Millennial Mage

Chapter 430: Next Steps

Tala almost snapped at the woman as she told Tala to lift her arms above her head again.

Instead, Tala did as requested as she was swarmed by Constructionist assistants, poking and prodding her even through her armor. Because, yes, these were the armor experts that Master Grediv had arranged to help her improve her armor’s utility.

Off to the side, they’d had her create plates of material in the same manner and of the same composition as her armor with the hexagons of iron and white steel for unit testing before they could assess the best way to utilize the ablative protection.

The four Refined who were in charge of the process got a much fuller picture of what she was capable of doing, and they were workshopping various ideas in conjunction with the information they were collecting.

As a whole, they were in a valley off to one side of Irondale, in a place that would be hard for the citizens of the growing town to actually reach.

Why there? Well, they wanted a place to work that they could come and go from with ease, and while the Constructionist Guild could have worked, that would have been problematic. After all, Tala’s iron couldn’t really leave her presence. Kit seemed to be an exception to that, given that the dimensional storage was soulbound to her. Thus, this was where they had to do the work, unless Tala was going to remain with them for the totality.

Master Grediv was correct, my iron can stay outside of my aura, so long as it is unquestionably under my authority still. Irondale wasn’t really that much of a stretch, but it was a good first step.

That aside, the presence of ten Mages in the area was slightly straining on Kit, but not in any long-term, meaningful way, and they were hardly the only Mages within Irondale at the moment.

In another part of dimensionality, some Constructionists were setting up various pieces of wall to demonstrate features of the interlocking battlements to Tala so that they could begin creating her set. They apparently had a nice suite of sample units that they rolled out whenever an Archon was ready to design their own defensive system.

She would drop through to make her selections for the first draft after they were done with analyzing the armor while she was wearing it.

The armor and wall groups each had an ingot of white steel to test and work with as well. Additionally, yet another group of Constructionists had received a couple of ingots of her white steel to experiment with outside of any specific goal or aim, unlike the wall and armor groups.

Tala had already given white steel baubles to Adrill, Brandon, Kedva, and Talax.

Talax had mainly slept through the receiving of his gift. Though he had opened his eyes to give a confused little glare at the touch of the cool metal before it warmed up to match his temperature. The little bracelet had been fashioned around his wrist through a simple act of will and magic. Tala had made it loose enough that it wouldn’t be restrictive while being tight enough to not twist or easily catch on anything.

Adrill had already made the fun discovery that even outside of Irondale or Tala’s sanctum—once he’d fully bled off all the increased magical power—he could still manipulate the white steel. Though it was much more difficult.

Tala bent to the side in a stretch, obeying the next request, allowing them to take measurements and observe how the armor compressed, shifted, and stretched.

This was entirely Tala’s fault, of course. She didn’t use traditional plates or other standard means of armor construction. Instead, she somewhat actively forced the armor to remold and move with her, causing it to be far closer to a part of her body than even magical exoskeletons usually were. It was reasonable that she hadn’t actually used one of those as a basis to work from. They were rare, expensive marvels of Constructionist engineering, and Tala hadn’t actually ever seen one in action.

While she knew what she was doing was important, she really wanted to go test her ideas for her breath weapon.

Toward that end, she entertained herself by controlling her breathing and directing each breath in a different manner as Master Doitean had taught her, using her threefold sight to observe the different ways that her lip, jaw, tongue, speed of exhale, and myriad other factors affected the shape and distribution of the air after it left her.

Nothing came of all the analysis of her armor that day, and honestly, Tala was glad for that. She would have been irked if they simply gave her platitudes and generic advice. Instead, they had gotten a holistic view of what she could do and were working that all in together.

The only true disappointment through the armor analysis came when she had tried to absorb one of the ‘infinite needles’ into her elk leathers; it hadn’t been able to work. Tala had felt that she could absorb it if she broke the working on it, but then the working would be broken, so that wasn’t useful.

With the armor portion of her day completed in the morning, she swung by the wall displays, ran a few tests and selected the features that caught her attention. They, too, had some questions about her particular abilities, and asked for permission to incorporate some elements into the first test sections of wall.

She agreed and, with that done, she went to the outer edge of Alefast for her breath weapon test.

On the way, she opened her sanctum, and invited Terry to come out and witness her test.

The avian flickered out to perch on her shoulder before trilling and headbutting her cheek.

She found an out of the way tower, which lay between the two units currently on duty to either side of her. It was also near where she and her unit would be on that night. That way, she was already basically where she needed to be, and she had time to play with.

Rane was engaging in a back and forth with Mistress Holly through the Archive at the moment. He’d likely be doing that all day, as his inscriptions were getting a marked upgrade. Tala would have had to be doing the same, but Alat was doing that for Tala. Thus, she had a moment to herself.

Alright, let’s do this.

Deep within her sanctum, she formed a hollow sphere within the bedrock, reinforcing and hardening the stone around the spherical cavity.

Then, with an act of will, she packed as much air into it as possible, increasing the air pressure within.

