Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 123 – Explosive Departure

Emily stands up from the unrecognisable bloodied remains of Diego’s corpse, wiping her Claws off on her tattered cloak as her mind falls quiet, the irritating buzzing fading to a dull background noise.

“Fucking scum. He didn’t even have the balls to try detonating his circles,” Emily mutters disdainfully, reaching down to take a spatial storage bracelet from his wrist.

She recognises the runic structure from some of the storage items she bought in The Dome and quickly locates the runes responsible for holding a mage’s mana signature to bind it to them. With a powerful pulse of her own mana, she effortlessly crushes the existing signature, wiping the item clean and allowing herself access.

Just a few earth crystals, communication crystals, and some healing potions. Disappointing.

She takes the useful items and pulls the spatial crystal from the bracelet with a small flex of mana, carefully severing the runes binding it to the storage enchantment, before looking around the scattered bodies surrounding her, scanning for the third circle mages while checking for enchanted items with her magical senses. Her senses draw her attention to all of the discarded crests, all of them bearing The Covenant’s contribution tracking enchantment, and she notices that not all of the dead mages belonged to the Mandrago family.

Did they call reinforcements from their nearby allies’ estates?

Emily stops before the shredded corpse of the earth mage and glances at their crest. They aren’t from the Mandrago family. Emily shrugs as she grabs the drawstring pouch from their waist. Inside, she finds some more earth crystals, a few communication crystals, and a couple of spells written on parchments. She discards the communication crystals and sends the rest into her belt before tying the pouch at her hip.

This one can be used by non-mages. I’ll give it to Anton if he chooses to join me.

Emily glances over at the first third circle mage she killed, shaking her head when she sees their scorched corpse without a single surviving item left. She spends a few minutes walking through the pools of blood and viscera, checking for anything valuable. She takes a few clockwork rifles to pass on to Anton’s crew for self-defence but otherwise finds nothing of value.

She turns away from the dead and walks slowly back to the main mansion. Emily runs a few scans as she does, detecting a few unawakened people moving about in the servants’ wing that she chooses to ignore for now, her anger dulled to a quiet background hum now that her main targets are dead.

If they run away now, I’ll let them live. If not, they’ll die when I get rid of this place.

Emily reactivates the pain receptors in her legs as she walks through the entrance hall, frowning as she notices a few cracks in the bones of one of them.

I need to work on a better self-reinforcement spell. I can’t keep breaking my legs when I use sky step at full strength.

She activates another injector on her spine, letting the healing potion soothe the leg as she walks up the stairs, the once-green carpet now stained red, and enters the Patriarch’s great hall. She checks the dead direct line mages for storage items, finding all three to have small owner-locked spatial storages with some gold, crystals, potions, and even a few simple enchanted items within. After stripping the corpses and removing the space crystals from their storage items, Emily approaches the body of the Patriarch. She grits her teeth as she looks him over, wishing she could have made him suffer more as she slips the storage ring from his finger.

Removing his signature takes her a few minutes and drains a substantial amount of her remaining mana, but she calmly converts machina to make up for it before binding the now ownerless item to herself to look through it, opening her eyes wide in surprise as she does.

“Rich bastard,” she mutters, finding nearly three hundred gold coins and a stockpile of greater crystals almost as large as her own. “Why does he even need this many different elements? He only ever used wind spells as far as I saw.”

Emily slides the ring onto her finger and turns her attention to the enchantment on the floor behind his throne. She walks around him and looks down, seeing a blank spot on the floor from which she can feel faint mana emanating.

It looks like something’s hidden back here. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I were a normal third circle mage.

She crouches down and places her hand on the stone, closing her eyes and pushing her mana into it. Her senses extend down into the floor, and she quickly locates an empty space below that causes her brow to crease.

Is there a room below this one?

She quickly runs through her memories of running through the building clearing it out to build a mental map of it, and confirms her suspicions.

There isn’t. At least, not one you could access from downstairs.

Emily tries casting a spell to soften the stone so she can move it out of the way, but she finds the unknown enchantment resisting her influence.

“Brute force it is,” she mutters, standing up and raising her only foot with a whole boot.

She activates the enchantment on the boot to increase its weight before driving it down with all her strength. A large thud sounds as her foot slams into the stone, spreading a web of cracks from the point of impact. She lifts her foot and slams it down again. On the third blow, the stone below her shatters, and Emily leaps back as she watches a hole open up in the ground.

She feels the unknown enchantment vanish, and a strong flood of mana rises up to replace it. Emily steps up to the edge, looking down into the hole and seeing a narrow, straight chute leading down into the earth.

“A hidden passage,” she says to herself calmly, resting her hand on The Clock’s pouch as she steps out into thin air and drops into the dark tunnel.

