***** The Prince’s POV 2:59 AM *****

Drat. I’m wide awake and the sun’s not up yet. What time is it anyway?

Bong!... Bong!... Bong!... *Silence*

Double drat. It’s only three in the morning. Why didn’t anyone warn me that having too much stamina regen would significantly limit your ability to sleep?

“Pardon me, Your Highness,” said a curiously flat yet cheerful voice. “but Bud and Broohn wish to speak to you remotely and privately about a matter of the utmost importance.”

“Oh, good morning Gooble, I’m free to talk to them now. Is there anything that I have to do?”

“Nope. I’ll connect the call immediately so y’all can get the formalities out of the way while I get the privacy screen up and running, at which point I will make this noise-” *dootDOOTdoot* “-to inform you your conversation is private. Connecting now.”

“Good morning you two! How are things going out there?”

“Good morning Your Highness,” greeted Broohn. “Things are going swimmingly at the moment. Had a bit of a scare earlier today, but at this point, everything is mostly dealt with.”

Good morning Your Highness, like he said, we had a bit of a problem, but most of that is sorted now.

*dootDOOTdoot*

“Glad to hear that. So, why are you calling me this early in the morning?”

Someone sent a disposable army to steal my core, and they’ve mostly been dealt with. In dealing with the army, we ended up in a situation where we need your advice on how to proceed.

“Oh?”

We managed to trick the invaders into stealing a fake core and teleporting it back to the man who sent them. Inside of this core, there was a hidden tracking beacon and a sedative AB foam bomb. We now have the person in question trapped in a room in their own home with little chance of escape. The problem is that we are fairly certain that he is a Noble. How would you have us proceed?

“Oh dear, that is a problem. Where is this person relative to you?”

“Roughly 1165.7782 kilometers away at 3.5° South of Southwest.”

“Oh, dear. That sounds like Lord Ubaro’s lands. Broohn, I think the best option is you come pick me up and then we go pay him a visit. How soon can you get here?”

“Five minutes.”

“WHAT?!”

Broohn, you can’t go suborbital. That would stand out too much, remember?

“Oh, right. In that case, I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.”

“That works. I’ll meet you on the southernmost shore of Capitol Island.”

“Alrighty then, I’m on my way!”

***** Broohn’s POV 5:15 AM *****

“Well darn. That is Lord Ubaro’s Castle, but the shield is up,” The Prince said as I circled several hundred feet above it. “There’s no way in.”

“Well, I am a dragon. It’s only natural that they prepare to defend themselves.”

“True. Let’s back off for now and try approaching on foot.”

“It’s worth a shot,” I agreed.

Sadly, another half an hour later, it didn’t work. The shield was still up.

Out of curiosity, I picked up a fist-sized rock off of the ground and tossed it at the shield. Sure enough, it bounced off, but there wasn’t anything special about the way it did so. It just bounced.

So I tried again, but this time I used some glamor to add a decent amount of kinetic energy to it, so it probably hit the shield at about seventy.

This time it bounced straight back at my face and I just barely managed to catch it. It might not have hurt if it had hit me, but getting hit in the face by a fast-moving thing still isn’t fun. Also, getting hit in the eye would have sucked.

The other thing I noticed was that a wave of white ran over the shield starting where the rock hit, fading as it went.

“Huh. I wonder if I hit it hard enough, will the wave travel back to me?” I muttered.

“Wave? What are you talking about?” asked The Prince. “There’s no water here.”

“The white circle in the shield that expanded out from where I hit it with the rock.”

“In that case, I have no idea. What I can tell you is that this kind of shield is stronger in the white section.”

“Oh?”

“Well, there’s more energy in it. The shield absorbs energy from the wave it as it travels through the shield. It’s been proven through multiple experiments.”

“Alright then, what happens if there’s too much energy in the wave for the shield to contain?”

“Ummm… Nobody’s ever managed to put too much energy in this kind of shield. Not in any kind of controlled fashion. They simply take too much energy to overload.”

