The next morning, 5th division broke camp at Giant’s Head and marched south. They would pursue their foe to where they had fled to, and this time they would finish the job. However, Edwin wasn’t with the rest of the adventurers at the front of the column, as he had his sights set on something else.
“Let’s hear it,” Archibald said, looking at the other two ritualists expectantly. “What did you come up with?”
“Well, my first idea was to transmogrify the stone of the wall into something else, maybe sand,” Ludmilla began, “but I immediately realized that that would be incredibly inefficient. I wanted to bring it up anyway, just so we had it on the list.”
“I’ll write it down, just in case,” Archibald said with an approving nod. Not mentioning an idea because it seemed impossible was almost criminal for a researcher. You never knew when it was the exact thing that could lead to a breakthrough. “Rolf?”
“I was thinking pure force,” the young ritualist offered. “A telekinesis ritual that accelerates large boulders to high speeds and flings them forward. From what I understand the walls aren’t magically reinforced, so they should be susceptible to kinetic energy.”
“Hmm,” Archibald said, tapping his fingers on the table. “I have a suspicion. Let’s do a rough draft and calculate it through.”
Edwin couldn’t help but smile as he leaned against the wall beside the door, watching the three journeymen work. No matter how many times he lived, he couldn’t imagine magical research ever getting boring. There was simply nothing like delving deep into the foundations of reality, armed with nothing but your wits, limited by nothing but your creativity, only to emerge with something never seen before clutched in your trembling hands.
“Yep, that’s what I thought,” Archibald said, shoving over his paper to the other two. “To give the boulder so much speed that it retains relevant destructive potential even after crossing the distance, we would need way too much mana. If we scale it down so that it’s manageable it does the same as a catapult, just way more expensive.”
The other two looked it over, and Rolf sighed. “I didn’t take the distance into account. That’s really going to be the problem here, isn’t it?”
“The challenge, Rolf, the challenge,” Archibald corrected with a wry grin. “Ludmilla, what have you got?”
“A cutting beam. I was thinking if we fed enough power into a mana blade, we could cut right through the wall from afar.”
Again, the three leaned over the cramped table and began sketching and calculating, and Edwin snuck closer to look over their shoulders. His hands were itching to take up a charcoal pencil and join them, but he held back.
“Ah, dammit,” Ludmilla sighed. “It’s the range again. Even if we assume that the ambient mana is the lowest on the continent, the mana blade gets destabilized too quickly by the interference. We would either have to be within at most forty meters for it to work or overcharge it so much that it would burn through all of our mana crystals in two seconds. That is, if we can build it so it doesn’t melt.”
“Too bad. Still, I like the mana blade idea, maybe we can do something with that later. Let’s keep going. Rolf?”
And so it went on, one idea after the other being proposed, tested, and discarded. Edwin was impressed. There were even some that he hadn’t thought of himself, though that might have been because it was immediately obvious to him that they were pointless.
“A tunneling ritual!”
“We would need to be close to use it, it would be slow and mana intensive. Way more efficient to just make a note with the dimensions we want, hand it to the materialists and let them dig it themselves. That’s what they do.”
“A ramp then! We pull together the dirt in front of the wall to build a ramp right up to the ramparts, so our soldiers can simply walk up.”
“Not bad, but with the width and height of the ramp, the amount of dirt we would need would be immense, and it would have to be reinforced. Takes too much mana.”
Ideas came and went, some more outrageous than others, but none were exactly what they wanted. They had some that would work but needed to be right up close against the wall, which wasn’t necessarily a hindrance, but was to be avoided if possible. The soldiers could get them there, but setting up a ritual while being pelted with arrows, rocks and gods knew what else was not ideal. Others would deplete their limited store of mana crystals and leave them unable to run even their fireball defenses. Still others were simply impossible. Nevertheless, through trial and error they learned, and as the hours passed their ideas became more and more realistic.
“So we’re in agreement that mana blade is the way to go,” Archibald summed it up, leaning back to crack his spine after sitting hunched over for several hours. “It’s the cheapest and quickest way to get through the stone wall anywhere we want, and it doesn’t bear the risks that tunnels or ramps do. The question now is: How do we deliver it?”
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“We could probably build it in a way that the soldiers only need to carry it to the wall, place it down, then slot in the mana crystal,” Rolf said slowly. “It would be like a magical siege ram, except instead of banging against a gate it cuts one right out of the wall. The dangerous part would be to get it there without it being damaged.”
“Yes,” Ludmilla added, excited. “It could actually cut out a piece of the wall in the shape of a gate, then push it inwards or pull it out with telekinesis. Instant gate, ready to march through!”
“Oooh, I like it!” Rolf said with a grin, giving his colleague a high five.
“You would probably have to slice out an entire piece of wall,” Edwin interjected. “If you just cut out a gate shape and pull it out, whatever is on top of it will collapse and potentially block the way. It would probably work on a small scale, but not the way you envision it.”
“Aww,” Ludmilla pouted. “I guess it was too good to be true.”
“Still, not a bad idea,” Archibald said. “As you said, it might work on a small scale. Let’s put it on the ‘potentially useful’ pile and move on.”
