Chapter: 286 Bonus - Cazor, Alex, Decate, & Harcraes (Patreon)

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Cazor sprinted down the street. His net of hyper attenuated sensors had picked up a blip.

This was the tenth he’d investigated, but he had a good feeling about this one.

I had a good feeling about the last one, too.

That hardly mattered. This was his job.

The target had seemingly been covertly cutting people’s purses with some sort of magically created blade.

Moreover the thief was so efficient at it, the city grid hadn’t detected the magics. It had only been uncovered when enough people reported thefts, and the Guard, after further investigation, noticed how perfectly clean the cuts were.

The Mage Hunters were informed, and Cazor had been assigned to the case.

That was a week ago, and he was starting to get frustrated.

There’d been ten more purse snatchings brought to his attention, only three of which seemed to be the same person. The others were common thievery, unfortunate, but definitely the Guard’s job, not his.

He’d found the areas this ‘Mage’ worked in, set up his net, and here he was.

His net would mark the worker of magic as well as the target. That way, so long as the thief wasn’t using instantly disposable items, he could track perpetrator and victim.

There.

His magesight was flooded with power, filling his vision with unfamiliar sights. Though, he could interpret them well enough to know what he was looking at.

He slid to a stop beside a woman who’s belt held cut purse strings.

He held up a badge of office. “Excuse me, ma’am, can you tell me where you just came from?”

“Oh! Master Guardsman. I… I just came from down that street there.”

Cazor gave a slight bow. “Thank you. Report in to the nearest Guard post. Your coin pouch has been taken.”

The woman glanced down in alarm and let out a cross between a yelp and a groan when she saw that he was correct.

He was already down the street that she’d indicated.

The street was sparsely populated with slowly walking people, but no one stood out.

It’s been less than a minute. Where is he… where is he…

Somehow, the thief either hadn’t been marked, or had gotten away quickly enough.

Cazor was about to curse, when his net pinged him again.

The thief had decided to grab two purses in quick succession.

This time, it came from just around a nearby corner.

Cazor sprinted around the turn and his eyes locked on the rag-wrapped figure.

There!

This poor creature’s skin—what little of it that he could see—was covered in blisters. Does he have some sort of illness?

That was all the more reason to bring him in. The city grid should have detected anything truly contagious, but the last thing they wanted was something spreading through the populace.

The man’s eyes locked on Cazor and widened.

This side street was less well traveled, with only one other pedestrian in easy view, likely the latest victim.

The thief turned to duck into an alley, but Cazor was already acting.

With an easy pulse of magic, he created an acceleration tube in the form of a free-floating, powerful, long, hollow magnetic field, snatching out a clump of iron dust from the closest pouch and launching it with precision.

He’d gotten the velocity dialed in to the point that it shouldn’t break an adult male’s bones, and it wouldn’t break the sound barrier either.

The thief yelped, clearly sensing the attack coming and twisting to get out of the way.

Cazor’s attack—which amounted to a well clustered, fast moving handful of sand—hit the wall beside the man as he stumbled back, making a loud thwack!

The rags fell away, revealing even more blistering at various stages of healing, some seeming incredibly recent.

The spell-lines that Cazor could see looked… haphazardly done. They didn’t seem wrong, but they did seem inexpertly executed.

A set glowed, new blisters formed around them, and a blade of hardened, sharpened air formed and flew towards the Mage Hunter.

Cazor pushed off of a cluster of iron dust, vaulting upward, over the incoming wind blade.

He twisted midair and flicked his power forward. He traded speed and stopping power for accuracy, guiding his attack all the way to its point of impact and filling the man’s mouth with a cloud of iron.

The thief sputtered, swiping at his own face, even as he kicked out with a sandaled foot, sending another cutting arc.

Fast deployment. Sloppy scripts, though.

Cazor could see yet more bubbling under the man’s bare skin as some of the manipulated air got between the various layers.

He didn’t seem to cut himself with his magics, but the air manipulation was likely a cause of constant pain.

What a waste.

A simple manipulation of magnetic fields swept iron through the incoming working and obliterated it.

Cazor landed and punched the man in his shoulder, even as he kicked out the thief’s forward knee.

The blister covered man cried out as he dropped, spinning and landing on his knees facing away from the Mage Hunter.

Compressed iron dust formed shackles around the man’s wrists, drawing them together and locking them in place behind him, near his waist.

Cazor’s voice cracked out, speaking with practiced authority. “You are under arrest for unlawful use of magic toward the detriment of other humans. No further use of power will be tolerated. Any attempt to activate a spellform will result in your keystone being disabled. In such a case, we cannot guarantee it will ever return to functionality. Do you understand what you have been told?”

Instead of responding, the man tried to roll forward and away, power moving to yet more inscriptions.

