B3 Chapter 10 - Offense

It had been a while since Syl had interfered with prismatics. The last few times he’d gone directly counter to a prismatic family, it had been under the guise of Pride, not of the Aurian archmage who’d been critical to the nation’s continued survival during the Third World War.

There was no more nation. No more normalcy to protect.

On some level, Syl regretted his role in bringing this to pass. Casting Ouroboros had undeniably been one of the catalysts for the new war to get as bad as it had. He’d also engaged with the Cascadian Virtues in a more violent way than necessary, ensuring their allies would be very aware of the existential threat posed to their countries.

Of course, the former had been necessary because of the grey goo weapon the king had unleashed upon his own nation while the latter had been something of a personal touch.

Still, he and Bianca had established something of a normal life. They’d never been the most normal magicians. Both had come from Aurian biological experimentation; him from an archmage project, her from the royal breeding program. They were anomalies even within the context of their  backgrounds, becoming far more powerful and entering significantly more combats than even veteran military magicians.

Syl had thought he wanted peace. Bianca certainly had. She had been more at ease in the school, and he had to admit that there was some level of certainty there. No matter how much he had let his pride slip out, no matter how many people he’d angered, it had ultimately been nothing more than school. There hadn’t been anything on the line more serious than egos and irrelevant grades on the line. Terrorist organizations going after a former crown princess was the extent of the dangers they’d faced.

It had been nice. Syl had taken some pleasure in it, and having uninterrupted, peaceful time to practice the kind of engineering that could benefit the world instead of making more weapons had been a use of his time that didn’t feel like it was soaked in blood.

All good things had to come to an end, though, and Syl knew there was no getting back that peaceful silence they’d had half a year of. The world was at war now, and it was as likely as not that it would never recover from this.

All the same, Syl didn’t find himself regretting his decisions at all. He hovered now two kilometers above the flooded ruins of what had been the greater Santa Cruz area, a dozen lifeless bodies floating in the air around him. Some of them were more intact than others. He wasn’t the best at lethal measures that didn’t go way over the top.

Though a taste of peace hadn’t been displeasing, there was an energy that flowed through his veins now that he couldn’t get anywhere else. Where the school had been a somewhat limited sandbox to play around in, a war was where he could truly stretch out his muscles, so to speak.

This was where home was—atop a mountain of corpses, pushing himself and his understanding of magic further and further beyond. This was what he had been made for.

Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t received a reply from the the prismatic families that had sent said strike forces, but he doubted they were going to make communication with him ever again. Once he had a little longer to rest, a little longer to prepare, none of them would be alive to reply.

At this stage in his magical development, Syl’s problem lay primarily in logistics. The moon was still raining down on them in humanity-killing pieces, and that hadn’t helped at all with locating and destroying those in his way. Movement was also growing increasingly difficult; where once there were organizations and countries managing the rise of new Gates, there were now ruins upon ruins and nothing to guard the land from fresh manifestations and the resultant flux fluctuations but corpses.

The Third World War had gotten to a point like this, Syl was told, but even in the final days that he’d been active during it, societal collapse hadn’t been this total. This, he felt, was more akin to what the world must have been like in the days, months, and years after the fall. When technology had failed for the first time, mankind plunged into a new age of violent wonder. It was happening again, seventy-five years later—except this time, it was no outside force that had introduced humanity’s end but instead the fruit of their own labors.

The material effect of that was that Syl didn’t have a way to quickly locate the enemy prismatics, nor did he have an easy way to get to them if and when he did. For the time being, he wanted to return to the lab back at Incarnate. The trial run had gone well, but there was still so much to refine and improve on when it came to their new discoveries.

I should probably check to see if the others are still operational.

Syl: Status check.

#

“Doing great, thanks,” Uriel muttered, typing back something to that effect on the FCD. She added on a quick description of how things were proceeding on her end.

She’d killed a lot more acquaintances in the last hour than she’d wanted to for a full lifetime. There were few of them she could actually call friends—most of those were either on her side now or had died during the Cascadian offense when a minor nuclear weapon had detonated at the AMI.

Still, it wasn’t a good feeling. She’d grown up with a lot of these people, Red and Violet and all their associated branch families. Uriel was just glad that her own family hadn’t sent many people to this location. She had managed to avoid killing any Indigos so far. She didn’t know what she was going to feel when she was eventually forced to.

More than that, she was worried she’d feel good about it. As an artillery-type specialist, Uriel had always gotten a bit of a thrill out of releasing a long-range spell, knowing that her perfectly-formed magic would find its target and cause whatever effect she’d imbued it with. The sense of power had been a critical one in an environment that suppressed young magicians as much as pre-war Auria’s had.

