Bianca sighed, placing a hand on her forehead. “Of course. I do not know why I expected anything different.”
“This is groundbreaking research,” Syl said. “Why wouldn’t I want to participate in it?”
“That is not the point,” Bianca replied. “You have a blind spot when it comes to engineering, Syl.”
“I have a blind spot when it comes to dealing with people who aren’t trying to kill me,” Syl said drily. “You of all people should know that.”
“In fairness, you still do not know whether or not Jennifer has hostile intentions.”
“Everyone has hostile intentions. She has more to gain from working with me than trying anything.” Syl paused, tilting his head. “I’m starting to think that this isn’t what you were taking concern with, though.”
“This conversation is helping,” Bianca said, face slumping further into her hands. “You may not notice any advances she makes in the first place.”
“Oh, that’s what you’re worried about,” Syl said. “She’s too young for me.”
“Syl, she’s seven years older than you.”
“Biologically, maybe,” Syl replied. “But that’s not the only point. She’s lost a lot of people, just like us, but she’s never actually been in the field. In that respect, she’s little more than an infant.”
“What does that make me, then?”
“You know better than me,” Syl said. “If you were concerned about this, you could have just directly told me.”
“That would have been embarrassing,” Bianca said. “Especially in the environment we were in. I am certain that you are aware of how many people are surveilling us at any given time. We attract enough attention as the year one prodigy and dark horse, respectively. Telling you directly would draw more.”
“You say that like more attention would be that damaging,” Syl said. “I think we have bigger problems to deal with.”
“Prismatics are not only using their children to surveil,” Bianca said. “If word gets around that a class 1 is trying to keep her class 3 engineer from dating, cracks start to show. Those families are not informed into our situation, and I would much rather not have the elder Reds getting on our backs about our status.”
“You certainly put a lot more thought into it than I did,” Syl admitted. He had some experience with navigating the political side of magic, but this kind of minor detail was something he had never bothered with.
“I grew up having to put thought into this,” Bianca said. “Our… situation did not change that.”
“In any case, I don’t particularly think that she’ll give you anything to worry about,” Syl said. “There’s very few Reserve members who operate in the same world as us, and Jennifer isn’t one of them.”
“I never said I was worried,” Bianca said crossly. “Just that you should be careful.”
“I am not risk at subversion by route of seduction, if that was your concern,” Syl said. “Is that coffee I smell?”
“It is,” Bianca said. “Are you planning on staying up again tonight?”
“I’m going to check in on the status of our interrogation and see if I can’t preempt whatever the next thing Cascadia is going to try.”
Their house was one of the few locations where he was comfortable speaking so candidly. Apart from a select few black sites run by Aurian royalty and prismatics, this house was one of the most fortified against perception-type spells in the country.
Syl had designed many of the defenses himself, most notably an extremely illegal strategic-class spell jammer that utilized a good chunk of chaonite from a certain special operation unit’s archive of confiscated materials. That jammer only applied for about half an inche inside the house’s walls, roof, and foundation, but he made up for the lack of thickness with raw coverage. It was enough to catch most anything, even half the surveillance spells he had designed himself.
“Would you like company?” Bianca asked, levitating two cups of coffee over to them both with a few clicks on her FCD. “I have nothing planned for the night.”
“No homework or club activities?”
“Handled already.”
“There’s a good chance that there’s nothing of note. If there isn’t, I’m just going to work on a project until daybreak.”
“I know the deal.” Bianca’s flux fluctuated with nervous energy, a pattern Syl recognized from his own.
They had fought for so long to get their own peace, and now that they had it, they had told themselves that they would fight for it—but that wasn’t the full story. On some level, both of them had left parts of themselves on the killing fields; parts that could only make them whole when they fought.
Syl reached out to his contact in the special unit. They had engaged in a fairly standard enhanced interrogation well out of range of any detection equipment in their own black site a hundred kilometers off the Pacific coast.
This special unit tended to operate on these with a suite of spells that resulted in a subject being eviscerated alive, their internal organs and part of their nervous system removed from their body while retaining sensation and a slight connection to it, a master-class fortification-type Biostasis spell keeping them from bleeding out immediately. While torture was demonstrably not the most effective way to obtain accurate information, a combination of this high-threat scenario as well as a suite of spells “borrowed” from the Violet family to increase suggestibility tended to result in reasonably accurate information.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
While Syl himself wasn’t participating in this one, he was intimately familiar with the process, having taken part in one or two of them himself. The last time he’d been involved, he’d done the disassembling part. He’d been twelve at the time.
This Cascadian hadn’t been very cooperative, going so far as trying to cast without an FCD using his own blood as a medium, but the unit had still squeezed some information out of him.
Unsurprisingly, Cascadia was going to try to pull something during their war game this time around. The exact details of that either hadn’t been transmitted to this specific prisoner or his resistance to enhanced interrogation was abnormally high.
That wasn’t the interesting part. Even the Reserve members who hadn’t been involved in the Gate incident were pretty certain that Cascadia was going to commit some form of aggression here.
What did catch both Syl and Bianca’s attention was who the Cascadian had identified as being involved with this year’s.
[RANK HIDDEN] [NAME HIDDEN]: He claims that Gluttony is going to host it.
“A Sinner,” Bianca said, looking at the name. “She has not operated under Cascadia in quite some time, has she?”
“Sinners aren’t particularly beholden to anyone, no,” Syl said, ignoring the pointed look Bianca gave him at that. “I’ll pull up the file.”
While most people regarded the Seven Sinners more as natural disasters than human beings, they were very much real people that most nations and special interest groups had been able to collate a good deal of information on. Universally paragon-class magicians, they were one-person armies, appearing without rhyme or reason and almost always leaving chaos in their wake. Though they had been regarded as unrelated at first, their similar methodologies and active times as well as power levels had seen them gain a common myth.
