Self healing was easy, Yuriko thought as she sent her Anima into Scarlett’s body. The smol girl’s Anima was slowly recovering, but it was easy enough to suppress. For the moment anyway. The act was profoundly uncomfortable, and it showed by how she squirmed and groaned.

Healing another, on the other hand, was far more difficult, especially since she didn’t have any techniques, Ennoias, or spells that could actually heal efficiently. Well, she knew enough Arcana Weaving to cobble up a spell, but her incarnation body didn’t have any spell circles carved into the Anima. It was easier and faster to boost Scarlett’s regeneration with the Recovery technique, but she’d have to donate Animus to fuel it, or drive Scarlett’s Anima into the cycle. The latter was complicated due to the weakened and crumbly state of said Anima.

Huh, something to consider.

Her Radiant Physique allowed her to elementise her body to regenerate from any injury, but that consumed internal Radiance. Those motes were stuffed into her cells and generally unavailable for use. Depleting that reserve could actually cause her body to dissipate, but only if she forcefully converted too much matter to Radiance. She barely had an Animus reserve and she certainly didn’t keep outer reserves, since it would force her to keep a weak halo of light constantly.

She had two hundred lumens of Animus, which wasn’t enough to close that horrific wound across Scarlett’s chest. Minor regeneration sped up healing by a factor of ten or so, but something like that would take weeks to completely heal, though probably less than an hour to form a scab. Scarlett had already stopped bleeding though the scabbing looked too delicate.

She infused her Anima into Scarlett, then adjusted her resonance to match the other girl’s Anima. Since she was the one who helped unlock Scar’s Anima, it wasn’t that difficult to get a mild resonance. She moved her Anima into the Recovery pattern, dragging Scar’s Anima along. It was sluggish and prone to deviating, mostly because their bodies were so different. She had to go against her own instinctive use and adjusted for the other woman’s size and shape.

It took several minutes to complete the first circulation, after which the process sped up. The first completion of the cycle was enough to thicken the scab, reducing the risk of tearing the wound open whenever Scarlett moved. The second circulation knitted enough flesh underneath the gap. The third closed the smaller wounds altogether. Most of the contusions progressed to the point that they shouldn’t be painful to the touch, though they would probably be stiff. The broken bones knitted back together, realigning properly rather than healing every which way. Yuriko moved the shattered bone fragments to their origin and held them in place, for the fourth circulation. The fifth couldn’t be completed.

Yuriko’s eyes shot open when she felt the barricades shudder. She felt something push under the barricades, or rather, several dozen somethings. Pentapods. Of course.

Yuriko grunted as she slew the irritating critters by flicking her fingers at them. Bluish blood splatter covered the floors, contrasting sharply with the dull brown stains on the white tile. The creatures’ deaths might have alerted the other enslaved apes since she detected a squad down the corridor. They turned towards her location and quickmarched.

“Rotter,” she muttered.

Helping Scarlett with Recovery didn’t require touch, but she had to use quite a bit of her Anima reach, as well as about five strands of consciousness. She pushed the gurney farther from the barricade that was nearer the soldier apes, then swore loudly when she detected another squad coming down the opposite way. They won’t quite reach the doors at the same time, but that didn’t really matter. She forced the circulation to finish and was barely done when the apes started hammering the doors.

“Wha—?” Scarlett roused out of her stupor, half from the healing and half from the thunderous racket.

“We’re under attack,” Yuriko said calmly as she got back to her feet. Her Radiant reserves had recovered enough to form another sunblade, but this time, instead of making a single, standard sized one, she formed three mini-blades. Not quite as small as sunshards, and the sum of all three would constitute a single standard blade. She separated control of the sunblades so that a strand of consciousness was directly tied to each, infusing no more than the minimum Intent and Will into them. They won’t work beyond her Anima reach, but that was all she needed them for.

Scarlett struggled to her feet. Her hands groped for her telescoping batons, but those things had crumpled to scrap in the earlier battle.

“You’re nowhere fully recovered,” Yuriko said bluntly, “Stay behind me and focus on your regeneration.”

Scarlett’s face twisted into a grimace. Guilt and self-loathing flooded down their emphatic link and Yuriko winced in response. Thankfully, Scarlett didn’t notice, otherwise the spiral might have gone worse. The left-hand barricade crumpled into the room, and considering she barely spent a minute piling them up, that was about what’s expected.

The Apes didn’t immediately enter, and instead, threw fist sized orbs of elemental energy. Most of them were red, but a couple bordered on purple. She wasn’t sure what that would have accomplished and the point was moot anyway since she used the mini-blades to intercept and consume.

Then, she sent one blade out of each doorway and began the slaughter of violent, yet mind-controlled apes. The smaller size of the flying swords meant that using them for defense was harder, but in offensive maneuvers, as long as the things reached her foes, that was all that mattered. The daemon apes weren’t hardened against Radiant energy, unlike the ‘Chronian Gear users in Dragon Fall.

She sent the mini-blades through each ape’s center mass. She wove the path to go through each soldier and in a couple of seconds, none of them remained standing. When the bodies collapsed, the attached pentapods wriggled and extracted themselves from the corpse. They looked larger than the ones she crushed fresh from the egg, so perhaps they grew after parasitising a host. They were along the hallway and out of her line of sight, but Animakinesis was enough to crush them.

