Syl hadn’t been inside a Tower in quite some time now. During the increasing activity leading up to World War III, he’d partaken in more than a handful of climbs.

The flux oversaturation that characterized the area around a Tower was much less of a problem inside, where all that excess flux manifested itself in environmental changes and monster manifestations. As such, there had been those who had tried to start civilizations within them, though those inevitably went poorly because, as it turned out, Towers reset themselves at irregular intervals, wiping the slate clean.

What had been much more common were individuals or small organizations taking temporary residence in Towers, using them as training facilities or undetectable planning areas. Since there were no spells yet known to humanity that could penetrate the walls of a Tower, perception-type surveillance spells included, they had repeatedly proven themselves to be very effective as temporary enclaves for groups that didn’t want to be found. Oftentimes, they would take a floor that could generally be marked as A-class or tactical-class—usually the ones below the tenth. Syl had rooted out a number of them, and he’d grown reasonably knowledgeable about Towers.

Syl had learned from a great deal of mages in his own time, most notably the ones whose knowledge had quite literally been planted into his brain. Some of those had been Aurian archmages. While the country had a nasty habit of covering up its own inadequacies and pretending that its magical theory was the only one necessary to succeed as a magician, there were elements of brilliance to certain schools of Aurian thought that most other countries simply hadn’t replicated.

For instance, when combined with the works of some of the more notable Manchurian dark emissaries, the late Aurian fortification-type specialist Lillian Creshi’s insights into Tower magic were absolutely fascinating. Every country had done their due diligence in analyzing Towers and Gates—they were, after all, the primary source of a number of magical resources that were critical to the continued functioning of the magical world as well as one of the few places that modern magical theory simply did not have a full grasp of it. Creshi’s interactions with the Tower she’d spent much of her magical life as well as her ultimate death in had yielded information that was useless for most people, but not for Syl.

Her expertise mainly came in handy for floor-crashing. Since around the early 30s AFI, it was common knowledge that each floor on the Tower had at least one and up to several hundred potential exits that could be taken up or down a floor. Some manifested as portals, others physical staircases, and still others ritual circles that had to be properly activated to ascend to the next level. Entrances, on the other hand, were not defined but were predictable. Obviously, this made them perfect for people who needed security in the short term. Floors were easy to fortify from attack both above and below, and many a competent tactical-class death squad had met their end traveling between floors straight into pre-placed explosives.

Thanks to Creshi’s understanding of floor makeup built through nothing short of tens of thousands of fortification-type spells cast exhaustively over kilometers of Tower as well as filched expertise from the paragon-class mage heading one of Lingdao’s black ops wardbreaking squads, Syl and his unit had developed a unique way to break through in points that nobody would expect.

Doing so relied on finding an exit on the previous floor quickly and hijacking it, essentially overwriting parts of its flux structure with Syl’s own. Given how Towers worked, said structure would start replacing itself almost immediately, which meant Syl had a very limited time window to read the exposed patterns, much of which were fully incomprehensible in the way that calculus would be to a caveman—the framework just didn’t exist in modern magical theory, no matter the place. That said, there were parts that were parseable, and it was there where he would convince the Tower that, at least for a period of time, this modification he was making was part of its own natural order.

This had variable effects depending on the exit utilized and what Syl could do with it, which meant that it heavily relied on his extreme magical literacy and adaptiveness to work with. It was theoretically replicable, but he had never seen if anyone else could do it. They had no reason to share, after all.

There were two primary effects.

The first was that he could cast spells between floors.

In this specific case, he had injected one tactical-class spell and multiple synergistic A-class ones into a portal. Not even he had been able to accurately predict the effects—while the appearance of thick fog on the fifth floor was roughly the same as what was produced by the Spelldampening Cloud that it was based on, but the black sky’s cause was anyone’s guess. It was also hard to tell if the ground had already been this disturbed on the way in or if the tactical-class Earthquake had done that.