Cazor sighed and the shackles jerked upward, lifting the man even as twelve iron needles slammed precisely into place. He had used his magnetic manipulation to aim and propel them with sufficient force to penetrate only to the required depth.

Every Mage Hunter had a method of disabling a criminal’s keystone, but most had devices or circuitous methodologies.

Cazor cut to the heart of the the issue, literally severing the main lines of the keystone, rendering it useless.

The needles effectively rendered the man mundane.

The thief bled from the small holes in his back, and his hand spasmed, dropping the coin pouch he’d been clutching.

Cazor picked it up and filed it away to be turned in as evidence, and hopefully for reclaimation by the original owner.

“You were warned.”

The man hung from iron that now wrapped him, wrists to upper arms, putting incredible strain on the man’s shoulders.

With a repositioning, Cazor alleviated most of the pressure.

Blood still ran in trickles down the man’s back as he tried, ineffectually, to gather enough coherence to curse.

Cazor stepped forward and grabbed the man’s chin as he hung there. He looked into the vacant, roving eyes and nodded. “It’s a common thing, the panic. You will become accustomed to your lack of power soon enough.”

A bit of blood dripped from the side of the man’s mouth, and Cazor sighed. I might have nicked something important…

“Let’s get you back to the node. There are healers on deck that will get you in tip top shape.” He looked the thief up and down, again seeing the dozens of blisters. “Better than you’ve been in a long time, most likely.”

The man moved to float behind Cazor as the Mage Hunter walked, now also supported by an iron belt as well.

Cazor pulled out and tossed a cloak over the man, then caused him to follow with the cloak just brushing the snow on the ground.

It simply looked like the man was walking incredibly smoothly as they went around, and the Mage Hunter collected all of his sensors.

These things were expensive, and if he lost one, or allowed one to be damaged, he would have to pay for its replacement out of his own wages.

He could have removed the iron needles from the man’s keystone since the lines were severed, but such could sometimes reconnect, and if Cazor had hit something important, removing the needle would likely make it worse.

All told, he had the thief back at his local node less than twenty minutes after their short fight.

If you can call it that.

He had outclassed the man at every level. He’d been using the interaction to hone his abilities more than anything.

It was a bit foolish of me to not take it seriously.

But the man was just a Mage and likely not even that. He was likely a runaway mageling, who’d just never been recovered.

Cazor sighed as he pushed open the doors, the man floating in behind him.

The easy part was done.

Now, he had paperwork to do, and as the slow drip, drip, drip of still flowing blood attested, it would be quite a lot of paperwork.

Let’s get to it. A smile pulled at his lips. Regardless of anything else, he’d made the city a little safer this day.

* * *

Alex sat back, looking at his partner. “Well, rust me, Mistress Kadlyn. That’s the proof we needed.”

Mistress Kadlyn shook her head. “I’m still frustrated with you. You spent half our research budget on these memories and books.”

They didn’t know where the memories had come from, and as might be expected, they couldn’t see the person whose memories they were, but they were clearly from the arcane lands to the south, and they showed, in detail, how their holds functioned.

Additionally, the book was a somewhat detailed overview of how hold-systems were set up and interlinked. It wasn’t all there, but most of the key components were pretty obvious.

“But this is the proof we needed. Now, we can get more funding, and actually move forward. Imagine it, collective magical systems that act in a magically rich environment. I knew it. I knew it! This could revolutionize caravan defense.”

“You knew it, eh?” She gave him a sardonic smile.

“We knew it.” He grinned back.

“So? Take this to the Wainwrights? Get them to sponsor us?”

“Oh, that’s thinking too small. What’s the core of this system?”

Mistress Kadlyn frowned. “A fount, yeah, that’s not great.”

“No! Well, yes, but not what I’m trying to say. It’s a gate.”

Her frown deepened. “What are you getting at?”

“What if we created integrated systems that could hook into a gate, without requiring training at all?”

Mistress Kadlyn’s eyes widened. “Mundanes gates can’t take extra strain.”

“Not without conditioning. We’d be making a universal keystone, part of that is expanding. People wouldn’t be able to have a heavy magical load at first, but eventually?”

“That’s… that’s amazing. City grids only function when they suck all the power from the area, but these, these function with a single source, irrespective of the general zeme.”

“Exactly.”

“Would this make Mages irrelevant?” But then she answered her own question. “No, of course not. Mages would always have an advantage in power and control, but this… Imagine a Guardsman with magical protection, not dependant on a mage or the city.”

“I know… This could change everything.”

“If we can get it to work, and that’s a big if.”

“Oh, undoubtedly. This won’t be a short road, but it just might be possible. It’ll be a hard road either way.”

Even so, the two were grinning from ear to ear. Decades of research and investigation, and now, it could all be put to use.

Their plan had the initial tests and support-gathering taking another century, but now, they had a proof of concept in hand.

They were going to change the world.

