Quinn was a god.

He could control his perception of time, and his mind worked hundreds of times faster than a normal person.

He quickly noticed that the fighter jets seemed to be terrified of him. They flew very high, far away from him, and never come low enough for him to see them clearly. He had to work from memory.

He dropped very close to the ground and flew through the twisting valleys and rolling hills. He felt alive. If he saw something particularly beautiful, he would slow his perception of time, drawing out the scene for hours and hours even though it would only last a second. He lived an entire lifetime flying through the sky, just seeing how beautiful it was.

However he needed to remember is purpose.

He reached down deep into the ground and sucked out as many different types of metals he could find. He began to forge them, doing experiments to figure out the best way to make the metals very strong. He decided that aluminum would be a good choice for the outside of the aircraft, with some ethersteel for the places that required additional strength or would provide additional control. He tried to reshape the aircraft around him into the shape of a fighter jet, but quickly realized that the propeller was not spinning fast enough to pull so much weight. He stripped off the heavier metals and shaped the airframe over and over, but he could never quite get the power.

He realized that he would need to invent a new power source.

He found a nearby town and looked for a library. He ripped the roof off the library and sucked out all the books. He sorted them by topic, and was particularly interested in chemistry, physics, and engineering books. He could read entire books instantly just through the sound waves from his propeller striking the book. He could tell the difference between paper and ink on any page anywhere in the book at any angle, even if it was completely closed. He read all the books in the library and realized that they had been corrupted by oculomancers.

They had been corrupted in such a clever way also. The corruptions would create inaccuracies in equations or facts when used in ranges that might be used in the construction of flying machines. And there was otherwise no pattern to the corruptions, they seemed to be intended to frustrate anyone attempting to read the books.

Quinn reached down into the ground and the trees and the rivers and pulled as many chemicals out that he could find. He began to perform experiments while flying, filling in the chemistry and physics gaps created by the oculomancers. This process took a long time in objective time.

He saw fighter jets observing him, however they stayed far away. They were observing him, probably reporting his progress to other fighter jets. Yes, such a system would be useful. The oculomancers must know that this exact possibility might happen, that a witch would slow time and increase their intelligence to transcend their limits and invent all of aeronautical science in a few hours. They probably have some contingencies in place.

He would need to be faster.

He decided upon a design for an engine that would use turbines to compress air to very high pressures and temperatures. Then, there would be small nozzles that inject atomized kerosene into the stream of hot air where it would be ignited. This would turn a second turbine that would power the entire shaft with a large intake fan. The exhaust would blast out the back freely. He tried it, building the device, but it could not reach the temperatures he needed to burn the kerosene. So he added an electrical starter that would create sparks on engine start and then automatically stop the sparks when the inside of the turbine was hot enough to light the mixture automatically.

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He noticed that there were not oil deposits in the ground. The oculomancers must have found them all and sucked them dry. However he could use chemistry to make kerosene on the fly. He built two of his jet engines and then built a new, fighter-jet shaped airframe around that. it had a tall tail fin with a rudder, the entire horizontal stabilizer could be used like an elevator, a triangle-shaped pair of wings with a single combined flap/aileron surface on each wing, and a tube-like body with a nose cone. He attempted to fly the machine but it did not handle very well, so he added canards near the nose of the aircraft to help stabilize it. That worked very well, but he still needed to burn a lot of ether to increase his strength to operate the controls. He was moving very fast, after all.

He designed a hydraulics system, which allowed him to move the control surfaces easily. He linked various control surfaces together with mechanical devices that would prevent positive feedback loops from developing. He flew very fast and very high, looking down at the top of Spire Renna. It had a long runway painted with numbers and while lines. He realized the numbers matched values on a compass. A very sensible setup.

He saw some aircraft flying around, but decided not to destroy them. When he killed the Elder Saint and replaced her he wanted to inherit as much of her stuff as he could, and destroying it seemed wasteful. He did get into a dogfight with a few fighter jets and destroyed them with his power. They were not carrying any weapons that he could tell, so he had nothing to copy. Weapons might be useful though, because they could be shot at a distant target and operate on their own, whereas he would have to focus on each target he wanted to destroy, and it needed to be close enough for his abilities to work. In theory, he could develop new weaves that would travel a long way, however that would be effectively the same thing as just making missiles, and would waste his time as he focused on controlling the spell as it moved towards the target.

He returned to the surface, pulled up more raw materials and began working on missiles. He settled on a design that resembled a tube with fins on the back and a nose cone. He designed a heat-seeking mechanism that would drive actuators in the fins of the missile and allow it to be attracted to other fighter jets. He developed a firing mechanism and wired it to a trigger on the control stick. As he flew to the west towards Spire Lin, he noticed that there was a great many fighter jets in the sky. He tested out one of his missiles and it worked, killing the enemy from far away.

He was flying directly over a large army camped in the heartland of the Theocracy. No, not one army. It was the border between two army camps. There was a large festival down below. The enemy fighter jets seemed to be orbiting this area. He wasn't certain why. Spire Lin was to the west, and at the base of the Spire, through a gap in the clouds, was an unfamiliar view of a familiar place.

He gave could see the Spine, the University Fjord with it's double-arch Bank and the tall tree-like campus administration building. The gentle slope of the snowclad grass of the University Fjord. Finally, the great White Chasm itself, which was indeed just that. A chasm, with many bridges and dwelling build into the walls, painted white with snow.

He was admiring his home city when something hit him in the face and destroyed most his chest and throat.

Annoying.

He reached out and took control of all the flesh, blood, and metal that had been displaced, and carefully put it back where it was supposed to go. He made himself immune to physical trauma, which would have been a good idea, in retrospect. More projectiles rapidly tore at his fighter jet. He looked up.

It was the most beautiful thing that he had seen in his entire life.