Blue core, p.78
Blue Core, page 78
part #1 of Blue Core Series
"I have never heard of a Phantasmal Realm." Ansae said, grinning toothily. "Show me the field."
I cordoned off a piece of land next to Shayma and Ansae with my mana before latching the Field onto it, the open door facing the two of them. Once again the physical world faded into shadows while mana flared into brilliant streamers, this time highlighting how it bent around Ansae as if she had a gravitational pull. There was even a very faint shift around Shayma, as if she were accumulating her own phantasmal mass.
"That is so strange to look at," Shayma said. "It’s my [Phantasmal Path], but not quite."
"It is odd," Ansae agreed, padding closer and waving her forepaw through the boundary. On the inside, her scales and flesh manifested as a vast ocean, the only nod to its material reality being the shape. While with my improved mana-sight I had a better appreciation of her mana density, in the Phantasmal Realm it was like looking into moonlit water. There wasn’t mana streaming off her, nor did she did blaze as everything else did. She was dark and deep and everything about even that glimpse warned of sharks living in the shadows.
When prodding the Field failed to give her whatever answers she was looking for, she shifted down into amazon form and ducked through the doorway. She strolled into the middle of the Field, looking around curiously, this time unaffected by whatever the Field actually did. Then she stopped, slowly taking a full circle as she surveyed it. Then she flexed the tiniest bit of magic, and the damn thing shattered like glass.
"Fucking, ow." It wasn’t exactly like having a wall broken, but it was close. [Genius Loci] fuzzed for a moment, either from pain or magical feedback.
"That wasn’t intentional." Ansae grinned. "But now we’re even."
"Wait," Shayma said. "Even for what?"
"It turns out that [Mana Diamond Forge] is a little loud. I tested it before insulating it and it annoyed Ansae."
"Oh, wow. I’m glad we didn’t stay to watch, then." Shayma both knew how powerful something had to be to annoy Ansae, and that I was underselling it when I said that.
"I wouldn’t have advised it," Ansae agreed. For some reason I wasn’t surprised she didn’t apologize. I had the feeling Ansae rarely apologized for anything, and our relationship, such as it was, still had prickles from Ansae’s eavesdropping. I wasn’t stupid, though. I had hurt her, even if unintentionally, and I would bet that she, and other Powers, didn’t simply let that sort of thing go. Now she had.
"So any idea what’s going on?"
"I believe this Phantasmal Realm isn’t so much a place as a perspective." Ansae told us.
"But I can actually go into it and come back out," Shayma objected, and demonstrated by popping out of existence and reappearing next to Ansae. "That seems to be a lot more than a perspective."
"I’ve seen things like it before, but nothing so complete," Ansae admitted. "Even a Power, even one such as Blue, can’t create an entirely new reality. Besides, there’s nothing in that Phantasmal Realm that doesn’t already exist. It simply changes which parts are important."
"Then why can I move so fast?" Shayma challenged her. Ansae’s grin widened.
"How big do you think the world is, once you cut out all the unimportant parts?"
"That makes a weird sort of sense. I’m not exactly sure where it came from though. It’s not like I have any special insight into magic."
"No, but you do have a special sort of insight," Ansae pointed out. "You have all that unique knowledge that makes you view the world differently. It’s simply a guess, but that likely has played into this Phantasmal Realm. How and why it has manifested this way…" She spread her arms in an eloquent shrug. "One of the mysteries of Blue."
"Well that’s reassuring. Thank you, Ansae." If a something-thousand year old dragon didn’t know what was going on, I was pretty sure nobody did. Though what she’d told me actually was reassuring in its own way. I hadn’t broken into some eldritch basement dimension of crawling horrors just beyond sight, and exposed Shayma and Iniri in the process, I was simply looking at reality from a different point of view.
I was still skeptical that was the right explanation, especially since it had started with one of Shayma’s Skills rather than mine. Plus it hadn’t been recognized as a Power thing until it spread to Iniri, which implied there was some threshold that had to be met, and just having the Field wasn’t enough. I could speculate all day but in the end the number of data points I had was one.
