Perhaps unsurprisingly, the threads didn't lead her directly to the city. Even more of a surprise, it wasn't towards the east either, but closer to the north-northeast. The Radiant Sun had disappeared beneath the Veil… no, there wasn't a Veil within sight here, it was a different term that the Bresians used. Horizon? Yup, that was it. The Radiant Sun had disappeared beneath the horizon of mists, yet the Luminous Moon had not yet risen.
Her Radiant glow illuminated the twilight as she flew towards where Sofia's thread tugged her. She could feel the girl's emotions, and though they weren't completely in distress, it felt more as if the other girl was groggy and not quite in full control of herself.
She reached for Juliette's threads, too, but without the lingering connection of the spell, she couldn't quite make out her condition. The feeling of direction was fainter too, but it was…
Yuriko frowned. The heading towards Sofia and the one towards Juliette diverged ever so slightly. Perhaps they were in different areas but were close together? Or perhaps they were in entirely different places. The only saving grace she had was that neither of them had been brought into a…
"Rotter! Swarm fodder!" Yuriko yelled when she felt Sofia's thread suddenly obscured. It was still there, and she knew the other girl was still alive, but she was no longer on this layer of reality. Juliette was still there, and that made the decision much easier.
However, after a couple of minutes, Juliette's thread was suddenly obscured, too. The direction adjusted to be the same as where she lost the other girl, and she sped up her flight.
For that matter…where was Ryoko?
A sense of foreboding overcame her, and she hurriedly entered the dreamscape and pulled at Ryoko's thread, only to find that it was similarly obscured. However, the emotions rolling off the thread, though something stood in its way, were more easily read. Ryoko had a much deeper connection to her than the two disciples after all. The woman had crossed the Chaos Sea, even if it was on a ship, to come and serve her. That, and Ryoko's Mishala Heritage meant that the Mien had a much easier time grasping the other.
She forced her mind to connect with Ryoko, casting True Connection when she returned her consciousness to the material realm. The strength of the thread was more than able to power through the distance between the layers of reality, and she felt it connect.
"Young mistress," Ryoko's mental voice was calm and quite in control, "thank you for seeking me out."
"I'm sorry, Ryoko," Yuriko said. "I didn't notice you missing until just now."
"I am your handmaiden. Your needs come before my own." Yuriko felt Ryoko smile through the threads.
"Where are you?"
"I'm not sure. I was captured before noon in Virtalla City and had been transported inside a blacked-out carriage. I felt that we moved through one of those portals. There's no mistaking that gut-wrenching feel."
"Rotter…" Yuriko muttered. Just as she couldn't pinpoint where Gwendith and Heron were, or Saki for that matter, she couldn't do the same with Ryoko, much less the students. She could only hurry to the last place she could detect, and hopefully, she would find the Chaos Fount's gate.
The longstrides rolled underneath as she flew for another half hour. Her perception aura was spread as wide as it could go, and she was even tempted to release Damien's memories. Only the fact that they were likely to overwhelm her instead of fading away stopped her hand.
Still, she was sure to find them, and a hundred and sixty paces radius was pretty big. More than enough to find something. It was only a matter of time.
The surrounding farmlands were a mix of grain crops as well as orchards. Her flight speed ate up the distance and by the time an hour had passed, she'd crossed nearly a hundred longstrides.
A moment later, Yuriko realised that perhaps flying towards a hostile force, while glowing like the sun, and in the evening twilight, meant that her approach would not go unnoticed. At that moment, she felt a ball of Fire Elemental energy, wrapped within a spell, fly into her perception range. Sharps of sharpened metal followed it, rocks the size of her head, and even worse, compressed obsidian in the shape of spears, as well as nearly invisible blades of wind.
Eyes widening in alarm and more than a little bit of anger, Yuriko propelled herself to the side. The fireball exploded several dozen paces away, and she was well out of its range. The spears swerved to follow her movement, but the other earthen projectiles missed. The wind blades were the fastest of the lot and deflected off her condensed aura.
Her sunblades darted out from under her coat, expanded to full size, and hovered around her. Yuriko looked towards where the spells came from, but could not see anything. Then, a new wave of attack spells came from another direction, though it was still from the general heading of where she suspected the girls had been taken.
She used six sunblades to deflect the blows and used one to burst the fireball a hundred paces away. She inscribed several sunblades with detection spells, Tremorsense and Echolocation, and sent them scouting.
A few moments later, she began conjuring more sunblades at a rate of a dozen per second, occupying only that many strands of consciousness while she used the rest to track the incoming spells, adjust her body, and move forward.
She winced at a condensed ball of wind, visible to the naked eye as an extreme distortion, which slammed into her Anima. With her perception out and the fact that she was controlling about four dozen sunblades now, her effective reach was much shorter than her maximum. She could deflect or block the more solid spells, but the wind gave her some trouble. The lack of Animus empowering the thing, plus the fact that it melded into the prevalent Wind Elemental energy around her, meant it required a bit more focus for her to see the things. The distortions, visible they may be, were subtle enough that it was hard to spot when she was evading the barrage.
