B3 Chapter 24 - Beginning of the End

Waylan regretted his choices.

It was a bit late to say that now, but he did.

At the time, it had seemed logical. Or—no, logical was the wrong word for it. It had seemed right.

There had been no way to justify continuing to work under a Sinner. He hadn’t wanted to defy him or end his operations, of course. Waylan wasn’t stupid enough to think that trying that would end in anything but a quick and painful death.

But he hadn’t wanted to watch from a Sinner’s palace as they gunned down his family. Waylan had considered himself divorced from the main branch of the Reds in mission, but he was theirs in blood. Even if he disagreed with their mission and their upholding of an evil status quo, he had wanted a peaceful resolution to everything. One where they could have changed the system from the inside, not one where he abandoned his humanity at a madman’s behest to slaughter the people who had raised him.

That conviction rang less true now that he had spent real time in the prismatic side of things.

Adonis Red had folded like paper in the face of said Sinner. Waylan had to honestly say that he was grateful for that decision. While he had witnessed the effects of Pride’s magic before, he hadn’t felt it at such a close distance as he had that day. Waylan hadn’t even been the one dueling and he’d felt the need to throw up defensive spells of his own. Syl had been invincible. Unstoppable. The only way direct opposition against him could end was in ruin.

So Waylan had been happy to change tacks with the Red family. He’d been planning on attempting to get them to do so even if the rest of the plan had worked out—if it had gone better, he wouldn’t have been the only prismatic leaving the Sinner’s group, and they would have peacefully established a different coalition elsewhere.

That had been idealistic, he knew, but that still felt better than the reality of things.

As it turned out, bonds built on trust and tradition fell apart really quickly once someone started violating them. For the most part, the Reds were fighting the remaining Violets and Indigos. They had established an uneasy peace with the purification-type Blue family and had no contact from the Oranges, who had fully defected.

Every day was another complex web of lies, betrayal, and everything Waylan had always despised about being a prismatic. More than that, it was just… so insignificant. Especially now, cutting down lesser magicians that had been puppeted by the few remaining high-class Violet magicians as he tried to ensure he didn’t let up on the personal protective spell keeping himself from choking on the radioactive ash in the air, he had to wonder if he’d made the right choice.

“What the hell am I doing?” he muttered.

Comms had been limited, their resources dwindling as they’d not been able to find good stockpiles to restore themselves with, but he’d caught wind of what had happened. The Sinner and the princess in hiding had revealed themselves and taken the country.

Was that really such a bad thing? He’d been worried that they would force him to do the same things to himself that they had, but they hadn’t enacted any apocalyptic plans yet. As much as his skin crawled at the idea of a Sinner running a nation, Syl was a normal person when he wasn’t talking like the inhuman magician he was. He had espoused enough similar views to Waylan that he couldn’t be worse than the king, surely.

Suddenly, the atmosphere around Waylan shifted, and he tensed. The section of the mission he was on hadn’t been one that required full focus out of him, but there was something wrong now.

The autocannon at the fort in front of him that had been firing in his general direction had stopped. Any sign of magic was gone now too.

He hurried to close the distance, slowing as he realized that he faced literally no resistance. The animated bodies facing him had all fallen, puppets with their strings cut.

His comms buzzed.

“Waylan.” The connection was fuzzy, but it was clearly Adonis. He sounded harried, to say the least. “Get back to base, please. Weapons down. Don’t disrupt him.”

Him?

Waylan’s blood ran cold.

Getting back to base took only half an hour, but it felt like it could have been a year.

Syl was still there when Waylan arrived. Maybe still there was the wrong term—he looked like he’d just arrived as well.

“Waylan,” said Pride, faceless visor turning towards the magician in question. “I thought you wanted better for this country.”

Waylan’s throat was suddenly very, very dry.

Adonis was alive and even well, though he didn’t look comfortable at all. What was offputting came from a number of factors—the raw amount of magic flowing off from Pride, the casual ease with which he’d infiltrated their base, but most importantly, what he was holding.

Family crests embedded in broken FCDs. The kind one might receive as an honor after they had served their family at the highest level for decades. Waylan had only seen Adonis and a select few other elders in his family wear them, all strategic-class magicians.

Syl had a dozen of them wrapped around his arm, twisted and broken FCDs belonging to House Violet.

The puppets. They’d fallen because there was no more magic to animate them with.

