The First Law of Magic states that once a spell cast will run its course until such a time as its intended effect is realised. However, whether that realisation comes to pass hinges on two factors. Firstly, is the degree of fluency of the mana from the originator of the spell. Secondly, is the intent with which the mana has been supplied. -Wysterl Weisermann. The Fundamentals of Magic.

Ledges and fissures, pits and darkness. The dungeon was full of them. After running from the antechamber, Arthur and Livierre had run into one more. Hopefully, the last because in the middle of almost darkness was the core. At first glance, Arthur had mistaken it for a floating cube―until it turned. It had taken the motif of the dungeon, an actual sierpinski octahedron.

Below it was a dais of concentric circles, making up the steps to an artifice. It was as black as the rest of the platform jutting out into the void. A walkway connected the ledge to the platform. The material it was made of was so dark it was almost hard to pick out as it seamlessly blended with the rest of the chamber .

Arthur couldn’t even risk using [Draconic Sight] to peel away the veil of reality and see the mana. He had no other reason for it other than the thought he’d be temporarily blinded. For there was the densest concentration mana Arthur had felt.

The air almost felt electrified with it, stinging their nostrils and making their teeth ache. It washed over them in ebbs and tides and thrummed in their thaumovasculi like too much sugar in their blood. Even Livierre’s silver inscriptions glowed in the dark.

It was positively brimming with mana. Traces of green and blue flashed and pulsed across the core’s surface, mirroring the light from the surroundings. The dome shaped edifice had tessellated bricks that glowed like Cherenkov radiation.

“And you’re telling me we won’t just get dosed with it,” Arthur mumbled.

“ What was that?” Asked Livierre, who was fiddling with her pearlescent trinket. A Lonsdaleite diamond. It was the same gem that he had seen used on a thaumostat back at Sturms Keep.

‘It would've been too greedy to just pry it off the forge,’ Arthur sighed. “ What’s the verdict?” He asked. He had no idea what the [Artificer] was looking at and time was running out.

“ As I thought, it’s not an unstable leyline,” she sighed.

“ I don’t see what that has to do with anything. How come you’re telling me this now?” Arthur groaned, narrowing his eyebrows. “ And are you sure the [Sygnumeric Artificer] didn’t carry any specialised equipment with him? Because I am positively sure we’re going to be sick after this.”

“ Then we just have to work fast,” Livierre said, letting him borrow a mageslate to use. They made their way across the walkway. Below them yawned a bottomless shaft with swimming motes that twinkled like glitter bugs in the night. They rose up, fading in and out, but did not rise past the walkway. He felt hot and cold as they crossed.

‘How to describe a feeling when you’re walking above the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor?’ He muttered to himself. ‘There isn’t even a guardrail along the walkway.’ he shuddered, wrenching his eyes from the bottomless darkness. Perhaps whichever civilization built the dungeon drilled into the leyline the same way they drilled geothermal wells back on Earth. Did that make the shaft a mana well?

Finally, they were right in front of the dais. Upclose, they could see that the artifice was much like a well head. Wisps and motes streamed up from the depths to strike the bottom vertex of the core. The air was also warmer, as though on the verge of spontaneous combustion. As for the core itself, it was almost mesmerising to look at as it lazily floated above the wellhead.

Whatever material it was made of , Arthur couldn’t tell because of all the blue green illumination, which gave the dungeon core an iridescent tinge. Some kind of ward or shield ensconced the core like a second skin. Maybe it was bismuth, but it was nigh impossible to even think of forging that mineral into such a shape. Bismuth was brittle.

With the core right in his face, Arthur wanted to get on with things, but for the life of him, didn’t know where to start. It was obvious that the controlling artifice was meant to be a large revolving keyboard.

The artifice was made up of redundant tiles of glyphs that several people could work simultaneously, by spinning it around. All the glyphic tiles that served as the input foci were dark. He couldn’t extend his [Mana Sense] to the artifice because it was no use with the mana being too dense to make sense of things. But first, the attuning array had to be found. He looked around the circular glyphboard.

