Chương 256

Orion stared at the floating fortresses, watching the acidic clouds spread dangerously close to their position. Magic was weakening, and they hadn't inflicted enough damage on the machine army to end it before it could turn the tide. Within the next hour, he expected the Alliance to be pushed back, and given how much trouble their powerhouses were having against the Enders, he couldn't expect any help from them. Even the druids were beginning to falter.

They fought with great ferocity, felling giant machines with their control over nature and doing their best to dissipate the clouds of Silence, but the sheer volume of mana they were channeling would leave them exhausted before long. When that happened, they'd be easy prey for the prowling Cyborgs, who took advantage of any opening the Centurions and Burrowers created.

If I had known they would bring so many zeppelins, I would have insisted on stationing someone above, but then again, that might have left them exposed to counterfire. We've been protected by the wards so far, which is the only reason the zeppelins haven't unleashed their weapons on the Basin and turned it into a wasteland.

"Come on," he urged, prompting Pauline to follow.

"We need to find someone who can send us up there." She stared at him as if he had lost his mind.

"We cannot survive that cloud, Orion. And even if we could, any broom or levitation artifact would falter the second we entered it." Given that the zeppelins had held back, hovering high above their forces, any such fall would leave them dead on arrival, either from the impact itself or from the mass of spinning blades that would greet them.

"Ah, there is no need to worry," Orion reassured her, already moving along the trench line toward a cluster of Arcane Collegium wind specialists who were supporting a nearby elemental-staff battery.

"We will have all the headspace we need to shield ourselves from the fog. After all, we won't be flying up there." He only gave her time to narrow her eyes in suspicion before he grinned.

"We'll be launched!" Sliding into the trench beside the blue-robed mages, he tapped the shoulder of an Arcanist he recognized from his earlier demonstration.

"I need your squad's help," Orion ordered, leaving no room for debate. The man blinked, deflecting a hail of shrapnel with a flick of his staff.

"Voidwalker? We're busy if you can't tell. Those damn machines are targeting our positions because we're the least affected by the Silence."

"A single battery position won't matter if we're drowned in it," Orion countered swiftly.

"The big zeppelin is generating most of the fog. It is their greatest asset, which makes it their greatest vulnerability. If we disable it, the buffer collapses, and we'll be able to shoot the rest of them out of the sky."

"And how do you propose we reach it?" the Arcanist asked, glancing nervously at the toxic clouds overhead.

"I am not asking you to come up with me," Orion said, pulling his lab coat tight.

"I just need you to create a high-pressure wind tunnel. A straight, frictionless vector aimed directly at the lead airship's underbelly. I will handle the rest." The man stared at him, quickly doing the math.

"You want us to fire you up there."

"Essentially," Orion agreed.

"I need your four best wind casters for a couple of minutes at most. But we must move now, before the fog descends any lower and makes it impossible." Although the mage appeared quite unsure about the situation, he found no support in Pauline, who defaulted to her usual approach of going with the flow whenever he got wacky ideas. More importantly, the situation was clearly deteriorating rapidly, and Orion had already proven his talent.

When no reason to deny him materialized, he signaled four of his mages, drawing them back from the front line. Orion led the small team to a cleared section of the cliff, relatively sheltered from the battle's aftershocks. He checked his equipment to ensure it was tightly secured and took a deep breath.

"Pauline, leave the fog to me," he said.

"I will need your shadows the moment we hit the hull to anchor us, so use the time I'll buy you to focus." She gave the sky one last look, where explosions of silver and fire kept going off as the tier-four fighters battled, and sighed.

"Alright, let's do this." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. With her agreement secured, he turned to the mages.

"Link your casting. I need a concentrated cylinder of wind, focused entirely on pushing upward. Do not let any of the pressure escape laterally." That last part was fundamental. His plan hinged on being able to hijack their construct once he was high enough, wielding it with [Atmospheric Centrifuge] to briefly mimic the magic of a higher tier.

It was risky, as without being the true caster of the spell, he couldn't impart the full breadth of his Knowledge to it, but he had to trust that the portion contained within his own matrix would be enough to grant them safe passage. The mages began a synchronized incantation, threads of mana weaving together to summon a howling pillar of air that spiraled straight upward, precisely aimed at the gleaming brass of the largest zeppelin. Orion entered the wind tunnel's base.

The powerful gale instantly ripped at his clothes, almost lifting him off his feet before he even gave the order. He fed a surge of mana into his CC and linked his hands with Pauline, ensuring their combined physical mass was included in the calculation. Next, Orion cast a complex gravitational matrix around them. He negated the Earth's pull, rendering them effectively weightless, while simultaneously placing a point of gravity directly beneath their boots to keep them stuck to the stone.

