B3 Chapter 9 - Defense

The strike team deployed to the Pasatiempo Viridian complex was lethally overprepared for a community of around fifty thousand refugees and woefully underprepared for a single Sinner.

Each of the Viridian facilities that had been converted had undergone a hasty, incomplete process. While the building itself couldn’t be and hadn’t been expanded far in the two weeks since the start of the war, temporary shield generators placed every few hundred feet provided shelter enough for everyone under them, protecting them from the elements, radiation, and a fair bit of external hostility. Food and water was also consistently supplied, differentiating it from other settlements or doomsday bunkers where resources had only been enough for the lucky few allowed in.

Given the sudden, explosive scale of the operation, it was a miracle that there were defenses at all. They were rudimentary, intended more at keeping people safe from incidental monster attacks from newly-forming Gates in the devastated Aurian landscape than to protect the core functions of the place against attackers.

This specific strike team was a group of a dozen magicians sparsely organized from the Indigo, Red, Violet, and Blue families. None of them were particularly used to working with members of the other families, but desperate times meant desperate measures. Given the relative ease of attacking a fairly unguarded site, this was also meant as practice for them.

Their target were food synthesizers, flux batteries, and nuclear power generators. Though the prismatic coalition had their own supply of those, they didn’t have enough to remain self-sufficient. Many of their investments in those had been poisoned or destroyed wholesale by the Cascadian offensive, and the infrastructure was almost entirely missing now. Meanwhile, the Incarnate-supplied synthesizers that the Viridians were currently using were effective on their own.

The group of prismatic magicians were all master-class with the exception of one. Their leader was a Red—Darren Red, Waylan’s uncle. As a strategic-class duelist, nobody could put up even token resistance. Most people just ignored the group as they moved through the masses, slicing through the shields without issue. Few who had survived this long wanted to risk the lives they’d fought for by trying to stand up against clearly military magicians.

Few didn’t mean none, though. A significant chunk of the refugees were magicians themselves, and there were some with actual skill amongst them. Here or there, there were patches of A- and tactical-class magicians who’d formed informal policing units. They tried to question the prismatic contingent and suffered dearly for it.

The line of thinking at the moment was very clear cut. Those who did not immediately submit were enemies. Darren didn’t even slow down as he moved, dashing in bursts of absurd speed and cutting resistance down with thin blades too small and quick for the naked eye to see.

There were over five kilometers of refugee bubbles surrounding the Viridian site itself, some of which were partially underwater. Many of those forcefield bubbles had held when the Santa Cruz tsunami had wiped most of the rest of the landscape clean. Some hadn’t, and those tended to be pretty obvious; they were the ones that had sunken into flooded craters.

The strike team reached the site with little resistance. Breaking in didn’t take much, either. This site’s strength had always laid in its relative secrecy, nestled as it was in a crevice between two mountains. That strength was gone now that it served as a central hub of sorts, and its defenses were nowhere near powerful enough to match up against a dozen master-class or higher magicians.

The internal section were a different story.

Darren stopped in his tracks the second the door opened, his perception-type spells triggering on something he couldn’t immediately identify, but another magician continued forward at a magically accelerated pace.

He promptly hit the ground in half a dozen pieces, separated by razor-sharp filaments held in place by automated stasis spells.

“Ridiculous,” Darren sneered, watching the Indigo magician’s body hit the ground.

He flicked his fingers, sending blades of his own to break the trap, and continued.

“Trace the signal for these,” he said. “They must be remotely controlled.”

A message flickered through his FCD, bypassing layers of security and worming its way onto his intranet somehow.

That’s where you would be wrong.

“Comms are compromised,” Darren announced, disgusted. “Turn them off or disable net functionality. Clear the traps, carefully, and get going.”

That won’t be necessary.

A flashbang-like explosion popped in front of the strike team’s eyes, smoke propagating from its point of origin. One of the Indigos countered it immediately, sandwiching the smoke with an A-class projection-type spell. Closing her fist, she drew the box smaller, crushing whatever might have been within.

