MiP B2 Chapter 60: Combat Hacking

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Amber stared at the impossible sight before her. The Crown couldn't be defeated! Right? Especially not so quickly and with such apparent ease. She knew that Princess Lornera had called for emergency reinforcements, but she hadn't truly believed that the Crown might actually lose. She and Carlos would answer the call, earn some favor for their earnest efforts, but ultimately prove unneeded as the Crown inevitably won the battle. That was how things were supposed to go.

They weren't supposed to end up watching King Elston, Princess Brenelle, and Prince Patrimmon all get trapped in separate globes of impenetrable force that seemed impervious to the Crown's best efforts. They weren't supposed to watch the king and his scions get ruthlessly battered and cut by an endless succession of immaterial blades, hooks, and spikes that relentlessly scoured the volume within those cages, each weapon imbued with soul-cutting power. And where was Prince Hinren? He couldn't be gone, right? He must have… retreated. Yeah. Surely, that must be the explanation for the fourth scion's absence. The Crown was invincible. Prince Hinren Kalor could not be dead, because that was impossible.

It was every bit as impossible as Princess Lornera Kalor being sidelined by a soul wound, and especially King Elston Kalor himself being trapped and held helpless. And yet, that was exactly what her eyes and mana senses were seeing.

Something inside Amber's soul woke up and nudged her firmly, and she snapped her jaw shut and shook herself. Her prioritizer was right; she couldn't afford to spend time obsessing over how much the situation broke her expectations. She needed to take action before Nyralis could trap her and Carlos too.

She switched her gaze from the struggling royal family to Nyralis. He seemed to be just watching, exulting in his triumph for now. The king and his scions were still alive and healthy, still struggling mightily to break free, but they had no room to dodge, each attack drained more of their mana to resist it, and Nyralis still had plenty of mana in reserve. Nyralis was watching it happen and paying no attention to her or Carlos.

Amber cast a quick spell to try to subtly adjust the rigidity of Nyralis's traps. She sent her spell out in an arc to hit on the side opposite Nyralis, hoping it might escape his notice that way. Nyralis didn't react, but his spells didn't change, either. The barriers continued letting each cut or thrust distort them like water, uselessly passing through without actually harming anything. They would only push back against their victim's entire body, denying the ability to focus force on a small point to break through.

At the same time, another of her minds threaded a Teleport spell through a dimensional access bridge, bypassing the barriers to touch the king's soul and offer him an escape. He rejected it instantly. She tried reaching out the same spell to Brenelle and Patrimmon, but they rejected it as well. She projected a sound message to them, "This will teleport you 20 feet up, outside the traps." They ignored her and still rejected the spell when she tried again.

The king continued slashing and thrusting wildly, trying to pierce and break the barrier keeping him trapped, but all he accomplished was making it wobble and distort like a particularly sturdy soap bubble. His scions tried to help, even coordinating with him to strike the same spot on both sides of the barrier, but the barrier just slipped out of the way and let them hit each other, then closed the gap back in the moment they separated again. All the while, blades of force struck them from every angle, forcing them to spend mana resisting the cutting edges.

The Crown might have dismissed and ignored Amber's efforts, but Nyralis did not. He aimed a wand at her and fired a volley of four Golden Beams at once. One lanced straight at her, one went past and above her before turning sharply to strike her head, and the other two bracketed her from below, turning to aim for the backs of her legs. She had kept one of her minds watching him the whole time, so she saw it coming, and she already knew this spell's counter.

Amber cast an array of four mirrors, each angled to reflect a different beam upward, and each with a specially-designed esoteric construct of essence attached to it. The essence construct looked like a misshapen claw with an oddly-placed spike near one side, and it would have had no obvious purpose if she didn't already know exactly what it was for. The Golden Beams struck the mirrors, and their own essence constructs passed through hers. The clawed shape twisted the spells' structure into the correct orientation for the spike to stab one precise spot. The spike pierced where the Golden Beam's target location was stored, knocked the microscopic piece of essence that represented that value out of place, and replaced it with a new value: 10 miles straight up.

The light of the four beams bounced off the mirrors, and the accompanying spell constructs followed the new path from that point without resistance, streaking off into the sky high above. Nyralis scowled at the sight. "How are you doing that?"

Amber didn't bother to reply and sent a bolt of lightning back at him. The lightning splashed futilely against his protective barrier, but that was fine. It was more for show than anything else, really. They needed to keep him overconfident—and she really hoped that it truly was overconfidence—while they figured out a way to actually take him down.

They'd tried "hacking" Nyralis's barrier spell, but that spell held its control constructs inside its own protection, and their attempts to break through had all bounced off or spent all their power just digging shallow scratches and divots in the surface. They could try to bypass that with Remote Presence—the name for the newly-christened spell felt familiar and natural, though she knew in the back of her mind that Carlos had just then come up with it—but they couldn't put enough power through that to achieve anything without it drawing Nyralis's attention.

She mentally nudged Carlos; he hadn't tried to attack Nyralis, even for show, since their initial entrance. He fired off some kind of lightning-wreathed drill, which achieved about as little as her last Lightning Bolt had, and nudged her back. He'd noticed something about some of Nyralis's items. Amber focused one of her minds on the items in question, and she immediately noticed the same similarity that Carlos had.

