CoESC Book 18-12.3: Threshold (Patreon)

Something was different, Yuriko noticed. Fri’Avgi’s spirit was normally a projection, an illusion with no substance, while the body, the greatsword, continued to exist. Yet now, where was the sword? It was gone, and in its place was the spirit. 

Or was it? 

Yuriko tilted her head in an unconscious way to seek another angle to look at things. Yup, slightly different. For one thing, there was a sheen of golden metal running in circuit patterns across Fri’Avgi’s arms and the exposed skin on her torso. On her face were two symmetrical, yet jagged lines across her cheeks that terminated just underneath the centre of her eyes. They looked like stylised lightning bolts, come to think of it. 

“MASTER! What did you just feed me?” Fri’Avgi shrieked as the spirit reached over and grabbed Yuriko’s collar. Then, she was shaken quite heavily as Yuriko didn’t think to secure her position on the canvas. 

Yuriko, her head shaken quite thoroughly, couldn’t help but giggle.

“MASTER!” 

“Ah, sorry, sorry,” she murmured as the annoyed spirit let go. Yuriko dusted her pants as she stood up. Fri’Avgi’s avatar, or perhaps a fourth form, was just a bit shorter than she was. The avatar's initial appearance had resembled Yuriko, and now, with her Anima intertwined within the artefact’s red gem, that resemblance grew to the point they could be mistaken for sisters. Not quite twins, though. 

“Well?” 

“Damien’s memories.” 

Fri’Avgi blinked in surprise. “Ah.” 

“Yeah, I decided that I can’t keep them in me, and absorbing them could possibly change me too much…”

“Yes, it would. There are already several changes,” Fri’Avgi said bluntly. 

“And that I can’t allow my Anima to be burdened by that weight when I ascend to Manifestation. So I cut it off. But since I didn’t want to lose all access, I linked strands of consciousness to the mass and hoped for the best…ehehehe.” 

Fri’Avgi’s brows furrowed, and she growled. “So you just stuffed me full of him and hoped for the best?” 

“Yeah, sorry…” Yuriko gestured at the other girl. “It seemed you’ve attained a corporeal body.”

Fri’Avgi’s expression blanked, then changed into a troubled look as she backed up. 

“Fri?”

 “...this is new.” 

“Truly?”

“This is the first time an avatar form came out so early,” Fri’Avgi clarified as she raised her arms and stared at the circuit patterns curiously. 

“How many forms do you have anyway?”

The avatar shrugged. “It depends on how much you grow and what you need. Now put me back in your Anima. I need to nap.” 

Fri’Avgi’s form shimmered then returned to its original sealed shape. Yuriko chuckled to herself and did as the spirit asked. 

She settled back into mediation since she needed to know what the real effects were. There was a clear partition between herself and her memory storage incarnation, though the latter really wasn’t an accurate description. Fri’Avgi’s spirit had coopted everything about it, and all she could really do was access the memories like a book from a library. Not even anywhere similar to accessing a database using a tablet, which meant it took time to check things over. That was intentional, however, to prevent further contamination of her mind. 

After a while, she shifted over to her own condition, and it wasn’t much of a surprise that she was just at the threshold when it came to her Radiance. Her core was completely saturated with Radiance, and here she had a choice. She could keep her Ennoia core as it was, which meant that her Animus core was permanently infused with Radiance, or she could split the two. It wouldn’t really create two cores, but much like a planet, the Animus—which hovered between photonic and gaseous—would wrap around her core like an atmosphere. 

The concept, the very idea, or doing it like that had not occurred to her until she saw other worlds. In fact, she had not seen planets until she entered the 1st level of the Eternal Tower. Something to be grateful for despite everything else that drove her sojourn. 

Of course, she did the latter. Animus, by definition, was refined Chaos, and if she allowed it to merge permanently with her Radiance, it would be nothing but Radiant energy. 

She was in a training hall anyway, and any damage she made wouldn’t affect the station. Of course, she’d have to pay for repairs, and Fri’Avgi already melted part of the walls with her outburst—Not my fault!—so Yuriko would have to fix it, or pay the penalty. Since nearly all of their funds were being used for the trip, she’d have to do it herself. It was just melted metal anyway. 

Animakinesis penetrated the runoff, and then she used a little Radiance to heat them all back up to malleability. Afterwards, she moulded them back to their proper shape. Thankfully, the walls didn’t have any power lines or somesuch inside, so she didn’t have to fix those. She wouldn’t have succeeded in that case since she didn’t know the blueprints. It took her a few more minutes to finish, but once she was done, she was ready to advance her Colligia. 

The first thing she had to do was expel the Animus from the core. Radiance had seeped into it, but not every particle had been converted. Hmmm, no, that wasn’t true. Now that she really took a good look at her core, she realised that her Animus was gone, or at least the one she stored in her body. Her Anima still had the holding runes for external Animus, which was also something she’d have to remedy. She couldn’t fully retract her Anima with the Animus storage in the way after all. 

