Chapter 99 - Runes

Notes : Chapters 102 and 103 have been written and added to the queue !

Man I've been tired lately. There's also been a lot of snow, which is super scenic.

I will probably need to switch to TFW soonish. In part because it's been a while, in part because my publisher is trying to get book 10 published ASAP, which means that the backlog will evaporate.

Chapter 99

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Starfire Pass

Click click click click, reverse.

The Hand gazed at the darkness in the pass.

The other side was once again working, using the cover of darkness to hasten their pace. Not as close as they'd used to, but closer than where they should have been.

If Sarcher had to make a guess, it would be that the Nineteenth was building some forward fortifications, in case of a sortie to disrupt the expansion of the trench network.

Given the sounds of movement, everything brought out today was meat. Zombies. Possibly some ghouls, held on tight leashes.

Clearly the Nineteenth didn't intend to lose another five maniples to an artillery barrage. If they could even spare five to begin with. Their total strength had to have taken one hell of a hit. Hell, it was more than what the Hand had available when they'd finished pushing the rebels out of the pass.

Not that they had a lot of that force left. Two maniples remained, if you were being generous. In truth, one and a half. Heavy on the archers and slingers.

Manning the second 'defensive line' was no longer viable. It was still intact, the enemy having sailed over it with their spellcrystals rather than try to clamber over it. So it might serve some purpose still as an obstacle.

Now it was down to the wall. And if it fell, they would be destroyed.

The option to retreat into the tunnels was still there. But...

There was a chance. If the rebels accepted a ceasefire, the Nineteenth could be held back.

Denying them the objective was paramount. At the end of the day...

Even if the mines couldn't be taken, or the rebels couldn't be reasoned with, better the ore be in their hands than the Nineteenth and their patrons.

If nothing else, they were certainly putting it to use kicking the Nineteenth's ass right now.

The trick, of course, would be to keep it that way.

Mmmhhh. That was a thought...if the mines couldn't be acquired...

They could be turned into a trap for the Nineteenth. Forcing them to shovel resources into attempting to take control of the valley.

Besides, the Hand had to admit to themselves that even if a reinforcement legion arrived tomorrow...

This objective was a failure. The rebels, or rather their...allied? Friendly? What was the relationship there exactly? Regardless, the mechanical abomination they fought beside, had demonstrated their ability and willingness to collapse tunnels, as well as a the capacity to manufacture and deploy vast quantities of explosives.

The mines were extensive, but already heavily damaged, many tunnels already collapsed when the expedition evacuated. It wouldn't take many charges to bring most of the primary shafts and hubs down. Once that was done...

Well, it would probably be a lot less thorough than the demolition visited upon the rebel mineshafts when their troops retreated, but the valley wasn't nearly as easy to access as any of those sites, and there was the slight problem of the rebels still being in the way right there. The Nineteenth might have the troops and zombie manpower to spare to both overwhelm the rebels and reopen the shafts quickly. But the Hand or any of the legate's reinforcements wouldn't. They were stretched too thin.

The Hand sighed, their shoulders sagging as they finally admitted the truth in the sanctity of their own minds.

This venture was a failure. Now the objective was to salvage whatever benefits they could. Even if those 'benefits' were just exacting a heavy toll upon the Nineteenth.

*****

"Well. At least we had a lot of the legwork done." Said Sapphiria. She was surrounded by floating holograms within the simulation, but this time she wasn't sitting down. "Looks like my early impressions are correct. The runes are akin to program functions. Though of course Kalia doesn't call them that." She gestured, bringing up the three 'scripts' they knew so far. Bane, UIS and Magistracy. "I'm guessing the runes differ because each of them made different functions for different purposes. It might even vary from magical school to magical school."

She started pacing, the holograms moving alongside her, while Cia simply followed her with her gaze. Interestingly enough, the simulacrum was sitting on one of the old fashioned seats, and unless Sapphiria was severely mistaken, the tray set aside for the AI had suspiciously low levels in its carafe of hot chocolate and a few crumbs scattered here and there.

"They could be distinct arcane languages of course." Said the AI. "Which brings the question, how the hell are they made? It implies they're artificial, yet supposedly spells came from aberrations."

"Perhaps aberrations from different Convergences would carry different runes? Just like they have differing monsters." Offered Cia, and Sapphiria froze.

"That...would actually make a lot of sense." And explain the variations in the different groups. "So, would that make...the UIS runes Icerend's? Mmmhhh." She shook herself. "Anyway, with those basic runes, we can at least start dissecting the spells Kalia and Malry used."

Some of the floating holograms went in front of her as she talked.

"We only have the basics, but it tells us a lot. For example, there are a lot of those emergency discharge rune sequences in Kalia's spell, and none of the mana recuperation ones. If it failed or she was interrupted, the goal was to just vent the mana without creating an aberration, not energy efficiency. Meanwhile the ones Malry used seem to be laser focused on protecting the target." A lot of the runes she'd learned worked like a variety of fuses, effectively. If something went wrong with the spell, they broke it apart and tried to prevent the nastiest side effects. "Which makes sense. Protect the patient. And Kalia's spell was made for a single energy discharge. Meanwhile Malry's made to consume its own charge over time, gradually."

