Chapter 785 – Issues of Scale

The issue of the magical world is itself and its own theories. It is almost prophetic, how this happens, for the magical world relies on methodology to train, and yet that methodology then becomes a limit. It is akin to a woodsman felling trees to build his cabin, yet the moment he lets go of the axe, he has set the extent of his chopping and will never pick it up again.

Theories breed habit, habit becomes subconscious, and magic is all about the manipulation of the mind. Yet to teach magic, a method is needed. Wilders and self-trained mages are universally a skill above academy mages, yet the most common way to encounter such a fellow is to be part of the clean-up crew that goes to see whether any identifiable parts remain of the body once he inevitably self immolates, self implodes, self explodes or self castrates and then takes his life in shame.

I believe magic is limitless, for the mind is limitless. To be threatened by advance is to acknowledge there is a material limit that one cannot surpass. Yet to rely on old wisdoms is to chain oneself to tradition. A career magician will preserve the ashes of ancestor-genius without ever trying to light the flame, and very well frankly! For most magicians are not capable of straying down the path of self-actualization.

Ultimately, it is this crude, mathematical, scientific refinement mindset that has fully annihilated magical development in the world. Worldbreaking remains the greatest show of magic by human hands, it has only recently been surpassed by Continent Cracking and that was wielded by a Goddess and not a human. The transmutation of Ashen Skies and their clearing was not new magic, it was a further conquest and submission to industry and technology.

Arcadia, in essence, has to serve as a research lab of originality. Every spell ever cast had a time when it was a step into the unknown. The ashes that have been carried for millennia need to be put down, and a flame has to be lit in their place.

- Excerpt from “On the State of the Modern Magical World”, co-written by Goddess Elassa, of Magic and Goddess Anassa, of Sorcery.

“What about…” Anassa began the sentence without finishing. Elassa turned to the woman as yet another paper was scrunched up before the Goddess of Magic decided to set it alight with a snap of her fingers. She did not even want to be looking at her own failures, frankly. It was embarrassing. “A lance?”

“Do you mean physical or magical?” Elassa asked said as she tore yet another piece of paper from her book, slammed it onto the middle of the table in the office, and then proceeded to scrawl the word lance in the very middle of it. Anassa swirled her wine and extended her other hand into the air, palm facing up, her fingers curled as if she was grabbing something.

“What do you think?” Anassa said. A peach blinked into existence in her grasp. Elassa stared at the fruit. It was from her own gardens, she could tell by the fatness and by the fact that Anassa was one of the laziest Divines on this world, she won’t have travelled far.

“I’m asking you, I know what a fucking lance is.” Elassa said, pointing to the peach with a single finger. “Are you not going to share that?” Anassa was about to bite into the fruit before sighing. She put it on the table and once again held her hand in the air again. The magical lamps in Elassa’s room which functioned as early warning sensors if anyone was casting nearby gave not a hint of reaction to the Goddess of Sorcery doing… whatever that trick was, Elassa had never worked it out. Another peach appeared as Elassa took the one Anassa set on the table. “How do you do that without tripping the lights?”

“I’m not casting anything.” Anassa said. “The peach is in my hand here and there. It’s not being moved.” Elassa sighed and went back to looking at the word lance on her paper, that, at least, she could work with. “A magical one.”

“It won’t work.” Elassa said. “Unless we raise the circle again.” A lance was the name for a beam, without just using a stupidly blunt word for beam. A battlemage that was a lancer would cut channels in the army through their magic.

“Then we raise it.” Anassa said.

“We’re working at a minimum of two hundred thousand magicians already.” Elassa said dryly. The multi-layer communion had been tested to five hundred. Not five hundred thousand, but five hundred individual magicians. It worked, that was the worst part. It worked like a dream, the amount of power that five hundred had been able to channel simultaneously had resulted in a new mountain in the Sassara. Today, the figure would be pushed up to a thousand, a pair of five hundreds, which themselves were built out of three more layers each.

A ritual totalling ten thousand should be able to have enough power that it be able to manipulate an entire continent on Arda. By twenty thousand, they were temporarily handing power that rivalled… nothing in fact, because it dwarfed every record that had been written down. “Ignore the number.” Anassa said. “That’s what I would do.”

“There’s a limit on how many we can put into space.” Elassa drew a line which would be the Second Arc at the top of her piece of paper, from one end to another, then a small circle at the bottom. That was Arda.

“Dad will solve it, he just needs the figure.” Anassa said. The plan earlier had been relying on Elassa going to space and channelling the magic herself. That could still be done, of course, but that was a last resort. How terrible that sword would be, or whether the Watchers would pull Elassa out mid-channelling to their room was too great a risk to take. It would have to be commanded by a human. “We channel a lance of mana, and then we drag it across the Second Arc.”

“You’re dragging…” Elassa drew the number, all digits included. 8 0 0 0 0. “That many kilometres, do you know how far that is? That’s hours of channelling.”

