MiP B2 Chapter 52: Mysteries

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For one heartstopping moment, Carlos feared that the dragon would die, crushed under the system-fueled power of the negative parameter bug applied to Amber's Force Bubble spell, and take all the answers he wanted with it. Then the transparent sphere of force abruptly stopped its rapid collapse, stabilizing with the dragon merely uncomfortably cramped inside it.

He paused for a moment to take stock. It was hard to believe that the fight, so tremendously difficult against what had seemed like a nearly-unstoppable force, had so suddenly ended in their victory. The meaning of the dragon's posture was undeniable, however. Far from pushing back with its incredible strength and trying to tear the spell apart, the dragon was curled up almost into a ball. Its wings were furled tightly against its back, its tail was tucked under its body, and its long neck was bent into a U shape, holding its head all the way back over its torso. Its legs, both front and back, were tucked in close. Despite all possible means of physical support being as withdrawn as possible, the dragon still hovered right in the center of the Force Bubble.

Carlos drew even with the dragon, but stayed a cautious 50 feet away hovering in front of it, despite the barrier holding it captive. Then he engaged his comprehension aid's guidance on how to communicate with the dragon and unleashed his curiosity. "What do you mean, asking how we learned that spell? I know what you are referring to, but… How can you sense it? It is a thing of the spellcasting system, and you do not cast spells."

Before the dragon could answer, Carlos's sight of it was interrupted by the arrival of a heavily-armored warrior holding a torn tower shield protectively between them. Kindar stood warily in front of the contained dragon, shield forward, and sent a question to him through Purple's telepathic links. [What's going on? Did we win, or are we still fighting? And why are you growling and snapping like… um, well… like that?]

Carlos blinked, then chuckled. "Right, sorry. Of course you don't understand it. The dragon surrendered, so we're… probably done fighting? I don't particularly trust it, but you can stand down for now. For whatever else is happening, it involves house secrets. Now, unless it tries to attack again, I'd like a clear view of the dragon I'm trying to talk with." He waited, and after a few moments, Kindar drifted to the side a bit and minutely relaxed his stance.

Carlos shifted back to spell-augmented dragonspeech. "Now, as I was saying: How can you, a non-mage, sense the… let's call it an 'anomaly', in how that spell works?"

The dragon twisted its neck back toward Carlos, awkwardly contorting to both stay balled up and give him a wary side-eye. It almost seemed like the dragon was afraid to even risk the slightest chance of just touching the Force Bubble's shell. "Release me."

Carlos stared for a moment, then huffed skeptically. "You surrendered, yet now you're making a demand? You're in no position to demand anything."

The dragon's eye on the side of its head facing Carlos blinked, then narrowed. Its voice firmed up with a measure of confidence. "You want information from me. First, release me. Dispel your… anomaly. Then, I will talk."

Amber called out from farther above, "If we do, what's to stop you from using the opportunity to attack again? Or to escape? I will not give up this surety of our victory, and our ability to demand answers, without something to replace it."

The dragon glared up at her and growled, then sighed. "You want surety? Very well." Mana poured forth from the dragon and imbued its voice with a strange reverberating resonance that impressed a feeling of significance upon Carlos's mana senses. "I, Ankalondorithmal of the Silver Flight, swear Oath upon my Flame that, upon release from your spell, I shall converse with you and then depart peacefully. I shall no longer contest your claim to these lands and their wellspring." The sense of magical significance faded, though the dragon—Ankalondorithmal—spoke once more. "Now, your turn. Release me."

Carlos looked up at Amber and reached out to her telepathically. [What do you think? Anka– … Whatever its—His? Her?—name is, that oath certainly sounded serious, and I got the impression that it's magically binding in some way. But I don't really know. Dragons as a real thing, not just a topic of made-up stories, are new to me.]

Amber kept her gaze focused on the dragon. After a few seconds of consideration, she nodded. [I got the same impression, and whatever else dragons may be known for, they do not have a reputation for lying.] She flicked her mana through the spell's controls, and the Force Bubble vanished. The feeling of wrongness disappeared with it, and Carlos released some tension he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

The dragon extended its wings back to their full span and beat them once, lazily, bobbing up a bit while it relaxed its neck, legs, and tail back into its normal posture. It almost seemed to glow, its silver scales shining in the sunlight. "That's better. Now, how did you learn that spell?"

Carlos cocked his head. "Aren't you the one who's supposed to be answering questions now? You still haven't answered how you can sense it. And come to think of it, why do you care? Oh, and what's your name, again? I didn't quite catch it the first time, sorry."

The dragon snorted and, with a quick flick of its wings, started flying to its left while maintaining the same distance, circling Carlos clockwise. "You have mastered the speech of dragons, yet have trouble remembering a simple name? Hmph. I am Ankalondorithmal of the Silver Flight. If that is too much for you, you may call me Ankalon. As for how I can sense it, how could I possibly not sense it? Your… system, as you call it, is hardly subtle in crying out its distress."

Carlos raised an eyebrow and exchanged a look with Amber. "Huh. Among humans, typically only those who actually use the system can sense that at all. I guess dragons are just naturally more sensitive to all kinds of mana use. That doesn't explain why you care, though."

Ankalon turned their head to stare directly at Carlos, while still circling steadily, and narrowed their eyes. "Surely, you cannot possibly be that ignorant about the nature of what you wield. How did you learn it? The knowledge of that spell should have been lost! There was no successor, no student or apprentice, and you humans hoard your secrets beyond all reason."

