Chương 510: AF Chapter 509 – The Heart of the System, Part IV

Kris glided forward, staring intently at the completely unaware being working what looked like a magitech computer. The fellow was definitely not in a hurry, as his long fingers only hit certain keys occasionally, zooming in on this scene or that before moving on to the next, clearly looking for signs of something interesting. Quaver slid out silently, the wash of Mercy running down its Ruby length.

Even the Lost Lights were muted as Kris glided up, and expeditiously inserted it into the being's small, almost non-existent ear. There was no explosion of Health Qi to mitigate the damage. The being quivered, and went straight to unconsciousness.

"It has fast healing, but the Blooding is stopping it from working," Kris said, pulling Quaver free of its brain.

"It'll be unconscious until the dawn, at the least."

"Briggs, wrap your Source Field around Kris's Null. Kris, all the magic I'm Casting I need to pull out of you. I won't be Casting at max level, so Briggs' Sun will automatically burn off any resonance if it spreads past your Null." I looked about hastily." Illusionary Wall in front of the door; if anyone looks in here, they'll see the room is empty."

"Go ahead." Kris looked around sharply.

"The Wards are still here and sensitive, are they?"

"I'm assuming any Casting outside technomagical effects is a trigger for them," I agreed.

"Your Null and Source should interfere with the ripple effects of Casting, while drawing from you instead of the manafield will not trigger any passives sensitive to those things." I began to draw through our Magebond.

"Can you manipulate your unconscious friend's fingers to type?" Kris considered the idea with a smile, pushing his floating chair closer, her long hair flowing over his arms in dark tendrils and wrapping around his fingers. The long digits, their tips still bare, twitched accordingly, but she still had to physically move his arms back and forth. The Wall went up, turning the view from the entry into a room empty of people, although the images on the screens were still there.

If someone wanted to shut them down, well, in they'd come, and we might be discovered. Briggs standing near the door would feel anyone in the hallway nearby, so at least we'd have warning.

"Your goal?" Briggs asked calmly, the situation having moved into the area of a specialist.

"First, learn the appropriate languages for their magitech system. Second, start finding out what the system can do. Third, exploit said mastery to do the things we want." I eyed the unconscious being there, features sitting on the very edge of potentially human, and I shook my head.

"Not human, right?"

"No, it's a techno-organic Construct of some kind, more akin to a positive energy undead, level 200. Its insides are not human, made to an adult form more than grown. It should be programmed to its purpose, excel in it, and not go much beyond that," Kris claimed confidently.

"I don't have a lot of Tech Level Ranks in anything to really get into particulars on this stuff, for reasons you can imagine."

"When you live in a barely post-Medieval society, that's not hard to believe, even if you're trying to upgrade them. I, on the other hand, come (in)directly from Terra-Luna, where not only have they not forgotten all the 'modern' tech, they are totally enthusiastic about getting super-science, magitech, technomagic, psitech, and hypertechnology if they can at all, to the point of arranging for some White Magic Zones just for making better guns." I shook my head once.

"They cracked cold fusion, on a world where a fusion power plant is an atomic bomb waiting to go off, just because the limits on intellect and materials were exceeded."

"Sick!" Kris nodded total understanding of that viewpoint.

"So you devoted a rather unconscionable number of Skill Ranks to Skills which might not have any relevance in the world you found yourself in, just on the off-chance they might?"

"Running water, electric lights, and steam power are things tech does so much better than magic," I had to agree.

"They just require a much bigger foundation and buy-in from the masses to work." I had to smile slightly.

"And, of course, invaders in orbital space tend to be rather surprised when a particle beam from the planet's surface can hit them." Both Kris and Briggs blinked.

"Well, that's a pretty good reason for such things, isn't it?" Briggs mused.

"It is, indeed. And for bombarding the Insect Queens of Verdan who keep trying to send their broods our way. Nothing like lightning coming from the world you are orbiting that looks so good for expansion cooking all your egg-ships and then burning furrows across your territory to indicate a lack of approval for what you are doing." Kris was pressing buttons with the fingers of the unconscious being, testing to see what they were doing.

"Ah, dissuasion. Did it work?"

"It did after they killed one of the Queens with that trick, using True Seeking, invisible spotters in orbit, and four cannons at one time. Of course, that might just be because all the neighboring Queens proceeded to grab all the territory they could from the beetles, but the orbital stuff really started to tone down after they began picking the bastards off in orbit. Angels make great spotters." Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Briggs was staring off into nothing.

"How did you position the cannons?" he had to ask.

"They ended up making at least single hardpoints on every continent they could man without much effort, basically seedpoints for later expansion. North America naturally got multiples of them, but they wanted at least four cannons able to reach any point in true orbit outside the planetary rings."

"How'd they deal with atmospheric interference?" Briggs had to ask, clenching his fist.

"Technomagic. Adapted Cyclonic, Accuracy, and Distance." His pale green eyes opened wide, and he had to smile widely.

"Oh, that is so broken…"

"Especially when it ignores TWO atmospheres and doesn't lose cohesion, yeah. As I recall, it's like playing a video game, and no matter what the facing of the planet is, they are always in range of something of ours."