Now, though, she could feel it going to her head. She’d barely even strayed away from the command center to attack, guarding only its immediate perimeter while eliminating strike teams from kilometers. What had once been a laborious process just made so much more sense in her head now, and she’d slain dozens without them ever entering their effective range. That was the problem of sending in duelists to deal with artillery defenses—while they might be better in a fair one-on-one, there were no fair fights here.

“You’re back early,” Waylan said casually, paging through his monitor display. He wheeled around in his chair as he saw Uriel come back into the command center where he’d been posted up alongside a few Viridian family members. “Back from killing us and ours, I assume?”

“You’re welcome to go out there yourself if you’d prefer,” Uriel said crossly. “For someone with a dueling specialty, you don’t fight much.”

“I’m not going outside to get my ass handed to me by one of my family members,” Waylan fired back. “Don’t get me started on what it’d be like if I actually won.”

“They’re dying whether or not you’re out there,” Uriel said. “It would be a symbolic gesture, at least. You could stand to push your boundaries some, too.”

“Push my boundaries,” Waylan repeated drily. “You mean like you’re doing?”

“Not just me.” Uriel shrugged. “Bianca too. Syl.”

“There you go with him again,” Waylan said. “Drank the kool-aid.”

“Just because you like pre-integration literature doesn’t mean you need to quote it at me all the time,” Uriel huffed. “Speak English.”

“He’s insane,” Waylan said. “Used to think that was a good thing, but let’s be real for a second. He’s a fucking Sinner.”

“And he’s on our side,” Uriel replied, shaking her head and eyeing her FCD. Another message from Syl. Great. “In case you haven’t noticed, the world is ending around us. People that should have been on our side are raiding our facilities to steal our food—“

“Our?” Waylan snapped. “Uriel, you’re a fucking prismatic just as much as I am. You’re Indigo, I’m Red, and as much as I hate what we were becoming, we’re still family! We are not Jennifer’s clan, and yes, I appreciate her for what she’s done, but we’ve put ourselves on the line for her and not the people we should be backing.”

“Those aren’t my people,” Uriel replied shortly. “They haven’t been for a long time. Not since they sent my brother off to die on a field we’ll never see for a cause that never bore fruit.”

Waylan laughed without humor. “You really think he’s going to be your savior, do you?”

“Savior?” Uriel snorted. “Waylan, I don’t know where you’ve been, but you should take your head out of your ass. Nobody is coming to save us. This boils down to power, and I know one side prefers to actually find a way forward instead of spending all their time trying to make sure nobody else does.”

“A way forward? Look at yourself. You’re more machine than woman at this point. You put one more piece of foreign tech in you and a strong enough EMP will blow you away.”

“You seem awfully sure about yourself,” Uriel said. “Are you sure about that? Do you really think I would do what I did if I didn’t know the risks?”

“Quite frankly, yes,” Waylan said. “We’ve been in this together for a while. I hated the prismatics as much as you did.”

“Clearly not as much.”

“People. Change. Situations change. There’s a difference between trying to fix a system that’s hiding the secret about a potential next war and working with the people we should trust the most in the middle of that fucking war!”

“People who still refuse to take the apocalypse seriously,” Uriel hissed. “People who aren’t willing to do what’s necessary.”

“People who do what’s right,” Waylan countered. “Who understand that there are boundaries you don’t cross.”

“I’m sure the moon will care a lot about what social boundaries stayed intact when it wipes us off the face of the planet and liquifies the Earth.”

“You’ve started turning yourself into a machine. Do you even hear yourself right now?’

“Do you?”

Waylan tapped his FCD. “You’re doing all this for nothing. You were never a frontliner, and you’re not going to just by following a Sinner. The moment he’s tired of you, you’re just going to be another obstacle.”

“I won’t be an obstacle if I don’t make myself one.” Uriel, sensing the change in the atmosphere, thumbed her own FCD. “Are you trying to do that yourself?”

“Fuck no,” Waylan said. “I don’t want to cross a Sinner. Everyone within a klick of him who even thought about doing him dirty is dead now. You might even have heard it from your own family.”

“The Indigo family no longer accepts me as one of their own. Does yours?”

“They do,” Waylan replied. “I’m not trying to sabotage anything. I’m not so stupid as to try anything directly against the most powerful mage I’ve ever had the terror of being in the same room with. Hell, I’m not so stupid as to even try to subtly against him. I just want out.”

“Out,” Uriel repeated flatly. “And that means what exactly?”

“Not being here,” Waylan said. “Taking a non-combatant role out of the field, sheltering. Surviving. It means helping people where it counts, not arming doomsday weapons.”

“You’ve lost it.” Uriel twitched her fingers over her FCD, prepping a set of the spells she’d gained a more intuitive sense of in recent days. 

