B3 Chapter 1 - Stormwall

Magicians reacted to disaster in different ways, which was unsurprising—they were human, after all, and nothing was more human than being vastly different from a person just one short country away.

Syl, personally, was in the lab.

The Aurian responses should have been largely similar, but those too were incredibly varied owing largely to Sylvester himself.

As it turned out, face-checking the king and counteracting an apocalyptic-level weapon he’d been using as a hidden threat to keep the populace in line had done wonders for the kingdom’s politics. In the days that had followed, the nation had splintered in a violent manner matched only by that of its neighbor Cascadia’s. That had also been his fault, in fairness, but he cared a little more about the situation back home.

If the magicians in the know had thought that the prismatic situation was tense before, that went triple now. Each and every one of the prismatic families, even the ones who had actively been trying to stay out of conflict up until now, was making a play for personal power. They had to, if they wanted to survive.

Already, Syl had heard news that the Gold family was functionally extinct. Their first through fourth-ranked magicians had all died defending the capital. Syl was reasonably confident at least one of those deaths was due to him. Though the Gold family had been overwhelmed by the paragon-class enemies seeking the king’s head, they had also retreated quickly. They wouldn’t have been able to retreat past his attack, though.

Apart from them, the remaining six prismatics were split amongst themselves. Alliances had become significantly more tenuous once the king’s sovereignty had been overthrown and the leadership of multiple clans had gone missing, presumed to be dead. They had always been primed to fracture the second one of the prismatics gained enough power, but they were split even further now.

The Violets were regrouping, having lost the head of their house as well as two of their strategic-class magicians during the offensive, which meant that they no longer had allegiances from anyone except their branch families. Both the Red and Indigo families were operating their individual territory grabs, which Waylan and Uriel had a questionable amount of relation to. There was only so much plausible deniability and goodwill they could use up before they were cast out for their unclear allegiances.

The Blue family was restructuring as well, trying to establish a sanctuary of sorts with their purification-type magic. They had temporarily banded together with the Oranges, who had largely gone quiet.

With the Golds gone, that left only the Viridian family, which had split into two. One part of that was actively getting conquered by the Reds on the south side right now, while the other was tentatively working together with Incarnate.

At this very moment, Syl was working his way around this laboratory on crutches while the leader of that faction split her attention between dealing with spitting out orders towards her stretched-thin subordinates and running a meta-analysis on the data their newest set of observations had gotten.

Jennifer had taken the Viridian seat of authority straight into the worst crisis Auria had seen in over a decade. Not only did she have to deal with the resistance inherent in any succession crisis, especially given her age and relative inexperience compared to some of the older members of the family, but she also had a burgeoning world war on her hands.

Perhaps the worst part about this entire matter was the fact that the war wasn’t even the greatest concern. A good number of large-scale conflicts had still occurred over the past few days, but many nations had drawn back.

“Adriana Orange is willing to run defense for us against the Reds,” Jennifer reported, swiping a screen away from her vision. “That’s good. Gives us more time to deal with… that.”

She looked up. It was a pointless gesture—they were all underground right now, since staying aboveground was a recipe for disaster. Though not quite a death sentence, the ground level of Auria was irradiated, constantly experiencing inclement, disastrous weather, and had been devastated by a meticulously planned Cascadian campaign whose effects would ripple on for years even if it had been ultimately foiled.

Still, she got the point across. This section of the subterranean Incarnate facilities had been dedicated to an earthquake inducer/preventor experiment years ago, but given that its original purpose hadn’t been necessary in recent times, Incarnate and Jennifer’s section of the Viridians had moved heaven and earth to convert it into a temporary high-tech observatory, using a complex set of relays Syl had built to reach the surface.

The other prismatics didn’t even reach top three on their priority list, so getting some kind of temporary respite was nice but not absolutely necessary. Their most significant worry by far was the one still descending towards them.

One hundred and twenty-six significant sized fragments of the moon had been identified. There were a great deal more than that, but that figure counted only the ones that were likely to achieve devastation on par with or greater than the gigaton nuclear bombs that were still frozen in time partway through their devastation of Middle America.

Good to hear you found a solution, Syl signed. How is the data looking?

“Not promising,” Jennifer said, clicking her tongue. “I feel a lot more confident knowing Pr—you’re on our side, but this is still unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

Despite Uriel freely referring to him by the moniker he’d been most infamous under and Bianca often doing the same, Jennifer still seemed to be allergic to the word Pride, as if saying it too often would lead to him silencing her.

