B3 Chapter 20 - Inhuman

Uriel hadn’t wanted to take on the name of a Sinner, but she wasn’t going to say no to the fact that she was currently able to wield influence that went significantly beyond the limit of her actual abilities.

It was just a temporary measure. There was a part of her that instinctively rebelled against it. She did not deserve the title of the magician who had been the single instrumental part of elevating her to her current heights, but she also knew that they couldn’t afford to give up any advantage they had.

Since Pride—the real Pride—had vanished, another few million had died. The death rate had started to slow, though. While wars continued to rage on, enough people had made their way to bunkers and shelters, and the remaining survivors were by and large magicians with at least enough talent to keep themselves alive. Earth’s population had been knocked down by a full third, and current projections made by Jennifer’s camp estimated that only about half of the pre-war population—roughly three point two billion—would survive the year.

That was the average-case scenario, at least. There were best cases where the remaining casualties were limited to the low millions, but that was a fantasy that could only occur if everyone suddenly decided to start working together. There were worst cases to simulate too, of course, and those often resulted in the near-total extinction of humanity, though even then there would be survivors. There were never not survivors.

Viridian-Incarnate’s stated goal was to drive the world as close as possible to their best case scenario, but that wasn’t exactly what they were doing right now. Gluttony and Uriel continued going on expeditions to Gates across the continent, building more thorough methodology for their data collection.

At the moment, their number one priority was the retrieval of Pride and his partner magician.

In the process, they accidentally made a name for themselves. While Uriel was never recognized for who she actually was, all data associated with her wiped out without a trace when they departed each Gate incident, there were a number of interested organizations tracking her flux trail every time she left. Sinners were typically inactive for long periods of time and showed up with wildly different magic patterns between appearances, but in these unprecedented times, all seven—supposedly—were active nearly every day, which had steadily brought on tracking.

The Viridian-Incarnate alliance was gaining a lot of attention from outside the boundaries thanks to that. Both Gluttony and Uriel returning to it multiple times and it not only remaining intact but steadily growing in power brought it notice.

That was the final nail in the coffin for any other power trying to claim legitimacy in what had been Auria. The prismatics had fallen apart, seemingly due to infighting. The core members of Viridian-Incarnate were aware of the truth, of course. The Reds had been turned by Syl, and they continued fearing the presence of Pride as they ran their family and others through a bloodbath. The Orange family had been willing to run defense for Viridian-Incarnate since the start, and having them split off had been simple enough. At this point, especially to Uriel, the families that had once been the end goal of her magician career were little more than an afterthought.

It was a jarring realization. She dealt with them on occasion, her and Gluttony’s mere presence enough to scare off any prismatic teams trying to harvest Gates in their area, but she barely even registered who she was dealing with.

Thanks to Syl, she had seen the world for what it was and what it could be.

Bit by bit, they gathered resources and data, clearing Gate after Gate with breaks only to stop fragments. As a byproduct, they stabilized a solid chunk of the North American continent. Nobody wanted to be fighting in the area that two Sinners would be in shortly, and their combined efforts eliminated even the no longer quite as rare paragon-class Gates with ease.

Jennifer was making decent progress, it seemed, but she’d run into a few difficultites.

Uriel caught the engineer one early morning after returning for a status update. Gluttony was elsewhere, brute-forcing her way through one of the now-hyperactive Towers.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“I don’t have a fucking team,” Jennifer sighed, head in her hands. She clearly hadn’t been sleeping, evidenced by the empty cans of stimulants surrounding her. “And the Gate data’s really good, but it’s just not enough. There’s something I’m not seeing.”

“What would you need the team for?” Uriel asked.

“Production,” Jennifer replied instantly. “I can work a lot of the fabs myself, but this is a larger scale project than I’m used to working on. After a metric shitload of analysis, I have a prototype that mimics some of the tech they used. Some.”

“Show me.”

