Lester Yong & Rosa Fontelera-Yong

CoESC Book 8-9.1: Stalemate

Yuriko’s golden light flared out threateningly as soon as her feet landed on the mud. Her kinesis formed mud shoes so that she wouldn’t sink, leaving wide footprints behind. A tinge of red lingered at the edges of her light, not reaching a bit more than seven paces away.

The battlefield seemed to freeze when she stepped onto the field, and she saw the warriors shudder as she took a single threatening step. On her second, they broke and fled.

Blinking in surprise, it was all Yu...

CoESC Book 8-8.3: Escalation

The cannon shells fell in a staccato beat as they pummeled the Protective Dome. Yuriko hurried towards the town hall, to the Dome chamber, to check the controllers.

She released her Resistance aura almost as soon as she heard the pounding, covering the distance from her home to the town centre in less than a minute. The square was half full with the curious–mostly children, actually. The past few weeks of fighting had inured them to the circumstances and it looked like their wariness ...

CoESC Book 8-8.2: Escalation

“A year and a half?” Jiro gasped.

They had been in the Chaos storm for only a couple of days! Such a huge gap, what in the Abyss?

“Establish contact with Rumiga!” he said firmly, keeping his emotions in check. Panicking now would only lead to Vagaris losing morale.

“Gemheart link, connecting,” Maruko said slowly as she sat down on the communications console. A legion’s flagship always held a minor Gemheart, used to communicate and link with planar Gemhearts. Co...

CoESC Book 8-8.1: Escalation

It began to rain unceasingly. At midnight, the end of the Celestial Refraction, the skies opened up and poured down a light drizzle, growing heavier by the hour, until by the end of the day, Yuriko could barely see through the pouring water.

“The garden’s flooded!” Rami complained as he stomped into the kitchen from the backyard, the morning on the 2nd Day of Water.

Yuriko grunted around her toast, shuffled off the kitchen table stool and peeked out of the door. There was ab...

CoESC Book 8-7.3: True Refraction

Yuriko sat up from her sweat-soaked sheets. Her room was empty, and from the darkness, it was either still the Celestial Refraction or it was just before dawn on the 1st Day of Water. Her Anima spread out instinctively, to look for her friends and observe the house, but as it did, she froze.

A hundred inches. Her Anima had grown. It could reach more than seven and a half paces now. All during that strange time in the dreamscape? What in the Abyss was it?

As she scrambled out of be...

CoESC Book 8-7.2: True Refraction

The corpse’s explosion took Yuriko completely by surprise. Its concussive force knocked her over and she tumbled head over heels across the bridge. She only managed to stay on it by using her kinesis to hang on to the edge.

Orange and red flames blossomed from the body next, even as fragments of scales, bones, and bits of hardened flesh rained down on her. A charred scent filled her nostrils and made her gag.

After a few moments, she flipped herself back on top of the bridge, ey...

CoESC Book 8-7.1: True Refraction

Between one blink and the next, Yuriko’s bedroom had disappeared. Now, she was floating over a void, Chaos streams swirling violently around her.

“What…” Yuriko gasped but calmed herself once she realised that there was a familiar feel to the place. “The dreamscape?” she murmured. How did she get here?

She looked around her, then attempted to awaken. However, it felt as if she ran into a wall. A soft and yielding one that absorbed all of her momentum and threw her back...

Discord Accounts

Now that the Discord server is running, please do let us know if you haven't yet been added to the correct Patreon tier, just in case your Patreon email is not the one linked to Discord.

- L & R

CoESC Book 8-6.3: Truce

Finan Conail Agalmar stood on a balcony, sheltered from the rain by the overhang that also served as a roof. The winds blew droplets all over him so he wasn’t quite as dry as he preferred. The Implacable Jade hovered next to the tower, fifty paces above the ground. The ship had its gangway secured on another balcony, though Finan knew that the moorings would detach quite easily.

Towards the west was the planar Veil, and that was what he was observing. Normally, a planar Veil was invis...

CoESC Book 8-6.2: Truce

Today was the 87th Day of Air, several days after the near-disastrous skirmish between the Knights of Faron’s Crossing and the coalition forces of Haveena and Kadrac. Heron Synka Muryh stood on the wall’s battlements, looking over the south field.

The butcher’s field.

He hadn’t been there when it happened, but he saw the change in her afterwards. Yuriko had always been a bit more easygoing and lenient when it came to battles. At least against other humans. She was nearly m...

