Confessions of the Magpie Wizard Book 3: Dissolution (Chapter 39 & 40) (Patreon)

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Chapter 39

Nagoya, Japan

Monday, August 8th, 2050

I tried the door to room 3-B, but it didn’t budge. “Locked?” I was in the habit of going to homeroom early, but I had never beaten Mr. Maki there before.

I leaned against a nearby row of lockers and watched the other early birds pass by. I resorted to reviewing my notes to distract myself. I needed any escape I could get; I expected it would be an awkward day. Mariko had begged off meeting up with us in the gym, and Paul had been AWOL. I hadn’t told anybody what had happened Friday night. Not only to avoid a dreadful conversation, but for the sake of my cover. Nobody needed to know I’d been out in the woods in the dead of night. I hoped that Mariko had been Kiyo’s only confidante. We didn’t need Yukiko catching wind of it and mentioning our lapse to the headmaster.

More time passed, and there was still no sign of the Divine Blade. Further down the hall, I saw other groups waiting outside of the other classrooms. All of us students milled about awkwardly, even Ms. Yamada. I had half expected her not to show up. She was still in poor shape. The bags under her eyes made me think of Kiyo after an all-nighter. Something else was off, and it took me a moment to realize that she hadn’t braided her hair. I’d never seen her wear it loose before. If she didn’t seem so deflated, I might have called it a good look.

I wasn’t the only one who seemed to detect something was off. “Good morning, Mariko,” said Hiro brightly. “Did you do something different with your hair today?”

She forced a smile on her face and giggled playfully. “Oh, that? I didn’t feel like braiding it this morning. You shouldn’t pay me too much mind. What would Yukiko think?”

“She would think he was worried about a friend,” replied Yukiko. “You seem a little off today.”

Mariko clutched her bookbag to her chest. “There’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t worry about me.”

“You can say that all you like, but it won’t stop us from being concerned,” said Yukiko.

Mariko’s face fell. “Yukiko, it really isn’t any of your business. I just want to lay low and think about things.”

Yukiko straightened up and I saw a little of the old Yukiko’s imperiousness shine through. “I’m here for you, as your friend and your class representative. If you won’t tell me as the first, I might have to act as the second. We are all a team here, and we are only as strong as our weakest link.”

It amazed me sometimes how young Ms. Sato could mix the absolute right and wrong things to say all at once. You could see Mariko erect her emotional walls. “That’s what people care about, isn’t it? I’m just here to be a cog in the machine.” Mariko screwed her eyes shut and sighed. “Don’t you worry, Ms. Class Rep. My grades aren’t going to slip.”

Yukiko’s hand flew to her mouth. “Mariko, wait, I didn’t mean it like-”

Yukiko’s apology was cut off by a loud tone from the loudspeakers above. Headmaster Tachibana’s voice echoed through the halls. “Will all students please report to the main assembly hall for an announcement? I repeat, please report to the main assembly hall.”

“I suppose Mr. Maki didn’t just sleep in,” I said.

“I guess not,” said Hiro, concern written on his face.

Yukiko jumped into action gesturing towards the elevators. “Alright everyone, you heard the headmaster! Let’s get going!”

She looked triumphant as we all shuffled our way down the hall. They had ignored her orders before in the aftermath of the War Game incident. It seemed that patching things up with our circle had gotten the other students listening again.

I didn’t often see the whole student body in one place, and it surprised me that you could fit all of us in a small space. The school operated at partial capacity, since Tachibana had built it for future wizards who hadn’t been born yet. We were separated out by class, but it hardly seemed necessary. You could tell the second years apart on sight, since they wore their white and green cadet uniforms instead of our black and red civilian attire. There was a certain air about them, like a spring ready to release its pent-up energy. I remembered that they were about to graduate into the Wizard Corps service, and they probably thought they were about to go out and get some demon scalps. The poor fools.

Rose had snagged a seat next to me. “If all of the teachers were gone, this can’t be anything good. Do you think it’s the Holy Brotherhood again?”

