It had been a fair bit since Syl had found himself in the awkward position of having to interrogate living prisoners, but he could make do with what he had.
The Sanguine operative was likely going to be unresponsive for some time. Syl had shot him first, so he’d already had some time to lose blood. It wasn’t impossible that he’d bleed out entirely if nobody did anything. Bianca was certified in first aid, but the less she got involved here the better.
He made his way to the insensate operative. The Sanguine magician had been mid tactical-class—a solid bet for dealing with most students, but not for the elite Reserve that had come here. The group must have assumed that they could get away with doing a hit-and-run, leaving before the Reserve’s master-class magicians could mount a proper counteroffensive.
Except that hadn’t been the end of it, because the Sanguine operators weren’t the only ones who’d been sent here. Two dead Cascadians and a dying third were proof of that. They weren’t in the perfect environment for their powers—if Syl’s intelligence and memory served him correctly, Cascadians worked best with running fresh water, not the stagnant water of this lake—but they were still overkill.
More to the point, they were exceptionally illegal. They must have been aware of that, since they had gone to some length to disguise their identities as regular mercenaries, but their spell signatures were too distinct. Syl recognized Cascadian magic when he saw one.
He’d killed the first one intentionally, but he hadn’t fully expected the ice wielder to die as well. Usually, they wore some kind of equipment that protected them from aftereffects of allied spells in case regular magical defenses failed. The lack of that must have been what had done him in once Syl had smashed through his active skill.
The sole survivor out of those three was keeping himself alive, using his remaining flux to roughly manipulate his own blood, stemming his gunshot wound. It was taking all his concentration, so Syl deemed him a non-threat for the time being.
He was also going to live longer than the Sanguine magician, so Syl lowered him on the triage list. Though he wasn’t particularly invested in keeping them alive, there was no known spell that could extract a confession from a corpse.
Rather than use valuable resources or reveal more trump cards to anyone who might have been watching (and there were always people watching, even if Bianca had cleared out all the official sources), Syl used a more basic spell.
There was no true field of healing magic. While there were spells that could modify the body and mind—typically combinations of the Enhancement and Manipulation systems—they often worked by hijacking existing senses and reinforcing biological processes, such as the Violet family’s signature Violet Eyes or the Red family’s Phoenix Time. Accelerating the body’s ability to heal itself was technically possible, but every true healing spell was prohibitively expensive and inefficient. Syl had been working on some of his own, but even he had been forced to admit that reproducible healing was largely a dead-end task.
What he could do, however, was the same thing that medics had been doing since humans had fought with particularly sharp sticks. The only difference was that he had far more resources. The difference between a medic from World War II and III was as severe as the one between that 1945 medic and their ancient predecessor staunching bleeding with sap and leaves.
Syl tore off a piece of the Sanguine magician’s uniform, though “uniform” was a strong name for it, then placed it on the worst of the bleeding. Using Hemosynthesis, a standard C-class transmutation-type spell that combined both the fortification and sabotage elements of the Enhancement system, Syl converted a portion of the cloth and the blood soaked into it, synthesizing a compound called kaolin.
A second spell of the same class and type was less standard, but very effective for the medics who used it. This one was more temporary, but for some time, he could have his target’s body convince itself that a certain externally designated item was part of it. In this case, it was the kaolin-infused piece of cloth, which fused with the Sanguine operative’s skin, stemming the bleeding.
Since he’d probably damaged something internal, the kaolin mattered too. This was one of the spells that had been developed from pre-magical principles. Field medics had already used equipment that could deploy this compound through chemical processes to stabilize bleeding—all that had changed was how precisely and effectively it could be delivered.
As much beauty as Syl found in the world of magic, he continued to realize time and time again that humans had been just as ingenious before the Gates had opened as after.
Once he was sure that the Sanguine guy wasn’t going to die immediately, he reared back and kicked him in the side hard enough to crack a rib.
The operative jarred awake, panicking and reaching for his FCD before realizing it wasn’t there.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Syl adviced, his own FCD active and visibly manifesting magic. The spell he was manifesting was harmless, of course—the real threat he held came from his second, hidden FCD. Everybody always expected the obvious weapon. “Your FCDs have been disabled, including the one implanted in you by your organization. I would strongly advise that you start talking, or you might find that I’m not inclined to give you as kind an end.”
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Syl really was rusty. Though he had a fair variety of magic, he wasn’t well versed in the techniques nor the precise applications of spells that Aurian specialists in enhanced interrogation used. He wasn’t going to start practicing now, so he figured threats would have to do.
“F-f-fuck you, kid,” the operator snarled.
Threats didn’t tend to work if they weren’t backed up by something, so Syl opened his hand, casting Magnetism once again. It was a petty display of power, since he’d put the gun down not too far away, but sometimes that was what worked. At least, he thought that was it. He wasn’t accustomed to leaving survivors.