CoESC Book 8-6.1: Truce

Rage.

The red nearly overcame Yuriko’s mind. Her golden light slowly bled, her Anima quivered.

Grief.

Maru…

Who?

That archer.

Yuriko saw her, still alive, but gravely wounded. Her hands tightened on Fri’Avgi’s hilt, and the red rage of her Anima flooded into the artefact. She felt the spirit within it respond. She felt Damien shift in the back of her mind, felt his touch.

She felt her consciousness begin to fade and knew that if she didn’t r...

CoESC Book 8-5.3: Counterstrike

Battlefield Prescience. It was Commander Frederik Holster’s most prized ability. It was a technique he learned from his bond, an ancient map table, handed down by his family for nearly a hundred years. The ability to foresee movements on the battlefield just before they happened would have been priceless for an army commander.

Unfortunately, despite the name, it could do little more than provide Frederik with bumps of intuition.

However, the ability did have a more useful aspect...

CoESC Book 8-5.2: Counterstrike

There was little cause to hesitate.

Fri’Avgi dropped into Yuriko’s hands and she channelled Animus and Radiant energy into it. Five dozen sunshards spun out of the red gem and spun around her. Sixty shards, nearly three times as much as she was able to create and control before–a product of the Radiant Ennoia.

She could feel every sunshard, and could even perceive through them. The fragmented vision in her mind would have overwhelmed her if she had remained the same as she w...

Housekeeping!

Almost all the tags have been updated and the CoESC links in the pinned post should have majority of the book chapters in them already--whew!

- L & R

CoESC Book 8-5.1: Counterstrike

At dawn on the next day, Yuriko and Saki stood next to the river banks. Yuriko’s aura curled around her body protectively while Saki’s shadows concealed everything but her face.

“I will follow along the banks, young mistress,” Saki preempted, “they cannot find me.”

“Alright,” Yuriko agreed easily. The Caradec’s current was swift this time of the year, and it was nearly unbearably cold. She was clad in her usual traveller’s gear: stretchy pants, white button-do...

CoESC Book 8-4.3: Reprisals

“The cannon bunkers are here, here, here, and here.” Saki marked the map with a pen, making little triangles and circles on the canvas. The points were at least four or five longstrides south of Faron’s Crossing.

Yuriko pursed her lips. “No wonder I couldn’t see them.”

“Out of visual range, eh?” Marron chuckled. “No, little sis, you haven’t refined your Enhanced Sight at all, did you?”

“Er…”

“At the Knight level, you should be able to see ...

CoESC Book 8-4.2: Reprisals

Sadeen had grown rather tired after observing the wall for several hours. Having concealed herself at a nearby ridge, she watched as the Wyldlings struggled to breach it. At irregular intervals, a passageway would open at the base and some of the swarmlings and Wanderers would rush inside. The door would remain open for several minutes, allowing dozens to a hundred to enter, and then it would snap shut with such force that anything at the threshold would be crushed.

With some morbid fas...

CoESC Book 8-4.1: Reprisals

It took a couple of days before a proper rotation was set. Yuriko manned the Dome chamber that night and went to sleep at dawn. Gwendith tried her hand at controlling the chamber and said that using the controls was easy enough. Spellweaver Merill took over past noon.

Afterwards, Constable Andersen returned to the town hall with several youths and adults in tow. Mikel, as well as Gwendith’s cousin, Asami, were with the group. They conducted the test though Yuriko was too tired to pay ...

CoESC Book 8-3.3: Life Under Siege

Yuriko was outside the door in an instant, her eyes zeroed in on the burgeoning fire a few blocks away. The sound, the thud, and then the flame. And then she heard the same high-pitched wail and her head snapped towards the night skies.

The thud and the flare of flames came not a second later, nearly a hundred paces from where the first one landed. And then, there was a third high-pitched wail, but this time, whatever it was hit a dome of bluish-green light that covered the entirety of ...

Patron Notice

For this coming week, we will be triggering an update for all patrons per chapter cascade.

It has come to our attention that there are patrons who cannot access the chapters directly on the page. Until we are able to find a remedy for this, the most immediate resolution we can offer is sending alerts per chapter update.

This means everyone will receive 15 notifications for the chapter releases on Monday. We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause some patrons but we do hope...