“Couldn’t be,” I replied. I would hope they would inform me first.

The lights dimmed and a hush went over the theater. An enormous screen lowered itself from the ceiling, and a projector mounted high above came to life, as a stirring John Philip Sousa march blared over the speakers. It was Hands Across the Sea, if memory serves. Text in Japanese, English, and a script I didn’t recognize filled the screen. The part I could read declared in bold characters that the following was a presentation from the Anti-Demonic League Ministry of Public Education.

“Ah, good old-fashioned propaganda,” I whispered to Rose. She shushed me and I deigned to pay attention.

The music’s volume dipped to let a booming voice be heard. The camera, mounted on what I assumed was a flying drone, panned across the dim outline of a warship. “The Straits of Malacca, shortly after midnight on Saturday, the Eighth of August, 2050. As always, the USS Alabama forms part of the thin line between civilization and the barbarism of the Grim Horde. Because of their tireless efforts, the citizens of the island of Sumatra can sleep easy.”

I’ll give the Ministry of Public Education this, they knew how to edit. Between the announcer, the music and the camerawork, I found myself almost admiring the brave crew of the ship, and they hadn’t even done anything yet.

“Yet, in the nearby Malaysian Peninsula, the forces of darkness have gathered. Millions of orcs, goblins and devils work to man their boats, with one common goal.”

“To not get flogged by their superior officers,” I quipped at Rose.

That earned me a light smack on the arm. “That isn’t funny, Soren!”

“Sorry, sorry,” I said. I needed something to lighten the mood, since if I was right, Maggie’s message had gotten through to the right ears. I’d very nearly gone down in such a boat, and I didn’t like to remember that trip across the English Channel.

“Around 1 AM, the first wave of boats sets out. Filled with expendable goblins and kobolds, their objective is to clear the thousands of mines that fill the straights.” The drone swung about, its night vision camera momentarily blinded as the first crew of goblins met their fate. If Grand General Beez’s forces behaved like ours had, there would only be two or three of the lesser races per boat and, of course, no devils.

The crowd of students roared in approval. I joined in belatedly, not wanting to seem like the odd man out. I wondered how many of them thought to question the convenient camera drone. It was obviously a setup.

“Eventually, the first of the Horde Ships break through the minefield. Too bad for them that the Alabama is ready and waiting!” The main cannons of the destroyer lashed out, along with numerous lighter arms. “The primitive technology of the Horde is no match for human engineering knowhow!”

A moment into the barrage, the sky filled with energy barriers. Shells designed to destroy warships exploded harmlessly in midair. They looked like a Svalinn’s Mercy, though many times the size. The average devil has many times the magical reserves of a human wizard, so our spells tend to be grander in scale. We also didn’t have to pace ourselves like human wizards did. There were probably more lower-born devils bobbing around in those rowboats than all of the active duty wizards in the Corps.

The drone’s camera feed cut out and was replaced by video from a more distant camera with a telephoto lens. “Jamming fabricata are also deployed, rendering our electronics useless. As always, the cowardly Grim Horde has to get by on magic.” Funny, we always said the same thing about human technology. “Built on simpler, World War II era designs, the Alabama fights on, punishing the waves of enemy landers. Despite her crew’s gallantry, the Alabama is soon in danger of being overwhelmed.”

An enormous gash cleaved through the water, looking like the parting of the Red Sea. The resulting waves capsized dozens of boats, sending many unfortunate armor-clad soldiers beneath the waves. The camera zoomed in, showing Mr. Maki’s Sonic Blade wreathing his arm as he strode about the deck of the Alabama. The applause and hollering from the assembled Nagoya students was deafening, with Hiro cheering the loudest of them all. They nearly drowned out the next part. “However, the Wizard Corps is on hand to put an end to that!”

A flurry of images filled the screen in quick succession. A dozen propeller-powered bombers unleashed their payloads against the attacking vessels. Helicopters and transport planes flew in after them, and spell circles filled the air as human wizards cast counter-magic to weaken the devils’ defenses. The camera switched from a pale green night vision to regular light; between the explosions and the constant barrage of spell and counter spell, the moonlit night looked like high noon.