Carlos met Ankalon's stare unflinchingly and kept his voice firm and level as he replied. "I know that it forces the system to not only help the spell function, but to supply mana to fuel it. I know that the mana supplied by the system can empower the spell far beyond what the caster's own mana would be capable of. I know that, if pushed to an extreme, it can deplete the system's mana in a substantial area around where it is used. I know that non-system magic still functions in an area depleted this way. And I know that the system can recover from such depletion, given time."

Ankalon flew a full circle in silence around Carlos, periodically looking askance at him. "If that is all that you know, then your teacher left out the true depths of it. Or did he relax his grip on secrets just enough to leave behind a book or journal with the barest surface of it? If so, I hope you destroyed the book and kept it to yourself."

Carlos laughed. "No one taught me this. I figured it out on my own. The method required to make it work is convoluted and circuitous, clearly an unintended flaw in the design of the system, a gap in the safeguards meant to prevent this exact issue. I stumbled across it while experimenting in curiosity with variations on a basic standard spell. I shared it with her—" He flicked his head up toward Amber. "—and no one else."

Ankalon circled for a while before they spoke again. At last, the mixed growls and roars of their voice rang across the landscape once more in a firm proclamation. "If you speak truly that you lack knowledge of that spell's greater dangers, then… Perhaps that is for the best. Do not use it again, and especially do not try to empower it further. No one, yourselves included, wants to create another Voidlands."

Without another word, or even waiting for the beginning of a response, Ankalondorithmal flicked their wings and, with a burst of mana, the dragon flew away. In mere moments, faster than Carlos could decide how to react, Ankalon was already little more than a dot on the horizon. Carlos stared after the dragon for a few seconds, then chuckled and shook his head ruefully. "I don't think trying to track him down is worthwhile. Wait, or is it 'her'? We only got a name." He shrugged. "Whatever. I figure that giving chase has a high chance of running into another dragon, possibly a more powerful one, and that is not a chance worth taking."

Amber floated down to hover beside Carlos, looking in the same direction. "Well, apparently they surrender immediately if we just use that spell, but… Yeah. We don't know how universal that is, and I'd rather not find out the hard way that there's one that can break it instead. Or possibly worse, find out what Ankalondorithmal meant about 'another Voidlands.' What do you think that could mean?"

Carlos stared off into space, thinking. "Hmm." He glanced at Kindar and pointedly switched to telepathy. [You know, they kept talking like it was about a specific single spell, not a general trick that could be applied to many different spells. If the first Voidlands was created specifically by a Force Bubble that used the exploit to crush things… A black hole would fit the "void" descriptor supremely well, but that would require a stupendously immense magnitude of force to create, and I'd expect it to be either irrelevantly small or so catastrophically powerful that everything would already be gone.]

Amber's face blanched, and she glared at Carlos and blinked several times. [A… what?! No, no, never mind. How can you just casually mention something like that like it's an ordinary everyday concept? And how… What… Just– No.] She took a deep breath. [Please don't mention that again, unless you seriously believe it's actually relevant. I don't want to have to think about the… stuff that my comprehension aid told me is packed into that term.]

Carlos put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed lightly. [Right, sorry.]

Amber smiled at him and nodded. [Anyway, moving on… Maybe it's an area devoid of mana? That would fit with the exploit draining mana from things other than the caster, if there's a way to force it to go beyond even the system's reserves and pull from the environmental aether, and maybe even other things.]

Carlos smiled back at her and shrugged. [That sounds reasonable, but who knows? I guess we'll have to track down Ankalon, or maybe another dragon, at some point to ask for more details.]

[Yeah.] Amber stared after the direction the dragon had gone, hovering in contemplative silence.

After a few moments, Carlos tilted his head. [Hmm. I wonder what all of this has to do with Sandaras, too. Ankalon mentioned him earlier. Maybe Sandaras is the one who used the exploit before?]

Amber's head whipped around to stare at Carlos. [Wait, what? When did–]

"Congratulations on your success, Lord Carlos and Lady Amber! I knew you could do it, though inducing a dragon to retreat is an unorthodox outcome. However, I feel I should remind you that the important business of actually claiming the wellspring yet remains."

Carlos jerked in startlement and looked toward the voice, ahead and below him. "What? Oh, Lorvan. Um, right. We'll get right on that."

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A while ago, I was pleasantly surprised when I finished reading a chapter of another story I'm following, and found a review and recommendation for Magic is Programming in the author's note, completely unsolicited! I'm returning the favor now.

The Factory Must Grow is, of course, heavily inspired by the game Factorio. It's set in a fantasy rather than sci-fi universe, however, and it prominently features a System - one that was artificially created by the civilization the characters are from, and that is largely nonfunctional in the new universe they just arrived in. Fortunately for them, one of their members is a superbly educated expert on System engineering and magic in general. Unfortunately for them, they find themselves in a completely untamed wilderness, that has never even seen the presence of sapient life before, and most certainly does not have any of the infrastructure they are all used to working with.

Even worse, they are all completely unprepared for such a pure wilderness scenario, because such an event is very definitely Not Supposed To Happen. The ritual that sent them there was supposed to work by hijacking an existing civilization's isekai-summoning ritual, sending a trained and prepared team instead of a random teenager to handle whatever crisis prompted them to gamble on a Summoned Hero. As such, there's supposed to be an existing civilization for the team to work with in their new world.

Instead, they're having to build everything from scratch. First objective: Survive! Second objective: Somehow build a System Node, so they can finally stop being stuck at level 1 with a bare minimum of skills and stats!

It's an interesting and well-done take on a fantasy LitRPG variant of the Factorio premise, and I enjoy all the theory and background stuff it goes into in the [Erudite Enchanter]'s scenes where he builds up to eventually creating the critical System Node they need so badly. If you like the soul structures and system worldbuilding of Magic is Programming, I think you'll probably like this one too.