The vast majority of the other basic runes were, apparently, tailored on how to draw, move and control mana. The first were always the quantity the spell should use. According to Kalia, you could do without them, but if didn't have good concentration you could end up eating all of your available mana or just fail to draw any.

After that, there were a bunch on what mana should be drawn and how. Once again, you could disregard them, but risk drawing in, say, raw mana crystals and have a catastrophic failure.

Then it was about...storing and modulating it? The best analogy she could up with was a capacitor. How much you wanted to store, for how long and how quickly you wished to be able to discharge it. For most spells it was 'everything, less than a second, right this instant' respectively, but as she'd noted, Malry's healing spells were a bit more subtle than that.

After that, it was mostly safety. The fuses, plus a few more esoteric ones. There were a few for example, intended to shield the spell from interference by nearby aberrations. And as she'd mentioned, some were made to try and recover the mana from a failed spell. It just condensed back into raw mana crystals. Apparently mana didn't have a 'free' state, it either took physical form, dispersed, or was consumed in a spell or aberration.

Which made it even more fascinating. What happened when it 'dispersed'? Did it decay into something else? If mana didn't have a free state, were manastorms just giant, high altitude aberrations that then collapsed, their internal mana then forming the crystal fields and smaller aberration fields?

There were so many questions!

"Ma'am, you...went silent."

Sapphiria blinked.

"Oh, right! Sorry. Just thinking. This opens up some amazing possibilities."

"Which we would be able to use had we been given our promised materials."

"Kalia's just being cautious." Unsurprisingly, upon learning that the AI had no idea what she was doing, the mage-magistrate had just flatly refused to let her bring the mana crystals home, instead opting to keep them in Astralis until...well, until her girlfriend wasn't at risk of blowing herself up with them.

'I know it won't kill you, but I'm not letting you lose your body to some dumb accident' had been her exact words. She'd then reinforced her point with a very thorough kiss.

It had been hard to argue with her points, so Sapphiria had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. And also she already had a chunk of the door being shipped to the minilab to keep it busy anyway, the full structure having at last been excavated and then given multiple full scans to make sure they had everything.

"As you say."

"Anyway. That's enough analysis work for now. Do we have anything on the list?"

Cia pulled out a scroll, and let it fall, revealing an endless expanse of paper as it rolled around on the floor.

"...You've been looking in the library core's movie section, haven't you?"

"Only twenty-first century references."

"Just...just tell me the next item."

"The most important one was wiring."

"Wiring? Oh, right." With three smelters, and the ore to keep them busy, her old worries of cables taking too much mass and fabricator time was over. She could actually afford to draw one from the crash site up to the workshop. "Let's be about it then!"

Eh. Her aunt loved those books. Maybe she should make a catbot. Or reconfigure her android to have ears and a tail. Actually, did they have cats at all here?

She should ask. So far they seemed to have most animals she'd consider standard for a terraformed world, but you never knew.

*****

"Do you think they'll wonder what we're doing?" Asked Sapphiria as she sat down on Kalia's desk.

The mage-magistrate snickered.

"I'm sure there will be...plenty of speculation." She waggled her eyebrows, and Sapphiria blushed.

"Right."

"So, you've really memorized the basic runes?"

"Yes. Want me to recite them?"

"Just to be sure."

Sapphiria did so, and Kalia nodded.

"That's...impressive. And kind of creepy, not gonna lie. Well, that means we get to skip all the stupid squeezes and tests, and we can get to the meat of the problem." Kalia pulled the ornate box out of a drawer, and opened it, revealing the mana crystals. "Remove your gauntlet."

"Why? I-"

"Remove. Your. Gauntlet."

The AI looked at the mage-magistrate, and nodded. She was entirely serious.

Removing the gauntlet was easy, and the AI set it down on the desktop.

"Alright. Now grab a crystal." The AI leaned forward, and picked one up with her bare hand. Oddly enough, each was a distinct color, instead of the mad kaleidoscope of the raw ones. "Good. Now tell me, can you feel it?"

"Feel wha-"

She almost dropped the crystal as she felt...weird.

Her matrix threw up errors as security programs activated, filtering her inputs and quarantining unknown data. What the...actual fuck.

This wasn't just garbage data being reported by her sensors and skin. There was almost a direct input there. Like the crystal was transmitting data packets.

...Energy state computers. She'd thought about them when she'd seen how magic worked. Was the crystal attempting to ping her?

"You do." Said Kalia. "Feel that sensation? That's magic, reaching out to you. I want you to reach back."

"Reach...back?"

"Imagine the sensation you're having. Then try to push it towards the crystal."

Oh hell. It was a handshake protocol. Effectively she would be returning its ping. And apparently it worked on squishies as well. Interfaced with their neural systems.

She did as ordered...and then had to swallow a scream as the sensations changed. A constant, repeating stream of data. The hell?

"Okay. It changed."

Kalia smiled, and the AI had to stop herself from melting at how pleased she looked.

"Good. Very good! What you've just done is called interfacing. It can take an apprentice years to learn how to do it. Some never manage to. Feel those new sensations? That's the crystal talking to you. If you were trained as a Magister, mages who specialize in refining and handling mana crystals, you would be able to tell how much mana is in that crystal. How stable it is."

Oh hell. The data was a freaking status report. The crystal was giving her a constant stream of status reports.

"Alrighty. What's next?"

"You put it back in the box. And then we can start talking about fundamental spellforms."