NABC BECMI Chapter 467 – Core Studies
BECMI Chapter 467 – Core Studies
There would be no peaceful resolution in the war of the two empires taking place.Delpha held unassailable advantages in wealth, territory, numbers, and magical power. Siricil’s edge in martial prowess and fighting spirit simply was not enough to overcome such assets. The only reason the war wasn’t a complete farce was because so many of Delpha’s Overmagi considered it a trite nuisance and beneath them to contribute to it.
That mindset would only change if Delpha itself and their personal holdings were threatened by Siricil, and that was simply not likely. If the whole Council of Delpha mobilized, the war would end tomorrow by wiping the city of Siricil, the capital of its empire, right off the map, and then repeating the feat with any other city that thought to stay defiant, one per day.
There simply was no way to stop that much magical firepower, except one.
Get rid of all magic.
Remove magic, and Delpha’s overwhelming advantage would drop to mere parity. Its advantage in population would still easily counter Siricil’s military prowess without difficulty, but an invasion would be impossible to support, and the war would end because Delpha would be forced to retreat home to consolidate and adapt.
Removing all magic was thus an overwhelming threat to Delpha, and one its Immortals could not tolerate. The Core of All Magic could do such a thing, it was not in their control, and its current controller, a chaotic and childish magocracy, could not be trusted to manage such power.
The war would continue until Delpha, and its Immortals, had control of the Core.
Delpha… needed to go.
The Core… needed to go, or it needed to change.
They were two constants I had to do something about.
Tek and I materialized at the edge of the Core’s subsurface access point, the lower one never used by Thaum. Tek raised the silvery Shield that was once his security badge, now warped into a powerful Artifact-level item by the circumstances of his Ascension, and the door below cycled open immediately for him.
I didn’t tell him I also had such a badge. The nature of the Artifact meant that this particular door wouldn’t open for even an Immortal who lacked such a badge, hence why none used this access.
Prince Jean-Arc was currently up in the Senate, the situation of raiding Delphans proving annoying in the western areas of the country demanding his attention, and he had indeed out several times to confront them. Reports of the forces from Sind heading that way also demanded investigation… and magical effects to slow their advance were only proper, mostly in the way of very inclement weather in the sands and wastes that were the homes of the nomads.
Tek looked around carefully, both of us seeking out any form of monitoring devices and spells, and temporarily neutralizing those that we did find so that there was no alert to Thaum of our presence.
In short order, we were soon in the beating heart of the engineering department, which had now been transformed into the control room of the single most powerful Artifact in the world.
Flashing his badge gave Tek complete access to the preserved computers, now magitech devices that still obeyed their ancient programming. As the former number two engineer of the place, his security clearance was absolute… and actually the highest remaining, since I’d taken care to hack Gaebrel’s and remove it completely, just to be on the safe side.
It took us about an hour of joint work to go through everything that was being done to the former fusion core, looking at records of processes and things done to it that it had never have been designed for, yet were still faithfully recorded in the update logs and maintenance charts. The fact the area was being washed in enough betathaumic radiation to kill normal mortals in minutes didn’t matter to either of us with the right magic up, and we stuck to our tasks as Belle continued to monitor the Grandmaster in Parliament and make sure we weren’t surprised.
Tek finally sat back as the current holographic representation of the Core floated before him on a side display, while the calculations and power controls being experimented with by Thaum rose up on the middle display in six different languages, whatever was best to describe what he was attempting to do with technology and magic combined… despite the Grandmaster being a devoted wizard and quite opposed to technology gaining any foothold in Zanzyr!
Magitech not so much, I supposed?
“This is utter insanity,” the former Jorg Turmalez finally said, gazing at the rotating display. “The Core should have burned out years ago given the radials and quantum degradation. But from what I can see, it has only grown … although that has changed recently.” He pointed to a series of charts that were slowly declining on one side. “The amount of input of the native, eh, manafield has slowed below optimal levels, and is declining slightly.” He pointed at another series of charts, tracking output. “The field strength in the betathaumic bands is decreasing rapidly, and could be considered to have collapsed completely here, while the gammathaumic bands are being restricted. Is this the result of your Pyramids?” he asked me directly.
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“Yes. The alphathaumic bands are the energies that drive the Secret Schools and allow mages to absorb sufficient power to learn and wield those arts. Without that aspect of the Radiance, the powers of the Schools cannot manifest. Thus, you can’t learn the Schools or anything similar outside of Zanzyr, although other nations have tried multiple ways to do so. The Sidhe elves are particularly perplexed, because in their minds the highly magical nature of their forest should allow them to duplicate the effects of the Schools, and it is just not possible,” I answered him calmly. “The betathaumic bands are the most harmful to living creatures and are the main feeding mechanism for the Core’s magic. The gammathaumic bands empower the core spells of the Radiance and any external effects the Core launches are based on those. In short, the Core can massively expand its betathaumic grip, consuming magic to empower gammathaumic events… such as the one that made Jean-Arc an Immortal.” I tapped several keys and brought up the records of that event on both sides for us.