She falls and crystals embedded into the walls light up as she passes, letting her see the neat brickwork surrounding her as she descends towards the dense mana below. She drops past the ground level, sinking deep into a hidden basement, tens of metres below the surface. It doesn’t take long for her to reach the bottom, where she reinforces her legs with rock body before slamming into the ground, absorbing the impact without difficulty and looking around the open chamber before her.

Other than the low ceiling, which is only two times as tall as Emily, the room is the same size as the great hall above. Emily is standing at one edge, and filling the rest of the space is a massive magic circle.

“Woah,” she mutters with awe, looking around the glowing, twisting, geometric patterns filling the room and stretching from the floor up to the walls and ceiling.

There are dozens of large magic crystals embedded into sockets around the circle, and a dense, barely visible, mist of mana sits over the massive construct.

So this is why he needed all those crystals.

Emily walks into the centre of the circle, her eyes scanning over the runes surrounding her as she breathes in the dense, refreshing mana.

“There isn’t the same feeling of pressure here, but the mana density is probably the same as in the depths of The Crystal Waters,” she mutters, reading the runes near the centre and trying to decipher them. “It’s drawing mana from something... a mana vein? Using these crystals as a catalyst... To spread mana across... Do these runes designate the area?”

She pulls up a page in her notes, quickly filling it as she walks around the circle. As her mind absorbs the vast amount of information she gleans from seeing such a large magic circle for the first time, an idea forms, bringing a vicious grin to her face.

That could work. Time to erase this Goddess-forsaken family from the city.

Emily walks around, pulling the crystals from their sockets and disabling the magic circle, removing the glow from the room but leaving the barely perceptible mist of mana. Next, she moves back to the first runes she identified on the floor as controlling the spread of mana and pours mana into the ground, casting a spell to soften the rock and using a delicate manipulation of mana to bend the runes below her. She changes them into a familiar set used for condensing mana instead. After finishing with the first area, she moves around the circle, doing the same at every point responsible for dispersing mana, using air walk to reach the runes on the ceiling.

That should do it.

Satisfied with her modifications, Emily places the magic crystals back into place, feeling a sudden increase in the mana density of the room, as the mist grows thicker by the second. She moves to the next stage of her plan, pulling a few greater fire crystals from the Patriarch’s ring and placing them at the centre of the circle along with a thick metal disc with a dial on the top, the numbers one through thirty carved around it: a timed explosive.

This circle doesn’t have any runes for stabilising such a large amount of mana, so it will either detonate on its own or disperse after reaching critical mass. Based on the current increase, that shouldn’t happen for about twenty-five minutes though.

Emily turns the dial to twenty, sealing the fate of the estate, and quickly moves back to the exit. She casts air walk and springs up into the vertical chute propelling herself up into the mansion above. Landing back in the main hall, she runs through the building, casting lightning step to boost her speed as she rockets out of the building, past the piles of corpses.

She arrives at the front gate and pauses, looking at her sister’s decapitated head one last time.

“I never got to say this to you properly,” she says, a tear rolling down her cheek as she uses air walk to lift herself closer, reaching out and shutting Anna’s eyes while burning her sister’s agonised expression into her mind. “I’m sorry.”

With that she turns, wiping her cheeks and speeding through the city streets. She first runs into her old home, grabbing Anna’s diary and the ruined picture of their family before lighting the front of the building on fire to cleanse the Mandrago’s mark from it. She then speeds away towards the docks, her face falling back into a cold mask the moment she leaves the shop she used to call home for good. She runs through the sparse crowd in the main entrance and into the passage to Calypso, using her Claws to draw a single slash through the centre of the Mandrago crest hanging above it. She reaches the ship less than five minutes after setting off the timer in the mansion’s basement, finding Anton sitting alone on the bottom step leading up to the ship.

Emily stops, cancelling her spell and grinding her heels in to kill her momentum. Anton’s eyes open wide in shock as she appears before him, and he looks her up and down with an uncomfortable, fearful expression.

“Are you, uh…” He pauses, unsure what to say. “Are you done?”

“Yeah.” Emily nods, glancing down and noticing her tattered, bloodstained clothes.

She casts cleanse, calming Anton slightly before asking for his response.

“So, are we leaving together? Or do I need to find another ship?”

Anton gulps down his fear before standing up and taking a deep breath to steel his resolve.

“I’ll take you,” he says, glancing at the pool of blood left on the floor by Emily’s cleanse.

“Good. Let’s go,” Emily says, walking past him up the steps to the ship.

“Wait!” Anton cries, reaching out to grab her shoulder and flinching as she turns to look at him, her eyes still glowing with simmering anger. “Half the crew is missing. We can’t take off yet.”

