Broken Lands

Chapter 350 – A Forgotten Chance

Sweetfire was happy to put the word out about the weapons to some people he knew. He said it would probably take several days to get any answers, and that was only if the bandits were dumb enough to sell the weapons immediately; they were to keep their heads down and not attract any more notice than they had by bringing Mikka back to Mazehold, just in case. 

It wasn’t until they were about to leave that Sweetfire mentioned just who the “people he knew” were. Apparently, the Professionals of Mazehold actually had a police force, unlike the Called. They couldn’t do anything about Called-on-Called violence, whether it was inside the Maze or not, but they could watch for the weapons to show up. They’d even handle getting better descriptions of the weapons from Mikka.

Sophia’s belief that they’d spend the next few days looking for the bandits evaporated with that information. She knew that if she didn’t propose anything, they’d end up watching the entire dyleda tournament; that sounded like fun, but this also made a perfect time to visit Tiwaz since they had the time after all. It was very easy to talk the rest of her team into “a quick Maze trip” that was really a visit to Tiwaz to ask about hubs. 

The next morning, they headed towards the Maze, then looped around to a secondary entrance to Tiwaz’s complex. It took a few hours to reach Tiwaz without being seen, and several more hours to catch it up on what was going on.

“Thank you,” Tiwaz said slowly. “I believe that answering your questions will take some time, so first I should tell you what I have accomplished since you were last here. I was able to make a third scout before the Arena staff responded to the failure of their remote healing setup; I believe I now have a firm grasp on their minimum response time after an incident, as it has ceased declining and the participants in the mission have remained constant for the past four excursions. They appeared quite confident this time, so I delayed triggering one of the traps until an unfortunate time to get their attention; it did make them slow down. They did not have any significant issues with the ice beasts, but the Hunger caused some problems and worried them; they were concerned that such a beast escaped from the Maze. I am glad that your summons are not truly what they represent.”

“So am I,” Sophia admitted. It wasn’t worth trying to explain that they were really Cliff’s summons. She’d tried that and it didn’t get her anywhere with Tiwaz. “Did they do anything about it?”

“Another team came down a couple weeks later and found both the cold room that supposedly kept the Hunger alive and the caved-in entrance I had my construction remote construct. They plugged the hole with dirt but didn’t add any stone, so it will be simple to make it appear to have been found by whatever we have move in next. I was not expecting you for another month, and I still believe it will be best to wait that long at a minimum. I believe that is too long for one of your summons to last?” Tiwaz sounded like it hoped for an answer other than the one it expected.

Sophia shook her head. It was much, much too long. “Not until we can crack the problem of feeding them mana from your systems in a controllable manner. I don’t want to repeat what happened last time.”

“The explosion was impressive but undesired,” Tiwaz agreed. 

Sophia thought he was understating it. If the dragon’s carcass hadn’t dissolved into mana fragments after exploding, it would have taken days to clean up the mess. As it was, Tiwaz had to create a specialized maintenance android and some large crystalline cables to patch around the damaged collection web until the android could fix it properly. Sophia remembered Tiwaz being fairly upset about that; its repair supplies were very limited and it didn’t have the right materials to make a maintenance android that would last longer than a couple of months because of the volume of information it had to hold locally. 

“I believe that I have adequately analyzed the data from that incident, however, and isolated the cause. It was not a fundamental incompatibility, as I believed initially.” Tiwaz paused and a diagram appeared on the dark wall to Sophia’s right.

Sophia grinned slightly. She’d known it couldn’t be a fundamental incompatibility and argued against Tiwaz’s original despairing hypothesis. Cliff was a dungeon core, and raw natural mana with Affinity bleed was exactly what dungeon cores used to make monsters back on Earth; Tiwaz’s mana was, if anything, more stable than what Cliff was used to. He wasn’t a particularly experienced dungeon core, but that simply meant he didn’t know what went wrong. 

She managed to avoid saying that she’d told Tiwaz so, but it was a close call. 

“It was also not a transfer speed issue, or at least not entirely a transfer speed issue,” Tiwaz continued by knocking down Sophia’s guess after the explosion. “I have animated the readings onto a heat map and as you can see, there were actual ripples in the manaflow surrounding the echo dragon’s paw where it rested on the collection web.”

Sophia disliked the term “echo dragon,” since it was really more complex than that, but she couldn’t argue too much about the term for a dragon that was in some sense Sophia’s echo. She hadn’t managed to come up with anything else Tiwaz would accept, at least not once she admitted that there were many different types of dragons and that all of the ones Cliff could summon were based on Sophia’s echo in some way. It was enough of a fight to get Tiwaz to call them dragons instead of winged lizards.

