Jennifer’s last fifteen hours or so had been tumultuous ones. She hadn’t expected to encounter Drew in the secret archives, and she certainly hadn’t thought that he would have possessed access to information gathering methods that her own family didn’t.
It hadn’t even been through his family. As far as she was aware, Drew’s mother, strategic-class magician General Allison Violet, was either still unaware of the precise details of who the two most dangerous magicians in the entire national academy system were or had simply turned a blind eye to it.
Despite his seeming buffoonery, Drew had proved to be remarkably adept when it came to navigating prismatics—and more importantly, in finding who was important to them. They’d been running on limited time and very little data, but he’d pieced together connections quicker than anyone had seen. They’d made their way to no fewer than three separate private residences in the middle of the night, woken up people who officially had no relation to the kingdom, and obtained fragments of information from them, chaining their way to the person who actually knew things.
Watching Drew work had been frankly terrifying. He’d proven that it wasn’t just Syl who was hiding the true extent of his power. The Violet had been born and raised for this purpose, and he had carried out spell-assisted one-sided interrogations with a clinical efficiency that made Jennifer wonder if she should consider investing in protections against the type of body control magic herself. It would be a late to do so now, but still…
She had wondered how the hell someone like this man had gone unnoticed for so long. Despite being “only” master-class, he had navigated the situation with the ease of a paragon. If he continued to grow in power, which was very possible at their age and development, he was going to be a true terror.
He would have been a true terror, she thought distantly, watching his corpse hit the ground.
How had it gone this horribly wrong?
She hadn’t been able to help but believe the master-class when he’d said that he was going to operate in his official capacity as a kingdom liaison. Prismatics were occasionally selected for royal positions, sometimes without the knowledge of their family, so for someone of his power and versatility, it made sense that he would be a quiet asset.
In reflection, she had to wonder if he’d been manipulating her the same way he had everyone he’d questioned in the process of learning that the woman with the highest scores on the entrance exams was the least acknowledged member of the royal family. Jennifer had checked herself for magical influence after, but though she was a master-class engineer, the same didn’t necessarily apply towards the esoteric school that the Violets were best at. She could have missed something.
Whatever the hand had originally been, the cards were now on the table. Jennifer lost sight of them almost immediately as the arenas themselves morphed.
Where there would normally be reserve fuel tanks to continue powering the arenas when the ambient flux proved to be insufficient for normal function as well as to clean and reset their configurations after a duel completed, instead there had been drones, automated capsules that spilled out and grew legs before executing a pre-coded spell process that, judging from the sheer size and raw flux density of the spell, was either high master or fully strategic-class.
Somehow, her mind still hadn’t quite caught up to reality. Even as Jennifer watched a blinding display of coordinated spells going off simultaneously to trap three—two, now—members of this unit, she could only think, he must have been a pretty bad liaison if he was working with Cascadia.
The ground shook with an explosion, shaking Jennifer back to reality. Whether or not Drew had been a true liaison or not was immaterial. He was dead. Nobody would ever find out, especially not her if she died here and now.
Uriel was shouting orders, using a basic voice amplification spell to be heard over the sudden din.
“Do not advance!” she was calling. “I had eyes on somewhere in the range of a hundred tactical-class magicians. Can anyone confirm?”
Jennifer’s devices were going absolutely insane with notifications. Her tools had been used for general oversight in addition to monitoring vitals and a number of other logistical functions for the Aurian team, and they were pinging everything that had just occurred.
She hurried through the logs. This machine was the result of years of engineering, a project that she’d had the fortune to work on but hadn’t been the creator of. It had originally been designed for war, then repurposed to use for the circuit.
It had then been repurposed a second time.
Pattern identified: Strategic-class projection-type spell, Changcheng.
That would be the kilometer-long forcefield cutting the battlefield in two. How long had it taken them to set this up? How much preparation?
Why?
Pattern identified: Strategic-class stealth-type spell, Flux Veil.
That spell would have been what had stopped them from detecting so many abnormal flux signatures from the Tower. Jennifer scrolled through the notifications at speed, ignoring literal hundreds of minor spell activations being noticed, then found the map of blinking red dots that counted flux signatures.
It was harder to read than usual. The entire area’s diagram was fritzing out, covered in a hue of red thanks to the sheer amount of flux coming off Gluttony.
“Two hundred thirty-one confirmed signatures!” Jennifer shouted back. “At least thirty coming our side!”
“Defensive spells,” Uriel ordered. “Fall back! Evac is on its way!”
Everyone still standing was happy to acquiesce. They could see the sheer volume of spells forming, feel the pouring rain still dripping down on them, and see the writing on the wall.
