In Odan, Lord Daron, Defon, and Fugap, dressed in black, stood in silent reverence in front of General Makon's tombstone. The mass funeral service had just been completed, with many empty coffins being symbolically buried in the earth. Lord Kardo joined them, having paid his respects to one of his old friend's son.
"You know, I just wish he hadn't rushed to attack first." Lord Defon said bitterly. "The moment I laid my eyes on Ganz, I was met with the look of a ruthless man who needed to be dealt with care."
"Well now we are thrust in his position." Lord Fugap said. "We cannot allow this sacrilege to go unanswered. Ganz as to be brought to book."
A wail broke out from another part of the cemetary, The glanced in the direction, and sighed at the sight of yet another grieving mother being consoled by her family.
"There's room for optimism-" Lord Kardo began.
"There's barely any room I fear," Lord Defon interjected. "Ganz won't hesitate to do the same to us if he deems us a threat."
"Well Makon, rest his soul, proved one thing, Ganz is not invincible." Lord Kardo said. "He risked his life on that belief, and even though it really did cost him his life, it has given us the audacity to stand against Ganz."
"We have to be very discreet." Lord Fugap said quietly. "Especially those mages in Saymor..."
"They're very experienced." Lord Kardo said. "They will be fine."
---
"You know I actually still don't believe Zeron." Binko said at the breakfast table at Lufa Arabambi's house. Keri Arabambi had served them cereal with dried fruit, combined with goat milk and orange juice, While they ate, she fried bacon in the kitchen as a later addition.
"Why?" Lakan asked.
"What did he tell us that we don't already know? or that's useless information?" Binko said. "You're telling me he doesn't know how he intercepted a wave link? He doesn't know how to reverse the arcanite spell? I'm calling bullshit."
"So you're saying he played us then?" Lakan said.
"I wouldn't have done it, but in hindsight, it's clever as fuck, You're about to be tortured, so you start divulging a bunch of information and grandstanding about how you're too smart to require torture, but then after you gain the trust of your captors, you start lying." Binko said.
Lakan thought about it for a second.
"I mean I guess that's possible, but that's... That would be an insane gamble." he chuckled..
"So you're saying we should torture him anyway?" Hark asked.
"I mean..." Binko shrugged. Lakan laughed. "Are you doing this because you genuinely want information, or are you still looking for ways to hurt the poor man because he ran his mouth at you?"
"Poor man?" Binko asked with a raised eyebrow. "He's a fucking criminal, Lakan. Poor man my ass. Besides, I'm not that petty. Forking him on the foot was good enough. He'll feel that for a couple of days."
Keri Arabambi came into the room with the bacon and shared it around the table. then she took her own seat and started to eat. Binko looked at her for a while.
"Hey Keri, you said Zeron was your boyfriend yes?" She asked. Keri nodded with her mouth full.
"Where did you meet him and how did you break up?" She asked. Keri stared at her blankly, glancing at Lakan and Hark.
"You don't have to talk about it-" Hark offered.
"Yes she damn well has to." Binko interjected. She leaned forward and looked directly at Keri.
"Listen babe, I'm sure I don't have to tell you how dangerous your ex-boyfriend is, or the crimes of the crowd he's moving with." She said. "He's your ex, I don't think you have any reason to protect him. Spill the tea."
Keri swallowed and cleared her throat. Lakan took a sip of the wine.
"Binko, have you ever been in love?" She asked. Lakan spat out the tea from laughter.
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"What's funny Lakan?" Binko asked.
"Keri, allow me." Lakan said. Binko sighed and facepalmed.
"you see, Binko here, used to be a lovely romantic." He said. "In fact, I was her first crush, you see. She wrote me a lengthy love letter even."
"I was fifteen." Binko said, waving him off. "Now shut up. She asked me."
"Keri, yes, I've been in love before, it's a whole thing. How is that relevant?"
"Zeron was my third boyfriend, But he was different, It was a different kind of love." She said. "He was smart, funny, kind."
"Kind!" Hark exclaimed.
"yes he was!" Keri argued. "I don't get it. He was a totally different person in that bar, a unknown monster."
"Incredible." Lakan said
"He was so spontaneous too. He would take me on these insane adventures, impromptu. He was so charming, you know?"
Binko nodded, Keri continued.
"I met him at a party at the beach side, He just walked up to me and started talking to me, and then we went back to his place..."
"You followed him to his house?" Binko asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Well in hindsight..." Keri said. "I mean I'm a warfare mage, what was a random guy going to do to me? I had no idea."
"Yikes."
"So did you guys have sex?" Lakan asked.
