Cascadian magicians had a particular specialty in liquid water, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t control other forms with similar amounts of proficiency. Given that these were tactical-class magicians, Syl assumed that they would be able to control the ice given a moment to adjust.
Thus, to win, he simply had to not let them have that moment.
The Cascadians managed to free themselves of the ice quickly, but the Sanguine member didn’t have the same specialty and struggled, trying to shake himself free of the ice trapping him in place.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Syl said, looking at the former. “There’s a treaty in place, in case you’ve forgotten.”
They all knew exactly what was going on here, but conversation was always a good tactic to distract. All four of his opponents recognized this, and they weren’t idle. As Syl was still in the process of forming his voiceless spell when four spell jammers switched on.
He’d had some level of oversight over the ambush thanks to the surveillance spells he’d planted on Waylan and one of the undergraduates, so he’d known to expect chaonite, but even Syl had to admit to being surprised by just how much raw power they were packing. The Sanguine member’s jammer was B-class, which was within the expected range of jammers given the amount of chaonite they’d been confirmed to have, but the Cascadian trio were all equipped with tactical-class jammers.
Their jammers were also more specialized. While the Sanguine member had a wide-range one that excluded its user from the area of effect, tactical-class quantities of chaonite had to be directed lest they end up affecting the user as well. That was good for Syl. It meant he could make windows.
All in all, neither opposing group had sent their best. This might have been an honest attempt on a life, but Syl doubted it was the final attack.
“This is more of a probe than anything else,” he thought aloud. “Disposable magicians, no uniforms for plausible deniability… yeah, this is bait.”
Bait that he was going to take, of course, but it wasn’t like he had that many other options. Keeping the princess’ secret was important, and little data would make it out of the Gate anyway if he eliminated all of them.
As one of the Cascadians opened their mouth to reply, Syl interrupted the cast of his first tactical-class spell to use another.
Free casting had a great deal of advantages over traditional FCD casts. For instance, spell jammers operated by using chaonite to disrupt flux fields around people. They did not, however, interfere with a magician’s internal flux, which was exactly where Syl cast the spell.
Okay, he didn’t want to actually call his technique free casting, since that wasn’t precisely what he was doing. Memory casting, maybe?
Syl decided he could think of the answer later. He leapt upwards as he cast the spell, knowing that the conditions he was in were less than ideal for the parameters he’d injected into his memory.
Sure enough, he moved off target, sending him hurtling halfway to the ceiling in the wrong direction, but it was enough to get him out of the path of the tactical-class jammers.
Syl wasn’t sparing the processes to check his intelligence spells, so he didn’t know if there was anyone spying on him, but given the cirumstances, it was safe to say at least one friendly was watching. Revealing his signature spell—his true power—was an obvious no-go, but a less obvious one was the sheer breadth of his spell list. There were a good deal of tactical and master-class spells he knew that would be perfect for an environment like this one but were hidden behind many, many layers of security. Being detected using one of those spells would result in more questions that he was comfortable with.
A spell he could use, however, was the tactical-class spell Magnetism. It was a very simple spell, involving only an activation and start process. The cost was the only prohibitive part of it, but Syl had flux to spare.
He overcharged the spell as he twisted in midair, controlling his fall. The Sanguine operative yelped in surprise as he lost his gun, spell jammer, and almost his FCD. He caught the last one before it could slip off his wrist.
Syl caught both as he landed and shook his head, looking from the struggling Sanguine operative to the unaffected Cascadians. “It’s 74 AFI, and you still make your equipment frames out of metal?”
Ice erupted under his feet as the other magicians got their bearings again, and a jammer turned onto him. Syl dispelled the Magnetism before his flux could be suppressed. He had no need for it anymore.
As he leapt upwards again, manipulating his weight with a simple single-process movement-type spell, he aimed the assault rifle with one hand and fired, barely controlling the recoil of the three-round burst.
Two shots hit the ice, the third striking the Sanguine operative on his FCD arm.
Non-lethal, and it would take him out of the fight. As Syl arced towards the stalactite-filled ceiling, grabbing onto a particularly low-hanging one to avoid the ice under him, he hoped the rest would give themselves up as easily.
They didn’t.