“The ripples amplified as the mana transfer continued. This still frame represents the time that you reported an issue; as you can see, the ripples had spread and started to constructively interfere with each other. I believe that what we are looking at is an issue with mana regulation; the interface adds a point of restriction for the mana flow, so it backs up and pulses across both sides of the connection. We need to add either a damping agent, which I am unable to manufacture in this location, or a better connection method. Both would be preferable.” Tiwaz paused long enough for Sophia to nod her understanding. “I am basing this off a comparison with the mana recharge units used for my scouts; they have a dedicated input location that reduces the restriction, along with a specifically designed and manufactured charging location that they have to use; they cannot simply accept mana directly from a collection web in significant quantities. There is a limited amount they can accept, but this effect explains the restrictions on android recharging quite well.”

Well, the solution to one of those problems was obvious. “Use the horns.”

“What?” Tiwaz sounded completely lost.

It seemed obvious to Sophia. “She’s my echo, right? That means she has my mana system; she’s an arcane dragon. That means her horns are a direct connection to her mana and essence channels. That’s what they’re for. You didn’t think they were for dominance displays or something?”

Tiwaz made a sound like clearing his throat. It was clearly deliberately generated, since he didn’t have a throat. “That is the usual purpose of horns, that and combat of one sort of another. In your case, I didn’t assume they were for anything; most horned hominids use them for decoration.”

Sophia knew that wasn’t entirely true; she knew of several counterexamples. Minotaurs came to mind easily, since some groups of minotaurs back in her home universe had a fighting style that used the head and the horns significantly. Tiwaz’s assumption was generally true of the Suras, who were the closest Sophia had to a large group of kin other than dragons and humans. Among the Suras, horns were a mark of status but they weren’t useful in combat any more than Sophia’s were.

Well, not physical combat anyway. Sophia’s horns could be used for mana control that was better and easier than using her hands. She found them useful mostly for power channeling, because she could get better precision and flexibility using aura-based mana shaping. Both were vital for spellforms. These days, she could use her feathers more or less the same as her horns, too, so it really didn’t come up.

“If her horns are a valid connection point, that solves one of the issues, even if only for your echos and not the other summoned monsters, but it does not solve the other.” Tiwaz shifted the image to show a collection web in the wall and the echo lowering her head to meet it. It looked awkward. “I do not believe that she will be able to reliably hold that position, and even if she can, a damping agent is still needed. The one in the mana charging units for my scouts is not suitable, unfortunately; it severely limits the power throughput to eliminate the resonance, and that imposes long charge times. It also cannot be installed at an arbitrary collection hub; charging stations were not designed to be mobile.”

“Then what should we use?” Sophia hoped Tiwaz had a suggestion. It would be really nice to be able to summon creatures well in advance and avoid any possibility of having their visits “to the Maze” get connected to the monsters “destroying” the underground conduits that powered the Arena’s healing device. She didn’t think anyone would make the connection, but the more they obscured it, the better.

“The best option would be a custom-built powering chamber like the ones for the scouts, but as that is clearly not an option and neither are the next several things on my list, I believe we will have to make do with a combination of infused aurichalc, which can be obtained from the Maze if you do not have any, and a conceptual binder like dreamspider web or spatial resin.” Tiwaz paused almost long enough for Sophia to think he was done before he added, “I do not know where you can obtain those, though I know that dreamspiders were rarely found in the Tower. Most spatial resin was imported, and while it is stable for a very long time if properly sealed away like the resin you used to repair the interspace conduit that connects me to Othala, I believe that she is out of resin as well.”

“Do you know how spatial resin is gathered in the first place?” Xin’ri interrupted. “Does it come from … say, black goo monsters that walk out of broken portals?”

That seemed like an oddly specific question for a moment until Sophia remembered the “mirror-creatures” that came out of the Windows Sweetfire showed them after the large earth mazestorm. They’d fought them a few times since then, but for some reason she didn’t think they’d ever mentioned them to Tiwaz. Sophia really wasn’t certain why; she thought they’d simply forgotten, more worried about talking about what they’d learned from Bai than an ancient broken monitoring system for areas they didn’t recognize.

Tiwaz dimmed for a moment, then brightened as if it had found what it was looking for. “I don’t know about broken portals, but the records state that it was harvested from monsters made of living resin that emerged from between the Gates while they were inactive. This was a known side effect of the Gates themselves. Finding and dealing with the animated spatial resin monsters, then collecting the resin was one of the common duties of the Gate Guards before the Maze formed at the base of the Tower and made guarding the gates too hazardous. The amount of resin imported rose significantly once we no longer had a way to make our own.”

“Then we need directions on how to make spatial resin, because I know exactly where we can find those resin monsters.” Xin’ri grinned widely at Tiwaz. “Also, what do you know about a monitoring system somewhere above us that looks like a series of mirrors that show other places? It’s called the Windows now, but I don’t know if that was the original name.”