B3 Chapter 8 - Make War, Not Peace

World War III began on January 1st, 61 AFI. It lasted seventy-three days and resulted in over two billion casualties. In the fourteen years since, the Earth had recovered to some extent. Those two billion people hadn’t been replaced, but reproduction rates had already been high before the war, only increasing in its wake. As humanity grew more and more magical, the average citizen grew more confident in the abilities of their children to defend themselves in their world. The next wave of magicians had been a promising one.

World War IV was a different story. Initiated by Cascadia and Auria, two nations that ceased to exist within six hours of the war beginning, it was the first time in recorded post-Integration history where a full-out war included a non-human entity. There had been many, many conflicts in early integrated Earth, but they had by and large involved individual countries managing Gate and Tower breaks.

Over sixty percent of the existing sovereign bodies on the planet were directly involved in the fight. The remaining countries could not separate themselves entirely, either. The powder keg that had been two west American countries and their numerous alliances had exploded.

It was in no small part Syl’s fault as well. With an energy surge as large as the one that had taken place in Taiwan, all of Asia had burst out the plans they’d held for a rainy day as well.

In fairness, the ultimate player were the machines. Them shattering the moon had brought already high tensions to a boiling point.

All this was to say that the Earth was in a crisis like none it had ever faced before. Tides operated seemingly at random, the gravity of the fragments approaching Earth causing tsunamis and ocean withdrawals alike. The actual impact of any fragment, even slowed and shattered, was enough to cause earthquakes, tsunamis, and shockwaves strong enough to kill millions. Flux fluctuated strangely as well, Gates forming at unprecedented rates and Towers reverberating with enough magic that even approaching them risked death.

All the while, nations, organizations, and individuals fought to be on the top when the dust cleared. A grand total of nearly five thousand ICBMs were fired over the course of two weeks. Most of them were stopped by high-level magicians. Some weren’t.

World War IV began on December 24th, 74 AFI. By January 6th of the following year, only two weeks since the beginning of it, the population of the planet had dropped sharply under what it had been the day the previous war ended.

Over a billion casualties in two weeks. With master, strategic, and even paragon-class magicians dictaitng the flow of the war everywhere, lower-tiered magicians could do nothing but struggle to adapt or simply die.

And the fragments were still falling. It was a vicious cycle. Whether or not a country focused on preventing moon pieces from striking the Earth, they had to contend with conflict from both within the country and without. That meant deaths, which in turn meant fewer magicians to deal with the fragments—which then fell more brutally, casuing more deaths and an inevitable breakdown in the supply and command chains dictating a response.

If left unchecked, that was sure to spiral into an extinction-level event. Six of the Seven Sinners operated with increasing regularity, their power one of the few remaining barriers between humanity and oblivion.

Death counts increased. A fragment’s slowed impact in the Pacific Ocean on January 6th caused a massive tsunami accompanied by water-borne organisms spat forward from suddenly forming gates, overwhelming the Aurian coast. San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and any number of other coastal cities that had already been left hollow husks of themselves thanks to the Cascadian offensive were wholly obliterated. Cascadia’s specialty in water magic was all that kept their own country from risking total destruction.

Within Auria, the division of power between factions had appreciably emerged. After the tumultuous beginning, most of the prismatics had united behind the Red and Indigo families, the two of which had performed somewhat of a merger thanks to high casualties. Their territory spanned most of what had been northern Auria as well as a good chunk of former Cascadia, its peoples included in their domination.

The other was the Incarnate-Viridian alliance. Though their leaders worked together, the Viridian family and the Incarnate complexes operated somewhat separately. Incarnate continued operating largely as it always had—quietly, under the radar, without much care paid towards the apocalypse around them. 

The Viridians, on the other hand, were significantly more public-facing. Across their territories, they were temporarily sheltering over a million refugees of a country that had once been Auria, using Incarnate devices to synthesize food and provide protection from the harsh, irradiated weather.

It was thanks to this seeming focus on consolidating their non-violent supply chains that they drew the attention of the other prismatic faction. The remaining prismatics, led by Red and Indigo strategics, saw potential weakness. They had been largely operating by taking the resources of captured Cascadian outposts, but there was a limit to how far they could spread before they saw diminishing returns.

With how robust Incarnate’s infrastructure seemed, the prismatic coalition set their sights on the other Aurian faction, thinking that they were so focused on self-preservation that they had neglected their defense programs.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

#

“This is a gold mine,” Jennifer said, tossing her hands up in an expression that was somewhere between awe and defeat. “But I can only tell that what’s inside is valuable. Without you, I don’t think we could have even started decoding half of this within the next year.”

Dealing with the Polarian contingent had been relatively painless after their one confrontation. They had made a total of three trips in and out of the Gate, taking pieces that they’d figured out wouldn’t trigger the aggression of the machines. Avery had picked up a critical-looking piece of hardware by mistake and very nearly lost his head for it. The response had come in the form of nearly invisible nanometer wires that had sprouted out of seemingly nowhere—more artifact technology.

