Millennial Mage - Chapter 438: Modular Defenses

Tala stood beside Rane—Terry on her shoulder—looking into the massive room, arranged so that she could make the necessary choices for her modular defensive wall segments.

There were a couple of wall segments free standing at the far side of the room, but they were different sizes, and Tala didn’t quite know what they were meant to demonstrate. Most of the room, however, was filled with various magics, mechanisms, and materials that looked to be in various stages of construction or deconstruction, laid out for demonstration and elucidation. At least that is what she assumed.

Master Bunas stood before them—having just opened the door—giving a shallow bow. “Welcome, Mistress Tala, Master Rane.”

They both bowed in return, Terry easily holding on through the small motion.

“Come in, come in.” Master Bunas seemed incredibly excited. “We have so much to show you.”

He first led them to one of the half-finished pieces. The cross section of wall, at least where it was exposed, contained an odd sort of mechanism, and Master Bunas began by introducing a young looking woman who bowed as deeply as her Fused aura indicated was appropriate.

“This is Mistress Stiwaf. I will let her explain her contribution.”

Mistress Stiwaf bowed again. “Thank you, Mistress Tala, for the opportunity to work on your defensive structure. Whether you use my ideas or not, I appreciate the chance to explore some of the interesting possibilities opened by your unique magics.”

Tala smiled. “Sure. I’m interested in what you have. Care to take us through?”

The woman turned and gestured to the slightly exposed mechanism, and then a second example of it, this time free of the wall. “As you can see, there is a thin, long horizontal slit in the wall, narrowing toward this device. The purpose of the mechanism is to prep each metal plate—one after another—to align with the slit. And as you can see here,” she gestured to the back of the mechanism, “it then also displays a designation for each plate, letting you know how many are left, and which specific one is aligned for use.”

Tala frowned. “For… use?”

“Yes. When I heard you describe your scale mail hauberk, this idea came to mind.”

She immediately connected the dots. “You want me to augment the gravity of each plate toward its mount, then change the target when it is aligned properly. That would fire it forth like a ballista bolt.”

Mistress Stiwaf grinned. “Precisely. As you can see, we designed these segments to be interchangeable so you can create as many of these as you want and then switch them out when one is empty.”

Tala’s mind was spinning. This was brilliant. The mechanism would allow for easy queuing up of the projectiles. With her increased mental capacity, she could likely fire hundreds of whatever the projectiles were every minute.

-Even faster if we were well practiced and if the naming schema was something easy to iterate through.-

Yeah…

The Fused seemed to be getting nervous at Tala’s continued silence, but before the woman could get too flustered, Tala nodded and responded, “This is amazing. Can you make these emplacements and interchangeable…quivers? What do you call them?”

“Magazines, Mistress. I named them after the similar mechanisms we create for multi-shot crossbows for the Guard.”

“Excellent. Can you make these magazines for round projectiles as well?”

The woman gave a slow nod. “I think so. I would need an example of the desired items in order to work out the kinks.”

“I call it a siege orb. If, somehow, you can break the magic on that, don’t. Doing so would end badly for anyone nearby.” Tala held out her hand and an unpaired siege orb dropped downward for Mistress Stiwaf to catch.

To her credit, the Fused did try to catch it, but it slipped through her fingers before dropping to the floor. Rane almost lazily kicked out his foot and touched the sphere right above the ground.

The siege orb stopped in place, his shoe pressed against the side, his magics flowing through it to rob the object of kinetic energy. He grinned over at Tala. “I think you forgot how heavy those are.”

She grinned back sheepishly. “Right.”

Mistress Stiwaf raised an eyebrow. “That’s quite a bit heavier than I realized.” She shook her head. “I know you told us the specification, but I definitely wasn’t thinking of them.”

She squatted down and got a good grip around the siege orb before Rane pulled his foot and magics back. Grunting, she stood and carried the sphere over to a table and carefully placed it in a recessed portion.

