“Wu? I have managed to duplicate the Cast now.”

Lera’s voice came from the entrance into Wu’s workshop when she caught her eyes on the messy room and the one pile of meat sitting in the middle of the room. Then, the thing turned around with a wicked smile as Lera squeaked.

“Lera…hehehe…you are here…” Wu said, rolling back onto his shoulders before he hopped towards Lera like a zombie with both of his hands held out in front of him. Lera avoided the initial charge before pivotoing to Wu’s side.

“Did you…go insane from the experiments?” Lera asked as Wu blinked a few times, sanity slowly returning to his body.

“Yep.” Wu cursed, “Nothing worked. The beams just won’t focus, and it just won’t become smaller no matter what material I use. I was really tempted to use the Kraken's shell too.”

“Oh…” Lera halted for a moment before she reached her hand forward and handed Wu the duplicated communication Cast, “I…repurposed the Scouting Eye so it can see small things, and you were right to think that there were extra security measures hidden under the first layer.”

“Small things…small things…” Wu muttered before he rapidly grabbed onto Lera’s shoulders, nearly stripping her, “You just made microscopes?! You are a genius!”

Lera, of course, was completely and utterly confused, but Wu didn’t allow her confusion to linger on for much more before he asked her to set up the Scouting Eye Microscope over his desk. This gives him a far closer look at Void Domain unlike before.

The Cast of hers was rudimentary, and it seemed the individual Cast segments that focus and redirect light were behaving far better than those same segments that focus Wave, as expected, as Wu had suspected the Wave to be a sort of radiation-particle mix that resides beyond the known electromagnetic spectrum.

Akin to what light is at the smallest scale, one possesses behaviors of both particles and waves.

“Let’s think…” Wu squatted down until his body was completely folded up like an accordion, “Say I have a series of articles I would like to focus in a beam, like those in a particle collider…what would the physicists do…They would guide it using a magnetic field if the particles are electrically charged. So…if I want to guide the Wave into a specific direction, I need something that will interact with it specifically…”

That’s just any Cast, or any Wave abilities, for that matter. Not really helpful.

But wait, there’s more. Casts are too dependent, too variable, and too inconsistent, even despite how well the Wave users had progressed in their ability. Wu needed something more stable, more absolute.

Ordinarily, he would use Void Domain, if he wanted to guide the Wave in a specific pattern, but what if he wanted to direct Void domain itself?

He would use anti-Void Domain.

“Bingo.” Wu smiled, lying back onto the ground with his hands outstretched, “I love you, Lera!”

“What?! What brought that about?!” Lera jumped slightly before she turned around.

“I guess you being here just helps me think.” Wu grabbed onto her legs and pulled her down until he’s cuddling her her thighs as she pressed onto his head, “I figured it out.”

The design was deceivingly simple. He would focus the Void Domain Laser as normal, but at the end, he will also focus a circular ring of Anti-Void Domain, and the radius of the ring is what ultimately determines the thickness of the outgoing beam.

That was all sound in theory, but to create something with such a small tolerance in practice was easier said than done. Thankfully, Wu had Lera’s patience and steady hands at his aide, and soon, he was able to narrow the beam down to the size of a needle.

It wasn’t perfect, as the anti-Void domain ring itself was a chunky accessory. Therefore, before the two of them progressed further, Wu took the design and miniaturized it into another Cast segment before slapping it onto his original experimental set, in place of the concentration Cast.

This time, a dark beam barely visible shot out from the back of the stack of paper. Science truly is amazing. So long as you follow the established rules, you can accomplish anything. What's even better than this is that Void Domain and anti-Void Domain acted as a balancing force of their own, preventing any Wave from overflowing and burning the material the Cast is sitting on.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Wu initially wanted to tattoo that Cast onto his body too, but Lera brought up the point of how he would even be able to interact with such a small tool, due to the nature of his body. For such fine motor skills, the importance of touch cannot be understated, and Wu had to give up the Cast for Lera’s use, not that he's disgruntled or jealous or anything...