“ I found the attuning array and the receptacle!” Lieverre said. The distortion in her voice as the sound came from the opposite side of the controlling artifice was weird. It was as though they were speaking underwater.

“ Let’s begin with the attuning,” Arthur said as he turned to his mageslate. He flinched at the warbled sound of his voice. First they had to see if the artifice would even connect at all. Then they would deal with the crystal. Livierre had gotten it from Nora just before the dhampir had saved him from being smote by his rebuffed lightning spell.

‘Please be safe Mastresse Nora,’ Arthur couldn’t help but worry about her.

“ Right away!” Livierre said. There was a buzz as the artifice lit up akin to one of those LED dance floor tiles. Most glyphic tiles lit up blue, but the inconsistencies lit up a variety of other colours, from yellow, orange, and deeper into red, like a highlight in a string of bad code.

‘And there are our bugs,’ Arthur said as he turned to the mageslate. He tapped it with a rune scriber, infusing mana into the etching utensil. He needn’t have done that because intention alone was enough to do it. The mageslate also lit up , or rather, the material that formed the words faded into view, black against a muddy green, like a digital watch.

Aetheroglyphs flew up the screen, similar to the first time he’d connected to the dungeon shard. Then they settled on one word that took up the entirety of the screen. A runic word, as close to the approximation of the aetheroglyphs as was possible. Arthur had puzzled out the underlying structure and made it so it would automatically convert aetheroglyphic into runic output and here it was. It was like coding school all over again.

｢Wᛖᛚᚲᛟᛗᛖ! ｣

“And what might that be?” Livierre asked. She’d set down the knapsack containing the aqertherite mana crystal and was peeking at Arthur’s slate from the side. On her slate the same thing was mirrored, as both had been attuned to the same attuning focus.

“A welcome message, no doubt,” Arthur said.

“ I have no idea what that language is,” Livierre whispered.

‘I was counting on it,’ Arthur left unsaid. As he waited for whatever background process was being done to conclude.

｢Dᛖᛏᛖᚲᛏᛁᚾᚷ ᛚᚨᚾᚷᚢᚨᚷᛖ｣

“What’s it doing?” Livierre asked impatiently.

“ Working,” Arthur said. Watching the process continue.

｢Pᚨᚱᛋᛁᚾᚷ ᛚᚨᚾᚷᚢᚨᚷᛖ｣

｢Pᚨᚱᛋᛁᚾᚷ ᛋᚢᚲᚲᛖᛋᛋᚠᚢᛚ｣

“Huh? It's repeated the first word,” Livierre breathed.

“ Astute,” Arthur grinned. “Now the progress is about to pick up,”

“ How do you know that?” Livierre said. “ All I can see here is runes; some so old I don’t even know the meaning of,” she said. The woman looked askance at Arthur’s borrowed mageslate and hers, both were showing the same things. She could not for the life of her understand most of what the words said.

“ You’re catching up,” Arthur droned. The Djy’veli was starting to annoy him.

｢lᚨᚾᚷᚢᚨᚷᛖ eᚱᛃᛏᚺᚱᛖᚨᚾ cᛟᛗᛗᛟᚾ｣

｢Linguistics… Updated!｣

“Oh, so that’s what it was doing. Last two words must be ‘Erythean Common’ ” Livierre interjected.

｢State Designation!｣

Arthur let the words fade away and scrawled on the mageslate. In English of course. He was relieved that they did in fact operate on the same architecture, so he’d learnt to translate each of the commands from Erythrean Common to English. Input accepted could be English but output would still remain the same. The ability of Livierre’s mageslates to have some sort of short term runic memory he could wipe and reprogram had culminated in this plan.

“ Dekara! What did you write?” Livierre asked.

“ I did explain that the dwarves use a coded language, did I not?” Arthur said nonplussed.

“ Of course I would remember,” Livierre said, rolling her eyes.

