Rogue dungeon detected.
Seero had only a moment after the Dungeon system messaged her before a torrent of mana struck her core. Holy mana streamed in from the flows of the world in massive quantities.
Warning: Geo-Oscillator offline! Connection could not be reestablished!
Unfortunately, the Geo-Oscillator was not, in-fact, offline. Rather, Seero’s other components had lost contact with it as the massive flow of mana blocked any magical or electronic signal. In the meantime, the Oscillator had gone haywire. It was flooding her components, both organic and cybernetic, with mana…and attempting to terminate them.
Seero took what mana she had left and activated a Blink spell, pulling her into the boundary of the Material Plane once again. But this time, she didn’t stay within range of her anchors, but allowed the spell to carry her off into parts unknown.
In fact, that was the point.
The foreign system had turned against her, and activated a hostile protocol hidden within her core. A technique to turn a dungeon’s strength against it by removing the safeguards on their mana intake, and connecting them to the flows of mana throughout the Material Plane to boot. Seero was assaulted directly by her core..and even if she managed to turn her core non-hostile, the sheer quantity of mana would still overload her. Even Seero, the master of growing Material Plane, could not withstand the weight of the first, much larger one, not to mention additional mana pouring in endlessly from the Source.
And unfortunately, since Seero had lost contact with her core she couldn’t deactivate it. She had activated the Equalizer immediately to counteract the mana surge, but the entire world had been pouring mana into her core. The Equalizer’s output simply couldn’t keep up. Seero needed to cut off the connection.
So she shot off into the Realms of Mana. She was now surrounded by fire. She had hoped to end up in the Realm of Eternal Night, but the Realms of Mana were not so simply traveled. Jumping through the gap in the boundary created by a corrupted core to the Realm it was connected to was one thing. Trying to target a specific Realm as she moved beyond the Material Plane haphazardly was something else entirely. She had ended up in the Realm of Inferno instead.
But that worked for Seero’s purposes. The mana-burning effect of Inferno would suffice as a substitute for the shrouding effect of Eternal Night. Additional mana from the Material Plane couldn’t reach her here, and even her direct connection to the Source was muted.
Now she just had to deal with the vast quantities of mana still assaulting her very being…before the mana of Inferno burned through her Spatial Angling defenses. And then she would have determine how to reactivate her core while modifying it against this sort of attack…all while rationing the amount of mana stored in her capacitors so that she would have enough left to find a way back when it was through.
Additionally, the mana had already dealt some damage. Seero had been focusing her defenses on key components, and had not been able to resist entirely. She already lost most of her left arm and leg, her right limbs would soon follow. So if she managed to get the situation under control, she would also need to effect some serious repairs.
The situation was suboptimal.
Warning: Risk of termination of unit Seero at critical levels. Engaging contingency protocol.
Seero’s robotic eye flickered while her organic eye blinked. In fact, the situation was so suboptimal that a particular contingency protocol activated.
A contingency protocol that Seero had somehow not been aware of.
Non-standard energy exploded out from her organic components of all things, and collided with the rampaging mana. Her body stopped disintegrating, and new data flooded her processors. Seero’s organic eye widened slightly. The non-standard energy was not mana…but it was something that Seero had some data on.
“Commander Elise?”
A non-standard energy she had recorded emanating off of her former commander. Her calculations indicated, therefore, that this was likely a protocol Commander Elise had given her…and had hidden by storing it in her organic components rather than her cybernetic memory. She was not certain how that was possible…
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But she had no time to ponder. The non-standard energy stored by Commander Elise would not last forever. She still needed to determine a solution for this situation in the next few minutes if she was to avoid termination.
And the new data from the contingency protocol would help with that.
What Commander Elise had included…were blueprints for a modified Equalizer. It appeared Dr. Ottosen had merely scratched the surface of what an Iesnuorium-powered device was capable of. So Commander Elise had recommendations on how to significantly improve the efficiency of the device…and its flexibility.