With the coast clear, Yuriko sighed and grabbed Scarlett’s hand. “ We should get going.”

“Where?”

“We—well, we need to get Desire, or reach her location. To finish your healing, if nothing else.” Yuriko swallowed, “Also, three days passed in Astoria.”

“Three…days?” Scarlett’s eyes widened and her eyebrows practically disappeared into her hairline.

“Yeah,” Yuriko sighed. “Also, Dee thought she saw Brilliance and Speedrun captured.”

“What? How?”

Yuriko shrugged. “Who knows?”

They walked slowly, carefully, towards the corridor and Yuriko oriented herself towards Desire’s location. Scarlett wasn’t in the best of shape, but they couldn’t afford to stay here considering the pentapods were probably connected to each other mentally.

She was tempted to just run, but the maze was far too convoluted, and the area behind the walls wasn’t air or other rooms. Void. The interstitial space meant that they were already in the gaps between the material plane and the Realm of Thought, Ideals, and Desires. The three formed the mix of the dreamscape and didn’t exist in the Myriad Planes of the Chaos Sea.

She’d learned much about cosmology in Bresia, as well as Dragon Fall City and Shangria. Information was widespread in both places, and while it was the same in Astoria, the height of knowledge wasn’t the same. She knew that outside the Chaos Sea, each realm was separated from each other by a layer of Void. Of nothingness, where everything was taken away. It wasn’t the same as the emptiness of space around Shangria. That was just empty of air, water, and landmasses. There was still light, varied Elemental energies, and just as important, Chaos.

Void didn’t even have Chaos in it. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that when Chaos intrudes into the Void, either it remains as Void or it becomes Chaos. She shivered at the thought. Radiance, as she understood it, would flare briefly in the Void, then sputter off at the lack of anything to consume.

She tilted her head in thought as something twinged from Damien’s old memories. It disappeared before she could grasp it, but she had an inkling that the last bit wasn’t quite universally true. Oh.

Scarlett walked slowly while she tried to continue Recovery. But the technique requires far more focus than that, especially from someone so new at it. In the end, she carried Scarlett in her arms to allow her to focus. Yuriko didn’t move much faster than a jog, and she focused on the smoothness of her movement. The trio of mini-blades swooped and circled around her. She sent one ahead, to the limit of her reach. One behind to a similar limit, while the last one with arm’s reach.

Scarlett’s progress was slow, but thankfully steady. A light mist drifted from the vents on the ceiling. The same foggy air that persisted in the daemon’s nest. She felt the corridors begin to twist. They lost the crisp ninety degree turns and became sinuous tunnels that tricked the eye. The walls were still stone and the aesthetic still that of an abandoned hospital. She could feel an emotion pressing down on her, and she was certain her friend was also affected considering her Recovery circulation faltered and failed every now and then.

Frowning, Yuriko released some of the Radiance locked in her body. She threaded weaves into her Anima and the mists boiled away while she glowed like a bonfire. Consume, propagate, return.

Yuriko smirked now. The mists, whatever they were and wherever they came from, were nothing but prey to her Radiance. Every mote she sent out was returned threefold, and she forged a dozen mini-blades in less than a minute. She set them scouting ahead, and before long, she caught a troop of soldier Apes. They died quickly and with little fanfare, with the pentapods dealt with afterwards.

But as she suspected, the critters were connected to each other in some way. Though perhaps the quality of the connection wasn’t enough to convey accurate data, considering they hadn’t been swarmed already.

Or just as likely, the daemons’ attention was occupied by the Unfettered. A powerful regenerator, humanoid-lion hybrids that weren’t actually real and nothing more than projected force, and seemingly endless birdwomen, were more than a match for an army, even one as resilient and powerful as the Crimson Apes. Perhaps if the soldier apes were armed with more than their natural abilities they might have put up a better fight.

In Shangria, her true body had remained in the same campsite while her companions continued the hunt. The second layer wasn’t as hospitable as the first, but the shards proved to be more lucrative than expected. They might reach their target budget if they held out for a few more days, weeks, even. The resource biome was only a couple of gates away, well within the daily limit of nine biomes travelled per day. That meant they could stretch their supplies for as long as they needed to, though they also had to contend with other hunter groups.

Delver rules prohibited staying at the resource biome more than a day. Most hunter groups camped in the surrounding biomes, and the ones adjacent were hotly contested. The ones around that one, not so much. They shared this biome with another four groups, but considering that this space was more than a league across, and the hunting groups didn’t consist of more than half a dozen or so people each, none of them got in each other’s way.

Yuriko sighed as the partition went down and her bodies synched up properly. She had devoted more strands to handling her incarnation than her true body, considering she wasn’t in actual danger here. The time dilation was still annoying, but more bearable now. She brushed aside the headaches that would inevitably come when her incarnation returned to Astoria, and instead, crawled out of her tent.

She looked towards the eastern gate. There was an odd prodding there. A connection that wasn’t quite real? A thread unrealised. It was fleeting and distant, and it poked at her attention, but there was nothing she could do about it right now.

Snorting to herself, she followed her nose and floated towards the cook fire. Food.