“Alright, let me try something,” I said, backing up until I was 150 meters from the shield. “I’d recommend you take shelter behind a tree or something just in case something goes wrong.”

“Um… Okaaay… One moment… Alright, I’m sheltered.”

While The Prince was seeking shelter, I was combining and tweaking several pieces of spell-code on my smart wrist bag as there was a fair chance that my reaction time wouldn’t be quick enough one things got going. The first piece of code was a linear accelerator/decelerator/momentum-reverser that I had put together years ago because I thought it would be useful, and boy had it been. The second piece was a shield harmonics analyzer that I had built to check the stability of the energy shields on various spacecraft, while the third piece was a ballistics timing control unit I’d pulled off of the web years ago that was good enough that I’d never had reason to replace or exchange. Finally, there were several standardized user interface modules that are easy to reprogram to do what I wanted.

“Almost ready… Done!” I said as I set the spell-code running. It took a moment to boot up, but a glowing red fifteen-centimeter diameter hollow tube appeared in front of me, shortly followed by a fist-sized blue cube with another much smaller tube sticking out of it pointed at the shield, and then the keyboard, screen, and other user interface components showed up between me and it in green. Finally, a bunch of gold filaments extended from my smart wrist bag and connected with each of the components and engraving circuits into them both inside and out.

“Broohn, what are you doing? Where did all of this come from?”

“This is the magic that I’m going to use to test the shield, which I created using the spell-code projection and solid hologram features of my smart wrist bag. Admittedly, I’ve never used it in quite this manner, but I know what all the various pieces do so it should work just fine,” As I spoke, I finished typing in the last set of instructions into the newly created system. Admittedly, I could have added those instructions before I ran the code, but it was easier this way.

“Yeah, but what are you doing?”

“I’m testing the resonance response of the shield to see how it responds to impacts of varying frequency and strength. And… done! Fire 1!” As I finished speaking, I inserted a fourteen-centimeter diameter ball bearing into the back of the accelerator tube and hit the fire button, launching the ball bearing at the shield at just under Mach 1. The only reason this speed was possible is that I’d long since hooked my smart wrist bag to my armor’s power supply for situations such as this where large amounts of power are required.

When the ball bearing bounced off of the shield, it flew right back into the tube just as I had hoped. Meanwhile, the white wave that traveled through the shield moved much faster than the last one and did, in fact, travel all the way around the shield and condense back into the original impact point. The system that I’d put together analyzed the wave propagation and hit the shield with the ball bearing again just as the wave converged, dumping even more energy into the wave. Once again, the ball bearing bounced right back into the tube, and the wave traveled across the shield even faster than before.

This process repeated several times, with the speed of the wave and the speed of the ball bearing increasing significantly each time. While this was going on, between waves I noticed that the sections of the shield that weren’t occupied by the wave at any given time were getting fainter as the wave got bigger and faster.

Then, somewhere around the tenth or eleventh iteration, the shield disappeared in a flash of light when the ball bearing hit it. I had a brief moment of panic that the remains of the ball bearing were going to continue on and hit the castle at speeds in excess of Mach five, causing a massive amount of damage. Unfortunately, I was so excited to get to test a shield like this that I had forgotten to consider the consequence for the castle contained therein.

Fortunately, the shield was able to absorb the ball bearing’s kinetic energy one final time as it failed, at which point the ball bearing just hung in the air for a moment where it had impacted the shield before falling to the ground.

Except it wasn’t a ball bearing anymore, it was a magenta crystal that was half again the size of the ball bearing, and I dove/teleported forwards and caught it gently before it hit the ground.

“What just happened?” asked The Prince, having drunk a minor healing potion to restore his hearing.

“I have no idea. Let’s go deal with Lord Ubaro, and then I have to get back to the dungeon to help with the Lizarolfkang get acclimated to their new forms. Then I can get Bud and our new enchanter to help us figure out what this is.”

“Alright, but no more experimentation! I’d rather the castle remained intact!”

“Party Pooper!”