Chapter 254: Good News, Bad News

“This whole system originally belonged to the Builder,” Clive said. “There’s a good chance he has at least some sense of what is happening with it. Probably only to a limited degree, though. Otherwise he wouldn’t need to send out teams to activate these towers.”

“Meaning we should set off the phoney sabotage,” Jason said.

“Exactly meaning that,” Clive said. “If the Builder thinks we're going for it, he’ll concentrate his forces everywhere except here because he thinks we’re going for another tower.”

“If we do that,” Humphrey said, “will it prevent your ability to figure out what’s going on?”

“No,” Clive said. “The sabotage is designed to pulse out some impressive but harmless waves of magic, after which this tower will go dark long enough for us to move on. It will restart itself in fairly short order.”

“Are you sure this sabotage thing isn’t a trap?” Jason asked. “It won’t just blow the top off the tower, will it?”

“Probably not,” Clive said.

“Probably?”

“The rest of us won’t be up here when you set it off, just in case,” Clive said. “I’m sure it’s fine, though.”

“Why am I the one doing it?” Jason asked.

“Uh… authenticity?” Clive suggested. “It’ll be a more accurate representation of someone of your skill level making the mistake.”

“Are you saying I’m so crap that you can’t even fake being this bad?” Jason asked.

“No,” Clive said. “I’m just handing you the notebook…”

He passed it back to Jason.

“…and leaving diplomatically.”

Neil let out a loud laugh, slapping Jason on the back as he followed Clive in the direction of the stairs.

“Clive’s judgement is pretty good with the magic stuff,” Belinda said, leaving with the rest of the team. Sophie flashed him an apologetic smile as she walked away with the others.

“I’m definitely sleeping with his hypothetical wife again,” Jason muttered to himself. He opened the notebook and made his way to the plinth on the centre of the tower. It was covered in glowing runes, like the mirage chamber control panel belonging the Humphrey’s family.

He took his time, taking his own notes while he prepared to follow what he had originally assessed to be a sabotage method. Now that he knew better, he started to notice the ways the notebook was directing him, along with the flaws in his original understanding.

With the fake sequence recorded in his own notebook he started touching his fingers lightly to the sigils. Their glowing lights brightened and dimmed, sometimes changing colours. Slowly but surely, the runes started going out and not coming back on.

As the final one faded out, he was unsure if he had done it right for a moment as there was no reaction. Then his magical senses picked up something from the tower below him. It was a slow growth of power, building and gathering into a much more powerful force. Just as it seemed ready to burst, it violently unravelled, lashing at his magical senses as he felt an impressive destructive chain reaction being released.

The magic collapsed in a way that felt like a permanent end to whatever functionality it once possessed. Even knowing that it was only a wave of magic projecting a false magical impression, it was so jarringly effective that he began to have doubts.

None of it was harmful but Jason’s whole body tingled from the electric sensation. He was still recovering when the team returned.

“That felt incredibly real,” Neil said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn the magic in this tower had just been ruined.”

“We should go,” Humphrey said. “We’ll find somewhere to hole up nearby so Clive can examine the towers at need, but we’d best not be here if the Builder sends more people.”

“That’s fine,” Clive said. “I’d like to take some more time with the notebook. It’s far from a complete breakdown of the tower’s magic but it falls right into line with what we’ve seen of the Builder’s astral magic. That’s why I’m hoping the books Knowledge gave Jason will help fill in the gaps now we have a starting point.”

“We don’t have time for a research project, Clive,” Humphrey said. “We have hours before the Builder knows we aren’t following the plan, not days. Every moment we lose is stealing away out initiative.”

“Do you seriously expect me to figure out how ancient magic from outside our universe works and how to use it to stop the machinations of a great astral being, all in a matter of hours?”

“Are you saying you can’t do it?” Humphrey asked.

“No,” Clive said. “I’m just making sure that you’re suitably impressed when I accomplish the absurd task you’ve set before me.”

“I think he’s let that hero thing go to his head,” Neil said.

While Clive pored over books from Jason’s inventory and the notebook they took from the cultists, Sophie and Jason scouted the area. Shade did the same, as did Stash, in the forms of various lizards and jungle birds. They were looking for any trace of cultists or the Builder’s spyders.

Clive eventually pulled Jason off scout duty, roping him and Belinda into a renewed investigation into the towers, as they were the ones with enough knowledge to be useful. Clive was inside the tower with the world engineer while Belinda was on top, keeping a close eye on the portal gate. Through Jason’s voice chat, Clive directed him to use the control plinth on the new offshore tower.

“Alright, Lindy,” Clive said after several hours work. “Watch out, because this should get a reaction. You might want to back off a few steps. Jason, you can start the next sequence.”

