The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (35 page)

“Then I would appreciate it if you keep it to yourself.”
Quewanak acknowledged.

“Six and Val and Karz already know ‘cause we’re still Linked, and I wasn’t blocking it when I realized it.”
Helemia told him. 
“But we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

“Thank you.”
Quewanak told her.

This exchange had only taken a fraction of a second, during which the green dragon had continued the audible conversation without pause or visible acknowledgement of the psionic one.

“Exercises will be conducted without prior announcement from now on, as they were tonight.” he announced.  “They will be at random times and at least once per week, with no more than three exercises in any given period of five days.”

“Now see here!” Sana exclaimed.  “Maybe it was good for our training to not know whether tonight’s exercise was real or not, but it scared the soul out of the children, and disrupted their sleep besides!  I can’t see how that’s good for anything, and if we do it repeatedly, it’s likely to harm their mental health and their development!”

“I agree.” Quewanak nodded.  “I’ll amend my plans.  From now on, all non-combatants will not perceive my simulated demons, and if they’re asleep when the exercise begins and you Translocate them to safety, I’ll re-direct their Translocations to leave them asleep in their beds.  You can then consider them to be outside the exercise and safe.  If they’re awake when the exercise begins, they’ll be informed that it’s only an exercise as they’re Translocated to the shelter.  I’ll work with Hilsith to ensure that none of the children is permanently affected by tonight’s events.

“However, there will be times when I will do everything I can to convince you combatants that the exercise is real.  That will include your not knowing if psionic contacts with the outside world are genuine or simulated by me, you will not be able to perceive any non-combatants who have been Translocated beyond Hiliani in the exercise, and if the exercise is held when the children are awake and they are Translocated to the shelter, you will not be able to perceive them.  And of course, on those occasions, some of the attacks that are no longer effective against the simulated demons will be effective again, to prevent my ruse from being revealed as it was tonight.

“I’ll leave you to discuss your performance amongst yourselves.

“And by the way; well done.”

With that he was gone.

“How about a cheer for our new young warriors?!” Bezedil called, and everyone did give them a rousing cheer.

“Thank you.” Reggie said, speaking for the four of them when it was quiet again enough for him to be heard.

“We might not have an exercise for a while after this.” Mark chuckled.  “I think it might take Quewanak some time to figure out how to counter your spell.  I sure can’t think of a way yet!  And he never has his demons counter anything we do unless he’s actually found a way to counter it in reality.”

“The easiest way would be for him to simply kill the four of us at the beginning of the attack.” Helemia mused.  “So we should teach it to as many of you as we can right away.”

“Beyond that, we can think of at least three ways they could counter it by magical and psionic means.” Reggie stated.  “Including Shielding from the energy that comes from the sun, casting very big psionic Shields a few meters beyond their bodies, and doing a lot of really fast Translocations to avoid being targeted.  So I’m sure Quewanak will find a counter quite quickly.  On the other hand, we do have a few more tricks up our sleeves.  As Quewanak once told us, researching in isolation gives you originality, and we four have been able to think of different things than the rest of you have.  Of course, now that we’ve joined the community exercises, it’s time to meld all our efforts.

“So we should make sure we’re psionicly Shielded against Quewanak and any demons who may be listening and that Ria is sheathed for a while, then we’ll show you what we’ve been working on…”

The next exercise was four days later, in the late afternoon.  The four children had just finished sparring and were relaxing on the grass when there was a bright flash of extremely short duration, then they suddenly appeared in the main shelter.

“You are dead.”
Quewanak informed them from the center of the cavern as dozens of children and older women appeared around them, and the command group appeared around the table.  Then most of the other powerful members of the colony appeared around the edge of the cavern, having been ‘killed’ as well.

“The exercise is concluded.” Quewanak stated a moment later.

The four moved up to the table and past the Privacy Barrier, allowing them to see the display spells and hear the command group, which today was composed of Silaran, Kragorram, Bezedil, Dalia, and Markhan the Senior.

