B3 Chapter 12 - Calamity

Syl had been meaning to get around to restoring something of a voice to himself. It had been the least of a long list of priorities, and the process of putting an FCD together that was capable of acting as a stand-in for his vocal chords was, while not terribly difficult, time-consuming. With how crucial every minute was in their current state, he hadn’t spared any time to calibrate and create a replacement for the device he’d used for so long.

The duelist faceplate would serve as a replacement. He didn’t particularly care for most of the technology embedded in it—some of it was somewhat innovative, but it was outdated at best now that the world had insights from the machines in the moon.

It did, however, carry a voice synthesis program. While it wasn’t as effective for Syl as the custom devices he’d had made for himself, the design was meant for the user to be able to communicate if they were silenced for whatever reason. Eye tracking and flux processing did the rest, converting movements and intent into words. Not quite the same as speaking with his own voice, but it was usable.

Syl still had Adonis by the armor. This hadn’t been the only way to win. It certainly hadn’t been the most efficient way to win. It had, however, gotten the point across. More importantly to Syl, it had been a good test of his restorative capabilities.

At this point, he wasn’t yet at his full capacity. If he had been, he might have been able to stop one person by simply overwhelming them with flux—though that would have left him pretty gassed with regards to any follow-up. This time, he’d created the illusion of having that typical overwhelming amount of power by surgically targeting the spells and movement joints in Adonis’ armor. Fear and spell backfires had done the rest.

He was quickly on his way, though. Syl’s period of rest had been valuable for him. While it had come at an extremely inconvenient time, his relative inactivity had been crucial for restoring his magical capacity up to a usable amount.

At the point he was at now, his magical capacity wasn’t up to his usual standard but was certainly high enough to earn him the classification of paragon. That was more than enough to handle a strategic-class who was a little inexperienced when it came to combat against those with true power.

In a fair fight, Adonis could probably win against anyone. His problem, as it stood, was that there was no such thing as a fair fight between two magicians. Not a real one, at least.

Syl looked at the now unmasked Adonis, tilting his head and fiddling with the voice synthesis program.

“Do you accept your loss?”

Adonis’ expression was paralyzed, but he managed a nod.

Syl dropped the strategic class magician.

“This concludes the duel, then,” he said. “Withdraw any surviving members of your task force.”

“How the fuck did you do that?” Waylan asked, breaking the spectators’ silence.

“I thought you weren’t interested in the methods of monsters,” Uriel snipped.

Syl turned to look at both of them, which shut Waylan up quickly.

“Remind me,” he said. “What is the Indigo family doing?”

“The same thing as these guys, really,” Uriel said, gesturing towards Waylan and Adonis. “Fighting for scraps while the world ends around us.”

“Then this will not be the end of the matter.” The vocal synthesis software inflected the words, but it was devoid of much other emotion. “I would much prefer not to deal with them while we have greater problems.”

Syl turned back towards Adonis, releasing him. The Red strategic didn’t make an immediate move to run, feet planted where they were.

Hm. There was an idea. He had kept this magician alive because it would be more of a pain and waste of time wiping out the family to the last—plus, there was never a guarantee that one could eliminate every part of an associated group, and doing so would often spark retributions from allied groups. A threat would have theoretically been more effective.

At this point, though, he was rapidly growing tired of people getting in the way of his efforts to improve. While he could deal with any individual magician with little difficulty, eliminating an organized, distributed effort like the prismatics was far more of a time investment.

“Which groups is the Red family operating with?” Syl asked.

“Indigo, Violet, Blue,” Uriel volunteered. “Golds are dead, Viridians are ours, Oranges are quiet.”

Adonis remained silent.

“I would recommend you volunteer information,” Syl said. He pointed towards Waylan. “Your traitor isn’t going to survive much longer otherwise.”