Once it was to a healthy level, Tala hopped a couple of times in place, feeling some nervous energy. Terry gripped on tightly as she did so, but otherwise didn’t react to the movement.

-Come on, Tala. No need to be nervous. Let’s do this.-

She opened her mouth to a comfortable degree, then opened a hole into the center of the sphere of compressed air that she had made within her sanctum, putting the exit from Kit within her mouth, pointing outward.

That would have been embarrassing if I’d pointed it inward on accident.

The instant that it opened, air rushed out, but it wasn’t a steady stream as she had hoped. Well, it was initially, but almost instantly, the air became choppy, buffeting the inside of her mouth so much that it actually dislocated her jaw, but that was a blessing in disguise.

She almost reflexively closed her mouth to stop the flow, but that might have caused all sorts of horrible things.

As the opening was fixed in space, she wasn’t blown backward by the force of the exit. Still, it felt like someone had punched her teeth from the inside.

Terry squawked, flickering away to a nearby perch on the crenellations.

Tala let out a whimpering screech, even as the torrent came to an end, only having lasted for a second or so before the pressure equalized. She closed the opening and staggered to a seat against the crenellations of the tower.

-Well… that seemed painful.-

Tala reached up and forced her own jaw back into place with a sickening pop. She worked it back and forth, scraping her tongue against her teeth as if trying to get a bad taste to go away. “Yeah… that wasn’t great.”

Still, Tala was nothing if not stubborn. So, it was time for iterative tests, a lot of iterative tests.

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Terry regarded her critically, and she looked back at him with a raised eyebrow. “You wanted to see something destructive, didn’t you.”

He bobbed a nod.

“Not destructive to me, though.”

He bobbed again.

“Shall I call you back out when I think I have it worked out?”

Terry seemed to consider, then shook himself. He then flickered to the far side of the tower where he curled up and laid his head upon his wing, eyes fixed on her.

She smiled. “Alright, then. Time to figure this out.”

She was still on the tower at sunset, but she had a workable starting place, now.

Most of the bottom of her sanctum had been reworked, with her artificial lung now entirely made of the edge of reality, only connected to the bottom of the sanctum by a long cylinder, capped by a hardened and reinforced circle of bedrock. Above that, was solid bedrock all the way up to the surface.

It was at that circle of bedrock where Tala made her portal out, rather than in the middle of the compressed air. That had been the first—and most obvious—revelation. Having the exit on the side and at the end of a perfect cylindrical tube smoothed out the flow of air and removed basically all the choppiness which had so hurt her jaw and teeth.

The space was sized to give her a relatively consistent ‘exhale’ for up to three seconds or so. For ease, she also kept her own magical density out of the air within, as it wasn’t needed, and it would be wasteful of the resource.

Even though it wasn’t that large, she didn’t want to fill it from the air in her sanctum, because of how much air that it would take with multiple iterations. Though, she still could at need. Thus, the only practical way for her to refill it was to open a portal into it and draw in air through the opening. Thankfully, that didn’t have to be through her mouth. So, her ‘inhale’ could be pulled through basically anywhere within her aura.

Through the testing process, she also perfected where in her own mouth to open the release portal, playing with the shape of that portal as much as she did with her tongue, lips, and jaw.

At one point, she found the right combination of shapes to create the resonance of a truly sonorous whistle, though much lower in tone than she could otherwise have created.

-Yeah, I’m not sure what we’ll use that for, but it’s interesting to have in our back pocket.-

Indeed.

The long exit tube also aligned the air’s momentum to such an extent that it held together much more coherently than Tala had expected, and it was long at nearly a hundred feet, even if it wasn’t much bigger than an inch in diameter. Once she took the next step to add magic into the air, it could be devastating.

Toward that end, Tala began playing with her iron-tube spell-forms, trying to mimic the endingberry seed dissolution magic.

It was a spellform that she knew incredibly well, given that she was utterly pervaded with its inverse. She’d also impressed that inverse into natural magics of two others in the last year or so, giving her an even better than usual understanding of the basic and interconnected forms.

In that vein, it took her less than two hours to get the basic spellworking transposed into the new medium—iron—and material—magical power.

Then, with glee, she iterated it in linked chains around the entire outside of the artificial lung within her sanctum.

Now… how to get power to it… For the earlier practice, she’d had the spellshape in front of her, and she could simply touch the spellform to give it the magic that she needed it to have. Thankfully, she was stumped for less than a minute before an answer came to her. Oh! That’s easy.

She had often used her Way—void channels—to connect to and empower Flow when the weapon wasn’t in her hand.

Her soul was already bound to Kit—and therefore the entire sanctum. Thus, it was trivial for her to connect a series of void channels to the mesh of spellwork surrounding the artificial lung.

Power flowed through it almost lazily, slowly building up the dissolution energy in the already highly compressed air.

A bit too slowly, unfortunately.

It was almost time for her duty-shift, and she wanted to give this at least one test breath.

Come on, go faster.

-You could void channel the whole form, that’s made your inscriptions work more efficiently—and thus quicker—in the past.-

Hmmm. Tala considered for only a moment before shrugging. Good idea.