Everyone except, apparently, James Rokho.
He couldn’t make it over the wall that had formed to cut them off from the center area, but he certainly could run at the Cascadians spilling out of the tower on their side.
Either he knows something I don’t or he’s just lost it, Jennifer thought. From the way he’d been acting after the loss of his companion, it was likely the latter.
“Leave him,” Uriel said, directing her voice towards the general group before turning towards Jennifer. “Jen, do you need a hand?”
“Fuck,” Jennifer muttered, messing with the settings on her device. This couldn’t fall into enemy hands. This, at least, was Aurian technology that Cascadia couldn’t rival. If it came down to it, she would trigger a failsafe and atomize it, but that was much less preferable to getting away with it. “No, don’t. You might break something.”
There was valuable data in here even if it was resoundingly clear that the Aurian team was in way over their heads. Jennifer had to preserve the recordings—even just having a surviving measure of a Sinner’s power and flux patterns could potentially push the institute ahead by years when it came to magical research.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
And she still needed the device setup to function from a distance.
“Jen,” Uriel warned. She barked out a spell command, forming a simple shield wide enough to cover a loose group of three of the circuit magicians from debris conjured by one spell and accelerated by another. “Running out of time here.”
“One moment,” Jennifer said, fumbling with a small device—an Incarnate design, actually. Once she got it set up, she got to work closing up the rest of the devices into a form more capable for travel. “Start falling back. Evac should be arriving soon. I can handle myself.”
“Not leaving you,” Uriel said.
Elsewhere, one of the circuit competitors—Lifeline, if Jennifer had the name right—cried out as a spell hit him directly in the chest. The Aurian to his fight reacted quickly, using a low-class explosive spell to detonate the pattern in Lifeline’s chest before it could finish triggering. Lifeline stumbled, a chunk of his heart suddenly missing, but he got back up, gaping wound sealing itself back together.
“Still behind you,” Jennifer said. “I have data on evac. Forty seconds out. Go.”
“Hurry the fuck up!” Waylan shouted from ahead, changing tack from a fighting retreat. “Wildcard and I’ll buy some time!”
Pattern identified: master-class fortification-type spell, Supernova.
To Jennifer’s eyes, Waylan glowed bright crimson. Far too bright.
She couldn’t waste time on sentimentality here. The recording device was down, and she’d packed the equipment up. Whether or not it would survive fleeing was no longer up to her.
Jennifer cast a look over towards where Waylan and James were engaging the Cascadians, then froze as she realized her own FCD modification was still working.
She could see the Cascadian magicians’ activation processes.
“Change of plans,” she shouted, augmenting her voice in such a way that it would reach exactly Uriel. “I’m going to run interference. Take the sensor suite. No questions.”
To her credit, the Indigo knew how to operate under pressure. She picked up Jennifer’s sensor suite as the engineer cast a Flash Step, cursing herself for her own stupidity.
They won’t even put this on my grave. It’ll be an engineering accident or some dumb shit like that.
Rain poured down on her as she drew closer to Waylan. James was already deep in the midst of the Cascadians, flashing with flux and raw energy, water evaporating in his presence.
“What’re you doing here?” Waylan hissed, holding a hand forward to let off a blast of uncontrolled flux. He flashed forward, knocking back an enemy magician that had stumbled out of position before returning.
In lieu of an answer, Jennifer projected her own spells, using the combination of her and Syl’s FCD upgrades to identify where activation processes were forming. Rather than try to fully create a spell, she just filled points in space with directionless flux that would make casting a spell with those pre-formed activation processes much more difficult, if not entirely possible.
She saw results immediately, water manipulation spells backfiring on their users, providing more windows for Waylan and James to fight.
It was strange. Even though all three of them were higher-class than the magicians arrayed against them, there were still a lot of Cascadians, and it was raining. They should have been pretty handily outmatched.
Mj. Uriel: Evac is here. Starting boarding. Lost three more on our way out. One Reserve. Two circuit.
Jennifer realized belatedly that for all the spells they’d been casting, these Cascadians were mostly focusing on keeping each other alive and drawing attention to themselves than they were killing the Reserve. Even after being in the thick of the melee, James was still alive and so were most of the Cascadians. That should have long since not been the case.
She put two and two together quickly. Whatever was happening here, it was a distraction from what was transpiring on the other side of the wall. It was also just lethal enough that it was a genuine threat on their lives that could not be ignored.
Their true goal involved Syl and the princess. That much was clear. What it was—Jennifer couldn’t focus on that. Distraction or no, these Cascadians were still going to kill them if they didn’t do anything about it.
