B3 Chapter 25 - Breaking Down

Bianca was being followed, and not in the normal way where she could just cast a stealth-type spell or find and subdue the person behind her.

No, the thing following her came in the manner of a perception-type spell that she had never seen before. Though she couldn’t tell its power level just from trying to sense it, it resisted all attempts to countercast it and clearly pierced through every stealth-type countermeasure she deployed.

It was to the point where she suspected the very fact that she was able to detect it was an allowance the caster had made and not a particular quirk of her own magic.

If it was this hard to sense one, it would be safer to assume that there were more.

Was it malicious?

She chuckled at herself for even thinking that question. Of course it was. The important question was what kind of malice it was.

Back when she and Syl had been just learning the ropes, trying to adjust to the unprecedented flux bond they’d been put into, they’d had to learn quickly to understand what was trying to kill them and how.

Isolate the variables. Unknowns were always, always the reason behind an otherwise competent magician finding themselves an early grave. Finding that was always easier if it wasn’t occluded by the noise of a hundred red herrings.

She could sense where Syl was, so she gave him a berth. If he was occupied by something, being near that event would certainly make this more complicated.

Bianca chose to go up instead. It was true that there was a certain danger in that as well, but there weren’t many better options. New Auria’s rise to power was no secret, and the world had taken notice. Though it was unlikely anyone was going to challenge them on their home turf after seeing what had happened to the first few challengers, it was also wiser for the queen to not stray too far off her home territory and risk someone killing her over the open sea. The machines, on the other hand, had been dormant for long enough that she was willing to go a hundred kilometers into the air.

From there, she had planned on doing a series of diagnostics, but it soon became clear that she was looking in the correct direction. The signal grew stronger as she drew closer to the barrier of no return. Here above the natural clouds, inside the constant ash storms, she was significantly freer to try spells that would be dangerous to use anywhere near a population center. A suite of strategic-class spells confirmed that the only spell anywhere near her was that perception-class one.

“If you’re trying to lead me somewhere,” she said aloud, “you should consider just a message. We have an official complaint system in New Auria now.”

The spell moved a little. Bianca glared in the general direction from which it was hanging around her.

There were a few possibilities here. Given how the spell was strengthening as she approached the point of no return, it was likely that the caster was there. They could have also been trying to bait her into going higher, but if they wanted her dead, they could have done it another way.

Of course, if it was the machines casting this spell, then they would definitely want her to come up into their domain. It kind of made sense to do so, too, since she and Syl had proven so effective at dealing with fragments themselves.

That was unlikely, though. They would have targeted Syl first, and the machines had never demonstrated perception-type spells on this level. It was actually one of their weak points—much of their communication and detection was done electronically, not through magic, which meant they weren’t capable of catching some things that high-level intelligence mages were.

It was still a possibility, but Bianca had another suspicion. There were very few people who could survive above the layer that the AI had claimed as its own, and most of them were busy enough with business on Earth that it was unlikely they would randomly go here.

There was one person she knew of who had exerted dominance over the machines and gone so far to use them as a weapon. One person who had been suspiciously unseen since the war had started. A magician whose death and subsequent catalyst event could not have gone unnoticed.

Bianca decided to chance it.

“If you were looking for me, you could have just asked, father,” she said. “I’ve been waiting long enough for you.”

The spell vanished abruptly, and Bianca knew she was right.

Heavy flux, a screaming sonic boom, and the familiar sense of motion caused by an object large enough to have its own gravitational pull falling towards Earth told her that a fragment was coming. 

Bianca readied herself for a response, letting herself fall so she could get out of its distortion field for long enough to send a message to ready the mass drivers again, but she noticed soon enough that nothing was piercing through the ash storm.

The fragment had stopped itself.

That in itself wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. The machines had stopped fragments themselves before, moving them to another part of the world that was less prepared for them.

What was abnormal was that it stayed still. Bianca approached it again, using the strategic-class projection-type spell Kamikaze to drive the ash away, giving her a clear visual.

This was no ordinary fragment. It was large, yes, but not so gargantuan so as to have a horizon of its own.

What truly stood out about it was what she saw facing her. Pointing downwards towards Earth was a perfect replica of the now-destroyed royal castle she had grown up in.

The king.

She rose to meet him.

#

Half a continent away, Syl faced off with visitors of his own.

“So this is who Pride is now,” Sloth said in slurred Spanish. Syl followed along easily. Languages had been part of the databases uploaded into his brain. “It’s been a long time. I, too, had hoped not to find you.”

