B3 Chapter 23 - Conquer

There was no playbook for what the new leaders of Auria were doing.

In the past, there had been multiple efforts made to make magic as widespread as possible. Most countries still considered FCDs a basic need for their citizens, and even the least talented magician tended to get access to one.

That said, only about half of the population ever awakened their ability to do magic, and of those, less than half had the potential to go much further than D-class.

At least, that was the conventional wisdom. It was common knowledge by now that large chunks of humanity were simply capped and even entirely incapable of acting magically.

Syl wasn’t so sure he believed that anymore.

Even before he’d discovered that the world was much, much larger than he had once believed, he’d looked to examples of others who were pushing boundaries. Polaris had operated an expansive, relatively inexpensive clone force. Clones ran into the same problem that non-talented magicians did—no active flux pool. Still, even they could be trained to manipulate external flux to some small extent such that they could operate magical items.

With Syl and Auria now capable of mass-producing weapons that didn’t even require a flux charge to activate, that balance tipped further.

The average human didn’t actually want to be a magician—at least, they hadn’t. While most people wanted to cast magic, the life of a magician was a devoted and difficult one. With so much of it being devoted solely to combat magic, it was a path one trained for solely and without secondary intent.

Many of those who hadn’t focused on magic were now dead. Of those who remained, there were few who wouldn’t take a precious upgrade to their limited or nonexistent magic ability.

So when Auria began to distribute artifacts to its people, nobody complained. There were those who asked how exactly they’d gotten so many functional artifacts when the only known producer of those were Towers, in which usable ones were exceedingly rare, but those voices were drowned out by those who just wanted enough power to survive the winter.

Logistics proved to be the hardest part of it. Auria had to scale its processes quickly, and it simply didn’t have the capacity for it.

Syl had started the processes for that, but he wasn’t involved with anything past the capture and repossession of a good number of the remaining factories in the country. He left Jennifer and her people in charge of actually getting the produced artifacts from the point of creation to the people who needed it. They were managing that fairly well, he believed, but he wasn’t particularly involved there.

The machines had noticed something was wrong. It must have been something to do with incident on Kepler-138b. As far as Syl knew, no data had escaped that ruin of a planet, nor had any of it made it out of the isolated Gate that had served Incarnate purposes as a method to gain unfettered access to the remains of hundreds of thousands of machines while also serving as a trap to send Syl and Bianca off planet. 

It was possible some had leaked through the seals, but he doubted it. The machines should have been acting differently if sensor data had made it through. Zero hadn’t reappeared near him, which told him they’d likely recognized that the planet on which Zero’s form had been sent to had been cut off from them, but the actual important part—Chronos, the time acceleration spell, and his progress from that—wouldn’t have made it across.

For once, they were operating on less information than he was.

They could put together data fast, though. While Syl’s actions might not have reflected the true extent to which he and Bianca had moved their plans and abilities forward while on the exoplanet, they did paint enough of a picture for any prying eyes to get a general sense of what had changed.

Whatever it was, it clearly didn’t fall in line with what they had wanted out of him. Over the course of the last few weeks, the fragments had been falling in roughly even patterns. Though there was still no particular identifiable rhyme or reason to them, there was a limit to how many fell in one day. It had become clear that the rate at which they fell was largely driven by the artificial intelligence guiding it.

The end of Earth as humanity knew it was a guided one. Anyone who had learned to crack the basics of the machines’ communication—which was almost the whole world now that Incarnate had spread information around—knew the stated reason for that by now.

The machines didn’t want to eliminate humanity. If they did, they could have just driven the moon into the Earth. Even with all the paragons combined, it was unlikely that there would have been more than double-digit survivors out of that.

No, they had said that they wanted the human race to evolve. Syl now knew that meant that humans were acting as guinea pigs for the AI to gain more information about killing magic so that they could absorb it and use it against the apparently galaxy-wide presence of other intelligent life.

He hadn’t shared that last tidbit with the world at large yet. It was unlikely to bring any benefits at the moment, and it was already clear enough that even with the common enemy of extinction and the machines on the horizon, there were enough arrogant, selfish, and paranoid magicians to keep humans from working together as one.

The point was that said behavior had changed. Multiple fragments a day were falling in or around Auria, enough that even other paragons were taking notice.

