B3 Chapter 27: Ghost in the Machine [END]

After so long struggling to manage the careful balance between avoiding detection, minimizing collateral damage, and still effectively carrying a mission out, it was refreshing to finally have a playground where he could let loose.

Unlike the last time he had abruptly had to deal with paragon-class threats, Syl was at full power now with a battlefield of his choosing. Sloth had chosen to stand by him, and the Sinner didn't regret it.

Sloth knew by now that Syl had the ability to undo his time stops. It hadn't taken much of a leap of logic for him to realize that Syl was going to use the active explosions of weapons that had never been reused since they had gone off during the third world war.

The trick to making doomsday weapons was avoiding actually eliminating all life on the planet while utterly decimating the enemy. The gigaton nuclear bombs deployed by a death cult in Middle America during the war had not paid attention to that. Their goal had been to wipe the slate clean.

As such, the power of the detonation was beyond even that of the most successful moonfall so far. Those had killed tens of millions. Left unchecked, these would have killed eight billion.

The other Sinners had arrived at roughly the same time. They had deployed attack spells immediately, naturally, and Syl had countered that by casting Ouroboros.

The effect of this spell was more complex than most of the relatively simple, if destructive, arsenal that he liked to wield. With an immense amount of magical power, it could still something. Anything.

When he first used it, he had used it to still a certain area of magic, using nothing but his stored flux reserves to negate a section of Sloth's ultimate spell.

He had much more flux now and a much greater understanding of both pieces of magic.

Some 200,000 square kilometers of frozen time—roughly everything in a 250 km radius, most of it relatively unpopulated—snapped free in an instant.

Stuck in the area were another 125,000 souls who had been caught in the area of effect when Sloth had saved the world during the third world war. Syl doubted their cognitions had caught up. The only reason he had been aware for so long in that frozen time was the same reason Bianca had. There was so much flux packed into their own bodies, but a very small part of their perception had stayed intact through the entire ordeal. Even the strategic-class magicians who had been caught inside were very unlikely to have noticed the 14 years that had passed on the outside.

Or maybe they had. It wasn't like anyone was going to be able to ask them. Within half a second of the detonation unfreezing, over 100,000 of those people had been incinerated.

The detonation washed over the entire landscape, leaving no nook or cranny unturned, not discriminating between weak or strong. Defenses went up everywhere, but it was only top-class defensive spells that had even a hope of surviving. With a bomb this big, functionally the entire radius was ground zero.

Every Sinner was amongst the number of those who could protect themselves, of course. The kind of magic that was necessary to stop a point-blank nuclear explosion started functioning at around the higher tiers of strategic-vlass. Every Sinner, without exception, had something more powerful.

Syl had an artifact, casting the same suite of spells that would be necessary if he wanted to use Armageddon within a couple hundred meters of himself.

That meant that his will spell processes and FCD were all ready and available to cast a separate spell.

His artifact had enough room for two. By his side, Sloth began a spell process.

Syl was a step ahead of him. When Sloth noticed what he was doing, the Spanish-speaking Sinner stumbled, almost missing a step in the process of the spell itself. Both completed the spell pattern at roughly the same time, Sloth’s experience proving itself even through his surprise.

There was no formal name for that spell, but it had been cast many a time. It was Sloth’s ultimate, a spell whose every casting was so significant that intelligence agencies around the world recorded them as chronostasis events. They always indicated that something terrible had gone wrong.

As nuclear hellfire burned around them, the other Sinners, too focused on protecting themselves from Syl’s ambush, both he and Sloth cast the same spell that had frozen Middle America, Beijing, São Paulo, Toronto, and a dozen other former population centers across the globe.

Syl didn't have the same grace that Sloth did casting the spell. It was his first time using it after all. The level of precision that the other magician had, alongside the sheer range he could manage with the spell, was something that only someone who had been using the same magic for decades could match.

That didn't mean he didn't help. Syl directed his much more offensively, applying it in specific ways against the other Sinners so as to make resisting it more difficult for them. They were already distracted by the necessity of defense, but Syl knew their spells inside and out. Though he had never come into direct conflict with them until now, he observed them at a distance. He studied them. And he had a hell of a lot of time to understand how Sloth’s spell worked, which meant he knew how to modify it.