#
Operatives Lance, Andrea, and Zane were used to missions where they would be given callsigns, but for their integration into the subverted local anti-establishment group, they had been told to use their first names. One less link to Cascadia benefited everyone involved, even their enemy.
Lance was their unofficial leader, but they hadn’t needed much direction in this ambush. During the brief minute of violence, they had eliminated a few names that someone back home probably cared about, but they had also dealt a crippling blow to a magician from one of Auria’s great houses. That was a victory worth celebrating on its own.
Unlike Zane, Lance had no illusion that they would be able to fully eliminate the students within the Gate. He was the one who’d activated the sealing spell, and though he was using external flux batteries to support his own, it wouldn’t last forever. There were multiple master-class magicians in play, and even if they had the advantage of the water here, their group of three tactical-class specialists would be far less capable attacking a fortified position.
If the local Sanguine group had stayed alive for longer, this may have been a different story, but Lance had found himself disappointed in Aurian power once more. If a group this incompetent was causing the country real problems, then they deserved to be overrun by Cascadia.
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They had accomplished one of their objectives, which he was starting to think would have to be enough. The most important task here had been to find, identify, and capture or kill an abnormally powerful woman who was supposed to be linked to the Aurian royal family, but nobody Lance had seen so far seemed to fit the bill. The master-class prismatic woman with the blue hair and perception spells had been strong, but not in a way that deviated from the norm.
Lance clicked his tongue in disappointment as the latest pain in his ass clung to the ceiling by one hand, flux patterns beneath his feet keeping him from falling.
Somehow, a young student who couldn’t have been past his first year of university had taken it upon himself to take revenge upon the “Sanguine” strike force for what they’d done to his classmates. Even more amazingly, he’d used some trick to freeze the entire shallow lake and cast spells while apparently evading the effect of spell jammers that should have been able to shut down anything a student of his like could even think of casting.
And he’d disabled the last Sanguine operator, who was clutching a bloody arm in disbelief.
Stars above, are these natives good at anything?
During mission debrief, they had been told that this form of Sanguine had been operating for over a decade without being shut down by the Aurian kingdom, and yet here a student had just managed to overpower one that had a spell jammer.
Casting another disgusted look at the domestic terrorist, Lance looked up to where the student was still brandishing a stolen rifle.
“You’ve got balls, kid,” Lance said. “Look, nobody has to get hurt here. We’re just about wrapping up here. We can give you a pass.”
“I just heard you four discussing how you were going to kill all the witnesses,” the student replied.
Lance shrugged. “Plans change. Enough of a stalemate here and we’re probably just going to go.”
The Sanguine operative managed to break himself free of the ice, not knowing that Andrea had helped him along. To his credit, he did have the presence of mind to pull his bloodied FCD off his injured arm.
From above, the student’s eyes flashed violet, and the Sanguine man stumbled, dropping his FCD onto the ice.
Lance sighed again. Useless. That spell was an interesting one, though. Hadn’t he read about that in a briefing somewhere?
The student was still hanging from the stalactite by one hand, gun in the other, which brought a question to Lance’s mind. How had he cast that spell without using his FCD? Regular Aurians weren’t supposed to possess innate magic.
“You’re not doing a great job of hiding that you’re not actually with him,” the student said, gesturing at the reddening ice. “Shouldn’t you at least pretend to care?”
“It’s more convenient for everyone involved to assume that this is an Aurian problem caused by Aurian groups,” Lance said.
“Lance,” Zane drawled. “We’re wasting time. This kid’s green. Why don’t we just kill him?”
That got a frown out of the senior magician. Why indeed? Lance didn’t like wasting talent, but he’d been willing to kill the previous group of students without compunctions. On some level, this student felt different.
Lance cast a quick FCD analysis spell, frowning as he parsed the data it returned.
Name: Syl Auria
Class: C (estimated based on flux output and speed)
“Lance, is it?” the student asked.
A C-class wasn’t worth losing sleep over. The others were right. Lance dismissed the nagging feeling in his stomach and cast, shouting out a command word that triggered a deep tremor above them, his attraction-type spell using veins of water in the cave rock around them to trigger a partial collapse.
A massive section of rock collapsed, centered around the student. He fell alongside several tons of granite, which immediately crushed him into the ice below.
