NOVEL NEXT Interlude: T-Minus Ninety-Seven Seconds
Quint Aumraham is having his best day in fifty years.
He has, just this moment, teleported back to his tower, having dropped off Topher Bailey and his two friends in the frozen far north (after giving Topher a scroll of Protection From Cold, which he thought was rather considerate if he did say so himself). In return, Topher has cast Remove Fatigue on Quint, giving him a boost of energy and wakefulness at a time when he most desperately needed them. He has also, in response to a very peculiar request, cast Create Food And Drink to summon a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk for the archmage; this is because Quint Aumraham, whose grandfather was a D-Ranker from the original Summoning one hundred years ago, is one-quarter Otherworlder and thus had a rather unique childhood.
As he sits down at his desk and slowly, lovingly consumes his sandwich and beverage, he has a vague feeling that he has forgotten something; he is reminded about halfway through his repast by the massive explosion which tears the castle apart. In the dungeons below, Biet Mel Astragath has been forced by Tetsuo Okano's masterful battlefield strategy to make the sacrifice play which every Demolitonist hopes they will never be called upon to execute; Okano escapes by cutting off his own left arm (today, it seems, is not his day to die). This will have a number of consequences, such as being tended to by Megumi Nakano as she creates a clockwork prosthesis; the construction and calibration of such a device will require a great deal of time together and culminate in the two of them fucking like rabbits in a stairwell in the Infinite Dungeon some two weeks from now.
Quint and his tower are, of course, completely unharmed; he has made a little game the past ten years by sinking half of his unspent mana pool at bedtime every night into the wards surrounding it, and he is fairly certain that it could survive the destruction of the entire world (and possibly any other, unknown constituent elements of the universe) without even depleting half of its stored protections. Everything of value in the rest of the castle (mostly the staff and the books in the library) have already been relocated; Quint has even taken special pains to relocate the king to a secure underground bunker, although he is under no impressions that the king is in any real danger. In fact, Quint is fairly sure that he could park Zashe outside on the curb with a sign that said "ASSASSINATE KING TO END WAR" and the monarch would still be safe as houses; Quint has survived one hundred and sixty-six attempts on his life by the Demon Lord's forces and minions, and has never once had to lift a finger to protect the king (or his predecessor) from anything other than gout and poor judgment. He finishes his sandwich, then sucks down the last of his chocolate milk and emits a deep belch of pure satisfaction. For exactly five seconds, he is contentment personified.
Then he rises, and begins wearily sketching a long and complex series of equations on a blackboard. He has no time to dawdle if he wants to be on time for attempt number one hundred and sixty-seven.
Far out to the west, deep into the trackless sea, a little boat bobs and skips in the restless ocean; it has been afloat for nearly three months, and its occupant is wet, sore, and feeling deeply put-upon. Yul Aut Melagrat, Third of Artificers, has spent the past two years constructing the device which sits upright in the boat beside him; it contains two very small linked portals (roughly three inches in diameter) and has been accelerating a pea-sized droplet of very dense liquid through an infinite fall for the vast majority of that timespan. The droplet, now traveling at a very respectable fraction of the speed of light, will cause unimaginable devastation if it leaves the vacuum-sealed containment tube, so Yul Aut Melagrat has not slept terribly well these last few months as each jolt and bump of the vessel provoked twitchy anticipations of instantaneous oblivion. But, at last, the appointed day has finally come; according to the predictions of Zum Velbat, First of Diviners, his quarry will be entering the targeting zone very shortly.