They never stood a chance.

When it came to magic, especially magical combat, all it took was one mistake to end you. There was a reason most combat magicians had a lifespan of five to seven years after they first entered the field. For most of their lives, the Sinners had been exceptions.

But when everyone you dealt with was exceptional, it was only a matter of time until a slip-up cost you your life.

For Envy, Lust, and Greed, that slip-up was here and now. That mistake was trying to fight Pride on his own terms.

They didn't go out in flames. They froze, surrounded by them, eternally aware in a moment of frozen time, trapped by a nuclear explosion that would never finish washing over them.

Syl and Sloth rose through a narrow untouched column left open during their casting.

“How do you know that spell?” The first words out of the Sinner betrayed how uncharacteristically unsure the paragon-class magician was. In all his time active, there had never been as world-shaking a series of events as this.

“I was stuck in it for a decade.” Even through the synthesizer, Syl’s voice sounded dry to himself. “And I saw you activated it in the heart of Auria just months ago. Not being able to replicate it would have been a stain on my reputation.”

“You're a monster of a different kind.”

Syl shrugged. “We all are. Or were.”

“What happens now?” Sloth asked.

“I have a call to make and a fragment to get to,” Syl said. “For your part, I'd stay on watch. The machines are going to start moving again, likely sooner than later, and with the other Sinners missing, you're going to need to do double duty.”

“I hope you know what you're doing.” Sloth shook his head. “This is not how we should have ended it.”

“I think you'll be more than satisfied with the results. If you need more information, reach out to one Jennifer Viridian, temporary co-leader of Incarnate, head of New Auria’s tech division. She'll have more information for you.”

Syl texted the engineer in question as he spoke. Once he had a solid summary of things sent over, he went back to his other priority.

He took to the skies.

Bianca's flux was linked to him in a deeper way than the FCD used to link them together would suggest. When they were separate, they could generally identify where the other was. With her obviously casting a spell as a beacon for him, it was simple enough to find where she was.

Even without that effect, however, it was pretty likely that he would have been able to find her. There was only one fragment under the point of no return at which the machines had begun firing on space expeditions.

Before he even visually sighted it, however, he noticed a presence that hadn't exactly left his side.

“You're still here?”

Sloth had his defenses up higher than ever. The entire area around him was unrecognizable, his body existing in a space of splotchy colors and movements as time and space warped around him. His speech was still comprehensible, but nothing else was.

“I'm interested to see what else you're going to do. You're headed off to a fragment, no? Nobody who has done that has survived. Not since the machine started fortifying them.”

“Feel free to join. Just don't get in my way.”

“I had no intention of doing so.” The words seemed genuine.

It had been a while since Syl had seen genuine fear from the magicians generally considered to be the strongest in the world. Seeing how prepared he had been to take down the rest of them must have made Sloth rethink things a little.

“Then come along. We have a human race to evolve.”

#

Bianca and the king were in something of a standoff. She couldn't leave here without taking his weapon. He couldn't leave here without leveraging her for her unique traits. It was clear that he didn't have the same capacity as the machines to replicate her, because he wasn't even trying to make an offensive move.

Two generations of Aurian royalty basically looked at each other. Their discussion hadn't gone any further than it had before. The king wanted concessions. He wanted Syl out of the picture, a cut of his oldkKingdom, and guarantees that he would be given a second chance.

Bianca would have been fine with giving up some land. It was inevitable that the people the king ruled over would be subject to the same restrictions that he had once placed upon people like her, but it was a small concession in comparison. The second chance was the same. She didn't like him, and she had always maintained that the position of ignorance that she had forced upon his people was evil, but it was a compromise she was willing to make.

Sacrificing the greatest magician to have ever lived was a different story.

“I don't think you want to hurt me,” she ventured, “and I feel the same way about you. That said, we can't just stand here forever.”

“No, we can't.” At that, the king’s presence expanded, raw power emitting from his body. It was a scare tactic. The same one that Syl liked to use against enemies he didn't want to kill and the one that prismatics often used to lord their power around.

