Chapter 26 - The Light that Burns the Sky

Every now and again, there were events so significant that observers around the world couldn’t ignore it. This had held true since long before the dawn of magic—the eruption of Krakatoa, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the first atomic bomb. They had become more commonplace since the world had turned to one of magicians and monsters, but it was very rare for those world-shaking events to be the effect of only a handful of magicians.

Each of the magicians currently over the San Francisco crater was an exception to that. Each of their emergences were public record. A Sinner simply appearing was a notable enough event to be international news. Doing anything with the amount of power they possessed elevated them to a global one.

Now six of them were fighting.

The initial moments were complete chaos. Envy, Lust, Greed, and Pride all individually activated multiple paragon-class spells. The three Sinners other than Syl had reached a kind of silent agreement. Informed by Zero that their erstwhile acquaintance had slowly started to succumb to a bout of lunar madness himself, they had come prepared to fight.

And fight they did. Within moments, the already damaged city shattered further, the ground itself rippling as ocean stormed into the crater like it was a living thing, liquifying the earth and annihilating any remaining ruins. Shadows of horrors long past smashed their way through the air, splitting it apart with the force of multiple nuclear detonations.

An actual nuclear device ignited amongst the midst—a lower-tier one, of course, since it still wasn’t possible to pack more than a couple of kilotons into a device not that much larger than the palm of a hand.

Most magicians were fragile. Magical combat was by and large an extremely fast, brutal affair. The only reason any combat went on for longer than a few minutes was because the magicians in question would kite each other around cities, avoiding each other until an ultimate direct confrontation that would typically only last as long as it took for a single powerful spell to connect.

Again, the Sinners were exceptions. Some of them—Gluttony, Pride, Envy—still had centrally human bodies, but the level of defense that they had for themselves was worlds beyond that of the magicians closest to them. They redirected, cancelled, absorbed, or otherwise nullified the damage that all the devastation in the area should have done to their bodies.

That said, their combat was no less brutal for it. Within the span of ten seconds of back-and-forth, even the ruins of the militarized zone that had been San Francisco were now unrecognizable.

Sloth and Gluttony cast their own spells, both defensive. Gluttony was ostensibly Pride’s ally and had been recognized as such by a good chunk of the world, but that recognition had come from when she had been operating with Uriel, not with Syl. While she admired Syl’s magic, she was no true ally of Pride’s. Here and now, she made no movement to protect him, only absorbing the flux in the area around herself.

Sloth was a more interesting case. Despite the other Sinner being the sole reason for Syl’s ten-year imprisonment in frozen time, he bore no ill will towards the wide-range termination-type specialist. The feeling seemed to be mutual, as Sloth slowed the various reality-tearing effects before it could reach him without expanding the spell outwards to become an offensive one.

Syl’s own magic joined the mix, shattering opposing spell patterns before they could reach him and jettisoning him through the flurry of paragon-class attacks. Before the bulk of them could wash over him, he slid into the Gate he’d tuned.

It was empty within but for a darker, equivalent of the ocean Syl had just been over. A good number of the Gates they’d opened had been like that—they were weaker but more stable, probably thanks to a lack of life to provide any fluctuations to the stability of the portal. They ended up running out of power on their own and closing pretty quickly that way instead of vomiting their contents out, though, so it was a better idea not to spend too much time within the temporary space he created for himself lest he strand himself the same way again.

Syl took a second to reorient himself before exiting the gate just as the door began to close.

It was still chaos outside. Most magicians, even paragon-class ones, simply didn't have the gas in the tank, so to speak, to keep their ultimate spells out for an extended duration of time.

The Sinners were not most magicians.

In a matter of seconds, the devastation had spread so widely that not only had the crater of San Francisco been redoubled in size, but damage was spreading to the area around it. The closest Aurian settlement was a solid 10 or 20 kilometers away, but the sheer intensity of the power being thrown around meant that not only did it have to be evacuated, people in the neighboring cities were actively dying second by second.

Nobody actually wanted to fight here. There were no real resources to fight over, and the terrain didn't particularly favor anybody. Even with the amount of defense each of them could bring, it was very unlikely that they would be able to stomach the full power of each other's onslaughts for long.

As such, after their initial spell trade had worn off, each of them tried to shift the battlefield themselves. Up until now, the Sinners had been mostly hands-off with each other. With Syl’s declaration of war, however, that paradigm changed. 

They had always operated under the understanding of mutually assured destruction. Now that one of them had stepped over the line, this wasn't going to end until at least one of them was dead. That meant that rather than running, Envy, Lust, and Greed tried to shift the fight into their favor. 

