B3 Chapter 17 - Tea

Fourteen years ago, Katelyn Lesling had been the third Sinner on the scene in Middle America. She’d sensed the gigaton nuclear bombs beginning to detonate hopelessly late, and though she’d been a mere thousand kilometers away, she’d known that she would arrive far too late to keep the chain reaction from starting. When she’d arrived, it had been with the intent of eliminating the out-of-control magic that certainly would have decimated most of the face of the country.

Things hadn’t quite worked out that way.

Gluttony, like many of the other Sinners, had a particular interest in gaining more magic. Unlike Envy, who created shadows of techniques she witnessed; Pride, who designed his own unparalleled spells; or Greed, who was more intent on gaining raw power than magical techniques, Gluttony had an incredible sense for telling who was casting a spell and where it was coming from.

That day, she had sensed Pride’s presence in Middle America and assumed that the situation would not spiral out into disaster. When she’d scented the bombs going off followed by the presence of Sloth, she had assumed the worst. 

For over a decade, she’d been right. Pride had been wiped off the map, his presence completely erased by a massive wall of frozen time. Nothing had ever survived one of Sloth’s signature spells. The only way that anything had ever escaped had been when they’d managed to escape while the spell was still in its formation process.

In 71 AFI, Pride had proven her wrong. Gluttony was one of a very few people on the planet who had accurately identified the spell. She’d come as fast as she could, but the signal had once again reached her late—she’d been in a Tower for most of it. As such, she’d been too late and had lost track of him for years.

Seeing Pride again in the fall of last year had been a delight for her senses.  It had been a brilliant display, and she had finally been able to taste the one-of-a-kind magic that he wielded.

But it had happened again. After she had come so close to that unique ecstasy, the kind that could only be achieved by absorbing the most decadent magic to exist, she had lost the source she’d valued most.

It had happened in an instant. Just like before, she’d sensed the start of a great spell before it had simply disappeared. The magicians who had been with him had been easier to track once she’d known which fragment they were on.

She stood now in front of the door of some of those said magicians. Katelyn had a distaste for the particular style of architecture that the Aurian prismatic families liked to attach to everything, even their secret bases, but that had more to do with negative experiences with the country growing up. They were nothing like what they had once been, and there was only one that she even could be bothered to spare a second of thought for.

Gluttony was well aware of the effect her presence had on the people within the complex. No matter how much popular media and rumors wished to paint them as inhuman monsters who couldn’t understand the slightest nuance of the people around them, the Sinners all came from the same species. Even those who had left their humanity behind were at least aware of basic psychology.

Agent of terror or no, Katelyn had questions, and she wasn’t going to dick around without getting at least some of them answered.

Defensive measures went up, which was unsurprising. Gluttony inhaled, wincing at the foul taste of the familiar Aurian magic. She knew that the engineer behind these was capable of more. She’d seen Jennifer Viridian at the Santa Rosa Tower, and she’d witnessed her growth as one of the magicians in the orbit of Pride. This was not her finest work.

Breathing in wasn’t enough to disable the defenses in their entirety, but that was only the first step of Gluttony’s attack. She expelled the magic she’d absorbed, choosing raw, chaotic power over any specific spell.

Once enough of the defenses were down, she walked through the door. It wasn’t open, and six inches of solid steel-titanium alloy blocked her path, but holding a hand to the material was enough to melt it and allow herself through.

On the inside, she was greeted by a magician who had quite recently flown onto her radar, once again thanks to the Sinner who she personally looked up to the most as one of the group.

“Uriel Indigo,” she said.

Both of them were hovering in place, their feet not touching the ground. That did render the million-volt flooring rather useless, but it wouldn’t have affected her in the first place. The flight was more because it was comfortable than for any tactical reason.”

“Gluttony,” Uriel replied. “Why are you here? I was led to believe that even Sinners had found a higher purpose. Did you come for revenge?”

