章 1268: 29
Volition 3.7
After Amelia was calmed down, I went to the bank to pick up our new cards, then I made arrangements to rent a higher quality apartment, and various equipment/furniture to set up a livable area on Earth M. I also acquired some fake—but legally legitimate—IDs and drivers' licenses.
In between, I thought about the situation with Amelia and what I had gained.
Thanks to Amelia's efforts at healing me, I had managed to successfully form a single artificial magic circuit without dying. So now I actually had access to prana, and could theoretically use some magecraft. This wasn't a feat I could simply repeat to gain more circuits however.
Magic Circuits were organs of the soul, and the physical expression of it in the body was merely temporary. Normal circuits could be activated at any time, but artificial ones involved a process of remaking the physical circuit each time. This conversion of nerves to circuits was a potentially fatal endeavour, and the character Shirou Emiya who used this method only survived because he had a powerful healing item that was still active when he first started. Amelia's healing substituted in my case.
However, the process would leave an imprint on the soul, making it easier each time afterwards, which is why I could do it now with some help from Agate somewhat safely.
But if I tried to add more circuits this way, my soul itself might start sustaining damage, and that would very bad, because Amelia couldn't heal that. I didn't think she could even perceive prana or the artificial circuit's physical expression either.
Self-reinforcement was the first spell I obtained. That was again thanks to Amelia's continuous healing which allowed Agate to experiment on my body until it worked. My reinforcement was very weak though, and currently gave me only about a ten percent boost.
Fortunately, my body itself had been substantially upgraded by Amelia, so that I was already several times stronger and faster than unpowered humans, so even a ten percent boost was nothing to scoff at. Even more important was that Reinforcement was a conceptual thing, not a mechanical thing. It made my body parts "better", and that included things like the regeneration factor Amelia had added to my body.
With this spell and my new ability to cast minor magecraft, there were many new things I could do, and I was eager to start learning, but it would have to wait a bit until I took care of some other things today.
Eventually Taylor contacted me in the late afternoon, and we all met at the warehouse.
"So these are the costumes you've been working on?" She asked. Amelia had already finished most of it, so it obviously looked like armour now instead of the easily misunderstood thing from before.
"It's all Amelia's work, I'm just watching," I said.
"Your spider silk costume is really high quality. I thought we should get something to match yours," Amelia said, smiling.
After that, Taylor asked some more questions about how Amelia was making the costumes, and decided to ask her to modify her own costume as well for the higher defensive quality of the materials Amelia made.
"So, what are we going to do today? Should we start planning patrol routes?" Taylor asked.
"First, I have some things I'd like to show you, and some very good news to tell you…" With a fluid motion, Agate was in my hand and I opened a portal to Earth M.
While Taylor was stunned at seeing the portal, I said, "This is an ability I developed yesterday. It lets me create portals to alternate worlds like Aleph, or this one, if I have a reference point for it. I've named the world on the other side Earth M."
Then I walked through and the girls followed.
"You just…develop abilities?" Taylor asked.
"Well, I told you before that my powers don't come from the shards. To be more precise, what I use is magic and when I develop new abilities it's really more like learning new spells," I asserted confidently.
I could see both Taylor about to protest, but I put up a hand to stop her.
"I know you think magic doesn't exist. It doesn't exist on this plane of existence. But I'm from outside of it, as I mentioned before. There are planes where magic is real. This here is a magic wand that channels my magical abilities," I said, raising up Agate for them to see.
"Isn't that just Tinkertech…?" Taylor muttered.
'I'm sorry I called her smart before! What an idiot!' Agate thought to me, offended at being called Tinkertech. 'Kaleidus, can I talk some sense into her? Please?'
'Sorry, but I'd rather keep your sentience a secret. Your ability to act on your own is a hidden ace I'd like to keep up my sleeve just in case. You know why. The more people that know about you, the higher the chance of the one card we have to play against that person failing.'
'Aww….'
'I'm pretty sure Amelia thought you were Tinkertech too though, why weren't you upset about it then?'
'Well, she didn't say it out loud! And what she did say aloud was kind of right. I did get some of Professor Haywire's stuff in a sense, even if indirectly, because I analyzed the portal the Simurgh opened using his tech.'
"Just ignore his delusions. He thinks he's a magical alien," Amelia said with a smirk.
"Oh come on, I was just messing around before, I'm serious about my powers being magic though. How else can I simply develop more abilities?" I said.
"Magical alien?" Taylor asked Amelia with curiosity in her eyes.
"I'll tell you later," said Amelia.
"Ahem. Anyways, the point is, by using another portal, I can go back to Earth M in a different spot, as long as I've set a marker there beforehand. I can do so remotely if I'm using sense projection. As you can probably imagine, there are many useful applications for this kind of long range transport ability," I said.
Taylor nodded. "Teleportation is a rare power on its own, but alternate universe portals are even rarer. Except for Professor Haywire, no other known capes can do it. At the very least, we would be able to go directly to the enemy when they're least expecting it, and retreat without a trace."
I smiled widely. "That's exactly it! Although my portals last for at least 21 minutes each, so it's not that useful for retreating yet, until I improve them further. This brings me to the next thing I wanted to show you."
With that, I brought them to Coil.
Then I explained how I spied on Coil and captured him, how I stole his money, found out about Faultline's Crew being hired, and finally how Amelia and I interrogated Coil, confirming that he intended to abduct and drug Dinah to use her powers.