Warily, he activates his Inertial Fixation device; the boat halts abruptly (nearly spilling him into the water) and levitates straight up for about a hundred feet, providing a rock-solid platform upon which to aim until the device's power is exhausted. He wastes the first several minutes of preparation getting his nausea under control, for abruptly transitioning to effectively solid land after three months at sea is not terribly kind to one's equilibrium, even if one is a fifteen-foot-tall mass of blasphemous muscle festooned with vicious horns and claws. But his schedule takes such things into account; and so, when he finally recovers, he sets about the arduous process of affixing his Mark 0 Gravity Lance (Prototype 3) to its highly secure mount and performing the intricate calibrations to aim it at a particular, apparently random, point in the sky. There is a large stud affixed to the device, which, when pressed, will invert the upper portal and launch the droplet directly at whatever the Lance is facing; he is very hopeful that its first test will not be its last. He is wrong, but that's okay; science is often unforgiving, and even failures are an important part of the process of discovery.
Shuji Takano has been awake and vigilant for nearly four full days, despite the utter lack of anything to observe or take interest in; he is very grateful that his Skills prevent him from losing focus, because otherwise he would be bored out of his mind and probably starting to hallucinate by now. He has spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of his existence and is pondering, very cautiously, whether he should be making his peace with death; he is dimly aware that it is sometimes the custom of his people to compose a death poem, but he has never been much good at poetry and is a little afraid of fucking it up. And so it is his great good fortune that he is spared the decision when Quint Aumraham appears, in a flux of aquamarine radiance, about two feet from his left elbow; Shuji is incredibly startled but does not soil himself (solely, it must be said, because his Immovable Defense prevents it). He opens his mouth to greet the archmage, but Quint forestalls him with a shushing noise and a wink and shoves a scroll into his hand. Then, a half-second later, the droplet from the Mark 0 Gravity Lance (Prototype 3) strikes the archmage directly in the head.
Yul Aut Melagrat does not live long enough to see the triumph of his efforts; the shockwave of the droplet leaving the Lance's vacuum-sealed tube rips him and everything within several miles of him into their constituent atoms, reducing the demon and his boat (and an untold number of sea monsters and millions of gallons of water) to a rapidly-expanding cloud of plasma, because despite their recent work with vacuum-sealed spaces to eliminate friction the demons are still grappling with the idea that air has mass (since vacuum does not occur naturally in their native universe). Zum Velbat, on the other hand, knew perfectly well that this would happen, but deemed it an acceptable sacrifice for delivering a miniature supernova of force directly to Quint Aumraham's face.
Shuji Takano hangs, confused and terrified, in a massive inferno of destruction for several minutes; when the blast dissipates, he is still unharmed, but the archmage is no longer nearby. If he hadn't been blinded by the explosion, he might have been able to glimpse Quint impacting with the force of a thermonuclear pile-driver into the celestial dome above him and to his left; the archmage will disappear from the conflict for several weeks before revealing his survival, because if there is one thing Quint Aumraham loves more than PB&J's and chocolate milk it is being underestimated. When he finally regains enough self-control to think logically about the situation, Shuji Takano reads the scroll he has received and likewise disappears; he does not rejoin his comrades en route to the Infinite Dungeon, however, for Quint has other plans for him. Instead, he finds himself in an alehouse in Korkburg, a middling-size city in Virtuous Pioren (the southern of the two Piorenic nations); a note at the bottom of the scroll instructs him to head for a large castle to the northwest and, to his confusion, 'kill every sonfabitch there', because Quint learned how to swear from his grandfather and knows a thing or two about Earth profanity.
Shuji Takano spends an appropriate amount of time agonizing over this decision, and eventually turns to self-medication via copious quantities of ale to help him resolve his deliberations; it is nearly midnight when he staggers out the door and into the distance, resolved to murder whoever is required and, he hopes, figure out whether it was necessary later. This will cause a great deal of confusion and chaos in both Pioren and its surrounding environments, and (Quint hopes) draw attention away from other, more subtle plans while forcing Sahlerra Siukh to stop pussyfooting around and commit to either one side of the war or the other. This goes only partially according to plan; gambits jam up against other gambits, double-bluffs go unnoticed, and things generally get extremely nuts, because this is the part of the war where the wheels come off and everything dissolves into complete batshit insanity. Quint merely hopes that, after all the radioactive dust has settled, there will still be a world left to save.