Douglas Miller
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MiP Chapter 56: Power Failures
🕑 Added 2024-02-27 22:28:22 +0000 UTC<< First | < Previous | Next >
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."
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Comments
Jesse Wood
Unless he gets much better with dungeon magic. That stuff has serious potential.
Jesse Wood
Didn't the first chapter mention Carlos being isekaied by some ROB? Could that be the admin?
Jesse Wood
Yes, but it takes time to respawn. Are the souls sent to the respawn point then revived when the timer runs out? Or are they held where they die until being sent to respawn? Or sent somewhere else to have the the level extracted? If they were held anywhere in the local area, they're dead. I'd say their chances of reviving are inversely proportional to the chances of the system having a revival spell.
Carl Mason
On the other hand, he would likely get a good deal of practice, or at least have the opportunity to, dealing with casting magic freehand. If he does that and crashes the world system, he could become the most powerful mage alive.
Ddave
It's interesting that he sensed the components coming together, but missing something. What is the system doing to aid in spell formation? My best guess is that it provides the mapping of concepts to concrete spell fragments. That would explain where the resonance comes from when learning a new keyword. If this is true, then it would be impossible to learn new spells in the blackout zone, but it may still be possible to cast them using an alternate method. This doesn't explain existing spells falling apart in the zone, so maybe the fragments also interact with the system in some specific way. Maybe this helps make the structures more powerful by limiting their operation conditions.
Tim Judge
Delicious. And you do seem to have mastered the art of the "leave them hungry for more"chapter ending
Irony
Carlos is definitely fucking around with dark magic, he should definitely take a step back from it. Messing around with the underflower limit may eventually crash the whole system and then he’s just stuck in the dark ages.
Dan Chadwick
True, though stepping out to an adjacent demesne might be enough to do a search... then get it upgraded/restarted!
Daniel Martinek
Well, that will not work here... You cannot run help on a computew when breaker tripped/ battery ran out.
Douglas Miller
@Zac Cookson The system was created so long ago that its origins are lost to history. Technically this doesn't rule out the possibility of an immortal and secretive system creator hiding out somewhere, but immortality (or at least immunity to aging) is pretty much what it would take for an original system creator to still be alive.
Zac Cookson
I genuinely believe that when Carlos learns to alter the "programming" of the incantation infrastructure, he'll likely patch out that exploit more definitively. Though I suppose the creator left it with wrongness rather than denying use, it must have to do with a defence measure or was like a backdoor created by an enemy of the creator or something. I can't help but think this system was made during a war between science and magic.
Zac Cookson
Though that implies that the 'help' options don't fail when the system does, it's more likely he'll have to repair it externally.
Zac Cookson
That's assuming the original creator is still around to monitor the system and not off somewhere else working on his next project.
Dan Chadwick
I take it that the mana pressure was affected? Or else simply waiting would refil the system mana pool. Potentially the system would need a reboot once mana pool is refilled? Or was the well spring shut off with the system? "Help - restart system..." Absolute value filter to prevent exploit...
viperfan7
SOmething something pentium floating point bug?
David
we are on revision 3 if memory serves. So maybe Carlos makes rev4 someday?
Douglas Miller
Yeah, it's definitely a strict last resort for him now, leaving him mostly helpless after just one overpowered feat.
Irakli Jishkariani
Carlos will be idiot if he uses that again. He will be in most disadvantage. Everyone relies on soul structures to do magic, he relies on incantation system and discovered help command, he is the most knowledgeable in incantations now ir he will be. That's cutting branch you sit on. He will be powerless without incantations.
Markell
My god, what if everyone suddenly gets a notification saying: “Patch 3.3 released: * Fixed under-flow and over-flow exploit. Personal mana will be consumed regardless of integer values.” Immediately breaks half of the enchantments in the kingdom as floating values are interpretted incorrectly.
ForNatureOfPredatorsStories4837
No, the energy from the anti-levitation spell came from the system that supports (artificial) incantation, Carlos took too much energy from the system and made it cease to exist in the local area, it is not clear how big the ‘local area’ is, for story reasons it’s most likely a relatively small area that does not even reach the near by town,
Josh
When they talked about wellsprings and failures gone horribly wrong for no reason that anyone understood, I wonder if that was an integer *overflow*? They concentrated so much mana into a tiny channel that they caused an integer overflow and the system crashed, fatally, in the area of the wellspring. Also, I wonder if people killed in today's battle are going to respawn or not. With the incantation system offline, they might not.
Josh
I just had some ideas for what it might take to restart the incantation system in this region. Mana gets spent to power incantations, and perhaps some portion of that is siphoned off to power the incantation system itself, keeping the system self-perpetuating. (It seems unlikely that they're powering it directly from wellsprings, or Carlos wouldn't have been able to drain it.) By draining all the mana that was being used to power the incantation compiler/runtime system, it no longer has enough resources to function. I wonder if it'd be possible to re-bootstrap it by attempting (unsuccessfully) to cast in the area without an incantation, allowing some bootstrapping portion of the system to siphon off the requisite mana and reboot. On the other hand, if no such bootstrapping mechanism exists ,then this region might now be a good place to experiment with the assembly-esque underpinnings of the incantation system, since the incantation system itself wouldn't be competing for resources. Or, alternatively, to attempt to copy the spellform of the incantation system itself from a working area over to this one.