The magician was still looking at him, Waylan realized.

“I do,” he said, trying and failing to hide how nervous he was. “I… always have.”

“I believe you,” Pride said.

As easy as that? A pit in Waylan’s stomach told him that it wouldn’t be that simple. There had to be another shoe. He’d as good as betrayed Syl even if he could justify it to himself in a dozen different ways.

“You’ve done good work. I’ve already informed Adonis of this, but three Red magicians were found slaughtering the New Aurian civilian advance force. They are now dead. Others who interfered will soon be dead.”

Waylan gulped.

“Your distrust in me is not misplaced,” Pride said, inclining his head. “That said, you do not need to put my faith in me. Bianca, Jennifer, and Uriel lead the country. Your allies.”

With you behind them, Waylan thought. He didn’t voice it. The sheer pressure in the air right now was enough to choke on.

“New Auria is going to make the visions your movement had a reality,” Syl said. “You can join or fight back.”

“I’ve made my decision,” Adonis said from the back. He’d been the greatest figure in Waylan’s mind, once upon a time, but he almost felt like a petulant schoolchild trying to be included int he conversation now. “But I don’t think I’m the one he wants to hear it from.”

Waylan had made it since before he’d walked into the room. The method was monstrous—but was it that much worse than what it had been before? Pride held his knives out in the open, while the Aurian king had hid them behind his back, sliding them into his people’s ribs in the shadows.

And maybe the world needed monsters right now. Waylan had seen the sky ignite at night. He knew what that meant.

“I’ve made mine,” he said.

It felt right to kneel. No, not just right—necessary. He did.

“Welcome to New Auria,” Pride said.

#

Once the leaders of New Auria set their sights on their targets, those magicians were as good as dead. There were very few magicians in the world who could even think about contesting them in terms of raw power, and the only one who might have considered doing so was actively working with them. Gluttony didn’t particularly care about the political processes nor the moral dilemmas that Aurians were dealing with, but she did care about witnessing Pride, the Queen of Auria, and their meteoric rise in power.

That meant no third-party interference. Nobody wanted to get between two Sinners, a new paragon-class royal, and their prey—especially not when everyone had so many fires to deal with on their own.

With the Reds turned, making advancements was easy. They were made easier by a series of sudden, violent assassinations decapitating the Violet and Blue families and sabotage-type magic from the Oranges ruining the primary counteroffense mounted by the Indigos.

Syl left Uriel to deal with her own family.

Unlike Waylan, she had long since accepted the split from her family. That had weighed on her mind for a while, but she knew what was necessary when it came to magic.

The Indigo family had been stuck in the past since before she’d been born, and they’d refused to adapt since. All they had in the ways of advancement were trying to steal more of the same patch of land for themselves, refusing to turn their eyes to the fact that there was a world—worlds, now—of potential out for them.

She made contact with her family again on the same day the Violets fell. They didn’t recognize her as the strange magician thought to be Pride that had been clearing Gates all across the continent, but they were suspicious of her motivations. 

Rightfully so. They had disowned her already, and she had no interest in coming back into the fold. Uriel wasn’t going to lie to them. She had one purpose and one purpose only in finding them.

Pinpointing their location wasn’t hard when they put their full resources on it. They already had confirmation of where projection-class magic had come to attack Aurian advance forces. With the help of special unit 317, now formally reinstated as the primary intelligence unit for New Auria, finding their position took less than an afternoon.

They had established themselves in the surroundings of a Tower, which was a bold choice but also one that should have theoretically made detection and destruction harder. The apocalypse had brought on more aggressive Towers alongside the creation of countless Gates, and that meant that wild magic effects were in full flow in the vicinity of each Tower.

The Indigos weren’t quite harnessing it, but they had developed something to at least coexist with it and make use of some of the effects when they came their way.

Too little, too late. Uriel skirted around the worst of the magical winds, countering it with a thick flux barrier if it gottoo close.

She descended on their fortress like an angel of death. Above and behind her, dozens of master-class Arcane Cannons and Antimagic Railguns propagated themseslves, spell circles visibly forming in the air. Some of them were disrupted and thus blown away by the Tower’s winds, but the vast majority of them successfully triggered, raining hellfire down on the fortifications.

Automatic defenses caught the first barrage, then the second. They couldn’t stay up forever, though, not when the Tower was this disruptive to any magic in its area.

