B3 Chapter 11 - Domination

Syl had suspected something was wrong with the converted black site for some time now. Telemetry from sensors Incarnate had distributed alongside the food synthesizers, water purifiers, and oxygenators indicated a continued sharp uptick in flux presence there. Even when Uriel had confirmed that they were in the clear, he’d been suspicious.

Bianca had cleared her site with no difficulty. Just like Syl, she preferred efficiency over power, but where Pride was willing to overwhelm a situation with raw flux, she went in the opposite extreme. One to two spells per person. Tactical-class or lower only. She had taken no survivors—which, admittedly, was a little easier to do than Syl’s unconscious captures, but was still nothing short of extraordinary against the type of master-class enemies she was facing.

In the world they were in right now, though, the one where the weak could do little more than survive, extraordinary was a necessity.

That aside, Bianca clearing out the site she’d been assigned to had also coincided with the elimination of all abnormal flux signals in the area besides her own. Syl knew her pattern as well as his own, so confirming her victory had been easy, not even necessitating his personal presence.

He’d predicted Uriel would have the most trouble. Waylan had already started becoming a loose cannon, and he was the one who Syl had considered the most likely to hold ties back to his old family.

One thing had led to another. Now he was here.

No wonder the flux was strange. Adonis aside, Uriel and Waylan had been moments away from coming to blows by the looks of it. Both of them had their FCDs drawn and active, and the expression on Waylan’s face and the fizzled-out EMP device at his feet told Syl a good chunk of the story.

Adonis completed it.

Buying time while waiting for a superior magician for support, Syl signed at Waylan. Not the worst tactic when you know you’re outmatched.

“What?” Waylan asked, confused. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

Syl huffed out a sigh, looking down at Adonis.

Don’t even think about it, he signed.

The Red patriarch thought about it.

Syl gestured towards Uriel, giving her a sign that even Waylan would understand. Shorthand in  the Aurian military. Stay out of this.

Though Syl had knocked out a good chunk of the Red’s power armor when he’d spotted him earlier including the powered flight built into the thing, enough of it was still functional for him to right himself quickly, a burst of light accompanying the spell his full-body FCD cast on himself.

Master-class fortification-type spell. Supernova.

A Red spell. Syl was familiar with it. It sharply increased the user’s reaction time, speed, power—everything a duelist would need. With enough flux, it would push them beyond superhuman and into the realm of absurdity.

He disregarded the immediate threat, choosing to send a message instead. Waylan wouldn’t understand him anyway, and he didn’t want him pushing his way in and screwing with this.

Syl: I assume we both would prefer the technology here remain intact. I propose a duel. One on one. I’ll refrain from destroying you immediately. In exchange, if I win, I want you to never touch my property again.

Adonis snorted, lines of flux igniting within the power armor like a nervous system. In some ways, this FCD resembled Syl’s own Horizon Breaker, which wasn’t surprising. He had shared parts of the design, after all.

“You want to duel me,” he said. “You might as well surrender now.”

Syl: Will you honor the terms?

The strategic-class’ face was hidden by his FCD, but Syl could practically see the grin.

“Tradition is what separates us from the animals, after all,” Adonis said, spreading his hands. “This venue is acceptable, I presume?”

This venue meant the mostly vacant command center that Syl had spiked him into with a burst of enhanced gravity. It had already been running on a skeleton crew, but evacuation orders had emptied it more.

Syl nodded. 

“Waylan, if you would,” Adonis said, gesturing towards the younger Red.

Said magician looked a bit out of his depth, freezing at the gesture.

“R-right,” Waylan said, righting himself. “Um, the duel will end when one party is incapacitated, cannot adequately continue to cast, or acknowledges defeat. Duelist Adonis Red. Do you accept the terms of the duel?”

“In nomine virtutis,” Adonis said. “I accept.”

“Duelist Sylvester Auria—“

A-class sabotage-type spell, Dead Man’s Tongue. Syl silenced Waylan with a gesture.

You may address me as Pride, he signed.

Adonis froze.

Letting the silence spell drop, Syl pointed at Waylan again.

“Duelist… Pride. Do you accept the terms of the duel?”

Syl nodded. The rules permitted for a mute magician to participate in a duel, though the cases were rare. That was sufficient acknowledgment.

“Then… begin when you are ready.”

The Reds had been renowned across not only Auria but internationally as a family of duelists. Their record in even duels against paragon-class magicians from other countries were near flawless. Adonis in particular had victories against Lingdaoese, English, and Polarian paragons.

None of those duels had been to the death, of course, but the principles applied.

Syl had gained a considerable amount of knowledge in recent months, but he needed not apply any of it to this fight.

Against any of the Reds, he had been sure of his victory since he’d been twelve years old. It was no unjustified pride, either.

He was equipped with a generalist FCD, one that he could carry in the palm of his hand and would overheat if he passed more than a couple strategic-class spells through it. Adonis had a specialized one that would enhance his spells to the. Point of potentially even letting him cast a paragon-class spell. Supernova had already been applied to him, and he could now move faster than any normal human being could even hope to react to.

Syl stepped forward casually. Horizon Breaker’s claws were set into him, the device upgraded and recalibrated with bonuses from the knowledge they’d gained from the machines. He could have activated and killed everyone standing here in a moment. Hell, he could have cast Ruin a couple of times and sacrified his generalist FCD to reduce even a strategic-class magician to ash. As far as he knew, no Aurian magician had ever developed a counter to that.

