Soundwave looked at his communicator and opened the message from an associate. He smoothly moved his car to the side of the road, flicking the turn signal just before he changed lanes.
"Really?" Lightfoot grumbled even as she pointedly looked at the side mirror that reflected the deserted street.
"What?" Soundwave blushed lightly. "Obey the traffic rules even if not doing so won't be a problem. You never know, maybe someone might come out of a turn, or someone runs out into the street all of a sudden."
"Yes, but clearly, I should be driving," Lightfoot complained.
The car they were riding was actually Soundwave's and not the group's transpo. The two of them had been on their way to dinner and not to work.
"So?"
"What?" Soundwave asked idly as he fished out the communicator.
"What does it say?"
"I was just looking! Divines, woman, can't you get a grip on your temper?"
"No, I can't. I can only manipulate and store momentum." Lightfoot said cheekily.
"Huh," Soundwave muttered when he opened the message.
"Don't 'huh' me, tell me!"
"Weavemaster found a vigilante."
"So? Isn't he one himself?" Lightfoot grumbled.
"Not anymore, he signed up like we did."
"Huh, I wonder what changed his mind."
"Well, nobody on the side of the law would chase and arrest him, for one," Soundwave said. "All he had to do was give his true identity. But that isn't much of a sacrifice since the feds already knew."
"I see." Lightfoot frowned, then gasped, "Wait! Where and who did Weavemaster find? And why didn't he confront the rogue?"
"He didn't say. He gave an address, 3312 Pullman Way, down at the quay district, Burmington."
"Well, don't stop, get going! That's only a couple of longstrides away. Ah, let's just get off this clunker and run!"
"Hey! This is a perfectly good car!" Soundwave yelled, but he got out of the car anyway. Since they were off duty, neither of them were wearing their costumes. Both had a spare mask so they slipped those on.
Then, it was off to Pullman Way, with Lightfoot carrying him on her back.
_________
The rift above the ritual circle wasn't quite big enough for someone to enter. It was barely ten inches tall, and only a couple of inches wide. Yuriko couldn't see through it, and only darkness seeped out of whatever the rift opened into.
"Oh, divines," Weavemaster hissed, his eyes focused on the flayed corpses.
Yuriko glanced at the bodies and noted that they were remarkably clean. No blood spatter, or rather, all of the blood was on the ritual circle's lines and symbols. It left the bodies looking as if they weren't real. But the scent of blood, the look and feel of the flesh…those were real. There were three men and two women, and their faces were frozen in a rictus of pain. All except one man, who had a placid look, as if he hadn't felt any of the cut, or believed that death would come for him.
Each body had a couple of incisions across the torso: a vertical from the neck to groin and a horizontal one right underneath the ribcage. Their organs were cleanly removed from the cavity, each completely intact and connected to the others. They were placed around the body and had their own blood circle with symbols.
The symbols were not in runescript. Yuriko was certain of it. It was something profane; it made her back itch as if something, or someone was watching her with malice. As if someone was holding a blade a hair's breadth from stabbing her heart. It made her teeth ache.
"Tsk." She nearly burned the symbols out with Radiance, but the certainty that mixing Radiance and whatever this thing was would result in a conflagration made her stop. Well, that and she had more control over her impulses now.
"Divines on their throne, which sick effer did this?" Weavemaster swore. He kept his distance from the corpses, then eyed Yuriko oddly. "You…you knew something like this happened?"
Yuriko shook her head. "Not at all. I've merely detected the presence of that." She pointed at the rift and at the darkish fog that seeped through.
"What thing?" he asked.
Yuriko turned to look at him, and noted his gaze was on the floor, where the corpses were. He didn't even look at the rather obvious tear in the fabric of reality.
Hmmm, he couldn't see it?
"Look there." Yuriko pointed directly at the rift. His gaze passed the space without stopping.
"I guess you don't have the senses to see it." Yuriko shrugged. "What is there, ten inches above the centre of the circle, is a tear in the fabric of reality, ten inches tall and two wide. It's leaking something I call daemonfyre, though that's probably not what they call it."
Yuriko shrugged. Her perception aura covered the wounded daemons and some of them had already recovered enough to get up. Yuriko smacked them back down with an ample amount of force. She slapped them around until they were knocked out, then left it at that.
"Daemonfyre? Those are daemons?"
"You know of them?" Yuriko asked curiously.
"Well, anyone who follows the Orthodoxy would," he muttered. "Daemons are right in the good book, as enemies of the Divines and heralds of Chaos and death."
Yuriko hummed. The good book? She hadn't heard of anything like that. Oh, hmmm, maybe that meant one of the classes that Lilibeth had to take last semester called Theology. Oh well.
"Well, there are daemons." Yuriko pointed to the outside.
"Yeah, I suppose they can be considered as that." He frowned at her. "How can you distinguish them from normal people? They looked like humans until they started fighting. Are you…are you a Herald?"
