli’Theria recover, then perhaps…?

Shaking her head, she knew she would have helped no matter what. She would not allow the animating spirit to suffer. As she came closer to the Colossus, she felt her Anima perception being rejected. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Only parts of the Colossus were rejecting her perception, and…

Ah, whatever it was just revealed itself.

From the Colossus’ bowels, black sludge oozed out and dropped to the watery ground. The oil-slick water skirted away from the sludge, as though it couldn’t bear to touch the darkness. The thing slowly accumulated until it was a mound three paces high, and about half a dozen wide. Then, the sludge squeezed together until it was no bigger than a human. Even its form was humanoid, but it was all flowing sludge rather than flesh. Or metal.

And unsurprisingly, it didn’t utter a word and simply launched itself at her. Yuriko’s eyes widened when she saw how fast it was. The thing’s fist slammed into her condensed aura even before she could blink. Her aura was anchored to the ground, keeping her aloft, but that also meant that she wasn’t braced properly. The kinetic force passed right into her body and blew her several paces backward before she grounded her feet. The water splashed away from her aura and she shed the momentum with a couple more steps.

The creature stared at its fist, as though wondering why she wasn’t paste. Yuriko smirked, formed her sunblades, then launched herself into battle.