[Warpworld] Ch 34 – A Line in the Stone

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            “Wow, that wall must be a thousand feet high,” I commented to nobody in particular, my singularly unimpressed voice rubbing off on all of them.

            Warpstone battlements pulled out of the Warp towered higher than my Pyramid, replete with all the engines of war one could imagine, even some crude mortar-cannons already swiveling in our direction.

            The towers there burned with arcane energies, writhing and twisting as vivus swirled around them like living things, keeping it away as the Domain of the Warpeater Pyramid fell upon them. Their meeting point quickly became a swirling maelstrom of churning unwhite fires and fogs.

            “Huh. Cheaty bastards bought Hellcannons,” I murmured. “I guess they really want to see us fighting here and everything.”

            Trying to establish a technological edge where they couldn’t do so with a magical edge, as it were. Klaw must’ve been happy to see jRaztl so at a loss, even if He’d lost a prime servant to said magic.

            Could I deliver on the science edge of things, too?

            Who did they think they were dealing with, some kind of noob?

            On Terra-Luna, we hadn’t reached the levels of what is commonly called ‘super-science’, i.e., Weird Science/Science Fiction levels of science. Which was kind of a weird thought itself, as super-science was basically any science beyond your own…

            Anyway, we’d certainly developed up a fine knowledge of munitions, firearms, and similar things, and all of that knowledge had been retained and kept, along with whole slews of other knowledge that just wasn’t useful/functional anymore in the magical universe we found ourselves in.

            Our whole society had been built on those technologies, and we had been determined not to give up on them or let them die. Arguments had been made that if we switched universes once, it could happen again, so the knowledge should be preserved… plus there were two other considerations.

            One, nothing said that as individuals we wouldn’t be going into universes where science worked, with or without magic, and knowing that stuff could be key to survival.

            Two, we had White Magic Zones. White Magic Zones were limited in size, scope, and usefulness, requiring quite the number of Sources about to keep them powered up and working, but they suppressed the anti-science portion of the manafield on Terra-Luna by driving the effective Caster Level of magic down by six to ten Levels inside them, so technology actually worked in such places.

            We used them for all our data management needs, high-end computations, backup mundane data storage, and the like. If we splurged on anti-magic Greyfields to protect working tech, we could even set up transmission towers between places, making use of radio and even fiber optic cables, as light going through glass wasn’t one of the things magic made hard to work with.

            I had tons of Skill Ranks, quite literally more than I knew what to do with. As a result, I had filled them with an incredible amount of stuff, a huge portion of which had nothing to do with magic at all.

            The simple fact gunpowder worked here was probably an affectionate holdover giving mortal humans a survival edge, and maybe other races, too. After all, gunpowder had existed for a LONG time in our world, it just took centuries to be refined down to rifled shells and such.

            But I knew that tech. I knew ALL that tech, from the simplest 15:3:2 gunpowder ratio to guncotton, fulminate of mercury, the metallurgy needed to make the things, and so forth and so on. You could drop me in a world and I could make a firearm from nothing, given enough time. I had taken very, very specific steps to preserve and hold the science, engineering, and mechanical knowledge to be able to DO that, just because I could.

            Given magic, I could make one VERY quickly. And oddly enough, there was a lot of purified metal and other raw materials we’d rolled over I could suck up into the Pyramid and make a reserve of, just in case.

            Nor did I have to restrain myself to just gunpowder. After all, if that worked, it took very little testing to see if not only Rule of Fire wasn’t working, but the Rule of Lightning.

            I gestured at two of the stone blocks to the sides. Gearcrafting Artifice glittered on them, and they folded backwards and around, making room out of nothing Transformer-style, and the first railgun came up and around and settled into place.

            Like I was sitting around doing nothing all this time. If they wanted to cheat, I was totally going to have things in place that were totally cheaty, too!

