Why did our ancestors stay on Abilos, you may wonder. Why did they see this Dungeon of horror and decide to stay anywhere near it?
Well, once upon a time, it was worth its weight in gold. Minerals were readily exposed, and the ground near it was fertile and flat. What few Hounds that ranged from the Dungeon were dangerous but manageable, and Champions were a rare sight.
It could be said that the Empire owes its existence to the Dungeon. That our forefathers saw its threat alongside the benefits, and realized what it might one day become.
Either way, we are here, and every century someone tries to make everyone leave. It never succeeds.
Expert from the Beasts of the Dungeon
***
"I think your guards are suspicious of me," Marcus began. Horzo stiffened slightly, but didn't look at said guards. "They are aware that I'm not just going to randomly attack you, right? It would make no sense for me to risk my life like that."
Horzo frowned mildly, his face smoothing over a second later. "No offense was intended from either myself nor the Prince Primus, Archmage. I offer my apologies if decorum has been breached."
"Silent Gods, relax," Marcus replied, groaning. "I've been running around like a madman trying to get the Loyalist network fixed, and I haven't been sleeping great. I'll make you a deal. If you say something that offends me, however unlikely that is, I'll just tell you, alright? You do me the same courtesy, and we can leave the double talk to the nobles."
The Texomancy Archmage nodded slowly. "Alright, deal. I don't like that you're late, both now and to the Empress's meeting of Archmages. It's rude to keep others waiting like that."
Marcus blinked, not quite sure how to respond to that. Was he late? They'd said afternoon, and while he wasn't early, it wasn't dinnertime either. But hey, being polite costs nothing.
"Sorry about that," he finally said. "A lifetime of royalty has given me some bad habits, and I'm seemingly not quite done breaking them all. I'll try to be more punctual in the future. Now, if we're being honest, I don't like being surrounded by lots of people, and I have this nagging feeling that your guards are going to be following us all day."
Horzo paused, seeming to think that over, before waving his hand. To Marcus' surprise, one of them—he guessed their captain, by her insignia—spoke up. "The Prince Primus has ordered us to protect you, Archmage. We cannot do that if we are not close by."
Well, wasn't that an interesting statement? For one thing, being close nor far wasn't going to matter much, not if they got in a proper fight. Barring a very talented—and increasingly touchy—Life enhancement expert, he didn't know of anyone who wouldn't get flattened if two Archmage cut loose.
Pointing that out would be unhelpful, though, so he didn't. But more interesting than their apparent confidence, however, was the fact that the woman spoke at all. He himself encouraged open discussion, especially if he was being stupid, but in front of a foreign power? It undermined Horzo's authority rather fiercely, and showed that their political situation was… divided.
If Vess were here she could no doubt whisper a dozen opportunities in his ear, but she wasn't, and he wasn't interested in involving himself. Being Emperor, more so than usual, sounded exhausting. He damn well wasn't going to play at it.
"Tell the Prince Primus that I'll be fine," Horzo replied, only having waited a few seconds to do so. "You are dismissed."
The woman didn't seem to like that at all, but she and her men retreated. Marcus himself nodded to his Royal Guards, who moved away without a single protest. And if he was feeling the slightest bit smug at that, no one would ever know. Also, he blamed Elly.
Horzo spoke up after they were alone, half turning to the side. The hill that they were standing on overlooked the flat plain that housed the airships, though he couldn't quite see so far. Marcus hadn't wanted to spoil the view. Horzo cleared his throat.
"Shall we?" The man seemed more relaxed without his guards, thankfully, though neither his nor Marcus' own would be too far away. Not until he purposefully abandoned them, anyway. "There is a lot of work to do."
"Lets."
They turned, cresting the hill and bringing the fleet into view. And while Horzo barely paused, Marcus did. He paused and stared, because while he'd roughly known what to expect, seeing it was something else entirely.
Twenty-one airships were arranged in neat lines, the ground under them artificially flat, and around them were camped nearly nine full Legions. Their flags flew in the wind, creating nine separate blocks around the site. Nine bastions.
A wall had been raised around the ships themselves, tall and thick, but the ships. He'd seen fleets before, both his own and Elly's, yet never on land. Never like this, surrounded by an uncountable number of soldiers and even more civilian personnel.
Each ship was as large as one of his galleons, though missing their masts. That did little to make them seem small, since most hovered at least a few dozen feet above the ground. Wooden stairways had been built to reach them, and even from here he could see the lightly shimmering shield barriers around each.
One airship had been imposing, bombing an entire horde with impunity. This? This could raze Redwater to ashes in a few scant hours, or Strada in a day. It was something he had no reference for, and so for a long few seconds, he just stared.
Horzo laughed, a friendly sound. "You're not the first to stare like that. Even the empress looked impressed, and she's been funding the entire project."
"It's incredible," Marcus replied honestly. "I have no idea how you got it done so quickly, or how we've only had a few delays."
The man shrugged. "Oh, I can only claim to have created a fraction of each ship. Their cores and associated tendrils, essentially. It provides flight, one-way shielding and little else, but it was a tricky combination. Shielding itself wasn't too hard, but allowing magical attacks to leave yet not enter? Let's not even talk about flight. That I have a hundred failed experiments of, and it still isn't perfect."