"No…?" Yuriko answered though she wasn't quite sure what he meant. "I'm human. Just like you." She giggled. Well, not exactly like him, but she was human while also being an Ancient.
"I find it hard to believe, but I'm not a pastor who could tell if you hold any of the Divine's mandate," he muttered. "Well, apparently you can see something I can't. What now? Oh, wait, I see something."
Yuriko started. She hadn't felt anything with her perception aura, not even the void that 'Chronian Gear gave to its users. She glared at the rift and saw that there were tentacles poking out of it, seven in all. They pressed against the edges, then pulsed, and ripped the tear wider. Out popped something that flew directly at her.
For all that, Yuriko's reflexes were enough to react to the sudden attack. She twisted sideways and slashed with her sword fingers. Black blood with blue highlights painted the air and the thing fell into two pieces. She would have examined it if not for the fact that more came out of the rift. The things didn't attack her. No, they went for Weavemaster who got smacked by the tentacled things.
His ropes and threads unravelled to catch the little, ferocious things, but as soon as he caught one, more came at him. He managed to split his control so that he used a dozen strands to deflect as many squigglies as he could, but the thirteenth made contact with his… costume.
"What the, get them off!" he squealed in panic. But it wasn't as if Yuriko was free to act. No, a veritable flood of squigglies shot out of the rift like bullets and all of them bypassed her perceptive aura. She focused on one and used her Animakinesis to catch it, and she succeeded. In fact, the squiggly nearly burst to flame after being caught by a hand-shaped golden Anima, and it emitted a high-pitched, and grating scream that sent the incoming squigglies into a frenzy.
The seven tentacles wiggled on his cloth and then stabbed cleanly through.
"Ahhh!"
Weavemaster writhed in pain. His hands shot towards the squiggly, grasped its bulbous, globular head and squeezed. Now that they weren't flying around, Yuriko finally got a good look at them. Their bodies were about a couple of inches wide, but the tentacles reached ten to twelve inches long. They had a singular eye, with rectangular pupils, that occupied most of the space in their bodies, and they didn't have any suckers along their length, but the tips looked hard and sharp. Ah, no the tentacles just grew suckers and hooks. They were shapeshifters like the ones outside. Or rather…
She noticed that the humanoid shifters outside, those still conscious, stopped flailing around and parts of their skin grew holes. Since she couldn't perceive the squigglers, she assumed it was they who wriggled out. Yuriko slammed the fallen outside with her Animakinesis, layering each body with an infusion of Radiance.
Squeeee!
The screams validated her guess.
"Tsk."
She clicked her tongue as Weavemaster managed to rip the squiggly trying to burrow into his flesh off. Part of his costume ripped out with it, revealing a fairly chiselled torso. Hairy too, though there were patches of reddened and bald skin now.
Ouch.
She danced as she carved the flying squigglies to pieces. As long as she bisected the eye. She allowed a thin layer of condensed aura over her body, but it also made her glow with a not-so-subtle golden light. The squigglies that dodged her attacks managed to touch her body, but only for them to be rebuffed by her condensed Anima.
They screeched in pain and anger but continued to attack. Yuriko only let them through her dance once, to test if her current aura set-up was enough to protect her. Then, she simply danced to the rhythm of the Ennoia of Swords, though she hadn't touched it yet. She could feel it coming closer.
Something occurred to her just then. Why was it she was only using her sword fingers to slice and cut? She could resonate with the Elements with her movements, why limit herself to a couple of blades? Her true body could create thousands of sunblades that ranged nearly a longstride away, could she not do something similar?
She avoided conjuring swords with her Anima since that would only rethread the same path. Instead, she sent her Anima to her elbows which created a sharp edge along her forearm. She maintained the sword fingers, so she had four blades to use now. The squigglies continued to emerge from the rift, and they continued to throw themselves at Yuriko and Weavemaster.
The masked man had retreated in fear even as he used his threads to entangle, and eventually, cut the squigglies apart. He had a full view of Yuriko's sword dance too, and she could feel rising admiration, infatuation, and fear.
Four blades weren't enough. She was moving around too much, wasting time avoiding blows. Yes, they couldn't easily penetrate her aura armour, but so what? Taking the blows meant her dance failed unless she incorporated the hits to her movements. She saw little need for that, however as she'd rather not get touched.
She sent her Anima to reinforce her knees and feet, creating sharp edges that protruded from her limbs. Eight blades now, and every movement sliced each squiggly clean in half. The resonance that fed into her Anima and her mind was not an Elemental resonance but from a deeper thing hidden in the folds of reality. The path to the Ennoia of Swords became clearer, and she reached out to grasp it.
Understanding crystallised within her mind, and her movements, her dance, that she'd thought had been smooth, revealed themselves to be shallow. Her movement changed. The sword need not be in hand to cut. She did not need to manifest a blade to wield a sword. Her passage through the battle, the winds she displaced…those were blades if she resonated with them.
She leapt towards the rift, passing through thousands of squigglies. And the moment her foot touched the concrete floor, every one of them was cut in twain.