There was a hint of hopelessness in that voice, and for good reason. There were no recorded incidents of someone fighting a Sinner and winning. At best, one could hope for survival and maybe even diverting the magician from their goal. There had never been a fight in which a Sinner had been forced to flee, however.

Despite that, this magician was willing to fight to the death. Gluttony commended that mentality, though she did wonder how Pride had come to command this kind of blind devotion. While she respected the other magician, it wasn’t in the habit of anyone to be ready to die for a Sinner.

“My name is Katelyn Lesling,” the magician who was one of the reasons most official magical organizations had an unnamed tier above paragon-class said. “I have not come for violence.”

“Tell that to the door.”

Katelyn laughed without humor. “You didn’t reach out to me first.”

“Excuse us for not thinking someone with a seven-digit body count isn’t here to chat,” Uriel countered.

“If I was here to be violent, you would not be standing on your feet,” Gluttony said. 

There was a danger in her words. There always was. It was no more and no less than any other magician of her caliber would have, but there were very few magicians of her caliber.

The one standing before her had the potential to be one of those sacrosanct few. While Gluttony had never seen fit to take on students or apprentices, it was only natural for Pride to want to create something in his own image. Uriel Indigo was closer to a Sinner than nearly any other magician Katelyn had seen, which was saying something when the girl was only just now reaching strategic class.

There was a part of her that wondered at that. One did not simply make a great magician—they created the conditions necessary for one to be born and hoped. That was why so many paragon creation projects had either died in the cradle or ended in flames. Even given the right conditions, the type of magician who was willing to do what it took to throw everything else away in the pursuit of magic was not one that could be controlled.

Yet Uriel had made the step from master to strategic in months, if Gluttony’s assessment was correct. There was a certain rawness to her power that betrayed how fresh it was.

Pride had done this. Unless he had selected the school he had ultimately entered specifically to capture one magician, which Katelyn didn’t think the younger Sinner would even think of doing, he had picked a trained master-class magician essentially at random and not only led her to water but also made her drink.

It was early days yet, but to not only inspire but also cultivate a fanatic… Gluttony wondered if it was better that he was gone.

No, she decided, remembering the taste of his Ouroboros, a spell that decidedly reached the upper boundary of paragon-class, if not even higher. I need him back.

“Are you going to stand there and brood all day?” Uriel asked, defiance clear in her tone and the roiling flux around her. “Or are you going to tell me why you’re here?”

Gluttony blinked. The magician wasn’t scared. She knew how clearly she was outclassed, yet she didn’t flinch even as the Sinner increased the pressure of her ambient magic, physically pressing down on her. Had being around Sylvester changed this magician that much?

“Pride is gone,” Katelyn said succinctly. “I would prefer the situation to be otherwise.”

Uriel barked out a disbelieving laugh. “That’s why you’re here?”

“Yes. You were his closest allies. I was hoping you would have a lead on him.”

“You’re serious?” Uriel asked, disbelieving. She shook her head as if to clear it. “You’re serious. I would have thought that a Sinner like him would have been rubbing elbows with your kind more often than us lowly mortals.”

“We are still of the same species,” Katelyn reminded the young woman. “I was born from a human mother and father seventy-two years ago. And Sinners do not interact with each other nearly as much as you might think. Until about twenty years ago, I was barely aware of the existence of others. Thirty years ago, I didn’t even know I had a title.”

“Huh. I would have never figured that for you.” Uriel tilted her head. “Then I suppose we can talk.”

“Please.”

#

Jennifer had no idea how it had gotten to this point. Fifteen minutes ago, Uriel had volunteered herself for a sure-to-be-suicide mission, choosing to delay the inevitable in exchange for a chance that the others would be able to evacuate.

Now, they were sitting around the command table having tea with a fucking Sinner.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” said Katelyn Lesling, claimant of over a million lives.

Jennifer had witnessed Gluttony’s presence once, but she had never been so close to her as to get a good look at her actual features.