"Lakan!" Binko and Hark exclaimed, but Keri nodded.
"That slick bastard..." Lakan commented.
"We dated for three weeks." Keri said. "It was the best three weeks of my life, and then all of a sudden, a few months ago--"
"Hey, hey, wait a second." Lakan said. "You told us he was an asshole, that it didn't last a week, and that you broke up two weeks ago."
"She said that?" Binko asked.
"What? none of you paid attention?" Lakan asked.
"I think I remember hearing that, yeah." Hark said. Keri looked down on the table.
"I lied, I'm sorry." She said quietly.
"Why would you lie like that?" Lakan laughed. "So unnecessary."
"I really hated him for breaking up with me, besides he really was an asshole about it!" Keri replied. "He told me I was no longer the most important thing in his life. That he was going on to greater things."
"Yikes." Binko said. "When did you people break up?"
Keri told them, and they realized it was merely a week before Ganz invaded Pirun. Six months ago.
"It takes years to learn War mage skills." Binko said. "Zeron must have known Ganz for at least 10 years now."
"We need to interrogate Zeron again." Hark said. Lakan nodded.
"I guess my torture spell might come in handy anyway."
---
It had been a week since Mage Saulmon had assigned the students in the warfare school the simple exercise of concentrating energy into an infinitesimally spell, Dodi Fulba was exhausted, in his room with paper littering the floor around him, most of them half burnt, filled with many scribbles. Nyubi knocked the door, he went to the door and opened it, seeing both her and Zoyi there. he let them in and collapsed on his bed.
"Working on the buddle problem?" Nyubi said.
"Yeah, It's kicking my ass." He said. "How far have you guys gone?"
"I was able to get one percent of a buddle into a one millimeter sphere, Nyubi said." Dodi laughed.
"I can't believe I thought I'd be able to beat the ten percent figure he gave." Nyubi said.
"Nah that was an actual lie." Dodi said. "There's no way anyone at our level can concentrate ten percent of a buddle. He just said that to get our hopes up so we could get humbled when we actually tried it."
He noticed Zoyi, who had remained quiet.
"Hey Zoyi." He said, nodding at her. She smiled nervously and nodded back.
"Hey Dodi."
They smiled at each other before Nyubi interjected.
"So Zoyi actually managed to do 2 percent." She said.
"That's impressive." Dodi said. "I just managed a 4 percent infintesimal sphere"
Zoyi and Nyubi were shocked.
"What the hell? How did you do that?" Nyubi asked.
"I've been locked up in this room for the past 8 hours, working on it. It's hard."
"You insane boy." Nyubi said with admiration on her face. "Teach me."
"Yeah, me too. please." Zoyi said.
"Sure, no problem, I'll need some tea first."
They waited for him to get his tea, and once he was done, he began.
"The rune formula for the infinitesimal sphere is very unstable, once you start filling it with energy, it breaks apart pretty quickly. So you have to analyze all the resonance points up to the seventh term, but on the seventh term, a second harmonic pricks up, because that's where the spehre becomes so small that the opposite ends of the spheres are so close they actually start to interact, so I had to account for them by using a brittling rune formula to shore up the structure. That also expands into an infinite series that you have to solve."
"I knew something was up!" Nyubi exclaimed. "Why didn't Mage Saulmon just tell us about the seventh resonance point?"
"To be fair, he did tell us that each resonance point had a potential to escalate." Dodi said. "We can't really expect him to give us all the clues."
"So where are you stuck then?" Nyubi asked.
"The brittling rune is failing once I cross the threshold of about 4 percent of a buddle. I don't know why yet. I've been doing a ton of calculations, I'm actually pretty tired now." Dodi replied.
"My approach was to fix the sphere size and increase the energy concentration by five times, and then shrink the sphere gradually using a manual rig spell. " Zoyi said. "But I couldn't get it past two percent. Do I really have to expand the resonance series?"
"You have to," Dodi said. "The seventh resonance has a large factor that really kicks in as you increase the energy input."
"That's so... complicated." She sighed.
"And yet I've seen mages write powerful spells containing thousands of buddles within just a few hours." Dodi said.
"They have years of training and compact runic sequences. I once saw a page of Segi Arabambi's grimoire. She wrote a white blast spell in just five lines. FIVE LINES!"
"That's insane." Dodi remarked. "We'll get there one day guys. We just have to figure out this simple problem."
"Yikes." Nyubi said.
"Actually I'm pretty tired guys," Dodi said. "I'm going to take a nap now, You guys can read my calculations and spells, just gather all the papers."
He jumped on his bed and grabbed his pillow as Nyubi and Zoyi collected the papers to study them.