CoESC Book 8-3.2: Life Under Siege

Commander Frederik Holster’s lips were pressed into a thin line as he surveyed the carnage. Two Adepts were injured, and several Intermediate Binders were nearly crippled. One had his arm cut in half, and the worst part was that the enemy’s Animus lingered in the wounds, preventing the man from recovering with healing techniques. Some of their equipment was damaged, mostly armour and shields, but several spears and polearms, not to mention nearly a hundred arrows, had been spent. All for ...

CoESC Book 8-3.1: Life Under Siege

There were two types of battles that Yuriko had experienced over the last couple of years. One was the brutally quick kind wherein she demolished her foe with a well-placed blow or sheer overwhelming power, and the other kind was the drawn-out dance that more often than not, ended with her enemy running away. There were a few times where she was the one who ran, but those were the outliers, she thought.

The first kind was nice, easy, and quick, but dreadfully boring after a while of onl...

CoESC Book 8-2.3: An Answer

Commander Nikolas Campbelle of the First Kadrac Ranger Regiment wasn’t a happy man. Not since his daughter was a prisoner of war, and not when he was practically forbidden to initiate a ransom offer. The war between Rumiga’s Empire and the Federation of City-States was just ramping up in the West, even though the fires of war in the east raged hot enough to melt iron.

Simply put, they couldn’t afford to go to the negotiation table this early, not when doing so would betray their p...

CoESC Book 8-2.2: An Answer

Yuriko glared sourly towards the southern plains.

After she missed the day’s fighting, which she was still annoyed about, she had opted to take the first watch within the observation tower. A rotation of Knights was needed to guard the town, otherwise, the Federation could sneak in their higher-level fighters and wreak havoc.

But…nothing had happened during her watch, and by the time midnight had come, and she’d been relieved, the only thing she’d looked at were the Feds t...

CoESC Book 8-2.1: An Answer

Wings of light fluttered in the wind and, even though they didn’t need to move to provide lift, Sadeen’s battlewings reacted and moved to her emotional state. At the moment, they moved in quick, jerky fits and starts.

Annise Delovine.

Sadeen knew only stories about her, but of those she’d heard, none of them ever indicated that she was weak. Quite unlike the other Pia’Vasi, Annise had never been content with fulfilling her role in the Empire. Strength and power were what s...

Polishing, Polishing

Tag and post title updates are on-going. It may take some time to get things sorted but for those in the habit of reviewing previous books, if you notice any chapters missing, do feel free to alert us. ^_^

We've just noticed that some posts were not properly tagged and will therefore come up as "missing" from the book's chapters if you click the link in the pinned post where the link to each collection has been added.

Updating is now on Book 4, however, so we should be able to cat...

CoESC Book 8-1.3: Spear

Marron Mishala Davar stifled a yawn as the dawn’s first light crested over the Zarek Mountains in the east. He had kept vigil on the observation tower for most of the night, taking a break only a couple of hours earlier to sleep.

As he and the others expected, the Federation Combined Forces had made some movements near dawn, and they were currently forming up south of the west Faron’s Crossing. The River Caradec bisected the town, and while the west side contained the town centre an...

CoESC Book 8-1.2: Spear

When Yuriko arrived home from the wall, her younger brother Rami was sitting fitfully on the living room couch. He looked up at her as soon as she walked past the foyer and leapt to his feet.

“Big Sis!” he yelled as he wrung his hands fitfully. “Is it true, are we under attack?”

Yuriko smiled tiredly, her mind still reeling from her expenditure of Will. She opened her arms and beckoned him to hug, and he leapt into her embrace.

“Don’t worry, Rami, we’ll keep yo...

CoESC Book 8-1.1: Spear

The Gemheart Chamber was eerily silent.

Legate Iola Melanthos Brygos stared in mute shock at the artefact, once clear and translucent, it now bore a single inky blot along its brilliant cut facets. Even as she watched, the blot seemed to quiver and grow…no, it was growing!

She could feel the Gemheart’s power, their connection giving her an intimate feel, and she could feel it begin to wane. Oh so slowly, and minutely, nearly imperceptible if she hadn’t been focused on it. 2022-09-19 13:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post

CoESC Book 7-23.3: Challenge

Sadeen Kiera Mishala floated in the void, a Waypoint bereft of anything that made life possible. There were few such Waypoints on the surface of the Chaos Sea, and each one usually had a little secret. It could be a Chaos seed hidden deep within, or there could be a creature that devoured everything and was now slumbering in its depths. For this one, as far as she could determine, something had siphoned all the ambient Chaos yet left the Veil intact. The result was an empty bubble.

Anim...