It was a fair concern. There was a time when he would have considered that. It had long since passed, but she was doing her due diligence in exercising cuation.

That said, Syl was not feeling up to being a Sinner at the moment.

I’ve told you this already, he signed. I’m not sure how useful I will be in the field for the next few weeks. For the time being, I am more of an engineer than I am a fighter.

During the day the Cascadian offensive had begun, Syl had cast over a dozen strategic-class spells and three separate paragon-class ones—one to eliminate all water in a kilometers-wide radius at AMI, one to accelerate himself so fast that he spent nearly three years in Taiwan in the real-world equivalent of about a minute, and Ouroboros, the last of which was costlier than any spell he’d ever created or seen. He’d had help for the last, but that was still a stack of magic that would kill any lesser magician.

As it was, his body had run out of gas. Despite all his modifications, despite the memories of dozens of archmages guiding his hand, he had pushed himself beyond his limits. It wasn’t something he couldn’t recover from, but for the time being, he was much more mortal than he had grown used to.

Even now, he could only manage a very basic perception-type spell that required active effort to maintain the shape of rather than the passive master-class ones he preferred simply because of his lack of output. The physical frailness would pass soon enough, but he was going to take it easy for as long as he could to encourage his magic to return faster.

“You’re still the most brilliant engineer I’ve ever had the fortune of running across,” Jennifer said with a shrug. “Data’s almost finished processing. The flux storm in the lower atmosphere should’ve calmed down a bit about half an hour ago. This’ll be the clearest shot we get of the nearest fragments.”

That had been a persistent problem. Thanks to the massive amount of spells and radiation that had been tossed into the air, sensitive equipment wasn’t working the way they needed it to. As such, they’d only been able to find the most general information. That was how Syl had decoded the messages they’d sent, which had yet to be disseminated past his inner circle. Jennifer and Bianca had nobody else to tell it to, while the special unit was already enacting contingencies and now officially did not exist thanks to the destruction of any archives about them.

That’ll be useful, Syl signed. Send them my way whenever they’re processed.

He’d been working on a weapon in the meantime. With his vast flux pool running dry, he wouldn’t be able to knock a single fragment out of space alone, let alone all of them. Even at full power, he wasn’t sure how much of the moon he would have been able to take down. The sheer scale of mass they were working with was on another scale—beyond even that of any paragon-class spell known to man.

That meant he needed to make a weapon. Fortunately for him, he had already been good at that before he’d started plumbing the depths of the artificial magic the AI had mastered.

Finding more detailed information about the moon’s surface would be another crucial step towards making something that could potentially keep them from wiping out the human race. Though they didn’t yet have confirmation that it was the AI that lived on the moon, signs strongly pointed to it in a way that made virtually every other theory laughable.

Operating with that as a base assumption, Syl knew that there was no better source of potential inspiration and research material when it came to creating weapons. He’d made leaps and bounds in his understanding of artifacts based off of his observations of ruined technology in Taiwan, and that had been after humanity had done its level best to annihilate everything within it.

On top of that, all the tech he had analyzed there had been old. The Taiwan machine uprising had ended in 32 AFI. The year was now 74, and it was likely to reach 75 before the first pieces of the moon crashed into the Earth. If the machines had been that far ahead of human magicians then, what were they like now, forty-two entire years later?

The answer was obvious. Unless they had somehow stayed dormant while humankind had advanced, their magic certainly outstripped what Earth had to offer.

Syl had made breakthrough after breakthrough over the past semester, finally given the time to stop and study instead of constantly dealing with the unending fires that plagued the world. Even then, he knew he was playing catch-up. Even knowing that he’d pursued a few paths that others hadn’t thanks to Zero’s comments, he still had a lot to learn.

“Sending it over now,” Jennifer said. She checked another monitor, then clicked her tongue. “We have more visitors. Should I go greet them?”

If you want, Syl signed.

The visitors in question were unlikely to be hostile. Repairs for the broken defenses weren’t done yet, but there were a number of makeshift sensors that Syl and Jennifer had been able to machine out pretty quickly. Given the types of enemies they’d created, it was much more likely for someone to come in guns blazing than with any kind of subterfuge attempt.

This wasn’t the first time they’d had this kind of visitor. In the days since the Cascadian offensive, the vast majority of the Aurian populace had been killed, displaced, or otherwise harmed by the knock-on effects. Refugees were starting to wander open land, many with limited supplies and magic. Incarnate and the Viridian complexes had accepted some dozens of them already, and projections said that there were almost certainly going to be many, many more.

“We should automate this process,” Jennifer said with a sigh. “We don’t have the people to deal with this.”