Fortunately, countermeasures had evolved. Auria’s mass driver wasn’t the only large-scale weapon available to deal wth moon fragments. Despite losing the majority of its leadership, Polaris had one or two sites capable of dealing with it, and wandering paragons from the Asian continent ferried in weapons that their own states had made.

The machines fought back, of course. They positioned themselves in manners that lessened each individual impact, casting protective spells that caused hundred-kilometer chunks of lunar regolith to fracture instead of disintegrate when shot at. Streams of lunar madness inducing nanobots swarmed off the fragments as they broke, eerily echoing the same method of engagement the machines had chosen on the other worlds.

It was those streams that made Syl understand why the machines had continued designating Earth as a type 2 civilization. The magic human magicians had, even as far as they had pushed it, still didn’t quite stand up to the kind of planet-scale offensive the machines could manage. It certainly wasn’t as good as the wide-scale magic the quadrupedal alien civilization had used at a level easily beyond what was currently classified as paragon-class to beat back the AI with barely a scratch.

Syl did wonder sometimes how the machines planned on getting usable intelligence out of humans given the sheer disparity in power between them, but he supposed that was the point of their “evolution” experiment. There were a number of other type 2 planets that the fascimile of Zero had pointed out, and none of those had included video explanation. It was safe to assume that the moonfall they were bringing to Earth was not the only forced evolution experiment they were running.

Also, they had more raw power. If the complexity of some of the spells Earth magicians fought with could be scaled up and absorbed into the machine hivemind, it was very possible that they could be effective even against greater civilizations.

Syl didn’t plan on just being a pawn on this board. He didn’t plan on being on the board at all.

While the leadership of New Auria began spreading their soft power, engaging their new manufacturing facilities at full capacity and distributing powerful artifacts, welcoming new additions to the kingdom, republic, or whatever it was now, Syl and Bianca took a rather more direct approach to leading.

“Contact in thirty seconds,” Bianca told him. “Mass driver hit it, but it redirected the momentum. It really wants you.”

“The machine will get what it wants,” Syl said. “Just not how it wants it.”

There were eyes on them. Of course there were. The machines recorded his magic, though they could not currently replicate it. At the moment, the more important eyes were those of the citizens of what was now New Auria.

They hadn’t only been distributing weapons, of course. If all they’d wanted to do was give their citizens self defense, they could have just produced guns and synthesized ammo. No, the artifacts they supplied their citizens were multi-purpose, giving them the tools any true magician needed. Part of that was a perception-type artifact that recharged itself on natural flux and could be used for anywhere between half an hour and eight hours to cast varying levels of observation spells.

That meant that there were always people looking up when fragments were falling, using newly established intranet hubs to spread footage of them with each other. There was precious little any of them could actually do about the fragments, but they could watch.

On any given fragment outing, there were something like ten thousand people looking at them, perception-type artifacts piercing through the dust layer surrounding most of the Earth.

They were approaching two dozen fragments in the span of a week. It was highly abnormal out of the machines, both because they hadn’t targeted a single location nearly as frequently as Auria as of late and because they were continuing a strategy that wasn’t working.

Syl was sure they were trying to analyze his spell patterns, but given his experience, hew as more than confident that the machines would be incapable of identifying the details of how his spells worked from just observation.

Notably, they tended to not survive long enough to report anything.

“Ready?” Syl asked.

“Always,” came the reply.

Syl and Bianca were both bound with limitations caused by the experiments that had made them who they were now, but both of them had long since learned ways around them, their symbiosis benefiting them in ways far beyond what it had initially been intended for.

Paragon-class transmutation-type spell: Armageddon.

Calling the spell just paragon-class now was a bit of a misnomer. Granted, “paragon” was technically a title for magic deemed large enough to wipe out multiple cities on its own, but he was getting far beyond that now.

Rather than the simple conversion of matter to antimatter, the upgraded, higher power version of this spell propagated itself, seeding chunks of the fragment before detonating with the force of a dying star.

Bianca cast multiple paragon-class protection spells not just for the two of them but also for the fallout that said massive cast would cause for the surrounding area. As she did, a belt of glowstick-like artifacts hooked to her full-body FCD triggered, igniting with a radioactive green light before they shattered into glass fragments and dust, evaporating into the spell patterns the self-declared queen of New Auria was creating.