Manual defenses came next—magicians Uriel had been raised with. She did her best to keep their takedowns non-lethal, but she didn’t waste any thought on the ones she did cut down.

From start to finish, it took twelve and a half minutes for her to make it into the core part of the Indigo base. By the time she got in, magicians were by and large no longer trying to fight her and instead falling back.

She’d never been in this specific temporary fortification, but she recognized its insides. It was the same place she’d been in any number of times. A table of voices, all of them old guard, none of them ever wanting to give an ear to the ones in the shadows that their movements actually affected.

It was like that now still. Uriel recognized every person at the table. Some seats were empty, their owners killed by some disaster or another in the last few months, but they hadn’t been filled. There were still those waiting for their turn to speak who would never be permitted to.

“Uriel,” said the man she had once called father. “You’re back.”

The words sounded like they tasted of ash, spilling forth with a disgusted contempt that Uriel had always heard used in reference to those of lesser birth. Of lesser magic.

“I wouldn’t call it that, General Indigo.” Uriel’s magic flared, highlighting her in the dimmed room. “I’m here to make an announcement.”

“You child,” he snarled, not rising from his seat. “Know how to address your eld—“

He froze in his seat, then collapsed, tumbling to the ground in a heap.

Strategic-class transmutation spell. The Wedding of Cana.

A complex, difficult magic—harder still with no incantation. It turned biological matter into water. She’d targeted the heart. Easier than the head, which bobbed and weaved with anger.

A spell she’d learned from Pride, who in turn had learned it from Greed. It wasn’t her forte. She’d always been best at artillery-type spells. It shouldn’t have worked on a magician like this.

But he’d learned to not see her as a threat, and she had decided to stop restricting herself to what she thought was possible. Even now, after she had defeated his guard and when the world was ending, her father had still thought she couldn’t surpass him without his help.

General Nathaniel Indigo died as he lived; unchangingly.

Around her, cries of outrage, fear rang out. Mixed in with those wordless shouts were spells.

“Flagea a—“

“Aux—“

“Thesq pra—“

A wave of pressure rolled over them, and the lights in the room flickered out, the magicians gathered within silenced for a moment. Their spells shattered in the midst of their cast.

That hadn’t been Uriel, but they didn’t need to know that. She resisted the urge to look up.

I had it under control, she thought ruefully.

Uriel couldn’t complain too much. She couldn’t countercast as cleanly nor as effectively as Syl could. She would have ended up spilling blood if she’d tried to manage everything herself.

In the wake of his passing, the magicians who’d tried casting by and large froze. Whispers abounded amongst them. The rumors of certain Sinners and their activity in New Auria had made it this far.

Quite, urgent conversations buzzed, but one word kept on reappearing. A name.

“I am not Pride,” Uriel said, cutting through the tense hum. “I’m sure some of you would have noticed by now if I was. If Pride was here, none of you would be walking right now. You might be breathing if he felt merciful.

“You can consider me an envoy. I’d be grateful in your shoes, personally. He sent me for you out of mercy, not because he needs to.”

Nobody else spoke a word. She could see on the faces of the other magicians at the table that they valued their life over tradition, even if this burned them. They wanted to attack her, but they knew who she represented.

“Now, as to the announcement. New Auria is claiming Cascadia. You will be given access to resources and artifacts pending your cooperation. This is not a choice. If you have any concerns, now is the time to voice them.”

She kept her eyes on the ones who were the least likely to adapt. The ones who had created the system they’d all lived under.

They didn’t voice their objections. They acted on them.

None survived.

#

Syl: There were more casualties than I would have liked. Regardless of their outdated beliefs, there were talented magicians amongst the prismatic leadership.

Bianca: As long as it’s done. We have people moving into Cascadia now?

Jennifer: Working on it. It’ll take some time to get them established fully. I have our tech teams going for the factories.

Bianca: Good. We need to scale as fast as possible. Syl, status?

Syl: Returning. If patterns hold, another fragment’s going to come.

Bianca: Same here. Meet you in the sky.

#

After the initial surge, fragments abruptly stopped falling entirely. At first, New Aurian leadership assumed that the machines had finally obtained what they had wanted from Auria and had decided to focus on other parts, but the same day moon fragments stopped falling on Auria, they also stopped everywhere else.