“Look, I’m not asking for much,” he said, aiming the AR at the operator’s head. “I know your affiliation, so I just need your name, purpose, and who you report to.”
Funnily enough, the gun got the operator’s attention more than the FCD did. Recounting the fight, Syl did recall that he hadn’t done much impressive in the way of magic before knocking this guy out of commission—oh, wait, no, he’d frozen the lake. Then again, given the generally lackluster intelligence sported by this group, it was entirely possible that the operator had just assumed that was his Cascadian allies.
Speaking of which. “One more thing. Why are you working with Cascadia?”
No, this definitely wasn’t good interrogation procedure. Over-pressuring people with too many questions was a good way to force a false confession, Syl finally remembered. It wasn’t the best for getting real information.
“Hold on, lemme start this over. Name?”
“Claudius,” the operator finally said, clearly less confident now that he was more lucid and more understanding of the shit situation he was in. His eyes flicked over towards the bloodied corpses.
“That’s not your name,” Syl said, annoyed. “That’s an operator designation.”
“What? How do you—shit.”
“Your group isn’t as secret as you pretend to be,” Syl said. “I’m going to ask one more time. Name.”
Honestly, he didn’t care that much about the name as much as he did establishing that he was only going to accept correct answers.
Also, he wanted something to refer to this magician as other than “the operator” or “this guy.”
“Isaac,” the operator finally said. “Isaac… Nashton.”
“False last name, but at least we’re getting somewhere,” Syl said. “Purpose. Why are you here?”
Isaac remained silent, his expression twisting.
“Do I need to shoot you again?”
“No no no,” Isaac said, trying to hold his hands up before realizing that one of them had had its nerve endings severed and was functionally useless. “I… this was supposed to be a smash and grab. Kill a few students, shake them up. There was a target we were looking for.”
“Who were you looking for?” Syl asked. “Who are you reporting to?”
He was starting to regret having tried this. His initial plan had been to question them, then kill them before they could potentially speak about the power he’d unleashed to others, but it was looking like he’d have to involve his team on this.
“Please,” Isaac said. “I have a family. They—if I talk, they’re dead.”
Syl rolled his eyes. “I wish it was that easy to get people to shut up.”
He sent a message to Bianca. While they were inside a sealed Gate, there was no way to send information out without actually leaving the portal, so he would have to wait until they left before he contacted anyone else.
For the time being, he would content himself with knocking the two of them out and taking them out. The fight was functionally over, after all.
While healing the body was difficult, temporarily disabling it was a different story. It was much easier to turn natural processes off than it was to activate new ones, after all. C-class sabotage-type spell Cut Consciousness did about what it said on the label. It used flux to reduce the amount of information and energy transmitted by certain nerves, rendering a target immobile and mostly unconscious. It was rarely usable against higher-class opponents, even before taking counter-casting and similar defenses into account. Just flooding one’s own body with flux was often enough to flush out spells that sought to modify it.
Fortunately for Syl, these two were a bit too busy bleeding out to counter his spell. The Sanguine operative keeled over, out like a light. His head hit the ice with an unhealthy-sounding thunk. Syl didn’t bother to check for a concussion. Play stupid games…
Lance might be more of a problem. That man wasn’t master-class, but he was a much better magician than Isaac. The fact that he was still crawling forward despite the bullet wound in his stomach was proof of that.
Syl had dismantled the Cascadian’s FCD as part of taking him down, but fully eliminating an FCD’s usability was a tricky thing. For a casting device to work as intended, there were a great deal of delicate pieces of technology that needed to be intact and assembled. Its components, however, still held power. Misuse of a broken FCD to act as a casting aid had been commonplace during the days of terror that had marked World War III and all subsequent conflicts.
Lance, apparently, knew about that. He scrabbled for the largest intact chunk of his FCD—the process control element—and wrapped bloody fingers around it, immediately beginning another cast.
Syl had to give the magician props. Even in a situation like this, he was trying to leave a final mark, no matter how fruitless.
The momentary amusement faded as Syl realized the tactical-class spell Lance was casting wasn’t aimed at him. That lethal blade was going right for the Cascadian’s own neck.
"I don’t think so,” Syl said, shoving a great deal of flux into a signature technique that had been registered in some classified documents as Ruin.
The spell fizzled out, and Lance’s head hit the ground, his fingers going slack.
“That was a mistake,” Syl said. “I didn’t particularly care about if you lived or died beforehand, but if you’re willing to kill yourself to hide your information, you’re definitely worth taking in alive.”
He realized a bit awkwardly that he was talking to an unconscious body. Syl rushed over to the prone man, applying another round of first aid to ensure he wouldn’t bleed out, and frowned as he looked around the iced-over lake.
“This is going to be a lot of paperwork,” he muttered.
“The seal’s down!” Bianca shouted. “Let’s get moving!”