"They're not?"
"Oh goodness, no. They can only fly for around a week before needing twelve hours to recharge, during which they have neither flight nor shielding. It's not a process that can be interrupted, either. Not a huge issue on the surface, with friendly cities to dock in. During the invasion? There seems to be a good reason we are bringing as many soldiers as we are. "
"Not my area of expertise," Marcus replied, shrugging. "My wife is the soldier, I'm interested in magic. And right now, to ensure our survival, I have to indulge my curiosity and figure out how your cores make ships fly."
Horzo hummed. "Is that what marriage is for? I knew my family was lying to me. 'Continuing the next generation' sounds logical and all, but making the womanfolk fight so we men can do science? Much better."
"Exactly." Marcus grinned, which dimmed after a second. "Don't tell Elly I agreed to that."
"She'll get upset?"
"Worse, she'll try to do science. Mind if I shortcut what looks to be an hours' walk?"
The Archmage shrugged, so Marcus teleported them to the closest ship. And maybe he skipped a dozen military checkpoints and pissed off a few Legion officers in the process. Marcus had magic to study, and nobody was going to stand in his way.
He put them both on the ship within a few minutes of teleporting, which was kind of slow, but he was feeling kind enough to give Horzo a chance to breathe. Like most people who were teleported for the first time, his body didn't like it much.
"You shouldn't—blessed cloth this is vile—shouldn't be able to do this," Horzo said, putting a steadying hand on the railing. The man breathed slow and deep, a strip of fabric twisting to touch his forehead. It felt like cold, but the magic was strange. Old in a sense he couldn't describe. Horzo groaned, straightening regardless. "Teleport us onto the ship, I mean."
"Why not?"
"It's shielded."
"Why would that matter?"
Horzo tilted his head. "I'm actually not sure."
"Exactly." Marcus turned to the approaching captain, finding it not to be the captain at all but rather an officer of a rank he didn't recognize. "We're going to need the ship for a while. Evacuate it, and don't let anyone else onboard."
The man didn't so much as blink, saluting and turning away. Hells but he loved the Empire and its emphasis on competence. Horzo snorted. "That was rude."
"Yup. But I also provide a service that no one else can, by which I mean both spatial expansion—of this scope, at least—and the Gates, so the empress won't care. I've also found that I don't have time to argue with every single person I come across."
Horzo—and wow, the man had relaxed pretty damn quickly. Good on him—straightened his clothes. Or rather, the clothes straighten themselves. "People can be unfortunately focused on wasting one's time, I agree, but this will make you nothing but enemies."
"Woe is me," Marcus replied dryly. "I'll make enemies no matter what I do, and if they're too stupid to leave me alone, or strong enough that they think they have a chance, I employ a lot of people whose job it is to stab them to death. And in the event they actually are stronger than me, I'm very good at running away."
"You are nothing like how you presented yourself at the meeting of Archmages."
Marcus shrugged. "I'll take that as a compliment. Now let's go see these cores, my industrious friend."
The Archmage led the way, and they descended down the stairs amidst a stream of ascending workers. Marcus ignored them, as usual, though his defensive suite quietly hummed in the back of his mind. Their talk about enemies had poked his paranoia, and he only resisted scouring his body of poison by a slim margin.
Fortunately, Horzo led them to the second lowest deck of the ship in short order, then into a smaller cabin. Its walls were wood interwoven with cloth, though only here was it really visible to the naked eye. Everywhere else only Marcus' finest senses could detect the infection of fabric.
With the more obvious signs of cloth also came durability and shock absorption enchantments, which he assumed were meant to protect the core. Back when he'd taken a look on Vistus' ship it hadn't been so thorough.
"As you can see," Horzo began, stepping into the cabin, "the core is at the center of the ship. It has to be, because the magic—"
Marcus interrupted, too busy taking it all in to consider how rude he was being. "Because the magic interference would unbalance the weave. It's essentially one giant spell, but not just for connection, or something as basic as gravity manipulation. That would make it consume magic at an unsustainable rate."
"Just so," the Archmage replied, sounding vaguely pleased. "This is older magic, closer to what witches practiced than modern disciplines. Much of what most mages master is crude and heavy handed, throwing around different types of energy to kill one another. Which I will admit has proven effective, but flight is a different beast altogether. Can you guess what I used?"
Looking deeper, and closing his eyes, Marcus hummed. "The outer weave, that which spreads through the ship, is simple. Guidance and focus, stopping it from bleeding out into the air. What does bleed out is collected to help power the shields, which I'll freely admit is elegantly done. The core, though, I cannot begin to guess at. What I know I mostly learned from the School of Life, and then a lot of self study. I am no master."
"It is a fundamentally different branch," Horzo agreed. "Though certainly not lesser. Balthazar's masterpiece is, as the name implies, a masterpiece. The copy you allowed me to take has proven inspirational, by the way. But no, that is not how I approached flight, and the Empress has denied my repeated requests to take apart the Armor of Aversion regardless. I had to start from scratch."