"I would appreciate it if you’d set up another Field to study. In its own room, perhaps off the cottage? I’d love to see what I can do with it."
"I could, but I’m a little worried about the status of trading favors with another Power. It’s probably a little late for it but I’m trying to be marginally smarter and not get in any deeper than I have been." Ansae threw back her head and laughed.
"If we were tracking favors and debts we would need a staff. I do approve of your caution, though. I have a number of things I want and I’m sure you have a number of things you want. Perhaps we should deal?"
"As long as you don’t expect me to haggle. Yeah I have plenty of stuff I want but mostly I want you to make up with Shayma."
"Hey!" Shayma objected. "That’s not fair, Blue."
"Two of your friends are basically in the hospital and Iniri is busy with an army. If you’re on the outs with Ansae there aren’t many people left who you can hang out with."
"Always a delight." Ansae grinned. "I wouldn’t suggest treating any other Power this way, though. They’ll take advantage of you." She gestured back toward the center of her lair, and Shayma reluctantly fell into step next to her. "I am sorry to have upset you, Shayma," she said. "But the world we Powers inhabit is not a kind one. Yes, most people either cower or avoid us, but the ones who don’t are the most ruthless, the most power-hungry, the most deceitful. The most desperate."
"Sounds fun," Shayma said, but her heart wasn’t in it.
"You and I fall under the category of desperate." Ansae continued. "You didn’t have any choice but to trust Blue. I could, possibly, compel him. I’d rather not, but if he were planning to betray me I would have to be extraordinarily careful." She shrugged. "He’s not. We can work on friendly terms. You have no idea how rare that is."
"But how can we know we can trust you? You spied on us!"
"Yes, and I told you about it." Ansae nodded. "I didn’t have to. You would have never known, but you would have wondered, especially if I said one betraying word. Better the wound that heals than the poison that festers. That which is necessary is neither good nor bad. It just is." Shayma’s face twisted like she’d bitten into a lemon.
"I’m not sure I like it."
"That’s good," Ansae said. "It’s not very likeable."
"Honestly I think that’s more something we can leave to Iniri. Let people who are already used to politics twist their heads in knots. I need you to continue being my bright light." Shayma blinked, then laughed. It was the first genuine laugh since Ansae’s revelation, and it made me feel a lot better.
"You are a terrible flirt."
"He absolutely is," Ansae agreed.
"I was trying to be serious!"
"That just makes it worse!" Shayma grinned. Ansae grinned back.
"Let’s move onto other things I need before I get in trouble."
Ansae just laughed.
I needed more silver, more gold. My gold supplies had almost been wiped out by the plug I’d put to keep myself from bleeding mana into the so-called perspective of the Phantasmal Realm, and now that I could produce argentum I wanted a nice big stock of silver so I could keep at it. Other elemental metals were less easy to specify, but I did convince Ansae to part with a large vial of mercury.
As I’d expected, quicksilver had certain well-known properties in alchemy and runework and ritual magic. The magic didn’t make it any less toxic though, so it wasn’t exactly in common use. Higher level classers or those with certain Skills could shrug off elemental mercury poisoning, though I doubted they’d be able to deal with organomercury compounds, but I was hoping once I put it through the [Mana Diamond Anvil] it’d be less dangerous. Considering from what I knew it had connotations of change and shifting I figured it’d make a perfect companion for Shayma’s shapeshifting if only I could decide what to do with it.
Ansae wanted more tayantan fruit, the juice and any food made from it, because even though she could only get maybe ten points of health, stamina, and mana from it a day, that was still far more than she was regenerating. Unfortunately it wasn’t like I had any of that stuff in actual production, and the pie Ansae liked so much was made by a third-tier Classer who had an actual [Advanced Pastry] Skill. Once I had Anton’s Village bound to me, though, it wouldn’t be any trouble getting a steady stream of goods. For the moment I just added some extra tayantan trees around Ansae’s cottage, altering the mana flows slightly to make sure they bloomed and fruited.