Bianca responded with a showing of her own. She didn't have the raw power to match the show of force he was trying to dominate their situation with, but she had learned a lot of tricks over the years. After so much time learning how to tune a gate with minimal power, freely manipulating the flux around her was a simple task. She needed no FCD to slash through the magic, no spell pattern to counteract him. The level of complexity she had been able to manage with spell patterns had been great enough that learning how to use magic without the assistance of a casting device had vastly improved her flexibility.

That still left them at an impasse. He couldn't non-lethally disarm her. She had no way of ensuring that he wouldn't destroy the weapon if it came to a fight.

As it turned out, she didn't have to reach a conclusion on her own.

The presence of two Sinners was surprisingly unremarkable. Both Pride and Sloth looked like they had seen better days, but appearances were deceiving. Despite the ash staining them, their magic felt tight and dangerous.

“The prodigal son returns,” the king said, his voice bitter and reproachful. “Do you think you can—”

“Bianca,” Syl said. “April 16th.”

That visibly confused both the King and the other sinner, but Bianca needed no further context.

April 16th, 71 AFI. Neither of them could ever forget that day. They had escaped a living hell. She still remembered the spell patterns she'd cast when she'd finally been able to move thanks to Syl.

Tactical-class movement-type spell: Blink.

Strategic-class fortification-type spell: Supernova.

Tactical-class movement-type spell: Blink.

In mere moments, she hurled herself away from her current position, strengthening her body and increasing her reflexes as she did. Supernova was a spell that she and Syl had stolen from the Red family. It was a very punishing fortification-type spell but enhanced the body significantly above human standards in exchange for a great amount of flux. She’d learned some tricks over the years.

She joined Syl. That was what had worked before, it was what had saved her life, and it was what she did now.

Moments later, the castle on the fragments stopped moving, an eerie, slightly discolored effect taking over the entirety of the shattered segment of the moon.

“Sloth,” she said, shifting to the center's native Spanish with ease. “I have to say that spell is much nicer when you're not on the inside.”

“So I'm told,” the sinner said. He peered toward the machines, all of them frozen by his own spell. “So this is the king. One of the dark horse paragons. I was told to fear him once. Was I right to?”

“No,” Syl said, conveying disgust even through his synthesizer. “You were not.”

“We have a lot of catching up to do,” Bianca said. “If we can work with this, we've won the war.”

“I have no taste for war,” Sloth said. “All I ask is that I can live and have people to live amongst.”

“We have enough taste for you,” Syl said. “I do, at least.”

“I do like the slower bits of life sometimes,” Bianca admitted, “but I can adapt just fine.”

“What's the end game? Where do you see this ending?”

“This ends at one of two points,” Syl replied. “Either when we die, or never.”

“You claimed there are worlds beyond this one. Will you continue fighting there?”

“We will go as far as humanity does.”

Bianca laughed. “And when have we ever stopped?”

#

The machines had largely been dormant in the months since Syl and Bianca had returned. After failing to eliminate them with repeated targeted moonfalls, they had concluded that the better strategy was to fortify and wait.

Now that Auria had three Sinners and their former king under their control, things started to shift again. The machines recognized the threat that Syl posed. Though they could not detect the details of what he had done, they had a number of data points. He had escaped a time stop. He had accessed time-stopped material to use in his favor. He now had several incredibly dangerous magicians available inside time stops.

The former Aurian king was not someone who had actually been on the machines' radar. If he had been, his fragment would have never been allowed to go unmolested.

Still, the sinners were certainly on the threat list for the machines. They were also on the list of magicians that they dearly would have liked to absorb and form ghosts out of. Those lists happened to be one and the same.

Activity started again just as Incarnate started sending their people towards the edges of these zones. While the machines had no way of telling what artifacts Incarnate had created, they rightfully assumed that the same magician who had caused these time stops was actively trying to take advantage of them.

And so the moonfalls began again.

There were fewer people to deal with them this time. While the population hadn't decreased that much since the last time the moonfalls had regularly occurred—in fact, it had even increased thanks to the lessened activity—the number of paragon-class magicians alive and active certainly had. As the sky began to fall on itself again, interest groups across the world prepared to feel the impact of lacking the Sinners.