The word he’d scrawled was [Administrator]. He waited with bated breath to see if the core would accept it. He wouldn’t put it past the Dwarves to have put in some sort of safeguard, like a mana signature of some sort or a passglyph. That would be a headache. And he could already feel from all the dense mana in the air.

｢Parsing…｣

｢Designation…Accepted!｣

｢Passglyph…Null!｣

‘Bingo! Take that, you conceited bearded midgets!’ Arthur mused. “ Then let me work,” Arthur said curtly. “ This place is already starting to give me a headache,”

“ If you say so,” Livierre trailed off. She pursed her lips and resigned herself to watching.

｢Initializing Core Master Control…｣

｢Populating Artifice Main Interface…

[Status]

[Diagnostics]

[Log]

[Resources]

｣

As he’d thought, the architecture was the same. He’d prodded at every single one of the nested command matrices and gotten an idea of what they did through the shard. But he hadn’t had a chance to look at them in-depth because the attuning array had limitations on how long he could use ambient mana to access the shard.

“Hmm, [Diagnostics]” Arthur scrawled on the mageslate. The letters faded out to be replaced by another output.

｢Sys.Self.Diag.Start

[Core Integrity]…Failing

[ Mana Source Status]…Fair

[Decision Parameters]…Unchanged

[Core Date]…Error

Sys.Self.Diag.End ｣

Arthur was still learning the syntax and structures that went into such a work. If he could hazard a guess, maybe they were auxiliary programs that ran off the main interface. That would have explained why the main interface did not have periods and mnemonics.

‘If it's not broken, don’t fix it,’ Arthur murmured as more output populated the mageslate.

｢Current Status:

[Core Integrity]… Compromised

[Date Date]…Error

Intervention Overdue.｣

“What is it saying?” Livierre said impatiently.

“Hmm? I think the dungeon core has been running for a long enough time that it's falling apart,” Arthur said, humouring her. He examined the number of tiles not in the blue and matched it to the conditions of the core as he examined the scintillating polyhedron.

“That does not bode well,” Livierre said, worrying her lip as she too looked at the core. “ No wonder we had a frenzy and a dip in mana levels. Any ideas on what we can do?”

The rune conduits were still flaring but the stutter in the glyphic tiles was anything but normal. The nested headings indicated that they were like some kind of castable matrix, just like [Flame Dart] or [Light]. It confirmed that verbal commands had been part of its structure.

“Oh, now you tell me.” Arthur gave her a reprehensible look of slit eyes. “What was the gem for?”

“ The lonsdaleite ? It was to measure the rate of mana pulses,” Livierre said exasperatedly. “ I thought you knew,”

“ Working under assumptions is a very dangerous thing to do, Mastresse Livierre,” Arthur said brusquely. He was not idle as he checked the output on the mageslate, cross checking which of the glyphic tiles matched which subsystems. Finally he got down the details and got to work.

“ What am about to do is use that key word your Djy’veli courtesans have heard repeated, “So saying he scrawled the word and watched the slate blank out as it returned output.

｢Key.Prompt…I｣

“This is all in Common. I have structured it for your sake but the underlying symbols are all Antecian runes, or so I would like to think. "

“ I understand,” Livierre said, nodding.

“ Now I am going to run diagnostics on the oasis’ [Auric Field],” Arthur said. He followed the structure of the commands he’d seen so far, defaulting back to using his own language.

“For the interest of time, I’ll use verbal commands in dwarven,” he said. For better or for worse, Nora was not around to sense if he was lying or not. However, thanks to Aeskyre's language lessons, he knew that dwarves had an accent that sounded vaguely like Cockney and German.