“For a hundred of kilometers across the strait, much the same story plays out.” More rapid images, all of them showing human triumph and demonic defeat. Dozens of fights had been spliced together. One unfortunate human ship found itself swarming in devils, but a powerful wind spell sent them all flying overboard.

Rose gripped my arm and pointed excitedly. “That’s the HMS Northampton! I bet that was Albert!”

“Yes, I imagine so,” I said in a shaky voice, gripping my other armrest tightly.

I’d wanted this, of course. Their deaths were necessary to save Father and get myself one step closer to home. I’d known the consequences of these political games. I simply hadn’t expected to be shown them in high definition. All I could think was that save for the capricious grace of Our Father Below, that could have been the Wizard Corps sending me to a watery grave.

“The fight continues for hours. Many brave sailors and soldiers give their lives in defense of humanity, but as the sun rises, the only monsters left in the Strait of Malacca are the sharks.” An image of a grey-skinned orc clinging to a piece of driftwood came up on the screen, and the students laughed as the poor brute was dragged underwater by a tiger shark. “And they’ll eat like kings for weeks.”

I heard a distressed cry to my left. Mariko had covered her face long before, and the students who noticed her shot her dirty looks. No wonder they thought she was a demonkin.

The footage found Mr. Maki again as he helped a wounded sailor onto a transport helicopter. They loved to use him for photo ops. “Remember what has been lost, but also remember that we will still win. Because-”

The feed buffered for a moment. At first I thought it was simply a technical glitch, but the buffering image coalesced into a familiar symbol of a demonic skull impaled by a sword.

“The Holy Brotherhood,” spat Hiro from the seat in front of me.

“I speak for the Holy Brotherhood of Mankind,” said the dour voice of Holy Brother Ratte “I will not keep you long. You are celebrating now, and you should. This is a great victory for the world, but it was not won cheaply.” New images flashed over the screen of enormous demonic spells devouring helicopters and of a burning vessel that was nearly the Alabama’stwin. “We lost five warships and dozens of aircraft. The League left that out of its report. You are the wizards of tomorrow. Why did they hide that from you?” More images of crashing airplanes and orcs swarming warships filled the screen. He waited a moment so that his words could have their intended impact. Distressed whispers from the students filled the room.

“They want you to think that the war is going well,” he continued. “It is not. The Corps won by the skin of their teeth, and only because of information provided by the Holy Brotherhood. Without our intelligence, the Horde would be marching into Medan as we speak. To the people of Sumatra, you are most welcome. Remember who will take the steps needed to save the world, while the League cowers in fear, imagining itself safe far from the front lines. The Holy Brotherhood is the spark that will burn down the Grim Horde. Join us, and become part of the solution! Humanity First!”

He certainly made a fine case! If I hadn’t already signed up, I would be asking about membership dues. I wondered if Ratte would have been so enthusiastic if he’d known the information came from a devil? I decided the Holy Brothers were more than willing to use our tools if it suited them, so I doubted he’d care much.

The feed cut back to the Wizard Corps’ film. “-ember, we’re in this together! Everything you can do, great and small, will save the day. Buy Wizard Corps Bonds! Reduce, reuse, recycle! Together, we will overcome!”

The lights came on and, far too late to matter, the hacked video stream ended. The good mood was completely dashed by the intrusion of the Holy Brotherhood, which was of course the intended effect. Confusion reigned, and an order from the Headmaster sent us back to our dorm rooms. We were told we were confined to our own rooms for our safety due to increased Brotherhood activity.

We walked in stunned silence until we reached the elevator. “They don’t want us talking about it,” said Rose, with a scowl.

“That’s the only way to stop their propaganda,” replied Yukiko. “Keep us from spreading it among ourselves.”

“It won’t help,” said Hiro. “You don’t stop lies with silence. You stop them with the truth.”

“What if they weren’t lying?” I asked. “If those were fake photos, they were awfully convincing.”