James was starting to slow down, the weight of dozens of lingering spells starting to drag him down.
Mj. Uriel: Fall back now or we’re leaving without you.
Waylan got the same message, apparently, because he turned to Jennifer.
“No last stands for us,” he said. “James!”
Wildcard didn’t hear them.
“Shit.”
“Leave him,” Jennifer said. “It’s two of us or none of us.”
Wildcard was also, as the name suggested, a wildcard. If that had been Uriel in the midst, this would have been a different story. Jennifer could deal with losing Rokho. He was on the right side, but he wasn’t an element they could control.
“We can still save him,” Waylan grunted, throwing the entirety of his master-class spell into diverting a flurry of attacks aimed at the less well defended Jennifer. “We have time.”
Another message came to them.
Syl: Leave.
Syl: For your own good.
“Go, Waylan,” Jennifer hissed.
“Fuck,” Waylan spat. “Fuck.”
He wrapped the engineer in a bear hug and moved, Jennifer’s vision and inner ear going haywire as Waylan’s spell granted him superhuman speed until they stabilized just short of a fast-deploy aircraft marked with prismatic colors.
They were five short of their original eighteen.
Jennifer stumbled inside the entrance ramp, dizzy beyond belief, and vomited on the floor.
By the time she could see again, the ship was already taking off.
#
A recording device on the scale of the one left by Jennifer Indigo was not strong enough to penetrate through the strategic-class spell Changsheng, but it did not need to. Gluttony did not obstruct the Aurian group evacuating, nor did many of the Cascadians.
They hadn’t come to kill that group, after all. It was all too easy to simply murder magicians. That could be done at their convenience, not with a setup like this.
The Cascadians had come for the princess. Their intelligence had been more than sufficient to identify who she was, and the value she could provide to their programs would mean the most painless possible takeover of Auria in coming years.
Gluttony was faintly interested in her, but that was not why she had come to officiate. She remained in the same position she had been hovering in since the start. She was still watching.
After the evacuation, the portion of the Cascadian operation intended to look like an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter their enemies finished, and they collapsed on the one surviving non-critical Aurian. James Rokho lasted for a fair amount of time, his rage propelling him through the magicians around him, but he wasn’t the only master-class magician here. He also wasn’t the only one benefiting from the circumstances.
The spells that struck him didn’t kill him immediately, but they would. His efforts bought him a few bodies of his own, but it was a hollow revenge.
The Aurian evacuation ship took them from the site of the ambush, each of those on board aware that their loss would lead to nothing. Their country would not risk attempting to punish Cascadia for their transgression even if this should have been grounds for open war—exactly because it was grounds for war. The higher-ups would do anything to avoid anything like that, even if it meant letting their own die.
As they escaped, a few occasional potshots splatting against the aircraft’s shields, a sensor detected the descent of the barrier spell that had blocked sight and magic between Auria and three of their magicians.
When the veil dropped, there were still two Aurian magicians alive and active. Syl and Bianca were still mostly standing in the same location. They’d made micro-movements, but there were too many opposing magicians to do much other than defend and dodge. It helped that their opponents had been focused on the rest of the circuit teams.
It also helped that, unbeknownst to them, neither the assembled Cascadian forces nor Gluttony wanted them dead.
“They’re gone,” Bianca said, flickering back and forth with flux, counter-casting spells in the same breath they were cast.
Syl nodded, looking up at Gluttony as he sent a tactical-class spell to eliminate a magician that was trying to get close enough to commit to melee combat.
He had finally figured out what she wanted.
The silent archmage shook his head, then gestured towards Bianca.
Do it, he signed.
Gluttony’s rictus smile grew wider, and she started laughing.
“I knew it,” she laughed, throwing her throat back. “You’ve been here the whole time, haven’t you?”
Rather than reply, Syl held a hand out, tossing his still-intact uniform off. On his back, clasps sinking into his flesh and shielded so perfectly that nobody had seen it, was something resembling a backpack, neon blue lines crisscrossing it like a nerve system.
Bianca threw her flux into the system, using a total of thirty-seven spell processes to unlock and calibrate the device.
It expanded, criss-crossing links sliding over Syl’s back, his arms, his legs.
A Cascadian must have realized what was happening, because a strategic-class spell slammed into their location a second later.
“No,” Gluttony said, absorbing the spell with a flick of her fingers before the silent archmage could do it himself. “I’ve waited far too long to see this.”
The final piece of the full-body FCD snapped into place, covering Syl’s face in its entirety. The steel at his arms extended and warped, a rifle-like structure emerging from the device.
Paragon-class custom FCD.
Horizon Breaker.