The distance from the academy city to the Santa Rosa Tower—now part of the border with Cascadia—was less than Syl thought anyone should have been particularly comfortable with. Even if the buses they were using were significantly faster than any of the diesel-munching monoliths that had been the primary design for this type of vehicle pre-flux, it still shouldn’t have taken only an hour to get from an academy—military though it might be—to the border.
There were some discomforted murmurs amongst the people within the transport at that. At higher speeds, Cascadia had a straight shot from the border to the heart of the country within half an hour.
To minimize the risk of a well-placed bomb or similar trap from inhibiting their movement, each of the three buses had multiple tactical-class sabotage-type specialists aboard. Uriel and Syl also both had wide range surveillance nets up, keeping an eye out for potential ambushes. This wasn’t officially sanctioned by the kingdom, of course. Auria didn’t want to be on record allocating records to fight a quiet conflict that they weren’t even supposed to be involved in. That meant little to no military intervention and zero magicians backing them up or even scouting ahead of them.
Somewhat surprisingly, they didn’t encounter any major issues on their way into Santa Rosa. Nothing manmade, at least.
Syl’s bus was entirely people he knew already—Waylan, Jennifer, James, Lia, Bianca, and Syl himself. Two Reserve members and four undergraduates, though James was already a national circuit competitor. Lia was the odd one out here, the only magician under tactical-class in this bus. Syl wasn’t sure if she was the lowest-ranked across all eighteen participants, but it was very possible she was. Officially, he was probably the lowest, but that illusion was quickly slipping away.
“I haven’t been to a Tower before,” Lia muttered as they got closer, the bus’ inertial dampening enchantments making up for the increasingly rough roads. “Only ever saw an exclusion zone from afar.”
They had to slow down as they entered the region surrounding the Santa Rosa Tower.
Unlike Gates, which formed and closed with somewhat regular frequency, the Towers had largely remained static since their formations during flux integration. There were currently some six thousand or so of them scattered throughout the world, though some were significantly more notable than others.
No Tower had been climbed to completion yet, and it was unlikely that it would ever happen. They grew increasingly esoteric as they grew higher, and though they were mostly between two to ten miles in height, their interiors did not reflect that. It was also impossible to break in from the outside as far as modern magic was considered.
While Towers didn’t hold the same issues as Gates—namely, the issue of altered creatures escaping from within and wreaking havoc on their surroundings if not cleared—they came with their own issues.
Jennifer clicked her tongue. “I’m very glad I have blockers. Towers are always miserable.”
She seemed unusually nervous today. Syl would have chalked it up to the high-stress environment they were entering, but from the way she kept glancing at him when he wasn’t looking (with his eyes, at least), there was something bothering her about him. He wondered if it was just from the conversation they’d had last night or if she’d somehow managed to find something new.
Whatever the case, he hoped she’d figure out how to address it by the time they needed to fight.
Her complaint about the Tower was fair, though. The primary issue with Towers was that they were frankly incredible sources of power. Even nuclear reactors couldn’t compare to the amount of raw energy they put out—but while reactors worked with radiation and steam, Towers just put out flux.
Even those without hypersensitivity could see the magic in the air. Threads of it radiated out from the miles-high tower looming over the horizon. Having a lot of ambient flux was usually not that much of a problem. With how activation and spell processes worked, there was never the risk of actually causing an explosive reaction like there was when a spell was jammed. The problem came from long-term exposure to it.
A regular amount of ambient flux tended to barely affect a magician, who was generally constantly cycling it in and out. Near or in a Tower, that cycling process would be substantially enhanced thanks to the amount of raw flux available. The sheer amount in the air, however, meant that over months or years of exposure, their flux channels would start to warp. Syl had seen articles comparing it to nuclear waste pre-integration, though that kind of radiation never caused issues anymore.
Nobody lived near a Tower. Most preferred not to even approach one if they weren’t going treasure hunting inside. Doing so for an extended period of a time was a sure ticket to an early, painful death.
That much flux also had a deleterious effect on non-magical structures. Santa Rosa had been a relatively normal suburban city before the integration and had held research facilities from some time, but you would be hard-pressed to tell that now. The city had been worn down to nubs. Most of the original structures had been ground down into desert dust a long time ago. Post-integration facilities, built before humanity had realized that they had needed to regulate how much time they could spend in these conditions, only stood in fragments.
Brutalist flux-reinforced building foundations and skeletons marked the dour landscape around them, slowly battered down by the constant wave of flux.
“This isn’t going to be dangerous, is it?” Lia asked. “Not the combat, I mean. The exclusion zone.”
“You’ll be fine,” Waylan reassured her. “They’re pretty popular for notable duels because they let people recharge faster. It takes at least a month for you to start noticing actual problems.”
