Magical violence tended towards extremes. Magic in general tended to do that, but combat was even moreso. Apart from World War III, which had been an outlier in so many ways that it was easier to list the few ways in which it had resembled a normal conflict, most fronts typically involved a great deal of waiting, putting the pieces into place to execute a masterstroke. Said masterstrokes usually quickly devolved into extremely messy, brutal fighting—the other mode of magical combat.

  A recent incident recorded by both the high council of Cascadia and the royal court of Auria in the Santa Rosa Tower had occurred exactly like that. Tensions had been high, but the first fatalities had come during structured duels before the fighting had come to a head with Cascadia’s ambush attempt followed by a paragon-class spell deployed by what Cascadia believed was the Sinner Gluttony and what certain individuals of the Aurian court knew was a different one.

  This time, that same Sinner had entered the situation when it was already midway through that violence.

  Unlike the rest of the sins, Pride did not have a standard modus operandi—not this Pride, at least. The others had gained their names for reasons that were transparently obvious to anyone familiar with their legend. Gluttony’s signature spells revolved around devouring the magic in a wide area, Sloth’s slowed time until it was functionally frozen, Greed stole flux and blood from within people’s bodies, and so forth. Pride, on the other hand, had no single signature—at least, not one that any observers survived to see.

  He was also currently not operating in his capacity as a Sinner. This, at least, was par for the course. A Sinner’s appearance was monumental, potentially world-shaking news, but paragon-class magicians often disguised themselves to have lower power levels in situations where raw power alone wouldn’t solve the problem.

  Thus, Sylvester Auria and Bianca Ashwood cleared the temporary installment room by room. Syl had identified the silencing effect from analysis of the ambient flux, though he couldn’t tell what spell it was. His assumption, which was that it stemmed from a Tower artifact, was correct, but he had no way of verifying that until he found the source of the effects.

  Said source was currently preparing to leave. Justin Lilac had completed the job his family had sent him here to do. He didn’t know why they were assisting Cascadians, but he wasn’t in a position to refuse. The people above him knew more, and they were always right.

  Both Aurian and Cascadian magicians had realized that the Auria side’s defenses had shattered at roughly the same time. Naturally, the Cascadians had attempted an artillery barrage, but the Indigo daughter in charge of the Aurian side had maintained the presence of mind to get fortification specialist Ashley Aurum outside of the range of the jamming effect as quickly as possible, though she remained within the large-range silencing one.

  The magical artillery barrage had thus taken only one or two lives, clipping the outer edge of the rapid-deploy setup where Aurum’s protection spell didn’t reach.

  The situation had developed from there.

  Syl and Bianca stepped over bodies both Aurian and not as they maneuvered their way through an outpost with flickering power and insufficient flux. The Cascadian forces had maneuvered their way across the no man’s land to make an attack coinciding with this ambush, and from the looks of it had managed to take control of part of it.

  They had to be relying on nonmagical firearms. A master-class spell of any significance would have obliterated a good chunk of the outpost, and most of it had still been intact when the two of them arrived.

  Cascadia hadn’t sent master-classes, which fed Syl’s growing suspicion that these weren’t only Cascadian soldiers.

  His suspicion grew as good as confirmed when Bianca broke down a barricaded door and found three magicians in Cascadian colors with four Reserve privates, the former preventing the latter from moving with their rifles.

  Against enemies with no strategic value, Cascadian MO was take no prisoners.

  To their credit, the four “Cascadians” adjusted quickly, bringing their guns up, but Syl was faster.

  Chaonite magic jamming worked by disrupting flux fields around people, preventing their magic from escaping and trapping a large amount of energy around them. This base, however, was under the effect of artifact magic jamming. Artifacts from Towers were such a black box that not even the world’s most talented magical engineers had been capable of cracking them, and their effects varied even between two similar items from the same Tower floor.

  Syl had tried to cast a spell the moment he had sensed the effect take over, and he had quickly realized that rather than the flux field restriction that directed chaonite jamming involved, this artifact just disrupted standard spell patterns, making it absurdly hard for a traditional magician to complete a spell. The enemy soldiers had equipped pre-activated magical equipment to compensate for this, granting them an advantage over the Aurians who were caught completely off guard by their sudden inability to verbal cast their spells as well as the chaos that burdened them when they tried to create regular spell processes.

  Unlike them, the silent archmage had been casting in these conditions his entire life.

  Thanks to the enemy’s own artifact, they couldn’t cast either, which meant they had no defenses against a relatively easy to counter lethal spell.

  Sabotage-type A-class spell, Aneurysm. Syl felt the artifact crushing his spell processes, but he knew how to operate with none. From start to finish, without even using a verbal component, the spell completed within a quarter second.

