MiP B2 Chapter 29: Research Progress

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The next morning, Crown Mage Felton showed his growing impatience by packing up the whole camp with a wave of his hand and an outpouring of mana the moment everyone was out of their tents. He nodded to Esmorana as he telekinetically deposited her wind-driven passenger-carrier in front of her, with assorted baggage arranged beside it, ready for everyone to just pick up their stuff, take a seat, and fly.

With that done, he marched up to Carlos and gave the bare minimum bow to acknowledge a high lord's rank. "Lord Carlos, I will give you the service of handling Kindar's transportation to your next campsite, but I expect a greater focus on the project that I came here for today. You have now completed your Tier 8 unification and subsequent creation of new structures, and you assured me that this would finish the last of the capabilities you need. I hope to see more concrete results today."

Carlos nodded back while picking up his pack. "We'll give it our best effort, and yes, we have completed our preparations for that."

"Very good. Oh, and Lord Carlos? You should learn a flight spell soon, so you can dispense with using this wind-powered contraption."

Carlos laughed. "We'll take that under advisement. Now, I'll need you to get Kindar out of the danger zone before I pick up Purple, and then we can get going."

"On it. I'll see you again shortly."

___

Carlos chuckled quietly to himself as they set up camp in their latest spot. At first I thought that faster leveling was the main advantage of noble soul ranks, but now we're leveling slower than Ressara. Is that ironic? I think so, but I remember irony being something that people commonly get wrong. Anyway, she's catching up fast, despite us spending more time absorbing aether than she does - she can't do it in her sleep. We're still limiting ourselves to areas she can handle, but she's already caught up enough that we can leap from a Level 19 zone up to a Level 23 zone despite that. At the rate we're going, it will take us 5 days to reach the limit of this area's aether.

He looked around at their new surroundings. They were camping under the trees this time, not in a clearing, to make it harder for any hostile searchers to find them. It made for a lot more obstacles and underbrush, some of which was dangerous - or rather, had been dangerous before Purple established his dungeon domain over the area and took control of all the potentially harmful vegetation. Carlos took an especially close look at a scrubby bush that was covered in thorns 2 feet beside his tent; the thorns were all still there, but blunted.

"Hey, you ready for a day of in-depth analysis?"

Carlos looked up and saw Amber standing in the clearest break between trees nearby. She was fidgeting, half-turned away, looking over her shoulder at him, and a bit antsy on her feet. He smiled and straightened, quickly moving to join her. "Of course! We've finished making all our fancy tools for this, now let's go play with them!"

They quickly found Felton, who had set up shop in a 10-foot wide break in the underbrush, bounded by several trees and still thoroughly shaded by the forest canopy above. A pair of royal guard gauntlets almost shoved themselves into Carlos and Amber's hands the moment they arrived, and Felton clasped his hands and nodded to them. "A timely beginning, good. Lord Carlos and Lady Amber, let's get down to business. As we have already established that the sabotage separates itself out when the runes are expanded for easy inspection, I kept these in their normal mode for operation. You confirmed the presence of micro-scale attention diversion before; what more can you determine now?"

While Carlos immediately raised his gauntlet for close inspection, Amber hesitated and then asked a question first. "Did you succeed in learning to cast the analysis spell yourself, and what did it tell you?"

Felton pressed his lips together and shook his head. "I learned it, but it gained me nothing. It found exactly the same information as the sabotaged gauntlets themselves report."

Carlos raised an eyebrow at that. "Huh. Either the concealment is so good it simply outclasses the analyzer completely, which seems unlikely since we've still managed to sense it, or whoever designed this got clever."

Amber nodded. "Of the options I can think of, the only one that makes sense is that the concealment includes something customized to counter this specific analysis spell."

Felton added his agreement. "If so, that would be yet more evidence that the Enchanters Guild is responsible."

The improvised wilderness magic workshop lapsed into silence as Carlos and Amber focused intently on the intricate enchantments in the items they held, with Felton waiting for them to find something worth speaking about. Carlos closed his eyes to better focus on his mana sense. He could feel much smaller details in the enchantment than before, thanks in part to being higher level, but primarily to having more specialized sensory soul structures. Before, he'd had a single comprehensive mana sensor for sensing all forms of mana in any quantity. Now, he had split that capability 3 ways, specializing separately to sense liquid mana, gaseous aether, and solid essence. On top of that, he had split the capability further into separate soul structures for sensing bulk amounts on large scales versus sensing fine details on small scales, for a total of 6 soul structures devoted to sensing the various forms of mana.