Syl had been the one to notice the defense mechanism and had also countered it before requesting a more specific set of rules.

The machines were not an ally, but they weren’t exactly an enemy either. They had taken an interest in him because he could communicate with them, but that interest wasn’t exactly the same as a human’s might have been.

After they’d left the Gate, the entrance had collapsed. It hadn’t been explosive—in fact, it hadn’t even seemed like magic. There had been no sequence of disintegration, just a sudden disappearance.

There was still so much Syl didn’t understand, yet he was one of humanity’s foremost leaders in the subject.

He typed a response to Jennifer.

Syl: I’m counting on other responses being similar. For the time being, anyone who’s using the moon fragments to study from—effectively, at least—should be people who won’t immediately turn them on neighboring nations.

“You can say that again,” Jennifer muttered. “How the hell did you decode all this stuff? It’s like you’ve already been working on this for a decade. This isn’t intuitive in the slightest.”

Syl: It’s intuitive from a different point of view. I had some exposure to the technology in Taiwan.

Though it wasn’t quite a decade like she was insinuating, he’d had a fair bit of time to study. Just short of three years, and when every waking second of his perceived time had been spent observing and learning from the ruins of the machines, he had picked up a lot. More than a normal lab might manage in a decade.

“Utterly insane,” Jennifer said, shaking her head. “Have you made any progress with the Gate generators?”

Those were by far the greatest piece of technology they had seen. While the defenses and artifacts were fantastic studies, all of them violating many of what had been thought to be hard laws of magic, they weren’t the real prize. Even the technology that they’d supplemented into the mass driver was less important than those.

Of course, the machines hadn’t just let him walk in and waltz out with what he’d identified as the pieces most crucial to creating Gates. It was one of their lynchpins, after all, and it was very likely what had allowed the AI to create a stable flux environment on the previously dead moon in the first place.

They had, however, not acted against him when he’d taken a look. Syl suspected their philosophy wasn’t so far from Zero’s. When the original Sinner had met him in Taiwan, he’d given Syl the tools to make a discovery but not the path to it. Both he and the machines did that—giving someone a vehicle without the road to go down. They liked that. Making others find a path of their own.

Alarms blared, alerting Syl and Jennifer as well as half the Incarnate complex.

“Another set of refugees?” Jennifer sighed. “I swear, I have no idea how they’re still alive up there.”

Syl: Different alarm.

Jennifer tensed. “Right. Been a bit.”

They had dealt with a few attacks on branches of the Viridian complexes, but those had mostly been opportunistic. Scavengers, primarily. Jennifer had actually ended up just creating supply drops for those who preferred to survive off of what little fruit the land had left to offer rather than submit to an external authority.

This was different, though. This alarm had to be manually triggered.

“It’s the secondary Viridian complexes,” Jennifer said. She frowned. “Three of them. Coordinated attacks.”

Syl: Good time to test some of the new tech. I’ll deploy to one and have Bianca go to another. Send Uriel and a team to the last.

“None of your special unit?”

Syl: The only person still here is a retainer. The rest of them are underwater somewhere in the Pacific.

“Alright. I’ll send you to the most impacted one. It’s partially submerged, but I assume that won’t be a problem for you. Bianca to Santa Monica. Waylan’s on-site in the converted black site in the east. Uriel should be able to handle that.”

Syl nodded and rose. While he wasn’t quite back to his full power, the time spent away from direct conflict had been good for him. He’d hoped to find a breakthrough for flux recovery given how much he’d spent in the opening salvos of the war, but the machines didn’t face the same problems that humans did when it came to flux pools. That entire different problem set was part of what had stymied Syl the first time he’d studied them and continued to do so now—but that was besides the point.

Assembling the necessary mages for this expedition didn’t take too long. Uriel and Bianca were both in the Incarnate site. They weren’t engineers, but they’d been running drills with the new equipment, stress-testing and practicing with it, preparing for the run they were going to have to make against future fragments.

Until recently, their response time would have been capped by vehicles. While hovercraft could move fast and jets even faster, the latter was more prone than ever to getting shot out of the air and the former would take at least an hour to get to the closest one. Flight made it a different game, but only Syl, Bianca, and now Uriel could manage that. In the latter’s case, a hovercraft would probably be faster.

Fortunately, they were no longer limited by that. Each of the magicians primed to leave retrieved a one-time-use artifact from storage containers that had entered standardized production.

“You’re not bringing a contingent?” Jennifer asked.

Uriel passed her hand over the glowstick-like artifact, then looked up. Her eyes glinted with artificial light. “No. It wouldn’t be a good test otherwise.”

“You need to spend less time around this guy,” the engineer huffed. “Bianca, Syl, are you ready?”

Always, Syl signed.

“Remind me to get a voice synth working for you again,” Bianca said. “Ready when you are.”

Syl nodded. I’ll see you soon.

He snapped his own artifact and slipped away into the darkness.