It was strange to think about, but Serenity was pretty confident this wasn’t a repeat from the previous timeline. Yes, large portions of the eastern seaboard were destroyed, but it wasn’t all at once and it was completely explainable. It wasn’t easy to follow when everything was breaking and Vengeance had only cared about two of them, but the people he’d traveled with had cared. He’d have known if everything went in a massive earthquake and volcanic eruption, which was what this seemed likely to look like.
The only possible time he wouldn’t have known was if it was what triggered Earth’s destruction, but that didn’t make any sense at all. What he saw shouldn’t be enough to destabilize a planet. Just as importantly, there wouldn’t be warning signs of a spell like this and there was more than a year’s warning of Earth’s destruction. Serenity wished he remembered what that warning was, but all he remembered was that Earth started growing weaker rather than stronger, then the portals all closed. That was followed by a rush to gather the Etherium to buy their way off the planet. Serenity thought more information was probably known, but Vengeance simply didn’t care. He fought because the people he traveled with asked him to and fighting was better than thinking.
Now that he thought about it, it was probably impossible for this to have actually been triggered in the original timeline anyway. The destruction of New York City alone probably moved some of the ley lines; that was all it would take to make the ritual impossible without repairing it first, and getting into the city was tough. The later damage to DC was even worse. Serenity thought there were more obliterated areas within the ritual’s area but he couldn’t be certain; he simply didn’t remember.
Well, however different it was that he was fixing a problem that was new, it was time to take the fight to the enemy. Honestly, it had been time for a while; Serenity would have already gone if he knew where to go. If only the interrogation of the man he’d raised from the dead on A’Atla had turned up anything useful. “Any luck on finding out who’s behind this or even a place to look?”
Russ shook his head. “Whoever’s doing this is too used to covering his tracks. We can trace it all to the same holding company fairly easily, but tying them to an individual, any individual, hasn’t been possible. The money for the purchases came from another holding company; they’re currently being investigated, but I’m not expecting results quickly. The only real new development is the offer to rent the house for a week that Red got yesterday. I told her to act like she was willing to think about it and get some details if she was asked the question again.”
“You mean like AirBnB? That shouldn’t work if there’s an ownership requirement needed.” Serenity frowned; a lot of the thought he’d put into the way the ritual worked was on the assumption that there was an ownership requirement; renting wouldn’t get that.
“Maybe there’s something they need to do on the land and owning it is the easiest way? No, that doesn’t make sense; killing the owner wouldn’t make doing something on the land easier. It’d be far easier to just sneak in and do it, as long as it isn’t something inside the house itself.” Of course, the summon-traps had always been a questionable move, since the houses might end up in a legal limbo for a while, where the owner was dead and the heir didn’t have possession yet. Unless … maybe that was the point?
“If I assume that all that’s needed is the right to be present or at least that there isn’t a competing right … that’s weaker but it would fit the attacks and an attempt to rent the place. It still doesn’t explain the random attempts to get demons summoned, but that may be a different goal.” Serenity’s mind flashed to the four young demons he’d seen recently. The only one that tried to attack him was the Wrath demon, and that was basically a greeting for a Wrath demon. He’d been the one to attack the assassination demon, while the Sorrow and Resolve demons had acted compliant and done what he asked with no argument.
Serenity had taken a demon lord evolution; he knew from the smell at the destruction on A’Atla that his opponent was also a demon lord. Lords had followers, and as far as Serenity knew there were very few demons on Earth. It added up, especially if the ritual did something to the other demon’s presence or ability to reach those demons; Serenity wasn’t certain what it would be, but maybe that section in the upper left?
“You really think that’s possible?” Russ’s question interrupted Serenity’s train of thought.
“Yeah, I do. Ownership is an agreement, not an innate thing, so it’s all about what you think is required.” Serenity felt a smile start to appear on his lips. “It’s always about intent, after all. Intent and concept are both involved here. I don’t see anything in the spell structure that would require a strict interpretation. It might change the trigger, but that’s all.” Serenity paused and took another look at the diagram. “Did I mention that there’s a specific location to start the ritual? I’m pretty sure that’s also the location required to benefit from it, assuming there’s a benefit at least.”
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“You mean we can bait whoever it is in and trap him?” A grin started to spread across Russ’s face.
