Scarlett was unconscious, but Yuriko didn’t let that stop her. The other jail cells had the rest of the defeated club members, but she didn’t have an accurate count. Troubling as it was, she knew that there had been casualties. She only vaguely remembered the people Scarlett mentioned who died, but nevertheless, they were her students. Casual as the tutelage and relationship was, that connection still existed. The Threads of Fate connected them, and a quick count told her how many had died. Five. 

Six. Another thread snapped. 

Growling in both anger and frustration, Yuriko ripped the jail doors out of their hinges, sensed the people inside, and winced. All of her clubmates were unconscious or otherwise indisposed. Half the girls were crying while the boys were either sniffling or rocking on their heels. Only a couple actually realised that the doors were gone. 

“Who’s there?” one girl cried out. 

“It’s Lilibeth. Come on, let’s get out of here.” 

“Lily…?”

The same thing repeated several times, and while she rescued the imprisoned, she felt another club member die. Yuriko gritted her teeth, but there wasn’t much she could do. She could head to where she felt the club members died, but if she left the prisoners, nothing stopped the Unfettered from grabbing more of them. For that matter, nothing stopped those monsters from coming down here to fight her.

As if on cue, the door down the hallway, which she guessed would have led out of the prison and either into wherever the others died, or perhaps it would have led out of the compound, slammed open. The rather familiar giant roared as he rushed in. Mauler was barely big enough to fit in the hallway, and normally, Yuriko would have thought it was a disadvantage, but considering his prodigious ability to recover from his wounds, she supposed he didn’t need to dodge. This way, he effectively blocked the passage but her Anima perception was also blocked by his body.  While she could probably slip through the gaps, it involved a bit more focus than she could afford at the moment and more intimacy than she ever wanted to feel. Either way, since the sunblade proved effective in stopping him before, she conjured a couple to use. She heard gasps of surprise and not a little bit of fear from the people behind her, but the cat was already out of the bag, so to speak, and she wondered if all of them also Altered. The concentration of Elemental energies as well as ambient Chaos was much higher here, too. 

“That’s not going to work!” Mauler yelled as he rushed her. 

“Oh, what makes you think that? You’re nothing but a lumbering bull!”

She took control of the sunblade using the Ennoia of the Radiant Flying Sword. It was much harder than she expected since she didn’t have that Ennoia Core within her, but she had expected a downgrade comparable to what her true body felt when she used Bladeless Sword. But no, her true body was at Transformation while her incarnation was at Actualisation. The Ennoia felt clumsy and she could barely hold on to the sunblade. She had to tether an Anima tendril on the sunblade’s hilt to get a proper level of control. 

An instant later, she flung the sunblade at Mauler, who yelled and punched at the flying sword. It looped around his fist and darted towards his eyes. She saw them widen in fear and surprise and it was all he could do to jerk his head to the side. But the sunblade, being under her control, stopped and altered its trajectory. In the end, his dodge was useless and the weapon sunk into his eyeball and into his brain. A second later, Yuriko’s other sunblade sunk into the other eye. Mauler grunted and fell bonelessly on the ground. 

“You killed him…” one of the club members said in tones of relief and fear. 

“Not quite,” Yuriko grunted. “We don’t have time to make sure he stays dead. Let’s keep going.” She used her kinesis to drag Mauler over to the side and opened up a passage that the others could use so they didn’t have to step on the creature. She preceded them through the door and found herself in another hallway. The severed threads of the dead students led towards the right, though those things were quickly unravelling. 

But the other path probably led to the exit. So where should she lead them? To safety or to more danger? The fear-riddled eyes stared at her back, and more than a few were shaking. Scarlett was in a daze, but she clutched at Yuriko’s back convulsively, refusing to let go. 

But the ultimate question was if she had the confidence to bring noncombatants into a possible warzone in order to rescue more of her club mates or if she should shrink away from the challenge? She saw it for herself. The Unfettered were unable to harm her, just inconvenience. So far, anyway. Did she have the leeway to be overconfident knowing that a mistake would lead to her friends dying? 

There was nothing wrong with feeling fear, but it was a mistake to let it rule her. If she didn’t follow the threads, it was more than likely that the remaining captives would die. And if she went the other way, there was no guarantee of safety either. She could hold everyone within her Anima reach, and since her Anima was denser than it normally was, she could exert more influence over the world than with comparable strength. 

Mind made up, she led the group, fifteen strong, to the right. She couldn’t run and she didn’t want to carry everyone. For one thing, she would be slowed to a crawl, and for another, it looked like the others would break down and cry if she tried. She felt another thread snap. 