The specialization for sensing fine details was particularly relevant for studying such a compact and complex enchantment, but separating the senses for essence and aether also made it a great deal easier to pick out the enchantment's structure from the background torrents of aether that he and Amber were constantly absorbing. Let's see, there's the analysis enchantment, and as expected, there's the attention diversion reacting to my inspection of it. It's trying to push my attention away from… Geeze, these filaments of essence are really fucking tiny! I actually can pick out two distinct threads of it there now, though.

Carlos chuckled to himself. Heh. The closer I look at that thread, the harder it tries to push my attention away from it, which my copy of Ressara's inverter turns into focusing on it even more. It's still like looking at a spiderweb, but the spiderweb is glowing neon green on a black background. Now, can I tease out any meaning from this…

He spent several minutes examining threads of essence and even identified a few keywords among the structure, but still had nothing useful when the effort started giving him a headache. He sat down and groaned, rubbing his forehead. "Ugh, this feels like trying to make up for the lack of a magnifying glass by looking so closely I go cross-eyed. No, wait, it's more like I have a magnifying glass, but I need a better one."

No one responded to Carlos's comment, so he just took a deep breath and shook himself. "I need a different approach. Hmm…" He lapsed into silence, thinking to himself. This would be a lot easier if I could get it to expand for display like the main enchantment does. Actually, could I do that? He carefully grasped the hidden enchantment and tried to press it against the main one, hoping to hold them together as he triggered the display feature. For a brief instant, it seemed like it might work, but then the filaments of essence started slipping. He gripped harder, but the threads he was hoping to examine slipped out of his grasp. He sighed and gave up. I need the improved essence manipulation soul structure I'm working on today, higher level, or both for that to work.

He looked over at Amber. She was doing something with Felton. The royal mage had cast a spell on the gauntlet, and Amber was examining how they interacted. With a closer look, Carlos quickly identified the spell as the same analysis spell that the enchantment duplicated.

After another minute, Amber smiled and made a quiet exclamation of triumph. "Gotcha! It's reacting to the Analyze spell by probing its structure, and when it touches certain key parts, it hooks into them and attaches some extra pieces that change how the spell works."

"Intriguing." Felton smiled. "That implies an extreme mastery of understanding of the spell by the saboteur."

Amber nodded, but then grimaced. "Yes, but I don't have a lead yet on how to remove the sabotage. That's your main goal for this, right?" Felton nodded, and Amber turned back to her gauntlet. "Then let's keep trying."

___

After a few more hours, Carlos called for a break. "We've managed to identify a few small parts of the sabotage, and I'm sure we can expand that with inferences from its structure and analyzing what would make sense for the finer details to be, but that will take time, and it will be easier with more power as we continue to advance. For now, I have a headache, and there's something else we should check on. You'll want to see it too."

"Oh?" Felton raised an eyebrow. "Very well. For now, I am satisfied with your progress. What do you speak that we should check?"

"You'll see." Carlos led them on a brief search for first Trinlen and then Esmorana and asked her, "Are we near the place where you rescued us?"

Esmorana smiled. "Near enough that a flight there would be swift. Why, do you want to revisit it?"

"Yes, with our mage companions, here."

___

Soon, they were looking out over an artificial clearing strewn with shards of shattered trees. Felton frowned as he inspected it up close, adding to his observations from their 2 flyovers before landing. "A battle occurred here not too long ago, certainly, but I don't see anything important to reexamine."

Carlos thinned his lips and shook his head. "Try casting a spell."

Felton raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and exerted his mana. "What the-?" A large broken log rose into the air, lifted by his mana, but slowly and with noticeable shakiness. "What… What is this?"

Carlos sighed. "The legacy of something I did during the battle. I'm glad to see it's recovering. I was afraid the damage I'd done might be permanent. Two weeks ago, your spell would have failed outright. All spells would have, and runic enchanted items as well." He levitated a coin unsteadily in front of himself, looked at it for a few seconds, then grabbed it out of the air and pocketed it again. "Not mystic abilities like Esmorana's wind control, though."

"Troubling." Felton tried a few more spells, then took to the air with the Flying spell he'd already cast beforehand and paid close attention to how steady and easily-controlled his flight was. There were a few barely noticeable wobbles, and his frown deepened at each one. "I have heard of such a thing before, but only after battles far greater than this one. You say you caused it?"

"Yes, and I intend to never do it again and to take the secret of how I did it to my grave. It is dangerous knowledge."

Carlos and Felton stared intensely at each other for several seconds before Felton finally nodded. "Good. See to it that you do." He cocked his head, and a thoughtful look came over him. "If you devise a countermeasure, however, sharing that would be welcome."

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