Calling the Sinner skinny was underselling it. While Jennifer couldn’t spot an FCD, it was likely hidden somewhere under the clothes that should have sat normally on a woman her size but instead billowed around her frail limbs. She almost seemed to be wasting away, her cheekbones sharp and visible through stretched-out skin.

Jennifer didn’t particularly want to ask why that was the case. The reason Gluttony had gotten her name had to do with her signature magic, not anything to do with her actual person.

Uriel seemed to have no such reservations. “You don’t drink a lot for someone with your title.”

“I forget to do so most of the time,” Gluttony said, setting her barely-touched cup down. “Magic is enough to subside on. I would have more of an affinity for water, but I was born long before my people started engineering for it.”

This was still too surreal to be happening. Jennifer had finally gotten around to accepting Syl for what he actually was, but to just see someone who could be considered more a force of nature than a human being sitting casually with them was too much.

Aaron and Avery clearly thought so, too. Both of them had excused themselves well before Gluttony had arrived, leaving the three of them alone in this room.

The Sinner made direct eye contact with Jennifer, which was about as terrifying as anything else in her life could have been.

“You too, I see,” she said, barely loud enough for her to hear.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jennifer asked, instantly regretting it.

“You’re close to him,” Gluttony said. “And you have gained the potential to be so much more than you once were. And you’re like me.”

As much as Jennifer wanted to shake the gaze off, she met the Sinner’s eyes. In them, she recognized a certain light that she’d seen in her own so many times.

Flux sensitivity. A simple but rare affliction. It seemed impossible that someone as above the rest of humanity as Gluttony would have something so human, but there it was.

“How does it not hurt?” Jennifer asked.

There was a reason she’d never gone into the combat arts beyond even that of the expectations placed on her by the Viridians. She couldn’t. When there were spells flying this way and that, it only took the filters on her glasses overloading just a bit before she would be flat out incapacitated by the sheer volume of spells.

“It hurts,” Gluttony replied. “Pain is not an enemy.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

“You will learn in time, I’m sure of it,” the Sinner continued.

Jennifer shivered. That had been too close to a direct answer to what she’d been thinking.

“So, should we get to what you came here for?” Uriel asked. “Pride.”

“Sylvester,” Gluttony agreed. “He is gone.”

Uriel and Jennifer exchanged a look. They hadn’t exactly had the time to discuss how they were supposed to have a casual chat with a Sinner, but their feelings on the subject were pretty clear here. Gluttony already knew. There was no point in lying to someone who could snuff them out in a breath.

“He walked into a Gate,” Uriel said. “It closed behind him.”

“Sealed?”

“You should know the answer to that already. Do you think he would let a seal stop him?”

Gluttony sighed. “I thought as much. One of the artificial Gates, I presume.”

“A machine’s,” Jennifer agreed. “I’ve been analyzing the data since. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make anything out of it, but there’s a lot to be learned. Given time, data, and good luck with the machinery we picked up, I might be able to make something that can poke a hole into a Gate.”

“Can you?” Gluttony asked, a note of genuine curiosity in her voice. “I have always wondered what it would be like if I applied my abilities a different way, but the time to switch my path has long since passed.”

There was something just fundamentally wrong with her. Jennifer wasn’t sure if it was the physical appearance or something deeper, but just being around the Sinner gave her the same unease that she did when a Gate started destabilizing or she was putting the finishing touches on a project that would detonate if handled wrong.

But there was an allure to it too. Syl was a brilliant engineer, and his magic had proved exceptionally useful when it came to gaining insights into the art of flux itself. Gluttony’s magic promised to be a different angle of attack. There were no living magicians who had gotten good, close-up data on a Sinner’s magic before.

“If you’re open to some observation, I might be able to find a path through,” Jennifer said. “What do you think about that?”

Gluttony extended a hand out, bony fingers reaching towards the engineer.

Jennifer realized that she was meant to shake it only after Gluttony raised an eyebrow.

So this is it, she thought. I’ve gone completely mad.

She accepted it.