“They had to be,” said Hiro. “The Holy Brotherhood are monsters!”

“You were all just laughing at that orc while sharks ripped him to pieces,” said Mariko, looking physically ill. “We aren’t any better.”

Rose looked aghast. “Sure we are. We’re defending ourselves! They’re the invaders here! They deserve whatever comes to them.”

Mariko sighed. “Just forget it.”

“No, you don’t get to do that,” barked Rose. “If you really want to defend those demons, tell me why I should feel bad for them.”

“It was a thinking being.” said Mariko, gripping her hands together tightly.

“Yes, thinking about killing everyone in Sumatra! My brother was in the fighting there!” Her eyes widened in shock. “I don’t know what happened to him. I need to call home!”

I was grateful when we got to my floor. At first I’d hated the idea of being confined to my dorm room. However, if it meant getting away from that argument, I’d go gladly. Silence was safer. I didn’t dare give anything other than full-throated approval of the slaughter I’d just witnessed.

“Don’t worry, Soren,” said Hiro. “We’ll get those Holy Brothers someday. They can’t keep getting away with this.”

“Hopefully not,” I replied. Though, I hoped the day of reckoning would occur when I was safely back in Pandemonium.

Chapter 40

They say that idle hands are the devil’s playthings. I wondered what that made an idle devil’s hands. I had quite a bit of time to myself and not much to fill it.

After I got back to my room, most of my sources of amusement were shut out. When I tried to message Kiyo, I received a message saying that non-essential communications had been temporarily suspended to prevent the spread of inaccurate information. It was the same with our discussion boards and external social sites. The only thing I could access was online copies of the school library. It looked like Rose’s guess was completely right.

I made a note to myself to look into how that was done. If the school or the League could shut off our electronics like that, Maggie and I could almost certainly do the same. Kiyo had mentioned to me that everything one did online had a digital footprint, so I decided not to risk it being known that Soren Marlowe was searching anything questionable during a lockdown.

I needed to distract myself somehow, though. I couldn’t drink myself silly to block out the images of dead and dying demons, like I had back home. I also couldn’t focus well enough to tackle my homework just yet. I decided my room could use a good tidying.

While getting my laundry ready to go down the chute, I found my abused clothes from my fight with Haru. They still smelled of ash, but I had expected that. I wondered if I was better off destroying them, rather than raising questions about their sorry state. I decided I might as well; my rewards from the Headmaster could buy some new civilian clothes.

While fussing with the pants, I found something hard in the front pocket. My lingering terrors vanished as I realized I finally had a toy worth playing with. “Well, well, Maggie. You were so intent on chasing me out that you forgot your disguise fabricata!”

The long, wooden wand was notched with intricately carved runes. I focused my magic through the device and Junko Kazushi appeared in my bathroom mirror. I hadn’t ever had the chance to experiment with the magic when I wasn’t on a dangerous mission. Human disguise magic seemed to be one area where they were definitely ahead of us back home. We could pretty easily scramble our features, but the sort of picture perfect recreations that the Holy Brotherhood regularly employed were beyond us. What was their trick?

First, I had to check the limits of the disguise. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t been with Kiyo in so long, but my mind immediately went into the gutter.

“Hm, Maggie was right,” I said in a melodic voice. “They are just light projections. What a shame. She has a nice pair.”

I couldn’t even get a good look at ‘my’ body, since the disguise kept me clothed, even when I removed my uniform. I had feared as much, after the way that Maggie’s illusory hat had stayed in place. The disguise wasn’t useful for anything prurient, unless I could get Kiyo alone and do a little roleplay. That thought made me feel a little dirty when I grabbed the scarf she’d knitted me as a gift. It also vanished into the disguise. Evening tying it around my face like a bandana didn’t change the image in front of me, though my voice was muffled.

“It seems I can only look like an on-duty nurse. That’s a letdown.”

Speaking of my voice, I heard a different voice in my ears, but was that an illusion, or was the wand truly warping my words? There was only one way to find out. It took me a few tries, but I found a voice recording app on my smartphone.