That impact was less severe than many feared.

“Tracking potential impacts over New York, Southern Texas, Montreal, Shanghai, and Taiwan for some reason,” Uriel declared. “Should have a 20, maybe 30-minute window between each of them.”

“Do you take the foreign ones?” Jennifer asked. “We’ve got weapons here.”

“On it.”

The questions about morals, about ethical policing of their lands, and of whether or not their naked grab for power was right had been left behind in the dust long ago. Anyone still working with the Auria core leadership had bought into the program. They were, in a word, believers.

Uriel had surpassed strategic-class. With every death, she gained power. Every preserved body and mind could be repurposed. Every piece of technological progress they made could be integrated into her body.

She was now capable of slowing a fragment herself. So she did.

The weapons across Auria had grown stronger as well. Over the course of months where they had been largely unimpeded by the machines, manufacturing processes had grown, evolved, and continued to develop. With an entire world of data to explore—entire worlds—there was so much more that an engineer with no regard for safety or proper testing protocols could accomplish. There were casualties, naturally, but that was the price of progress.

Anything that dropped over what was now the New Aurian Kingdom faced coordinated series of attacks from weapons powered by entire cities' worth of magicians. When it had been isolated nations, each of which were in active conflict with the other nation-states on the continent, a coordinated response hadn’t really existed. Now, however, a fragment was much more likely to join the layer of cosmic dust still blanketing the entire planet than it was to come close to inflicting casualties with its impact.

That wasn’t to say that the moonfalls didn’t have any impact on human life. Each time they split up, they dumped billions if not trillions of microscopic nanobots, each with the sole goal of causing lunar madness and consuming magicians. While there were no death tolls as staggeringly devastating as those of the initial days, valuable personnel were frequently lost, and after a while, it became clear that each death on the human side was empowering the machines.

Sometimes, when a silver-gray cloud of robot mass fell from the sky, it would be accompanied by human forms. Always, those human forms would cast the magic they had known in life, stunning and killing and paving the way for more damage.

The number of human forms increased with time. Given enough of this, it was pretty clear that they would be able to snowball their way to a gradual victory. Sometimes, word of deceased Paragon-class magicians spread through devastated cities. Aurian citizens who had once belonged to the state of Polaris whispered of the return of Lila Adams, except this one had the same particular bloodthirst for their own citizens that the last one had had at the end of her life.

Auria didn’t remain idle during this time. While the machines were occupied with dropping fragments and acquiring more data, Jennifer, Sloth, and Syl were slowly but surely extracting information.

Thanks to research gathered from the Viridian household combined with a great deal of experimentation, Incarnate had the ability to extract a large chunk of magical information from someone's body by excising it from their corpse and transplanting it into another. The trick with doing that with the Sinners was that they had to end the stopped time and kill somebody whose body wasn’t built like a conventional human being without them fighting back.

But it was possible, and if it was possible, it would be done.

It took them three days to kill Envy, two weeks for Lust, and an entire month for Greed.

Not all of them were compatible with Syl or Bianca, but pieces of them were. And other pieces were compatible with other members of Incarnate. With enough distribution, they could get all the magical data they needed to replicate every single spell the Sinners had known. Some of them would even be able to cast with the same abilities.

Waylan Red received a portion of Greed’s power. He could have received more, given his surprising compatibility with the man, but he had burned enough trust to be limited.

The machines increased the intensity of their attacks, but it was clear that they were still waiting. Zero had yet to make a reappearance, and they were more than capable of throwing literally everything at the Earth at once if they truly wanted to kill Syl. They were just trying to pressure humanity into evolving faster.

And that was their one mistake.

The machines had long since left any kind of normalcy behind. They were not confined to biological bodies, and they were not confined to human standards. That meant that their processes believed them to be better than human. They didn’t make mistakes, and if they did, they were always recoverable. There was always another plan.

Unknown variables. That was all it took. To the machines, there was almost no such thing. The second something came into play, it was comprehensible. It was something that could be broken down and analyzed and used. Yet they still had blind spots.

As Jennifer and her department armed a burgeoning empire, Syl looked to the skies for perhaps the most critical one of those.