While they didn't necessarily have a unified game plan, each of them tried to do roughly the same thing, blanketing the ocean in a wave of high-tier spells, seeking to saturate the area with enough magic to either eliminate their opposition or force him elsewhere.

Syl took the bait. He didn't want to be in this area of the country anyway. It was too close to the places he actually cared about.

Instead, he rocketed off, avoiding the wide-range attacks and screaming through the skies. Each of the other Sinners was creating their own kind of anti-magic field, and while they weren't getting everything, he was sure that they would specifically target his highest-level antimatter spells once one of them detected him casting it.

Once he was far enough away from them, however, their focus changed from trying to negate any one of his spells to trying to keep control of the fight.

Syl was completely fine with that. They weren't going to be able to contain him for long.

There were a few things that he had advanced while the others hadn't. Of course, he lacked some things that the other Sinners had in spades. Each of them grew with every kill they had. In their own individual ways, they possessed methods to continue growing their power without ever having to innovate, constantly increasing the quantity and variety of flux that they could use.

Despite some very obvious advantages, Pride had to do things the hard way. In his humble opinion, it was the right way.

And one thing he had been doing that they had no hope of replicating was developing artifacts. Ever since he figured out the basic principle of how to create one on the day the war had started, he and Incarnate had been iterating and improving on their processes.

Pride triggered an artifact that sent him hurtling through a tunnel of warped space, applying similar principles as the ones that allowed for gates to open. Their first teleportation artifacts had been unseemly, highly specialized copies of artifacts that the Cascadian army had pulled out from towers in their own country. The ones they used now were original, courtesy of experimentation and the expanded resources they had gotten from conquering a continent.

One downside of it was that it left a very noticeable flux trail. In this moment, that downside was more of a useful side effect. After all, with the battle between the Sinners revolving around him, it would naturally hold to him the moment he arrived at his destination, allowing him to control the flow of the fight.

He appeared in Middle America, at a height of roughly 7,500 meters above sea level. Less than a kilometer under him was a still burgeoning explosion and the beginnings of a mushroom cloud that had come from magically enhanced nuclear bombs some 14 years ago. It still hadn't changed a single bed.

It wasn't far from here where he'd been imprisoned in time, fighting for a decade to find a way out of a spell that turned one moment into an eternity.

It was little surprise that Sloth was the first to make it to Pride.

It had been his spell, after all, and the level at which they operated as magicians had a special connection to their own magic.

Sloth's figure had recovered the blur effect, his earlier surprise canceled out by decades of disciplined practice and sheer power.

Notably, he didn't immediately cast against Syl; instead, he followed Pride's sight line, looking towards the frozen explosion that had almost caused a separate apocalypse during the first magical world War. Though it had been no moonfall, allowing that gigaton bomb to go off should have meant the end of the human race.

“You came here for a reason,” Sloth said. “Why?”

“Would you believe me if I said it was for the memories?”

“No.” Though the other Sinner’s figure was indistinct through his magic, it was clear he was shaking his head. “I think you mean to use the bomb, my magic, or both.”

“You're not making a move to stop me.” Syl wasn't going to deny the claim. He was here for both.

“Maybe I don't think you should be stopped.” Sloth slowed his flux, returning to a holding pattern and making him almost visible again. “We all got the message. If what you're saying is true—that's something we can't afford. I liked this world. It'd be a shame to see it destroyed.”

That wasn't exactly the kind of passive submission one might expect from a magician with a name like this Sinner's, but Syl saw that as a good sign. Sloth was not a term that defined every fiber of this man's being. It was a label given by a man who had been a machine for years.

“Is this a formal declaration of allyship, then?”

“For the time being. The others are split to the winds, but they will find you soon. Us, I should say. Gluttony has chosen not to participate. Should we fight them here, it will be two against three.”

“I can make that work. We're going to borrow an apocalypse. Just be ready.”

#

Bianca settled onto the fragment with more than a little bit of apprehension. This wasn't good practice when it came to being an important magician, but she had left the realm of good practice some time ago.

With the amount of developments that she and the country she now ruled over had made over the past few months, she was less uncertain about her chances should things go wrong than she had been before. Even without Syl, she was sure she could handle herself against any reasonable threat.

It had been a long time since she'd been in the royal palace itself, and her last impression of it had been of it collapsing as a gray goo weapon had formed itself out of the ruins of what had once been a proud but cold castle. That same distant, unfeeling structure dominated the area of the fragment where she landed.

It reacted to her landing, opening up for her and creating a pathway. If it hadn't already been obvious, it was clear as day now that the king was waiting for her.