The second effect, of course, was enough destabilization of the above floor’s flux to enable an unpredictable entry.

Syl had planned on doing it on every floor since they hadn’t known where the Cascadians were, but he and Bianca had found recently hidden flux sensors on the first floor which had conveniently been tapped into an encrypted frequency. Breaking into that hadn’t been trivial, but Bianca had a great deal of experience doing exactly that. Finding the floor the Dragoon squad was on had been simple from there.

There were six magicians remaining. Both Bianca and Syl had one kill to their name. He hadn’t seen how Bianca had gotten hers, but his had been simple. The magician he’d scanned with a close-range Flux Radar had been disoriented by the darkness and had still been trying to engage countermeasures, so Syl had dropped the detection spell, cast a low-impact D-class absorption-type Silencer, and shot his target in the head.

Early on in the semester, he’d listened to a lecture and subsequent demonstration of practical magic by Professor Adams, a high master-class magician with a couple of strategic spells up his sleeve back at the academy. He had emphasized the importance of knowing how to use a firearm in combat because magic alone wasn’t always fast enough.

Syl had to wonder if Adams actually knew what the real battlefields were like. His file had him placed in or around Auria throughout the entire war, and while there had been a nasty battle or two, there was nothing like the horrors Syl had witnessed. Yes, part of using firearms was because of attack speed, but the real reason was efficiency.

There was a reason Syl didn’t just walk into every single engagement using Ruin into Armaggedon. While that would solve one fight, even he would be gassed after two or three activations of that, and in war, you just couldn’t get away with leaving yourself vulnerable. It was better to use a low-cost spell that perfectly fit the situation than a higher-cost one that could steamroll through it unless the latter had no downside, which no strategic-class or higher spell could boast. Especially when it came to a mission that didn’t have the parameters of total and complete destruction, limiting the amount of flux used (for a regular magician) as well as the necessary occupied processes (for Syl) was critical.

Even paragons could fall if they weren’t careful. Syl knew that all too well.

His caution was immediately rewarded. Since the flux impact of the spells he’d cast for his gun was low, he had enough mental awareness and immediately available flux capacity and spell processes to hard switch into perception-type spells once he heard the leader start barking orders.

Syl got low to the ground, waiting until his Safety Net detected Bianca’s gun alongside the sidearms that two dead bodies and six live ones were carrying. Once he had a firm idea of where everyone was, he moved. Bianca was keyed into his spellwork thanks to the fact that half her flux pool was constantly flush with Syl’s excess, toxic magic, so she made her move at the same time.

Spells flashed, and Syl stumbled for a moment when they weren’t what he’d expected. Cascadian squads almost always led off with either physical attacks or something water-related. Since there were no sources of running water and it wasn’t raining, Syl had assumed that they would either try to use the water in the grass beneath them or disrupt his body’s bloodflow and had prepared countermeasures for that.

Instead, he read four spell processes overwriting the darkness, tightly packed together and just narrowly avoiding overlap like a good set of coordinated spells should—like this, it would be nearly impossible to countercast one of them, let alone the set.

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The contents of those spells, however, were completely unlike what he’d expected. Instead of casting a spell to temporarily transmute the water in his blood to a substitute that wouldn’t react as well with flux, Syl switched tracks at the last second to throw up a completely different spell in just under half a second.

In that half a second, magnetically charged projectiles synthesized out of the material in the ground via a tactical-class transmutation spell accelerated from zero to twenty-six hundred meters per second thanks to a third and fourth spell that created an artificial firing solution with incredibly powerful magnets pulling in opposite directions, utilizing the limited space to create what could best be described as a fully automatic railgun.

Bianca covered Syl before he had to abandon his spell for a Simple Shield, creating several dozen C-class protective spells at once. They were simple forcefields, breaking the second they absorbed an impact, but her ability to manage so many simultaneous spell processes meant that she could continue repositioning them to take one or two impacts.