Of the six active Sinners, Syl was actually the one with the most baseline human features despite being as inhuman as any of them. Sloth’s figure was blurred, the space around him warping like the time he played with the most.

“Longer for me than for you,” Syl replied. He kept the voice synthesizer in English. They all understood him. “We’ve never all gathered in the same place before. What brings you here?”

“Not all,” Envy said, her in her native Mandarin. She was also indistinguishable amongst the field of shadows that constantly surrounded her, a dark army of one. “Wrath is dead, and nobody has taken his place. Zero is elsewhere.”

“Wrath lives within you,” Lust said. The magician’s voice changed with every sentence, their appearance doing the same—a greying man one second, a child the next, a college-age woman the next. Nobody knew who the original magician had been before they’d started stealing bodies. “He’s in there somewhere, isn’t he?”

“Not important,” Envy said, waving her hand. “We are not here to talk about the past.”

“Pride. You’ve gone and started an empire,” Greed said, sounding more like a British middle manager than someone who had stolen lives from millions. His physical manifestation resembled that of what Zero’s had been—a living, breathing nervous system writ large built out of blood, metal, and more exotic materials. There was a human somewhere in there, not that it looked like it.

“It’s not mine,” Syl replied. “Is that all?”

“Oh, but it is. Your queen is as much a part of you as your heart is,” Greed countered, which… was fair. “We made agreements, all of us. There are limits.”

Syl knew what he was speaking of. It hadn’t been his decision to take on the mantle of Pride. Zero had given that to him, a long time ago.

“You’re bringing this up late,” Syl said. “I would imagine you would have brought this up earlier. Alone, probably. Why all of you? Why now?”

“There are unwritten rules. A balance.” Lust ignored Syl’s sentence, picking up where Greed left off. “They were made for a reason. A war between us would end the world.”

“The world is already ending,” Gluttony said. “Look around you.”

“You’re taking his side?” Sloth asked. “I thought better of you.”

“I assume you noticed me fooling around with your time stop.” Syl had no time for this posturing. They were better than this. “That was the catalyst, yes?”

“It was,” Sloth confirmed. “We keep each other in check.”

“That was the deal,” Envy added. “Zero must have warned you.”

In that moment, the pieces clicked into place.

“You didn’t all randomly decide to come after me because you thought I was going to drop a gigaton bomb. He sent you.”

There was no need to clarify who he was. Syl hadn’t seen Zero since the original Sinner had shown up on the exoplanet and he’d blasted every last iteration of the machine construct to pieces, but that didn’t mean the machines hadn’t been using his form.

“Nobody sends us to do anything.” Greed’s words dripped with disgust. His actual form dripped blood into the water beneath them. The ocean boiled where it touched down. “We were warned.”

Syl shook his head. “This is a pointless discussion. Zero is dead. He has been dead since the Australian Defense Force put a ninety millimeter railgun shell through his face.”

Sloth, belying his name, was the first to respond to that. “A bold claim. He uses the same magic. The same level.”

“You should have seen direct proof by now that this is something the machines can do,” Syl said. “Lila Adams. The Kingslayer. She died of lunar madness five months ago. I saw her in the days afterward.”

“I’ve seen it,” Lust admitted. “It’s not all that different from how I copy bodies. I can get them right down to the molecule.”

“You’re claiming that the original Sinner has been an artificial intelligence for the past fourteen years,” Greed said matter-of-factly. “Since before there was even a sign of machine life existing past the 30s.”

“Correct,” Syl said. “Any direction or warning you have received from him has been a manipulation. The goal of the machines is to gain information on how we use offensive magic so they can incorporate it for themselves. I’ve seen it for myself.”

He explained straightforwardly and simply the events that had transpired in Kepler-138b. He omitted the part where he’d spent not twelve days but six years and some change on the exoplanet, but everything else—Zero, Lila, the explanation of the machine’s motivations, the existence of extraterrestrial life, artificial Gates—he left in.

“…You can’t possibly expect us to believe that,” Lust said. “I was more willing to trust your words before you mentioned that.”

In lieu of an answer, Syl drew an artifact and triggered it.

A Gate carved itself into existence in front of him.

“I don’t expect anyone to take me at my word,” he said simply.

The Gate was untuned. They still didn’t have a fantastic way to ensure that they could get one to open to an actual intermediary space, but Syl and Bianca had both been practicing tuning them for some time now. While he wasn’t yet capable of finding a specific kind of Gate, he could get to an existing one with reasonable efficiency.