The table creaked a bit, but held. The Fused nodded seriously, examining the item where it rested. “I do remember you mentioning these. I apologize for not considering them.” She chuckled. “I’m just glad that I have some physical enhancement, or I wouldn’t even be able to study it safely.”

Tala waved that off. “This is already excellent. There is no need for apologies.”

“I assume that you would have the same need of something for them to gravitate to before you can switch the target of their attraction and send them forth?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Alright. I can work with that.”

“Now, as to the mechanism on the whole, I would like a few changes.”

“Certainly. What can we do for you?”

Tala grinned. “First, I don’t need an external display. Assume that I can see through physical objects near me sufficiently to not require that.”

“Oh! Is that a change? I thought I remembered you saying that while you can see through things near to you, sometimes you have difficulty distinguishing details. My aim was to remove the chance for misreading and thus mis-launching.”

Tala nodded. “That was true, but I’ve worked out the issue.”

“Noted.” Mistress Stiwaf did, indeed, take out an Archive slate and note that down. “What else?”

“If you can simply make perfectly sized cavities for these magazines, I can open my dimensional storage at the bottom to drop out empty ones, and then at the top to put in new, filled ones.”

“Oh! That’s amazing. Yes, we can do that. Few have that level of fidelity. While I would normally recommend letting it be something that others can reload for you, in this case—since you are already the only one who can activate these weapons—your suggestion should actually be superior.”

Tala nodded with a grin. “I look forward to seeing what you come up with.”

Mistress Stiwaf was considering. “I think we can fit one plate flinger and two siege orb reserves in each wall segment without reducing integrity too much. It does depend on what size of modular frame you choose, but we can work with it either way. How does that sound?”

“That sounds like I’ll have a lot of magazines to fill and empower.” She grinned at the woman. “Excellent. That sounds excellent.”

The Fused chuckled. “Quite a lot, most likely, yes. They will be interchangeable between wall segments, so at least that will be in your favor.”

“Definitely, thank you.”

Master Bunas gave a small bow toward his subordinate. “Thank you, Mistress Stiwaf.”

She bowed in return. “It was my pleasure. I’ll get to work on the new designs immediately.”

With that, Master Bunas led Tala and Rane to the next station where a man and a woman were waiting. “These are Mistress Ceangal and Master Nascad.”

The two gave slight bows, as to fellow Refined. Master Nascad spoke first, “We found the white steel you provided to be wonderfully useful in many applications, but what grabbed our attention most was…” he gestured to his partner.

Mistress Ceangal smiled, gesturing in turn to the demonstration pieces. “If we put pieces of the magical steel through the wall, with catches in various places, then when you deploy the defense, sections of metal on each set of adjoining wall segments will be in contact.”

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Tala’s eyes widened yet again. “Oh!”

Mistress Ceangal nodded. “I see that Mistress has understood. With a simple application of power…” The Refined extended her magic outward into the test pieces and they fused into a singular whole. “As you can see, that would then unify the adjoining segments. Another application of power can undo the connection, allowing for these to be retractable far more easily than our standard loadout. Each wall segment is equipped with catches on all sides, and the white steel also allows for those to be retracted when not needed, once the battlement is fully deployed.”

Rane let out a low whistle. “Oh, yeah. I want that too.”

Master Nascad chuckled. “I think everyone will, honestly. There will be a high demand for this metal as soon as word gets around.”

Tala frowned slightly. “Is there no danger of an enemy unlinking the segments and weakening the defense?”

Mistress Ceangal nodded. “That was a concern, but we have enacted several countermeasures. One of the main things will be to keep aura superiority over your own wall. If you lose that, an unlinking of the segments will be the least of your concerns, regardless.”

That was true enough.

“We have also included the most basic form of the standard linking spellforms. You can use those in order to add a small amount of extra strength to unification of the defense, but the main purpose will be to allow you to still link up with others’ mobile defenses at need.”

“Clever.”

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“Yes, I would like this as part of my modules.”

“Of course.”

The two shared a look before Master Nascad cleared his throat and spoke up, “That will mean that we need a significant amount of this metal.”

