Magic wasn’t the solution here. According to thirteen years of my research into understanding the nature of magic, the power of Precognition, operating in high level Seers primarily made magi see magical solutions to magical problems. For example, a Seer could see what spell their enemies would use against them, but any mundane physical actions, simply didn’t translate into Seer Foresight.
I had arrived at this conclusion after I thoroughly interviewed the Cessna Librarium Administrator Pion Ress about this matter. Foresight spells were magic that saw magic - echoes of it, manifesting within the Astral, before a spell was even fired. Time within the Astral Ocean was screwed up on some fundamental level and therefore it was possible to predict many magical actions of a mage minutes or even days ahead!
Thus, mundane actions were unexpected by those who relied on greater Foresight.
I reached out to a lever next to the couch and pulled it. A large generator in the back of the house, fueled by a rushing brook that was rapidly spinning several wooden wheels powered on a circuit leading to iron beams wrapped in coils located directly beneath the entrance to our parents’ cottage.
The cultists were nice enough to bunch up exactly at the entrance between the giant boulders - exactly where I wanted them. People in Skyisle were used to walking on the ‘safe’ paths covered in the lights of the hex-lanterns.
“Hold person!” I barked from the Aunt Delta's ant-operated lips and pretended to cast a spell with my splayed hand.
The electromagnets buried directly beneath the path activated. Ishira’s staff, which was made almost entirely from magic-augmented blood-iron ripped from Magenta’s gloved fingers. It slammed into the ground and fell sideways, instantly becoming attached to one of the magnetized iron beams.
Magenta bent down to grab at it, and herself slammed down, unable to control her increased weight. One by one, the cultists who tried to help her up, fell into an uneven pile with loud clattering, their metal swords and armor now firmly attached to the iron beams.
“What sorcery is this? How have we not foreseen this spell?!” One of the cultists ground out, unsuccessfully trying to detach herself from the ground.
“It is the magic of our Radiant, All-Seeing Goddess,” I said. “Ishira has seen that you were intending to hurt me and chose to interfere. She closed your Sight to punish you for opposing me!”
“No! It cannot be!” A cultist wailed. “Unbind! Unbind person!”
“Disrupt hexagram!” Another cultist yelled, blasting mana into the ground.
The lilac-robed women and teens repeatedly tried to cast unbinding and magic-disrupting spells at the ground. It obviously didn’t do anything against electromagnets.
“What is happening?!” Magenta growled.
I smirked. “Those gold eyes you’ve painted on your foreheads won’t aid you against me, no matter what magic you cast.”
“No!” Magenta uttered. She hopelessly pulled at the staff, but was unable to tear it away from the beam, getting even more stuck herself. She was too confused and panicked to even attempt to cast anything at this point.
“Yes,” I said, walking forward. “You’ve lost. Surrender.”
“I cannot,” Magenta cried, eyes suddenly filling up with tears. Her violet curls shook. “My Archangel won’t let me! I must complete this mission or…”
I extended a second layer of the Ward to encompass the uneven pile of cultist bodies and took a few more steps forward with the ant-mech, opening the wooden gate.
“P-please, free me!” Magenta wept. Brilliant, radiant waves of [Charisma] magic blasted from her mouth. It didn't do a single thing to Archmage Delta who was composed of fifty thousand ants. “I am but a simple barmaid," she lied. "Please! Let me go and I will surrender…”
I knew that her words were a lie, pushed into her lips by the grotesque, gold fungi hanging above her shoulders in the Astral.
“Let us free at once!” the other cultists wailed, adding to the chorus of [Charisma], which once again, did absolutely nothing to the ant colony. “Disable this vile spellwork! Free us!”
I reached into Aunt Delta’s pocket and snapped a Vow-disrupting, wooden collar over Magenta’s neck.
The mushrooms above the teen, who were beginning to strangle her into action with their gold threads flickered and were suddenly unable to reach their host.
"In the name of Ishira, oh Angels, fall silent and turn away from this child!" I sang, making the voice coming from the bee-speaker extra deep.
Magenta choked below me, eyes wide with pure horror.
“I have just told your Archangels to turn away from you,” I said. “Do you believe me now, Magenta? Am I the Bishop of Ishira or will you call me a liar and attempt to strike me down once again? Do you feel the gathering inferno beneath your face? It will devour you if you oppose me! The Wheel of Death seeks to consume sinners!”
The electromagnets beneath me were starting to heat up and Magenta felt the warmth coming from the ground.
“I… I cannot hear my Angels anymore!” Magenta stared at me with tear-streaked eyes.