About a third of the moon had been blasted into pieces or relocated into Earth oceans, irreversibly altering the ecological conditions of the planet. The other two-thirds remained in high orbit, confirmed mostly by extraterrestrial journies by various national parties as well as perception-type equipment strong enough to pierce the ash wall in the air.

Said extraterrestrial journies started proving significantly more difficult than before. Nations and magical bodies across the world had started mining operations on the fragments, seeking to gain as many of the exotic materials created by the machines as possible, New Auria included, and it came as a bit of a shock when worldwide communication to those mining operations all abruptly ceased on the same day. Shuttles sent upwards very rarely made it back to Earth.

Suspicions around the world mostly amounted to the same thing. The machines had identified a new goal of some kind, and they were preparing for a different angle of attack.

But for the time being, there was nobody who was willing and able to challenge those machines while there was still so much to do on Earth.

The dust would not settle for years if not decades, but the power struggles that had been going on during the three-month moonfall sharpened the instant the fragments were put aside as a threat.

Auria’s rate of expansion increased drastically. Many other nations that had managed to hold themselves together did the same. Casualties were well over two billion but had slowed drastically; any form of order in the chaos was generally welcomed. Within a couple of months, New Auria occupied a good chunk of the North American continent. Their influence spanned across about three-quarters of the area now. 

Logistics were much, much harder to scale than pure power, but magic patched a lot of that. Incarnate worked double overtime, gathering new engineers with reckless abandon and repurposing and fixing as much infrastructure as they could.

It was messy work. Though Syl and Bianca weren’t as involved in the day-to-day aspect, they were well aware of what a herculean effort it was on all levels. People died. Some settlements fought back.

But things were getting better. Without the constant threat of the fragments interrupting them, New Auria’s leadership was more than capable of increasing their production and innovation. Gluttony quietly left them before long, her primary purpose in assisting them gone now that Syl had returned. That didn’t mean she was gone, of course—she was still in the area, just doing her own thing instead of constantly feeding data to Jennifer and her team.

By May, the machines still had yet to make an action other than rendering any height past roughly three hundred kilometers above the ground untraversable. In the meantime, New Auria controlled over ninety percent of North America. Some two hundred million souls were now under their influence, though much of it continued to be managed by the same local leadership, just under a new master.

Artifact production didn’t quite match that population, but there were well over a hundred million of them in circulation now. Providing magic to the masses caused its own fair share of casualties, but it made up for that in the leaps and bounds in magic skill of the average citizen.

Though loosely managed, it was becoming an empire.

#

Bianca: Syl, status?

Syl: Green. It’s probably best not to attempt undoing Sloth’s spell now. Nobody else has the capacity to freeze a gigaton nuclear explosion like he did. If I undo it now, it won’t just be Middle America gone. We’ll wipe the planet clean long before the machines can.

Jennifer: Mm. The redirection project is… going. I still need a more consistent Gate-tuning method that doesn’t involve going inside a Tower.

Bianca: Great. Nothing urgent, then?

Syl: Something came up. If you need me, I’m occupied.

Bianca: Alright. I have eyes on something on my end. I’ll let you know if I need help.

Jennifer: I was going to notify you about the meter spikes in the Bay, but I’m going to assume you have it handled. Let me know if I can do anything.

Syl looked up from his FCD.

That seems unlikely, he thought. He didn’t send the message. True as it was, Jennifer was busy enough without worrying about a lack of immediate power that she couldn’t do anything about.

He’d noticed the signatures following him when he’d left the scene of Sloth’s time-freezing spell in Middle America and had led them to the west away from population centers, all the way to the crater where San Francisco had been.

Gluttony hadn’t been following him. Other than Bianca, she was the closest paragon-class magician to him, and she’d done him the decency of informing her where she’d be, so he’d done the same. She was waiting for him.

“It’s been a long time since we had a gathering anything like this,” she commented, a rictus smile plastered on her face.

Gluttony was right. Syl hadn’t even seen some of these people in over a decade. Each of them hovered in their own bubble of signature magic, keeping a distance of a good kilometer or so between each other in case a single one of them decided to act sooner.

Six magicians flew over the crater. Combined, they had an official kill count in the tens of millions. Given the lack of reporting recently, they very likely had reached nine digits.

Pride tweaked his vocal synthesizer, then spoke.

“Lust. Greed. Sloth. Envy. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”