Chapter 389: Book 6-16.3: Rearguard

“I…well, we can probably freeze over the water and walk across,” Kalla said, nodding to Gwendith who stood next to Yuriko.

“Eh?” Gwendith jerked her head, “I haven’t tried to freeze that much water…”

“You’ve got ice kinesis, don’t you?” Kalla continued, “I’ve seen you manipulate snow and ice. And besides, I misspoke, I don’t mean to freeze the river, that would take far too much Animus. I meant we could construct a bridge out of ice and snow and cross that way.”

“Nearly three hundred paces across?” Sheamus blurted out.

“There’s a narrower section close to the middle of the plateau. It’s only a hundred and fifty paces across there.” Kalla shook her head. “Our only other alternative is to scale down the cliffside and,” she looked pointedly at the rescued women, “I don’t think we’ve got the strength to attempt that.”

“No, I’d think not.” Yuriko sighed. “Are you sure you can build a bridge quickly enough?”

“Build, yes. Quick, no,” Kalla muttered. “Well, it depends on how much Miss Sharine here could help me.”

“As I’ve said, I haven’t attempted anything of the sort before,” Gwendith said firmly, “but, I’m more than willing to try. I’ve…learned a few things about cold and ice here.”

“I see. Let’s exchange notes then?” Kalla grinned, though Yuriko was sure that the older adventurer meant that she was willing to teach more than anything else.

“Well, I think it’s time to move. We don’t want to be trapped here,” Yuriko said.

And with that, the rest of the gear was packed up and the eighteen of them left the cave and trod up the path back onto the plateau. Yuriko looked over the edge. It was nearly a sheer drop to the hills below, some seven to eight hundred paces away. Much like above, the hills were covered in a thick layer of snow, but also with groves of evergreen trees and bushes. She was too far away to catch sight of any movement from fauna and was tempted to use Enhanced Sight to do so. It was in the midst of the Season of Fire, but here in the north, the only sign of it was that there were fewer snowstorms. Just the ever-present cold and ice. Maybe that was why the barbarians were so aggressive. They may have wanted to return to a more temperate climate except that the Empire stood in their way.

They could have crossed the Zarek Mountains. There was nothing much north of Faron’s Crossing beyond the Shillogu Woods. Her home town’s climate was closer to tropical than anything else, with snowfall a rare occurrence. Or perhaps there were already barbarian tribes there and these ones couldn’t trespass?

Sheamus and Nathan led the group, followed by Yuriko and Desire. Gwendith and the others trailed behind her with Kalla bringing up the rear. The older scout dragged a wide branch behind her, doing her best to obscure their trail.

But a couple of hours hiking had the freed women shivering. The modest warm clothing wasn’t enough and Yuriko thought they’d have to stop and warm themselves up or risk frostbite.

The wind was picking up too, and the clouds were low and dark in the skies. The first flurries of snow started to fall. Yuriko looked for a likely shelter, zeroing in on a spot near a grove. There was a clearing that they could use, with the trees close enough together to protect them against the wind.

Yuriko and the scouts dug the snow up until they reached the frozen earth. The hard-packed snow reached all the way to her waist. Kalla, and to a lesser extent, Gwendith, compacted the snow into blocks and together, they built a shelter. It took a couple of hours, but just as the snowstorm intensified, they managed to finish. Three braziers warmed up the air inside and all of them huddled together for warmth.

“How long before we can leave?” Yuriko murmured.

“A day or two, I’d think,” Gwendith murmured as she pressed up against Yuriko’s side. “You’re really warm,” she said drowsily.

Yuriko supposed her Radiant energy meant warmth. She never really felt cold, now that she thought about it. Not when she wandered into a Waypoint that was practically ice and snow, and certainly not when she entered Rumiga here. Radiant energy suffused her entire being, little motes embedded into her body and Anima. It was a wonder that her skin wasn’t hot to the touch instead. Radiant… Huh, perhaps that was the answer to a pressing need.

Even huddled together and with the braziers filled with Animus and radiating heat, the air inside the shelter was cold enough that their breaths came out as plumes of steam. Shivers and chattering teeth.

Desire pressed up against Yuriko’s other side, distracting her for a moment. Then Gwendith nuzzled closer, murmuring in her sleep. Eh? Did Chaos Lords need to sleep? Desire’s eyes were closed and there was a small smile on her lips.

There weren’t enough bedrolls to go around so she and the other two leaned their backs against the berm. The shelter was dug into the earth, easily accomplished with her kinesis, and the ice had been shaped into a dome. The braziers weren’t open fire so there was no risk of the smoke, but there were still air holes to keep the air inside fresh. The menfolk were resting near the entrance and the other women were huddled near the centre where the heat was.

Lucinda had set up three stew pots and filled them with water and ration bars. She also tossed in a few spice packets, but alas, no meat. It was a good way to pass the hours while waiting out the storm.

The problem Yuriko had been ruminating about was how quickly the freed women got tired, and how much they suffered from the cold. It sapped their meagre strength and if they couldn’t keep moving then she was sure the barbarians would catch up. Yuriko wasn’t arrogant enough to believe she could protect everyone from being hurt. Maybe if her Anima could spread as far as it could during her incarnations’ vision, then that would have been possible.

So the solution would be for her to create something that could keep the cold away from their weakened bodies. If she created a ball that held in a respectable amount of Radiant energy, would it help warm them up?

She wove her Animus into a ball that was just big enough to fit comfortably in her hand. Then, acting off a hunch, she added the runescript lines of storage inside. Then she filled it up with Radiant energy, about enough motes to create a sunshard. The ball grew bright in her hand. And warm.

