Chapter 46: Chapter 46 – An Alternative Path to Victory

Amber brings her hammer down on the vast, sprawling tree of light, and the word that comes to mind for how it shatters is strangely.

I hadn’t even thought about what it meant for the floor to not be dungeonstone. I hadn’t, for that matter, consciously noticed it; I was, still am, too busy trying to ignore the surroundings to really study them. The others had noticed, had studied them; now we huddle around the shockingly bright glyph-lines that are revealed as a result.

“That was a really cool spell.” I nod my head towards Tim, Visor manifesting onto my face so I can study the glyphs more closely. “Does it have a name?”

“No.” Tim shakes his head. “Not yet! I need to work on it more. It’s inefficient, I think. It hasn’t coalesced yet, so I have to manifest it manually.”

“What does that mean, practically?” Amber, bless her, keeping the conversation going. “My approach towards spellcasting tends more towards divine channeling than arcane construction.”

“Well, I have to structure the mana manually, and hold on to the pattern. It’s reached the second stage; a little bit more work and it’ll go from nascent to… well, being a real Spell. I know it isn’t much, but it did help this time.”

“You are, to my understanding, at the threshold.” Zidanya’s voice is a lot softer and less cutting than it usually is. “By all grace, do not denigrate yourself for this; to add something to the Common Knowledge should not be held as aught but wonder.”

Tim looks halfway mortified and halfway enthralled by the fact that she’s noticed him, a state that he’s more or less constantly been in, given that she’s been talking with him since the truce started. “You honor me, Taveda,” he manages to get out, stammering.

“It relies upon the resonance effect?”

“Clear sight.” He smiles, looking down at the glowing glyphs that run across the floor. “Resonance for shape, the liminal cascade law, and the like-to-other friction effect. The enchantment on Dame Ashborn’s weapon, amplified and echoing; and the Skill, likewise. The effects were a gratifying example.” He’s managed to forget his previous self-consciousness, gesticulating excitedly with his hands.

I tune them out as they keep talking magic, with surprisingly little difficulty. The floor above the glyphwork was pulverized, stone turned to dust and then vacuumed up by a spell from Sara and shunted into the Void, and while Zidanya can split her attention between this and conversation, I’m now fully absorbed by what I’m seeing in my Visor. It’s an intricate tracery of glyphs running from one side of the room to another, terminating in each case in two vast embellished circles, and I’m barely able to pull it apart without popping Insight.

I don’t, thankfully, need to actually understand the glyphwork to work with it.

“This,” I say to nobody in particular, “is going to be a three-stage process.” I look around; everyone’s staring at me, or at least looking at me, which means everyone will hear me. “First stage, we deconstruct this part of the scenario by, among other things, shunting the energy going through these glyphs into the liminal space.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes, Tim, I can.” I smile at him, baring my teeth a little. I have a feeling that he got the wrong impression from how thoroughly out of my depth with magic and history I am, compared to him; I can’t catch any of his references, but I know runes at least a little bit and he, well, doesn’t. “With the right glyphs and one of my Skills, I can backfire this whole region, the prison and its surroundings, into the author’s soul, for lack of a better way to put it. It’s already set up to do it, is the key; we were supposed to pick a side here, and then at some point we’d leave; the whole region would get reincorporated. Not all at once; discorporate the materials into the storage glyphs and let that flow through a rate-limiter into the … author.

“There’s a maybe twenty percent chance, one in five, that the cascade pulls the rest of the scenario with it. If it does, that’s a victory, and the whole scenario will decohere into the liminal space we’re shunting into, and then we… um.” I take a deep breath.

Zidanya, seeing my hesitation, picks up the explanation. “Skip we then the second stage, and much of the third; the blood of the truer villain here flows into the glyphs which produce those rewards a Temple is known for.”

“And ye do this how?”

I look at Rei and sigh. “Pretty literally, honestly. I mean, blood has a metaphysical tie to the Self, and so does a person’s internal mana, I guess? So we set up a series of draw glyphs to feed the reward runes. If the scenario-author is… embodied… well.” I shrug uncomfortably.

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“Problem?”