  Normally counterable by simply creating a basic spell process within one’s own body when targeted, the specific conditions of the jamming prevented the enemy from doing so.

  Four magicians that Syl suspected were not Cascadian but Polarian froze up simultaneously, then crumpled to the ground.

  Elsewhere, silent gunfire from Bianca eliminated two more who’d come for backup.

  They continued onward without sparing a second glance for the Aurians they’d saved, systematically eliminating every enemy magician they came across.

  Less than half of the Aurians who had been in this base were dead. The ambush had been effective, but not lethal. That spoke in part to Uriel’s competence as a leader and magician, but it also raised further suspicions about the true target of this attack.

  Once they were far enough in, Syl signed to Bianca to finish clearing the space out and identify anyone using Violet family magic. He took to the outside.

  #

  Ashley and Uriel were holding down a makeshift position, their backs to one wall and their front covered by Uriel’s spells. The master-class artillery specialist was acting as a one-woman army, firing cover fire towards the magicians trying to use movement-type spells to breach the gap between the two of them. She had a notable killcount already, but there were a surprising amount of magicians firing back, and it would only take one lucky shot.

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  The moment an unknown magician arrived, clad from head to toe in an FCD a couple steps down from Horizon Breaker, Uriel nearly fired on him. She stopped herself when the silent magician turned instead towards the kilometers-distant outpost that held what was proving to be a startlingly high number of magicians.

  One critical piece of information Syl had that Uriel did not was the composition of the enemy forces. Every nation had their own unique style of warfare, and one of Polaris’ most notable points was their use of a clone reserve. Cloned biomatter could not awaken a flux pool of its own, but Polaris was a very effective mass-producer of magical items. Loading a set of programmed clones with cheap weapons that could simulate up to B or even A-class magicians gave them the ability to throw a lot of bodies on the field, providing more opportunities for their enemy to make a mistake.

  Uriel was growing very close to doing so. Still assuming they were fighting against Cascadians, she was putting more flux than necessary into each spell, predicting that the enemies would resist them more than they ended up doing. Since she was still silenced, the usual fractional seconds of time between successful casts were stretching into full seconds, sometimes longer. Failure was an inevitability, not a question.

  The figure she didn’t recognize prevented her from making a fatal mistake against the enemy by removing the enemy.

  Familiar with casting silently, he decided on a single spell for that purpose.

  Wide-range strategic-type artillery-type spell, Raijin.

  Certain spells started losing functional names around the tactical to master-class range, not just because of vanity by the spell’s creators but also because of the exact details of what they did. While it would have been close enough to its function to call this spell Lightning Storm, that was not what it did.

  This spell functioned best with clear skies and dusty or sandy terrain. Electric charge erupted from forty-one points across a one-mile radius, connecting with designated spots on the ground. Unlike other precise spells of its like, Raijin did not require a spotter. It took the path of least resistance, searching for liquid—such as, for instance, that inside a human body. When it couldn’t make contact thanks to a lucky dodge or magical defense, it arced onto the ground, kicking up and igniting sand. Utilizing the same thermobaric principle as a flour explosion, a miss resulted in an explosion large enough to kill the oncoming magicians.

  Uriel stared in abject shock at the spell. She recognized the spell as well as its use, but it would have taken her at least half an hour to cast that with a ritual casting array and several million dollars worth of flux batteries. The stranger had done it in less than ten seconds.

  He barely regarded them with a glance before turning to leave, satisfied that they were alive.

  As he set off, the silencing effect abruptly dropped, a pressure that had been constant on Uriel’s shoulders lifting.

  She’d been unsure of it at first when she’d read the sensor data coming from within the base, but she was certain now. This was the same secret magician who had turned the San Francisco Bay into a crater. The same one who had somehow saved the lives of two Aurian students at the Santa Rosa Tower.

  “Who are you?” she asked, hating how childish she sounded in that moment.

  The magician swiveled his head to look at her, opaque visor hiding his expression, then turned back.

  “The spell jamming is down,” Ashley said abruptly. “My dome is back to full effectivity.”

  That—or something completely unrelated, it was hard to tell—got the silent magician’s attention. He blurred with speed, and then he was gone, taking off back into the base.

  Uriel and Ashley stared at each other in silence. There was nothing for either of them to say.

  #

  Bianca had taken care of the majority of the enemy magicians who had invaded the base and had managed to both deactivate the silenceing, jamming artifact as well as fully disconnect a number of information cards from the intranet system.

  Back at the academy, Syl had recognized fluctuation in the flux of the transmitted image as well as a brief peek of someone with a facial structure and family crest he recognized.