“Can your people not manage it?” Anassa asked.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about because Sorcerers don’t last that long either.” Elassa said and Anassa shut up, taking a bite of her peach, setting the wine glass down and picking out the seed with her fingers. She put the hard mass down on the table and Elassa stared at it. “You can bring peaches here but you don’t throw the seeds away? Does the sign on the door say bin?”

Anassa sighed, picked the seed up, held it for two seconds, and then it simply stopped existing. “There.” Anassa said. “I’ve thrown it into your garden.” Through the window to Elassa’s room, there was another cheer, although those were getting subdued and tired now. Elassa leaned from the table, her mind still concentrated on this impossible problem. Another floating island was being launched. The ground rumbled, mountains shook, and the valley in northern Arcadia that once served as a training field now grew larger by another lake-sized amount of earth being ripped out of the ground.

“A lance won’t work because it’s too expensive and puts too much strain on the caster.” Elassa said idly as she watched that floating island. It was amazing, and what was more amazing was that such a massive of earth could be pulled out of the ground and Arascus could suck the magic out of it. There was a whole pipeline set up, a chain of islands, five should be in the air right now. They were all flying to Doschia and Northern Rilia, where engineers were building spacebases on them. Then, they would go on a test, up to give a kiss to the edge of the atmosphere and back down. “We’d burn the caster in a matter of what?”

“A communion still hands the control over.” Anassa took another bite of the peach. That was true, communion magic was useful because a mage that could struggle to control a fireball would have the control of the magic transferred to him.

“It’s just about the flow, which is what I worry about.” Elassa said as that floating island blocked out the sun. This time, Elassa didn’t flick the lightswitch, the pair of Goddesses sat in darkness. “Realistically, how much flow can a person take?”

“I don’t know. Unlimited?” Anassa said. Stupid answer from a stupid woman, although Elassa knew she was the stupid one for asking in the first place.

“It’s not something I’m willing to test.”

“What about a catalyst bomb then?” Anassa said. “We could collect the diamonds, from the Sassara. There’s more than enough there.” Elassa turned back around. Now that was the sort of the out-of-the-box thinking that Anassa should have had from the start. A catalyst bomb should work, functionally, there was nothing difficult about it. The one hard part would be throwing and embedding them into the Second Arc. She looked down at her piece of paper, crossed out lance and put catalyst bomb underneath.

And then she started at the scale. “How many?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Anassa said. “And how destructive would they be in the first place?” She tapped her finger. “And what do we if one catalyst bomb destroys another one and wipes it from existence before it explodes?” Elassa crossed out catalyst bomb. “There is teaching them something akin to Worldbreaking.” Anassa said.

“That’s what I keep going back to but we’d have to get closer.” Elassa said. She sighed, theoretically, that could be done too. “What about your reality erasing then? We channel into a sorcerer instead of a magician?”

Anassa pursed her lips. “I have those four that actually know how to commune.”

“You don’t teach your people magic?”

“Is there a point to it?” Stupid answer by a stupid woman, although Elassa internally kicked herself for being the truly stupid one and even bothering to ask it. “It could work, theoretically, I think.”

“You think?” Elassa asked.

“Well I could do it but I have a curse. I don’t know, none of them focus on straight reality erasure.” Anassa shrugged. “I mean, it’s not a discipline in the first place, it’s just something you…” She snapped her fingers and a butterfly materialized out of crimson energies blew its little wings from her palm. “How do I do that? Subconsciously, I know how but I can’t write you a manual on creating butterflies.” Elassa leaned back and sighed, taking a sip of the wine and following it up with some of the peach.

“That, I actually understand.” Magic had the same problem. The textbooks were good, but most magicians would never become great because they stayed to the textbooks and nothing else. Elassa had proven that magic could crack and move a continent and even now, she had heard there were certain sects of magicians in the Empire that were trying to distil that level of power into diagram. The truth was that there had been no method to it, it was magic for magic’s sake. Elassa called upon everything she could and she moved a continent. “So reality erasure is out then.”

“Well I could teach them, somewhat.” Anassa said. “But it is a case of imagination. How do you explain nothing? Just flat null to someone? And then overwriting something with that null?” Anassa raised an eyebrow as if she expected an answer back.

“I don’t know, throw them into Irinika?” Elassa said. “So we have to physically smash it then.” She followed up, they were not going to be teaching the meaning of nothing to people. Some things were instinctual.

“The worst case scenario.” Anassa said. “What about summoning an elemental?” Elassa replied to that idea with a flat glare. There was nothing to say about that stupidity, they were not going to be granting life to a creature that was supposed to be larger than Arda, even if that creature would burn out eventually. Elassa looked down at the sheet of paper, then began to fold it up.

The Goddess of Magic made a small little roll of paper as the sun returned. The island outside floated away, the mages working on activating the next one got to work. And Elassa set the paper down. “The issues are range, one.” Elassa said. “And scale, two.”

“And power, three.” Anassa said.

“And power, three.” Elassa confirmed. That wasn’t a hill worth dying on. “How would you destroy this? And think in scale, pretend you’re as tiny as the tip of my pen.”

“With magic or with sorcery?” Anassa said.