“You have but one choice here–reject renegade mage Giovashi or perish,” I said, releasing a few hundred ants through the holes in my feet into the pile of immobile cultists. “Serve me instead of the false renegade who dares to call herself an Archpriestess of Ishira!”
“Magenta! I order you to…! Ashhh shit! What in the Astral! Ahhh!” The bossy, oldest cultist screamed as the ants began nipping at her body.
“Burn,” I said through Aunt Delta’s lips. “You will all burn unless you swear allegiance to me here and now!”
“Delta, release the bees,” I turned to my sister. “Make Ishira’s symbol appear above me.”
“Can do,” she nodded, releasing a thousand bees from the large, leather backpack worn by the ant-mech.
A swarm of fire-bees blotted the sky above Archmage Delta. The cultists stared up in terror as the swarm darkened the sky around them.
“Say it! Go on, tell every child here who I am!” I ordered Magenta, sliding into the shoes of a cult-leader. “The Inferno of Divine Judgement will consume you if you lie! Behold the Symbol of our Goddess!”
I waved an arm at the sky and some of the fire bees ignited their stingers, hovering in place. The symbol of the All-Seeing Eye of Ishira appeared above the fallen cultists, woven from myriads of burning dots.
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“Decep…” one of the older women tried to speak, but started to cry and thrash as the ants began biting her more fiercely.
“Well?!” I barked. “Speak the truth Magenta!”
“You… you… are Her Bishop, Ishira’s Voice herself! I am sorry, your excellence! I’m so sorry! Please don’t burn me alive! Please! I’ll serve you! I’ll do whatever you want! Please!” Magenta yelled, shaking in fright, staring up at the sign of Ishira made from fire-bees. The armor magnetized to the ground was overheating now, making her sweat.
“And?” I leaned towards the barmaid. “Do you reject the false one?”
“I… I reject the false mage Giovashi!” Magenta cried. “From this moment, I swear to be your servant, forevermore!”
“Excellent,” I grinned.
I walked back into Georgi’s workshop, leaving the cultists to the mercy of the ants and the bees for a few minutes. When I returned, I began placing magic-reinforced, wooden collars with Vow-disrupting crystals onto the necks of each of the cultists.
“You are not to take these off,” I instructed as I collared the girls. “You have been marked as fallen by Ishira and your Archangels have turned away from you. From this moment you are to keep these collars on as a mark of your penance, understood?”
“Understood!” Magenta nodded rapidly.
One by one, I asked the cultists if they would reject Giovashi and embrace me as their new Master.
Through fear and coercion, fire bees and ant bites, I collared each of them and got a promise out of them to serve me. With their Vows now silent, they were just girls, teenagers for the most part. They were barmaids empowered by arcane artifacts and driven into obedience by Giovashi’s lies.
Without their tools and Archangels, they were all around level 20-40 at most.
In another ten minutes of this ridiculous charade, I reached out and pulled the lever once more, disabling the electromagnet, just minutes before the circuits began to overheat and melt.
I picked up Ishira’s staff and twirled it in my hand. Next, I confiscated all of the magisteel knives, wands and other amplifiers, shoving them into the large leather backpack that was formerly filled with bees.
The insects had settled on the former cultist’s shoulders and arms and crawled deep into their armor, making sure that they remained compliant. Without the Vows guiding their decisions, they looked completely lost, miserable.
“W-what will happen to us?” Magenta asked.
“You’ll live longer,” I said.
“L-live longer?!” Magenta’s eyes went wide.
“It is your punishment,” I said. “You’ll live until your hair turns gray.”
“No!” One of the girls screamed in horror.
“Yes,” I said. “You’ll grow up, fall in love, maybe even have children just like the rest of Skyisle women. You will NOT be taken to heaven. This is your penance for defying me and the Goddess! Embrace it with your heart!”
The lilac-robed cultists fell to their knees, begging for my forgiveness and mercy. I offered them none.
. . .
The situation within the living room became less tense. I was running low on mana, so I disabled ¾ of my Infoscopoes and watched as dust particles floated across colourful rays of morning light cast from the stained glass window.
“I don’t get it,” Kliss muttered, staring out the window with a somewhat confused expression. “Why are they so afraid of… living long lives?”
“The sacrifice of something important such as the ability of making children was a common manipulation tactic used by dangerous cults,” I explained. “In the USSR my assigned overseer, Officer Alexander Gradenski, told me much about cults and the way they function. He was personally responsible for arresting and deporting many cults from the mainland to the frozen North-East to work in labor camps. One such cult was the ‘Skoptsy’. They called themselves the ‘White Doves’ and one of their tenets was complete removal of reproductive organs to achieve ‘spiritual purity’.”