This was less of a crisis for the two of them than an academic problem. One they had solved many times before, at that. The only surprise came from the fact that they hadn’t expected it to come from this group.

This was four parts of a seven-part standardized spell package that utilized all A-class or lower spells to achieve a devastating barrage that outclassed an entire battalion worth of traditional small arms fire and non-magical artillery. Standardized in the years leading up to the Third World War in certain countries, it was commonly known as the minimum mass driver. It functioned best with seven people, but could be made lethal with as few as three.

It was also not Cascadian magic. The country that had popularized this and continued to use it in units down to their traditional seven-man squads was Polaris, Auria’s neighbor and ostensible ally.

More importantly, it was a spell pattern that Syl and Bianca both had a great deal of experience against.

One of the primary selling points of it was that once a solid holding pattern was established, the minimum mass driver could continue functioning with minimal flux investment so long as concentration was maintained on the spell. Thanks to her link to his flux pool, Bianca’s flux and focus restored quickly enough to continue supplying her with enough processes to continue blocking the general area that the two of them were getting hit from, but the Polarian spell formation could keep firing for as long as she could throw them up.

No magic pattern was flawless, though, and the minimum mass driver was no exception. Typically, one of the spells cast over it was meant for security, preventing alternate forces from acting on their firing solution. Syl’s standard method to break a firing solution was to counter-cast the security spell and then override the railgun setup with a wide-range spell.

That was generally lethal, though. This was an information-gathering mission, and two of the squad utilizing this Polarian technique weren’t casting towards it at all. Syl recognized the classified Cascadian sensor suite one of them had equipped around their body, which raised suspicion. That made them the the highest priority magician to take as prisoner.

Without the anti-interference spell and with the context that he still needed at least one of them alive, the spell he ended up casting was not what he would’ve done against a standard group running this formation.

Counter-casting was tricky work. Syl was extraordinarily good at it in large part because of how proficient he was at reading spell patterns and memorizing every spell he’d ever seen, but it was much harder to do in the darkness he’d spat out onto the next floor. Reading spell processes wasn’t the most doable when there was no visibility.

Instead, he went for something a little more direct. B-class sabotage-type spell, Concrete Dissolution. Intended for breaking through physically constructed walls, Syl was able to cast it much further than the touch distance it was typically intended to be used at. Rather than destroy the spell that transmuted the dirt into hardened steel projectiles, he dealt with the end result, dissolving bullets into foil.

The next step was the actual attack. The base spell was C-class, but Syl needed to cast it with enough flux to elevate it to A in order to ensure that it would be capable of dealing with the speed and volume of the projectiles involved here.

Reflection-type spell: Redirect Trajectory. The base spell was simple enough—cast once, it was a way for a skilled magician to change the direction of a decently-sized projectile if they were skilled enough to catch it midair. The manner Syl cast it in was noticeably different, modifying aspects of the spell to make it an area of effect one as well as a persisting one. It wasn’t the type of thing a magician could come up with on the fly unless they were extremely talented and familiar with the spell.

From start to finish of his two spells completing, roughly one second passed.

Bianca danced her way through the ongoing barrage towards Syl, arriving at his side just in time for his magic to take effect.

Over the comms they’d hijacked, Syl heard three cries of pain. He’d directed the spray of supersonic steel flechettes towards the people casting every spell but for the magnetizing one, which he knew from the experience was the most flux-draining one and thus on the person who had the least other combat ability.

“Dragoon squad, check,” the man who’d identified himself as the leader said.

“Your time is best served surrendering,” Bianca replied, using the same comms system. Dragoons two through six are dead or mortally wounded. If you lay down your arms now, your life will be guaranteed. You may also grant some of your fallen comrades a chance at life.”

A moment of silence passed. Around them, the fog was starting to dissipate, Syl’s old spell finally deviating enough from the floor’s original flux that it began cannibalizing itself.

“Who are you?” Dragoon leader asked, the anger from less than a minute ago now entirely gone, replaced by fear.