Josh
This is an impressive explanation and exploit! Now that he knows that it's drawing the power used to power the incantation system/compiler/etc itself, it's too dangerous to use in any populated area or any area that might want to be populated in the future, though a pervasive antimagic field blanketing an area would be a good last-ditch surprise to pull against an overwhelming force that's relying on magic. Apart from that, it might be appropriate as a MAD deterrent, in an emergency. Now that he knows what this feels like and what it corresponds to, I wonder if that plus the "help" command is enough for him to start reverse-engineering the assembly-level implementation underpinning the incantation system? (In an unpopulated area!) On the other hand, being even slightly careless with that also sounds like the kind of stunt similar to those attempted with mana wellsprings, that ends with substantial depopulation and death without respawning. "Press release: Today, the Royal Family Office of the National Thaumic Director released a report calling on the magical community to prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities by adopting incantation-safe programming languages."
Dan Chadwick
And have the capacity to rebuild it right! Has access now!
Dan Chadwick
Played a game way back when... entered -10,000 gold, -10,000 troops, and -10,000 bushels of grain, System dutifully deducted these amounts from my negligible inventory giving my positive numbers in all stats. Promptly cleared the board of other players...
Dan Chadwick
Thank you!
Maurice Brown
I’m loving this so much!
Cᐰptain ᐰwsome #119864 snapd
"Oh fiddlesticks, what now?"
Douglas Miller
The chapter title actually refers to multiple things in this chapter. Various characters' powers failing against each other, and also the incantation system having a blackout.😀 I'm glad you like the chapter so much!
ForNatureOfPredatorsStories4837
I just want to say I can’t overstate how good of a job I think you did on this chapter, like when I saw the chapter title, I assumed it was referring either to the enemy just completely failing against Carlos, or Carlos somehow failing because of the power level difference, but it’s referring to a completely different twist, which is not only great but also makes complete sense, it almost feels like I’m watching Attack On Titan or something with this type of twist, also, the chapter felt long, was it significantly longer? cause it very much felt like it, thanks for that
Daniel Martinek
Underflow more likely...
Darkarma
That's a zero-day exploit that really should be patched lest someone uses to to destroy the system entirely
allsampah
Did he just integer overflow the local environmental OS to take the mana?
daavko
At this rate, one day, Carlos will crash the entire System and will be very unpleasantly surprised. I'm looking forward to that moment!
Brandon C
Ooh! That is even more dangerous than I imagined! Bug report and fix! Actually Carlos might have to fix it himself if he figures out how to.
blaze87b
...Carlos just drained the mana well, didn't he?
Chad Williams
Well thats an even bigger implication if its taking mana from the system infrastructure itself! Carlos is their Y2K
Douglas Miller
It didn't take mana from the guards' armor. It took mana from the local portion of the system infrastructure that makes incantations work, and their armor happens to rely on that same infrastructure in order to work. I edited the chapter slightly to clarify this.
Colt Parris
Stealing power from the OS in order to run a command. Rough
Chad Williams
First! Tftc! The wrongness comes from stealing mana form the world around you. Very interesting that the system seems to override the likely protections on the guards armor and take mana from that as well as the world around it. The implications are powerful
Douglas Miller
Well, kind of. It doesn't take mana "from the environment", but rather "from the system". From the system that incantations rely on in order to work.
RikcPaTT
The guy managed to break magic
BerciTheBeast
TFTC!
Brandon C
It was great that you showcased the new hires! TYFTC!
Ashley Wallis
Whoa! Nice one. Interesting possibilities
Brandon C
I knew it! The negative lift take mana from the environment and channels it into the spell!
weas97
Thanks for the chapter, I will give some options for the new spaces of the soul: generator: increase the production of mana in the soul making it compatible with everything. mana core - has a larger mana reserve and the ability to compress mana by gaining and retaining higher level mana as well as being able to decompress it to use it (compatible with everything). accelerator: accelerates the use of all structures of the soul and mind as necessary and also works on the body as a haste spell, compatible with everything. soul memory: a structure that functions both mentally and in the soul, storing a record of all uses of the structures and Carlos' memory, combined with the corector and the understanding aid, it would be the same as the 'mark of the general' ' from the novel Mark of the Fool plus a perfect memory and helps you learn to use your soul abilities in a more complicated way (compatible with everything). enhancer: enhances all soul structures and abilities, also the mind and body, but you can choose what to focus your power on and how much to choose (compatible with everything) stabilizer: prevents unwanted changes in the soul, body and mind, avoiding overloads, harmful effects, giving more durability to the body and being possible to choose what it acts on, avoiding defects such as not being able to heal and being able to select aging as something to neutralize (compatible with everything). domain / aura: allows you to create a domain or aura with one as an anchor which can be controlled whose only effect is to use the structures of the soul outside the body, it is compatible with everything and allows you to use dungeon magic efficiently, use scans through the help of understanding, modifying and understanding magic and enchantments as well as creating them, creating barriers and flying combining mana manipulation and the stabilizer and thousands of other things. multitasking center: used in the soul to use all its structures with extreme ease at the same time and gives the mental capacity to perform multiple tasks such as casting several spells simultaneously or reading several books using divination spells while conversing and passing information by the purple links. Good luck if any of them are useful to you, good author :)