“We’re going to be here for at least a week,” James said gruffly. “Your honor duels last an hour at most.”
Waylan shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it. If you wanted to back out, you had your chance.”
James grunted. “That’s true. You know the deal, Lia.”
“I can handle myself,” the class 2 first-year said. “If I can’t, I’ll just forfeit and get out. You can stop fussing about me. You’re not my dad.”
Waylan chuckled. “Stay sharp out there, everyone. This is what we’ve been practicing for. Cover each other’s retreats if necessary. Everyone knows the evac plan?”
“We’ve only gone over it ten thousand times,” James said. “Anyone who doesn’t know it by now deserves to be left behind, really.”
“Wildcard,” Jennifer said warningly. “We’re about to enter a potentially live combat situation. Cooperate with us here.”
“You got it, boss,” the master-class magician said in a way that left no illusions as to how much he cared for that.
The bus slowed to a stop a mere half kilometer from the Tower, having reached the coordinates that prismatics and the royals had received from Cascadia.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
They weren’t the first ones there. The opposing Cascadian force had arrived a few hours ago, by the look of it. They had more people in their entourage than the Aurian side, and their transports were more clearly military than the repurposed buses that the Reserve and circuit group was using.
Their engineers had been hard at work setting up an impromptu arena for each of the primary circuit events. They were nothing like the custom holodecks that would simulate any number of environments—these were basic ones that were just barely competition legal. That said, it wasn’t like competition rules actually mattered when it came to an off-the-books game, but still.
“Earpieces in, everyone,” Waylan said.
Syl had already had his in and patched into an isolated channel on his FCD.
“This is Uriel speaking,” a tinny voice came through the earpiece. “Acknowledge.”
Everyone in the bus tapped a display on their FCD to acknowledge. It looked reasonably natural on Bianca, who just used a tablet, but did look a bit stranger on Lia, who had brought her full FCD—a sword too tall to properly hold inside the confines of this vehicle.
“Receiving,” Jennifer said. “Doing final checks now. Please state your name or designation when prompted to.”
“Natalie Irving. Mishap,” a woman’s voice came in. She already sounded pissed.
“Receiving,” Jennifer replied, nodding as she checked a more detailed display of the network. “Next.”
“Hannibal Aurum. Lifeline.”
“Receiving. Next.”
They proceeded through the list of names one at a time. Every national circuit competitor had an alternate designator, but the ones in the Reserve had only competed in inter-academy competitions and thus lacked said titles. They just included their ranks instead.
Syl, Bianca, and Lia were the only undergraduates here who also had no experience in the national circuit. They had neither title nor rank—at least, not officially.
Jennifer’s brow furrowed after she confirmed that she herself was sending and receiving properly.
“There’s supposed to be eighteen of us,” she said. “Operator nineteen, confirm receipt?”
“Confirming,” said an irritatingly familiar voice. “Captain Drew Violet.”
“Receiving,” Jennifer said. “Bus three, confirm presence?”
“Lifeline receiving, presence confirmed,” Hannibal said over comms. “It’s new. Kid definitely wasn’t here five minutes ago.”
“Watch who you’re calling kid, draft dodger,” Drew replied easily. “If you’re so blind to your own senses being modified, then you really do need me anyway.”
“You’re on the open network, Drew,” Uriel said. “Why are you here?”
“Figured I’d participate,” he said casually. “Now, it does look like our friends on the other side here are waiting for us to get out, so why don’t we get on with it?”
Jennifer’s fingers flew over her keyboard, presumably sending off messages to Uriel since she was ostensibly in command of this entire thing. After a few moments of that, she sighed.
Unknown variables, Syl thought.
“We don’t have the time or resources to turn him away,” Jennifer said. “Watch your backs. Let’s go.”
“I’ll kill him if he tries anything funny,” James said nonchalantly. “I’m good.”
They disembarked into the flux-infused atmosphere of the Tower’s surroundings. To magicians, it was like suddenly being underwater with how dense the magic in the air was, but they acclimated quickly.
The arenas were set up across the span of about a kilometer. The Cascadian workforce had mostly retreated back into their transports by now, leaving thirty or so magicians facing the Aurian nineteen.
Syl hadn’t been to one of these before, so he wasn’t actually sure how they were supposed to handle this. Most of his dealings with Cascadians in the field had involved a great deal of flux and violence, most of which began within minutes of arrival.
This time, though, they just stood there. Uriel was doing some kind of communication, he was pretty sure, but he couldn’t see what she was typing.
To sate his curiosity, Syl cast a stealth spell and then the A-class perception-type spell Projected Self, which essentially just connected his senses to a separate source of input that he could move around. He sent his second sensor suite towards the Cascadian group, looking for anyone he might recognize.