“I've seen what this did to a city. I don't particularly want to enter.” Bianca assumed that enough devices had been planted across the fragment to hear her. He'd heard her earlier when she wasn't even on the fragment yet, so it was safe to assume he could do the same now.

The castle reacted to that, and eventually, the pathway rippled. Bianca sent a probing perception-type spell out, looking for one person in particular. To her surprise, she found him. 

It was impossible not to wonder whether the king had been just like Zero and Lila Adams—killed by the machines and converted to be used for information. Why now? Why here? It had been so long since she’d seen him that it was a very real possibility.

Those thoughts were quickly pushed to the back of her mind by meeting the former King of the nation she now claimed face-to-face. He no longer wore a crown, and he looked quite ordinary, all things considered. Unlike Bianca, he wasn't even wearing a pressure suit. He was dressed in his formal regalia, breathing in an area of the atmosphere that didn't have oxygen and wasn't properly pressurized without a trace of concern for himself.

That brought the concerns back.

“Father.” There wasn't the slightest trace of familial warmth in her voice. “Quite a mess you've made.”

“So it is.” Bianca's father looked tired. “I timed my final advance incorrectly. I was unable to utilize my weapon to the proper extent, and so the worst has come to pass.”

“Your weapon.” This was the crux of the matter, the entire reason why she was here in the first place. “The machines. Forgive me for my doubts, but the last man who used the machines from self turned out to be one of them.”

“You speak of the original sinner. Zero.”

“Correct.”

“I assure you that I'm flesh and blood.” The king without a crown opened his hand, materializing a blade of force with a simple projection-type spell. He drew it across the palm of his hand, spilling red blood. “Inconveniently so at times, but human nonetheless.”

“Yet you control the machines.” Bianca gestured at the castle behind him. “Those are the same nanobots you used in an attempt to end the world.”

“Deploying these in the capital was never about raw destruction. I used it because I had to.”

“I find that very hard to believe.”

“You find it hard to believe because I succeeded in saving the greatest weapon any modern country has ever possessed from the clutches of those who would try to use it to conquer humanity.”

“Your weapon is pointless,” Bianca hissed. “The machines have the same, if not significantly more powerful, versions of your technology. It's not groundbreaking anymore when it is literally falling on top of our heads.”

“Oh no, no, no. You mistake me. The weapon was never these primitive nanobots.”

“You don't need to build up a sense of mystique. There's no point in trying to sell me on your grand plan. One way or another, I'm coming out of here with the knowledge you have. Explain what your weapon is and why you haven't used it yet.”

“Your generation takes all the fun out of things. Very well, then. The long and the short of it is that I have something of a control panel.” The king spread his hands, the castle behind him undulating with his declaration. “Auria wasn’t always the way it was under my control. There was a time when the world’s foremost research mages all came from the same land. The team that worked on the theory for the machines was half made up of Aurian archmages. I would know. I was one of them.”

“I don't know if I would consider that something to be proud of,” Bianca ventured. “Auria, in the state you left it in, was a weak country incapable of doing so much as to let its citizens know what was real.”

“It wasn't something to be proud of. Again, it was what was necessary.”

“Necessary how?”

Just like the machines had done in the gate where Bianca and Syl had ended up stranded for a subjective six years, her father held out a hand, forming images over it—technology borrowed from the castle weapon he had behind him. These pictures were less detailed than the ones the machine had managed, but they had enough weight to them to be recognizable.

It was a physical representation of a magical pattern—in an elegant one, more so than any Bianca had seen from most Aurian magicians in decades. Well, spell patterning had never been her expertise, but she knew enough about it from osmosis to be properly stunned by the level of proficiency he was demonstrating.

If this was the king, the nation should have been far more advanced in the magical field than it had been.

“Do you recognize what this is?” the king asked. “The last time I saw you, you had a real head for magic.”

Bianca traced her way through the spell pattern. It was advanced enough that it had taken her off guard, but she was still capable enough at spellcasting through her years of experience that she could find what an unknown spell was meant to do without too much trouble.

“Sabotage-type spell,” she concluded. “Incredible output. Whatever it’s attached to would crumble in an instant. How would you even power this?”

“By riding off of another power source. Perhaps the one that we invested trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and absolutely no caution into.” Though Bianca's face was hidden by her pressure suit, her emotions must have come through enough for the king to understand her surprise. He smiled. “I see you realize the truth of things.”

“It's a kill switch.”

“Correct. One guess as to what it kills.”

“If you have a weapon capable of killing the machines, why haven't you used it already?” The answer to that was obvious, but Bianca wanted to hear it from him.