“Gwendith…”

“...”

Asleep, huh. When Yuriko shifted, Gwendith slumped over and her head fell to Yuriko’s bosom rather than her shoulder. A few moments later, Gwendith grunted and straightened up, blinking blearily at her.

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“Huh?”

“Ah, sorry,” Yuriko said.

The other blonde girl just shook her head then asked, “What is it?’

“Here. Ah, careful.” Yuriko presented the ball to Gwendith who reflexively grabbed it.

“Oooh, warm.” Gwendith sleepily pressed the ball to her middle, leaned her head back on Yuriko’s shoulder and went back to sleep without another word.

“Alright.” Yuriko muttered to herself, “Then the only thing to find out is how long it’ll last.”

Well, the ball lasted for several hours before the Radiant energy was used up. By that point, Yuriko had made enough of them for each of the others to hold onto. Except, she’d foolishly left them on the ground, which melted the permafrost and made mud puddles. Then, the water evaporated making the inside of the shelter much more humid.

A few of the women noticed what she was doing and Yuriko passed the heat balls to them. They gasped at the warmth then held them close to their bodies.

Was this Spellweaving? Yuriko wasn’t sure if it was, but since she pressed her Intent into the constructs rather than write every line of runescript, then it probably was. Huh. So Spellweaving applied to Animus constructs too. It took about fifteen lumens to make the ball, and twice as much in Radiant energy. Her outer reserves were more than enough for the constructs while the Radiant energy took longer to regenerate. Perhaps if she had been outside and had the Radiant Sun shining down on her bare skin then it would have been a matter of minutes rather than hours. As it were, Radiant energy spilt out from the Radiant Essence Core when her reserves dipped low.  Well, that solved one problem.

While the storm raged outside, Yuriko chatted with the freed captives. One of the sicker ones, Jamari Lucinde, had been part of Stormwalker Century and she recognised Yuriko when they first saw each other again.

Yuriko didn’t though, and she felt a bit ashamed of it. But it had been nearly two years after all, and the woman wasn’t someone she’d spent more than a few hours with. She vaguely recalled the battle at the camp, where she first shed human blood. Perhaps Jamari was one of those who told her, Gwendith, and Ella-Mai to run.

The other nine were all from one of the northern camps, and they were all captured on that fateful day. They gave their names and Yuriko filed them in her mind, matching faces to the list. All of them were thin, but not emaciated, thankfully.

After eating dinner, Yuriko crawled out of the shelter and was met with a wall of snow. She shoved it away with her kinesis, angling the thrust at a diagonal upwards and was rewarded with the sight of the clear night sky. The Chaos Streams were particularly bright and she easily spotted the empty black circle of the Dark Moon somewhere towards the southeast. At least the snowstorm’s done.

She crawled back inside and slept for the night. The next morning, after breakfast and their morning ablutions, they took down the shelter. Yuriko pressed down with her kinesis to even out the snow. Hopefully, it should mask their camp. Then they continued west.

What took Sheamus, Kalla, and Nathan half a day took them nearly two days of slow hiking. But by the noon of the second day, they went over a small ridge and beheld the half-frozen river. The roar of the waterfall made talking a bit of a chore though. They moved towards the Veil and away from the edge. The plateau had widened by then, spanning maybe three longstrides from the Veil to the cliff edge, but the river’s narrowest point was only five hundred paces from the falls.

Ice floes drifted along the river, jagged discs that ranged in diameter from a single pace to several dozen. The river was fairly straight too, nearly a line from falls to Veil. The source was in the Chaos Sea, but Yuriko thought she saw a heaven-reaching pillar just behind the Veil. An ice mountain, she supposed. Why the water wasn’t completely frozen over, she didn’t know. Ah, the density of the ambient Chaos was much thicker here, by about ten percent, she supposed.

“Right, let’s get to work,” Kalla said as she rubbed her palms together.

She and Gwendith walked up to the riverbanks and started to shape the ice. It was slow going, and they had to change their plan after the first arch collapsed under its own weight. They lost several hours there, long enough for Yuriko to decide they needed to make another shelter so that the others could rest and recover. The Radiant spheres had done their job well and none of them succumbed to frostbite.

“Perhaps if you connected to one of the ice floes and used those as a bridge instead?” Yuriko suggested.

“Er, yeah, but how?” Kalla pointed at one of the bigger ones that were floating near the centre of the river.

“Let’s join some rope together,” Yuriko said. The coil of rope that came with her traveller’s backpack was only about twenty paces long. The scouts had several coils though.

“You never know when you need rope,” Nathan said with a rather morbid chuckle. When the girls stared at him reproachfully, he threw up his hands. “What?”

“Nevermind,” Kalla grumbled.

They joined up enough rope to reach out to a hundred paces. Yuriko grabbed one end, backed up a bit and took a running leap towards a passing ice floe. She flared and shaped her Anima into a set of wings, mimicking Mum’s set, landing easily on the ice. She shaped spikes at the bottom of her boots to keep traction. Then, she formed an Animus spike, complete with a loop. Secured the rope on it then stabbed it down into the ice. Once she was sure it was secure, she took another running leap back to the riverbank. She was nearly fifty paces downstream by the time she returned. She braced on the rope, sending her Animus down its length to strengthen in, then pulled as she walked up the bank. Her Anima covered her body and gave her both the leverage and strength to haul the floe all the way to the bank.

“There. Now all you need to do is secure this while I grab more floes,” Yuriko said easily.

Gwendith, Kalla, and Nathan exchanged gazes, then as one, they said, “You’re a monster.”

“Whaaat?” Yuriko exclaimed.

The two women just chuckled while Nathan just shrugged.

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