“You were killed in an explosion which sterilized the vale you were within, killing everything there.  Would you like to see it?” Quewanak continued, as the situation displayed on the table became apparent in tiny blue and red lights.

“Later definitely, but not now.” Reggie stated as they appraised the display, which replayed the few seconds of the battle over and over.

Only about two hundred greater and lesser demons had appeared.  They had obviously arrived as suddenly as possible in positions and deployments that targeted the most dangerous of the settlers, many of whom had none-the less survived the initial attack.

“They came in assassination squadrons, and tried to get everyone who could cast the Brain Bomb right away.” Helemia observed.

“Yes, but they failed.” Silaran stated.  “They got Mark, Yazadril, Theramin, Equemev, and Povon in the initial attack, though Povon still had time to evacuate the non-combatants before they got her.  That left us to form the command group.  Talia and Alilia stayed up there and cast the Brain Bomb, and that ended it.”

“It was somewhat predictable, but it had to be done.  It would be the demons’ logical next move.” Quewanak said with a shrug as he scratched his chin with a claw tip.

“So the scenario we’re actually facing in the exercises,” Reggie mused, “Is that we’re trying to hold Hiliani against successive waves of demon attacks, and that the big commander demons out there somewhere have a way of observing or monitoring the battles here, since they responded to what we did in the last one even though every attacking demon was killed.  And we have to pre-suppose some constraints on their resources or they’d just overwhelm us with millions of enemies every time.  So in this scenario, the war in the rest of the world can’t be going that great for them, since they can’t consistently allocate enough forces or enough power to guarantee them victory against us.  You have to figure that they’ve learned through repeated observation of the battles here who the most dangerous among us is.  Then last time we four popped up at the end of the battle and ended it with the Brain Bomb.  Since we were new to them and the Brain Bomb was new too, and none of the rest of you used it in the battle before then, they probably thought we were the only ones who could do it.  They probably didn’t expect that the rest of you could do it already this time, they just targeted you because they knew you were the most dangerous fighters here.”

“That’s essentially the case.” Quewanak confirmed.  “I play the demons fairly, and they only act on information that they could learn by distant observation.  Though I usually know what all of you are going to do before the exercise begins, I don’t let my simulated demons act on anything I know that they would not.  They learn and adapt at the same pace the real demons did in the first Demon War.”

“And that was an apt deduction, my son.” Mark said as the rest of those who’d been killed in the exercise gathered around.  “That they didn’t know the rest of us could cast the Brain Bomb yet, that is.  We managed to stay one step ahead of them.”

“Well we did succeed in defending Hiliani, and all the demons were killed.” Valentia nodded.  “But I have a hard time feeling like we won when I was killed.  I’d like to see the explosion that killed us now, Quewanak, if we may.”

“Certainly.” Quewanak nodded, and cast it as a Revealing.

“Ah.” Helemia nodded.  “A Demon Lord and four Greater Demons.  They were already casting the explosion when they Translocated in a half kilometer up.”

“And with that, we’ll get these kids home and get ourselves to the debriefing.” Mark nodded.  “See you all in the gathering hall in a minute.”

This time it was Talia and Alilia who were cheered as the heroes of the day, then they settled down to planning for the next attack.

The next one came three days later during breakfast, and only lasted a moment.  Everyone in the settlement saw a very brief flash, and that was it.

“You are all dead to the last soul.  The demons are victorious.”
Quewanak informed them. 
“That being the case, I have left you all in place, and I suggest you finish your breakfasts before debriefing.”

And so they did.  When they met in the Hall to discuss it, Yazadril revealed what had happened.  “It was an explosive spell of the same type they used against the four twins last time, but much more powerful.  On the same order as the spells that were cast in Mark and Talia’s last battle with Zarkog at the end of the war of the founding.  It would take billions of lesser demons to cast such a thing.”

“Or millions of Greater Demons, or thousands of DemonLords.” Alilia added.

“The few dozen of us who are powerful spell-casters can’t charge the Wards with enough power to resist such a powerful spell.” Yazadril continued.