While Syl was familiar with the enhanced interrogation methods that had proved most effective for extracting information from a captive, they were time-consuming, resource-intensive, and messy. This was faster. Neater. It also didn’t ruin the othe

“Traitor?” Waylan asked, suddenly panicked.

“No amount of encryption will stop me from reading you,” Syl replied, the expression of the synthesized voice as flat as he felt. “I thought you knew better.”

“He’s served his purpose,” Adonis said. “He has no further part in this. My sins are not his to carry.”

“You knew he was coming?” Uriel asked Waylan. She scoffed, putting two and two together. “You were buying time for him, weren’t you? After all your talk about not wanting to go against Syl.”

“I never—“

Shut up, Syl signed. He didn’t even need to cast. Waylan got the idea.

“Self-preservation seems to be in your repertoire,” Syl said to Adonis. “If you want to survive the next day, I would recommend you do as I say.”

“What am I even supposed to say to that?” the strategic asked.

“Maybe ‘yes’ or ‘thank you for sparing my life,’” Uriel commented. “Better yet, nothing.”

Adonis chose the latter.

“Your options are the following,” Syl said. “First. You can call off all your attacks on Viridian and Incarnate properties. Order the rest of the prismatic coalition to do the same. Failing that, kill their leadership until someone complies. You should be competent enough to do that, at least.”

“You can’t seriously expect me to—“

Syl amped up the amount of flux he was outputting, the sheer presence of the magic weighing on the other magician so much that he stopped talking.

“I can and will. Your other option is to die. I have no interest in dealing with you if you plan on being as irritatingly arrogant as the others. You likely have a reasonable successor somewhere. Maybe even right here.”

Waylan, wisely, remained silent.

“Go,” Syl said. “Both of you. Just remember that you are being watched. I do not have the patience to kill your entire bloodline, but I can make an exception for either of you.”

Adonis’ expression crumpled under the weight of Syl’s magic, and slowly, he nodded.

Pride was already leaving. The situation here was as good as resolved. He had better work to attend to.

#

When Syl and Uriel re-entered the Viridian control center, Bianca and Jennifer were already there, idly chatting as Jennifer reran her latest set of analyses.

“Hello again, Uriel, Sy—oh, where the hell’d you get that?” Jennifer asked.

“Off Adonis Red’s face,” Uriel said drily. “He’s still alive, by the way.”

“You met a prismatic and he survived?” Bianca asked, surprised. “I assume Waylan was the problem, then.”

“He was one of them,” Syl confirmed. “I redirected them towards the other prismatics.”

“It has a synthesizer!” Bianca exclaimed. “That’ll save us some time.”

“Redirecting prismatics. That definitely won’t turn out bloody,” Jennifer snorted. “It’ll be nice if it gets them off our back. You’re not going to just end them yourself?”

“We have better things to worry about than killing prismatics,” Bianca said. “Not even the other Sinners are constantly in the field. The ones that are aren’t going around resolving petty border disputes, either.”

“Bit more than petty, I think,” Jennifer said. “We’re at, what, eight million dead? Nine?”

“Somewhere around there.” Bianca shrugged. “The toll worldwide is closer to two billion than one now. I think that matters more.”

“Well, I have good news on that front.” Jennifer swiveled aroundin her chair. “Tests look good. We’ll be ready to fire our very own doomsday weapon within the week.”

“How many more impact events are we projecting?” Syl asked.

“Thirty to forty in the next month. Five are going to be over us. First one’s going to drop in eight days. Mass driver should be about online by then.”

“Excellent,” Syl said. “I’ll re-prepare the space program. We’re getting there first this time. I want to know how the machines operate their Gates.”

“I’m personally curious what they’re coming for,” Jennifer said. “Always easier to understand the effects when you can trace it back to the cause.”

“Isn’t it the same goal that they were attempting before?” Uriel asked, crossing her arms and levitating—an entirely unnecessary display of power, but Syl had done the same when he’d first gained the ability. “Reproduce and replace.”

