Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 199: Weaponized Generosity

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Garage Tinker

Level 13

HP: 14

Body: 39

Stability: 60

Nerve: 42

Attunement: 59

XP to next level: 10156

Spells: Paradox’s Pernicious Prison (6/6) Light (5/5), Dragor’s Kinesis (3/3), Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation (1/1)

Still ten grand away from level fourteen, Perry thought, staring up at his stat block scrolling across the roof of the richly appointed orgy chamber.

Perry glanced to the left and then the right, seeing the silk bedding spreading out in every direction for a good ten feet.

Because non-orgies don’t need beds this big.

He’d been content taking the slow XP. Nothing on Earth was particularly dangerous to Perry, except maybe Solaris, Chemestro, that guy who kills you with sound, Gramma’s Word of Death spell, about fifteen other Wildcards, and mom & dad.

Other than that, there weren’t really many reasons to be concerned with how quickly he leveled.

Perry was already up to 6.7 times human standard physical capabilities. He couldn’t go toe-to-toe with a prawn, but one wouldn’t catch him in a million years, either.

If he never leveled again, he’d live another 300 years. Minimum.

His mind flitted from topic to topic and dissected them instantly, grasping the meaning of things he’d found difficult or tedious in instants, and then never letting go of them. It wasn’t just understanding, it was application. He incorporated new things near instantly, not having to go through the standard human process of gaining life experience through pain and repetition.

He could perceive ripples in the fabric of dimensions, which was insane because when the fabric of reality ripples, you ripple too. He could touch them, sometimes.

He could make machines that fired spells that could level cities.

He could make machines that fired spells that could feed cities.

And yet…I find myself nervous.

His performance denying that he had Abun’zaul would only muddy the waters for a short time. The dragon seemed well-enough versed in the scientific method. He’d try to prove Perry didn’t have Abun’zaul, and when he failed, Perry guessed there was about a 60% chance he’d try to kill him and steal the legendary mimic for himself.

And the other 40% would involve bargaining and/or waiting until Perry was dead.

When he found out that Perry wasn’t willing to bargain, and they shared the same effective unlimited lifespan, he would probably revert to Option One.

Stupid cousins, starting a stupid rumor about me. Perry sighed, tucking his hands behind his head.

What kind of super did I want to be?

The dragon was going to be a problem one day. But it was an amorphous problem that would eventually rear its head over the course of time. One day they would be sworn enemies, duking it out for supremacy in the science of magic….but not quite yet.

Was he the kind of super to cut to the chase and remove the threat before it became a problem, before it had done anything egregious, like Solaris?

Was he the kind of super to wait until things got bad, justifying his dilly-dallying with ‘free will’ and never knowing when someone might be redeemed?

Or maybe…the Paradox way?

Tyrannus was going to keep Perry as close as possible as he tried to figure him out, shower him with gifts and exchanged knowledge about the nature of magic. Perry could take advantage of this.

They could be lab partners.

Like Gadravan and Pecholard. When they worked together, they advanced the study of magic by generations.

The question is, which one of us is going to die alone and broken, drooling from severe soul-damage, while the other one lives forever in the annals of history as a ‘great man’?

Perry had realized there were no such thing as ‘great’ men, they were generally assholes in their day, and the history books had seen fit to gloss over their many flaws in favor of their achievements.

William had something Perry wanted: Decades of experience subjecting magic to the scientific method. That could cut his time down on his universal theory by forty years.

Perry had something William wanted: a legendary symbiotic spirit with unlimited flexibility.

I think I need to take a walk and think about this, Perry thought as he detangled himself from Nat and put on some clothes before heading out the heavy oak door, out into the marble hallway of the dragon’s palace.

He’d boiled down his options to three:

1: move to kill Tyrannus as soon as possible, avoiding a long-drawn out conflict.

2: keep his head down, go back to Chicago, become a father, and let someone else sort this shit out. The conflict was fifty years away, at least.

3: Play the game. Try to suck every ounce of knowledge he could out of Tyrannus before they inevitably turned against each other. Be a greedy little shit.

…I am a greedy little shit, Perry thought with a shrug, watching the scrying eyes following him down the hall.

He couldn’t actually see them, but the spell left telltale whorls in the spacetime above him.

They hadn’t been in the bedroom, so he didn’t really mind. Who didn’t have security cameras in the halls of a high-level facility?

Light

(4/5) Remaining.

Perry held a globe of light above his head as he meandered through the dark halls, looking for his quarry.

Perry half-expected to be stopped by guards or run into some kind of magical booby-trap that forced him to get lost in the labyrinthine hallways of the dragon’s palace, but nothing impeded his progress, despite being watched by what he could only assume was Security.

He just wandered through the halls, following whatever direction he felt. They were mostly pitch-black and dim, although there were two raucous parties, whose noise attracted the aimless Perry like a moth to a flame.

A door slammed open in the hall and an obviously drunk couple of revelers stumbled out, lit by a beam of light that emanated from the open doorway.

Perry listened to the noise of maybe forty people living their best lives coming from that room, glanced into the silent darkness in either direction before stepping over the flirty couple and continuing on his way.

This is like walking through an entire city block…maybe bigger.

It wasn’t long before Perry noticed that something was guiding him. it was difficult to detect, but something had made it easy to decide where to go at each corner. An itch, a breeze, the sound of the party, something always drew his interest in one direction or another.

Perry surrendered to it, following his nose wherever it led him.

It wasn’t long before he stumbled across a manservant lugging a massive metal component behind him. The whole thing looked as though it weighed half a ton, and the cart it was resting on seemed to be bowing under the weight.