Jason waited for Belinda to back off, then started working the controls in the sequence Clive fed him. It was lengthy but eventually they got a result. For the first time since falling dormant after their arrival, the portal arch filled with dark energy. It lit up with stars like Jason’s cloak, which grew brighter and brighter before erupting out of the portal with a sizzling sound. Belinda was already well clear, but took a few extra steps back anyway. After the brief, pyrotechnic burst, the portal settled back down and was once again filled with only the darkness.

“Did we open the portal?” Belinda asked, looking at it. “Can we go home, maybe get some reinforcements?”

“It looks like a normal open portal?” Clive asked, still inside the tower.

“Just like Jason’s portal ability,” Belinda said. “Although his doesn’t shoot of a bunch of sparks first.”

“Under no circumstances should you attempt to go through,” Clive said. “We didn’t open a portal. This is a test to see if I could get the arch to interact with the dimensional membrane. If you tried going through it, you wouldn’t teleport anywhere. It would look like you disappeared because what little of your body that made it through would be in pieces too small to see with the naked eye.”

After a number of similar tests, they retreated to a nearby hiding spot. The team remained vigilant of their surroundings as Clive was absorbed in the huge number of notes he had written, muttering to himself. His notes were scattered amongst Jason’s books, sitting open and the cultist’s notebook, which he had taken apart, page by page. The whole mess was a riot of magical diagrams and multi-lingual texts that only Clive himself was able to discern any kind of order in.

Clive stood up and paced around, then abruptly stopped, turning to stare at the mess he had made with a gaze that could have bored into the brick floor. His hands were behind his head, fingers interlocked as his brain turned over.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said to himself. “It doesn’t fit. Why doesn’t it fit?”

“What doesn’t fit?” Belinda asked. Her time as Clive’s assistant had given her a decent sense of how to be a good sounding board for him.

“The portal gates,” Clive said. “the gates are integrated into the whole system, but instead of serving the dormant world engineers, its like they’re feeding on them.”

“How so?” she asked.

“Alright,” he said. “So, the portal arches are, at their core, a very escalated version of Jason’s essence power. Using an essence power as a model for other kinds of magic is a common practise, given that essence abilities represent the most stable forms of magic. To operate these portals, they were tapping into the world engineers. Even dormant they were an incredible source of magic. Drawing that power from the golems was only ever going to make it harder to awaken them. There may even be some damage to them after using them like this for centuries. Why would the Builder create such a terrible, ill-fitted system? It’s throwing off my whole understanding of how it all works together.”

“That’s easy,” Belinda said. “The Builder didn’t do it. The Order of the Reaper did. What do they care about the integrity of the Builder’s constructs?”

Clive slapped his hands over his face, letting out a groan.

“I’m an idiot,” he berated himself. “How could I overlook something that obvious?”

“You understand it now?” Jason asked.

“More than that,” Clive said, flashing the kind of wild, predatory grin the team would expect from Jason. “I might have just had an idea that solves all our problems.”

“All of them?” Jason asked.

“All of them,” Clive confirmed. “Oh, gods, as soon as you look at it from the perspective of two groups working at odds, everything falls into place.”

“Care to share your revelation?” Humphrey asked.

“On the way,” Clive said. “We have to run more tests.”

“Zato?”

“Yes, Lord Builder?”

“I’ve ordered the enhanced teams back here to the central tower. The rejector isn’t going to the other towers.”

“You said the sabotage was triggered on one of the towers,” Zato said.

“A stalling tactic,” the Builder said. “It is long past time they should have arrived at another tower, and now the tower they supposedly sabotaged is being used again. They are experimenting, but not getting far. All they’ve managed is to open a false portal that would have killed them if they stepped though.”

“We can only hope,” Zato said. “Should we send people after them?”

“No,” the Builder said. “They are going to come here.”

“Against the bulk of our forces and our defensive position? That would be foolish.”

“Yes” the Builder said. “The one thing Asano can be relied upon to do is the last thing he should. He thrives on the unanticipated surprise of the foolish move.”

“What does he hope to accomplish?”

“Presumably to destroy the central tower,” the Builder said. “It seems he has seen through the false sabotage, but there is no way he could comprehend the mechanisms for awakening the world engineers, even if he found them and determined that was the goal. I’ve seen inside his mind and know his level of understanding. It would not be enough to build a knowledge base that could decipher the functions of this place. He will likely conclude that if he can destroy the tower, he can bring it all to an end.”

“Can he?” Zato asked.

“No. The magic flowing through the tower would prevent even me from affecting it further without all but eradicating this vessel on the spot.”

“So we just wait for the rejector to come to us?”

“Yes. It is time to put an end to the mortal who thinks he can pit himself against a being beyond his meagre comprehension. He shall learn the price of challenging true power.”

Clive was sat, cross-legged on Onslow, who was floating back towards the towers. Belinda had used her ability to conjure simple objects to make him a small knee bench, which he was using to scribble down new sequences to test out on the towers. As he did, he was explaining what he had learned from the team.

