Tryouts for the school Tournament Circuit team were to take place in two days, which meant that Syl had a free weekend for once.
It was probable that Sanguine was going to be setting up for whatever raid they planned on making in the coming week, but without proper intelligence on where their local headquarters were, Syl couldn’t act on that.
The group hadn’t been that big a threat in his mind until recently. Sanguine had originally been a multinational group with the stated purpose of eliminating the magician-first status quo. That group had rapidly disintegrated around 40 AFI when mass-produced FCD technology had been disseminated to the masses. Even non-magicians had enough of a mana pool to make use of certain kinds of magic, and with one of their primary goals achieved, Sanguine had splintered into pieces, each of them trying to use the group’s resources for their own means.
This current iteration in Auria was a distant descendant of one of those splinters. The “main” Sanguine group was in Seaboard, the country that had emerged from what had been southeastern North America, and it had little to no affiliation with the one in Auria. The stated goal of this particular group was to dismantle the academy system, which they claimed placed too great a focus on a certain subset of magicians and not enough on merit.
Which, Syl knew, was mostly untrue. As far as his intelligence had made him aware, the group was mostly a glorified magician gang. They stole equipment, occasionally abducted magicians, and committed murders from time to time, but they were largely little more than a nuisance. A nuisance with access to stolen magic jamming and FCD disruption equipment, yes, but they hadn’t done much with it until now.
Their current target was the princess, and that could not be tolerated.
That said, it would do Syl little good to muse on that now. For the time being, he had magic to experiment with.
With his current assignment and schedule, he didn’t have an open window to go to the primary Incarnate laboratory for almost another month, but he had an encrypted line to his device there that allowed for transportation of research notes between locations.
Syl had reached a wall with his disposable FCD project. Though he had gained new insights while working here, it would take time and more precise tools than what he had available as a first-year class 3 at the academy to make more progress. He sent his notes over to the primary research team, then checked to see what else they’d looked at.
One particular file caught his attention.
Fundamental Unsolved Conjecture 3 — Zero’s Conjecture of Free Casting.
Syl had done some cursory work on that, but he’d never formalized much of his research. Many of the conditions that made limited free casting possible for him weren’t replicable amongst others, and putting down what he could do in writing was more dangerous for him than it was beneficial to the outside world.
After his conversation with Jennifer, though, he was considering it again.
Zero’s Conjecture was named after a man codenamed Zero, a paragon-class mage considered to be the first confirmed emergence of a particular set of otherwise unrelated powerful mages once known as the Power Seven and now simply called the Seven Sinners.
He was long dead, one of the many casualties of World War III, but when he’d been alive, he had been a true free caster. Though the conjecture hadn’t been made by him, Zero was the epitome of a type of magician that humanity had been trying to recreate since. He’d been capable of clearing gates without so much as a tablet or a wand. On more than one occasion, he’d been witnessed performing acts of great, complex large-scale magic that shouldn’t have been possible even with a regular FCD.
Syl had always found the story fascinating but hard to believe. Propaganda was at an all time high, and when half the currently functioning nations in the world had “confirmed” that Zero had originally come from their country, it was no great step to assume that some of the stories had been exaggerated.
His personal favorite conspiracy in that respect was that Zero had been an artificial intelligence. Those had run rampant in the years after humanity had successfully suborned the majority of the Gates until things had come to a head and they’d started collapsing societies. A collective human effort had sealed the bulk of them into magically trapped datacenters in Taiwan, which had promptly been glassed out of existence in the early 30s AFI. Any research on computing power that got too far had been summarily demolished.
If an intelligence had escaped the wreckage, though, it was entirely possible it could have possessed magical abilities like nobody else could ever replicate. The AI had been making progress leaps and bounds faster than most of humanity, and there were still magical discoveries being made by those brave research teams willing to delve into the death trap that was post-destruction Taiwan.
To most, none of that mattered anymore. Zero was dead, and his secret of free casting with him.
Syl, however, mused on that a bit more. The biggest roadblock to spell-oriented free casting—as opposed to the raw, uncontrolled free magic of early magical humanity—was that humans simply weren’t equipped to do the kind of calculations that FCDs did. Syl was capable of doing so, to a certain extent, but he was a rare exception. Even then, he couldn’t match the speed of a well-made FCD.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Knowing the exact calculations, huh…
Syl frowned. Calculations were performed to ensure that a spell worked for its given circumstances and statistics, but there were also a trillion lesser parts that an FCD calculated and recalculated each time.
“What if…” he said out loud. “No, that wouldn’t work. Would it?”
#
“Syl,” Bianca said. “Syl!”
Syl blinked, looking up from the device he’d been tinkering with.
“Syl, it’s Sunday afternoon,” she said. “Have you slept once?”
He furrowed his brow, running through his memories of what he was now realizing had been several dozen hours. “A couple hours, I think.”
The princess sighed in exasperation. “You’re not a robot, Syl.”
“I’m also not as reliant on biological functions as most people,” he pointed out. “My body’s broken in useful ways.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to kill yourself working on this,” Bianca said. “Come on. Out. You’re going to eat, and then you’re going to sleep.”