Shayma wanted extra clothing. I hadn’t much thought about the fact that most of her good clothes had been burned or sliced or otherwise mangled and destroyed. She also pointed out that Taelah probably needed new clothes too, especially if she was becoming a Companion, but it wasn’t like Ansae had some sort of magical auto-fitting wardrobe. She did have reams and reams of fairly magical cloth though, so Shayma took a bunch of that and some of the gold and silver I’d just gotten from Ansae and went find a tailor.
Which was less easy than it might be, considering the city was on lockdown under a giant black dome, but at least it confirmed that I could teleport people in and out while the [Relocate] was still building. I left her to it, since I was actually behind on my contribution to the defense.
If the Fortress was going to take up the land formerly occupied by Meil, then the stretch of ground outside the city walls was going to be the combat zone. Though I hadn’t bothered claiming it before, I did now. It took a trifling amount of mana to assimilate out a hundred meters of border that I promptly cleared, leaving nothing but grass and trees too widely spaced for cover. I could have made it stone but there were plenty of people with nature-based powers who needed the terrain. It was not lost on me that this was almost identical to the way Duenn had been defended.
Unlike Duenn, I didn’t have spellwork that I could use to boost those defenses. I did, however, have an explosive steam minefield I could lay. It might not do that much if the monsters were high level, but it was something. I had the LAEs too, for which I raised a bunch of short pillars near Meil to act as sources for the portals. I only had five LAEs made, and one was Shayma’s, but I needed all the pillars for the sake of coverage. Plus I was sure that at some point they’d get destroyed so I wanted backups.
The only area I didn’t modify was the stockpile where all the Classers were hanging out. Of course, they noticed my modifications and some of them started adding their own twists. A second-tier [Brass Binder] planted caltrop seeds, little beads of metal he sowed as if they were plants. A third-tier [Druid of the Living Lands] spent a great deal of time on a ritual on the woods just outside the cleared circle, at the end of which the trees shifted and muttered like an unruly crowd before settling down again.
Kind of creepy. I hadn’t seen any other third-tiers do something like that, but then again, the druid in question was a species I’d never seen before; summer-kin, and looked like her skin was made out of amber. It just reminded me of the map and the globe and how incredibly tiny the section of the world I’d seen truly was. For all I knew, other continents had swarms of level five hundred scientist-mages wrought of diamond and ivory and Tarnil was some provincial backwater. Scratch that, I knew Tarnil was a backwater, I just didn’t know how that reflected on the rest of the world.
In all it didn’t take me that long to set up the minefield, but I wanted to have a few more tricks than that. My answer was a giant lake of water and another of lava, both under pressure and with a portal at the bottom ready to go. I linked those up to Shayma as well, though she’d have to be careful about using them. Portals and momentum were a little bit weird and I was pretty sure if she just opened one of them up it’d end up launching her backward at speed.
With my obelisks though, I could use them to flood the battlefield pretty well and I could count at least three water casters and two fire casters that would probably appreciate it. Shayma said she’d pass that onto Iniri and whoever was going to be calling the shots on their side, since I didn’t trust I’d be able to recognize the best time to use them. I had many talents but I wouldn’t exactly call myself a tactical genius.
I wished I had more and better weapons, but my attempts at making a portal-fueled gun had ended poorly. At some unpredictable point the momentum of a projectile falling in an endless portal loop exceeded what the portal itself could handle. The portal failed, the loop stopped, and the projectile smashed into rock at whatever-many meters per second, ruining everything. It seemed portals acted a lot like artificial wormholes, with all the attendant issues, so I knew how hard they would be to properly weaponize. Besides, the impact I got from a failed attempt wasn’t even that powerful.
The [Relocate] finished just as it reached full dark, while I was still fiddling with my deployment details, snapping Meil into existence deep inside the mountain. The Grassland took a hit in its resource production, but otherwise didn’t seem to complain, but I couldn’t say the same about the people. I still had the lights on full, which generated a bunch of confusion. Oh well. I dimmed the lights a bit and let them work out what they wanted to do while I watched Iniri deploy the Adamant Fortress again.