"I've got some kind of menu here," Kris spoke up, and my attention turned to the central windows, which had been superseded by a control screen menu. Comprehend Languages did its thing, and words mentally translated themselves to terms I could understand, although the technobabble was just starting. I stroked the edge of Password, just waiting to trot that Divinatory magic out, copying what I was reading over to Visual File for the two of them to follow along on. They were both Polyglots.

An hour of this, and we'd be able to read the language like natives, and speak it, too.

"Archived files of mana field interactions," I mused, eyeing the last file.

"That sounds like something boring and chock filled with technical descriptions and higher-end wording."

"The more terms, the faster the Polyglot acceleration," agreed Kris, rolling her eyes.

"I am SO glad I have a thoughtstream that loves mindlessly boring stuff now."

"Yeah, Tedium-streams are absolute godsends at times," I had to agree.

"Also, I'd like to see if they've any cliff-notes about what happened during the Fall."

"So would I," Briggs nodded, his arms crossed.

"Now, do you think you can jailbreak this program and get to the underlying stuff, where all the real fun is?" he asked me.

"Technomancy is its own specialized field, but I've been quietly adding the spells in since examining those once-floating pillars around the newbie areas Asheron put in place to guard against the shadows, and after examining the henges that anchor the complex ley line redirections on Dereth. The whole thing stank of technomancy someone tried to conceal behind Glyph or Rune magic.

"You will probably not be surprised that I've got a dozen different spells related to technomancy in memory. Jailbreak Programming Architecture is one of those spells, just in case we did run into something like this." Fingers manipulated by hair tapped the choices, and we were into the datafiles that could be brought up. More tapping, and we were confronted by a wall of graphs, measures, datasets, colorful spreads of mana usage, flow statistics, and other high-end stuff that Comprehend Languages translated.

All of our post-35 Intellects began to make sense of them rapidly. Importantly, the interaction of math, language, and time was a great building block for the Polyglot Feat to work with, even word choice, grammar marks, and the like going into the mix.

"Guh. This is a needlessly complex language," Kris observed, squinting her eyes.

"The technobabble is everywhere in this one, it is."

"It's old," Briggs rumbled slowly.

"And it's not layered properly, like other old languages are, and it doesn't have an akashic resonance so you can pick among proper meanings for the right one. If I had to guess, based on the urges I'm feeling, this language has at least a quarter-million words, and common-use words exceed forty thousand."

"Goddamn long-lived shits making everything harder than it needs to be," groused Kris, her violet eyes narrowing to focused slits.

"They think lesser beings can't figure this shit out?" I murmured a second spell, and swore as my eyes sparkled from next to Kris.

"What was that for?" she asked.

"View Underlying Code." I squirted the view to her.

"Mithar!" She looked away from that section of the Visual File sharply.

"Post-Twenty?" she had to ask.

"Yes. It's a mixture of Runecraft, Spellcraft, and a bespoke machine language, written in five dimensions. Got three thoughtstreams on it now, looking at their interpretation of the Source Code of Magic." I hummed happily.

"Your hair is starting to steam, Ryin," Briggs informed me.

"I'm comprehending Eternal-level magic without the underlying spirituality to understand it, only my fuck-you Intellect Rating and Arcane Theurgies. Without the Sublime Chord, I couldn't look at this shit at all!"

"They went Source Code? Not higher Valence?" Kris asked, not stopping her scrolling down of the data files of mana usage, basically showing the spellcasting active across the whole of the island, bright spots including stress on the Shoreward, large use of Hengestones, constant and frequent Spawn Points Summoning new stuff in, and spells going off, in addition to rote expenditures on massive magical fields.

The consumption and generation of said mana in the middle of the Inner Sea dwarfed any other single source of mana, although five ley lines looped into the island, delivering massive amounts of mana from the rest of the planet.

"Zoom in on the island here," Briggs pointed, looking at everything calmly, the math of the sheer amount of mana being used and generated here absolutely intimidating. Kris obligingly scrolled the being's finger across the interface, and the visual display of the map zoomed in rapidly, additional data subdividing down in very precise meanings for individual Wardings, Seals, Divinations, Illusions, and both spatial and temporal manipulations. I whistled low.

"Look at the numbers coming up out of the middle, and just how much is being used in the Seals." They both did the math, and their whistles joined mine.

"That is a lot of mana," Kris whispered.

"And it's all externally fed. The stuff coming up from below is being sent out to the rest of the island, not used on the internal systems."

"They aren't reliant on anything from below to contain what is below. So they are bleeding off the extra mana from whatever is being contained down there, purifying it somehow, and sending it out through the ley lines the Power Forges tapped as an alternate dispersal system." I considered the view only a second.

"One more tier down. This is the look at the ley line system that I don't dare take with a Commune with Nature. Start scrolling the entire map at this level so we can get the entire view of ley-linked magic in use."

"Got it." Kris started scrolling, and we all watched as the most detailed view possible of the magic of Dereth slid by and showed us what was exactly going on and where.