Taylor gave several looks of shock and admiration as I explained it all. With Amelia already in the know, and having interrogated Coil about Dinah, it seemed that Taylor didn't suspect anything. This was the very reason I decided to interrogate him with Amelia without Taylor. I didn't want Taylor to impulsively ask Coil if he'd been the one to set Shadow Stalker on her dad.
Plus, I could also just claim that I found files in Coil's base confirming that he was the one who orchestrated it…the important thing was that Coil not be given the chance to claim innocence while Amelia was touching him.
Finally, at the end of it, Taylor asked, "What are we going to do with him?"
"He is too dangerous for us to hand over to the PRT. He is slippery enough that there's no hard proof of his having been Coil other than our word against his, and Armsmaster's lie detector wouldn't be accepted in court anyway. With his power being undetectable as well, and his connections in the PRT…handing him over would probably be the same as letting him go free." I said, but didn't elaborate further.
After a moment, when neither Amelia nor I said anything, Taylor spoke up again. "Should we…" she swallowed nervously, "…kill him?"
"He was going to drug and enslave an innocent child for her Thinker power. Killing him would be well justified, both for his crimes and for the threat he poses. But conversely, he is dangerous because he has an extremely powerful Thinker power himself that essentially allows him to erase unwanted outcomes and test whatever he wants with no consequences…if we could get access to it somehow or make him work for us…Although it would be risky to trust that he'd collapse the right timeline for anything critical, his power has some very useful applications in some situations that could be manageable," I said. "We just need a way to make him cooperate."
I saw Taylor's expression turn thoughtful. "The power to erase unwanted outcomes…" she murmured with a glint in her eyes.
Amelia noticed Taylor's look and glanced at me, but said nothing.
"What if we threatened him the way you did for his interrogation? When we need him to split the timeline, we don't tell him anything about what we're doing, except that we'll kill him in the timeline we don't want to keep." Taylor said.
"That's not a bad idea and we can certainly try it. Given the nature of his power, we would have to be committed to follow through on our threat through…which is why my interrogation earlier worked," I said.
They both looked at me with slightly widened eyes, as if just realizing that I must have actually killed Coil in any alternate timelines he tried during the interrogation.
"Regardless, before we decide what to do with him, I'd like to keep him alive for at least a while longer, at least until I finish taking over his resources. To do that I need to get some more information out of him." I said.
They both nodded with a sombre mood.
O O O
After that, we went to have a luxurious celebratory dinner. After chatting about some of the funnier PHO comments on my post yesterday, we discussed plans for the immediate future.
"We've accomplished a lot in a very short time, but that's mostly been good tactics and information advantage. The truth is, we're pretty weak right now compared to any of the other cape groups in the city," I said.
"We don't have any heavy hitters," said Taylor.
"That's right. We've had major tactical advantages that allowed us to choose when and how to fight against Lung, Oni Lee, and Coil, but if we start patrolling and fighting head to head against the villains on their terms, the odds are stacked against us."
The girls nodded at my analysis.
"Even with Coil defeated, Faultline isn't going to let us off that easily. Coil convinced her that we might be related to the conspiracy group and Case 53s. With Coil gone, she might be more cautious, but she'll definitely come for us at some point as she has a personal interest in that. The Undersiders won't be a threat anymore, but nor will I be able to replace Coil as their secret boss without Tattletale noticing something amiss. In the short term, our biggest challenges are Bakuda, and the E88."
"What about Canary?" Taylor asked.
"I have an idea I am working on in regards to that. I need to run a few more tests and investigate, but if things work the way I think they will, it could be much easier than I first thought. Just leave that to me for now."
"So, I get why the E88 is a big challenge with so many capes, but is Bakuda really that big of a threat by herself? As long as we keep our distance and know where she is, we can just use my bugs to knock her out with sedative without her noticing, just like with Shadow Stalker," said Taylor.
"You're not wrong. The problem comes if we go out on patrol, then she comes to us with bombs. We're pretty squishy, and even if we weren't, she has bombs that can fuck up Endbringers. This applies to most other villains too—like I said before, as long as we're in the shadows and pick our fights, we have a huge advantage, but as soon as we are out in the open trying to protect civilians, we have a problem."
"You don't want us to go out on patrol?" asked Amelia.
"I think I understand. Instead of passively patrolling, you want to us to attack the villains on our own terms," said Taylor. "But we're heroes, if civilians are in danger, we can't just sit by and do nothing."
"I agree. The solution to this is simple. If we're not strong enough, we need to power up until we are." I said with a devious smile. "And in the mean time, I can leverage Coil's resources to get us the information we need to go on the offensive."
O O O
After the dinner, I opened another portal for the girls to go to Earth M to train and experiment, with some suggestions I gave them on what to work on. The portal itself was made to last for five hours so they could come back to Bet at any time without my help.
As for myself, I portaled into Calvert's civilian residence and swept it for useful things. The PRT would probably comb it themselves after a few days once it was obvious that Calvert had gone missing, so I had to beat them to it.
Unfortunately my search didn't turn up anything particularly useful. It was a completely ordinary house, as far as I could tell, except for some PRT-issue weapons and armour. To confuse the PRT, however, I packed up and took many of his belongings to make it look like he left voluntarily, travelling somewhere.
After that, I continued the work of slowly taking over Coil's resources and learning about his organization. This time, I contacted Creep and followed all of the same procedures Coil took to enter his base.
O O O
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