“How can such cults even function in a world without magic?” Kliss asked. “How can someone be manipulated so far as to remove the ability to have kids, without making a Vow?”
“While we had science, it had no way to tell anyone what happens after death,” I explained. “Even without [Charisma] magic a person can be convinced to mutilate themselves for a greater purpose so that their present will be ‘more righteous’ and their future afterlife will be perfect. A century ago there were around a hundred thousand Skoptsy in USSR, but their number became reduced to less than a thousand over time as genital mutilation became frowned upon.”
“I see,” Kliss murmured. “So, how did you determine that these barmaids wouldn’t have families?”
“They simply wouldn’t live long enough,” I answered. “There’s a reason why the oldest one there is twenty seven. I scanned their bodies and the artefacts they wielded with my Infoscope - their swords, armour, wrist bracers and staff are all made from a very peculiar type of iron covered in crystalline flakes capable of absorbing the user’s blood.”
“Blood iron,” Kliss murmured, staring at the gnarly staff in Aunt Delta’s hands. “Necromage tools. I’ve read a mention of this forbidden dark magic in Cessna.”
“I didn’t use no freakin’ blood iron,” Delta commented. “My… err… Kopusha’s glider was made from premium magisteel! It fed on… the excess bloom of the Astral algae and corals, not blood or human souls!”
“The Acolytes of Tricameron indeed didn’t use such vile tools - these were devices used by the Seditionists to greatly bring up their level at the cost of draining their own body and soul,” I explained. “These tools are truly monstrous because they aren’t only fed by blood, they drain the user in a very insidious way, ossifying organs one by one from within.”
“Shit,” Delta bit her lip. “Is it too late for Magenta, then?”
“She is still young and can perhaps be healed with positively-charged [Vitality]. Had I given her a chance to use that staff to push her level to 200 to bring down our Ward, she would have drained half of her life in the process,” I replied. “The older cultists have the most damage, their lower organs have already shrunken and in some cases completely atrophied.”
“By Equality,” Kliss covered her mouth. “That’s… monstrous. I should have rooted them out as Overseer… should have done something about that damn pub on my first day here.”
“If you did, we wouldn’t be talking now,” I shrugged. “They would have made you swear a Vow to protect the cultists themselves, not the Alans. Your amarcus simply wouldn’t be able to oppose something like those blood shackles and staff.”
“Luckily they had blood iron on and not some other non-magnetic armor,” Delta commented.
“The magnets were actually designed to stop Imperial Legionnaires,” I shrugged. “It was designed to halt someone like Kliss in place, since I knew that Overseer’s armour was magnetic.”
“What if their tools weren’t blood iron?” Kliss asked. “Would they just slaughter us then?”
“Then I would have used another, far less peaceful tool,” I shrugged. “They’re Seers, so all I had to do was avoid using magic.”
“So what would you have done?” Kliss inquired.
“I would have let them get closer to the workshop, to allow them to investigate it and then I would have rolled about a hundred tons of logs their way,” I pointed at the pile of logs. “See that pile? I can trigger half of it to roll downhill with a lever that burns through a rope via a rapidly heating coil. Anyone going up the stone steps would have encountered an avalanche of logs.”
“That would have crushed them to death,” Kliss muttered, staring at the massive log pile made by Georgi.
“Sometimes life doesn't present us with the best choices.” I shrugged, yawning.
“But what if…?” Delta asked.
“Enough ‘what ifs’,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I got woken up at 5 in the morning, am exhausted and have a massive migraine from accelerating my mind to take apart a LV 90 Identify spell so I’m going to lie down for a bit. Take over as Aunt Delta, let our parents out of the catacombs and then learn everything you can about the extra cultists. I want to know where they came from, how they got to Skyisle and if Giovashi has more barmaids hidden somewhere that she can throw at us.”
“Okki, grouchy Captain,” Delta sent me a salute, leaned back and closed her eyes.
“Kliss, let go of her,” I said.
The dragon-girl did as advised and I saw Delta’s soul disconnect from her human body and flash as an Astral Phantom across our backyard, merging into Aunt Delta’s ant-mech form.
I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes. Kliss slid over closer to me and pulled my head onto her lap.
“Mrhmm?” I blearily opened one eye.
“Sleep, Slava,” she said, petting my head. “You’ve earned it. You’ve saved us today.”
“Just doing what I do best,” I shrugged. “Taking apart spells, making dragons…”
I didn’t finish my semi-coherent train of thought. My eyes closed and I drifted into the embrace of warm, dreamless sleep. I didn’t even have enough mana to activate Lucid Dreaming, but I trusted Kliss and Delta to sort stuff out now that the danger had passed.