“It’s… four in the afternoon,” Syl said, pausing a second to take a look at the time in the display his FCD presented. “I was just about done anyway. I can sleep later, but a meal would be good right about now.”
“Honestly,” Bianca said. “You need to take better care of yourself.”
“That’s what I have you for,” Syl said. “Like remoras and sharks.”
“You have too much of a passion for extinct species,” Bianca said. “That was almost romantic, then you had to go and ruin it. Am I the shark in this analogy, or are you?”
“Does it matter?” Syl asked. He got up, exiting the workspace he’d constructed for himself. “You already cooked. It smells good.”
The air was rich with the scent of spices and meat, the real kind that you could only get at the store once every other week. Even Syl, who was normally fine subsisting on nutrition bars and water, had to admit the aroma made his stomach growl.
“Of course it does,” Bianca said. “I think I’m the remora, by the by. It’s you protecting me, after all.”
“Protecting is a strong word,” Syl said. “Working alongside, maybe.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Come and eat. You can tell me what you’ve been working on in the meantime.”
Food was a spicy beef noodle stew with egg and savory vegetables paired with fluffy fresh-baked bread. It smelled heavenly, and it tasted even better. Syl didn’t say much as he devoured the generous serving on his plate.
“What’s the occasion?” he asked eventually. “We’re supposed to be undercover. Procuring this many luxurious ingredients is rare even amongst the wealthy.”
“It was a good harvest month, apparently,” Bianca said. “Our first week of class is over. I believed some celebration was in order. Was I mistaken?”
“No,” Syl said appreciatively. “You were not.”
“Also, you hadn’t eaten in two days.”
“That’s also fair.”
“Enough about that,” Bianca said. “Every time you get into one of these engineering fugues, it is for the purpose of something significant. What is it this time? Did you make an FCD to outstrip Horizon Breaker?”
Syl laughed. “In here? Absolutely not. I did make good progress on the project. Would you mind holding onto my FCDs for a moment?”
Bianca looked momentarily confused at that. To a magician, an FCD was everything. Most lived, ate, and slept with their FCD either equipped to them or within arm’s reach. To casually hand one over was not just a display of immense trust but also potentially suicidally idiotic.
Her expression softened as she clocked the former part of that statement, and she smiled. “Of course.”
Syl unclipped his two primary FCDs, both the one that he primarily used for class and the one that carried quite a bit more firepower in its pre-loaded spell, and handed them off to Bianca.
“Step away a bit?” he requested. “This is my first time trying the latest version, so there’s still going to be a fair few bugs to work out.”
Bianca acquiesced, eyeing him with curiosity.
Careful to not accidentally knock over any of the furniture they had gone to great pains to set up normally, Syl got to his feet.
Mentally, he settled on a specific configuration, then acted. Flux gathered around his body, emerging from his body as he willed it out. Instead of an FCD assisting him with crafting the spell, he simply wrote magic onto the air.
Activate. Process zero.
Start - modulate (speed, up). Process one and two.
Modulate (body, subprocess i3). Process three.
Modulate (speed, up). Process two, recycled.
Modulate (speed, down, harsh). Process one, canceling process two at the same time.
Stop. Process three now, ending the body enhancement.
Activate, end. Process zero, the activation sequence, finishing the spell.
All of that done within zero point six seconds created Syl’s favorite C-rank spell Flash Step.
He blurred forward, abruptly stopping some six meters in front of where he’d started. Syl stumbled as he landed hard, his feet having appeared about half a metere off the ground, but the spell had worked.
Syl wasn’t usually one to celebrate his victories, but he did allow himself a clenched fist and a quiet whoop.
“That’s incredible!” Bianca exclaimed, observing him. “That was free casting, wasn’t it?”
“Almost,” Syl said. “It does some of what free casting wants. The only way to interfere with that spell is to target the flux pattern itself, which is orders of magnitude harder than just disrupting the FCD.”
“How did you do it?” Bianca asked. “Like you said, the calculations are too complex even in a simple Flash Step to manage with a human brain.”
“I didn’t use a human brain,” Syl said. “I recorded the exact statistics of several dozen different Flash Steps and identified which parts of the spell could be eliminated from recalculation. For those that couldn’t—looking at environment, terrain, and the like—I took common use cases and created spell processes that would match those exactly.”
“How did you cast those?” Contrary to her duelist-like demeanor, the princess was also a flux scholar, and she seemed entranced by the spell he’d just used. “The problem isn’t just in finding the spell process you need to use. It’s also in casting.”
“That’s where the tricky part comes in,” Syl said. “It’s also why this isn’t a generational breakthrough. It’s a workaround. I used FCD technology to implant the exact magical processes I needed into my mind. It’s still a struggle to shape the magic, but with a blueprint, it’s much easier.”
“That’s genius,” Bianca gasped. She stopped, frowning. “Auria may not like that, though.”
“I should stress that this isn’t free casting,” Syl said. “Not true free casting, at least. The process needs to be repeated for any spell I want to cast this way. It’s slow, and if I encounter a situation where one of the pre-prepared spell processes isn’t working, it won’t work at all.”
“It’s still a major leap forward,” she argued. “You should be proud of what you’ve done.”
“Don’t worry,” Syl grinned. “I am.”
Sanguine weren’t going to have any idea what hit them.