“Either or.”

“With magic, I would set fire to it.” Anassa said. Even she knew that was a stupid answer, she at least had the decency to not go on. They were not going to be igniting a world’s worth of stone and metal and whatever else Tartarus was made out of. “With sorcery.” Anassa snapped the remains of her peach in half and shrugged. “I have no clue. That is huge.”

“I know.” Elassa said. They were going in circles frankly. So they may as well restart. “Alright, then we go again. Range, we need to hit it from a distance. A lance, you can’t drag that far.”

“What if we scale it up?” Anassa said. Elassa blinked, her mouth opened, then closed.

“You mean a beam with a diameter of eighty thousand kilometres?” Elassa said dryly. “With what power? The sun’s?” Even that wouldn’t be enough. The calculations were… billions? Tens of? They simply did not have that many magicians. “So without that, we still need to solve the range solution, that’s the big one.” They had no sensor on the Second Arc’s predicted gravity and no tell either. Even the models that came everyday from the Imperial Universities didn’t know what to make of a structure that was so long and thin and… And was a structure, not a planet. They didn’t even know what it made out of. It could be hollow, it could be all solid rock. Maybe it was just a giant hunk of refined metal even? Who knew.

Anassa leaned back and tossed the last part of her peach into her mouth. “What about a tighter shot then? Only Arda’s size, only destroy the middle and carve out enough space for us to fly through?”

“I was thinking that but then you have the problem of the other two pieces.” Elassa said. “What if they bend?” She put her finger into the middle of her roll of paper and squashed it down. The ends stood up as if they were a claw trying to snap at her hand. “Like that basically?”

“Mmh.” Anassa said. “So it all has to go.”

“To manageable levels.” Elassa said. “Arascus said a star shower is fine, if we can rip it to pieces, then it will be fine.” Anassa raised an eyebrow.

“That’s my sort of idea, not yours.”

Elassa had to sigh. What sort of fucking comment was that even? “Why exactly?”

“I assume that Dad said if they burn up in the atmosphere, then it’s mission success. What won’t be in the atmosphere?” Elassa thought for a moment and then realised what Anassa was talking about. The woman had a point. Even if they protected Arda, then the floating islands in space would still be torn apart. That level of loss would annihilate the magical world for a century.

“So they need to be equipped with defensive shielding.” Elassa said. “I’ll make a note on it to Arascus.”

“Why?” Anassa said. “Are you thinking of a cracking spell?”

“I am.” Elassa said. “Some chain reaction, it’d have to be probed first but the magic itself wouldn’t be complicated.”

“Too complicated in the firing sequence.” Anassa said, shaking her head. “And you don’t know if it’s one material. You set it to break metal and then you hit stone and what?”

“You should have been an enchantress.” Elassa mumbled under her breath, Anassa was fucking correct once again. A rupture spell would fail the moment it met something that wasn’t in the list of things it could rupture. It had been designed that way at first, the mage who wrote the books theorized of rupturing reality and never even gave a hint on how to do it. Frankly, Elassa didn’t even want to know.

“That’s low even for you.” Anassa said.

“Whatever.” Elassa mumbled back. “What if we hit it multiple times then?” Anassa closed her eyes, opened them, released a deep breath.

“Why are we trying to do it in one shot again?” She asked.

“I don’t know.” Elassa said. “You’re coming up with the ideas, aren’t you?”

“Yours aren’t any better.” Anassa said. “But what if we hit it multiple times?” Elassa leaned back on the table as she stared at the woman who was once her prodigy. They were both idiots here. Kassandora or Arascus or Fortia would have come up with this solution after ten minutes.

“But actually, is there anything stopping us from doing that?” Elassa said.

“No?” Anassa replied. “Are you thinking sequentially or simultaneously?” Elassa’s eyes grew wide. Why wasn’t she thinking of it simultaneously in the first place? Her original idea had been just to hammer it over and over again with whatever they could conjure but this?

“Why has Arascus got us working on one world ritual?”

“I don’t know.” Anassa said. “He rang me today to say that he still wants the plans.”

“Well I can’t have plans for a ritual circle where I don’t know what I’m casting, can I!?” Elassa barked back. She took a deep breath, refilled her cup with wine and then took a sip to calm herself down. Then another. And a third for good measure. “What about a lance though?” Elassa asked.

“You’re talking about several lances, aren’t you?”

“Why not ten? Hundred thousand each?” She took her pen and began dabbing dots on the roll of paper. “Like that, pop, pop, pop, pop.” Each pop brought about a new dot as Elassa stabbed her pen into the paper. “You see it?” Elassa could see. It could work even. They solved the issue of dragging and long-duration channelling. The casters wouldn’t need to hold a flow for hours, they could do an instant. Maybe a second. A minute at the most and the casualty figures should still be low. And they could scale the actual ritual down.

“Why not a hundred then?” Anassa asked and Elassa turned to her. That was exactly the sort of question that needed to be asked. And Anassa was precisely the sort of person to ask it. Why limit yourself to just ten?

“Why not a hundred?”