Magic is Programming

The greatest threat seemed dealt with for now, busy with his aerial duel with Esmorana, but by the same token she was busy dealing with him. Her tornado had dissipated, leaving eight other enemies on the ground now free to move. Two more had fallen from the sky when the winds ceased supporting them, but their bone-breaking collision with the ground shook loose their already-tenuous hold on life. In the center of the newly created clearing, four armored figures quickly lowered the closed metal box they held to the ground and released it. Four others, scattered amid splintered tree stumps and other debris, cautiously raised their heads to look around.

Two of the enemies rising to their feet suddenly jerked and collapsed, sporting daggers in the eye slits of their helmets. The daggers flew back to their wielder, and Carlos belatedly noticed the presence of Haftel just outside the clearing, and Noralt beside him. He'd been perhaps a bit excessively focused on watching out for enemies and dangers, not allies. He couldn't spot Sconter even with mana sense, though. Then again, Sconter seemed to have stealth abilities, and stealth would have to hide from mana sense to really be good in this world.

While Carlos was considering that, a piercing whistle sounded, and the two remaining enemies who'd been lying flat quickly stood up and raced to join the group of four in front of the metal box. At the same time, Noralt stepped forward into the debris-littered clearing. Her stout frame was completely encased in hard steel, she held a shield on her left arm taller than she was, and she wielded an even larger hammer in her right hand. She left deep footprints as she charged forward, shield in front and her enormous hammer extended to the side.

Thunder crashed from overhead again as the two enemies on the fringe of their formation moved forward to meet Noralt's charge, and Carlos glanced upward. Three spinning discs of Esmorana's mana flew in erratic loops, their edges razor thin and pulling tightly compressed air in a fast circle to form a deadly cutting edge. The discs came from widely separate angles and shot towards the crackling web of electricity that surrounded her opponent, while two more discs of air were forming on either side of Esmorana herself.

Carlos looked down again just in time to see Noralt's hammer swinging forward. Her target gave an impression of immovable solidity and strength to Carlos's mana sense, and the man clearly had great confidence in the shield he braced in the path of the swinging hammerhead. Noralt's mana was projected just slightly ahead of the hammer, and an instant before hammer and shield collided, her mana snapped forward and connected with the shield, fastening onto it. The hammer passed cleanly through the shield, leaving a hammer-shaped hole in it as though traced and cut out of the shield's steel, and slammed into the man's chest.

The man stumbled, and stared in shock at the gaping hole Noralt's hammer left in his chest piece as she pulled it back. To his credit, he hadn't been moved by the mighty blow, but several broken ribs jutted out from torn skin, and blood flowed freely. He was clearly dead, his chest caved in, his body just hadn't quite realized it yet.

Noralt withdrew her hammer from her first target, two new layers of metal taken from shield and armor coming with it as though shrink-wrapped onto it, and deftly swung it again as quickly and easily as if it were a child's toy instead of a 6-foot long monstrosity of a weapon. Her second target barely had time to begin reacting, trying too late and too clumsily to dodge instead of block, before her hammer acquired two more new layers and caved in his chest just like his comrade's.

She kept charging forward, passing between them, hammer raised and swinging once more. The foe at the head of the formation of four in front of her braced for impact, and this time Noralt's hammer bounced. Her third target had infused their own mana into their armor and shield, and her mana couldn't get a grip on it. Carlos wasn't sure whether this surprised her or not, but either way she swiftly adjusted to the new development, smoothly interposing her shield to block a counterstrike from the large sword in her opponent's other hand.

Amber mumbled right next to Carlos, and some of her mana flicked out into the sky, but failed to take hold on the man who was throwing yet another lightning bolt at Esmorana. Right, that was probably their most dangerous enemy here, and pulling him out of the sky would be a lot more useful than just watching. Carlos activated one of his own prepared levitation spells, making sure to focus on adjusting the force to pull downwards strongly, but the spell just fizzled out completely before it could even try to apply any force at all. His target was somewhere around 20 levels higher than him, and that difference in power was too great for his spell to even connect without the target intentionally allowing it.