“If you intend on surviving the next thirty seconds, you will be the one answering our questions, not the other way around,” Bianca said. “Now. Do you wish to surrender?”

As the fog cleared, Syl took in their surroundings. It looked like these might have been grassy plains at some point, but said grass had mostly been churned by the earthquake he’d caused. Five prone bodies were on the ground. Two of them still seemed alive though mostly immobile, while the third one who’d been casting the spell to create a vessel for the minimum mass driver lay unmoving in a noticeably darker patch of dirt strewn with viscera.

Dragoon leader hadn’t been part of the targets Syl had selected with the trajectory redirection, and he stood a solid hundred feet from them, Cascadian military uniform bloodied. There were two others, both protected by a wide shielding spell presumably cast by the only person Syl hadn’t identified yet. The other was the one strapped into a Cascadian reconnaissance exosuit.

The shield dropped as Syl watched, taking a stealth-type spell down with it, and he suddenly realized that they had managed to hide a cast from him.

The exosuit-clad woman released the spell she’d formed. Master-class. Artillery-type, from a quick reading—movement, annihilation, conjuration all in the same spell.

Syl snapped his fingers and cast one of his own signatures.

When he’d cast Ruin as an Aurian student for the first time, it had been targeted at FCDs. On his second cast, he’d eliminated two humans. This time, he aimed for nothing but flux.

In the same instant the spell reached completion, roaring out with the devastating, city-block-devastating force a master-class spell could manage easily, it flickered out like a birthday candle in a hurricane.

Vindicated again, he thought.

“What the fuck,” the exosuited woman they’d identified as Dragoon-7 said. “How—you’re a student!”

“I am not going to ask again,” Bianca said.

Dragoon leader looked to the magician next to Dragoon-7, then to Syl. Then back to the magician.

Slowly, he unclipped the bracer-type FCD from his wrist and let it drop to the ground.

The moment he did, the last unidentified magician moved.

Syl moved faster. Using the recorded spell he’d innovated earlier in the semester, he approximated free-casting Flash Step, sending him hurtling forward towards his target. He shot twice, aiming for center of mass and then the FCD. The first shot bounced off reinforced armor. The second made contact, shattering the spellcasting device. To ensure a nonlethal takedown, his followup spells were aimed at limbs. Three of the four were successful, severing the magician’s arms as well as one of his legs, cauterizing them in the process.

That was enough to take the magician out of the fight, but evidently not enough to stop him from his actual goal. He must have used some sort of flux or movement-activated trigger—whatever it was, it was quick and explosive.

The exosuit the woman had been wearing detonated in five separate spots, each with a yield much smaller than even a standard hand grenade but still enough to demolish the frame beyond recognition—and kill the woman within.

Syl tilted his head, watching as the ruined mess of metal and flesh crumpled to the ground.

She cast a master-class spell, he signed. You would kill a friendly master-class to hide your data?

The presumably Cascadian magician on the floor was too busy going into shock to answer.

He rolled his eyes, starting on basic treatments with synthesized kaolin before deciding to just jolt the magician’s nervous system and put him to sleep.

“Syl?” Bianca asked.

Once he was adequately satisfied that the Cascadian wasn’t immediately about to die, he turned back to his companion just in time to see the unconscious body of the Dragoon leader hit the ground. Bianca had his FCD in one hand, raising it towards Syl like a trophy.

“Next steps?” she asked.

Syl signed. Triage the downed ones. We lack the equipment to properly investigate the Tower. Return the prisoners for enhanced interrogation.

“Sound direction as always,” Bianca said. “It has been quite some time since we have had to fight Polarians. Has something changed?”

Just one way to find out, Syl signed back.

Auria’s geographically closest ally had either splintered, actively turned against them, or decided to train Cascadians themselves. Said Cascadians were taking specialized into equipment into Aurian Towers, going so far as to commit open acts of warfare upon peacetime research teams in the process.

They were looking for something. Syl intended to find it before they could.