Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Emily returns to the Silver Moon headquarters a few days later. The moment she steps onto Merc Street, she feels the familiar presence of a fourth circle mage ahead, and her anticipation grows.

She enters the reception, drawing more than a few glances that spark muttered conversations. Emily picks out several people whispering about her meeting with the Company Leader, along with several mentioning her conflict with the other mercenary companies, throwing around different nicknames she’s never heard before.

Looks like Crackshot’s been gossiping again. For such a miserable sod he’s surprisingly social.

Emily tunes out the attention and approaches a receptionist, but before she makes it to a counter, she feels the Company Leader step into the room. Her head snaps to the side, her face a calm mask as her eyes fall upon the missing panel in the wall where the man is standing proudly, staring back at her with a calm smile.

He looks surprisingly old for a mage, with long silver hair streaked with grey tied back in a tight ponytail, and light wrinkles creasing his face. However, though his age shows on his face, his back is as straight as a finely honed blade, and Emily can see his well-toned muscles barely hidden beneath his loosely fitted silver robes.

He silently raises a hand and gestures for Emily to approach, so she changes direction without batting an eye and walks up to him. Several of the people watching her let out audible gasps when they notice the Company Leader, and soon every head in the room is turned towards him.

He ignores their gazes, not taking his eyes off Emily for a moment.

“Hello, Emily,” he says in a low, smooth tone. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Earnie did mention giving you a piece of his mind,” Emily responds, stopping in front of the man and looking him in the eye as his dense mana leaks out, creeping towards her.

The pure energy presses down on her, but Emily releases the power flowing through her own body, pushing back without flinching.

Neither of them says anything, staring at each other in intense silence as their auras clash. After a few moments, the Company Leader retracts his mana with a small, satisfied nod.

“He was right to, by the looks of it. I’m fourth circle, Silver Octavius Moon, leader of the Silver Moon Mercenary Company. Though, you can call me Old Man Silver.”

“Emily Coldstone, third circle, F rank mercenary of the Silver Moon Mercenary Company.”

Silver’s eyes light up as she introduces herself as a member of his mercenary company.

“You can call me Emily.”

“Good. And do away with that F rank nonsense, you’re officially B rank now,” Silver says, raising his chin and waving his hand, sending out a light wave of mana. “Come along.”

He turns on his heels and walks back into the gaping hole in the wall, so Emily falls in step with him. The wall slides back into place behind them and Emily glances back to see the hydraulic mechanisms that moved it exposed.

They walk through a plain white hallway, clear of other people, that curves through the headquarters.

“This is a private path only available to B ranks and above,” Silver explains, leading her to a door that he pushes open, revealing a wide-open training hall.

Emily enters the empty room with a floor of loose sand and glances at the man beside her with a raised brow.

“I have a contract in mind for you if you would be interested,” he says, wasting no time and stepping away from her to create space before turning to face her as the door swings shut behind them. “But first I would like to confirm your combat abilities myself. I won’t put my trust in a report of events I haven’t seen with my own eyes.”

Emily nods, slowly reaching up and slipping the scarf from her neck, feeding it into her belt before cracking her knuckles and rolling her neck.

“Try to land a blow on me,” Silver says confidently, crossing his hands behind his back.

“Magic, or no?” Emily asks.

“Everything you have.”

Emily narrows her eyes, lowering her centre of gravity and holding her hands out, activating the new electrical motors in her Claws and silently extending them in the blink of an eye.

Silver’s eyes flicker down to the blades as they extend, and Emily takes advantage of the small opening, calling upon her lightning connection and focusing raw mana into her legs. She bursts forward, closing the distance between them in an instant and thrusting her arm towards her opponent’s chest.

Silver reacts calmly, tapping his food on the ground and leaning to the side as a burst of water shoots up from where his toes landed, catching Emily’s arm and knocking it aside, letting him slip past it unscathed. Emily quickly twists, planting one foot and throwing her torso around, sending her other leg in a cutting arc towards Silver’s head.

He leans back, ducking under the kick as an orb of water forms against his back before pulling him away, sliding across the ground.

Emily points one arm at him, fires the blade from her Claw into the bubble moving him, and pours lightning into the cable connected to it. Silver detaches from the water a moment before the shock hits him, flipping up to land on his feet, staring at her with a goading smile, his arms still tucked into the small of his back.

I’m making him use his arms.

Emily bends the crackling mana around her legs, forming it into the magic circle for Sky Step before she kicks off the ground. She flies across the hall, kicking off thin air and leaving a small platform of crackling sparks behind.

She forms several before Silver realises she isn’t coming at him head-on anymore. He takes the moment of reprieve as a chance to form a glistening magic circle that grows into a still dome of clear water he can watch her through.

Emily places a dozen of the charged bundles of energy before holding her hands out and calling the Stream into her grip, holding the rifle against her shoulder and lining it up with the barrel against one of the bundles of sparks, pointed at Silver.

She slams a magazine filled with mythril-tipped bullets into the gun and squeezes the trigger, sending five shots through sky step’s remnants. The buzzing lightning clings to the bullets, boosting their speed and dispersing into the defensive spell wrapping Silver as the bullets bounce off it, leaving harmless ripples behind.

The moment the fifth bullet strips away the last of the mana prepared in front of her, Emily kicks off again, this time leaving nothing behind as she sails past a crackling orb of charge, sending two bullets through it into the water dome.

