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Chapter 751 - Stallet’s Revenge
🕑 Added 2023-06-02 00:19:08 +0000 UTCEnjoy!
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Part of the blurb for a Kickstarter for Magical Laser Guns, prior to its removal due to violating Kickstarter’s policies on projects concerning weapons.
You’ve all seen the new releases from the big gun manufacturers, right? Magical bullets of a dozen different types that cost as much per bullet as an entire box, magical shotguns that can actually shoot monster cores that explode, specialized rounds for smaller guns that you can charge with mana yourself before you enter the dungeon?
There’s no need for any of that!
I’ve developed a weapon that can take YOUR mana and turn it into a ridiculously strong LASER BLAST! It’s aimed just like a gun, so you already know how to use it!
Several videos sit here, in which a young man shoots at increasingly durable things. It does look very much like beams of light come out of the shotgun he uses.
All I need from YOU is enough money to be able to finish the more durable prototype, then manufacture the actual product! If we hit the stretch goals, I will work on miniaturization…
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Serenity spent the next twenty or so minutes mostly out of it, unable to watch what the others were doing. It wasn’t just aches and pains; there was also dizziness, nausea, and probably some hallucinations. Well, either they were hallucinations or he’d turned his hand into butterflies temporarily. Serenity hoped it was hallucinations.
It took longer to recover than he’d spent in the ley line. Significantly longer. That bothered Serenity; he’d gotten used to healing in ridiculously short time periods from almost everything and it wasn’t fun being reminded that he wasn’t actually invulnerable.
Once he was with it enough to think again, Serenity picked himself up off the floor and went to find out what happened while he was incapacitated.
The area he was in was a large room; he was against one wall, while the center of the room was taken up by a table surrounded by chairs. The table held a diorama of the Academy; Serenity could make out several of the buildings well enough to see that, even without approaching it. The others were gathered around the diorama, so Serenity carefully made his way over to it.
He wasn’t certain he was entirely steady on his feet yet, so he moved slowly and cautiously.
“...kill them all, that way they’re not a problem.” Narin nodded as he finished.
“What if some of them are visitors?” Esme didn’t sound happy with Narin’s solution. “We need to get eyes on them first. I’m not worried about the ones in the other buildings, but some of the people in the Arcanum could easily be family or prospective students.”
“Probably not good prospects after being trapped for a year.” The words came out of Serenity’s mouth before he could think. He’d meant that to be an observation to himself, not to everyone. “So what’s the situation here? Is there some way to just solve the problem?”
Raz shook his head. “No. Not completely, at least. There are defenses we can activate, but they’ll only exclude people if they’re recognized as students or staff … or if they have a token that says they’re authorized to be present. And no one has a token. There are a few here and more in the Administration building, but most of them are in the Armory. I can’t be all that selective, either. I probably can turn the defenses on for one building at a time, but if I do it’ll burn out the enchantments on the building. All of them.”
“Who put him in charge anyway. Who cares about an old enchantment?” Narin muttered.
Serenity would probably have ignored it if he were the one being talked about, but Raz wasn’t nearly as forgiving. “Stallet did.”
Serenity saw expressions cross several of the others’ faces; the draykin were less flexible but their body language was just as good at expressing emotion. He thought this one was confusion, probably?
Raz’s, on the other hand, was either happiness or triumph as he let his jaw drop open for a moment before speaking. “Stallet left me the key and I’m pretty sure he’s the person who set up the defenses, too. Which means it was his choice to give me control instead of someone else.”
“He’s dead, how can it be his choice?” That was Narin again. He was probably just unhappy they weren’t taking his suggestions. Serenity wasn’t confident enough in his ability to read the man to come up with any other ideas for why he was being so obstructive, unless he’d missed something important while he was incapacitated.
“That’s enough, Narin.” Esme sounded annoyed. “We’d be having the same discussion if I were the one in control, so deal with it. Personally, I’m in favor of a run to either the Armory or Administration, some token collection, and some targeted strikes in the Arcanum. We can probably skip the other buildings; they shouldn’t have the same mix of people who might be targeted and shouldn’t be.”
“Maybe have Bylek take a look anyway? I’m sure he can sneak past almost anyone, so all he has to do is figure out if they should have a token or not. He might even be able to leave one on them.” If they could handle this with a little safe reverse thievery and an existing enchantment, Serenity was definitely in favor of that. Things were rarely that simple, but it was worth a try.
“Bylek…” Esme paused, then reached down and picked the messaging book up off the floor. She wasn’t blushing, was she?
Naah, why would she be blushing?