#

Being in a denser flux environment was good for Syl in some ways and less good in others. The less good part was, quite obviously, the fact that they were so far from Earth that not even magic could get them back. While the teleportation anchors he had created based on the Tower artifacts used by the Cascadian strike forces were capable of intercontinental travel, asking them to be used for hundreds of light-years was a different story.

On the other hand, it had done wonders for restoring his own flux. While he and Bianca had recovered enough to use wide-range strategic- and paragon-class magic again, they hadn’t been anywhere near their peak capacity. That was the problem with truly exhausting one’s magic supply; it was much easier to restore a pool to full than it was to essentially recreate that pool.

Here on Kepler-138b, there was very little in the way of lifeforms actually consuming environmental flux. There were the machines, but as far as Syl could tell, they used it efficiently and actually ended up outputting more into the atmosphere thanks to their ability to open Gates.

That ability wasn’t available to them, but the benefits of increased magic in the air certainly were. Spending hours here just passively absorbing the magic in the air were like the equivalent of days behind closed doors just purely focusing on mending a flux supply on Earth.

With a radius half that of Earth’s and a significantly thinner atmosphere, traveling across the exoplanet was substantially easier than it was back home.

It quickly became clear that they weren’t going to find an easy way out. There were Gates everywhere, both artificial and natural, but they closed as Syl and Bianca got so much as near them. The machines clearly had some way to turn off the Gates as easily as they enabled them, and they applied said method liberally.

Destroying the first city-sized machine construct had been easy—thanks to the thick flux in the air, there was much less worry about not being able to refuel for the next fight. The problem came with trying to extract anything of value. Anything that could have been easy pickings for them either self-destructed or was too fragile to preserve.

Zero even appeared a couple of times in the wake of that destruction, offering “advice” that came off more as a taunt than any actual attempt to be helpful.

“No shortcuts,” he said. “You have to find your way back yourself.”

It was uncanny the way his form kept on returning despite how thoroughly Syl destroyed him each time. The machines had grown very powerful at simulating a specific set of processes.

A more philosophical man than Syl might have spent some time pondering on the nature of existence and whether or not the data constructs representing these people could be considered alive. He mostly wondered how many of them the AI had gathered.

Bianca and Syl largely stuck together, her using primarily defensive spells while he eliminated threats in their path, attempting to make their way to an intact enough location to glean good data from and possibly hijack engineering facilities to create a way home.

They kept getting denied that, though. When they reached soft targets that looked useful, the machines readjusted, pushing the pieces of their distant exoplanet inwards and away, destroying what they couldn’t save. They bought time with spells, including a handful of very familiar ones. Dust storms carried nanobots with them, each of them trailing near-invisible lines behind them capable of cutting through nearly anything.

A spell that came from a certain FCD that its owner had named Excalibur. Lila Adams’ spell.

Eventually, it came to a point where Syl concluded that not only were they not going to offer any assistance, they were actively going to impede him.

That had to be for a reason.

“It’s been learning from the people it absorbed,” Bianca reasoned. “Zero’s free casting. Lila’s trace spell. Why hasn’t it tried to take us?”

Syl frowned, the two of them flying high enough to make out the spots of activity through the machine-colonized planet. They still had yet to cover most of the planet, but the results were unlikely to be different there.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But if they’re giving us nothing, it must be because they think they can learn something from us without killing us.”

“Maybe they cannot change,” she suggested. “They can build on what’s been given to them, but they can’t form new connections the way we can?”

“It’s not that important in the end,” Syl said. “Right now, they’re almost certainly trying to gain something from watching us flounder without any of their tools.”

“Should we deny it to them?”

“My thoughts exactly.”

The machines could account for many things, but they must not have modeled him properly if they thought they could just sit around and wait for him to do their work for him. It had worked in Taiwan because he’d had people to get back to and limited power to work with.

Here? Here, he didn’t need to hold back. There were no civilians around. No human cost.

“Let’s end this world,” he said.