“If distance is the problem,” Rolf said slowly, thinking as he spoke, “maybe we need to think outside the box. The engineers will build catapults, right? If we place feedback rituals on the rocks those throw, they should explode on impact. I could see that doing some real damage.”
“It would be really dangerous to people, I think,” Archibald said, tapping his fingers in thought, “especially because it would likely break the rock and turn it into shrapnel, but I don’t see it doing much against the wall. The blast of the explosion would be too unfocused, and with the rock randomly rotating in the air we wouldn’t have a way to direct it either—”
“That’s it!” Edwin exclaimed, making the other three jump. “Rolf, you’re a genius!”
“I am?” the journeyman asked, confused. “But I thought it doesn’t work?”
“Not like that, no,” Edwin said, stepping over to the table and pulling a sketched blueprint from a pile. “But if we combine it with this…”
The mages leaned over the sketch, furrowing their brows. “I don’t see how we… oh. Ohhhh! Oh damn.” Archibald chuckled. “See, Edwin, that’s why we keep you around. Your brain just works differently.”
“Could that work, though?” Ludmilla asked hesitantly. “I mean, a mana feedback loop is one thing, but if we want to attach that to a rock that spins randomly, it would have to be a good deal more complex, as well as, you know, round.”
“I think it could,” Archibald said, grabbing his pencil, “but we won’t know until we do the math. Ludmilla, map out the space the effect would need to cover at different ranges, and give me estimates on how much mana it takes. Rolf, clean up this sketch and see about ways to set it off. I’ll try and shape this thing into a ball.”
--- ----- ---
When they emerged from their wagon, it was dark out. The division had stopped for the night a good while ago, and they stepped into a bustle of activity. At the mage camp, dinner was being served, and they followed a young Journeyman materialist holding a bowl of soup to one of the other wagons. The young man knocked, then opened the door.
“Your dinner, Master, and the ritualists here to see you.”
“Thank you. Give it here and send them in.”
Master Gregory’s wagon, while smaller, was a lot nicer than the one they had just exited, but it was still far from luxurious. A bed that would take most of the space was flipped up against the wall, while a writing desk and a dresser took up the rest. It looked like a mobile and more cramped version of the office of a man who was too busy to go home to sleep. Gregory was seated at his desk, stacking a few papers to make room for the steaming bowl. The Journeyman placed it down, then left, shooting a curious look at Edwin as he squeezed past.
“Come in, come in,” the master said, waving them over the threshold, Edwin following after the others and staying behind them. The master materialist looked much more relaxed and approachable than any of the times Edwin had seen him, and he wondered if the man wasn’t quite as much of a miserly grump as he’d thought. “Good news, I hope?”
“Yes, Master,” Archibald said with a smile. “We think we have a solution for the wall.”
“Really? That was fast,” Gregory said approvingly. “Very well, let me see it.”
Archibald handed him the results of their work, several sheets of paper filled with the blueprint and their calculations. Gregory studied them, his brows increasingly scrunching together. Finally he lowered them to peer at the ritualists. His eyes stopped on Edwin for a moment, but he didn’t comment on his presence and moved on.
“I consider myself a deft hand at rituals, but I have to admit that I can make neither heads nor tails of this. What is it supposed to be, exactly?”
“Ah, yes, sorry!” Archibald hurried forward, leaning over the table to point at the diagrams. “We had to get creative with this one, so it looks somewhat non-standard. This part here is a rock – we want it to be shot from a catapult – and this here is the actual ritual. It’s shaped like a ball, so each of these drawings is from a different angle. This is from above, that is below, left, right…”
“I get it, I get it,” Gregory said, waving him away. “And the effect?”
“We added a short description at the bottom, with reference to the specific runes and their placement.”
“Ah, now I see it. And the resource analysis is…”
“Page two, on the back.”
“…on the back. Yes.”
The four of them exchanged tense looks as the leader of the mage contingent carefully studied their proposal, turning the sheets over to cross-reference the different sections. Finally, he placed it down and rubbed his eyes with a sigh.
“Archibald.”
“Yes, Master Gregory.”
“Are you telling me that the best idea, the very best idea you could come up with, is to strap several hundred gold worth of magesilver and mana crystals to a rock and fling it at the Marradi from a rickety wooden catapult?”
“…yes, Master Gregory, though I have faith in the engineers that the catapults will be well-built. We tried everything we could think of – this is the only option that allows us to destroy the wall from afar, with minimal danger to us or the soldiers, and with the lowest drain on our resources by an order of magnitude. Assuming we can recover most of the magesilver afterwards, that is.”
Gregory stared at the head ritualist, but Archibald held his ground without backing down. Finally, the master leaned back and sighed, running a hand over his bald head.
“Fine. If that is how it is, I suppose needs must. Truth be told, I would be lying if I said I was disinterested to see this bizarre creation of yours become reality. Go ahead and begin prototyping but keep me in the loop.”
Rolf and Ludmilla exchanged a grin behind Archibald’s back, who nodded solemnly. “Of course, Master.”
“Good. Now get out, my soup is getting cold.”