B3 Chapter 15 - Madness

As of January 15th, 75 AFI, roughly five percent of the moon’s mass had fallen onto the Earth. Not all of it had made surface contact—in fact, over half of the falling fragments had been stopped and shot back up into low orbit. One unforeseen side effect of this was that it rapidly became much more difficult to track and prevent new fragments from falling.

With no infrastructure for even basic observation of outer space, humanity lacked the tools necessary to see through the dust clouds and identify other fragments. That meant that even as weapons technology experienced one of the fastest revolutions it had ever undergone, humanity continued struggling to stop them.

Casualties were down compared to the initial couple of weeks, but there were more close calls to extinction than ever before. While anti-fragment weapons were powerful enough to push them back entirely now, their windows of opportunity were narrower. Paragon-class magicians were more important than ever, their unique abilities critical for delaying a fragment after detection so a weapon could complete charging and fire.

As with any revolution in technology, especially military ones, there had been nations that had immediately tried turning their anti-moon weapons on other humans. That had stopped shortly after it started, however; those nations and interest groups seemed to acquire a nasty habit of having complex, redundant systems simultaneously fail, detonating nuclear failsafes that should have never gone off under those circumstances.

After three of the new-era weapons detonated like that, most of the remaining groups intact enough to possess large-scale anti-moon technology took the warning for it was and stopped aiming it at each other.

With each loss of one of those emplacements, of course, powerful magicians became even more important. Almost every strategic-class magician on the planet was working around the clock either to improve the weapons or act as an early defense system when weapons weren’t hot, and there wasn’t a single paragon besides Zero who wasn’t actively operating in that capacity.

Lila Adams was one of them. After her initial showing, she had joined the ranks of one of the few magicians to directly interact with a Sinner and survive. Envy had used her signature magic to mimic Lila’s in shadow, enhancing it with a dozen other spells that had ultimately resulted in that fragment slowing enough to avoid an extinction event.

That had been a learning experience for the paragon. Though she had been aware of the magnitudes between her and the strongest magicians in the world, Lila had reached a level where almost nothing could seriously threaten her anymore. With rare few exceptions, she had been able to steamroll through pretty much task she put her mind to, capable of inflicting so much damage that she had been legally classified as a WMD and had thus entered one of the informal peace agreements worldwide that kept magicians of her caliber from destroying the world.

Essentially, even if she had thought that she had known her place, Lila had gotten used to being the strongest. Domestically and even internationally, there was very little that could stop her. After witnessing an entire four Sinners in the span of a month—Envy, Gluttony, Sloth, and the most terrifying of all, Pride—the fire that had once driven her to her paragon classification had lit again.

When a particularly anomalous fragment was spotted splitting through the dust cloud on a trajectory to hit just off the Pacific coast, she rose to the challenge, Excalibur extending and trailing behind her as she spiraled outwards.

What Lila did not and could not know was that this fragment was not a fresh one that had just decayed out of its unstable orbit. It had already been sent back up, placed into an orbital pattern that would keep it there for decades at a minimum. No collision had sent it hurtling back down towards Earth.

The only people who witnessed its true cause of movement were the three magicians currently docked on a space shuttle on the surface of said fragment—Avery Viridian, Aaron Lancaster, and Uriel Indigo. All three of them had been waiting for their pair of companions to return when the fragment had abruptly changed direction and speed, its momentum flipping on a dime and sending it straight down.

Though there were three master-class magicians on board, one of whom was only not classified as strategic because ever magician classification bureau on the planet was either inactive or atomized, they couldn’t affect the suddenly ballistic fragment they were on. They could do little more than break off pieces—and even doing that only triggered other magic within the fragment, strengthening the pull of the fragment’s own gravity and accelerating it downwards. Changing tacks allowed them to escape the pull of the fragment, abandoning the other two magicians behind.