“Where you going with that?” Perry asked.

“Ack!?” the servant flinched, glancing over his shoulder at Perry, who flashed the badge they’d given him when he first entered.

“Oh, um, well, I’ve been instructed to bring this to the master’s astrolabe.”

“I’m headed the same direction,” Perry said. “Lemme help out.”

“Oh, um…” The guy retreated nervously as Perry nudged him out of the way and picked up the handles of the cart without any visible strain.

Together they chatted about life as a servant of Tyrannus – Perry assumed he got the sanitized version – until they arrived at the servant’s destination: a massive pair of double doors, hanging slightly ajar.

Inside was an astrolabe in the strictest sense. It was fifty feet tall at the lowest point, with a representation of all the planets whirling around the sun, which was a massive globe in the center of the room.

“Ah, thank you, Mr. Smith,” Tyrannus’s voice echoed from the other side of the room, shortly before the dragon’s head emerged from behind the sun.

“And Mr. Zauberer, fancy seeing you here.” Tyrannus said, plucking the half-ton chunk of metal off the cart between thumb and forefinger, swapping out an identical part on the massive swirling solar system above them.

“I got your invitation.” Perry said with a shrug.

William glanced at him from the side, giving him the dragon version of a smirk before putting the expired part on the servant’s cart.

“I see. Thank you, Mr. Smith, I won’t be needing anything else tonight,” Tyrannus said.

“Very well, my lord,” The servant said, bowing before retreating as fast as he could, bearing the overloaded cart.

Perry waited until the servant was gone to broach the touchy subject.

“I need you to help me make a decision.”

“Oh, what decision is that?” Tyrannus asked,

“Whether to carry on this farce any longer.” Perry said. “We’re going to try to kill each other eventually, aren’t we?”

“…Most likely.”

“No protestations of innocence?” Perry asked.

“I thought the modicum of respect I garnered by ‘playing it straight’ would outweigh the negligible advantage of lying to you. You’ve already made up your mind.”

“I’d like to be greedy in how I handle this,” Perry said, studying the astrolabe, which seemed to be distorting around something. That something being…

Perry closed his eyes and refocused.

“And I figure you’d like to be greedy as well.”

“What are you suggesting then?” Tyrannus asked.

“We work together for however long it lasts, advance magic by centuries, until the inevitable betrayal, and one of us dies.”

“Ah. In poker terms, you wish to increase the size of the pot, allowing the winner to walk away far richer than otherwise. I like it. Let’s do it.”

“Exactly. BUT.” Perry held up a finger. “I can’t. I’m going to be a father. And a father can’t abide the possibility of an omnipotent dragon deciding his children’s fate.”

“I see. It’s a problem of responsibility.”

“Indeed.”

“Indeed…”

Tyrannus scratched his scaled chin with an arm-length claw. A moment later, he snapped his fingers, making a sound like a gunshot echo through the room.

“I know what you need. What you need is a guarantee. I think I can arrange that.”

With a flourish, a massive scroll popped into existence and landed in the dragon’s hand.

“Behold,” Tyrannus said, opening the mattress-sized scroll to reveal a thin sheet of ivory that had somehow been treated to make it flexible.

“Treated ivory taken from a Greater Orden tusk,” Perry said. It was the same ivory he used for his blood-contract darts. The highly law-abiding demon’s parts could be used to make magically enforced contracts

The value of a piece of orden ivory was commensurate with it’s size: Bigger size meant more stipulations could be written in the same contract. More loopholes could be closed. Or added in.

A mattress-sized scroll like this was worth more in the eyes of most demons than Franklin city and every soul in it.

“Interesting. Whaddya plan on doing with that?”

“Well, originally it was meant to be the finishing touches on Gna’kis, but that’s no longer an option. Until now, I didn’t have anyone valuable enough to me to use this on them, and I was considering cutting it up and using it piecemeal, since mortals really don’t warrant the full use of the contract.”

“So I qualify?” Perry said, thoroughly intending to refuse any deal.

“No. I am going to use the contract on myself.”

Perry’s brows rose.

“We can work out the details over the course of the night, but the broad strokes are this: I will make an oath not to harm or interfere with your loved ones for seven generations, enforced with my own blood, magic and will.”

“In exchange for…”

“Nothing. I simply believe this is what will allow you the confidence to work together with me and advance our study of Essence.”

“And I sign…”

“You sign nothing. I bear the full burden of this oath.”

Perry’s eyes narrowed.

“What do you get out of this? There has to be more than just keeping me around.”

“Do you really want to know?” Tyrannus asked, leaning forward until his golf-cart sized head was nearly nose-to-nose with Perry’s.

“Earn a modicum of my respect by ‘playing it straight’.” Perry said, crossing his arms.

Tyrannus chuckled, shaking the room.

“You are a very powerful young man. I’ve seen it. There’s a possibility I might not win. When we become enemies, when we are down to the final clash, when we have whittled each other to NOTHING, where one instant’s hesitation will determine who will live, and who will die…”

There will always be a niggling doubt in the back of your head.”

“Even if I die,” Perry said, understanding where the dragon was going with this. “My family will be fine.”

“And you’ll know it for a FACT.” Tyrannus said, hefting the contract.

So Tyrannus’s tactic was to cut out about 40% of Perry’s motivation to win simply by guaranteeing that his family would be better off if he died.

“Not bad, not bad,” Perry said, nodding, a grin slowly spreading across his face to match the dragon’s toothy maw. “Sounds fun. Let’s start drafting the contract.”

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