He did so, navigating until he found something close enough to the region they were in. Syl had been in the Gates around this area a few times, and it was relatively simple to find a valid oceanic biome to connect to—just one with no real life in it.

Gluttony was the only one of the Sinners unsurprised by this. She had, after all, been the one discovering the secrets of the Gates alongside Uriel and the leading members of Incarnate—now technically the engineering division of New Auria.

Reactions were instant and varied. Gluttony’s smile somehow grew wider, a stark contrast to the shock clear in the others. Envy’s shadows froze. Sloth’s figure became recognizably human, the passive distortion of his magic faltering in response to the sight. Lust grew more agitated instead, flickering through forms so quickly it was hard to tell if she was human. Greed did the same, the ocean beneath them turning red with his gathered blood.

Creating Gates had already been thought to be impossible, but those tended to be merely improbabilities when it came to magicians. Especially with a Sinner at the wheel, it was within the realm of the believable impossible.

Doing it on the fly with nothing more than spellcasting and a single piece of magical equipment, though? That was a different story.

The effect of Gates and Towers were gradually becoming better known thanks to the unprecedented shakeup that the moonfall had brought. While the mechanics of how they worked were still by and large a mystery, new discoveries and theories abounded, many of which looked at the integration itself.

When magic had entered the world for the first time, it had done so through the emergence of these two structures, with the initial propagation of flux centered entirely around them.

Now, one of their own had found a way to summon the catalyst of magic seemingly at will.

“Zero is also capable of doing this,” Syl said, “but that is because Zero does not exist. The magician formerly under that name is nothing more than a machine construct now, and the leadership—“

“Not leadership,” Lust countered, sticking in the form of a university-aged woman just long enough to get a full sentence out. “Guidance.”

“The guidance he provided is intentional manipulation to turn this planet into a farm for the machines,” Syl said. “I would prefer not to involve myself too deeply into more worldly affairs, but my priority lies with the human race.”

“You aren’t much of a human yourself anymore,” Gluttony pointed out. “None of us are.”

“We were,” Syl said. “I will not prioritize the whims of a machine over that of the race we created ourselves from. Evolution is desirable. Evolution for the sake of dying to benefit an intelligence that is not our own is not.”

That got multiple of the other Sinners talking, each of them with their own particular point about what he’d said or what Zero had told them or whatever other insignificant issue they had, but Syl ignored them all. He couldn’t care less about the complaints they had.

“To that end,” he said, “the Sinners in their original form are no longer necessary. Keep your titles if you like. I move to dissolve this organization the machines have built. Go your separate ways, or don’t—we should not serve a puppet of those who seek to enslave us.”

“There is no organization to dissolve,” Greed said. “We have always been alone.”

“Alone except for the master you want to serve,” Syl shot back. “I am cutting us off from Zero, one way or another. Use your power to advance humanity to its necessary next stage, not end it.”

“You aren’t asking, are you?” Lust asked.

“I am not.”

“Then this is not a movement.” Envy’s shadows stirred, a dark blanket spreading over the ocean, mixing with the blood within it. “This is a coup.”

So you admit that you are second to one, Syl thought.

He had felt the same way before. Zero was a mythological figure. One of the original mages. The only magician to figure out free casting and use it effectively. The pinnacle of the next phase of humanity that magicians could reach eventually.

Except he wasn’t human. He might have been, once upon a time. But he was dead now, and Syll was not.

Syl refused to bend the knee like the others had.

“If you want to call it that.” He readied flux in his body, memorized circuits flaring with power, simmering just underneath the surface. “Do you?”

Envy’s reply came in a storm of flux, the already dim light of the sun darkening to nothing.

Pseudo-paragon-class projection-type spell: Caliburnus. A shadow of the spell Lila Adams had once used as her signature.

Pseudo-paragon-class dual-type projection-fortification spell: Charybdis. Another shadow, this one of a spell the late Wrath had once used.

Paragon-class esoteric-type spell: That Which I Cannot Possess. One of Envy’s signature spells—the one that drew out the spell patterns she had stored inside conjured shadows.

“So it’s going to be like that, then.”

With an invitation like that, there was no world where Syl could do anything but respond. His response brought on others.

Six paragon-class magicians. Six Sinners, each of them considered a monster in a class of their own.

All six flashed into action at once.

Utter chaos descended upon San Francisco for the third time in three years.