* * *

Mistress Decate and Hemeter gave each other a massive hug as they laughed almost maniacally.

Mistress Decate was the first to speak. “I can’t believe it was that simple.”

“I know, right? The impressing of magics into the food is individualistic. It’s not dependent on the power, nor the scripts involved. It has to be customized to the specific Mage.”

Archons were always researching magic and crops, attempting to improve them in someway, or in the best case recreate something like the famed endingberry.

But even when they succeeded, the results had the same limit as that berry of myth and legend. It slowly overtook the natural magics of the consumer, killing mundanes and potentially magically crippling Mages.

There had been attempts to cater towards certain types of Mage, but they’d never succeeded.

Of course they hadn’t, because no one used magic in exactly the same way, so there was always disjoinment between the power consumed and that which the Mage already had.

Hemeter looked down at the purple strawberry they’d made with the techniques hinted at in the memory they’d traded for.

It had taken a lot of power, partially because they’d accelerated the growth to have a sample so soon, but it seemed like it worked.

The strawberry was specifically grown and imbued to match her own magic.

Hesitantly, she reached out and picked up the oddly warm fruit.

Her magesight let her see power swirling through the fruit in achingly familiar ways.

She took a careful bite and felt the power rush through her.

It was trivially easy to guide that power to her palm, where the mirrored magic existed in her inscriptions.

The power filled her inscriptions, activating them without even a trickle of power coming from her own gate.

A hauntingly beautiful ball of purple fire came into being over Hemeter’s hand. If anything it was brighter than she normally created, though the temperature didn’t touch her flesh.

Mistress Decate took a step back, a protective layer of power coating her against the heat that she could feel.

“Mistress Decate, this is… this is amazing. I don’t know what it will be useful for, but it works.”

“Mistress Hemeter, I think congratulations are in order.”

“Thank you, Mistress Decate. Congratulations to you as well.”

The two continued to grin even as the purple fire expended the last of its power and winked out.

* * *

Harcraes huddled in his basement, pouring over the memory of desecration one millisecond at a time.

“Why would you destroy those magnificent creations?”

The monster whose memory he’d acquired had shattered dozens of automata, dozens of superior beings, and he was forced to watch every excruciating detail.

How else could he backwards engineer their construction?

I only have this much work because I was denied the true prize.

The blasted Archivist refused to grant him access to the book he knew they had, no matter what he offered.

She’d even tried to revoke his access, once she’d realized what he was looking for.

The short sighted fool. He’d gotten an explanation of what would be available, and he’d made a request for all fights within holds. It was an innocuous enough set of memories that, while valuable, didn’t get too much scrutiny.

Humans were weak and flawed, but they were better than the other alternatives, if only just.

Animals were filthy and stupid.

Even magical beasts lacked the wisdom to focus on anything beyond their small corner of reality.

Insects were worse.

Plants, while not inherently objectionable, were inefficient and lacking in impetus.

But automata… these are perfect, they could be our next step.

They required a fount to work, and most humans had just that.

Imagine what we could do if we all had such perfect, everlasting vessels?

Hunger would obviously be eliminated, the best researchers would have unlimited time to continue their work and no distractions pulling them away from their progress.

“I just need to figure this out.”

He relived every strike the brute landed, recording every scrap the fell from the magnificent creations, and tracking back where it had come from.

This was at least his hundredth time he’d stepped through, and before him was a stack of massive papers that together was a nearly complete schema for the basic creations.

“Those fools in the Constructionist Guild don’t know what they’re missing. These shouldn’t be forbidden. No tool is universally evil. It is only how it is used that makes it good or bad.”

Harcraes ignored the fact that automata had never been used for good, despite dozens of confirmed attempts, and hundreds of lost outposts which had likely fallen to the automata-related research they were working on.

“They just didn’t do it right. I can make it work.”

He would use his own gate as the power source, while it remained within his chest. He would keep his physical body, at least for now, but he could power an army of automata, all enslaved and beholden to him.

“I will prove it works, then we can start the migration.”

Even so, he wasn’t a fool. He’d build in failsafes in case he was discovered before he could perfect the design. After all, nothing ever worked exactly as expected the first time.

Less than three weeks later, Harcraes’ body lay in a growing pool of his own blood, a hole through the center of his chest.

His life was gone, his soul had passed on, his gate was now closed.

Over him, an automaton soldier stood, holding the man’s heart. “Ah, I see it now. His gate wasn’t physical. That was an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

The inhuman head lowered in what almost seemed to be regret, but its eyes focused on the cooling corpse on the floor.

“Your explanation was flawed, much like your nature.” The voice had just a hint of accusation, even as it faded near the end.

With no more power to be had, the creation slowly powered down, its self-destruction scripts using the last vestiges of power to turn the humanoid shape into nothing more than a pile of dust.

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