While I was waiting for Meil to move I’d also put together a very large dynamo, in the form of a Volcano-Grassland-Glacier climate stack, in the hopes that would be enough to support the super-sized version she was planning. She strode out to the middle of the now-empty field of stone where the city had been, with Cheya and Joce and Keel alongside her, and set up the cubes again.
This time when she made the Fortress, she had an appreciative audience, and everyone was impressed with a massive building appearing out of nowhere. This time instead of a simple tower and a courtyard, the entire perimeter wall was studded with towers. The Fortress didn’t actually take up the whole space Meil had, but it was large enough that there were a good thirty towers, as well as barracks spaces, warehouses, messrooms, and all the other things that a real fortress needed. Then she opened up the front of it so everyone could start carrying the supplies in. As people started to spread out throughout the Fortress I saw that Annit and Keri actually had joined the Classers, which I took as an encouraging sign.
"So long as everyone stays inside the Fortress there shouldn’t be any Depletion issues, I don’t think. Right?"
"Probably. According to Iniri there are ways to get around Shield of Tarnil," Shayma told me. She’d managed to find new clothes despite the [Relocate], simple tunic and hose and boots. While she was as it, she’d caught Taelah while she was still in Meil and delivered her a new dress of the same manufacture, which the alchemist appreciated. "My [Phantasmal Path] Skill lets me bypass it if I’m really careful, so there may be attack skills that do the same. Or we might see monsters teleport inside occasionally. There’s a reason we didn’t just look for ranged Classers. But someone like Tor Kot has so much mana that it’s almost impossible for him to make it inside that way, so I think we’ll be fine on Depletion."
"He probably didn’t come himself anyway." I was still certain that the mage-kings were somewhat vulnerable outside their dungeons, though Tor Kot was scary regardless. He was also too smart to try and hammer against a nearly invulnerable fortress himself, in my estimation, so if he did show it meant he had a plan. "Do you know when the army is supposed to get here?"
"No, I’d have to ask Iniri." Shayma glanced around Meil, which was still subdued even if I didn’t see much outright panic. "I suppose it’s time for me to head over there."
"Probably. Pretty much all the other Classers are there already. You just missed all the heavy lifting."
"Oh no, how terrible," Shayma grinned. "I’d better get going. There’s probably not that much longer."
I pulled a teleport around her and dropped her off in front of the Adamant Fortress. There was still enough traffic in and out that I didn’t think that would get much of a blink, but apparently people knew who Shayma was. Some Classers stopped to gawk, others just got out of her way. Some people sidestepped without even seeing her coming, giving her an invisible bubble of space. The only exceptions to that were Sienne and Giorn, who spotted Shayma as they exited one of the messrooms and came over to give her a hug.
Eventually Shayma made it into the Fortress throne room, which was guarded even though Iniri had complete control over every aspect of the Fortress. Though considering the way my own attention was split and I barely noticed most of what was going on inside me, it was probably a good idea. The hovering cube with all its armatures and lenses would make a tempting target for any saboteur, not to mention Iniri herself. It couldn’t be shrouded with Iniri’s own [Shield of Tarnil] or else it couldn’t project the Fortress itself, so it remained a point of vulnerability. The queen waved as Shayma entered, forming another chair for her next to the throne. The instant furniture was handy, but I couldn’t imagine it was comfortable.
"When are they going to arrive?" Shayma inquired, taking the seat.
"Their advance scouts are already close enough to see us," she said. "The bulk of the army will be here in six hours or so, but I don’t know if they intend to attack during the night. Classers might, depending on Skills, but this isn’t a Classer army." Iniri frowned. "We just don’t know what to expect. Nobody has forty thousand Classers to throw at an army, and nobody has dealt with intelligent monsters coordinating like this. The hope is simply to bleed them and let them break most of their strength against the Fortress, until we have enough of an advantage to take the offensive."