The box shattered before it could get to that point, the smoke dispersing once again before it simply faded.

In its absence was a single magician. A student, judging by the age.

Darren looked at the kid, squinting. “Do I know you?”

The magician looked back, then shrugged, casting.

No incantation. No pause. No hand movements. Yet Darren sensed the raw power, his perception-type spells alerting him to danger. All his instincts screamed at him, and he followed them, dodging as he slid forward.

Kill him and move on, he told himself even as primal fear flared through his mind.

A wave of raw power knocked him backwards, his blades fizzling out as they did.

Two of the remaining master-class magicians collapsed.

Darren’s opponent frowned, looking at the other prismatics. Like he was… disappointed. What?

Before the Red could muster up his strategic-class backups, the ground underneath him detonated, knocking him upwards. Fortification-type spells kept the explosion from killing him, but they didn’t stop him from being caught in the middle of an artifact-cast spell.

The same filaments that had sliced the first magician apart cut through him, and he howled in pain and rage, twisting to escape them and kill this obstacle.

Pride looked back at the Red and glared.

Goodbye, he signed, snapping his fingers.

Strategic-class annihilation-type spell, Ruin. Before recent reworks, it required a complex set of instructions to execute, and it had been costlier to cast than the GDP of some smaller nations. A special FCD had been required to cast it with any semblance of efficiency.

If there was one thing the machines had perfected, though, it was using the least resources to do the most.

Sylvester was not even equipped with an FCD other than a single reserve in case his primary plan failed. The “FCD” on his wrist was a manmade artifact designed to do one thing: trigger the spell pattern he’d engraved into it, something that had technically been doable before the advent of the moon fragments but only at extreme cost.

Now, with insights from a species that had forced itself to evolve at speeds unlike any living being had ever known, that cost was trivial.

Darren Red was not permitted to learn any of this. There was no time. All he sensed was the snap, and then pain, his spells blinking out in an instant like blown-out candles.

The second snap coincided with darkness.

Though it didn’t make a difference to him, Darren didn’t die there. There was another use he could still serve. One that Jennifer had continued work on. A uniquely human magic.

Reports from the prismatic group in the aftermath of the disappearance of the Pasatiempo strike team came solely from their FCDs. It was just one message sending itself at regular intervals every five minutes.

This is your only warning.

- Syl

#

Uriel wondered if this was what it felt like to take recreational drugs.

She had left behind all semblance of the normal path of improving as a magician behind since that fateful day with Syl. A lot had happened in between, but that just meant there were so many more boundaries to break.

The Viridian family had been protecting a dangerous secret. The reason why a steadily increasing proportion of their engineers had also been threats in their own right was thanks to advancements made by Arthur Evans Viridian, the former patriarch of the family.

They had started creating innates. People with inherent affinities for magic.

All it had taken was death. A lot of death. Jennifer had inherited the information, taking the access to her family’s deepest archives from her father’s body. It was a horrific process, sure—the best ways to create an inherent understanding of magic within a body was to introduce magical elements into it until it became one and the same.

That meant organ transplants, a rigorous mental sync, and special blood draining procedures from an intact corpse. Jennifer had spent a fair chunk of time optimizing it with the help of Incarnate magicians. She’d been loathe to do it, her dreams to create something that actually helped people instead of more weapons of war still shining bright despite the circumstances, but she’d recognized the situation for what it was.

Desperate times, desperate measures. More to the point, it wouldn’t be possible to break through human limits without the willingness to abandon one’s own humanity. That was what Syl had espoused, and after what she’d done to herself, Uriel was a believer.

Integrated with the parts of half a dozen other master-class magicians and a strategic, her flux capacity had more than doubled. While she didn’t have the intuitive ease of casting their spells that she thought she might have, Uriel had grown much, much more comfortable with her own magic.