Thus, Tala filled her iron spellform with void channels laden with fast-flowing magic.

Something clicked deep below her sanctum in a way her magics never had before.

Terry lifted his head before flickering to his feet behind her, keeping his distance but clearly fully awake, aware, and oriented on her.

Tala’s eyes widened as she felt the power of dissolution magnify enormously every second to the point that the iron and very edge of existence within Kit felt like it was under threat.

What the Rust? She cut off her void channels and all power flowing to the spellforms, but the magic was still there, threatening to tear open a hole in her sanctum. It would also have dissolved the very air it was within were Alat and Tala not preventing that entirely through their will and authority.

-Get it out!-

Tala turned her head to look out over the wilderness, and opened the portal, not shaping her mouth for anything but a strictly straight line breath, the inscriptions in her mouth acting as they should to funnel the air and power, forcing a delay to the activation of the magics within.

Get out! Tala felt her will flexing, her very authority first within her sanctum, and then within her own mouth enforcing her desires.

There was an odd sound, like a giant snapping his fingers as the compressed air lanced out

Then, with a woosh, a blazing line of fire exploded outward, away from Tala, following the line of the continuing exhale, the very power of the explosion helping the expelled air move further, faster.

Tala’s threefold sight let her see the magic of dissolution hit the treeline an instant before the fire caught up.

The entire grove burst into flames, a vortex of flame roiling outward from the line of Tala’s breath to each side.

The roar of the flames consuming the trees almost instantly was tremendous.

No, the flames consumed the dust created by dissolution. She could see the dissolution rolling through the forest and turning everything to dust just in advance of the flames, pushed on by the heat and force of the continuous explosion.

A moment later, the artificial lung equalized, the magic was spent, and Tala closed off the release portal that had been in her mouth, having forced out the last bit of air after the equalization.

As she stared out at the spreading devastation—Guards and Defenders ran toward her position fearing an attack of some kind—Tala couldn’t help but break out into laughter.

Terry flickered to her shoulder, looking out at the resulting flames with slightly widened eyes. A moment later, he looked her way then trilled triumphantly at the skies.

Tala reached up and scratched his head and neck. “That’s right, Terry. I call this a success, even if it needs perfecting.”

Fortuitously, Master Clevnis was the first to arrive at her side on the tower-top. “Mistress Tala? What happened? What’s so funny?”

Tala pointed at the practical wall of fire that was slowly shrinking as it spread outward in a rough cone away from her. “I’d like to see the sireling defend against that.”

She continued to cackle, realizing that the entire thing had been accomplished without inscriptions. Maybe the Anatalins have something to their prohibition after all. If I’d tried to do this with inscriptions, it would never have worked even half as well.

Her unit leader cleared his throat, bringing her back to the moment. “So, was there an enemy?”

“No. I was just testing something.” She hesitated, realizing what he meant. “Oh… I apologize, Master Clevnis. I did not expect the results to be so… flashy.”

He shook his head and huffed a laugh. “It’s fine.” His eyes unfocused for a moment before he nodded. “There, I’ve notified the requisite folks that there is not actually an attack underway.”

Tala saw most of those running her way seem to slow and check various means of receiving messages before many seemed to simply turn around to go back to their post.

Some still came toward the areas of the wall on either side of the tower where she and Master Clevnis were, looking out at the results of her attack.

Honestly, it was less impressive than it appeared. The trees that had been destroyed weren’t strictly magical, and thus hadn’t resisted the dissolution as well as even a mundane human would have. It really was amazing how much a soul and a will insulated one to magical manipulation.

Humans in the path would still have died, but it would have been less… pervasive.

His messages sent, Master Clevnis leaned against the crenellations and regarded Tala. “Flashy is a good word for it. That was quite the flash-fire.”

“Indeed.” She nodded. Beyond the wall, the dissolution seemed to have finally spread out and expended enough of itself that it couldn’t continue its work of feeding the fire. The fire hadn’t remained long enough to heat up the surroundings sufficiently for a sustained burn. The early spring vegetation also wasn’t that prone to burn. Tala was thankful for that, otherwise she might have kicked off a rather large wildfire.

“So, do you want to talk through what that was?”

She hesitated for a moment then shrugged. “Sure, I’d love to get your thoughts, even if it isn’t your area of study.”

He nodded, then waved his hand, only then did Mistress Cerna come over from her place near the stairs up from the lower floors of the tower, some dozen yards away. She’d been waiting there to create space in case there was an issue or opponent that needed to be addressed.

They should be safe on the wall even if an attack had been underway, but that was still no reason to arrogantly put three Defenders right beside one another and open them to being taken down with a single well aimed, powerful strike.

She gave Tala a smile as she joined her husband. At the same time some of those who had been drawn by the light-show and explosion came up to the tower-top before seeing the Defenders and retreating back down the stairs.

Mistress Cerna gave a smile and nod to Terry. “Greetings, Terry.” Then she tilted her head toward the results of Tala’s breath-weapon. “So, Mistress Tala. What fun new thing did you figure out?”

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