“There’s a lot of good news,” Clive said. “Some bad too, but we’ll get to that. The first piece of good news is that these towers are all integrated into a single, linked system. There’s enough here in these notes provided by the builder that I can more or less determine what they do and – this is the important thing – how. I cannot overstate the value of those books of Jason’s. They have dimensional transgression theory that makes our most sophisticated astral magic look like cave drawings.”

“And what do these towers do?” Humphrey said. “We were already assuming that the point is to wake up the giant golems.”

“That’s only part of it,” Clive said. Despite holding a conversation, he never looked up from the notes he continued to rapidly scrawl. “Do you all remember that this astral space is artificially attached to our world?”

“Sure,” Neil said.

“Well, I don’t think it was just the connection to our world,” Clive said. “I think this entire astral space is artificial. It’s a giant boarding vessel. Instead of delivering people onto ships, it delivers the Builder’s most powerful weapons onto worlds. He loads it up with these world engineer things, clamps it onto the side of a world and them sends them in. But something happened, here, to change all that.”

“I think a lot of things happened here,” Neil said.

“Somehow,” Clive continued, “this place was taken out of the Builder’s hands and placed in the Order of the Reaper’s. They repurposed it various ways, but only one is relevant to us now. They repurposed the interdimensional mechanisms designed to launch the world engineers into a transport system, using a portal power as a template.”

“How does that affect us now?” Humphrey said.

“For one thing,” Clive said, “it’s the reason the Builder had to send out teams instead of just directing the whole thing to operate. His teams are bypassing the Order of the Reaper’s alteration to restore the original functionality of the towers and the Builder’s ability to control the towers remotely.”

Clive was still scribbling away madly, even as his explanation became more excited.

“So that bought us the time try something,” Sophie said. “But now what do we try?”

“We reconfigure the whole system the Builder is activating,” Clive said. “Instead of moving it away from the order’s modifications, we amplify it with the power coursing out from the central tower. I mentioned before that the Order’s changes were potentially damaging to the golems? This process will be worse for them than ever, as in piles of scrap. It will also burn out the ability of the original system to send them to our world.”

“Which shuts down the Builder’s plans entirely,” Humphrey said. “I like it.”

“You’ll like this more,” Clive said. “All that power won’t be going into the world engineers, but coming out of them. It will go back to what the Order of the Reaper had it doing, which was to power what the portal was for in the first place.”

“You mean…?” Neil asked, almost superstitious in voicing hope.

“I mean opening a portal home,” Clive said. “That much power should blast right through the interference caused by the damage to the dimensional membrane.”

“So, we shut down the golems, foiling the Builder and open a path home, all at the same time?” Belinda asked.

“I told you,” Clive said. “A solution to all our problems. There is a catch, however.”

“Which is?” Humphrey asked.

“The actual reconfiguring is actually quite simple,” Clive said. “As Jason noted, something operating on this scale has many potential failure points. It took weeks to configure the portal correctly and get us into the astral space. I brought enough materials to do something similar, if required, to get us back out. The damaged dimensional membrane rendered that moot, but I can use those materials to construct a fairly simple device to recalibrate the whole system in the way we need. I just need to use the towers here to calibrate the device itself.”

“That sounds good so far,” Humphrey said.

“The trick,” Clive said, “is that we have to take the device to the central tower to make it work. I’m pretty sure we’ll need to get it inside the tower, then run it up from the bottom to the top. We need to carry the device up through the interior of the building.”

“You mean actually, physically carry it? Jason asked.”

“Yes.”

“That’s it?” Jason asked. “Bottom to top? No rituals, no messing with the tower.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Clive said. “The Builder has already done all the work. All we have to do is flip the process on its head, so instead of moving away from the order’s alterations, the system pushes back into them.”

“Great,” Sophie said. “All we have to deal with is a silver-ranker, the Builder itself and an army of constructs, cultists and weird messed-up people that won’t die.”

“I did say there would be bad news,” Clive said.

“How confident are you in this?” Humphrey asked Clive.

“I’m working from unreliable notebooks, magical theory I barely understand and crazy world-invading devices operating on a larger scale than any magic I’ve ever seen,” Clive said. “But it’s this or we sit back and watch the Builder do whatever he likes.”

“That’s pretty good, under the circumstances,” Jason said.

Humphrey nodded.

“You’ve done better than anyone could have asked,” he told Clive.

“Didn’t stop you from asking, though, did it?”

“That leaves the rest of us to come up with a plan on how to overcome impossible odds, where the enemy has the strength, the numbers, the defensive position and probably knows we’re coming, if not why.”

“I always figured that we would need to take the fight to them, sooner or later,” Jason said. “I’ve been thinking about how to do that for a while and I do have one idea.”

“What is it?” Humphrey asked.

“Well,” Jason said, “it’s audacious, crazy and something I learned from a video game, so very much me.”

“What’s a video game?” Neil asked.

“Never mind that,” Humphrey said. “What’s the idea?”

“We run a train on the Builder,” Jason said.