Unknowing of this, Lila attacked what she thought was a regular fragment. After observing her own magic be used to a greater degree than she could have ever dreamed of wielding it, she had changed tactics, returned to attempting innovation at any cost even in the hellscape apocalypse that Earth had become. Now, she wove a strategic-class spell into the paragon-class barrier she created, enchanting the pseudo-weapon she created behind her with physics-defying powers to adjust gravity in random directions, functionally shredding anything it came into contact with.

It was a similar principle to part of the multifaceted defense system that humanity had placed over the Taiwan exclusion zone, but that had been added upon by magician after magician until the original spells were entirely unrecognizable. Lila was doing it on her own.

She wasn’t good enough at it to be on the level of a Sinner or even the stronger paragons, but the Polarian paragon could tell that she was progressing quicker than she had in years.

Here, she knew she couldn’t stop or divert the fragment on her own, but she could buy a lot of time. Time enough for the new developments from Polaris and Auria to aim their mass drivers and supercannons at the fragment and send it back. This too had become something of a routine. Though her heart hurt for those who would die regardless of her efforts, she was a paragon-class magician. None of them had reached this level without becoming aware of the human cost of magic.

Everything was going according to plan until her magic actually split the fragment apart on contact. Pushing herself to her limits, she had achieved a speed sufficient enough to make a spiral half the width of a region that had once been known as Nevada and was now mostly the western part of Polaris. It still wasn’t larger than the fragment, but it was a significant fraction of its size. When the lunar meteorite smashed apart, debris scattering into the lower atmosphere, Lila sped away from it, preparing to drop her spell whenever Polaris’ supercannon was primed to fire.

But as the fragment’s tip smashed open, millions of tiny machines from within spilling forth and swarming the emplaced spell. With its enchantments, a good ninety-nine point nine nine seven percent of those machines were battered to death in instants.

The problem with anything that came in mass volume—or the benefit, depending on one’s point of view—was the cockroach principle. No matter how strong a weapon of mass destruction, there was never a guarantee that it could wipe out everything. Sanitary fluid didn’t kill every bacteria. A nuclear bomb didn’t kill every cockroach.

Lila Adams didn’t kill every gram-weight robot carrying a payload of a specific virus designed and refined over trillions of processor cycles. For every million machines, she left some three thousand undestroyed, whether that was through some random adaptation or just plain bad luck. They detonated, payloads absorbing into her spell and spreading through it, infecting the magic.

If she had caught it there, she could have killed the spell, prevented it from tracking the flux pattern back into her FCD and ultimately her body, but Polaris had not yet found any of the causes for the condition known as lunar madness.

By the time the supercannon blasted the fragment into pieces small enough to repel with gravity magic, it was too late. Lila was well on her way down from the edge of space already, her FCD infested with the artificial intelligence.

One reason the AI couldn’t immediately take over the systems of the world in moments was the fact that once upon a time, it already had. Digital systems had already started failing in the wake of the integration, and easily exploitable weaknesses that could be turned against a nation in moments had been the first thing that humanity had freed itself from.

As such, there were only so many systems that the machines could infiltrate using their old methods. Modern technology with its flux basis repelled them enough that they had to make physical contact to do any of their old hacking shenanigans.

But these machines were inside Lila’s FCD. The paragon who’d once fought Lust to a standstill had no defense against an artificial virus that humanity had never been exposed to or even knew the composition of.

By the time she returned to the face of the planet, her rational mind had been replaced by one that saw everything in front of her as an enemy.

Polaris had made it through omst of the war relatively unscathed so far. They had experienced adverse environmental effects, of course, but they had managed to prevent the bulk of the fragments from hitting them and they had no real enemies or allegiances other than their betrayal of Auria—a country that now conveniently didn’t exist.

So when the primary reason for their continued survival returned to the base of operations representing the country’s leadership, they were naturally open to her.

“General,” her direct subordinate said. “Welcome b—“

His head fell to the ground with a wet squelch, the rest of his body missing.

A stunned silence followed.