“ [Diagnostics] on [Auric Field],” he said, stressing the latter part of [Auric Field]. From what he gathered, the [Auric Field] denoted the area of effect of the dungeon’s core. And [Diagnostics] was a matrix that could be used to check on the dungeon core’s status by activating it as a skill. This being his first time flying by the seat of his pants, that was a hypothetical, of course,

｢Subsys.Diag.Check

/Core.Clime.Cont

[Precipitation]…Unchanged

[Humidity]…Unchanged

[Auric Field]…Holding

[Wind]…Unchanged

[Lunar Cycle]…Static

Subsys.Diag.End ｣

Arthur reviewed the output again. The [Auric Field] was a command matrix under the core’s climate control system. The forward slash was being used to denote what hierarchy the command was from the root. Lack of a forward slash denoted the root, one forward slash denoted a primary command, two denoted a secondary and so forth.

“ Hmm,” Arthur murmured, contemplating his next course of action. “The microclimate has remained the same in the face of changing external conditions or rather, the dungeon core has been operating that way for years; centuries even. Climate is supposed to shift to new points of equilibrium ,” he said furrowing his brow. That meant the core had been operating on static data since the last time it was updated.

“I think we should change how the oasis adapts to the outside climate. I see... the option for [Lunar Cycles] is set to static. That might be the problem.” Arthur put across. ‘Maybe the dwarves did this for returning business eh?’ Arthur left unsaid.

If he had his way, he would have put a rotating hourglass because the time between processes was filled with a blankness of inactivity. One could not tell if the core was still actively looking at the request or if it had ground to a halt. Maybe he could pick up another class, but perhaps being magitech, it was already under the purview of what he already had.

｢Current Status:

[Auric Field]… Holding

Append changes?｣

“Yes,” Arthur supplied elatedly as the core renewed its prompts.

｢Parsing…｣

｢Parse…Fail!｣

｢Current Status:

[Core Integrity]... Compromised

[Core Date]... Unknown

Append Changes?｣

‘Frag! Of course it couldn’t be too easy,’ he groaned. ‘I have to deal with the hierarchy of commands. And of course I don’t know what the date is. I bet even Livierre doesn’t.’

The mana was making him as irritable as a coffee crash. His skin felt itchy and clammy. The mana was starting to get to him―there had to be such a thing as mana sickness.

‘The hell am I doing my due diligence for?’ He scratched his stubble. ‘A beard, I am growing a godsdamn beard. Damn,focus!’

‘Hmm, I have to admit I am way out of my depth here,’ Arthur thought. He looked askance at the [Artificer] who was listlessly staring at her mageslate. ‘Ah, then there’s the old age techie adage ‘When in doubt, factory reset’,’

“ Livierre,” Arthur prompted.

“ Whuh?!” the artificer mumbled. She seemed to have been lost in thought.

“ It’s time. Get ready to use the crystal when I say so,” Arthur said.

“ Already?” Livierre gawked.

“ Well? Do you want to get out of here or not? “ Arthur asked. “I am not waiting for you. [Key Prompt],”

｢Key.Prompt…I｣

“[Reset Parameters]; [Core Integrity]; [Auric Field]; [Lunar Cycle],”

‘Please work, please work, please work,’ Arthur murmured, worrying his lip. The longer he stayed in the core chamber the more he felt his teeth ache.

｢Parsing…｣

｢Parse…Success!

/Revert.Core.Sys

//Revert.Clime.Con.

/// Revert. Lun.Cyc

[Static Cycle]→[Dynamic Cycle]

Append Changes?｣

“No!” Arthur literally shouted. The slowness of things was really getting under his skin. Though he guessed that he’d been used to the conveniences of Earth. “ Well!?” Livierre prompted. She was just about ready to drop the Aqertherite crystal into the receptacle.

“ In a moment,” Arthur said, giving her a wobbly wave of his hand. He let his hand hang there—

｢Parsing…｣

｢Invoke Changes?｣

“Yes,” Arthur said. His hand fell. Livierre dropped the crystal into the receptacle. Arthur caught one glimpse of it before it disappeared into whatever recess the artifice used to receive the crystal.

｢Parsing…｣

｢Reversion…Invoking!｣

All the glyphic tiles across the artifice dimmed. Even the Cherenkov glow of the core chamber just blinked out.