“I told you there wouldn’t be time when I was done. You should have kept them aboard if you wanted to take them with you.”

“I didn’t want to say anything in case you considered it a betrayal,” he responds with a fearful shiver.

“You could have told them to stay without giving a reason. Anyway, we have just over ten minutes left until the gift I left in the Mandrago estate activates, and I’m pretty sure they’ll ground all ships the moment that happens, so there’s no time now. Besides, you have me, you don’t need the rest of the crew.”

Emily sends a stream of machina into the ship via the stairs below and raises her hand. She snaps her fingers for effect, pushing a spark of machina out of them at the same time and letting it run down her arm while activating the ship’s start-up procedures. The ship’s horn sounds, and Anton looks up in surprise.

“Magic can control ships?” he asks incredulously.

“With the right spells? Probably. But that’s not quite what I used.” Emily turns and continues up the steps, expecting him to follow. “Maybe I’ll explain it to you later. Come on.”

“Damn it,” she hears him mutter under his breath, a mixture of frustration and resignation present in his tone as he turns to call over the nearby crewmembers. “Ash! Pod! Get in!”

Emily boards Calypso with Anton hot on her heels. He pauses at the entrance to wait for the other two as Emily keeps walking.

“Gather everyone still on board to the bridge,” she calls over her shoulder as she moves in that direction to calm the two frantically trying to take back control from her.

She reaches the ship’s control centre as the steps withdraw into the hull and the ship shudders, the track below starting to pull it back towards the outside world.

“Damn it!” she hears Angela cry as she steps in. “I can’t fucking stop it. My controls are locked!”

“Calm down,” Emily says, instantly drawing the attention of Angela and Tony. “We’re leaving now. I’m in control.”

“What do you mean we’re leaving now? And how are you in control? The fuck’s your problem?” Angela growls angrily, standing up and stepping towards Emily.

Emily’s expression remains cold as she pushes Angela back into her seat with a light burst of wind.

“I’ll explain properly in a minute, but if we don’t leave now we won’t be leaving at all. Anton has agreed to follow me, and from this moment the ship is for all intents and purposes his, so that’s why I’m telling you what to do.”

Angela grits her teeth, confusion and anger overpowering the hint of fear Emily notices in her eyes.

Even when she’s scared she refuses to back down. I like her.

“I’ll give you guys back control now, so please get us out of this port as fast as possible.”

“Tsk,” Angela clicks her tongue, turning around to face her controls. “Fine. But you better not be lying about Anton agreeing.”

Tony gives Emily a conflicted look but nods and turns to focus on the ship. Anton enters the room with Ash a few minutes later and takes his seat as the ship sits on the edge of the docks inflating its balloon.

“How long do we have?” he asks Emily without looking at her.

“Eight minutes,” she replies, pouring machina into the ship and directing it towards the engine, speeding up the take-off.

“How long till we get in the air?” Anton asks Angela as she looks through the periscope.

“Normally, I’d say ten minutes,” she responds, displeasure still clear in her tone. “But whatever she’s doing is helping, so probably six.”

“Good,” Anton says with relief. “We can make it.”

He takes control, directing them through their final lift-off checks as they rush to get off the ground in time. Six frantic minutes tick by, and the ship detaches from the docks, floating forwards and up into the air quickly as Podrick walks in with Sam, the stout night shift cook.

“What’s going on?” Sam asks, wiping the crust from his eyes.

All eyes in the room turn to look at Emily: most gazes confused and fearful, but Angela’s is outright hostile. Anton goes to say something, but Emily raises her hand and he instantly stops.

“I’ll explain in a moment, but first we should watch the fireworks,” she points towards the front window as she uses her machina to take control of the ship again, turning it in the air to face the city and fly in reverse.

Everyone follows her gesture, looking out over the city with confusion as nothing happens.

“What are we looking for?” Podrick asks.

“Five,” Emily says in lieu of an answer, her own anticipation building. “Four. Three. Two. One. Boom”

A bright flash of light fills their vision as a pillar of flames connects the earth and the heavens, ripping a hole through the clouds overhead. The pillar starts in the centre of the Mandrago estate, growing wider and engulfing half the noble district in an instant as a thunderous shockwave hits the ship, sending a violent shudder through it and shaking everyone to their cores as the deafening boom rings in their ears.

Everyone but Emily grabs onto something nearby to stay upright until the shaking subsides, watching in shock and horror as the explosion dies down, leaving a scorched crater where people once lived, over a quarter of the city missing. Emily calmly watches on, feeling the anger in her chest fading away as her revenge is completed, leaving only a hollow sense of emptiness in its wake.

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