She bounces around the room, sending lightning-charged bullets flying into the dome from all directions. After her first reload, the dome grows unstable as the ripples from the many impacts meet, interfering with each other. Some grow in size, and some diminish, but at every meeting point the crackling charge flooding the dome burns away, releasing a light mist of steam.

It doesn’t take long before Emily’s bullets begin hitting home at the weak points caused by the ripples. They tear through the barrier, narrowly missing Silver as he moves around inside his shield, using small bursts of water to displace some of the bullets as he dodges the rest.

Emily keeps shooting until she creates two large weak points on opposite sides of the dome. She throws out the Stream, casting Guardian and using the floating liquid metal to catch the gun, carrying it away as she heads down to enter the dome through one of the gaping holes.

She charges headfirst into the water, crossing both arms before herself as she tears through the shield, drawing Silver’s full focus. His head snaps towards her so she flexes her machina, squeezing the trigger of the Steam a short distance away and sending a solid beam of bullets straight towards Silver’s back.

His eyes widen slightly as he feels the first one cut through the barrier behind him, but he can’t dodge as Emily swings her arms horizontally, releasing the blades from her Claws on their cables and swinging them in wide, sweeping arcs towards his chest.

“Checkmate,” she mutters with a momentary burst of glee as he moves the hands from his back, flicking his wrists towards the approaching blades and scattering them with two whips of water that grow from two small blue marbles of mana.

Silver spins, guiding his whips towards Emily and the approaching bullets at the same time, knocking the latter aside and forcing Emily to drop into a slide to get closer. She fills her Claws with machina, forcing the new motors to work in Overdrive as they pull the blades back in a blink, allowing her to shoot them towards Silver from point-blank range.

His arms drop, catching the blades again, but Emily drops her lightning connection and grins as she floods the blades with raw fire mana. It’s not a graceful solution, but the superheated blades cut through the water after meeting fierce resistance, and Emily rises from her slide just in time to slip between the cut streams and deliver a curled fist into the man’s chest.

Her blow slams home with a dull impact that picks up Silver and flings him back, dispersing his protective spell as he’s tossed head over heels.

“Tsk,” Emily clicks her tongue and relaxes.

He conjured a shield before I connected.

“Incredible,” Silver says as a deluge of water pours from him, forming into a thick wave that slows him to a halt and spins him back to stand upright, facing her.

He claps his hands, but Emily just stares at him unimpressed.

“I didn’t touch you.”

“No, but you forced me to use second skin, my last resort defensive spell. In my books, that counts for a third circle like you.”

His comment irks her, but the irritation fades as quickly as it came, so Emily easily dismisses it and recalls her gun, sending out a wave of machina that picks up the scattered magazines she dropped during the spar, carrying them back into her hands. She watches Silver’s reaction as she does, noting how his gaze focuses on Guardian floating beside her instead of the magazines.

It seems like not even a fourth circle mage can tell when I’m using machina. Does he simply think it’s another form of lightning mana?

“So,” she says as she dismisses the spell. “Do I qualify for your contract?”

“Of course you do,” Silver replies with a smile, forming the body of water behind him into an ornate throne covered in small, moving waves.

Emily sits back, internally casting a spell to form the ground beneath her into a matching throne covered in small, rotating gears of stone.

“The contract is a basic combat deployment. I would like you to lead a squad we’ve prepared for you into no-mans-land near the centre of the East Woods. There’s been some activity from Denros’ side there, and we suspect they may have located a new dungeon or mana crystal vein. Your job is to work out what exactly has their attention, and then ensure anything worthwhile ends up in our hands or destroyed.”

“Sounds simple enough. When do I leave?”

“Squad Cold should be assembled within two weeks. Return here at oh-eight-hundred on the tenth day of the seventh month and ask at the reception. They will hand over the details for your deployment, including your squadmates’ profiles and the prepared transports.”

“Okay,” Emily says, pushing herself out of her seat and letting it crumble into the sand. “Is that all?”

“Yes. Though, before you leave, could you satisfy my curiosity?”

Emily raises a brow and nods, urging him to ask his question.

“I was just wondering, since your spellwork is so refined, can you use condensed casting yet?”

“Condensed casting?”

“I’ll take that as a no then.” Silver smiles, rising from his seat and holding out his hand, palm up. “Take this as a small apology for sending you to watch an outpost then.”

A dense mist of blue mana leaks from his hand, twisting together into a glittering orb of power, nearly identical to the ones she noticed when he cast his water whips. At first, Emily doesn’t understand why he’s showing such a simple spell, but upon looking closer, she realises the orb isn’t a finished spell, it’s the magic circle for one.

She’s able to pick out several miniscule runes flickering on its surface, vanishing into the folds of the matrix as the orb pulses and a dense mist forms around them. Emily’s eyes light up in recognition, and she reaches into her memory banks, searching for a specific stint in frozen time.

In an instant, the world fades around her and she’s standing in front of Herber’s shop in Eimdon. She gazes up at the Mandrago Patriarch floating above her, looking past him with a cold, emotionless gaze at the glowing green orbs behind him.

He flicks his hand and one of the orbs pulses, small runes shimmering on its surface as a barely visible ball of wind shoots out of it, shattering Emily’s arm.

So that was compressed casting.

Blinking away the memory, Emily dips her head in thanks before turning to leave without another word, the gears in her mind already turning, trying to work out how to condense her spells’ magic circles.