Jennifer did, stumbling through a mess of scattered blueprints, physical data blocks, and notes. The prototype in question was an insanely intricate device the size of a human torso. Its innards were exposed to the air, and though Uriel couldn’t see all of it, it was clearly so dense with magic patterns that it was nearly unparseable. She was much better at reading magic herself now that she had gone through the program of enhancing herself with other magicians, but that was still beyond her.

Activating it was also a multi-step process, but after a series of clicks, beeps, and whirs that meant nothing to Uriel, the device projected a beam of energy into a waiting empty metal frame maybe a little larger than a makeup mirror.

Amorphous, iridescent light spread into existence there, filling the gap.

Even Uriel, whose knowledge of and context for magic had increase vastly of late, was taken aback.

“That’s a Gate,” she said. “You just created a Gate.”

“Not quite,” Jennifer replied tiredly, a smile stretching itself across her cheeks despite her words. “As far as I can tell, there’s nothing on the others side. I can modify the parameters, but it’s more of the same.”

“That’s still ridiculously impressive,” Uriel said, throwing an arm around the engineer. “You’ve done in two weeks what the rest of the world hasn’t managed in seven and a half decades. Give yourself some credit.”

“There you are,” Jennifer whispered. “I thought you were gone.”

“What do you mean?” That hadn’t been the reaction Uriel had expected.

“The woman I used to work with,” Jennifer said. “You from last year. It hasn’t been six months, even, but he’s eroded almost all trace of that away.”

“Syl?” Uriel said. It wasn’t a question. “You can’t deny that he’s changed you, too. He’s opening us to new worlds.”

“At the cost of being human.”

“It’s not a cost,” Uriel said. “I want the same things you do, Jennifer. To change the world for the better. That’s not happening with our bodies as messy as they are.”

“You can tell me that again.” Jennifer winced, rubbing her eyes. “I just miss when we could have a nice conversation about nothing of importance over coffee. Speaking of which. I should put on another pot.”

“That day’ll come. We just need to get out the other end of this first.” The reassurance was as much for herself as it was for the engineer. “As to the coffee… how long has it been since you slept?”

“Thirty… thirty-two hours, maybe?” Jennifer yawned. “You?”

“Fifteen days.”

Uriel flicked her fingers across her FCD, actively forming spell processes freely as she did. A Cascadian technique, but just because she didn’t care for its source didn’t mean it didn’t work.

She laid her hand to Jennifer’s forehead, finishing the spell.

The spell didn’t actually have a class. By flux output, it would be somewhere around C- or B-class. By complexity, it would be at least strategic. It didn’t quite fit into the existing magical dogma, but they were quickly finding that very little did.

Purification-type spell: Nighttime Refresh.

Jennifer blinked in shock. “What the hell?”

“The Blues never shared their spells, but the processes we’ve done to make me more magician and less Uriel have worked wonders,” she replied. “This is one of those. A regenerative spell that cleanses toxins the same way sleep does. It’s a variation of one of the purification-type spells the Blues specialized in combined with some of the Violet methodology.

“There are things other than human trying to end our world, Jennifer. We’re not going to win if we’re not willing to become more than what we are.”

#

Syl and Bianca flew above a ruined planet.

There was no trace of the machines anymore. With the amount of flux he had been able to gather from this planet and Bianca supporting him, it had been a much more controlled set of conditions for research than it had been last time.

Horizon Breaker hadn’t been built for defensive spells, but it hadn’t been the only FCD he’d brought. His bottled time had been channeled through the second full-body FCD he’d carried—the one built into the modified pressure suit. Rather than the three or so years he’d managed to squeeze out of his previous daily-use FCDs in Taiwan before they had given up the ghost and melted, he and Bianca had been able to spend a comfortable six without the pressure suit coming close to destroying itself.

In the aftermath, destroying the remaining machines had been easy.

Their gambit had been obvious once Syl knew what to look for. The Gate wouldn’t have led anywhere near their home. “Zero” had been trying to strand them somewhere where either they would be forced to create more esoterica from first principles or, more likely, send them to one of their vaunted type 1 planets where they would adapt to their surroundings and feed the AI data or die.