“If that was the case, then they would have emerged a long time ago, wouldn’t they?” Jennifer replied.

“Not if they only reached full production capability recently.” Uriel drummed her fingers on the table. “If you find the right readings in the right places—though I guess most of those places are gone now, what with Auria being in ruins and all—you can find uncensored history of the machines. Humans were the driver of all of their growth early on, whether that was through giving them information or actively constructing pieces of them. It wasn’t until the last five years of their existence that they started posing a threat, and not until the last year that they reached worldwide threat scaling.”

“Exponential growth,” Jennifer said. “You’re saying that they might have just established themself recently. I don’t see how that’s possible. If their manufacturing capacity just reached that level, maybe, but the fact that they’re still alive indicates that they’ve been around for decades. With that much raw material, they should have been able to do this a long time ago.”

“They have been active since at least the third world war,” Syl added.

He’d explained his discoveries to them before. Zero had survived his death and subsequent catalyst event through the AI, somehow. For that to happen, it had to mean that the machines had achieved some level of functionality then.

“We might be missing something,” Bianca said. “The facts we have don’t line up, which either mean our facts are wrong or we don’t have all of them yet.”

“Our next opportunity to explore more is in eight days,” Syl said. “We have new countermeasures. New interfaces. We’ll see what we can glean.”

#

Around the world, the calamity continued. There were few events in global history that could even hope to compare. By the end of the first month, the casualty count had ticked up to the point where even the integration’s numbers could no longer compare.

Just like the previous world war, deaths scaled as it progressed. Infrastructure fractured, war raged, supply chains disintegrated, and chaos reigned supreme.

That said, at a certain point, the sundered fragments of the moon stopped killing as many. Where each fragment had started by killing millions to tens of millions, certain nations started finding their weapon development programs enhanced by technology that only a very small group of people could understand. 

Though all of them were trying to advance themselves, only two or three countries had managed any breakthroughs on their own. Many of the rest had research teams working around the clock that weren’t amounting much until they found files sitting on their encrypted, protected systems marked with a single message.

Don’t misuse this.

Pride goes before the fall.

Incarnate.

While it wasn’t instant, innovations coming from those did bolster national defenses across the globe. In combination with the paragon-class magicians and the Seven Sinners—excepting Zero but now including Pride—they started making more consistent pushbacks. Many fragments were pushed back into orbit, while others were lowered into the ocean with almost zero speed, creating new islands that were immediately fought over.

Deaths started emerging from other causes, though. Fighting grew unnaturally fierce in areas. Pieces of the fragments were spotted splitting off from the main chunk and impacting, from which flux and technological emissions were spotted. In the following days, an effect that quickly gained the name of lunar madness overtook magicians in the surrounding areas. Comparable to catalyst events, magicians from C-class to strategic emitted all the flux stored in their body, often perishing in the process. If they didn’t manage to kill themselves, someone else stopped them—without that, one magician could take out thousands more.

The areas of Auria occupied by the Viridians and Incarnate largely avoided lunar madness, but they did have to readjust their strategies for dealing with the meteorites in the wake.

When they tested the mass driver for the first time, their adjustments came to fruition. Rather than replicate a stasis effect, it placed the fragment into an orbit that matched the Earth’s spin.

Given what they planned on doing, their selection of magicians was significantly more selective. Only three human magicians stepped out of the ship, with the fourth and fifth running ops and acting as the connection from Earth to the fragment. Avery, who Jennifer had needed to push for a lot in order to even get on, and Aaron, the same magician who’d come last time, remained there. Vivian had been offered, but she’d taken a significant injury when she’d been fighting off hostile opportunists while assisting with an East American fragment and was still recovering.

Last time, Syl and his group had sought to peacefully identify technology to integrate into their new discoveries.

This time, their objectives had evolved.

Pride, Bianca, and Uriel settled down onto the fragment to find open Gates already waiting for them.

Bianca: Let’s make some history.