She couldn’t run as fast as she could, though she could increase her pace. Soon enough, and thankfully before another thread snapped, they arrived at the end of the hallway. She didn’t find any trace of John the faceless man either, but she didn’t think he was a combatant anyway. 

When she stepped out of the hallway, it was to an outdoor setting. It looked nothing more than an unkempt garden, or perhaps a clearing in a forest. A campsite, come to think of it. Across the clearing was a dilapidated container house. In between the exit and the container was a firepit that had a metal tripod over the bonfire. A pot hung from the tripod and the warm scent of bubbling stew filled the air. However, it was almost overpowered by the stench of blood. The sight of the fencers and HAMA practitioner students piled on top of each other like so much rubbish boiled Yuriko’s blood, and elicited whimpers of fear from the survivors. There was also no welcoming committee, and when she expanded her Anima perception, she found it restricted by the rules of the interstitial space and restricted her from exploring the container house’s interior. 

Intent and Will boiled from the inner reaches of her Anima and she pressed down on the ‘rules’. She crushed the realm’s paltry strength, though only compared to hers, and forced her Anima through the restrictions. Her perception flooded through the threshold. 

There were three people inside. The first was a strange man who looked disturbingly like someone who had most of his body replaced with ‘Chronian Gear, the second, a teenager wearing a stained labcoat chuckling to himself while he cut open a third with a scalpel stuck to his finger. The third was a fencing club member, and she had a terrified look on her face. The labcoat boy had only made an incision on her clothes so far, but his eyes held no lust or appreciation, but rather, a coldness that told her his victim wasn’t even considered human. 

The moment her perception invaded the space, the first man jumped up from the sofa he lounged on, then he lunged towards Labcoat Boy and tackled him off his feet. The teenager let out a strangled yelp, but even before either man could land on the floor, a hole in space appeared and both of them went through it. The portal closed behind them even before Yuriko could blink. 

“Huh.” 

The victim, Jisha Myers, only stared at the empty space with disbelieving eyes, before she sobbed and laughed. She didn’t move at all and Yuriko noted that the girl wasn’t even bound. Paralysed? 

“There’s someone alive inside, Jisha,” Yuriko said. “The rotters escaped as soon as we arrived.” 

“How can you tell?” one of the survivors asked: a HAMA club member named Ashley Simmons. 

Yuriko just shrugged and didn’t answer. Instead, she hurried towards the container house and was next to Jisha a moment later. She kept her perception wide open and made sure there were no hidden enemies outside. Jisha was indeed, paralysed, but she didn’t have any wounds other than the small scratch on her sternum. Her shirt and bra were cleanly sliced in two so Yuriko held them close before she carried her off the table. She expected a body or two in the laboratory, but unexpectedly, it was immaculately clean. 

Shuddering, Yuriko left the container house, then visually inspected the clearing. Her eyes skipped over the bodies at first, but she forced herself to look after a couple of passes. What would happen to bodies left in interstitial space? But she didn’t want to leave them behind. Their families deserved to have them to bury or cremate. She noticed the container house had some body bags in one of the cabinets and she quickly retrieved them with her kinesis. While the survivors were still in a stupor, she quickly secured the dead in the bags and carried them with kinesis. The clearing was a dead end so they had to return the way they came. Mauler was gone by that time, but a more urgent matter was the ones still in the labyrinth. Still, she felt the interstitial space’s rules loosen up and she realised the Unfettered had fled. She stopped in the middle of the hallway, then rammed her Anima into the divide between the interior spaces. A moment later, she and the others found themselves in the middle of the labyrinth. The hedges and ravines still hid the others, but Yuriko pressed her Intent into the space. 

The sublayer, once its original owners were gone, was much like Fysallis. She was more than strong enough to control the space, and once she flexed her mind, the labyrinth flattened out and revealed the rest of the club members. 

She ignored the cries and looks of resentment and shame from either side and waved for them to approach. Once they did so, she directed her prodigious Will and Intent onto the walls that kept the interstitial space secure. She couldn’t just break it, otherwise they would be lost in the flows between the layers of reality, but she knew how to return from where she originally cut the fabric of the material plane. 

She gathered half of her remaining strands of Swordlight, then slashed the air. She cut apart the canvas of the interstitial space and opened a path to the material plane. The rift opened a few paces away from where the buses were originally intercepted/ her perception aura spread out and she determined that there was nobody around. Well, nobody within her perception range anyway. 

“Go through, quickly,” Yuriko said while impressing her Mien and the others. They followed without complaint, and soon enough, all of them were back in the material plain. They were on the slopes, amidst the trees. She determined the direction to the road and after a few minutes’ hike, they arrived. She placed the body bags on the roadside and waited. A couple of minutes later, a costumed man landed on the road in front of them, followed by a convoy of ambulances and transports.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep