Steel and Mana

Determined to make sure that all the Vasas on the other end of the world will be proven wrong in hoping that my son and his blood will save them, I was already deep into work, deconstructing the spells Zah'Ratil had shown Arthur, sending the Camelot out without me. I couldn't leave until I was done here. I also had doubts about what the Vasas wanted, because even if Arthur gets to control that Ignis, what's next? They could still not return to our side, no? Or there was something else they weren't telling us? My bet was on the latter. So, I pretty much moved into the underground testing facility and 'laboratory' within the mountain's belly.

"Whoa, now I see why you called me back from working on the Guardian's corpse!" Merlin gasped from the doorway to the workshop, holding two full pots of hot coffee, ready to begin working. Well, I did send him the call, telling him to get his ass back here because we have a massive issue at hand. "What an interesting concept... Where does this come from? Is it the Vasas?" he hurried in, putting them down and looking at the drawings on the blackboard behind me after pouring a cup for himself.

"Yep, good guess. How did you know?" I asked, refilling my own empty mug while looking at him.

"I had found the same repeating patterns in most of the monsters I examined. There is a sequence that is simply the same, just like how most things with a skeleton have a spine," he said with a shrug.

"Did you have anything new to report, by the way?"

"Not much... The thing is still a mess under its shell. I could barely get close to it, and when I tried opening the body, it reacted to the CC I used to cut into it and flared up. My advice is not to touch it. I don't know what is still going on within that corpse, but the insides must still be active, baking its core. The good thing is, it still has an adverse effect on the monsters. The Pass was attacked, but the incoming beasts sensed the presence behind the fortress and hesitated to move, becoming confused. Easy pickings." He set his mug down as he spoke and leaned closer to the drawings, scanning the formation with his usual focus when he found something fascinating. "So that's what they showed Arthur, huh? Hoo boy… what a mess."

"That's an understatement," I said, flicking my fingers through the air, rotating the diagram in my head, and I knew his own eyes could keep following my actions perfectly, "Their sequence leaks energy... I found multiple holes in it, so to speak, that cause the beast they took over to eventually either burn out or lose its energy. They say their hunger is dangerous... and yet they waste their magic, causing that hunger to intensify. Haaah... Nonsense. Look at this! These control runes here are cross-linked through their blood, and I had already inferred that it is because they connect it to runes present in their own bodies. That's fine if you don't mind growing an extra organ every time you cast something. No wonder they are rejected by the Gods' Formation, because they smell like beasts from within!"

"I see it," Merlin chuckled, rubbing his chin. "They're basically using organic feedback as the magical interface. Functional, sure, but… gross. I can tell you now that if Arthur is using it, the more he does or the stronger monster he controls, the more he would change."

"That's the thing I want to avoid at all costs." I zoomed in on the outer ring within my mind, tapping the relevant runes on the blackboard. "And they think that's clever."

"Well," Merlin said, glancing at me, "in their defense, it's kind of clever. They do have advantages... What we can already assume is that they are physically way above us, including our elite troops. I have no doubt that they could wrestle a mech, too. They are strong, fast, filled with magic... And we know they live much, much longer than we do."

"I'm ignoring all those comments," I grunted. "And before you start romanticizing it, remember that these are the same people who think 'sacrifice' is a valid engineering solution, because I can't really imagine how else they would have ship-slave-like figures stitched to the monsters to control multiple of them at once."

"Point taken."

Just as I finished grumbling, footsteps approached the room, light and quick, making me already know who was coming. When the door opened, Galahad stepped into the room, dressed neatly as always, clutching a leather-bound notebook almost as big as his head.

"Sorry, I was late," he said, a bit out of breath. "We were up for far too long with Fila... She didn't even wake up when I climbed out of bed."

"I am not going to ask about details." I grinned, making him blush immediately, almost dropping his book.

"We were studying the runes..." He mumbled, trying to answer me.

"Yeah, yeah," I waved a hand, gesturing him closer. "Come here. You've got homework to bring back to her. Just make sure she doesn't tell her mother... yet."

"She isn't gossipy!" He approached the blackboard and stared at the maze of symbols. "I asked Mom Mikan to make proper wave-scans of Arthur's body," he added, opening his notebook to show us my eldest son's skeletal recreation with all the runes within his bones. Haaah... It felt spooky. "We can use it to perfect the formation further and have more of the possibly missing pieces."

"What about Leyla?" I raised an eyebrow.

"I have everything," he said without a hint of a smile, flipping a page, having hers there too, answering as if I was asking him to prove he deserved the full marks.

"Leon," Merlin leaned toward me, whispering, "My son is smart, but Galahad is a monster."

"I know," I whispered back. "Isn't he cute?"

"I can hear you both," Galahad sighed, looking at us. "If you two are finished, can you explain what part of this work I should focus on?"

"Whatever that catches your eye," I nodded, "This is a collaborative work. But... short answer: all of it. Long answer: It's designed to let a human consciousness insert itself into a beast's magical circuit. The problem is that it's inefficient, unstable, and ultimately suicidal, as it involves giving up your humanity. We must reverse that."

"So we're upgrading our Trojan spell," Merlin added cheerfully.

"We're reinventing it," I nodded. "Because if Zah'Ratil thinks only Arthur can pull this off, then we'll prove him wrong. We already have it... A system anyone trained in Avalon can use, so it is time to create version 2.0 and rub it under Zah'Ratil's nose."

"Yes, I noticed..." Galahad hummed, "That's why it felt so familiar!"

"Exactly," I patted his shoulder, "But it won't be easy. You shift one rune and the whole thing gets scrambled... like some damned document with pictures..."

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"I don't know what you are referencing," Merlin grinned like a proud lunatic, "But this is going to be glorious."

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Hours passed... Then a day. And two. By the third, we had the Vasa's design up in a full projection, enlarged until it filled half the workshop. I recreated their formation rune by rune from memory, pausing every now and then to argue with Merlin about pattern orientation or energy decay ratios, because the moment we 'fixed' a hole, a new one seemingly opened up in the simulation. Galahad just sat quietly at first, jotting everything down, but it didn't take long before he started talking, too.

"They overuse red-phase runes," he said suddenly, pointing to a section.

"Overuse what?" We asked in sync, looking at him. "What red-phase?"

"Sorry, I call them that in my head... It makes it easier if I associate its sections with certain colors." He blushed, but then pointed towards a cluster in the formation, "See these outer circuits? They form four identical sub-loops within the main loop. You can see it, just color everything green and make those red. You can then notice they are, even if isolated, identical clusters. Its... Redundancy. It has, at least this one... and... Four of the same kind." He pointed them out, "If you merge them, the energy transfer efficiency would increase by thirty percent, at the minimum, preventing the monster's hunger from rising so sharply."

"..." I stared at him for a moment. "That's my boy."

"Good thing one of us is not lost in the sauce!" Merlin laughed, showing a thumbs-up at Galahad, using a phrase he heard from me... I think. "Nice catch! However..." He began to ponder, "Even then, the whole thing still leaves the feedback issue." he tiptoed and started tapping a segment of the inner circle. "Every pulse through the blood loop feeds back into the operator's own magic. Going by the runes in Arthur's body, they would connect it to his spine and from there, to the brain... That's what causes their mutations, as the brain begins ordering the body to start to mimic and grow things that don't belong in a human. I think they too have cores... And by then? They never truly separate the signal from the source, and that's not good... To make it work, how the Trojan does, we need to do something about it, or we have to start carving up our soldiers like the Vasas did, to allow them to use this magic."

"Which means we need a synthetic interface," I agreed. "Something that mimics the biological signal without actually being biological."

"I was afraid you would say that..." Merlin groaned, "I talked with my version one... He told me to just make ship-slaves. They are the key to our problem."

"Yeah, no." I answered, rolling my eyes, "We are not going to lobotomize people! Plus, we have all the things to mimic it."

"Huh?" They both looked at me now, and I was surprised Galahad didn't catch on.

"What is a beast? If you break it down." I asked, trying to nudge them towards the solution.

"Bones?" Galahad tilted his head. "Blood? And a core?"

"Yeeees?" I nodded, waiting.

"Are you going to breed them?" Merlin asked, making me shrug.

"No," I gave up, "We have the bones... Our mechs! We just need to decorate them with the appropriate runes. We also have blood. Well, that is harvested, yes, but we have monster blood. We can set up an internal circulation from a refillable tank. And our mechs are already working on monster cores. Bam. We got our artificial beasts! The only thing I haven't solved yet is the Knight in question... Because his mind still needs to be linked to the machine as usual... But we can't let him be transformed. That part needs to be redirected onto the machine somehow, if we can not deactivate it. If we say, make the machine break or degrade over time, it's fine. Those can be rebuilt!"

"I see," Merlin said, eyes gleaming, "We could set up our own loops that act as a filter, catching the monster's code like a dam... redirecting it."