And in September of 75 AFI, he returned to space.

He hadn’t expected the king to be one of the original engineers who created the problem they ended up in, but it wasn’t so surprising as to be unbelievable. The king had always been obsessed with control. Of course, his involvement in perhaps the most consequential human magical project in recorded history would include a way for him to maintain it.

Syl and the new Auria were quite unlike him in that way. Where the king tried to maintain control and ensure that he could wait until the perfect moment to use the weapons he had created, to exercise the levers that he had carefully built, this new generation of magicians and humans were driven by the same philosophy as Syl. The second something was in hand, it was to be used.

He felt that way about the Sinners’ magic. Already they were being implemented in Aurian defenses, and already they were using it to protect their citizens, their own artificial paragon-class magicians, imbued by the power of those who were so far beyond the label yet unprepared to do what was necessary for humanity.

The Aurian empire had expanded to the southern American continent as well by the time Syl began to pierce through the time stop placed on the king’s fragment.

Unlike the other Sinners, he simply popped this one like a bubble, returning the king to the present time.

He then deposited the preparations he had made for this specific “battle,” that being a large chunk of synthesized biological matter and a spell from Lust intended to create flesh monstrosities. Fusing the former king with mostly inert biological matter put a major pin in his ability to cast literally anything.

“We meet again,” he said.

Bianca, who had come with him, said nothing.

To his credit, the nameless king did not flinch at the fact that a solid 90% of his body was now a shapeless mass of flesh with no protections against the elements here.

“You disgust me,” the king said. “A talentless magician who can only steal. Someone who can never learn that rules exist for a reason. If it is your like who lead into the next era, it will be a world of pandemonium.”

“If chaos is what it takes to bring progress, then there should be chaos,” Syl said.

Bianca looked at him, signing subtly. You didn’t say you were going to talk.

He signed back. I have some last words for him.

“I have seen what your order looks like. I was made in defiance of it, but I lived under your control. I have witnessed what you did to a people. Necessary or not, you kept us from advancing. You sacrificed decades so you could buy yourself minutes. Generations of gifted magicians were wasted on you and by you, fighting for a dream that never existed. Potential squandered, progress burned so you could warm your hands just a little longer. You disgust me.”

Syl already knew what he had to do. The king wasn't going to give up his secret technique without concessions, but he could be forced to use it. He was a rat until the end, prioritizing his own safety over the fate of the world.

Paragon-class transmutation-type spell: Armaggedon.

When Syl moved to transmute that biological matter into an antimatter explosion that would wipe out the entire fragment, kilometers of lunar regolith began to move.

There. He'd gone and done it.

Syl had spent a lot of time refining his process. He'd created and optimized hundreds, if not thousands, of unique spells while constantly improving on the existing magical framework of those before him. When he found something that worked, though, he was more than willing to use it again and again and again.

“A couple last words for you,” Syl said. He signed the rest.

Fuck you. Burn in hell.

A little crude, but there was a lifetime of emotion in those words.

Syl looked at Bianca. Even through the pressure suits, he could feel her preparedness.

Once again, he cast his spell. With the refinements he’d put it through, with all the knowledge gained from within Gates and through Towers, Paragon was no longer a correct definition for this spell.

He chose its name himself.

Ascendant-class domain-type spell: Chronos.

One second became years.

#

By the end of it, the king wasn't even necessary. His technique was hard to extract, but he hadn't been lying when he had said it would take years. It did. Just not decades. And that meant that within the span of his spell, Syl was able to decode the back door he had built, and Bianca was able to find a way to sync herself to it.

When they returned to regular time, they did so well outside the fragment, some fifty kilometers away. Just close enough distance for Syl to have an uninterrupted sight line to turn the machines and ten kilograms of the king's body into antimatter.

The explosion was spectacular.

When they returned to Earth, the machines noticed something was wrong. Every time Syl had successfully cast Chronos before, it had been accompanied by a major paradigm shift. Since he immediately went to production facilities afterward, the machines recognized this as another one of those shifts.

By then, it was already too late.