Then the screaming began.

#

Across the span of roughly two hours starting from 7:13 PM Pacific time on January 15th, 75 AFI, the nation of Polaris fell. It was more like the death of Cascadia than that of Auria. Rather than the explosive death that had brought the latter to its knees, this one started with the entirety of the nation’s leadership either turning or perishing in moments. A pattern was later identified by survivors—any magician of master-rank or above succumbed to lunar madness, while those below perished thanks to the attacks of said magicians.

The mad mages didn’t operate as one unit. Many of them attacked each other, former allies turning the entirety of their resources on each other, exhausting trump cards and last options all in an effort to do as much damage as possible.

By the end of the two hours, nearly half of the remaining Polarian population was gone, every single major population center glassed by a variety of conventional and magical means.

It was around then that Sinners took action. Gluttony was the first on the scene, having already operated in the area. Another fragment had started falling north of what had been Cascadia in the meantime, taking her attention in the meantime. With no leadership, that entire region of North America needed someone to defend it from any impending apocalyptic events. Gluttony had taken the task at hand.

She realized quickly enough that her standard tactic would not work. There was no magic she could absorb here. Though her signature Devour spell was intended to clean any spell she inhaled of its potentially deleterious effects, enough of the lunar madness was caused by a non-magical component that she couldn’t afford to simply eat everything.

Gluttony was still a Sinner, signature spell or no. Everyone who met her perished quickly and painlessly, though she could not refuel lest she risk suffering the affliction herself.

The Sinner did not discriminate in her rampage. If magicians took a town hostage, she destroyed the town and everything inside it. Bit by bit, she mowed the Polarian magicians down.

But the madness continued to spread. The machines replicated themselves with the bodies of those that they infected, using the raw organic material to continue propagating themselves.

Envy was the second Sinner to participate. She used the shadow of a technique that she had witnessed in the Aurian capital as the war had begun, sending targeted pulses of flux across targets to still the virus at its source, releasing a wave of stilling force that propagated up the virus, dismantling it. It was nowhere near as large in scale or power as Pride’s Ouroboros, but it copied the basic principle just enough to be effective.

Ultimately, it took two Sinners and seventy percent of the population of Polaris to put a stop to the threat, eradicating and burying all trace of the virus.

In the aftermath, Gluttony and Envy, two opposing forces who had come to near-lethal blows more than a few times, looked at each other in shared understanding.

“That was the first paragon to succumb,” Gluttony said. “There will be more.”

“Alert me the next time, then,” Envy said. “This world’s no use to me empty.”

“It will be done.”

They parted, leaving nothing but destruction in their wake.

#

“Evolution,” the thing that wore Zero’s face said. “See?”

“We can’t see,” Bianca said. “Our perception spells don’t reach out 218 light-years.”

The Gate had been closed on them. Not sealed. Completely shut, the way it would be had a Gate destabilized and gotten its energy cores destroyed or removed. Nobody on the other side had reported anything, and none of the drones inside had seen anything abnormal until they’d simply been cut off.

“They could. All you need to do…” Zero trailed off, indicating the dormant Gate.

This was a mirror of the situation that Zero—or whatever passed for Zero—had put Syl in before. Stranding him and watching how he developed a way back.

He was sure now that it had learned. Just as his method of “free casting” had been substantially different from Zero’s, so too had his artifact replication been different from the machine’s non-organic cawsting.

It wanted to see that again.

Syl cast Ruin, blasting Zero into his component pieces..

“That won’t last,” Bianca said.

“No, it won’t,” he agreed. “I just didn’t want to see his face.”

Sure enough, the machines present beneath the surface of this planet reassembled another body. Not Zero this time.

Lila Adams.

She’s dead, Syl realized. She died, and the machine recreated her.

The machine’s approximation of the Polarian paragon almost looked sad looking at the two of them, as if she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to be here.

“Time is ticking,” she said. “What are you going to do?”