Instead, he reached into his pocket and drew a fist-sized chunk of 4P-chaonite coated in lunar regolith. The very supposedly banned material utilized in spell jammers was nothing short of ubiquitous inside the lunar Gates. As a matter of fact, it had even been incorporated into the machine’s own manufacturing.

Triggering it only required a slight investment of flux, creating a magic jamming field that affected the entire area.

Naturally, Adonis’ armor was shielded. Even if it couldn’t perfectly block out the disruption, it was tough enough to keep his active spells on.

Syl tilted his head, then gestured in a manner even Waylan could recognize.

Come at me.

#

Fear crept over Adonis’ back. He had known that the monster leading Incarnate was the same reclusive paragon-class magician that had been such a boon to Auria during the third world war, but he hadn’t heard of any association between this boy and a Sinner until today.

It was a scare tactic, he knew. The difference between one of those inhuman freaks of nature and a real human magician was vast enough to put off even the most experienced magicians. But no Sinner would be wasting his time in an irrelevant Aurian family trying to help people. Especially not Pride.

Right?

He shook off the doubts, focusing on the fight before him. Supernova amplified his senses, presenting the world to him in slow motion.

Mind games aside, the boy’s fighting style could be described as idiotic at best. He’d weakened himself only, jamming his own magic and wielding a utilitarian FCD that looked more suited to disaster relief than anything else.

You are Adonis Red, he reminded himself. Six-time victor against paragons. The Invisible Blade. You are undefeated.

Everything was logically stacked against Adonis’ opponent. Paragon or not, there was a level of confidence that was simply arrogance, and this magician had clearly reached it. He was preventing himself from casting any real magic and he had no other weapons.

Adonis, on the other hand, had his trademark chain-link sword. It extended forth from his FCD’s arm, energized with Atomic Blade, a master-class fortification-type spell that would make it cut through nearly everything. Shielded from the jamming field by the enclosure of the armor, which had been designed to work in the jammer-heavy environments before world agreements had seen chaonite banned, he was completely fine in this environment.

Adonis decided to stop second-guessing himself and simply move. He dashed forward, the world around him blurring slightly as he achieved speeds higher than any human should have been able to achieve. In one practiced swing, he sliced his way through any defensive spells that should have been there—not that there were any, since the idiot had just turned his own spells off—and reached flesh.

At least, he should have.

Instead, he came to a screaming halt, the edge of his blade not a centimeter from the unmoving magician’s neck. Vibrations coursed up and down the FCD like he’d hit something solid, his momentum stuttering into nothing.

Syl’s gaze bored into Adonis’, his eyes finding the Red’s even behind his helmet.

There was nothing in those pupils. They might have been grey or brown or black—even looking directly at them, Adonis couldn’t say. The sole, overwhelming impression he understood was that there was death in Syl’s eyes.

No, Adonis thought. Not Syl. 

Pride.

He tried to turn back and retreat to wind up another strike, adjusting his magic to cast a suite of movement, offense, and defense spells at once. This was what he specialized in—wearing down each countermeasure that his opponent could wield, outspeeding and outmaneuvering them until it was over. Adonis’ spellset was versatile enough to slip him out of nearly every situation.

Except the flux that had stopped him, the dense, layered, unparalleled substance before him, didn’t let him. It lanced out, completely undisturbed by the jamming field—because how could it? There was no spell structure to disrupt.

It pierced through his suit, breaking past the measures he’d had designed, and alien flux patterns met his own.

One by one, each of his spells failed, clinically demolished on a structural level. The magic particles composing them dispersed, threatening backlash, but Adonis had been countercast before. He redirected the flux, avoiding the trap that so many amateur duelists fell into, and yet…

This should have been impossible. He couldn’t fucking move. Unfathomable pressure pushed down on him, locking down his body as well as his magic. Dread turned into outright panic.

This—raw manifestation of flux so powerful it could act as spellwork even without the formation of a spell pattern, casually countercasting a total of five spells at once—it wasn’t the kind of magic any human should have had.

But then again, the Sinners had left humanity behind a while ago.

Adonis had not faced one in combat before, and for that he had counted himself lucky. The stories were inflated, he knew, but he had still never wanted to test his mettle against one of them.

As Pride casually raked his fingers over the joint between the FCD power armor’s wrist and the chain-link blade and severed it, claws of pure flux tearing through it like a hot knife through butter, Adonis realized that his so-called knowledge had been false.

The stories hadn’t been inflated. If anything, they had been sanded down.

The supposed student reached for Adonis’ helmet. It was vacuum-sealed, rated to be used in outer space or in the Mariana Trench. Its inbuilt defenses were such that it could take strategic-class spells head-on and not break. The functionality was multipurpose. It had contingencies upon contingencies upon contingencies.

With a single, light touch, the faceplate popped off, gas hissing out of the pressurized artificial atmosphere within. Syl reached in further, pulling the connected mechanism out entirely, then placed it on its own face.

It should have never been able to connect to another FCD. It had been designed to recognize one biological signature and one only.

Yet in a matter of instants, the wires snapped into place behind Pride’s back, the Sinner hijacking a piece of technology that was the result of decades of cross-family innovation.

Fear overwhelmed Adonis. He wasn’t too arrogant to deny that. He was outright terrified of this thing before him. There was nothing he could even think of doing. The Red wasn’t out of his bag of tricks—far from it. Despite that, a bone-deep certainty that reaching for any of them would result in a swift death and nothing more productive than pain for himself and those he cared about stopped him from attempting any of them.

The faceplate clicked into place with a hiss, adjusting to fit a face without a helmet. It hissed as it expelled gases. A digital rumble followed, followed by synthesized words.

“I win.”