“ Dekara! What in the Pits just happened?” Livierre said, panicking from the other side of the artifice. There was no light to see by. Even for a Djy’veli, the core chamber was too dark.

Then as sudden as a moment, the chamber brightened, almost as though it was day.The hum of mana funnelling into the core became even more prominent, going from motes and wisps to a full on stream as it bathed the dungeon core. The air at the middle of the artifice seemed to waver and wobble as though there was heat.

Arthur and Livierre watched as the glyphic tiles lit up sequentially, shifting like a Mexican wave. The flavour of mana in the air changed into that which was distinctly aqer. Even though Arthur was not attuned to the affinity, he could smell the ocean, taste the fresh spring melt at the tip of his tongue, and feel the mist on his skin.

‘Phew, now I can crash,’ Arthur mused, banishing the mageslate into [Inventory Chest]. A bone deep weariness was settling on him like a blanket. He felt his eyes ache as a migraine bloomed. Arthur put his back to the artifice and slumped down, feeling washed out.

“I’ve kept my end of the bargain!” Arthur shouted tiredly. There was no response from Livierre. She hadn’t even said anything when the dungeon core had reset; even now aqer aspected mana was pouring from the mana well and splashing into the bottom vertex of the dungeon core. Arthur knew it was so unlike Livierre to go silent.

“ Livierre?” he groaned, levering himself to look over to the other side. Danger Sense screamed at him. He flinched, out of reflex as a quarrel whistled past his cheek.

“ Scat’s creek Livierre!” Arthur cursed, ducking beneath the lip of the artifice. The Djy’veli woman was definitely trying to kill him! In hindsight, he knew this was coming all along.

‘Still doesn’t make what I’m going to do any easier. Frag this!’ Arthur mused deprecatingly. He armed his spell. The mana was almost too eager to be used. Maybe almost too eager, as he realised too late. As soon as he brought the [Spark Bolt] matrix to the fore, it ripped out of his fingers and arced up to the core, then rebounded through the whole chamber like chain lightning.

“Frag!” Arthur swore as a bolt of lightning struck too close to call. And it would have lashed back at his right arm were it not for the scale-mailed arm sleeve. It seemed to have been enchanted for that very purpose; an Aeromancer did not just wear metallic armour anywhere.

“ You whoreson! Are you trying to kill us? The dungeon core is a giant focus!” Arthur heard Livierre curse. The Djy’veli let out a slew of colourful expletives from the other side. She had been moving around the artifice, trying to get a bead on him.

“ Oh? I thought I was making the job easier for you!” Arthur sniped back indignantly. He scuttled clockwise around the control artifice, moving away from where he thought Livierre had been.

“ Haha,” Livierre chuckled. “ Any hope I can convince you to a truce?!” Her voice echoed through the chamber as though underwater.

“ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Thrice? Shame on both of us,” Arthur yelled back. The warbling of sound was serving as a good indicator of how near she was. He had to keep her talking―

'And then what? Stab her in the back with a dagger?’ He chuckled.

‘ Damn, whoever said a magical world doesn't need guns. It would have come in handy right about now,’ he thought, keeping an eye out for an escape route. He looked towards the walkway and the rest of the core’s chamber for a way out.

Lightning continued arcing above, flashing blue, amber, red, and eye searing white. It illuminated the platform, a circular disc hanging over the mana well and joined by the walkway; the very same walkway that was being struck repeatedly.

Only the control artifice had a lower incidence of the strikes. The only way they were going to walk out of there was by using a Faraday cage. Even if he whipped out his hoverboard, there was no way he’d make it to the other side before the lightning struck him.

Also, the Mark I wasn’t exactly shielded from external magic. It could go haywire and drop him into the shaft. Arthur doubted even translocation magic would work inside the maelstrom. As he was thinking that, he heard a familiar voice echo.

“Master Arthur! Livierre?!”

Nora had arrived―