"A firewall," I said, trying not to grin too much.

"Bringing it all to sync... Won't be easy." Galahad hummed, blinking his eyes, thinking through my idea while I began sketching a basic mech's frame so we could start trying to copy my twins' runes onto the metal skeleton.

The next few days were chaos. Controlled chaos, but chaos nonetheless, until we had a formation that all three of us were satisfied with. We etched the first prototype onto a slab of steel. Merlin handled the runes, his hands moving like he was a human CNC machine, while Galahad fed him corrections and alternate rune structures from memory when we had to make a new version. As for me, I was overseeing the entire process. In the end, when we began testing by hooking it up to a core and giving it monster blood, we reached version nine pretty quickly. During our test runs, the magic either failed or was too strong, melting the sheet. Damn. The first activation was especially… dramatic. The runes lit up perfectly, then, in under a second, the whole thing imploded, the entire slab melting through my table, fusing into the floor.

"Um..." Merlin stared at it for a long second, then said, scratching his chin, "It worked beautifully. For half a millisecond."

"We didn't even try to control anything, just turned it on," I moaned, groaning, "Curse it."

The second attempt lasted longer. Two seconds. The third fizzled out harmlessly with a sad little spark, just like the fourth and fifth. The sixth? Didn't even turn on. The seventh did turn on, but it was the same as the first. The eight lasted for four seconds before folding into itself, initiating a total collapse. This made me think it was about to explode and throw metal shrapnel everywhere... Luckily, it didn't.

"Alright," I sighed, pinching the ridge of my nose, "Clearly, the Vasas' way of looping feedback has one benefit... stability. They leak magic because they're lazy coders, but it also stops them from such catastrophic collapses."

"Mhm..." Merlin nodded, "A core has too much magic to be endlessly contained inside a sealed loop. It works for the beasts, but if we want to keep humans being humans, we can't physically handle it, not even if we are made of steel..."

"Then we stabilize the main loop artificially," Galahad said. "If you insert a sub-pattern, replacing the remaining redundant loops with it, that could absorb the overflow energy."

"Wait..." I blinked my eyes, thinking it through. "An absorption loop... We could then either vent the stored energy or use it as an emergency battery... good idea, Galahad! We can make it modular, so we can adjust thresholds on the fly."

"Or make it into a bomb," Merlin added. "If it is filled and a certain spell is started..." He looked at us, "It could end in a powerful explosion. I am not saying to give our Knights a suicide order... but you all saw how it was against the Guardian. If they go down... they go down with the monsters."

"We will see..." I nodded, thinking about some kind of emergency catapult system... But yes. Merlin was right.

With that in mind, it took us another day to produce something that didn't either explode, melt, or hum like a dying engine, wanting to fall apart.

"Alright," Merlin took a breath, stepping back from the workbench. "Version fourteen, complete! Trojan-Control Version 2.0, final-final-final-prototype alpha-beta-gamma-i-don't-know-amymore. Ready for testing."

"Catchy name," I said, making him roll his eyes. "Galahad, you ready?"

"Yes!" He nodded eagerly, "Recording everything."

When we activated it, the slab pulsed once; this time, a faint blue light traced the runes as I began pumping in monster blood from a massive syringe. When it hit the optimal flow, a low hum spread through the entire floor and workshop. It was resonant but stable this time, without melting the sheet of steel or causing it to start wobbling, showing signs of flying off and beheading one of us. Although... it began turning slightly orange, showing the accumulating heat from the resonance.

"Integrity at ninety-five percent," Merlin murmured, reading off his feelings, operating the core's magic. "No massive feedback spikes, though, but it is slowly falling. Energy retention... nominal."

Then there was a slight puff as the inserted safety loop released magic into the air, which was nothing but pure energy, warming up the room. I also saw the metal dim a little after it happened, like a working cooling system... Finally! I reached out, hovering my palm slightly above the slab's surface. I could tell it vibrated because a pulse of energy was flowing cleanly through the formation without bleeding out, running away, or starting to melt. When there was too much, it released it, causing the spell to keep working. If we hooked this up, there was a chance that we could use the Vasa's control technique... But those tests had to be done live... with someone sitting in the pilot's chair.

"Well," I said, "looks like we're onto something."

"Seems like it," Galahad smiled, too.

"There is still degradation." Merlin hummed, crossing his arms, "Whatever we install this on, that machine will, eventually, break."

"Good enough." I shrugged, "I would rather replace a machine than my people's humanity."