Silence.
“See?” Zane said. “Look how easy that w—“
A chunk of the rock shifted, and Lance felt the telltale sensation of ice sublimating near him.
“Vapor!” he said sharply. His control was strongest over water in its liquid state.
“He’s moving fast,” Andrea said. “There’s a shield surrounding him. I’m going to try and—care, back up.”
Next to the Sanguine operative, part of the bloody ice started glowing with heat before abruptly evaporating. The student shot out of the new hole, using the same spell he’d used to move towards the ceiling.
“Looks like negotiations have broken down,” he said, uncaring of the fact that three spell jammers turned on him immediately. “You could stand to be less of a pain.”
“Glad you lived,” Zane said, a vicious smile on his face. “Thought I wouldn’t get the pleasure of tearing one of you apart myself.”
Zane was much better at using ice than either of the other two of them, and that showed as the element immediately shot up towards the student, who blocked them with magical shields.
“The fuck?” Zane asked Lance. “Is my jammer broken?”
“No,” the student said, blasting free of the icy cage Zane had created with simple force spells that sent shards of ice flurrying towards them, all of which stopped short of them. Zane sent those shards flying back at lethal speeds just for the student to emit a sharp directional heat that melted the flurry and nothing else. “You’re just not very good at thinking about how to work around them.”
Lance took control of the melted water, drawing it to him instead of throwing it at the student. A refreshing chill spread through him as he absorbed the water, his innate magic empowering him.
The student took that opportunity to aim his gun at Andrea, who reacted on instinct.
“Thesq praes!”
Lance made to take advantage of the opening before realizing that the student hadn’t shot yet. Instead, a wave of raw flux swept the room, perfectly disrupting Andrea’s simple shield.
Only then did he shoot. The rapport of the gun was deafening in an enclosed area, but its echo wasn’t quite loud enough to overpower the sound of her body hitting the ice.
“You dipshit fuck!” Zane shouted, kneeling down and letting ice envelop him. “You’re going to pay for that.”
“Syl!” A new voice shouted. A woman, likely the same age as this first student.
Lance cast a perception-type spell instead of turning to see where she was, but there was a block of some kind preventing him from pushing beyond the confines of the cavern.
“What is it?” the male student asked, not even bothering to look at Zane as the tactical-class magician charged, the ice increasing his strength and power with each step he took.
“There’s no eyes on you,” the woman called out. “Just confirmed it. Uriel took hers off too.”
“Oh,” Syl said. “Fantastic.”
Zane lunged, the temperature around him dropping so quickly that his breath crystallized and joined the flurry of ice around him—and then he stopped, going dead still.
The ice cracked. A second later, Zane’s FCD hit the ground in pieces. The man himself followed, cold shock setting in as he suddenly lost immunity to the aftereffects of his own spell.
A chill ran down Lance’s back. What the hell?
This was no C-rank magician. Not by a long shot. Nobody had that type of magic. Nobody except…
“Don’t do that,” Syl said, pointing at the downed Sanguine operative, who was desperately clutching at his throat. A wave of flux burst out from Syl’s hand, and the operative fell still.
He knows about the self-destructs?
Lance had to end this now. Even if this hadn’t been their initial target, this boy was clearly an abnormality for Auria. Eliminating him now was a number one priority. He could not be allowed to grow any further.
He drew deep within him, burning reserves that shouldn’t have been touched. Lance could sense his life seeping out of him as he drew far more than he should have been able to. He wouldn’t be able to use a full manifestation of his bloodline’s signature master-class spell, but he could pull off an imitation that would come close enough.
The ice shook beneath their feet, melting in fast motion.
Syl just looked at Lance, rolled his eyes, and shot him.
The Cascadian threw up a shield the moment he saw the trigger finger actually pull back, not wanting to repeat Andrea’s mistake, but as his activation process fizzled out and his own flux clung to his body, he realized with horror that Syl had picked up the spell jammer.
Hot, mind-numbing pain spread from his core. Lance put a hand to it. Wet. Too wet.
His spell wavered, then shattered entirely as another wave of flux assailed him. Lance dropped to his knees.
“Oh, come on,” Syl said disdainfully. “I didn’t even shoot you that lethally.”