Yuriko pressed down on Scarlett with her Anima, holding her in place. The woman shrieked, but the sound didn’t propagate past her aura. She pulled the girl closer and touched her forehead.

“Scar…” Yuriko said softly. The connecting thread between the two of them pulsed oddly, with different hues. Unnatural hues. The emotions were all over the place, but there was one that stood out, buried underneath everything else. Hunger. 

Not just any mundane feeling of hunger. One that sought to consume. Not just anything either, but the self. Or rather, the host. That brief touch of her Mien revealed two consciousnesses within the redhead, and the other was tiny, malevolent, and growing. 

Her Anima perception pressed into Scarlett, then drove into the girl’s flesh. She bypassed hair, skin, then bones. She kept her touch as light as she could, but knowing that Scarlett’s Alteration involved higher natural healing, she wasn’t as concerned about any damage she might inadvertently deal. Just not too much at once. 

She found the thing. A worm-shaped thing the size of her fingernail at the base of Scarlett’s skull. It wasn’t of a different make than Scarlett’s brain tissue, but it was different. The Anima was different, and that was all she needed to know that it was an invader, a parasite. 

She swallowed nervously. It must be the Unfettered. How long had it festered inside Scarlett’s brain? Why hadn’t it been discovered by the medical checks that happened in the aftermath of that horrid day? Perhaps it had been hidden and only now grown? She didn’t know what to do. She could probably rip the worm out of Scarlett’s head, but would it affect the girl?

No, it would affect her, for sure. Scarlett didn’t have an awakened Anima, meaning the seat of her consciousness remained in the physical organ. Unlike Yuriko and other Ancients, at least, those who’d advanced to Actualisation and beyond. The reason she could have an incarnation and remain linked to the other was because her consciousness was seated in her Anima. 

That meant that even if Yuriko’s head was hurt, as long as she held onto her consciousness and used whatever means she could easily heal such damage. Having the core of her Anima hurt, on the other hand, would be as dangerous as a head wound to mortals. Though she had an inkling that it wouldn’t be the case once she advanced enough. 

Anyway, she couldn’t just rip the worm out of Scarlett’s head. But she didn’t know what to do to get it out. She could…use her Bladeless Sword to separate the worm from Scarlett, or since its body was still Scarlett’s brain tissue, just cut away to foreign, invasive Anima? If it were identical biomatter to hers, she doubted that an MRI or whatever machine they used to scan organs would work. She heard of CAT scans, but wasn’t sure if it involved actual felines or was an acronym, or something. Point of the matter was that the difference between the worm and Scarlett’s head was in the Anima rather than the flesh. Astoria had no way of identifying or even detecting Anima with machines. 

Scarlett was panicking. Badly. Thrashing against Yuriko’s kinesis.

The only reason she didn’t hurt herself was that she could barely move. Even so, the overflowing emotion was bad for her, and Yuriko had to do something before it turned into a full-blown panic attack. She knew people could die from fear, after all. She caused it in some of them. 

“Sleep,” Yuriko murmured as she pressed her Mien against Scarlett, the first time she knowingly did so. She made sure it affected the parasite, too. 

Scarlett went from full struggle to boneless heap in less than a second, and she brought the smol woman to the latter’s room to lie down on her bed. Asleep like that, Scarlett returned to looking like her normal self, which only twisted the knife in Yuriko’s guilt. She should have done something sooner, but she had not. She should have scanned deeper, but…

She shook her head to get rid of the malaise before she could spiral. The more important thing to do was figure out how she could help. She could keep Scarlett asleep for a long while, probably until tomorrow, without any consequence, but longer than that would be unwise. 

“Wait, if she was infected…”

So would the other survivors. Rotter! Blasted Unfettered! If she saw them again…if something permanent happened to Scarlett she would hunt them down and destroy them! No, that would be too easy and quick… 

She diverted a couple of strands of consciousness to fantasise about what she’d do to those rotters just to get it out of her system, then focused on what she had to do. The flesh worm could be excised physically. She could also just directly destroy it, but she was wary of essentially experimenting with Scarlett’s brain. The thought of bringing her to a hospital crossed her mind, was closely examined, and summarily discarded. 

But she didn’t want to just experiment with Scarlett’s head. But then…what about the other survivors? Did they also have worms in their heads?

She swallowed nervously. Would she have to experiment with them first? It shouldn’t be that dangerous since she already knew how to tune her Invisible Edge to cut dimensional barriers. A little bit more tuning would allow her to sever Anima instead. Right? Or was she seeing things too simply? 

She picked up her phone and dialed Captain Kyra Hays’ number, though stopped before the call actually began. Right. Message before calling was the proper etiquette. Hard to remember considering she didn’t grow up with phones. Well, Lilibeth did, but her memories were tucked away at the back of her mind and it wasn’t as if she absorbed the girl’s instincts. That was a whole can of worms she didn’t want to open. 