The machines acted quickly. Every remaining fragment of the Moon, a solid half of its mass, started hurtling towards Earth's surface at once. It was preceded by a massive amount of nanobots, ones that had been created by consuming these fragments and constructing themselves over and over for years.

Across the world, emergency klaxons sounded once again, a familiar sound by now, but never any more reassuring than the first ones had been.

Auria was no exception.

“Shit,” Uriel said. “That's really bad.”

“Who can you muster?” Jennifer asked. “The patch is going to take a while longer. We need someone to hold off as many of these as we can before we aren't here to complete it.”

“Every Prismatic,” Uriel said darkly. “For what that's worth.”

“Do it, then.” Everyone in the room was fully aware that they were very likely sending off that entire task force to their deaths. They had dealt with fragments before, not a literal half of the Moon complete with an army of ghosts.

Such was the price of progress.

“I'll see you on the other side,” Uriel said. She saluted, once to the room, once to Syl. Then the magician opened a portal—and she was gone.

“I'll be on my way,” Syl said. “Let us know when it's ready.”

“Bianca will know.” Jennifer was too busy focusing on her readouts to give a proper answer, but she waved him off, and he was gone too.

The first of the nanobots reached Syl and Bianca over the Pacific, forming a familiar shape.

“Zero,” Syl said. “Can't say it's a pleasure to see you.”

Just being in the presence of the two Aurian archmages was enough for the construct of the original Sinner to identify the risk they presented. Without even a word, he attacked, free casting like the original magician had.

Bianca replied in kind. Zero invoked a litany of spells, each classified as Paragon class on their own, and she summoned a Gate, absorbing them, then the supposed man himself. It snapped shut a second later.

A second Zero appeared. Then a third. Five. Fifty. A thousand.

Syl turned one to ash, sent another spiraling into the midst of his kind, then detonated him.

The machine formed platforms, summoning Gates. Bianca and Syl did the same. Both of them made liberal use of artifacts, doubling or even tripling their output. For Syl, the sheer number of spells he could have running at one time was vastly increased, while Bianca's output spiked.

The battle was as devastating as the one against the Sinners, but this time, it gained a little recognition. Across the world, everywhere, similar battles were playing out. Not all of them ended up favoring humans as much.

Waylan Red died fighting alongside Uriel when a dark emissary’s pillar of shadow swallowed up 20 strategic class magicians alongside the wave of machines spilling over Moscow.

Gluttony was sighted in six different countries, her signature Apophis spell vomiting out enough firepower to keep those places safe for the time being. She suffered a fatal injury in the sixth and chose to kill herself rather than be devoured. Her catalyst event devastated the entirety of Eastern Europe, but it did kill a great many machines.

At this rate, humanity was still doomed. Enhanced weaponry across the world meant that they could hold off for longer, but they couldn't stop everything that hit them. Even Bianca and Syl were playing a game of cat and mouse, zigzagging in and out of Gates to avoid the sheer destruction inflicted upon the Western seaboard.

It had taken a week to kill a billion people at the height of the moonfalls. Now, it took three and a half minutes.

And then, all of a sudden, the tide changed. As they were protecting themselves from yet another city-melting explosion that tore anything it hit apart with gravity pulses, Bianca froze.

“I have it,” she whispered.

Syl pushed her magic through into her, linking their pools as deeply as ever, and they cast in unison.

The back door that the king had created was devastatingly effective but also incredibly difficult to get off. To infect a single mass of AI, the magician using it had to get up close and make a one-in-a-million shot.

For Bianca, that level of required precision meant she had it in the bag a thousand times out of a thousand.

Around them, the Zero constructs had continually multiplied. Other magicians had appeared, but there was none other than Zero who could be as effective as he was in combat. As such, when Bianca applied the patch, it was 1,000 Zeroes who suddenly stopped moving.

Syl felt the connection, seized it with her guiding influence.

He raised his hand, and all thousand raised their hands with him.

“How much do we have?” he asked.

“Enough,” was the reply.

Their next task was herculean, but they were the two magicians in the world best suited for it. 

Over the past nine months, Incarnate had distributed some 250 million artifacts across the territories they had conquered. Most of them were minor, but over half of them had contained the capacity to connect to Viridian intranets, and all of them had just gained the ability to use that killswitch.