Only then did he turn to the CC to calculate the necessary equations for [Atmospheric Centrifuge], and it ran with them, producing hundreds of lines of code and integrating everything he could think of to grant the magic the resilience it needed. Once that was done, he gave the mages a curt nod, and they focused, tripling the winds. At the same time, he inverted his grip on gravity.

Freed from the earth's hold and caught in the spell's updraft, the gravitational repulsion acted like a struck firing pin, and Orion and Pauline were launched into the sky. The sheer G-force pressed Orion's lungs flat against his ribs, his vision blurring at the edges as they tore upward at a speed no levitation spell could ever match. The air screamed past his ears, deafening and cold. They punched straight into the yellowish-green fog.

The Silence immediately began to eat at the edges of Orion's gravity spell, returning some of their mass, but that was when he engaged [Atmospheric Centrifuge], seizing the mighty winds buffeting them and turning them into a rotating sphere. He already felt it wouldn't last long. The spell's mana was too alien, and while the mages below weren't fighting him, their grip was weakening from the Silence. But his theory held.

The fog could not halt the raw momentum of two human bodies hurled upward at the speed of a siege projectile. The hull of the zeppelin rushed toward them, expanding rapidly until it filled Orion's entire field of vision.

"Anchor us!" He roared, cutting his spells a fraction of a second before impact. They slammed into the metal plating with a bone-jarring thud. The breath left Orion in a sharp gasp, and the impact rattled his teeth and threatened to send him sliding off the slick surface. Before the howling wind could peel them away, Pauline moved. Orion knew that her magic had grown just as much, if not more, than his own. It wasn't just the mundane manipulation of ambient darkness anymore, as it had been when she first ranked up.

But the shadows that erupted from her cloak were thick, oily, and impossibly dense. They writhed with an almost unknowable quality, their nature seeming to defy the natural world. That same darkness drove like solid iron spikes into the hull's rivets and seams. It lashed tightly around Orion's waist and wrists, pinning him firmly against the exterior of the floating fortress. Orion blinked as a cascade of chaotic errors flashed across his vision.

The Arcane Overlay glitched violently as it tried to parse Pauline's shadows. The interference was almost as severe as the static caused by liquid Silence, and he could barely tell that she had condensed her mana to the point that it was warping the light and space around them.

"Hold on!" Pauline shouted, barely audible above the roar of the wind and the hum of the zeppelin's engines. Orion lay flat against the cold metal, feeling his heart hammering against his ribs. He looked down, and vertigo gripped his stomach as he saw the burning expanse of the Shattered Basin thousands of feet below. No take-backsies now.

With a grunt of effort, he dragged himself forward against the hurricane-force winds, pulling himself along Pauline's anchored shadows until he reached a flat section of the brass. He pushed a thread of mana into the metal, but nothing happened. The Silence plating instantly devoured the spark, rendering any attempt to breach it by conventional means useless. That just means I have to go with the unconventional. He pressed both hands flat against the surface.

The metal was cold at the high altitude, but thermodynamics dictated that temperature was merely a measure of atomic kinetic energy. If he restricted the volume and exponentially increased the pressure, the friction between molecules would skyrocket. Pressure equals Force divided by Area. Orion calculated, visualizing the basic equation in his CC.

More and more complexity was added, essentially canonically quantizing as much basic physics as he could get away with in the short time he had before something inside noticed them. Once he'd granted it all the Knowledge he could, he aimed at the space directly above it, weaving a tightly contained gravitational singularity, a pinpoint [+g] vector pushing downward.

To prevent the ensuing energy from blasting backward into his own face, he wrapped the singularity in a variation of his [Event Horizon], creating an inescapable containment field that funneled all the energy directly into the brass. Already, he could see some signs of warping, but it wasn't enough.

"[Maximize Magic]," Orion chanted, his voice strained as he forced the metamagic modifier into the already highly complex matrix. The mana drain was intense. His mind burned as he channeled raw power into the spell through the Silence, forcing the gravity well to compress a thousand pounds of force into an area no larger than a gold coin. The brass protested. It began to shriek, a high-pitched metallic whine audible even above the wind.

Inside, the armor was failing as the pressure generated catastrophic levels of friction, and the brass began to glow. First a dull, angry cherry-red, then a blinding, incandescent white. Orion gritted his teeth, holding the equation together through sheer force of will as the heat he couldn't contain radiated outward, baking his gloves. The metal could not expand because of the containment field, so it simply broke down, rapidly transitioning from a solid state into a superheated liquid.

With one last hiss, the molten slag collapsed inward, leaving a perfectly circular hole straight through the armor. A chime rang out in the back of his mind, clear and melodic. It took him a moment to bring up the notification with the attention required to gain more than basic information. System Notification! Innovative Spell Synthesis Achieved: [Thermodynamic Compression] Combining Gravitational Force, Spatial Containment, and Metamagic Modifiers to alter physical states of matter. +1 Mind +95, 000 Exp Level up!