Tala sighed and nodded. “Send me a request for the material through the Archive, and I’ll get it to you.”

The two bowed. “Thank you, Mistress.”

From there, Tala, Rane, Terry, and Master Bunas moved on to two Mages who had been working on an aura enhancement schema that would mesh well with Tala’s specific aura, thus causing the walls to be able to be used to add robustness to her aura at need.

With the white steel as a core component of her modular wall segments, it made her aura supremacy all the more important and these particular workings even more key toward long-term defense.

Beyond that, there were groups working on the defensive magics to be embedded into the outer layers that would resist or counter physical and magical attacks directly.

One school of thought was to use magics which would help distribute incoming force and energies in order to give the wall greater cohesion and durability. The other option was to specifically make ablative layers that would fully absorb any damage before crumbling away, leaving the deeper sections utterly untouched.

Rane, Tala, Master Bamus, and the other Mages had a rather in-depth discussion and debate on the topic. It took a couple of hours and a lot of the other Constructionists joined in, but it really boiled down to a fairly simple dichotomy, humorously similar to Tala’s thoughts and discussions about her own, personal armor.

Ablative defense was excellent for dealing with damage dealt at range over relatively short durations. If it could be easily repaired or replaced, then the short duration caveat was mitigated. It was, however, very poor at defending against sustained damage or close quarters conflict.

On the other side, unified defenses that stood or fell all as one were superb for resisting a lot of small attacks, sustained damage, or close range hits.

With that in mind, it became rather obvious that a defensive structure should have a mix, and be biased toward the former.

In close, attackers would be pushed back by—and under constant assault from—defenders, and with the emplacements that would be in Tala’s walls, specifically, she should be dealing with far more attackers from afar than close up.

That said, they decided that Tala’s fortifications should have the backing of unified defense, so that her walls couldn’t be reduced to nothing simply by wearing away the ablative parts. Additionally, that configuration made it reasonable to tie all the connected pieces together for the unified block, so that any section that had its ‘long range’ defense worn through would then have the backing of the whole structure to keep itself whole. She definitely would have wanted to have it sectioned out, if they had gone with a purely ‘unified defensive’ model. Thus, it was a good compromise in the end.

This was a bit different than others did, but everyone had their own way of thinking and styles of fighting and defense. Regardless, they all agreed—some more grudgingly than others—that this would work best for Tala’s purposes.

Finally, they got to the material components. Which was… far more in-depth than Tala ever really wanted to go and contained far more information than she ever really wanted to know.

She listened to the various shear strengths, compression durability, and ductility properties for some of the proposed materials, but in the end, she asked them to make the best choice they could given the parameters they had already discussed.

One interesting thing that came from the knowledge however, was the fact that, apparently, some Mages were willing to make their defensive segments out of living wood. In that way, the walls would essentially be planted when deployed. They would self-repair and were far more durable in protracted engagements, but they were effectively one-use.

Tala nixed that particular line of potentials, just in case they were leaning that way for some reason.

It wasn’t until they got to the final, fully built test section that Tala really understood the magnitude of this whole undertaking.

It was using stand-in materials, but even so, it was an impressive construct.

The block of the wall was reminiscent of a ten foot cube, with a wall-walk on top and crenellations to protect anyone on the wall-walk. It wasn’t quite a perfect cube as it was canted in such a way that the outer slope was inverted, and there was a bit of a slope on the inside to allow for defenders to slide down that face in the case of an emergency.

Also, in the front, there was an indentation that was the negative of the crenellations above. As it turned out, the wall-segments were designed to be stacked if more height was needed. The advice was to build an entire fortification one segment high before building upward to maintain stability throughout.

She had seen the thing on the far side of the room when she entered. She just hadn’t really considered it as being a single segment.

“These…” She looked up at the block that was nearly twice her height. “These are larger than those that I’ve seen before.”