Now, sitting in the research station with the duplicate of the communication Cast under the Scouting Eye microscope and Void Domain Scalpel in hand, Lera’s ready to get to work.

“Now, try to break up the Cast into its individual components.” Wu said, glancing at the projection floating besides the microscope, “The lines seemed all tangled together, but…”

“But there are some structures here.” Lera continued, her breath steady as she moved the tiny black beam through the paper. The scalpel left behind a charred line over the page, though it easily sliced up the ink lines that were still rich with the Wave, “I noticed a sub-layer here when I was duplicating it, and it seemed…weird.”

For organizational purposes, the Casts written on pages were always two-dimensional, but Lera’s sharp eyes caught onto layers hidden underneath the first one. However, Lera didn’t know how that was done, and she was only able to copy the form, not the function of the original Cast.

“The sub-layer would have been interacting with the top layer through the ink…” Lera murmured, “How could it have been done?”

“Unless there is an ultra-thin film separating the two,” Wu suggested, and Lera turned to look at him. Then, she picked up the original Cast and placed it under the microscope.

“Try the corner of the paper.” Wu said, as Lera lifted up the Cast and sliced the scalpel through an open space. The same charred lines formed over it, and a way thinner transparent layer rolled up due to the heat.

“Woah.” Lera’s eyes shot out wide, and a smile formed over her face before she worked slowly to peel away the top layer.

Now that the two layers of the Cast are separated, it no longer looked like a tangled mess. When viewing an object with three-dimensional complexity in two dimensions, things tended to mix together in unintuitive ways.

“What do we have here…” Wu crossed his arms as he examined the individual segments.

“An identity Cast here at the start.” Lera said, hovering the scalpel over the corner of the page where the two layers interact with one another, “It’s a standard design as any identity Casts.”

“And what about the one after?” Wu asked.

“Then…some logic Cast with…two different outputs. One is a steady one, and the other was a…seemed like a one time output.” Lera murmured, slicing through and severing the Cast into its individual compartments before isolating the second compartment.

The output from the second compartment feeds back into the top layer, and the top layer completes the cycle that sends the communication signal back to whoever’s on the receiving end.

“And to think that the steady signal was what the agent needed to send off once every three days…” Wu murmured, “We can just set a timer Cast of some sort here.”

Lera nodded, and she quickly covered her hand over a spare piece of paper before recreating a standard timer Cast. Once every three days, a pulse will be sent out through the input of the logic Cast, which then triggers the steady signal output into the communication Cast, giving whoever’s on the receiving end of the signal exactly what he wanted to hear.

However, before they modified the real thing, Wu and Lera swapped the top layer with a standard communication Cast that they use, and when they ran their setup through the sub-layer, a steady pulse showed up on the receiving end.

After another check comparing the original communication Cast and the standard one, Wu and Lera knew that they likely have done all that they could have into hacking up the agent’s communication Casts.

“So…yeah. That’s how it works.” Wu concluded his demonstration before placing the modified Cast down onto the table as the King of Varous, his cabinet, and the Atlas twins all nodded with understanding.

“This is great work.” The King acknowledged, “Let’s hope it works.”

Now that the first objective had been completed, Wu and Lera then turned their eyes onto the defensive structure Casts all over the kingdom. With the Void Domain Scalpel in their control, that should be a piece of cake.

Right?

As Wu and Lera hopped off the chariot to the most reclusive part of the Kingdom, staring at a tower made purely from the Wave point its cannons straight up into the sky, they realized that in reality, nothing’s ever straightforward.

“This…design. I have never seen it before…” Lera murmured, walking forward as the shields became automatically activated around the cannon, and it resisted Lera from getting any closer.

“And I have…” Wu grunted, “Just what is going on with this world…”

That was no originary tower. The entirety of the tower takes heavy inspiration from the modern weaponry back on his world, from the bearings sitting at the bottom of the cannon to enable flexible aiming to the twin barrels of the cannon itself.

To Lera, this was nothing except alien, but to Wu, this was creepily familiar.

“What did Augen say was the origin of the defensive Cast again?”