Marcus shook himself out of his analysis. "That's the armor Brandon wears, right? Guess they're scared you'd damage the Crown Prince's inheritance. Nepotism at its finest."
"I wouldn't throw that word around so freely, your Grace." Horzo straightened, clearing his throat. "But yes, it is rather vexing. While not on the level of the School of Life, the Armor of Aversion boasts flight, a rare enough boon on its own, and only weighs a third of what it should while standing at double armor thickness. Its finely overlapping shields with automatically regenerating matrices is almost elementary in comparison, but they are so very masterfully applied. If that wasn't enough, it can repair itself when fed the appropriate metals."
"I thought the empress didn't let you take it apart."
"She didn't, but Brandon is happy enough to spill its secrets, and I did spend a long few months non-invasively studying the artifact. That was before you awakened, I might add. Either way, perhaps it was for the best. What I discovered on my own is something I might not have stumbled across had my expectations been spoiled."
Marcus waved his hand. "Spill it, then. How does it fly?"
"It doesn't," Horzo said, a small grin on his face. "Not in the traditional sense. Every calculation I've run and every test I devised all pointed to the same thing. Sustained flight is impossible. Yet people have managed before, and I suspect they all did so through the same manner. Flight not through science, but combining exotic branches of higher magic, but more specific than that, by abusing what should be consuming a certain amount of energy, but isn't."
"Like my teleportation, or the Gates."
"Exactly!" The Archmage tapped the core. "Texomancy is, in essence, the art of imbuing cloth with magic. Yet where my fellow practitioners need to carefully weave every strand of energy they wish to use, fabric responds to my will eagerly. Enchanting it came just as easily, and through using what we Archmages—and some select other talented souls—enjoy, we can break conventional math."
Marcus didn't suppress the small, almost mad smile taking over his face. "One plus one no longer equals two."
"I'm sure that gets corrected somewhere," Horzo demurred. "But yes. The highly theoretical math that might point to where it comes from deals with things we cannot yet prove exists, but that's beside the point. You rip open holes in the fabric of the universe to avoid having to walk for an hour, and just like how that should take a measure of energy you do not possess, I can create a loop of enchantments that creates more energy than it uses."
Taking a step away from the core made Horzo laugh, though Marcus didn't care. "It does what?"
"Yes, yes, big bomb, everyone dies." The man rolled his eyes. "Trust me, if I was capable of that, the Dungeon would no longer be a concern. No, the cores generate slightly more energy than they use, which in turn they inject into a mechanism I dubbed the Turncite Triangle. It allows each thread of fabric to create a field of energy which I then attuned to the wood, fooling it into thinking air is water. Thus, flying ships which don't fly."
"I don't see how that would necessitate the creation of infinite energy spools."
Horzo raised an eyebrow, seeming delighted. "Oh, you've heard of them? You're quite well read for someone so violent. That's not an insult, of course. Violence is what we need to survive. Still, most people don't seem to realize how delicate our place in the wider universe is, and in fact—"
"We're here for a purpose," Marcus reluctantly interrupted. "As fun as it is to plot the downfall of reality, so to speak, I'm here to enhance the ship's internal space."
The Archmage sniffed. "Oh, alright. We settled on a twenty times increase last time, correct? I should be able to stabilize the magic, so that should hold. The weight equalizers still perform as described? We'll need to test them anyway, I'd think."
"They do, but I'd love your opinion on them regardless. At a twenty times increase, one of the galleons should hold about six thousand souls? That'll be a tight fit."
"They have been stripped of some unneeded compartments, so more like nine thousand per ship, including supplies. Six ships for the first wave, fifty thousand soldiers in them, another thousand mages and other assorted personnel—it'll work."
Marcus hummed. "That's one big ship. Might be I'd want to commission one for after the invasion."
"And might be that I have need of someone capable of spatial expansion this extreme, especially one who can neutralize the added weight. More broken math, I'll assume. Still, Big Betty isn't going to finish itself."
"Who?"
Horzo waved his hand. "It doesn't matter. Let's find a few of the texomancy mages that the Empire created after I awakened, and then we need to convince them not to panic when we strain the fabric of space a tad. People get very weirded out by such things, I've found. Anyway, while the collaboration of Archmages isn't unheard of, I trust my own observations over a three hundred year old book."
Marcus agreed, quickly found out that 'a few' texomancy mages meant several dozen—with hundreds more spread over the other ships—and an hour later he enjoyed the sight of their guards finally catching up to them.
It was a little mean, but his own were used to it, and Horzo's people seemed kind of annoying. Probably because their sole loyalty didn't lie with the man himself, which rubbed him the wrong way. Probably Elly's fault, that.
He looked over to the other ships when they made it back to the deck, properly realizing that they were going to have to enhance every single one. That was going to take a while. A long, long while.
Thankfully, there was a Gate nearby, so he would be sleeping in his own bed tonight. And if there hadn't been, he was itching to properly try out his personal doorway.
Marcus shrugged. Another time. For now, let's you and I go scare some so-called experts, my new friend.
Afterword
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