I’ll consider working on something, Syl signed back. Thanks to the king, I suppose.

The Aurian king’s ultimate superweapon—or one of them, at least—had been a weapon powered by artificial intelligences, trillions upon trillions of nanobots eating and replicating themselves with a vengeance. For decades, nobody had even dared to touch a machine with more intelligence than an average FCD, but the king had just opened the floodgates to experimentation again.

Some lines weren’t meant to be crossed. After the first person chose to cross anyway, however, the rest of the world tended to follow. It had happened before magic and would continue to for eternity.

Syl knew for a fact he wasn’t the only one taking lessons from the machines. His hope right now was that he would be faster and better at it than the rest of the world.

“There. Transfer’s complete,” Jennifer said. “Let me know your thoughts on it whenever. I’ll be back in a few.”

Syl opened a few windows on his own display, putting up the data Jennifer had sent him. Unlike her, he hadn’t been given the dubious blessing of flux hypersensitivity. With the surface unsuited for consistent human habitation and Syl still in a recovery stage that didn’t permit him to use strategic-class perception-type spells, he hadn’t been able to get a good idea of what was there beyond what he’d been able to interpret from Jennifer’s sensor data.

Unfortunately, this data wasn’t as clear as he would have liked it. It was substantially better than what he’d had to work off of, but he bumped “create better space telescopes” a couple of spots up his priority list. It was still a distant third under “keep humanity from going extinct” and “find how to utilize the secrets of the machines,” but it sort of played into the latter of those two.

As it was, the data Jennifer had transferred over was plenty enough to understand the basics of what they were looking at.

First and foremost from the data was obvious confirmation that the moon was magical. That didn’t take specialized equipment to prove; while Jennifer had been one of the first to notice its activation in the wake of an AI superweapon being deployed in the Aurian capital, it had started shining with so much flux that even non-magicians had identified there was something wrong.

Of course, there was also the part where it had blown up.

Slightly stronger equipment was able to detect what Jennifer had found with her eyes alone—the blinking. Patterns of more intense flux had been engraved into each fragment, the flickering lights providing something in the vein of Morse code, though to call it that was a gross simplification of a much more complicated, elegant process. Syl could convert enough of it to human language to wager a guess as to what it meant, but that wasn’t what was important at the moment.

What mattered was the actual magic on its surface, which the equipment they’d set up had certainly been able to capture a great deal of.

Syl flicked his eyes through the data dump, processing them at inhuman rates. He paused halfway through.

That can’t be right, he thought.

Most of the magic he’d seen exuding from the surface was unfamiliar, which only made sense. Modern magic was nearly unrecognizable when compared to patterns from even two decades ago, and the machines had always operated on a different scale. It only made sense that their flux emissions were different.

Despite that, there had been a set of patterns that he had recognized intimately. It took a second to place where he’d seen them before, but that wasn’t because they were rare.

No, it was because he usually didn’t even process their existence anymore. The seismograph stations rarely read the flux patterns anymore, and even when they did, those were rarely used outside of academic research. It was there that Syl had seen the similar data points the most, but he had lived this experience too many times to forget this pattern.

He blinked, then double-checked it. Triple-checked. Cross-referenced with actual recorded data in his current FCD.

There was no doubt about it.

It was a Gate.

That was, frankly speaking, impossible. Gates were natural phenomena, and while their forming processes still weren’t completely understood, it was a known fact that they didn’t form under artificial flux conditions. Experiments had been run the world over to prove that. No matter how much flux was pumped into a location, Gates simply did not form without a natural source of flux from the Earth itself.

Then again, it had also been a fact that flux shouldn’t have been able to exist outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It had once been a fact that magicians couldn’t cast without an FCD unless they were an innate. A century ago, it had been a fact that magic did not exist.

When it came to flux, the rules of reality tended to become outdated.

But this was monumental. Artificial formulation of Gates meant so much that Syl didn’t even know where to start.

One thing was for sure: he couldn’t let this opportunity to go to waste.

He sent a message to Jennifer, then the same one to Bianca.

Syl: Going to continue work on a deflector, but I don’t think we should destroy the fragments.

Bianca replied not long after.

Bianca: Then what do you suggest?

Syl: Auria had a space program. The king is in hiding and the nation is in chaos, so it’s likely to be less defended.

Bianca: I like where this is going.

Syl: We’re going to steal it, improve it, and fly a ship to what used to be the moon.

A couple minutes passed before Jennifer added her own reply.

Jennifer: What the fuck?

Jennifer: I’m in.