“One, two, three, four.” I discarded that. For once, I didn’t have any feathers to ruffle. I decided I might as well have some fun. “Are you ready for your exam, Mr. Marlowe? Or, would you prefer to examine me first?”

The voice that played back over my phone was definitely female, and a good approximation of the ladies of the evening from back home. I deactivated the spell, since that voice was only sexy when attached to somebody besides me. If I didn’t think that Kiyo would be horribly offended and question the source of the wand, I might have tried to use it to spice up our next bit of alone time.

My tests had shown a few key details. Somehow, these runes contained not only an exact duplicate of Junko Kazushi, but also her voice. How in the world did they accomplish that? Many of the more complex human fabricta I had encountered looked like printed circuit boards, with minute runic patterns. This was a simple carved device. The wood was an excellent conductor of magical energy, and easy to carve, but there simply didn’t seem to be enough runes to contain the totality of the woman’s appearance.

It took me a while, but I recorded the hundreds of carved runes onto a sheet of paper. It was easy enough to see how the stanzas were grouped. Determining their function took longer. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d been so devoted to my actual schoolwork.

After a few hours of effort, I had decoded most of the stanzas. I wouldn’t have been able to create a spell that complex on my own, but I could get the gist of what they meant to accomplish. Some defined how far the projected energy would extend from the user’s body. Others worked to render any parts that extended past the disguise invisible. I recorded those for later, since if properly applied, they could give me an invisibility fabricata. I wondered if the humans had realized that. If they hadn’t, that was just another feather in my cap.

What I didn’t see any hint of was how the disguise was actually encoded. I turned the wand over and over, looking for the missing magical code. I wasn’t sure what I was after, since if I had missed the coded magic, they were absolutely microscopic. I hadn’t ever thought of how to express a human face and voice in runes before, but it would have required thousands of them.

I was about to give up when I discovered a small notch towards the base of the wand. I pulled down on it and a small spring ejected a piece of wood the size of my thumbnail. “There we are!” The outer edge was the same white oak as the rest of the wand, but covered in nearly microscopic runic circuitry. The wooden piece protected a piece of plastic that reminded me of the game cards in Kiyo’s GoSato. In fact, if I didn’t miss my guess…

Kiyo and I had cashed in some of the reward points the day before to get me my own GoSato and a small collection of games. I popped out the puzzle game I’d wasted much of the previous evening on and inserted the memory card. It was a perfect fit, but the game console told me the card was invalid.

I checked my phone, but it didn’t have any openings in it except the charging port. I struck paydirt on my school PC, though. I got a popup message asking me what I wanted to do with the files. I couldn’t begin to make an informed choice, so I selected the prompt to use the defaults. The computer opened up a music app and some 3D imaging software I had never touched before.

“A. E. I. O. U. Ka. Ki. Ku…” It sounded different coming out of the computer’s tinny speakers than from my own mouth, but that was definitely Nurse Kazushi’s voice. I closed the player, since the Japanese sounds were gibberish to me, and the translator didn’t see a way to localize them for me.

The 3D software was more interesting. I was presented with a perfect model of the nurse that I could rotate any way I liked. If I opened up the folder representing my new memory card, it was full of normal pictures of the nurse, taken from different angles. Somehow the software must have taken those disparate images and knitted them together.

I felt a sense of triumph at having solved the puzzle. It was a shame the Horde would never be able to replicate it, since we didn’t have computers, much less the right type of storage cards.

I, however, did have a computer. I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at in the folder, and I’d have to fiddle with the formatting, but I had the tools I needed to make my own disguise. Maggie hadn’t asked after the wand yet, and with any luck, she wouldn’t.

I almost cried out with joy. I’d found something I’d needed since landing in the human realms. A way to disappear. It didn’t solve my issues with transportation or money, but if I could get into one of the nearby cities, I could lay low indefinitely. I could even prepare more memory cards to give me more disguises.

I chuckled at the irony. Being locked down had set me free. It’s a strange world we live in.

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