Magnus: Part 4
I didn’t know how much Magnus knew about electricity, but he had to know about rivers. Flooding caused massive problems in the ancient world. It wasn’t great for dams in the modern world either.
Overloading electrical components wasn’t the same, but loose parallels existed. Anyway, if he pulled in too much power at once, he’d be the component that burned out or the newly shattered dam.
On the other hand, if he could handle it, I was screwed.
I started rerouting the power he’d taken out of the hot spot away from him. At least I tried to.
He had the higher level of system control, deleting routes I’d changed or changing them to point back where he’d intended and then locking them so that they couldn’t be changed.
I changed tactics, ignoring the locked routes and attempting to remove power at an earlier point in the process—the hot spot itself. I pointed the energies elsewhere in the system, open spots that could hold energy, but without the infrastructure to get as much out at once.
On the other side of the force field from me, Magnus talked to Ray and Colette. I couldn’t hear him. Was he asking advice? Giving orders?
Ray put his hand on Magnus’ shoulder in a gesture that could have been friendly, but also, didn’t Ray duplicate powers by touch? If Magnus granted him the ability again, could he duplicate Magnus’ abilities?
That seemed beyond the scope of a regular superpower, but if Ray had enough Artificer in him, maybe?
It seemed like a good reason to prevent Magnus from getting more power.
I thought about the system as I knew it. Could I direct power out of the throne and make it inaccessible, preferably without killing people in the room around us?
It struck me that the throne drew power from the mini-suns above us. Could it send the power back? Following the flow of the energy within, I realized that it already was sending some.
I realized that could connect it to major paths and suck almost everything out. Not wasting time, I started changing routes.
Except… When you’ve got full control even if you don’t think systematically, you still have a lot of control.
Stolen story; please report.
Magnus must have seen what I was doing within the system because he duplicated what I’d done for one of the larger connections and pointed the route out into himself.
Dropping the force field between us, he shouted, “You are clever, but there’s nothing you can do that I can’t copy. And now I can do more than I’d thought I could.”
Though he’d dropped the force field keeping Ray and Colette with him, he created a new one around himself. Where the others were walls, this one surround his body, glowing visibly even without Artificer vision.
Despite the situation, my mind flipped back to the original connection of the throne to him. I’d noticed a structure that might have been a limiter that prevented power above a certain threshold from reaching the user.
“Watch this,” he said, and with the sweep of a hand he surrounded me with a force field. I couldn’t move.
Despite that, my sword was still connected to the throne.
I didn’t even have seconds to decide. I could route more power to myself and use it to break the field around me or I could route as much power as I could to him. There may have been better ideas, but I didn’t have time to consider them.
I went with plan b, attaching the route I’d just worked on to him, barely finishing before Magnus force field shattered my sword, removing my access to the throne.
Though my gut instinct was to recreate it, I didn’t. Magnus’ force field had begun to spark, glowing brighter than before. As the sparks started, Magnus stopped, looking downward toward a few that appeared near his right hand.
His eyes narrowed and he asked, “What did you do? You did something.”
His force field turned into a molten mini-sun, bubbling as he too began to glow, his skin reminding me of lava bubbling at the bottom of a volcano.
A part of my brain knew that he should be dead long before that happened, but most of it worried more about the fact that the force field he’d placed around me had started sparking as well.
A look at his wide eyes and gaping mouth told me that this was less likely to be revenge than a side effect. I concentrated on recreating the sword, hoping that I’d be able to cut through, and then maybe peel the container around me like an orange.
Despite putting as much power into it as I could find, I couldn’t cut through. The attempt made me feel dizzy as the power flew out of me.
Though I couldn’t push through, I did cut into it, realizing that it was the same substance as the throne, hard light that could be modified with a thought.
I felt it heating up around me, the Rocket suit’s HVAC keeping me alive, but not comfortable. Sweat covered my body.
If I didn’t want to die, I needed to figure the force field out. At first it felt overwhelming, but then I noticed the point where energy poured in. I couldn’t move my arms to slash it with the sword, but the sword was a metaphor anyway.
I knew how to reroute energy within this kind of system. I cut the power off, noticing the ache I felt after using my Artificer abilities too much.
Wondering if I could still tap the device for life support or if Magnus had figured out how to cut that off, I had time to notice Magnus again.
His skin had boiled off along with his organs. As I put my eyes on him, his skeleton glowed golden and disappeared, leaving behind only a vaguely human-shaped glow.
Colette and Ray had backed away while I was distracted. Both of them stared.
The human-shaped glow raised its hands, shouting, “Victory!”