For several minutes, Yuriko was imrsed in the flow of battle. Her sunblade was well-suited to deflecting bullets, but even with her true body’s speed, it would have been impossible for a single blade to defend against multiple attacks arriving at the sa ti. There were ways to minimise the vulnerable surfaces, and that’s what Undaunted Bulwark Style was all about.
It was fortunate that the gunn all ca from the sa general area, because if they’d caught her at a crossfire, she wouldn’t have had such an easy ti of it. As it were, they were spread out such that she had a hundred and twenty degrees to cover, and a normal guard would still have gaps towards her feet and sides. She had to use her switchblade to cover the odd angles surreptitiously, and when bullets headed to her lower limbs, she simply moved.
Huh. She didn’t actually have to return all of the bullets she blocked. She could also use the deflected bullets to deflect more bullets. Neat.
The key component of Undaunted Bulwark Style actually didn’t involve the blade at all. Instead, she had to be aware of the attacks. She could not defend actively against an attack she couldn’t see, though before, she could simply rely on her Anima armour to take the hit. Now that she couldn’t do that, she found that pain was a remarkable teacher.
Every bullet that hit her stung, even if they weren’t able to penetrate past the outer layer of her skin. And since her aura was confined to her body, she couldn’t actually disperse the kinetic force into the air. She had to resort to dispersing the force across where it hit or channelling it down to her feet and letting the ground absorb it. The latter was safer, since the vibrations that travelled through her body would still hurt. Or…she could use the vibrations to power her Radiant furnaces. That could work. She couldn’t convert all the kinetic forces that way, but it significantly reduced the hurt.
It was also quite annoying that the plane actively siphoned her Radiant energy away from her sunblade, so she had to constantly feed it with her reserves. She could only feed one sunblade at a ti at the rate her body created Radiance, though if she had a stockpile, she might be able to keep two working long enough to actively use Radiant Flying Swords. But then again, even in Astoria, Flying Swords couldn’t be kept up for long, and it certainly wouldn’t persist as a scout or a remote assault thod.
The plane was rather stringent with its restrictions, but then again, considering it ran at a high temporal displacent, there was little doubt that this place was engineered. She only hoped that her presence here had not been noticed, or simply ignored. She had a feeling that if she flagrantly tried to bend the rules too much, she’d draw unwanted attention, and while this incarnation was, to be fair, expendable, she didn’t want to abandon her goals here.
All musing aside, she should stop playing around. It was easy enough to disable every one of the gunn in quick succession, and when all was said and done, they weren’t really strong enough or well-ard enough to pose much of a threat. It was the power behind them that was of greater concern, and she spotted who it might be earlier on.
It was a woman who didn’t look much older than she was, had dark hair that was mostly concealed by a cap, and had red-rimd blue eyes. She was also thin enough to hide behind the trunk of a narrow tree, which was probably half a pace wide at its thickest.
The woman didn’t move, aim her weapon, or otherwise act aggressively. She just stared at Yuriko with wide eyes and a blank expression. Yuriko morised the woman’s face, then allowed her sunblade to dissipate. The resulting flash of light was enough to startle, and while she debated killing the woman then and there, she wondered about the organisation behind her. After all, if she was the one at the motel, then not only was she able to send police against her, but was able to send well-ard rcenaries to bear. That wasn’t the work of a single person, and if she killed the woman, they were likely to escalate even further.
She sowhat regretted killing that second bloodsucker, but she’d been desperate then. Now, she was confident because she had her Radiant Physique established, and she’d only grow more powerful as ti passed. She could afford rcy.
She spared a glance for the holess people sheltering in the tents. She made sure that none of the bullets would head towards them, but her reach was limited. Thankfully, it didn’t look like anyone was hurt, so there was that.
The question she still didn’t know the answer to was how the woman tracked her. There was little doubt of their capability, considering she’d spent the last couple of hours roof jumping. Perhaps it was sothing about the plane that just made it easier? Well, she couldn’t really tell what other rules were in place.
Perhaps the best she could do was not emit any energies beyond her body, like her perception aura. While that had not faced any resistance, unlike her kinesis, she still felt as if sothing was taking notice. With a frown, she retracted her aura and kept it all within her body, and almost at once, she realised that her guess had been right. There had been the subtle weight of attention on her that was now easing.
In the small hours of the morning, the streets weren’t quite as deserted as earlier. She wasn’t sure if it was the earlier commotion or if people started their days early. She caught sight of a public clock, and it read half past three in the morning. So of the houses in the neighbourhood had lights shining from downstairs windows, and there were already a few private vehicles plying the roads.