“Yes, Sara, there’s a problem!” I stop and breathe deeply. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t snap. It’s just… I don’t like violence and I very much do not like killing sophonts, but I decided on this strategy while extremely angry and now we have a deal, and the logic still holds.” I blink a few times, shaking my head. “Anyway. That’s if the cascade takes out the entire scenario, which I don’t think is the most likely thing. If it doesn’t, we still wind up in a liminal domain, but one that connects to whatever parts of the scenario are still intact; almost certainly the palace, maybe also the city surface and rooftops. Any given set piece has a chance of sticking around, but not a big one; the cascade effect taking out the smaller, less-anchored places is a high probability.”

“An we fall prey to terrible mischance,” Zidanya says, picking up where I left off, “we adapt, but belike where that may land upon us is there. Needs must, Adam and myself bestir ourselves to repeat this self-same matter within the coremost domain of our foe foul.”

“But if we’re doing that,” I finish with a sheepish expression, “we’ll be doing it under fire, possibly literally. Once we spark this off, at the very least we’re going to wind up with an extremely angry sentient in a great deal of pain. They won’t have reintegrated what we backfire back into them, not if they do it at the same rate as Zidanya does, not even if they do it a lot faster.” The woman in question gives something between a huff and a snort at the thought, and there’s a round of chuckles. “Yeah, I’m not putting a lot of weight on that hypothesis.

“Still, just because we’ll have shorted the system out doesn’t mean that we won’t have opposition. Anything that doesn’t get sucked into the grinder here is going to get thrown at us. Whatever is at the head of it is going to be something we could have handled, or that you could have handled, as far as the Temple is concerned; we’ll be relying on the five of you to handle whatever’s incoming.” I nod at Rei, Amber, Stella, Knives, and Tim in order, and nobody seems offended, which is good. “The three of us will boost whenever we’re not occupied otherwise, but the… the weight will be on your shoulders.” I almost say the engines are on your console, which wouldn’t be a particularly useful phrase here.

“Trick an a half, that.” Rei is doing his cheek-chewing thing again, and it’s still cute. “Loyalists and revolutionaries ain’t exactly equal matched, but maybe they’re a challenge fer four, three third tiers. Ye think we can take what’s for seven on with five?”

“Play square.” Stella’s voice is, I think, sly, but that’s a hard inflection to read accurately.

“Eh.” Rei waves a hand vaguely in her direction. “Fine, won’t add straight, and ye say some of the opposition might get dusted.”

“A fight.” Her voice is husky, and I look up to see that she’s talking to, or at, Knives. He’s gesturing, some kind of sign language that I guess doesn’t qualify for Omniglot translation, and she chuckles in response as Rei sighs.

“Eh.” Rei’s shoulders sag in a dramatic shrug, voice morose. “Guess we stick it in.”

Stella laughs, and Rei snickers along with her, so I figure it’s some sort of inside joke or just the kind of over-exaggerated mannerism that some people can make funny. “Then let’s talk stage one execution details.” I squat next to the closer of the two circles, inscribed into dungeonstone in bright blue, glowing fit to make me squint. “Normally, these glyphs here are mediating the flow. The point of the outermost pattern is to send the power, the mana, in a steady and controlled stream to the central storage, or accept from the same; one layer in, you’ve got the remote, local storage, the storage for this chunk of the scenario. We need to not just bridge the gap between local storage and central storage and make it flow without going through the regularizers and the rate-limiters; we also need to, uh, ensure it does so at trunk rate, at whatever the maximum rate is that the trunks of the storage fractals can output at.

“Sara, I need you to get to work disconnecting the stuff we need to no longer be in the loop. I used Disenchant and Dispel when I did it last, but there’s plenty of other things that work; it’s, uh, Earth-style, the rune at large is, if you’re using the same style as Zidanya’s been teaching me, where it transmutes like-into-like? I figure you can handle this?”

“Historical artifacts of magical theory aside, yes.” Sara doesn’t crack a smile, so I assume she’s serious. She turns away from me, sitting down on the stone floor right next to the circle.

I blink twice and nod once, turning back to the others. “Right, so. Zidanya and I have had some fun with power-warp glyphs. So what we’re going to do is-”

“My lord.” Amber taps me on the shoulder, smiling at me. “None of us is going to understand the slightest bit of what you speak.” Tim looks like he’s about to say something, but he catches himself and frowns in silence. “If you two know what you are to do, do it.”

“Right.” I close my eyes for a second to gather my thoughts, then open them and nod at Zidanya. “We got this?”

“Magelord.” She smiles at me, a smile that glitters with teeth and danger, a smile that makes me shiver. “Let us show these new friends of yours what Runewrights can wreak.”

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