It was the ultimate rejection of the former king's philosophy. A path to victory that involved even the weakest magician.

To execute it would require incredible control across an unthinkable number of items. The mental load would fry any normal magician's mind, and the inability to standardize flux across them meant that anybody but somebody with the purest flux would be incapable of remotely accessing all of those artifacts at once.

Bianca could handle that part. The technical part, as well as the sheer power required to activate her own control artifact, came from Syl.

As the machines continued to descend on Earth, the Moon falling behind them, Bianca began the ritual.

Across the world, everyone bought time. Uriel summoned the shadows of everyone she’d felled and more, bringing back spells from those long gone with Envy’s techniques grafted to her body. Standardized mass driver cannons drove back more, and a sea of blood rose from the Atlantic, an Aurian task force having been augmented with bits and pieces of Greed.

The machines focused solely on Bianca once they realized what was happening. They couldn't stop the individual artifacts—there were simply too many of them. They tried to cut it off at the source, but they couldn't. Humanity had learned, and as a wave of paragon-class magic descended on them, Syl and Bianca walked through a gate, then another.

They emerged 20 floors into a Tower. They stepped through another Gate. Another. When they reappeared, they were on the opposite side of the globe from where they started.

Inevitably, the ritual completed. 100 million artifacts dissolved, the sheer power of the ritual disintegrating them entirely.

The machines' desire to stop this infection proved to be their downfall. Enough of them were close enough to the artifacts that they were within range of the extension of two magicians who were far more capable of using the kill switch than its last owner.

They couldn't hit all of the machine’s mass, as Incarnate artifacts had largely only spread to the North and South American continents. But with instinct, Syl and Bianca’s minds expanded, granting them access to thousands upon millions upon trillions of machines, their virus spreading through them like wildfire.

With their abilities to cast freed, they used their access to this mass to spread it further, infecting more and more with every passing millisecond.

Something unprecedented happened.

The machines began to retreat. They opened gates, shoving themselves into them only to dissolve them entirely and self-destruct the remaining bots. Within ninety seconds, every remaining machine within 1,000 km of Earth belonged to two individuals.

Pushing back the moonfall was easy, then. They just acted in reverse, using their newfound control to send those pieces screaming back into deep space, ash clearing from the skies as they did.

Shortly afterward, both of them collapsed.

#

It took days for them to recover, weeks to even start counting the dead. When all was said and done and the dust had settled, only about a billion humans had survived.

Those remaining had indeed come out stronger for it. Their infrastructure was broken, their souls beaten and battered, but they had indeed done what the machines had wanted.

Only one outcome had changed. Humanity had taken control of a subset, and their incessant need to backstab each other in times of crisis had spread so far that even the architect of their doom had been betrayed.

Bit by bit, Auria began reconstructing the world. In its ruins, the rulers were clear.

There were only two people who controlled the machines. Only one kingdom whose rulers knew the magic to connect them to other worlds.

And within days, humanity knew the truth—that there were other worlds out there. That the machines still had a home among the stars.

At first, they rebuilt.

But years down the line, as populations began to expand again and the world lived under a single flag, their gaze turned to the galaxies the machines had promised.

Humans were a vengeful sort, and Syl was no different. Neither was Bianca; nor Jennifer, Uriel, even the late Waylan or anyone who’d risen to power with them.

By 80 AFI, the first portals to machine-controlled worlds opened.

Syl was the first through.

He had long since abandoned the title of Pride. It had given him some sense of self-actualization, an idea that he knew who he was, but it was a false title. It wasn’t his. Sylvester and Bianca stepped forward into a new world.

The Silent Archmage and the Queen of the Swarm. The names were whispered in hushed tones across the world, given the same gravitas that one might give to their god.

The machines started attacking the second they stepped onto a planet they’d only seen before in deep-space imaging, but their response was quick and overwhelming.

Combat had tired them once upon a time, but it was what they had been built for after all—only for themselves, not for the whims of masters above.

Good for us, Syl thought. There’s a universe of battle waiting right beyond the Gates.

One war or another, they were home.

And they would never stop.