Serenity felt his smile turning into the same grin. “If renting access is all he needs?” Serenity deliberately avoided the name Apollyon. It probably wouldn’t be heard, but it was better to avoid the chance since he was thinking about it and they were planning to trap the man. Demon lord. Whatever he was. “Yeah, I think we can. The terrain’s not great; it’s an open field with nowhere to hide. Still, if we can approach while they’re setting up to cast the spell…”
Russ perked up, then seemed to slump. “How hard is the spell to trigger? We can’t let them get close if there’s any chance he can start it. It sounds like it’ll have some really nasty consequences once it’s started no matter what happens.”
“It depends on what they bring, but … it won’t be terrible. Half an hour at the most, but if they’re prepared it could be a lot shorter. My guess is minutes and not many of them, but it could be less than a minute if they’re really ready. It depends on how good their planning is, and they’ve clearly had all the time they need to plan or they wouldn’t have been able to reroute ley lines,” Serenity was still appalled at that. The only possible reason to do that level of engineering was if there was some reason to not go to a more magical world. Admittedly, not being able to just hop through one of the Voice’s portals could be the reason.
Come to think of it, that was another good reason for the Voice to exist. It didn’t just make it easier to Tier up; it also provided easy transportation between worlds. It wasn’t cheap, but a relatively small number of delves could pay for a trip to another planet; for interstellar travel, that really didn’t seem all that expensive. Portals were definitely cheaper than ships, as long as there was a portal where you were headed.
“We can’t, then. Less than a minute is far too fast.” Russ’s grin had flipped into a scowl. “I really like the idea of drawing the culprit out, but it’s clear that he likes using disposable cutouts. We’ll have to take the long way for this and keep following the money trail. It won’t be fast, but it will eventually get us somewhere.”
Serenity didn’t want to dismiss the idea so quickly; he was tired of the continual string of problems from Apollyon and he didn’t want to give him time to somehow summon more demons. That only made him more powerful. Sure, Serenity could go grab them one by one, but Serenity was pretty certain he’d spent more time and resources on the summoning in Kansas than Apollyon had. Sure, maybe the information on Typhon Gaming would lead to something, but that required time. Serenity didn’t want to wait.
He turned back to the map. It was a spell diagram; surely he could figure out how to invisibly alter it so that it wouldn’t have the horrible consequences casting it should have.
He could ignore most of the diagram; affecting it would ruin the result but it wouldn’t stop the spell from activating and it wouldn’t stop the horrible consequences of ley line failure when the spell collapsed. It might help, since it might reduce the area, but that wasn’t enough. Serenity needed to stop the problem or at least confine it to a very small area. Simply reducing the damage wasn’t enough, either; it took surprisingly little to be devastating.
Serenity looked at one possibility after another, dismissing them as he went. Whatever he did needed to be hidden until the spell was activated, which made most of the options impossible; he couldn’t distort the diagram much and he couldn’t affect anything at all at the initiation site or on any of the reasonable routes to get there.
Preventing it from activating at all was the first option he looked at, but it just didn’t do what he needed it to. Walling off the initial activation was theoretically possible, Serenity could come up with several spellforms that did very little in a small area but used the same activation trigger. Unfortunately, every single one of them required moving a bunch of ley lines to draw the new spell diagram.
Serenity couldn’t handle the magic himself. In other circumstances, he might have tried; suppressing or altering a spell that way was possible if you had enough warning. That was one of the ways group spellcasting was done, after all. It required a lot of knowledge and preparation for the particular spell, but it was doable. It wasn’t quite the same as what he’d done to Lykandeon’s ritual, since that was ritual magic instead of a spellform, but it was really very similar.
Unfortunately, Serenity seriously doubted he could actually do it adequately with the amount of raw mana that ran through ley lines. If he were a higher Tier, it would have been his solution, but he was only Tier Eight. That wasn’t even close to high enough.
No, he needed to somehow affect the spell away from the initiation site without having it be obvious the spell was altered. That meant everything had to look right until the spell was drawing power.
Power! Yes, that might work.
There were four ley lines that fed the power into the spellform; they were what was bound together to create the knot that was the spell. Four ways in, four ways out. They were huge ley lines, carrying a lot of power, but perhaps he could do something about that.
The one that came in from the northwest ran approximately parallel to another ley line, a far weaker one. They were only a few miles apart; if he could figure out a way to make the small one run into the spell instead of the big one, it would lower the power level of the spell. It might not serve its intended purpose at that point, but it would still be devastating. He needed to look for more options, but it was a start.