“We still haven’t figured out how they’ve been Translocating through the Wards, either.” Bezedil pointed out.

“We’ll cast more Xervian-style Wards, to absorb the power of such attacks.” Povon decided.  “The elven-style Wards are better against individual demons because of their deceptions and transducing-counter-attacks, but they’re less efficient against big pure-energy attacks.”

“That’ll help, but not enough, not against something like we faced today.” Mark noted.  “I think casting more varieties of Wards might stop them from Translocating in, though.  We should cast every variety of Wards that we know of, with every kind of power and every kind of casting style we have available.  And we should try that trick you showed me for psionic Shields, where you cast one, and then cast another at a different frequency.  I doubt anyone’s ever tried to do that with other kinds of spells before.  Shifting the frequency of complex spells is a tough task, but I bet we can figure out how to do it if we all work together.  Actually, Yazadril did some basic work like that when he first figured out how to make wizard’s spells work on me.”

“And while you’re working on all that to stop attacking Translocations,” Valentia suggested, “You should give me that Xervian Wards spell and let us work on it for a while.  I know it’s a really, really old unicorn magician’s spell.  Since it’s really old and was probably designed to be cast by a group of unicorns, I’m sure I can make a much more direct and efficient way of casting it.  And all unicorn spells have a big psionic component, and I’m sure my brother and sister can come up with improvements in the psionics of the spell.  I’d also like to check to see how casting it with pure warlock-power affects its power-absorption rate.  I mean, the spell absorbs power as it’s charged and as it’s attacked.  There’s no limit to the power it can absorb slowly.  It only gets overwhelmed when the power it’s hit with suddenly is a lot more than the power it had charged up with before that.  If we can get it to absorb power a lot more quickly, it might be enough to stop a big explosion like today’s.  Karzog can help us with it too.”

“Here.” Povon said as she passed Valentia the Xervian spell.

“All right then, let’s form up into teams and work on all that.” Mark said.

“I’d like Nemia, Povon, and Alilia with me on the frequency shifting problem.” Yazadril announced.

“We’ll compile all the forms of Wards and Shielding spells we have among us all.”
Silaran announced, speaking for the unicorns.

“Talia and I will start translating spells into different techniques.” Mark decided.  “We’ll want at least one unicorn and one dragon with us on this, so Kragorram and Equemev, you’re with us.  And we’ll have Ria to help with magecraft.  And Mandri and Nek for human wizardry.

“The rest of you magic users can join whichever team you think you can make a contribution to.”

“All non-magic users, you’re with me.” Wittan announced as he raised a hand.

“What will you do?” Yazadril asked.

“Well, I figure you’re likely to be successful in strengthening the Wards against the demons, for a while at least.” Wittan grinned.  “That means that come the next exercise, there’s likely to be a lot of demons just outside the Wards tryin’ to get in, and we wouldn’t want ‘em to get bored out there.  Some will be standing on the ground just outside the wards, so we’ll build some nice drop-traps for them.  And a lot of ‘em will be flying just above the dome of the Wards, so we’ll build some hidden catapults just outside the dome and set ‘em to fire in an arc just above the dome from one side clear to the other.  We’ll use crossbow-style catapults to get the right arc.”

“That’s good thinking.” Yazadril nodded.  “A lot of these young elves won’t be very interested in the complex spell-work on the Wards.  Take them with you, I’m sure you can put them to good use.”

“That I can.” Wittan grinned, and led his team out as the magic teams all got to work.

For hours the spells went around from team to team; translated to different techniques by Mark’s team, frequency-shifted by Yazadril’s, simplified and improved by the children, then back around again.

They ate lunch in the hall as they worked, and spent the last hour before supper consolidating their work.  Finally they called the elves from the construction team to lend their power to the Command Link, and they all cast the improvements on the Wards with all the power they could muster, before going home to eat.

The next day was the same, and the next, and the next.  Since everyone in the community had been ‘killed’ in the last exercise, they didn’t mind putting in the effort to prevent it from happening again.