“Stop where you are!” One of the six-man squad in front of her demanded, his voice amplified by his tac suit’s speaker.

Full body suits. FCD-equipped ARs on four, dueling FCDs on the other two. Uriel recognized the formation. It was a Red favorite, often used to put down minor unrests or to accomplish supposedly top-secret missions. The one shouting orders at her was one of the ones with guns. It was almost nostalgic, in a way. They’d run drills like this all the time before everything had gone to shit. The Violets and Reds had maintained fairly good relationships in the years after the war—no, she corrected herself, between the wars.

“Wait,” she said, hovering a good twenty feet above them, “do I know you?”

She had come to assist Waylan and the other residents of this inland Viridian holding-turned-refugee-site with their minor invasion problem, but she’d quickly been overcome by the experience of simply having power. Uriel had thought that she had known what that was like when she had cast a master-class spell for the first time, but this…

“Uriel Indigo,” the guy with the gun said. “We’ve met. Vladimir Red. Tactical-class magician.”

Vladimir… she did know him. They had attended the same training facility for some time.

Here came another problem with this kind of thing. When it had been Cascadians or terrorist organizations or even one of the various religious orders with their fingers in Aurian pies, Uriel had been able to separate herself from the act of violence. Killing people was different when she was actually looking at them and every dead body came with the thought that maybe that magician had sat at her dinner table before.

What an inconvenient time to have a good memory.

“Vlad,” she said. “You were at the cross-family training camp in… March of 70 AFI, was it?”

“You remember that?” he asked bashfully. Though his mask hid his face, he looked away.

“How could I not? It’s not every training session that someone blows the managerial office up.”

“It was an accident.”

“Hey,” another one of the soldiers said gruffly. “Stop wasting time.”

“My apologies,” Uriel said, glaring at her. “Let me get to the point, then. I don’t want to hurt you. Leave and you’ll be fine.”

The soldier laughed, hefting her rifle. “You think empty threats hold any power here?”

“Flagea zerix mau,” Uriel mouthed, pointing.

She couldn’t quite manage a silent cast—there simply hadn’t been enough training time to facilitate that. Her advancements had, however, given her much better control over her flux. That meant more power, more versatility, more speed.

Master-class artillery-type spell, Antimagic Railgun. Effective range of up to a hundred kilometers, but she didn’t even need a percentage point of that. It was precise, and with her new modifications, the projectile could be tiny, narrow as a needlepoint.

The rifle’s magic components failed explosively, the disruption-type flux of the spell welding its barrel shut, and it failed to fire.

“Not empty,” Uriel said. “And they’re not for you.”

She looked at Vlad, who she still recognized as one of her own. Not a friend, but someone she’d lived with before. A comrade. He looked around him.

“They’ll kill me if I run,” he said.

In lieu of a reply, Uriel cast. “Mau flagea.”

It was so much easier casting like this. No limits. Nothing to hold her back.

Thank you for opening my eyes, Syl.

Five bodies later, Vlad was the only one left, flinching back in bloodied shock.

As he recovered, he fumbled for his own FCD.

“Don’t,” Uriel said. “You’re not going to like what happens if you do.”

“You’re a monster,” Vlad said, voice shaking. “You just killed them! We—we’re on the same side!”

Are we really? Vlad hadn’t seen real combat before, by the looks of it. His point of view was as limited as his magic.

He drew his FCD.

Well, if it’s come to that.

“I’m sorry,” Uriel lied.

#

Gen. Adonis Red: Strike teams SC and SM are both non-responsive. Third group is operating at eighty percent. Twelve members reported down.

Cpl. Waylan Red: Copy. It’s probably Uriel. She’s converted to whatever religion that freak in  charge follows.

Gen. Adonis Red: You may have to detain her.

Cpl. Waylan Red: I’ll buy time. I just need you to follow through.

Gen. Adonis Red: I look forward to it. See you soon.