So perhaps she shouldn't evade and fight head-on?
Just as she thought of that and straightened out, she saw a massive wave of Water Elemental energy, built up and flung at her. The wall of water was nearly fifty paces on either side but moved slowly enough that she could easily avoid it.
Except the spells didn't stop. The water wall parted when Elemental Bolts went through it, and close up almost as soon as the projectiles passed. But more spells came from the side, and even some that burst out from the ground underneath her.
"Swarm fodder," Yuriko growled as she compressed the entirety of her Anima into a shield around her body. Then she flew directly towards the water wall.
She smashed into it and found that it was several times denser than normal and that the Water Elemental energy within sought to envelope her. She could feel the tendrils until another's Intent worm into her defences, and the worrying thing was that it was much stronger than she expected.
Still, Radiant energy infused Anima boiled the surrounding water and burned away the fragments of Intent around the spell. A Season's effort of learning and adapting allowed her to glimpse the inner workings of the Arcana Weaving, not enough to tackle it directly, but she found out that the Water Wall was a twenty-five-circle spell.
Twenty-five circle spells could be cast by True Magi, though not quickly or easily. Did she face one now, or perhaps a group of lower-level Magi capable of weaving their spells together?
That was how these people fought in wars and something she had not known early on. Imperials, Spirit Binders, and Geist Users could not meld their efforts in such a way, and Sorcery cannot be a collaborative effort since the effort of Intent and Will to bend Chaos to their whims would clash with other Sorceresses.
Magi can weave spells simply by knowing and casting spell components in the correct sequence. It was something they had to train for, and it wasn't easy to synchronise, as far as she knew, but it was still manageable by an organised, armed force.
The water pressed down on her, seeking to bring her to the ground. She forcefully expanded her Anima and felt it resist. But ultimately, she proved stronger. The water struggled, but she got free, and because it was in contention with her Will, the spell weaving, or the caster still in control of it, couldn't let the other spells through. Which also told her that the attack was not by a singular foe.
As soon as she broke free of the water, she was unpleasantly surprised to find another, bigger wave bearing down on her. But it was no stronger or denser than the previous one, and the only advantage it had was that it would take her longer to push past it.
Which was probably the caster's goal.
She shaped her Anima into a sleeker shape, and she was able to cut through faster than before. When she was free, the next wave of water was quite a bit of distance away. She darted up and over the wave, which was at least twice as tall as the previous one, and flew towards where they all came from.
She felt one of the obsidian javelins approach from her right, and the fireball from her left. They were the same spells as before, and though they weren't enough to hurt her through her Anima armour, they were strong enough to send shockwaves through. She blinked as an idea flashed through her mind, and she willingly allowed the obsidian spear to close without resisting, then, when it was close, she applied her Animakinesis and deflected it towards the fireball. As she suspected would happen, the controllers of both spells, if they were even still connected to them, were unable to alter the weaves. The spells collided behind her and the shockwave from the exploding fireball propelled her faster towards her goal.
She saw another wave building up in the distance and gritted her teeth. It was still too far for her perception range and she used Enhanced Sight. There was a shimmering field there, the distortion only really visible because of the prodigious amount of Elemental energy gathering around it. She Activated Chaos Sight, tuning it to allow her to see Elemental energy instead. It had a shorter range, just until her Anima reach…really, but it would allow her perception to identify the Arcana Weaving.
The sunblades had reached a hundred and forty-four by now, and she spun them into an attack pattern, allowing the Ennoia of Radiant Flying Swords to control her defences while she practised manual control with the attacking blades.
Her Anima perception reached the edge of the screen as another wave blasted towards her. She sent the blades towards it this time, and when they hit, three sunblades were snuffed, but in exchange, the entire wall of water turned to steam. Billowing clouds burst and spread across the farmlands, covered the trees, and obscured her from the assailants. There were some muffled screams as the steam scalded exposed flesh, and by the time they recovered their aplomb, she had closed the distance.
As she pressed down with her Animakinesis, she hit several people, who scream and were flattened on the mud.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Bullets bounced off her Anima armour, and as the steam was blasted away, it showed a clearing in the midst of plum trees, an arch made out of twisted roots in the middle. Several dozen people, each one wearing a festival mask over their faces, stared at her with more than a bit of aggression and anger. But the person she had not expected…rather, she didn't think they would be so brazen and such a sore loser, stood on a stone platform, the surface of which was etched with hundreds of runescript spell components, filled with gold.
"There's no unauthorised flying in the city," Minister of Commerce Hector Soria said calmly. Next to him, covered in robes and a cowl, but nevertheless exposed because of the blast of steam, was the ambassador of the Ishodir Empire, Obadiah Cooper. He took one look at her and dove for the gate, leaving the minister behind.
"This isn't the city," Yuriko said softly, yet her words caused the reality fabric to resonate. "And you have some friends of mine."