“By the titanium tits of the vung-whores,” Tek swore, looking at the readings, which had spiked way up on his charts. “You’re right, it devoured the entire magical field of the planet for that!” He flicked through years of displays on the monitor, charting the reverberation of the event, and there it was, every solar year collapsing on the same day as the resonances built up and literally shorted out active magical manipulation again. Right there on the shortest day of the year, the Winter Equinox when Jean-Arc had Ascended!
“Look at these projections.” I sent some more derived charts over to him, things Thaum didn’t know how to access and had no idea existed. “They are power consumption projections for some of the things he’s trying to do.”
Tek blanched upon examining them. “What is that fool planning to do? This second one…”
“The first one is an attempt at a targeted magic drain to a specific area of the world, rendering the whole area non-magical for an indeterminate period of time, and either sucking away extant spells or draining them of power for an unknown duration.” Tap, tap, and the targets of the expected effects came up on a third monitor for us.
“How in the world is he getting a current planetary display up? The records are thousands of years out of date!” Tek protested, promptly going looking for the answer instantly. “Huh. Looks like he took a sensor drone into orbit and performed a standard scan of the planet from there, then uploaded the information to the database. Clever.”
“Oh, he’s definitely not dumb. He figured out all of this stuff with no technical manuals to speak of, and no education in higher technology. He’s all self-taught, although Divination magic probably helped a great deal, as did the self-learning programming the system uses, trying to help him along.”
“And this second thing? It’s a planetary field collapse again, even worse than the first!” Tek pointed out the projections. “It could crack open the manafield forever if it goes off! This is the kind of thing the Immortals are most afraid of!”
I popped up the simulation for it, and we both watched the Core reach out and drain the magical field from the entire continent of Delpha in a rush of devoured energy. The gammathaumic readings spiked to levels that would take centuries of work by the Pyramids to break down and counter. The energy of the Radiance would infest the land, changing and mutating the magical creatures there, and likely driving them totally insane with a gnawing pain, like their guts were being devoured from the inside out!
They’d be in a mana-less environment, and dying of mana starvation. If the Radiance got into them in its place, they’d mutate horribly and becoming terrifying dangers to everything, especially falling upon anything with even traces of magic about them… like spellcasters!
“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we cannot let him get these things off,” Tek said softly, staring at the disaster waiting to happen. “That will definitely doom the continent, but the rest of the world is going to be tottering on manafield collapse, too!”
“Yes, every magical creature in the world, including elves like myself, are going to be horribly weakened. Given the magnitude of even the first event, it will likely last a week or more. The latter one could last months!” I agreed with him.
“Can we stop it without confronting him?” Tek asked reasonably.
“Please. He’s a skilled amateur using the surface functions of the programming, basically convincing the computers to work with him. He has no real knowledge of the code or the supporting hardware. We can totally make him think he’s doing one thing while another happens.” I peered at the many interpretations of the readings of both magical and quantum energies with interest, my brains spinning along and doing some profound calculations.
Slowly, I began to smile slightly. “I think we can displace most of these effects elsewhere. It would require some work and preparation on our part, but the most harmful effects can be shunted elsewhere.”
“That sounds interesting.” Tek paused momentarily at seeing the very cold and cruel smile on my lips. “Ah. Why do I have the impression the recipient of said effects probably won’t like them much?”
“If our timing is good it could be downright terminally unpopular,” I said, leaning forward as a thought struck me. “Tell me, have you seen thaumic readings on vivus yet?”
He blinked once. “I have to say no. What difference would that make here?”
“Betathaumic radiation is effectively energy consumption and transmutation, aimed at the manafield. That’s basically stupid and wasteful, a result of the Curse of the rival Immortals on the device against what Energy has made possible using the Radiance. If we shift things around by introducing vivus to the matrix of energies...”
My fingers danced over the console rapidly. I was very familiar with Federation tech, having buried myself in it during my time in Darkmoor. By the time of the Doom, I was probably the most-informed person alive there on the broad aspects of the technological capabilities of the Federation, and that study had included computer programming.
Tek looked closer at the modulation fields on vivus, and then merging them into the Artifact-class mix of quantum and magical fields.
“That’s aligning the mana consumption in a specific direction that isn’t the manafield,” he judged after a moment, peering at the energy readouts. “These are all outside my area of knowledge,” he admitted after a moment.
“These are the foundational energies of Entropy, which magically manifest as necromancy and forms of negative energy in the manafield here. Vivus feeds on death. We’d switch the Core from feeding on mana to feeding on dead things, just like the living do…”