Yomida Cave Attack and Yuna's Abduction

The Yomida Cave Attack and Yuna’s Abduction is the assault on the Echo Master’s cave in which Van’s attempt to hold back the rochai becomes a desperate search for Yuna. The beasts’ coordinated approach, an arrow shot from the darkness, and Nakka’s disappearance transform an apparent attack on the cave into a pursuit through snow and forest. Van finds the abductors’ trail with help from a burning arrow, but collapses before the chase is resolved.

Causes and Warning

The danger arrives first as a report: Assenomi rushes into the cave with men carrying an injured man on a wooden door and announces that a rochai has bitten him. The scene places the threat inside a refuge that has already received a wounded victim; the men have brought the consequence of an encounter with the beasts right to the Echo Master. Later, when Suohl hears that the rochai have entered the cave, alarm gives way immediately to action.

A raven’s sudden flight through the cavern provides the warning Van acts on. He takes a hatchet, tells Assenomi he will stop the beasts, and orders her to gather everyone. Although he fears for Yuna, his heightened awareness locates the approaching rochai at the opposite end of the cave from the chamber where she is sleeping. He judges that a narrow passage may let him hold them long enough for someone to bring her to safety. His first response is therefore not pursuit but containment: he tries to make himself the barrier between the intruders and the people sheltering inside.

The Fight in the Passage

The rochai do not charge at once. They advance slowly, one after another, then stop in a line before Van with their heads lowered, fangs bared, and growls filling the passage. Their restraint unsettles him more than an immediate rush would: they seem to be measuring the distance, and he recognizes the pattern as that of hunting dogs holding prey in place until a master arrives. Van crouches, keeps his body ready, and watches them, but the pause is a trap rather than a chance to escape.

A numb chill spreads across Van’s forehead as he concentrates on the darkness behind the beasts. A bowstring twangs deep in the cave; the arrow grazes his left shoulder, painful enough to stagger him but stopped from becoming a deep wound by his thick clothing. The rochai surge forward at once. The smell of their bodies and breath breaks through the restraint that had kept Van in check: his surroundings and bodily sensations seem to change, his body moving on while his mind vanishes. In that bodily struggle, he smashes the leader’s nose with his hatchet, rolls forward with the blow, crushes another beast against the wall with his body, and kicks a third away. The attack is thus revealed as more than a rush of animals: the coordinated holding action and concealed archer turn the narrow cave passage into an ambush.

The Search for Yuna

When Van returns to the gathered survivors, he asks whether everyone is accounted for. Suohl says that several people are still missing and that Assenomi has taken men to search for them. Van runs out before Suohl can finish. Yuna is not with the group, and the uncertainty immediately turns his attention from defending the cave to finding her.

Assenomi tells him that Yuna is safe and was with Nakka, but Nakka is absent. She blinks at the discovery: he had been there only moments earlier. Van hurries into the stone tunnel calling Yuna’s name, then searches the dark, empty passages and runs out into the night. He expects her familiar call in reply, but hears nothing. Snow blows across the darkness as his head throbs, his throat dries, and his vision blurs; he wonders whether something was smeared on the arrow that struck him.

Outside the cave, Van reads the snow rather than the people. Most footprints lead from the forest toward the entrance and appear to belong to the men who carried the injured youth inside. One set runs the other way. Its prints are fresher and deeper than the others, and Van concludes that Nakka has carried Yuna away. The distinction in the tracks supplies the first concrete direction in the search, but following them is already complicated by Van’s injury: once he enters the forest, darkness hides the footprints, and he can make out only vague scents and sounds.

Van weighs returning for a lantern against the distance Nakka could gain while he is gone. With no light, he cannot reliably follow the trail; with a delay, he may lose it altogether. As he steps back out of the forest, a bowstring sounds above him. A flaming arrow arcs into the trees and catches on a branch, setting it alight. The fire illuminates the snow and makes the footprints visible. Van recognizes the tactic from his own ambushes of Zolian warriors: the oil-rich hokuso trees burn readily, turning the forest into a source of light and the trail into something he can follow again.

The Pursuit Breaks Off

The figure who appears beside Van is Sae, the woman he had met in the bath; the faint scent of pine resin links her to the shadow he had seen on the cliff. Van asks whether she loosed the burning arrow. Sae confirms that she did, but puts explanation aside: they must follow Yuna. Her intervention restores the trail, yet the chase continues under worsening conditions. Pain spreads from Van’s head through his body, and the beasts’ strange movements keep recurring in his mind, leaving him confused even as he tries to understand what happened in the cave.

A worried voice reaches him, and a slender hand slips beneath his hood to feel his pulse. Van believes he answers that he is all right and should be left behind so Yuna can be found, but he cannot tell whether he actually speaks aloud. An anxious crow’s caw is the last sound he remembers before darkness takes him. The abduction remains unresolved at the close of the episode: Sae is ready to pursue, the fire has made the tracks legible, but Van’s collapse stops him from continuing the search.

Significance

The attack turns a defense of the cave into a rescue pursuit through a chain of reversals. Van first positions himself between the rochai and the people inside; the beasts’ calculated stillness and the concealed archer expose that defense as an ambush. He survives the immediate rush, only to discover that the danger has taken a different form: Yuna is missing, and Nakka has carried her away. The tracks in the snow make the loss traceable, but Van’s injuries place a limit on what determination alone can accomplish.

The cave and the forest each shape the action differently. In the confined passage, Van can meet the beasts with his hatchet and body; outside, darkness erases the trail until a burning hokuso tree supplies light. The same tactic Van once used against Zolian warriors now helps him pursue Yuna, while Sae’s intervention offers a way forward just as his strength fails. The scene ends not with recovery or capture but with interruption: a visible trail, an ally prepared to follow it, and Van unconscious before the outcome is known.