Where, oh where could she hide? She was uncomfortable heading to her brother’s place while uncertain about whether she was still being tracked. She didn’t know how long before the trail faded away. What were her options?
Edgewater High was just a dozen blocks from here. Classes wouldn't start until nine in the morning. Dawn was about three or so hours away, and she could synchronise with her greater self then. She didn’t know how long that would take, though.
Well, no better place to go, and she didn’t want to look for abandoned buildings or sothing like that. She actually couldn’t see any from where she was, and without her perception aura up, it would take too much ti. Not that she had a deadline, co to think of it, but she could search in the direction of the school. Besides, from Amalia’s fragnted mories, it wasn’t as if Edgewater couldn’t get any worse.
She didn’t see any likely candidates to hunker down on the way to school, so she decided to just stay there. Preferably at the roof where she could face the sunrise. Edgewater High School contained a horseshoe-shaped building that was roughly four storeys high, where each floor contained the classrooms for each year level. As a sophomore, Amalia’s classroom was on the second level. Other facilities, such as the school library, the laboratories, and the faculty offices and lounge, were on the left end of one of the legs, if she reckoned by facing the building from the opening. The bottom of the horseshoe actually faced north, so the faculty and other stuff were on the west side wing. That ant she should hunker down on the east wing’s roof or the west wing. The forr since it was unlikely for faculty to head there for leisure, but was more like for students to do so, and the latter for the opposite reason.
Amalia didn’t hang out on the roof deck all that often, and if she did, it was with the girl’s friend…or perhaps rival? Juliet Harlan and Amalia Roth had been thick as thieves when they were younger, but as they grew older, their friendship either evolved or fell apart. Amalia didn’t quite know, just that she spent less ti in sleepovers and more ti sniping at each other co high school.
Hmm. Juliet had been with Amalia last night, but she didn’t rember seeing the other girl on her way out. Or perhaps she did, but Yuriko didn’t recognise her on the dance floor. Another mystery to ignore, she supposed.
Edgewater didn’t have a fence around its boundary, so she just walked up to the building. The doors were locked, of course, but it was easy enough to scale the outside wall. While her body wasn’t strong enough just yet, her Anima boost more than made up for the shortfall. Her fingertips were more than capable of holding her weight as she braced herself against the cracks on the wall. In less than a minute, she climbed over the chainlink fence that surrounded the roof deck and settled down in the midst of the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning structures.
While she waited for the dawn, she kept an eye out for pursuers, but mostly just rested. Amalia’s body had been in terrible shape, though it was likely because all of her blood had been drained, and Recovery repurposed most of her body’s reserves to heal. Radiant Physique was rapidly improving her inherited body, and the windfall of converted vibrational energy that was generated from the bullets hitting her was a net positive after taking away the energy used to heal against that damage. She quickly determined that bullets hitting her arms and legs, plus probably her abdon, would give her a net positive energy gain, while strikes to the vital points—such as her eyes, ears, and other orifices—would be a net negative, though not by much. As her body strengthened itself, she’d eventually beco tough enough that any kinetic strike below a certain margin wouldn’t even hurt. How long would it take, though?
At the rate she was going, maybe a Season? Less if she spent most of that ti eating, or sunbathing—though only if this plane’s reflection of the Radiant Sun actually gave out energy. She had a sinking feeling that it didn’t.
A few hours of silence and rest did wonders for her physique. The bruises that ca from the bullet impacts disappeared, and while the reinforcent of her internal organs, muscles, and skeleton should have been next, Amalia was roughly six inches shorter than Yuriko. So she had to grow her body up to standard first; otherwise, the disconnect between her bodies would hamper whatever Truths she worked on. By the ti the false dawn ca, she’d grown an extra inch, and she had to stop the process since her clothes wouldn’t fit. But because the reinforcent couldn’t proceed properly until she was the right size, she decided to scavenge clothes from the school. She didn’t even have to break into the building since the roof access lock was already broken.
She followed Amalia’s mories to her gym locker. The gymnasium was actually in a detached building behind the bottom of the horseshoe, but her sweatpants would show quite a bit of ankle by the ti Yuriko was at the correct height. The sweater she took from the lost and found bin was ratty, but large enough that she could fit after everything else. She supposed she could work with what she had now. The boots wouldn’t fit for much longer, though, so she grabbed a pair of sandals she liberated from the boys’ side of the gym.
She felt more than a bit of ick at using old clothes, but well, she only had to bear with it until she could buy new ones.
With that settled, she returned to the rooftop and allowed her physique to improve. By the ti the sun began to rise, she was back to her real height, though her features—other than her hair, which began to turn gold from the infused Radiance—didn’t change.
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