  He’d been hit with a Violet spell more times than he cared to admit, and he knew exactly what one looked like. The fact that there had been one actively casting in the background had led to the natural conclusion that something was amiss.

  Sure enough, Bianca had a Violet—or at least someone related to the family—by the scruff, a headless magician at her feet.

  “His name is Justin Lilac. This magician here was his escape plan,” Bianca said. “Swap uniforms and defect. I don’t know what was supposed to happen next.”

  Syl frowned. The Violets were intense loyalists. He knew that General Violet herself was a stout defender of Aurian propaganda from her experiences with her, but then again, Drew had betrayed them to the Cascadians in an attempt to kill Bianca.

  Is he working for anyone? Syl signed.

  “I was moments from asking,” Bianca replied. “He does not understand sign language.”

  We should go. Syl tilted his head. Uriel and Ashley are here. Wasn’t expecting that.

  Bianca’s expression was unreadable behind the visor, but she nodded. “The unit should be coming soon, correct?”

  I called them on my way back in, Syl signed. Five minutes maximum.

  “Excellent,” Bianca said. “Once we have him prisoner—“

  Up until this point, Justin Lilac had gone slack thanks to Bianca’s careful disabling of his most important nerves, but that word seemed to trigger something. His eyes glazed over, and his muscles began to work.

  Syl, recognizing the telltale signs of pre-programmed information security measures, sent a burst of flux at the Violet branch family’s magician at the brain, throat, and heart—the three most common places to hide a suicide device. He had grown adept at getting rid of them, and the Sanguine operators had reminded him to take precautions in these cases.

  Lilac, however, had a significantly more old fashioned method. He bit down, hard.

  “Gas,” Bianca said, a note of alarm in her voice as she shoved the prismatic aside, sending him tumbling bonelessly to the ground.

  A plume of nearly colorless gas rose from Justin’s mouth as his body entered its death throes, foam overflowing from his lips.

  Syl used a purification-type spell to contain and eliminate that gas. It was too late for their would-be prisoner. These kinds of capsules risked being countered by purification spells, but the Violets had been thorough. Justin had been dead from the moment he’d bit down on whatever had been implanted in his tooth or saliva glands.

  “No prisoner, then,” Bianca said. “Just an ID.”

  That tells us enough, Syl signed. We should go.

  The pieces of the puzzle were coming together. There still weren’t enough to make a solid guess as to what the final picture would look like, but they were no longer firing blind.

  Before Uriel and Ashley could regroup and ask them any further questions, the two of them were already gone.

  #

  Syl: I hear there was an attack on your outpost.

  Mj. Uriel: You shouldn’t have that information. It’s only a day old.

  Syl: I told you before. We’re operating on a different level from you. I have my sources. You’re off the front?

  Mj. Uriel: We’re wrapping up here, yes. There were similar ambushes at a number of other locations.

  Syl: No Violets implicated in the rest, I presume.

  Mj. Uriel: I shouldn’t be surprised that you know that, but I am. Three other Lilacs, each at a specific location. The Violet family has found evidence that certain members of the branch family were planning on a coordinated defection.

  Syl: That doesn’t surprise me.

  Mj. Uriel: I’m sure it doesn’t.

  Syl: It was too easy, wasn’t it?

  Mj. Uriel: Pardon?

  Syl: There was an ambush, and yet you lived past the first thirty seconds. Nobody blew you up. They threw one or two tactical-classes at you and a ton of As and Bs.

  Mj. Uriel: I was thinking about that. There was… it sounds stupid, but someone saved me. An Aurian magician. You wouldn’t happen to know them?

  Syl: I have no idea what you’re talking about. Besides, reports indicate you likely would have been fine, though it’s possible you would have taken more losses. A lot of the other locations that were similarly ambushed survived, and even though there was a direct attempt on your life, you had the general situation under control without outside interference.

  Mj. Uriel: I suppose that’s true. I won’t call it toothless because nine non-AMI Reserve students are dead, but they didn’t capitalize on it as well as they could have.

  Syl: “Appear weak when you are strong.”

  Mj. Uriel: Sun Tzu. War strategy from thousands of years ago wasn’t exactly applicable to pre-integration Earth. Much less so now.

  Syl: Not always, but this is too strange a coincidence. I suspect that the actual point of the ambush was to distract from another movement or set of movements. One of them has been identified—a Tower invasion. More investigation is needed.

  Mj. Uriel: I’ll let you know if anything pops up on our end, but we should be back within a couple of weeks. The deployment is almost done for all of us.

  Syl: Is that so? I look forward to speaking with you in person, then. Assuming Jennifer is coming back then, I need to meet with her. I have some artifact technology she might be interested in.

  Mj. Uriel: Copy that. Stay safe.

  Syl: Likewise.