Seero got to work immediately. She utilized her experience with Metal Magic, with growing the Primary Home Base, and with the construction of dungeon-core powered war machines to modify her own components in place. She took the Iesnuorium funnel that merely let energy pass through and rearranged it into a series of arrays. She disconnected the energy channels leading to the projectors in her arms, and constructed a new projector installed directly on the arrays. She took the sensors and processors that would automatically adjust the output to destructively interfere with her target and eliminated them entirely. Between her improved sensors, her Dungeon Field Generator, and her Divination protocols the sensors were unnecessary. And with her expanded processing power, the computer hard-coded for destructive interference was entirely too limited for the new setup.
And then…she activated it.
The new Equalizer fired up. Electricity surged into the new circuits, activating them one by one. The arrays hummed to life, and began producing anti-mana once more. Seero confirmed that the new Equalizer still functioned…in-fact, its output was noticeably higher due to the elimination of several inefficiencies in Dr. Ottosen’s original design. But that output still paled in comparison to the mana she needed to deal with. A limited, if notable, increase in output was not the goal of this upgrade.
Seero began to shape the anti-mana…and it responded to her command. The new Equalizer’s arrays did not simply spit their output out like a hose, in the barbaric fashion the inefficient Dr. Ottosen had designed it to. The arrays formed the output in intricate, complex, and variable patterns. They could adjust the output beyond simply negating a target energy type, and mold that energy before it ever left the Equalizer. They could not only cancel out supernatural powers…they could create them.
So Seero formed an inverted magic circle out of anti-mana.
The changes extended beyond the new Equalizer’s output. Its inputs had also grown significantly more flexible. Iesnuorium could also absorb any energy type, after all, so there was no reason to limit the Equalizer’s input to electricity now that Seero had the means to generate other energy types. Mana from her capacitors, as well as the mana generated by her organic components fed into the Equalizer to boost its output.
And more than that…Seero knew that mana had a mental component she still had not detected. There was some method by which mages could impart information and parameters to their spells beyond the magic circles. That had been a major bottleneck in her development of anti-mana spells. She couldn’t shape the anti-mana without physically molding an energy channel into the requisite shape…and could not find a way to impart the unseen parameters, such as target designation for offensive spells, at all.
Until now, when regular mana now fed into the Equalizer. Regular mana that could be imparted with those parameters as with any other spells. And the new Equalizer’s design, while it changed the energy type, seemed to maintain those parameters. In fact…by Seero’s observation, it was not dissimilar from the process of converting basic mana into an attribute.
So now…Seero could form fully functional anti-mana spells.
And she had just the spell to use. The mana-bourne virus 00B-Beta had assimilated previously gave her a more subtle means to infiltrate hostile mana…and convert it. So she adjusted the anti-mana output slightly, making it a slightly less perfect match for mana, and then sent the anti-mana virus through her systems.
The anti-mana infiltrated and reacted with most of the mana…but left a small amount remaining, cut off from the rest of the mana. This mana then entered the virus circuit left behind…and converted into more anti-mana, allowing the virus to repeat the process.
The anti-mana virus surged through the mana rampaging inside her, all but wiping it out. It then, per a protocol she had added to the code, looped back around to the Equalizer. The Equalizer’s input absorbed anti-mana as easily as anything else, and then Seero used it to cast a new spell. A wave of anti-mana surged out from her, pushing back the flames of Inferno that had just about chewed through her spatial angling.
Base mana from the Source filled the area, as usual for her Realm of Mana termination protocols.
But this time, it contacted something else.
The remaining non-standard energy from Commander Elise had moved to Seero’s exterior, attempting to repair her missing components. In doing so, it came into contact with the base mana from the Source.
The energy was not mana, but that did not mean it could not interact with the Source. In fact, Seero detected something like an attribute in the energy’s signature. An attribute that matched her own…which made sense given that it originated with Commander Elise, another NSLICE unit like herself.
The mana of the Source accepted this attribute as it would any other, and began to convert to a matching mana type. An area of the mana filled the space around Seero, and once the last traces of Inferno mana were gone, she disappeared, carried by the mana to the area of the Source that matched it…