“I built this weapon as a backdoor into the machines a long time ago. It was intended as a failsafe should our projects scale out of control, which it did. I failed to anticipate just how quickly and how violently it would do so.”

“When you were in Taiwan?”

“Correct,” the king said. “That was a different life. Auria was not under my rule at that time. The prismatic families were members of a new republic. I was just an engineer.”

“An engineer king. Not the only time it’s happened.” Bianca’s voice was as monotone as if she’d been using an unmodded version of Syl’s steadily degrading voice synthesizer.

“That man is no king.”

“That man? You mean Syl? A better magician than you, and more of a ruler than you could ever hope to be. At least he has the decency to fight.”

“He is a monster I had no part in creating. You, on the other hand, are a creation decades in the making. The theory that put him together is limited. There is only so much a magician can grow stealing the works of others.”

Bianca decided that it was probably better to not waste her time debating the point. While she knew what he said was false, it was of little relevance to the developing situation.

“You say this like my ascendance is thanks to you.”

“It certainly wasn’t solely my influence. If it was, the others wouldn’t have turned out the way they were.”

“Dead?”

The one-time king gestured at the amorphous castle behind him. “Became part of something greater than themselves. You pushed your potential past the point they did. You are the only one who can inherit this power.”

“You haven’t specified what this power is. A kill switch that you can’t use isn’t much power at all.” Bianca’s instincts itched. Was this how he’d always spoken? It had been so long since she’d seen him. It was impossible to tell if something beyond the obvious was wrong.

“I was getting there. The kill switch is not simple to activate, and it’s decentralized. I used it on a segment of the machines that I had embedded in Auria decades ago. I harvested them, cultivated them, and used them only when it was impossible not to.”

That recontextualized a good chunk of his statements. While he was still shifty around what the killswitch actually did, any weapon that could turn the infinitely replicating, self-learning machines to their own side would be incredibly valuable.

“Then the point of all that information suppression, of pretending a weak Auria was better than it was—“

“Yes. The direction I led our country in was clinically designed to take it elsewhere. Stale directions, yes, but none that would bring so much attention on us that other nations would realize what kind of weapon we were hiding. Black sites and secret programs abounded anyway, but for a long time, we were at a false peace that was real enough to keep our weapon hidden and unknown.”

“A weapon you chose not to use out of nobility.” Bianca didn’t buy that explanation.

“How many times must I say this? Out of necessity. I will survive. I cannot allow the machines to devour this world.”

“I don’t think we disagree on that. How does this help us now?”

“There is still a possibility of infecting the largest chunk of the machines with this backdoor. You have the highest potential to successfully complete that process. Your flux is pure enough to be compatible with anything. For an infectious weapon like this one, there could be no better match.”

Bianca eyed him suspiciously. “If you were capable of using it yourself, why haven't you already?”

“The mechanism to deliver it requires perfect synchronization across a spell pattern large-scale enough to bring the world to its knees. The world is not in a state to be synchronized right now, but you may possess the facilities to bring this weapon to a usable state. It's already usable against small isolated patches of the machines, but to infect it in its entirety, it would require reaching a critical mass.”

“And you're just going to hand it to me for free?”

“Of course not. You are my successor, after all, and that comes with its own burdens. There will be terms.”

“I don't particularly care for your terms. How do I get access to the weapon?”

“Oh, it's embedded in the fragment around us.” The king's voice was imperious, full of the certainty of someone who knew they had the winning hand. “And it's within my mind. You could spend years combing through this place and you would be no closer to having a functional version of it.”

“Maybe. I think you underestimate the magicians I'm with.”

“Sylvester? That man is too prideful for his own good. I know him. He's angered the machines and brought the eye of the other Sinners down upon him. He isn't going to survive the day, and he's not fit to bring the next generation of magicians into existence.”

You’re wrong. And it’s not just him. Once again, Bianca let her thoughts go unsaid. She’d already sent out a request for Syl to come when he could. Since he was otherwise occupied, she assumed…

A sudden light pierced through the ash, a ripple of force slicing through the brown and gray cloud cover that had been suffocating Earth since the beginning of the Moon fall. The sheer force of whatever event had just occurred burned the sky.

Ah. There you are.

They were high enough above the planet that they could see the effects of the spell writ large across what had to be a continent. Just as quickly as it started, it froze. Enough dust had been burned away that the surface of the planet was visible once more, revealing the miniature sun that had formed over a section of North America that Bianca was very, very familiar with.

“I wouldn't be so sure about his fate,” she said. “Let me be clear. This isn't a negotiation. One way or another, you will give me the kill switch.”