Carlos checked the ground battle's progress again, wondering if there might be an easier target. Maybe if he could help speed up beating the rest of these people, freeing up the other three adventurers to help Esmorana might be his best option. Noralt was exchanging blows with resounding clashes of metal on metal. Her opponent was strong, but she was stronger. Both of their weapons were moving so fast it seemed like it shouldn't be humanly possible, but in occasional moments of stillness Carlos could see that the enemy's sword had begun to bend slightly, and their shield looked increasingly battered and covered with dents.

As for the other three enemies, one was fending off an onslaught of daggers, one was running towards Haftel, and one was helping with the daggers but mainly focusing on watching out for attacks from behind them. The one running towards Haftel suddenly fell, his feet yanked out from under him by Sconter, who appeared out of nowhere without warning. Sconter produced an axe from somewhere, yanked on his target's helm to expose a slight gap on the neck, and chopped off the head with a precision strike, all in the blink of an eye. An instant later a dagger flew just over the newest corpse to join four others in seeking and stabbing at weak points in the armor of the remaining three ground-bound enemies, replacing a dagger that had just been snatched out of the air and stuffed into a container.

Carlos glanced at Amber and saw she was looking back at him. They shared a look for a moment, nodded, and turned as one to look back up into the sky. The ground fight would be over soon anyway, but they didn't know if anyone but them and Esmorana could even reach an opponent who was flying over a hundred feet up in the sky. He tried another levitation spell, but it failed to even connect again. The spell needed more mana to overcome the inherent resistance of the target's own mana. Well, this spell had a way to get that. Carlos chose a random broken tree stump for an initial target that wouldn't resist, and activated another prepared copy of his buggy levitation spell. The spell took hold, and the stump creaked and cracked a bit further as he dropped the "lifting" force far into the negatives to shove that stump hard into the dirt.

He let the spell just stay there and accumulate mana for a little while, and looked up to see how the fight was going. The last flash of lightning had been several seconds ago, longer than usual. The man was standing in the air, holding his right hand up to the sky above, and directing a forked chain of lightning with his left hand that was somehow holding off Esmorana's spinning discs of air. Even higher above in the cloudless sky, something was distantly charging up. Carlos had only a second to wonder what it was before a brilliant column of lightning lanced down from above.

Esmorana was still dodging continuously, she'd never stopped moving since the moment Carlos had first warned her to dodge, but this time it didn't matter. Her opponent wasn't actually aiming anymore. A colossal voltage difference between sky and ground discharged in an instant, and the discharge found the path of least resistance and took that path at almost the speed of light. Esmorana's body was more conductive than the air around her, so the lightning sought her out on its own, and dodging was impossible.

A tree exploded below her, burning shards of wood and bark flying in all directions, but Carlos couldn't see it, blinded temporarily by the flash of light. He could barely hear the sound of the explosion mixed in with the thunder. He could sense Esmorana's soul in grievous distress, however, and he could sense the mana in her air discs dissipating. She wasn't dead, at least not yet, but she was falling and losing consciousness.

Grimly determined, Carlos changed his spell's target, using his mana sense to direct it at their lightning-wielding enemy. He felt Amber doing the same thing at the same time. Their spells strained hard, spending their illegitimately-gained mana at a profligate rate, but after a heart-stopping moment of uncertainty they successfully took hold. The mana fueling the spells continued draining at an incredible rate, being consumed rapidly to continue overcoming resistance, and Carlos desperately multiplied the levitation's negative magnitude again and again. Finally, it stabilized, mana being produced by exploiting the flaw in the system faster than the man's resistance depleted it.

The feeling of wrongness the system kept throwing at him was so strong it was difficult to ignore, but the spell was stable and the man was suddenly plummeting from the sky even faster than Esmorana. Carlos almost tried casting another levitation spell to stop her fall, but he didn't have enough mana left after casting Sight Gate to support a human body's weight for long. Amber hadn't cast Sight Gate, though. [Can you levitate Esmorana?]

[On it!] Amber muttered the spell activation, and Esmorana's descent abruptly slowed just above the tree tops.

Carlos left that issue to Amber, and focused on blinking the remaining spots out of his eyes, and maintaining the downward pull of his spell on the enemy. The man hit the ground, but much more softly than Carlos would have preferred. Two of the man's allies were still alive, but both were wounded and disabled. Haftel's daggers darted towards him, but he waved a hand dismissively and lines of lightning sprayed in all directions, one connecting to each dagger. The daggers all tumbled and fell, and a moment later they crackled again and new lines of electricity leaped from each dagger to the source of the mana that had been controlling them. Haftel yelped and spasmed, and dropped to the ground in an attempt to shield himself.