What she did, in her core, was to rapidly convert Radiance to Animus. She rarely did that nowadays, since she had little actual use for it, other than passive consumption. Still, she’d rather not abandon everything from back home. 

Since there was no need to cleanse the core of Animus, but somewhat certain that she needed its presence when she advanced her Truth, Yuriko formed clouds of the stuff to hover around her core, not quite at the same distance as her satellite swords hung about. It was a diffuse mass that contained all the Animus that a normal body could hold…and it was far less than what her current maximum was. Huh. Strange. She didn’t think people could hold more Animus than two hundred lumens unless they condensed them. She siphoned the amount she held in her storage runescript lines, and they joined the mass revolving around her core. 

An Ennoia core didn’t really exist on the same physical plane as her body, nor was it really located where her Anima was. Was it somewhat in the middle? A link to the greater world? It wasn’t a question she could reasonably answer even if she could theorise as much as she wanted, so she put those thoughts aside for now. 

She gathered Radiance from around her, as well as from within. Her Radiant Physique produced so much Radiance that she’d never run dry. She could Elementize into Radiance for about a minute before she ran out, but even so, it took less than a second to recover what she’d expended. That meant she could draw as many of the motes into her core as she wanted, and she did so. 

The weight of Radiant motes pressed down on the current core, but it wasn’t enough to truly compress it down. Instead, it grew larger and larger, which also made it unstable. Bursts and flares of Radiance light danced along the surface, and it was close to just blasting itself apart. It was at that point that she used and expended her prodigious Willpower and pressured the core to crunch down. 

The resistance was incredible, and to expend all of her Willpower reserves would be more than foolish. She spent ten percent of what she had to push down, then rested for a minute so it could replenish itself, then she repeated the process. Every cycle crunched down the core by a minuscule percentage, maybe a tenth of a percent, but certainly not more. But it was only a matter of time anyway. Crunch, rest, crunch, rest. Over and over and over, until the core was back to its original size. At that point, the core refused to compress even further, and the cost in Willpower would be ruinous. She could increase her expenditure, recovering ten percent of her pool only took a minute, but if she expended twenty percent, it would take an hour to bring it back up to ninety percent, then another minute to go back to full. It would take too long, and for minimal gain. 

She was tempted to do so anyway, simply because that was what Damien’s memories seemed to indicate what must be done. But…why not complete the ninefold compression first, then do the squeezing over a longer period of time? Yes…that could work. 

It took more than a thousand minutes to get this far, and her booked training time was already done. She also had to perform synchronisation in a couple of hours. Well, her core was stable for now, and she estimated she’d be done in a few days. It didn’t look like she’d damage her surroundings in her efforts. 

A few days passed, and it was time to depart from Shangria. She’d compressed her core five times already, and every subsequent cycle was faster than the previous one. Each time, she stopped at the precise point where her new core was the same size as her previous one, and at the end of her process, she checked how much Willpower it took to compress further. The cost increased, but not by much. It always took at least fifteen percent of her reserves to crunch the core beyond its original limit, but perhaps the cost would ease up once it was a Reperta. 

She also wasn’t sure what the Reperta would do for her, as that wasn’t something Damien’s memories had explained, just that it was necessary to advance. 

The mobile HQ was dubbed The Wanderer, and it looked like a recreational vehicle that could go off-road. It was three paces wide, nearly five paces tall, and about twelve paces long. It was painted grey with red lines on its side, and had about five times as much space inside, accounting for spatial expansion. There was more than enough room to live comfortably in, and it was powered by an engine comparable to a void ship—a small one—and it could accept Elemental energy channelled by the driver or passengers. 

However, a large chunk of the cost to build the thing was the materials and enchantments that allowed the Wanderer to actually go through Shangria’s gates, even if the opening was smaller than the mHQ. 

They departed the station that very day, but since the first ten days of the journey involved going through the first-layer biomes, Yuriko decided to finish her advancement in one of the bedrooms. 

Another couple of days passed, and she was close to being done. Anticipation made her tingle all over, and with one final crunch it was done. 

The orb that was her core trembled as it reached a critical phase. She started drawing more and more Radiance from her surroundings, and she knew that a lot would be expelled, possibly enough to wreck everything around her!

Rotter.

She could still move, and she dashed out of the moving Wanderer, straight into a hostile biome. She charged past the monsters, barely paying them any mind. Any that came close was vaporised by her Anima, which had heated up to the point that the air around her ignited, and the earth beneath her feet turned into molten rock with every footstep. She heard Gwendith and Heron yelp in surprise and dismay, but she quickly put a longstride between her and the Wanderer. Then she compressed her Anima around herself to contain the destructive release. 

Just in time, too, as her core both imploded and exploded.