“Let’s see. It looks like he hasn’t made it back to the book yet, but Alrin is at the book. He left Ren’shel and Obas at the theater to watch over the former prisoners.” Esme frowned. “I’ll send him to Administration to get tokens; that seems less likely to be dangerous than the Armory. But … Raz, can you clear someone’s way if they carry a token, even if they normally wouldn’t be allowed there? Can you open up a building for, ah…” Her eyes wandered across the group until they landed on the quiet draykin. “For Vurin?”
Raz frowned, then reached out to touch the Administration building in the diorama. He closed his eyes and concentrated for a few minutes. “Yes, there’s an option to temporarily allow particular tokens passage. It looks like I can only allow it for a short period of time without damaging the enchantments, so they’ll need to hurry. Oh, and the tokens need to be here, so…”
Raz reached into one of the large pools in the diorama and pulled out a coin. Serenity maneuvered his way around the table far enough that he could see into several of the pools; it looked like they’d been left empty but still had space. That space was filled with different items; the pool Raz pulled the coin out of was the only one with disc-shaped tokens. The other pools each held their own shape, but all of the items were small enough to easily be held or carried.
Raz set the two tokens flat against the side of the Administration building, then closed his eyes. This time, Serenity could see both the effort it cost Raz and the amount of mana that was pulled out of him to fuel the tokens themselves. They glimmered with mana now where they’d seemed inert before.
Raz held them out to Vurin. “These should get you and Alrin into the building and offices, but you’ll have to find the tokens on your own. The enchantment doesn’t know where they are.”
Serenity had to speak up about that. “Probably because they’re not charged. I bet it can find those two but not the others in the pool.” He turned to Vurin without waiting for confirmation from Raz. “Make sure that whoever gets a token charges it with mana. I’m not sure the Academy’s enchantment will recognize the tokens if you don’t.”
Vurin looked to Raz for confirmation.
It didn’t take Raz long to wade through whatever he had to in order to get to where he could search for tokens. “He’s right, or at least those two are the only tokens I can find by looking at the Active Tokens selection. Probably better to do that for safety.”
Vurin hurried out while Esme scrawled a message in the book.
It was another half hour before Bylek reported in with a concise message that Esme read aloud. “Fools. Half before they noticed, another half after. They fear.”
Esme shook her head and laughed. “That’s definitely Bylek. He thinks everyone should always be on guard, even in a safe place. I’ll tell him to come to us; he can at least scout out-”
“He should scout the Dungeon Lore building. We’re pretty confident that they're invaders, but let’s make sure before we kill them all.” Serenity remembered making mistakes like that in the past. Well, in the future that would never happen. They had time right now, which meant they had the chance to avoid those mistakes.
Esme shrugged. “If you think it’s a good use of his time.” She didn’t seem to think it was, but she didn’t object further.
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As it turned out, one of the small groups in the Dungeon Lore building was four parents who’d been trapped there for a year. They were the last survivors of a group that somehow managed to pick off invaders one at a time without ever being caught, unlike their fellows in the theater. The rest of the people in the Dungeon Lore building were there either hunting them or trying to figure out what was so important that it had actual people left behind to protect it.
Serenity heard later that there were several tearful reunions when that group met up with the group in the theater building. Several of them knew each other, but they’d thought the others dead.
Bylek’s investigation of the people scattered throughout the Arcanum took long enough that the plan had to change. Instead of using the school’s defenses against the invaders immediately, the rescued people were moved out of the Academy to safety while more people were brought in (with the help of tokens to get through the defenses) to deal with the people in the Dungeon Lore building and the Hall of Blessings.
Serenity didn’t have anything to do with it; Raz managed everything with Grandma Tillon’s help. Serenity was happy with the arrangement; Raz was learning a lot and, at the same time, the place was being cleared out. Raz even seemed to lose a lot of the anger he held towards the people who killed his clan.
It helped that he was pretty sure Bylek killed the man that ordered it. After that raid, no one seemed to be in charge at all.
It also helped when Raz found out from some of the enemies trapped in the Arcanum that they’d been living in fear for a year. Some was fear of the students and others that were still alive, but a lot was fear of the Academy itself. They’d started with about four times the numbers when they broke into the Academy in search of whatever they were looking for, but the searching itself was deadly and each attempt to leave was worse.
However bad Raz felt about the loss of his family, at least he knew his ancestor’s creation made them pay for it.
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Author's Note: Not that long ago, I commented to someone that batteries would probably be the first mass-market magitech. I have since changed my mind: they’ll probably be second. First will be either guns or (more likely) ammo of one sort or another. Mundane weapons have reduced effect on dungeon monsters, especially as they go up in Tier, but people still want to use their guns - and it’s entirely possible to make enchanted rounds or shells.
With that said, the magical laser project presented above wouldn’t have actually delivered even if it were permitted. Well, the stickers and whatnot would probably have been sent, but not the guns he was promising.