She could sense a lot more details now than back when she had worn suppression cuffs in that remote cave… Was it really only two months ago, maybe two and a half? She dismissed the thought of that time span. What mattered was that, though her senses had been much less developed back then, she had gotten an extremely close look at the enchantment, and had even experienced its effects personally. Several of Nyralis's items unmistakably did the same thing, and they were currently active.

Technically, they worked by the same mechanism. The actual effect was undoubtedly different, as it would make no sense for Nyralis to have equipped items that would cripple himself several times over. Each item inserted a soul structure into him, but unlike with suppression cuffs, those structures empowered him. The answer to why he would bother with inserting structures from items, rather than just building them naturally, immediately jumped out at her: It was how he had worked around the normal limit and achieved a full set of ten superstructures that were all at Tier 10. Though, actually, that would only explain nine of the items, and he had… she quickly counted a full set of ten such items, all of them equipped and active.

Amber briefly wondered why Nyralis used an item even for the one Tier 10 superstructure that he could have made the normal way, but then took a mental note to consider it later and dismissed the thought. What mattered right now was any possible way they might be able to exploit this. Removing the items from Nyralis would remove the soul structures along with them, but they were powerfully secured to his body. Tampering with the enchantments could potentially achieve the same result, but Carlos had already tried, and they had layers upon layers of immensely strong and comprehensive wards.

Her other minds handled continuing the showy exchange of spells with Nyralis. She still had difficulty believing that it was even possible, even while she was actively doing it, but despite the sheer power of Nyralis's high Level, she and Carlos were picking apart and countering every spell he sent their way. Nyralis's spells felt strangely fragile, compared to her practice sparring against Carlos. Another spell construct took shape and blasted toward her, she poked a precisely targeted bit of essence in it, and the spell just… let it happen.

There was no special protection for the spot that defined how hot the fire was supposed to be, no resistance to it being altered, no redundant verification. It had a general shield against simple essence bludgeoning, but that barely did anything against the precision needles she attacked the spell's structure with. What should have been a white-hot blazing inferno dimmed into orange flickers of flame that she didn't even really need to specifically counter. She could have turned it all the way down to just gentle warmth, but that would have been too obvious. She cast a cooling spell anyway and tried to pretend to Nyralis that the directly opposite spell was the entire reason for his attack's failure.

The enchantments empowering and protecting Nyralis were much more resistant to meddling, unfortunately. Amber had already tried poking a few needles into them, as stealthily as she could manage, and each needle had gotten diverted, bent, and broken. She could crash the whole system to cut power to them if she really had to, but that would break their own power too, and that dragon's warning about the Voidlands was disturbing. Carlos's idea of a universal counterspell by attacking a spell's access to its mana supply would do the trick, if only the system would let it actually work.

Amber's mind froze in realization for a moment. Wait a minute, these aren't spells, they're enchantments. And we have replaced the mana supply of enchantments before, and the system didn't block it. In fact, it felt like the system actively helped it work, because we were replacing a hacky kludge with the actual proper way to do it!

She quickly examined what she could sense of how Nyralis's enchantments were powered, and they were definitely using the same kludge as the royal guard armor they'd fixed before. Amber sent a wordless idea to Carlos, and he responded with enthusiastic approval and a skeleton of a spell design. Amber devoted another of her minds to coordinating with him, and the spell quickly took shape as expansions and refinements on various sections passed back and forth between them.

Between their accelerated perception of time, their collaboration, their spell templater, autosuggester, spell optimizer, comprehension aid, and numerous other soul structures all contributing in their own ways, the spell was ready in seconds. Amber cast it first, and it was like Nyralis's enchantments actively opened themselves up to welcome the spell in and accept its effects. Carlos joined in, and in mere moments they had "fixed" all of Nyralis's most important items.

Nyralis cocked his head and raised his right eyebrow. "What did you… Did you just… improve my gear? And how?"

The mana of Nyralis's enchanted items flowed more smoothly, more potently, strengthening his protections.

Then, with Carlos encouraging her to "do the honors," Amber flicked a hidden switch with her mana. The backdoors they had built into this variant of a proper as-designed enchantment mana supply all triggered.

Ten merged superstructures emerged from Nyralis's soul, now bare and exposed, connected only to the powered-off items that should have been maintaining them inside his soul. His protective spiked barrier blinked out of existence. Carlos cast a Dimensional Force Cage around him, and his automatic teleport did not trigger.

Nyralis's eyes almost bugged out of his head as he dropped to the bottom of the aerial cage Carlos had trapped him in, his flight enchantment no longer active. He landed roughly, uncoordinated and surprised, and dropped to hands and knees before he could react.

With the main threat dealt with, Amber looked down at the soul-scraping traps the king and his elder scions were still trapped in. Unfortunately, while those traps may have been originally cast by an enchanted item, they were now spells operating independently. On the other hand, they could now freely focus all of their efforts on helping break those spells, with no enemy at hand to reinforce, repair, or replace them. With that circumstance, she thought it shouldn't take very long.

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