Magic is Programming

Carlos panted and leaned on his knees for a moment after conceding yet another defeat to Trinlen. He looked up at the sound of clapping, coming from the side of the arena opposite Lorvan.

Sconter met his gaze and called out to him. "Good show, you almost had him that time!"

Carlos took a deep breath, then settled to the ground and shook his head. He took a few more breaths to rest before answering the adventurer. "Maybe, but only because I have more mana than he does. That's not good enough. If I need a mana advantage, then that means my skills and tactics are lagging behind and need to be improved. We need to build up every advantage we can get."

Trinlen clapped his hands a couple times to add to Sconter's applause. "Good attitude, boss. You may need that edge someday, when you get into fights with other nobles."

"Yeah." Carlos straightened his back and looked at Trinlen. "There's one thing I don't understand about this, though. Surely the Crown must have had some of the best tacticians in the kingdom design this set of spells for the royal guards to use. Leaving aside Silence, since obviously that one is irrelevant for fighting against an actual royal guard, if the spells you used can beat theirs, then…"

"Why aren't they using my spells instead?" Trinlen grinned cheekily. "I'm flattered, really, but there are more differences between a mage and a royal guard than just whether they rely on speaking to fight."

Carlos shrugged and shook his head. "Well, yes, but many of the spells you used can't be substituted or compensated for with strength, speed, armor, and weapons."

"Correct, but those aren't the only factors." Trinlen called out to the side. "Colonel Lorvan, care to critique the idea of redesigning royal guard enchantments to use the spells I just demonstrated?"

Lorvan gave a respectful nod. "Of course, Mage Trinlen. To start with, many of the spells you used are specialized for narrow purposes, which means that achieving broad versatility with them would require a large number of different spells. Enchantments for casting spells are expensive, and packing many of them into one item magnifies the cost greatly. Equipping royal guards with your entire suite of spells would be exhorbitantly costly."

Carlos raised an eyebrow. "Too expensive even for the Crown?"

"Hardly." Lorvan snorted dismissively. "The Crown could bear the cost, of course. That is the least of the major issues with the idea. More importantly, cramming that many of such enchantments into our gear would require compromises in other aspects of its design. You've been studying royal guard gauntlets with Felton; imagine tripling the number of runic plates in them."

Carlos cocked his head and tried to visualize the idea. "They would have to be more bulky, I suppose. Couldn't some of them be put in the arms or other parts of the suit, though?"

Trinlen laughed before Lorvan could answer, drawing a curious look from Carlos. "He's still on the minor issues, boss, just less minor. Spreading them out more is possible. It would be less efficient and harder to protect from disruption, and doing it without weakening the defensive enchantments on the rest of the armor would be tricky, but it could be done." He shook his head. "Colonel, I think it's time to stop kidding around with the small stuff and give him the major reason it would never work."

Lorvan inclined his head a minute fraction. "Very well. The largest and most intractable issue is that many of Trinlen's spells require a degree of sophisticated control by the caster that can only be achieved with a soul structure dedicated to the purpose."

Carlos's eyes opened wide, and he nodded slowly in understanding. "Aaaah, I see. And that soul structure does not fit the royal guard soul plan. Refining the spells to handle those control details for you should be theoretically possible, I think, but it would be… complicated."

Trinlen chuckled. "Keep that up, and you might start competing with me for greatest understatements. I doubt even Sandaras could do it without sacrificing the flexibility that makes those spells worth using."

Amber called out to him as she walked over. "You've seen the lock spell Sandaras put on the copies of his spellbook, and that thing is so complex that just thinking about it makes me dizzy."

Trinlen fired right back. "I'll grant that he can handle extreme complexity, but that spell doesn't need to be flexible. Versatile flexibility has its own brand of complexity that is the biggest source of headaches for spell designers ever."

Carlos laughed and shuddered. "Now that, I already knew!" He shook his head and sighed. "So, essentially, we'll have to make that soul structure before we can really start sparring with you properly. Three more days, then."

Late that night, Amber looked at Carlos before getting ready to sleep, and paused. "I know that look. What's bothering you?"

Carlos hesitated, then sat up with a long sigh. "It's…" He shook his head and switched to the telepathy that Purple provided for them. [It's some of the incantation words we learned from the royal guard gear today. I can't find all of them in the help command's knowledge reference. I understand all of them and what they do, but for some of them that knowledge comes only from my comprehension aid. That shouldn't be possible. help's information should be complete.]

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Amber leaned back and thought. [It was all made by people. Maybe they just neglected to write about some of the words?]

Carlos shook his head. [No, they designed it to ensure that everything must be documented. help produces its information from the same part of the system as what makes it all work. If an incantation keyword has any effect, then that inherently makes information about its effect available to the help command. And yet, for some of them I can't find that information. I'm missing something, and I don't know what. It's bugging me.]

[I'll let you know if I think of any ideas.] Amber yawned and shook her head. [For now, just get some sleep. We learned a lot today, but we'll be set to learn even more tomorrow with the perception-themed superstructure done and the analysis-themed one in progress, and we need to be properly rested for that.] She deployed the tent's divider curtain and followed her own advice.