Syl loaded his unit’s report on his FCD and threw it up onto a monitor.
[CLASSIFIED] Seven Sins Digest
Zero
Alexander Petrov. Attributed casualties: ~12.8 million. Last active: 61 AFI, New Zealand. Presumed dead as of World War III [See Sinking of New Zealand].
Lust
Unknown magician. Attributed casualties: ~4.6 million. Last active: 73 AFI, Taiwan [See Taiwan Flesh Amalgamation Incident (73 AFI)]. Alive.
Gluttony
Katelyn Lesling. Attributed casualties: ~1.3 million. Last active: 74 AFI, Manchuria [See Harbin Tower Evisceration]. Alive.
Greed
Jeffrey Wagner. Attributed casualties: ~3.1 million. Last active: 72 AFI, England [See London Blood Collection]. Alive.
Sloth
Unknown magician. Attributed casualties: ~25.9 million. Last active: 73 AFI, Lingdao [See Beijing Chronostasis]. Alive.
Wrath
Dinesh Bhargava. Attributed casualties: ~9.4 million. Last active: 68 AFI, Okinawa. Presumed dead as of 68 AFI [See Okinawa Fallout Report]. Presumed to have been killed by Envy.
Envy
Tang Yu-Ming. Attributed casualties: ~1.8 million. Last active: 71 AFI, Switzerland [See Destruction of Geneva]. Alive.
Pride
Unknown magician. Attributed casualties: ~1.1 million. Last active: 61 AFI, Middle America. Presumed dead as of World War III [See Middle America Chronostasis]. Presumed to have been killed by Sloth.
“Lovely,” Syl said, typing a bit more. “It’s been a bit since the last incident this side. I suppose we’re overdue.”
“He could be lying,” Bianca suggested. “Even under the influence of suggestibility spells, an implanted impulse or false memory could have been placed to give the illusion of greater Cascadian strength.”
“They don’t need illusions to prove that their strength is greater,” Syl said. “If they were taking that path, why not imply that they had Gluttony on their side? She’s Cascadian, after all.”
He expanded her file.
Gluttony
Katelyn Lesling. Cascadian. Paragon-class. Date of Birth: August 8th, 47 AFI.
Specialties: annihilation, fortification, seal-type spells.
Recorded unique paragon-class spells: Devour. Samsara. Apophis.
Gluttony typically appears in Towers and Gates. It is believed that she has a unique affinity that enables her to gain flux capacity from those she kills and consumes with certain spells. Though Cascadian, she continues the Sinner pattern of showing no affiliation towards her original state.
This Sinner’s appearances are not always hostile. Recent appearances have largely included an evacuation period before she consumes the contents of a Tower or Gate.
Syl and Bianca read through the rest of her rather expansive file. He’d only seen her personally once, and that had been a decently long time ago. She seemed to have changed some since he’d had the displeasure of running into her, which was promising in some ways and less so in others.
“If the information is true, this is going to be a fairly major pain,” Syl said. “I suppose we can find a way to let this slip into the Reserve’s hands so we can start making preparations.”
“I’m not opposed to that,” Bianca said. “The presence of a Sinner will modify our response no matter her actual affiliation.”
One more pain point, Syl supposed. He wasn’t sure how anyone else was supposed to take this into account when training, but directing the Reserve’s response wasn’t his role. That went to Uriel.
“Nothing immediately actionable,” Syl said. “Looks like they were using Sanguine as their in.”
“Eradicating them was very useful, then.”
“I would imagine they were going to pull resources back for their next move anyway,” Syl said, shrugging. “I’m going to get some work in, then.”
#
The next few weeks passed quickly. Classes were easy, and Syl often found that he was more proficient than the professor at their own subjects. The limitations of finding professors or teaching assistants who could competently teach Aurian spell theory was that they often only knew Aurian spell theory, which was woefully incomplete in the more advanced spell types. Syl was a generalist magician for the most part, but he had a particular interest in the intersection of creation and annihilation type spells that Aurian spell theory didn’t even acknowledge as a legitimate field of magic.
It was nice to be frustrated at his teachers. Though he still felt detached from the entire deal, he found it overall pleasing to at least experience the facsimile of a normal life.
If all went well—or at least not disastrously poorly—he would be able to return to it.
Through the avenue of a faked data leak from the remnants of the Sanguine base that Syl had demolished, his unit was able to spread the information about the potential presence of Gluttony to the Reserve. Uriel handled it better than Syl had projected she would, to be honest. She’d emphasized surviving and evacuating during their training more than anything else, trusting everyone to know their games well themselves.
The details of the actual circuit were to be hidden until they met with Cascadia at the base of the Tower they now controlled, which meant that everyone just practiced a variety of events that they were suited for. Syl had tried everything; he was reasonably sure both he and Bianca could be slotted into anything so long as they weren’t required to defend their teammates.
When he wasn’t in class or training, Syl was working, upgrading old gear and creating new ones utilizing the breakthrough Jennifer had found.
The day of their departure crept up on them with startling speed, and eventually, Syl remembered that he had promised to meet that woman outside of class.
Since he had a decently functional prototype now, he took it with him.
She met him outside the academy on the day before they were scheduled to leave. Bianca gave Syl a meaningful look before announcing she would go home to study as if she wasn’t about to embark on a potentially lethal mission that would never be acknowledged by the Aurian kingdom despite one of their own royals being involved.
“Last night before things go to shit,” Jennifer said, pointing Syl towards a private hovercraft. “Let’s not do anything stupid.”