She had been able to draw from Syl’s flux pool, and even now she used some—but that was a waste when they were committing to magic this large-scale. That was what innovation was for, though. Refining her own flux and enhancing her ability to cycle it, especially through disposable artifacts meant to speed that process along, did wonders for her ability to rapidly create high-level spells. With her spell management and neutral flux as influential as it was, that was a game-changer for her total offensive and defensive ability as a magician.

Even with their improvements, they couldn’t immediately outperform the alien civilization they’d seen the machines fail against. That was only natural, of course. They were two people, and even six years of planning couldn’t imediately improve them to the level of a planetary defense organization.

But the machines weren’t trying to exterminate this planet.

In the span of a quarter of a second, a fragment the size of the Texan Republic vaporized. The detonation was bright enough to pierce the dust layer even to the naked eye. For those in Auria, it shone significantly brighter than the sun. Even if it only lasted a few seconds elsewhere in the world, nighttime briefly turned to day even in Asia.

The shockwave didn’t even hit either of them. The destruction was complete and total, but the force of it was significantly blunted by the layers upon layers of absolute shielding Bianca placed.

They returned to Earth without another word between each other. Their actions had done the speaking for them.

While the artifacts New Auria was distributing were useful in elevating the average magic level of their entire nation, they served a secondary purpose as one of the most powerful propaganda pieces of the modern magical world. Very, very few nations had ever attempted to elevate everyone within them rather than sift through the crop to find and refine the few magicians that could achieve true greatness. 

Apart from that, the infrastructure they’d laid down allowed rumors to spread like wildfire. While it was still a heavy strain on resources and only possible thanks to the now complete lack of outside forces attacking New Auria as well as literal mountains of repurposed machinery being turned to civilian use, enough people had basic necessities that they were willing to find a concrete person to attribute it to.

Watching their new queen protect their entire nation while a Sinner worked with her to near single-handedly destroy a fragment was more than enough to convince Aurians that they were in good hands.

It was even enough to convince many outside the nation that the country was worth joining.

Every avoided fragment fall built more faith in the queen and her reign. Every day that went by with continued access to clean water, food, and magic was another in which members of the faltering neighboring countries started to think that sovereignty was less appealing than survival.

Of course, this spread was a little more than organic. Syl and Bianca called on a certain Aurian special unit, drawing a highly coordinated strategic- and master-class team out of their contingency bases in the Mariana Trench, submerged within Everest, and other similarly hard locations to do what they did best and disrupt, spreading the good word of New Auria as far and as frequently as possible.

New Auria’s neighbors had both recently experienced something of a crisis themselves. All of Cascadia’s ruling Virtues had been assassinated at the start of the fourth world war by Sylvester himself, while Polaris’ leadership had been decapitated by Lila Adams succumbing to lunar madness.

Both of those countries, having not suffered the same devastating blows to infrastructure that Auria had, were nevertheless still hurting. Over time, local leadership, often master- or even tactical-class magicians struggling to keep a commiunity together and alive and healthy during the chaos, started looking for alternatives.

When New Auria started expanding east into Polaris, there was almost no resistance. They were welcomed with open arms and crossed fingers—there were still a few surviving community leaders that were aware of what had gone down with the false-flag operations during the events leading up to the war.

Their past actions were overlooked in favor of present cooperation, which was simple enough. Many of them weren’t using the factories anyway, the weapons they had been designed for unusable by a country that didn’t currently field a standing military.

It took less than half a month to conquer the entirety of what had been Polaris, adding their damaged but much more intact factories and facilities to New Auria’s power base.

Where they found more resistance was in the north. Cascadia—or, at least, what was left of it.

The prismatics that had once ruled Auria had largely scattered to the winds here. Thanks to the efforts of the Red family, chaos and infighting had torn the largest prismatic faction apart, but each of them separately held territory within former Cascadia now. Their operations weren’t looking great, nor were the conditions their people were living in, but there were still powerful magicians among them yet, and they were not willing to fold to the new administration when so many of them had been so close to tasting that power for themselves.

On February 14th, 75 AFI, Queen Bianca recieved a report that a good chunk of the front line of the volunteer forces deployed to former Cascadia had been massacred by magic present in the records of the prismatic families of Auria.

“This has been a long time coming,” she told Syl. “They’ve been a problem since the very start. Endless cycles of magicians putting themselves and their hegemony over the people they should be protecting.”

Syl didn’t have to speak in reply. They understood each other.

This ended today.