The next morning, before beginning their studies for the day, Crown Mage Felton had news for them. "I have been advised that the Crown believes it would be prudent for House Carlos to remain in the Wilds for a while, and to conceal yourselves from potential searches. The Crown arrested a number of noble scions with regard to the 'rotation agreement,' and there may be a chance that an affected house might realize you are connected to how the Crown discovered it."

Carlos just raised an eyebrow and shrugged. "So, we should keep doing exactly what we already planned to. Okay."

"Not quite," Lorvan interrupted. "We have not been concealing ourselves much. Though I'm afraid concealing your aether absorption to an adequate degree might not be possible, at least not without slowing down your advancement by an extreme amount. The Crown would accept the delay, in light of the circumstances, but that decision is yours." He shrugged. "Perhaps you could design one of today's new soul structures after the Tier 8 unification to do something about that. It would not be the most absurd thing I've seen you do."

Carlos blinked and paused. "We'll see if we can think of something for that." He exchanged a look with Amber and spoke telepathically to her. [Concealing aether absorption seems like something Purple would be better suited for; dungeon cores are the premier masters of aether manipulation, after all.]

Purple's attention suddenly focused on them, and he responded before Amber could. [I cannot conceal that aether is being absorbed. Aether continuously pours into the area around us and does not re-emerge. This simple fact cannot be hidden, nor can it be changed without stopping our absorption. What I could do is that, if I expand my domain to cover a much larger area, I might be able to conceal from outside observation precisely where in my domain the absorption is happening.]

Carlos mentally reviewed his knowledge of subterfuge tactics. Most of what I know on the topic comes from games or fiction novels, but all the good ones at least try to make it realistically plausible, right? One of the recurring principles I've seen a lot is that it's better to trick your opponent into believing a falsehood, rather than letting them know that they don't know the truth. So… He started sharing his thoughts with Purple and Amber. [Could you make it appear that the aether is being absorbed in one spot, when it's actually being sent to us instead?]

Purple mulled over the question, and the aether around them all made some strange and erratic movements as he experimented briefly. [With the refinements in my aether control from the dungeon domain superstructure I made yesterday, I believe I can do that. For it to actually fool anyone, I would need something to be a decoy, something that could appear to be doing the absorption.]

[Hmm.] Carlos frowned. [Amber, any ideas?]

[Not directly, but we have other people we could ask.] Amber focused on Felton, who was watching the silent interplay with patient curiosity. "As far as I know, the only thing that can absorb aether is a person. Felton, is there anything else that could serve as a decoy fake aether absorber?"

Felton raised an eyebrow. "You've thought of a way to disguise the location of the absorption, then?" He tilted his head and held his chin contemplatively. "There are some enchanted items that can use aether to fuel themselves, but unless you count the ones made out of dungeon cores, they're immobile and expensive. The main one is the teleporters that nobles use to enter and leave their contained wellsprings. Anyone who saw such a thing randomly out in the Wilds would immediately get suspicious." He paused a few more seconds for thought, but finally sighed and shook his head. "It would have to be a person. And to be at all believable for your rate of absorption, the person would have to be a noble. Preferably multiple people, but a noble in the second stage, inside a dungeon's domain, would go a long way toward convincing people to dismiss the remaining discrepancy."

Carlos hesitated, then slapped his forehead and sighed exasperatedly. "I hate to say it, but… Kindar?"

Amber stared in stupefaction for a moment, then laughed. "You know, using him as decoy bait to protect ourselves actually sounds appealing. But we'd have to go back and catch him up in levels. Unless Purple can…?"

Purple responded by demonstration. A small zone of the Level 19 aether nearby suddenly thinned out, most of the aether pulled back by nearly-imperceptible gossamer threads of Purple's essence, allowing what little remained to decompress to lower levels.

Carlos approached, fascinated, to inspect the phenomenon closely. "Only Level 10 in the center? Yes, and surrounded with thin shells of each level between that and the natural background. Kindar could survive in there. How long can you maintain it, and how easily?"

Purple let the de-leveled area collapse. [Indefinitely, and with only minor effort. Maintaining a greater difference in aether level would take more effort, but lowering the area by only 9 levels is easy.]

"Alright, this is starting to sound like a plan. We should contact Stelras."

Felton spoke up dryly. "You might as well go ahead with that. It's obvious by now that you have a means of purely mental communication, and that it has considerable range. If you want to keep that secret from other houses, you'll have to be a lot more careful about concealing when you use it."

Amber blushed sheepishly, and Carlos sighed and shook his head. Carlos took the lead in responding. "Might as well admit it at this point, I suppose. Alright, here goes." He focused on a mental image of the mayor. [Stelras, I hope I'm not interrupting anything important. We're ready for Kindar to join us soon.]

Mayor Stelras replied cheerfully right away. [Funny you should mention him. I was getting around to telling you that he got impatient and did something about it yesterday evening. No, nothing bad. He was surprisingly polite about the whole thing, actually. He just wrote down his entire soul plan, synergies and all, sealed it in an envelope, and handed it to me to relay to you. He said he hoped you could at least spare a few moments from your busy schedule - he even managed to avoid sounding sarcastic about that - to consider what extensions of it might be possible.]