“Ahh, yes. This is the largest we make them, and we wanted to show you that first. Here.” Master Bamus gestured to a much smaller segment, which was reminiscent of a five foot cube. “This is the smallest we generally make them. They are more expensive to make at this size and the emplacements that Mistress Stiwaf is making for you will have to be reconsidered, but we can go with anything between these two.” He smiled. “Note that for both sizes, you can abut them front to back as well, making any size with an interval of the block size. The five foot versions are more versatile but also more costly to create.”

Tala nodded, acknowledging his statement. Even so, she didn’t hesitate. “The five-foot versions, please. I want more versatility.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added. “But I think I’ll only want one emplacement in each section that has one, and only about half of them to have them. I will still want some emplacements of each type. That way, I can configure their placement at need.”

“Very good, Mistress Tala.” He then led them over to a place where there were wedges of wall. “These are how you can do corners. Conversely, we can construct towers that are able to accommodate varying angles of connection to allow for different configurations as well as points of greater defense.”

Tala frowned. “I’m not that versed in fortress warfare. What purpose do towers serve, specifically?”

“Generally, they give defenders the ability to get better angles of attack on those assaulting the walls. They are bastions of greater protection for defenders, places from which to sally forth at need, and to retreat into in case of disaster. They provide a greater height for observing the enemy. They are also a means of reinforcing what otherwise might be a weaker part of the fortification as corners are usually less robust than the flat surfaces of the wall.”

Tala nodded along, but after a moment’s consideration, she shook her head. “I think I won’t want towers for now. Tell me about the wedges?”

“The wedges are designed in variable increments, to be integrated with spells of joining or the white steel. With them, you can even make a full circle if you truly wish, but that would not be where they are strongest.”

“Alright. Now, what about overarching workings?”

Master Bunas nodded at that. “We do often integrate things like magical shielding that can encompass an entire formation once the circle is complete.”

They talked through those options, and Tala made her selections.

After that, they discussed a gate, and Mistress Ceangal noted that with the white steel, Tala could rather easily shift any segment to allow for the entry and exit of those she wished to pass through. That way, they wouldn’t be introducing the weakness of a gate or gatehouse.

Tala easily agreed, and that was that. All her choices had been made.

Rane had extensive notes, and Terry had mostly gotten a long nap, even if he had perked up and flickered about a bit to see what was going on before he settled back in to sleep.

Master Bunas bowed to Tala once again before gesturing, causing every Constructionist present to bow. “Thank you for your time. We will get to work on the true segments immediately.” He glanced toward Mistress Stiwaf and the woman held up two fingers. “Expect your first delivery of magazines to empower within two weeks.”

Tala bowed in return, joined in the gesture by Rane. Terry simply maintained his grip, seemingly continuing his nap. “Thank you all. I believe this will be quite useful, when I am called on to deploy it.”

“We will require quite a lot of the white steel. That will be the greatest limiter on our progress.”

“Understood. I will devote what resources I can to production. It is not a cheap material to fabricate, could you give an estimate of its market value?”

Master Bunas frowned. “Well, initially it will be in much demand, but I imagine that that will settle down eventually. Even so, it will never be worthless.” He considered a moment longer before stating a price. “And I suspect that it will initially command nearly ten times that.”

Tala paled slightly. Oh, I’ve been a fool. I should have been making as much of this as I could for as long as possible.

-No kidding.-

Rane cleared his throat. “I think it would be wise to talk with Master Grediv. He would likely sponsor the creation of the amount you need in exchange for the right to purchase a set amount on a preferential basis.”

Master Bunas was nodding. “And if the esteemed Paragon does not wish to make such a deal with you, I know that the Constructionist Guild would be happy to.” After a moment’s hesitation, he added. “If you are willing, we would happily be a secondary party to negotiate with, if you choose to open the doors to multiple offers.”

Tala nodded slowly. Please send a message to Master Simon, Adrill, Kedva, and Brandon. I’m going to need them to negotiate this for me. Artia would have the skills I need, but she’s still running her shop and doesn’t actually work for me.

-Done!-

Tala gave a small bow, then. “Thank you, once again.”

They bowed in return as Tala and Rane left.