“Look who’s talking.” Waylan stood from his seat. “I won’t fight you. I don’t have any quarrel with what you want to do. I just can’t conscience being here anymore.”

“I can’t let you do that.” Uriel matched his pace, circling him. “Don’t take me for a fool, Waylan. We know how intelligence works. You spent enough time putting yourself in critical positions that you have the data to split secrets.”

“Oh, now you’re all about information security?” Waylan scoffed. “Weren’t you just telling me about how the whole problem with our people is that they’re not open enough?”

“You seek to tear him down.” Uriel was surer of herself now. All the words in the world couldn’t convince her otherwise. “You want to break his organization apart with what you’ve learned. Hold us back from the magicians we could become.”

“What?” Waylan shook his head. “I don’t know what happened to you, Uriel. You used to be reasonable.”

“As did you. Don’t make me stop you.”

“Can you really?” Waylan asked, flipping a small device out from his pocket. “Directed EMP grenade. A hundred thousand volts per meter. Think your new parts are going to stand up to that?”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Are you?”

They stood there watching each other. Uriel would never have dreamed of trying to take Waylan on in a direct fight. He’d been training for most of his life as a duelist, after all, and there was nowhere he was more lethal than a one-on-one battle with preparation on his side.

Now, though, things were different. He didn’t see the way forward, and she’d opened her eyes to it. Uriel thumbed over her brother’s watch again, wondering what he would have said had he been around to see her now.

He would be on the side of progress. She was sure of it.

Waylan had his weapon out as an undeniable threat. He hadn’t fired it, but the unspoken promise was there.

Whether or not this was resolved peacefully, Uriel knew, something had been broken here. There had been a measure of inherent trust between the two of them for the longest time. Two souls considered to be prime candidates for rising up the ranks of their prismatic families, ones that wanted to come together and make a real change.

Just from this conversation alone, it was over. She had accepted reality, and he had stuck his head back in the sand. They had threatened each other. That measure of trust was gone, and the world in which it had been forged had long since disappeared.

So she acted first. Whether he actually had a grenade or it was something else, his weapon would be flux-based. Analog weapons of that complexity didn’t exist anymore, full stop. Syl and Jennifer were working on making new ones, but for a group as behind as the Reds, Waylan would only have flux weapons.

There was a new trick that she had learned recently. It was one that hadn’t particularly had much use when she had been a regular master-class magician, but those days had passed. Her body had undergone what could conservatively be called a redesign, building upon all the knowledge passed down through cycles of experimentation.

Uriel directed her flux out of her body without programming a spell into it. Under normal circumstances, this was a highly wasteful process. Using flux as a sort of dominating aura was just something some strategic-class and paragon-class magicians would use to flex the fact that they were so overwhelmingly powerful that their enemies didn’t even have a hope of toppling them.

With her capacity increased and her mind overflowing with the addition of the powers of now-dead Cascadian and prismatic magicians, not to mention personal training from a Sinner, Uriel could sharpen that non-spell flux into a spike and send it straight at the weapon Waylan was brandishing.

She did the same thing to him that he’d thought of doing to her, a flux spike overloading and frying the internal components of his so-called grenade and sending sparks flying.

“Fuck!” Waylan hissed, dropping the overheating weapon to the ground.

“I’m not going to stop you from going,” Uriel said. “I’d bet money you’ll cause more damage to the cause if you stay. But I won’t let that happen without precautions.”

“Precautions?” Waylan asked, disbelieving. “Uriel, you just attacked me. Why am I the one that should be taking precautions?”

A message hit both of them at the same time, their FCDs buzzing. Neither of them looked at it until a second, more insistent notification came.

Reaching a silent understanding, they both looked down.

Syl: You’ll see why. Give it a few seconds.

The ceiling folded outwards, panels retracting in the same way that they would if they needed to airlift something important inside, and a projectile came screaming down. Uriel reacted on instinct, popping a shield open to protect both herself and Waylan. As much as she had made peace with the fact that she might have to put a friend down to ensure the evolution of the human race, she hadn’t been lying when she’d said that she cared for Waylan.

It turned out to be unnecessary. The projectile turned out to be a human being, one that slowed its own descent as it neared the ground. He was suited from head to toe in an FCD power armor suit, spell patterns lit up across the entire thing. It was clearly damaged, though, the entire upper half of it partially crushed in. Forcefields around it flickered in and out of existence, though it was clearly trending towards failure.

Waylan practically jumped out of his skin.

“Adonis?” he asked.

Adonis Red. Leader of the family. There was only one reason why the patriarch would be here. 

It became eminently clear why his armor had been so damaged soon enough. Uriel knew it hadn’t been her—she would have remembered fighting a strategic-class like this.

Pride descended after him.