            The main thing I’d needed was ammo. I’d been ranging out with a LOT of Telekinesis, grabbing all the metal, Burning it with vivus, and then Heating it inside the Pyramid’s core to reshape it. I Sifted out the materials, then Fabricated what I needed out of the raw materials to put each of them into place.

            Railguns were super-science. Before the Fall, they were only theory with very little operational ability between them, needing more knowledge of materials and science and power to get working properly.

            It was pretty damn funny, but the Fall brought down our technological society, at the same time it inflicted a lot of super-geniuses on us determined not to let that technology be forgotten.

            The big secret I had here was Infusing the blocky thing and its teardrops of ammunition with Cyclonic. That effectively cut wind resistance to nothing for the first second after being fired, as well as gravity, turning this thing into a Mach 20 iron laser. Superconductivity, magnetics, metal shearing, and crystallization… those were all easy to deal with just as soon as you made all the air resistance and the resulting shockwaves go away.

            Introducing pre-facture lines in those steel teardrops to explode when they reached something solid and really disperse the kinetic damage was also something I might have done in my long, boring seated sessions.

            The elves all looked up as Thunder rang out like a bell, and a sizzling silver-on-black-starfield Thunderbolt descended from the writhing storm above onto the apex of the Pyramid. With an ominous crackle and rising hum, the railgun next to me lit up in series, and the wise backed away from it.

            I tapped Mortus Dius on the Pyramid three more times. Three more sets of blocks spun down, and three more railguns hauled themselves out of the interior of the thing.

            “It takes the power of one lightning bolt to shoot one round,” I informed the elves without looking around. “If the elders would like to begin bringing down the Wrath of the Gods, I’ll start redirecting said Wrath at our opponents.”

            The elves looked at one another, then grinned in delight. Being allowed to bring down as much lightning as they wanted, without interference nor limit, was like being given new toys to play with.

            “How does one shoot them?” Master Artlis inquired eagerly, his golden eyes alight.

            “You should see a single strand of Light in the thaumic bands coming off the tube directly under the muzzle there. You set the thread on the target within four miles, and hit the red button on the back.”

            They blinked at the simple explanation as the muzzle of the railgun shifted. They were about to ask about the sound when there was a discharge.

            It was ominously quiet, just a falling off of the hum after a crackle of faint lightning stretched out into the distance.

            One of the Hellcannons atop the Warpstone Wall ahead of us went away, along with a whole section of the wall-top, like something had just hit it with a godly golf club and scooped out a divot of the stone.

            Another bell-like Thunderbolt descended from the storm above. Electricity crackled and the hum of the railgun was restored.

            “May we shoot them?” Master Artlis asked shamelessly.

            “If you charge it up, sure. Make sure you pick a decent target, mind you.”

---

            Telekinesis let me help them with their aim, although the more adept elves rapidly used the same trick to set up their shots with more precision than just muscle. The saurids looked on in bemusement as the elves quickly and professionally took out all the longest-range mortars and cannons, then casually began to take down the relevant towers keeping the Domain field at bay, anything that looked like a command position, lesser siege engines, or any clusters of powerful or monstrous troops.

            Oh, and we got back into motion, too. It was going to take us an hour or two to reach the wall, after all.

            The foci of the magical effect getting pummeled by a lot of really solid reality moving at Mach 20, NOT by magical spells at all, the wall’s ability to withstand the Domain of the Warpeater Pyramid began to erode quickly. Minor Nodes inside the wall were severely stressed and overloading, which made them obvious to the magical senses of the elves, who promptly sniped them out in cold delight.

            After that, well, it was made of warpstone, trying to withstand vivus, which meant directly ahead of us was this massive wall of gasoline-soaked tinder waiting to be lit off, in relative terms.

            The failure of the field was quite visible, as suddenly EVERYTHING in front of us ignited, a great rolling wave of vivus sweeping out over everyone and everything in a silent roar of absolute hunger, the very air turning white… and the screams of a whole lot of Warped filling the air before going suddenly and reassuringly quiet, lost to the hunger of the Land and the music of the winds.

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