Another line had hit Noralt's hammer at the same time, but had no apparent effect on her. As Carlos watched, and strained to keep this man grounded, Sconter suddenly became visible behind the man, hastily backing off after dropping the weapon he'd tried to attack with, which had been zapped the moment it reached the constant crackling web that surrounded the man. Noralt stepped forward and swung her hammer, and the man jerked back, just out of reach. A torrent of lightning poured into Noralt's hammer and streamed all over her armor, but it drained into the ground without touching her underneath her armor.

Noralt stepped forward and swung again, but the man jerked back even farther and then began rising into the air once more. He had added an upward push that would normally be incredibly excessive to his simple resistance against the spell keeping him down. Before Noralt could reach him again he was twenty feet above her, and she reluctantly came to a halt below him, glaring upwards but unable to reach far enough to strike him.

Lorvan sighed and stepped forward. "It seems I am needed. Ordens, be ready to flee and report if my armor is disabled."

Carlos held out his right hand, gesturing Lorvan to stay back. "Not yet. I'm not finished yet." He almost snarled as he focused on amplifying the negative levitation even further. It wasn't as simple and easy as just choosing a more negative number, unfortunately. He had to conceptualize that number's connection to an amount of force, visualizing the strength of gravitic pull that should result from that number, and it was already strong enough that he was having some difficulty maintaining that visualization.

He'd been in a centrifuge before, at up to 3 or 4 gravities, and his visualization was already several times beyond that. The man should have been blacking out unconscious by now, if not for his mana resisting the spell. He needed to go farther than that. Maybe even to "human pancake" levels of force, either counting on the man's resistance to reduce it to something survivable, or just accepting that this might end in death.

Carlos tried to imagine a downward pull so strong that it would not only hold someone to the ground, unable to even crawl, but start crushing them to death like a hydraulic press. The image that came to mind was uncomfortably grisly, filled with blood, bones, and gore, but he embraced it and tried to imagine even the gore being smashed flat by its own weight. It felt so very wrong, in more ways than just the incantation system complaining at him, but he determinedly pushed through.

He sensed the man beginning to actually struggle to stay airborne, and amped up his visualization even more. For a moment something seemed to flicker around him, but Carlos dismissed the distraction and focused his concentration.

"Uh, what?" Ordens shook her head uncertainly. "Gear's not reporting anything, but even I'm feeling something wrong here."

Carlos had closed his eyes to better focus on imagining even higher gravities. Suddenly the feeling of wrongness seemed to recede into the distance; still just as strong, or even stronger, but not so close at hand. He shook his head. He'd figure that out later. He sensed the man's soul drop to ground level, finally, and Noralt leaped on top of him. Carlos opened his eyes to see Noralt wrapping her arms and legs around the grounded man, electricity glancing uselessly off of her metal armor, and released the spell with a gasp. The man jerked upward with the sudden release of force, but quickly stopped and settled back to the ground with Noralt inescapably grappling him.

Ordens stared at Carlos. "That… was not the sabotage. What did you do?"

Carlos turned to look at her, and belatedly realized the force bubble protecting him was gone. The spell maintaining it had just sort of… fallen apart. He frowned. "Just a moment." He experimentally tried activating another levitation spell. He felt the pieces of it trying to come together, but something was missing, and it failed to form. He considered how the feeling of wrongness seemed to be coming from a distance now, and shivered. He was pretty sure he knew the source of that "free" mana now, and it was in truth not free at all.

He shook his head as he realized the extent to which his guards' equipment wasn't functioning right now. All of the enchantments on it relied on the same incantations system that his own spells did, and that system itself wasn't working in the nearby area. "Something dangerous." He sighed. "I did something that I should never repeat if I have any other option, and should never teach, lest someone else uses it unwisely. I didn't know how bad the side effects would be. Your equipment should work again once we leave this place, I think, but I honestly don't know whether the effects here will fade." The incantation system still existed, or the feeling of wrongness would have disappeared entirely instead of becoming distant, but he had drained its power from the local area, and he didn't know if the system could repair itself from that.

Carlos took a deep breath and stood up. "For now, I think it's time to take some prisoners."