Assuming the recording had been accurate, other civilizations had magic beyond paragon-class. It had long been assumed that there was a simple upper limit to the amount of complex flux one human body could contain before it consumed itself in its own artificial catalyst event, but that was clearly not the case for all bodies.

Syl wondered how much less human he would have to be before he could cast a single spell that wiped out a planet. He’d been able to eliminate almost the entirety of Kepler-138b, but that had been over a period of time and with multiple paragon-class spells.

That was besides the point right now. He had learned what he had needed to do, and he hadn’t been alone to do it.

Bianca had been critical. Her flux had no specialty. Its complete neutrality had lended itself to the multi-process spells she favored, and it also meant that she was in sync with the natural state of a Gate.

There were too many intricacies in the process of creating a Gate to sum it up quickly, but the gist of doing it was that someone or something needed to act as the tuner, bridging the gap between one world and another. Bianca’s neutral flux bled into that bridge, infecting the violently unstable magic on either end and forcibly stabilizing it just like she’d done to Syl’s magic pool when she’d been selected initially

An open Gate lay in front of them, unstably flickering. They’d had to steal the framework in which the portal would open from the machines, not having a factory of their own to synthesize them with, but that had been easy after they’d killed all of them.

They entered without a word. Speaking was unnecessary. They had operated with each other for so long now that they didn’t need conversation to take a course of action they’d decided on subjective years ago.

It wasn’t that much of a surprise that the tunnel that opened on the other end wasn’t the same one they’d entered through. It had been difficult enough to reach a middle ground of any kind—even after getting the freedom to experiment with the Gate frame as they pleased after Syl had systematically eliminated every single remaining trace of the machines on the exoplanet, they had needed a great deal of time to correctly tune it. The act of shaking the frame free from its rooted position inside the surviving machines had messed its initial tuning up, making it substantially harder to activate.

Their goal from here on out was to tune the Gate from the intermediary plane of existence they found themselves in, forcibly restabilizing it by changing where it was connected to repeatedly. With their new understanding of this kind of magic, it was the likeliest play they had for reconnecting to Earth.

It took time, which they were expecting. Connecting to new locations from the inside actually modified the composition of the Gate around them. It was comparable to being on the inside of a Tower when its floor changed.

Their goals were simple—retune the Gate to either match Earth or find part of a Tower on Earth that would have a similar enough composition for their Gate to open into it.

Simple didn’t mean easy, of course, and hours turned into days. There was a lot of good data to absorb, but it was disconcerting being stuck in a reality whose existence was governed by a Gate that could and would destabilize entirely within a day or two if not upkept.

They did not sleep, though they did drink synthesized water and maintained food upkeep through nutrient slurries in the pressure suit. Other than that, it was just Bianca retuning their subspace and Syl doing everything he could to learn more about the limits of magic as they did.

Apart from that, they had some discussion of an idea they’d developed during their most recent six-year time-stop stunt. It was one that theoretically could shut down the entirety of the machine army, even those not currently on Earth, but it was also a risky enough plan that neither of them particularly wanted to attempt it until they had tested pieces of it much more.

“I do hope we can return to a normal life one of these days,” Bianca said a few days into their isolation. “It’s nice to live in a dream world sometimes.”

“I don’t think normal is a factor in anything anymore.”

“I suppose so.”

And that was that. Nothing else needed to be said. They’d rehashed this time and time again, and they both knew where they stood. Neither of them knew anyone as well as they did each other, and they were both well aware of who and what they were.

Weapons to the last.

Their process was ultimately interrupted twelve days in when a Gate that wasn’t their own flashed into existence, accessing the same subspace they were in.

A drone passed through it. Syl recognized the model.

That’s mine.

“Welcome home,” Bianca said. “Shall we?”

They’d had a lot of time to plan. They knew what their plan was now. Things had changed in the time since they’d first faced the machines.

Pride had been active since shortly after the fourth world war had started, but he hadn’t truly played that major a role in the world other than in his home country.

It was time for that to change.

Together, Syl and Bianca stepped through the Gate.