Lilibeth: Hi Kyra! How’re you feeling? Listen, there’s something I need to check with you personally. You alright to meet?

She waited for a couple of minutes, but when no answer came, she went right back to pacing. She…what did she have to do? Practice, for one. And not on Scarlett! On herself? She could hurt her Anima and it would grow back stronger than before, so it should be alright. She needed to tune her Edge to hit just Anima anyway. The question was if the frequency would be the same for everyone’s Anima or would it differ per individual? Even if the latter was the case, she had a hunch that the differences in frequency wouldn’t be that wide. 

She projected her Anima in front of her, solidified it into a chunk. Her true body discovered how to sense resistant things by increasing density, so she did the same, though more to provide a target than anything else. Of course, she needed to wrap something around it so that she could practice slicing it without doing the same to what was in between. She ended up using a bunch of scrap paper. 

Tuning the Edge didn’t take much time. It was an easy, intuitive process by now, and she was right in thinking finding the proper frequency to cut dimensional barriers was harder than hitting just Anima. Now the thing was to find out if she could hit someone else’s Anima without hurting their bodies. The bigger conundrum was doing it without hurting someone innocent. It wasn’t as if she could go hunt for lowlives… 

Or, well, she could, actually. She had the rest of the night to do it.

In her true body, she meditated and thought she could probably check with her lovers. She could experiment with them, too, and they were likely to survive any mishaps as opposed to mortals. Still, she needed both to be sure.

She left Scarlett in her room and dressed up in her disguise, which was really nothing more than baggy pants, a thick sweater with a hood, gloves, boots, and a scarf to help conceal her face. She stuck everything to her body with her Anima so it wouldn’t flutter and carelessly reveal her features. Then, with the sun already set, she flew straight up from the building’s roof. She made sure not to run into anyone in the building, even if she had to make a couple of detours. 

There was no shortage of gangers in Neo Prism City, at least in the outer districts. Jackstone and Brookshield, the southwest and southeast districts, were more likely to have gangs considering the docks were there. Hmm, perhaps she was stereotyping? 

Either way, she flew across the night sky, careful to keep her glow as close to her body and as dim as possible. Her Enhanced Sight allowed her to see the ground from over a longstride up, and while she didn’t see any gang violence, she did see evidence of it. Graffiti, gang signs, and all that. No actual muggings, robberies, or territorial disputes… oh, there it was. 

A couple of hooded men, or maybe bulky women, pulled someone into an alley and were brandishing a knife and a gun at them. Yuriko flew down quickly enough that she caught the vocal threat.

“…this is it? You ain’t got anything more? Your life isn’t worth all this,” the one with the gun said. 

“Th-that’s all I have, I swear.” 

“Hmph, well, it ain’t enough, take those off.” He pointed at the person’s coat, which looked quite luxurious. It probably wouldn’t be worth more than a hundred or so Torries. The victim didn’t move and the mugger jabbed his pistol into their face, but before the metal could make contact, the ‘victim’ ducked, then jabbed a fist in both muggers’ guts faster than they could blink. The ‘victim’s’ limbs blurred as they unleashed dozens of blows at the criminals’ bodies, and a second later, both crumbled into a heap. The ‘victim’ snorted, then rummaged through the muggers’ pockets until they pulled out wallets and phones. They swiped bills out of the wallets, but did nothing to the phones except take a measuring look, then shrugged and tossed them back. Then they strolled nonchalantly down the alley and back into the main road. 

Yuriko stared at the crime scene and chuckled. She had no desire to go after the Altered Human who was either a villain or a neutral, at the very least. She wasn’t even sure of their sex, considering the bagginess of their clothes. 

Anywho, she now had two lab mice to experiment with, and considering they just tried to rob someone, the failure was more a matter of chance than anything else; had they caught someone who wasn’t Altered, that would have ended differently. She used her kinesis to move them into a seated position, then used her Invisible Edge to cut a bit of their Anima. Because they weren’t Mystics, their Anima was embedded into their bodies. She wasn’t sure what hurting their core Anima would do for them, which was why she did it to their little fingers rather than anything more vital. She did have to adjust her tuning, but as she suspected, it was a minor tweak at best. 

She stared at the fingers she cut, or the Anima equivalent anyway. She cut the pinky and ring fingers of both hands from the gunner, and just the one hand from the knife guy. Nothing seemed untoward, but the fingers were looking a little pale. 

She would have observed them a bit longer, but she already figured out how to properly tune her Edge to cut what she wanted without hitting anything she didn’t. That was good enough. And if those two lost fingers, well…they were thieves after all, and in some places, specifically Xhota, thieves got their hands cut off. Well, she didn’t sever the Anima fingers, just cut them a bit. Oh, look, they were already joined back together. Whew. 

With that confirmation, Yuriko flew back up to the skies and made her way back home.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep