The popular image of a paragon-class magician was of a near-deity. Unstoppable machines of magic, mages like the Seven Sinners, the Asian continent’s dark emissaries, or the African lords of war were frequently looked towards like they were inherently other. Countries and organizations treated them like nuclear warheads while individual magicians thought of them like the ancients did their folk legends.
Of course, reality was quite different. Paragons didn’t operate only in flashy incidents like the ones the Sinners tended to get themselves into, and even the Sinners themselves didn’t always utilize the most direct methods. Syl had completed a number of missions without ever leaving a apartment-turned-situation room half a country over, barely ever leaving his desk. While he was something of a special case, it held true that many paragon-class mages were people. Walking superweapons, yes, but they were still humans that needed to do human things.
In this case, that meant waiting while Bianca piloted a private hovercraft towards Santa Rosa while Syl prepared his pre-loaded spells. He had Horizon Breaker with him as he always did, but that FCD was meant for emergencies and situations that called for great deals of indiscriminate destruction only. For the purpose of this excursion, that would not only be unnecessary but actively detrimental.
That was another common misconception about paragons. Not everything they did was of the same level of importance. Information was power, and sometimes a special unit would send a tactical nuke where a switchblade would do in the pursuit of it.
Alexander Petrov—alias Zero—had, by all reports, had been like that. Syl had studied the original Sinner as a manner of course. He had racked up an enormous kill count that didn’t only end in bodies; Zero was infamous for nearly single-handedly eliminating three major international alliances and dismantling the ruling bodies of at least five separate sovereign bodies. The sixth and seventh were disputed, true, but that was mostly because a good chunk of the modern world didn’t recognize those two as countries.
Yet that hadn’t been all he’d done. He had also been active in lower places, clearing out Gates and Tower floors as well as occasionally making an appearance in an area with no reason or rhyme to where or who he visited. Zero had done a deal of good early on—stopping violence, saving towns from Tower and Gate creatures and the like—to the extent that mass media had made a push to brand magicians like him as “superheroes” in the early days before he had caused the United States to splinter into a dozen pieces.
And he was dead. In 61 AFI, days before Syl had been trapped in Middle America, Alexander Petrov had been recorded by over thirty independent observers in New Zealand. Video and flux analytic footage demonstrated him suffering a total destruction of five layers of strategic-class free-cast magical defenses thanks to a combination effort from seventeen strategic and five paragon-class magicians from around the globe before taking a railgun shell to the skull.
That had also been where a rare phenomenon known as a catalyst event had been discovered. Leading theories on it stated that when a paragon-class or abnormally flux-rich strategic-class magician died while casting certain types of major magic, their death would violently expel all that flux that had been stored within them, reacting with their mid-cast spell and detonating. The details of it were unclear, since detailed magical records typically didn’t transmit through the ensuing blast and testing it was impossible for obvious reasons.
No footage past the moment of the railgun obliterating Zero’s body had survived, but the four survivors in New Zealand had reported a chain reaction of those catalyst events feeding into each other until the country had sunk. That had been the first and second time a paragon-class mage had been recorded dying in combat.
Yet not two days ago, someone had correctly identified Syl and spoken as the late paragon. Syl, Bianca, and the others in the unit were still split on whether it had been a fake trying to imitate him or if Zero had managed to survive his own catalyst event.
Syl found himself leaning towards the latter. He hadn’t exactly known Zero, not as a person, but he’d exchanged words with the man once or twice when he’d been younger. The original Sinner had designated him as Pride in their first meeting, replacing an archmage who had reportedly been assassinated in his sleep. Syl’s impression of the man had been brief, but even he knew that Zero had been a man to be feared.
Pride had survived something that shouldn’t have been survivable. Despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, Syl found himself believing that Zero could have done the same.
Isn’t it nice to be home? the message had asked.
Home. There was a word that hadn’t meant anything to Syl in a while.
“We are approaching the Tower,” Bianca said. “Signs of flux imbalance in the area.”
Sure enough, the hovercraft started to shake and jolt uncomfortably as they slid into the region of the Santa Rosa Tower. It was designed to stand up to the overwhelmingly flux-dense conditions that a Tower caused over time, but a combination of Gluttony, Syl, and the Cascadians that had come after had significantly destabilized how the flux in the area was acting, lessening the impact the stabilizers could have. The skies were a clear bright blue above, contrasting the burnt, glassed-over ground for kilometers around the Tower. Signs of conflict and investigation post-Armaggedon cast littered the area as well.
Syl leaned towards the monitors, navigating his way through the hovercraft’s sensor suite with trained efficiency.
He tapped Bianca on the shoulder after a moment. Found something.
About a kilometer from the Tower, someone had established a temporary structure. Unlike the ruins around it, it was clearly meant to be temporary and flux-resistant. From the remainders of the framework and the residue of the special heavy-duty canvas in the area, the source was obvious.
“That was one of ours,” Bianca said.
Syl nodded. It had been a standard setup for hazardous, temporary field work outposts. Had been, because someone had demolished it in its entirety.
Cascadians, Syl signed. Recent.
“Sensors are picking up denser collections of flux near the Tower and the outpost,” Bianca reported. “I assume the Cascadians went inside. We were looking to see if they were searching for something, correct?”
Syl gave her a thumbs up. The Cascadian offensives couldn’t only be serving a single purpose given their inconsistency with it—they hadn’t launched anything like a full-scale invasion during their Tower ambush. They had been making a play for something, and the special unit had commandeered a few squads of regular Aurian magicians to find out what it was.
“May they rest in peace,” Bianca said, briefly inclining her head. “Shall we enter the Tower?”
She didn’t even need to look at Syl to see his response, but she did anyway.
Someone is dying today, he signed.
#
“Dragoon squad, this is Dragoon-1 acting as Dragoon leader, check sound.”
“Dragoon-2, check.”
“Dragoon-3, check.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The comms lit up with a total of eight confirmations, the standard size of a tactical-class Cascadian squad.
“Sound should work for at least twenty more hours, but we want to be out before half that’s elapsed,” Verrin Nexson, callsign Dragoon-1 said. “Previous expedition cleared up to here before repurposing their mission. Remember, we are strictly exploratory. Kill monsters if necessary but prioritize escape or passage. Kill Aurians if possible. If not, ensure they see the flag. All colors secured?”
A round of affirmations followed his question.
Not one of the people in this group was Cascadian military. One of them had come from the country while not being an official operative, another was a mercenary, and the last were Verrin’s own magicians. He didn’t ask questions about the two he’d been tasked to bring along. He wasn’t being paid to ask questions.
They had made it to the sixth floor of the Santa Rosa Tower and so far, the plan was proceeding nicely. Thanks to Cascadian efforts elsewhere along the Aurian border, he and his skeleton crew would have plenty of time to work their way through the structure. They had found it delightfully unguarded but for one research team with a lax security team, all of whom were now ash in the wind.
The strange scenery of the inside of a Tower always bothered Verrin. Though he was already well acquainted with the fact that yet-unstudied magic made the insides substantially different from what they should have been able to contain, it was never not unnerving to walk in a floor like this one. His surroundings appeared exactly like the grassy hills that characterized the region just north of this right up until he looked at what its grass was made of or noticed that the sky was a shade of deep purple.
Tower climbing was a substantially different endeavor compared to Gate clearing. While Gates tended to have a very speciifc extradimensional space that was unlikely to change between delves and had clearly defined boundaries, Tower floors varied in size and were often biomes of their own.
The broad strokes of the fifth floor of the Santa Rosa Tower had been recorded by the previous Cascadian exploration into it, though significant details had changed while nobody was in it. Verrin had learned the reasons for it during his crash course in the topic, but he’d forgotten them. As a field operative, it was less important to know why something happened than how to respond to it.
The details on this particular expedition had been sparse. There were specific items Verrin was supposed to be looking for with the sensitive equipment his squad had been provided as well as recordings he was to bring back to his superiors, but that was once again not something he was going to question. A good operative followed orders, even if said orders were as inane as using callsigns with no remote operator overseeing this mission.
“Leader,” Dragoon-6 called. “Picking up something strange on the sensors.”
Six was the Cascadian civilian who had been assigned to this mission specifically to man the sensor suite, a fragile-looking exoskeleton that went over the military uniform she’d donned for the time being. It came with so many cameras and camera-like sensors that it made her seem like a human-sized insect. Verrin found it unsettling, but it wasn’t his job to be unsettled.
“Six, is it relevant to our current sitch?” Verrin asked, doing his best to keep the impatience out of his tone.
She’d been chafing the regular squad the entire time they’d been here. There was a reason they didn’t usually work with civilian magicians even if they were talented. Those people just didn’t operate in the same world as soldiers.
“Yes,” Six said tersely. “Picking up more traces on potential artifacts on the search list. We should find them within a floor or two. Aside from that, two unknown signatures just passed by sensors I left on previous floors.”
“You should have led with that,” Verrin growled. “Magicians?”
“Likely,” Six said. “I would have patched the data to you if you had let me in your network.”
Verrin glared at her, then shook his head. “The private feed is still open. Send it to me and I’ll send it to the rest.”
“Yes sir,” Six replied sardonically, using one of the additional four arms her exosuit provided to salute with a hand held out at the shoulder, palm facing upwards. A Polarian salute.
The helmet-adorned members of Verrin’s native country glanced at each other, flickers of flux splitting off from each of their FCDs as expressions of a general feeling that amounted to something like is this lady serious?
It took a valuable minute for the sensor data to start coming through. The private channel Verrin had with Six was secured in a different way from the standard data stream his country’s military used, and part of that meant a number of security protocols that made the transfer from sensors that Verrin didn’t have equipment to interpret much more of a pain than it would have been otherwise.
Through this filter, though, the relevant data could be rendered readable by Verrin’s heads-up displays. Once it started flowing, it quickly caught up to live data, though the bitrate was still insufficient to provide the kind of detailed live-action displays that he was more familiar with.
The moment the data made it to him, he distributed it to the rest of the squad. A great deal of it was simply noise, completely unreadable by his devices, but the flux signature detection was unmistakable. His squad usually would have had a seventh magician working as a dedicated perception-type specialist, but orders were orders, so they were working with Cascadian data instead.
“Bogeys on floor two,” Dragoon-3 called. “Wait, on three? Display doesn’t make sense.”
“There’s signatures on four floors already,” Verrin said. “Dragoon squad, split up. Seven, cover Six.”
“Go elsewhere,” Dragoon-8, the private military contractor who’d been the second addition to Verrin’s squad said. “I will cover the data specialist.”
Verrin bit back a retort. “Alright. Seven, take your standard driection instead. Keep eyes on each other, but establish minimum safe distances.”
Contrary to the military wisdom of the before times, splitting up was often the optimal choice when one became aware of incoming magicians. Based on the flux signatures, these two were anywhere between high A to mid tactical-class magicians, which meant they had access to devastating area of effect magic that could potentially obliterate large groups of magicians with the wrong defenses.
Even though Verrin’s own squad was made of tacticals with the assistance of a master-class mercenary, there was always the possibility that a certain spell slipped through pre-prepared defenses. Magic was an uncertain field, and minimizing the amount of damage a single spell could cause was standard operating procedure.
“Flux signatures are acting strangely,” Verrin said, noting the patterns on his heads-up display. “Weapons and FCDs hot. Either there’s something wrong with the sensors—“
“There is nothing wrong with the sensors,” Six said crossly.
“—or we have zero information on what’s actually happening down there. Pre-aim the likely manifestation spots.”
They had the advantage here. While the Tower wasn’t necessarily the most consistent in many respects, mankind had a habit of studying what they couldn’t understand. Despite its irregularity, the Cascadian woman’s sensor suite kept modern Tower detection technology in it, the same type that Verrin used. Based on flux concentrations, it was possible to identify the most likely locations for transitions between floors. By locking those down, ambushes became nearly trivial. There were ways to manifest that didn’t take the traditional pathways, but the spatial transportation magic present in the Towers was so unknown that those methods were unreliable at best.
Still, these people were moving unpredictably. Verrin wasn’t going to let his guard down.
“Flux sensors are showing a ton of fluctuation on floors two and four,” Dragoon-2 said.
A clattering rush of data surged through everyone’s display like the data pipe had just unclogged, and multiple voices overlapped on the channel.
“Just lost sensors on three—“
“—can’t tell what’s going on—“
”—no eyes on one—“
“—shit, shit, shit—“
“Clear comms!” Verrin barked. “Ready spells, ready weapons!”
The overlap cleared up as Verrin drew his own assault rifle, a one-handed affair that he could expend a small flux charge on to prevent all recoil. Thanks to Cascadia, it came with an underbarrel attachment—tactical-class chaonite. A spell jammer.
“Detecting a breach,” Six said, a note of strain in her voice. “Three likeliest locations identified.”
“Focus the breach,” Verrin said. “Prepare for—“
The ground beneath him jolted. A pit formed in his stomach like he was dropping from an airship, his sight jarring into complete darkness. Comms were nothing but chaos as Verrin struggled to maintain his composure, trying to cast a personal protection spell.
Before he could finish the activation process, though, the world restabilized. The sensation faded, and Verrin found himself in the same place he’d just been—almost. A deep fog had descended upon the fifth floor, limiting visibility.
Further obstructing that was the lack of unnatural light. The purple sky above them had turned a pure, midnight black.
“NODs!” Verrin called out into his mic.
No response.
“Sound check,” he said. “Dragoon-1 speaking as Dragoon leader, sounding off.”
A crackle of flux indicated that the system was transmitting again, and he breathed a quiet sight of relief.
“Dragoon-2, check.”
“Dragoon-3, check.”
Silence.
“Dragoon-4,” Verrin said. “Ernest. Are you there?”
Another crackle.
“Bianca Ashwood speaking as Dragoon-4,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice said. “Check.”
The next sound, transmitted through the comm system less than half a second later, was that of Dragoon-5 screaming. That, in turn, was followed by a thick, wet thud.
“My partner is unable to tell you this,” Bianca said, “but he would like you to know that you are operating outside of your jurisdiction.”
Heat seared through Verrin’s mind, his vision blurring at the edges. Flux spiraled around his body, incandescent with rage.
“Dragoon leader. KILL THEM BOTH.”