…nope, no hits. To be fair, he’d eliminated or captured most Cascadians he would have recognized, and there’d been quite a few years of new talent being integrated into their system. There were quite a few of them that had the same colors as Cascadian leadership he’d dealt with before, so he sent the sensor suite towards them, increasing the flux on the stealth aspect.
“…here, so we should call her in,” someone wearing a patch that Syl was pretty sure was roughly equivalent to Uriel’s rank was saying. “The artifact is ready for her, anyway.”
“She said she would know when to come,” another, lower-ranked person said. “Shouldn’t we wait?”
“She’s a Sinner,” the first said. “Do you really want to trust the word of someone with a body count higher than the population of the capital?”
“With all due respect, sir, why are we having her oversee this, then?”
“Oh, that’s simple,” a frail, emaciated young woman a head shorter than the officer said, smiling with too many teeth. “I felt like visiting home.”
Syl didn’t curse, but he was very tempted to. He had nearly forgotten just what it was like to be on the wrong side of a paragon-class magician’s abilities.
I need to up my passive sensory spells. With his normal suite, it had just seemed like Gluttony had appeared out of nowhere. It was quite possible she had, but it wouldn’t have been true teleportation. More likely it was a stealth spell of some kind.
From the way the officer jumped, they hadn’t noticed her either.
Syl’s spell wavered in the presence of a paragon-class mage. Her very presence had a gravity to it, crushing and compacting the flux around her.
Gluttony. Katelyn Lesling. She looked just as he remembered her—magic preserving a certain youthful innocence that didn’t quite succeed at hiding the vicious hunger underneath. Though she was on record as being almost as old as the flux integration itself, she didn’t look much older than Syl.
This woman had killed one point three million people.
A monster in the flesh.
Someone like me.
“Shit,” Uriel said belatedly. “She’s actually here.”
Gluttony turned towards the Aurians, hollow smile still plastered on her lips, and Syl’s spell flickered out. That was fine. He had no more use for it anyway.
The Sinner inhaled softly. By all rights, only someone standing right next to her should have been able to hear it, but the sound pierced through a kilometer of flux-rich air to reach everyone’s ears. A cold shiver went down Syl’s spine.
It had been quite some time since he had witnessed true power.
As she breathed in slowly, Syl heard a handful of the Aurians and a decent few of the Cascadians shouting in panic. The flux around them was moving, stripping down materials and bombarding people on its way as it traveled towards a single source.
“Shield your FCDs!” Jennifer called out. “It’s going to—“
Her voice cut out, though Syl could hear her finish with “break them all” since she wasn’t standing far from her. They hadn’t adequately shielded their comms, and they were going to pay for it.
Amateur mistakes, Syl thought.
His own FCDs were shielded and his body was used to flux bombardment, so he figured that he would be fine—flux didn’t have that much of a physical presence when not being shaped, and most of the people stumbling were doing so out of surprise more than sheer force.
And then his throat started burning, and he remembered the one device that he possessed that wasn’t—couldn’t—be adequately protected.
“That’s annoying,” he tried to say. Instead, he felt something crack.
Bianca was shielding herself against the flux storm beside him but noticed Syl touching his throat. She turned toward him, realizing what was happening in an instant. She motioned with her FCD, preparing to enter a program.
Syl shook his head, signing quickly.
I’ll be fine.
His throat FCD was at pretty high risk of malfunctioning explosively in a situation like this, but he had accounted for the possibility. There had been a time where fighting the Sinners had been a real concern of his, after all.
Unfortunately, like he’d wanted to say, it was annoying.
He pointed his primary FCD at his own throat.
Master-class transmutation-type spell, Augoeides.
The FCD dissolved into his bloodstream, active components becoming inert biological components in an instant. It had been designed to be receptive to this spell in particular. It had always run the risk of someone using said spell on him, but it was very rare to find this in the battlefield, so he didn’t mind too much.
Still. Annoying. He wouldn’t be able to get it replaced anywhere but Incarnate, which meant that he didn’t have access to his voice for the foreseeable immediate future.
The flux storm came to a gentle stop, the majority of the Tower-enhanced flux simply vanishing from the area and into Gluttony’s gullet.
The skies had been grey when they’d come in. Now, weak beams of sunlight shone down onto the hastily constructed arenas where both sides stood, the clouds pulled down from a portion of the sky and vacuumed straight into her body.
She smiled wider, stepping forward and suddenly vanishing.
The Sinner reappeared high in the air, hovering on an invisible platform. When she spoke, it reached everyone at the same volume.
“You have some games to get to, don’t you? Don’t let my presence discourage you. Let’s play!”