No matter how Larek changed up the Reflective Sphere Fusion, it didn’t seem to matter when it came to reflecting the Focused Light Beam that he’d created. There was a chance that the Clockwork Elemental’s beam of light was somehow different from what he’d managed to produce, but he wasn’t going to take the chance that it would fail if it was tested against the monster during their assault on the Calamity.
Therefore, he needed something else that would work to prevent the transports from being blasted out of the sky.
Frustrated that his Fusion wasn’t working, Larek wracked his mind for a solution. If a reflective bending of light doesn’t work, and forming a spherical void like the one from Protection of the Void is too expensive, then what does that leave—
Wait. That might work.
Larek remembered something that he’d learned from the Fusionists in Sanctuary that he’d almost forgotten about. While there weren’t a lot of Fusions that they’d been able to teach him, there was one he had learned from them that brought his memories back to the days when he first attended Crystalview Academy. While he was in his first year at the Academy, and before he had really developed his Skills in creating Fusions, there was one Fusion in particular that was used frequently but Larek hadn’t been able to make sense of it – because it was too complicated. Now, though, it might be exactly what he needed.
Magical Energy Negation Plane +1
Activation Method(s): Permanent, Reactive
Effect(s): Creates a contained plane of magical energy negation
Effect(s): Disperses detected magical energy into the ambient environment
Input(s): Magical energy detection
Magnitude: Negates magical energy up to the equivalent of 100 Mana in strength, contained plane is 1 foot in diameter
Mana Cost: 400
Pattern Cohesion: 8
Fusion Time: 90 minutes
The base Fusion wasn’t particularly difficult to create, nor did it cost a lot of resources. Granted, the hoops that used to contain the Magical Energy Negation Plane Fusions used by the Academy had been larger, at about 3 to 4 feet in width if he remembered correctly, so they required a bit higher Magnitude in order to fit within the hoops, but that wasn’t that much of an expense. It required someone able to create at least Intermediate Fusions in order to produce the Fusion, of course, but they also had to have a fairly good understanding of Mana and how it could be broken down and dispersed into the environment. From his demonstration of the Fusion in the Sanctuary, that was essentially what the field placed inside of a hoop did; when a spell was cast at it, the Fusion would detect it and then rip apart the loose pattern keeping the spell intact, before releasing the Mana inside of it into the ambient environment. It didn’t actually absorb the spell, as he thought at first, nor did it counter it; instead, it broke it apart and neutralized it completely.
While he wasn’t entirely convinced it would work against the light beam that the Clockwork Elemental would send out, from Larek’s experience, almost every form of magical-like attack coming from monsters involved transforming the Mana near them in one way or another to produce the result they wanted. If this was true, then it was almost guaranteed that the light beams the Elemental produced were created from Mana, and would theoretically be dispersed by this Fusion.
However, if it were true, then why wasn’t this type of Fusion used by the SIC in combat? The answer that he’d received from the Fusionist he’d learned it from in the Sanctuary was one that he should’ve expected. For one, it was an expensive Fusion to produce other than as a learning tool, and not every Fusionist understood the principles behind its creation well enough to reliably create it. Secondly, it could only be created in a circular plane without anything physical touching the plane, as it would disrupt its field; that meant it couldn’t easily be added to something like a shield, for instance, because the Fusion itself would have to be placed on something that extended outward from the rim of the shield, so that it had room to be free of obstruction. Third, physical objects that were not magical in nature passing through the field could temporarily disrupt the negation field, making it an unreliable addition to a piece of armor used in direct physical combat. Lastly, Fusions such as this were notoriously fragile when applied to objects used in combat, and could easily break without an accompanying Strengthen Fusion on the material, which only added to the expense in creating them.
That said, there were still those who had utilized the Fusion in the past to help defend against Scissions, though they were typically used in stationary or movable fortifications, especially when facing monsters that had long-range magical attacks. But the cost of maintaining enough of these Fusions to make a difference was eventually found to be too high, so the practice was discontinued in favor of simpler, more readily available Fusions on weapons and armor, such as Sharpen Edge and Strengthen.
But now Larek wanted to use the Magical Energy Negation Plane Effect on something larger – a transport vessel, to be more exact. The immediate problem with the current Fusion was that it was created to be a relatively small, flat plane of energy negation, where he needed one that could cover a much larger object. A sphere would be ideal, which would cover the entire transport, but then he thought about the Buoyant Sphere that already surrounded the transports, keeping them lightweight and able to be moved by the Buoyant-Thrusters that accompanied the flight system. In essence, he would have to make this negation sphere even larger than the one that provided buoyancy; otherwise, the weight-reduction effect would likely be disrupted.
But then he thought about people casting spells and using Fusions from inside the transport. While they would easily work inside the vessel, anything trying to affect targets outside would be negated; in other words, magical projectiles launched from the transport, such as through a VREP staff, would essentially dissipate once it passed through the negation field.
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That somewhat defeated the purpose behind the transports, which allowed the Volunteers and SIC members to attack from a distance and from a height advantage. Of course, those on board the transport could deactivate the spherical negation field whenever they attacked, but with how quickly the light beams supposedly emerged from the Clockwork Elementals, there was an extremely high chance that the transport would be caught with its metaphorical pants down at an inopportune moment and be destroyed.
Fortunately, he thought he had a solution for that. Using the idea baked into his Protection of the Void Fusion, he thought he could add a layer of intent around the inside of the negation field, which would transfer magical energy passing through the layer to an area directly outside of the sphere, bypassing the negation effect entirely. It was a rough solution, and would take some intense focus to ensure he brought all of the components together, but he was confident it would work.
Next on the issue list with this Fusion was the passage of physical objects through the field disrupting it. Thankfully, after digging into the reason why this happened in the first place, Larek quickly deduced that it was due to the strength of the field itself; he was 100% sure that there wouldn’t be any disruption as long as he established the Fusion with a Magnitude of 6 or higher. He was planning on making it even stronger than Magnitude 6, as he wanted it to stop even the most powerful spells that the Gergasi might throw against it, which would help immensely when they tackled the next portion of his upcoming plans, or if they decided to interfere with the Calamity once again.
The final issue he potentially saw was the cost it would require to create such a Fusion. Even though it was much less expensive, in terms of Pattern Cohesion, than the Protection of the Void Fusion, once he started changing the size and shape of the negation field, in addition to increasing its Magnitude significantly, he was worried that it would be so expensive that he couldn’t afford to create it. He had enough bonuses from his Specializations to reduce the initial Pattern Cohesion cost by 60%, thanks to Pattern Savant and Fusionist Scion, but there was still a chance that even that wouldn’t be enough.
There was only one way to check, however, and that was to try it and see. Before he created one of that Magnitude, however, he needed to check and see if his theory was sound. It took him about 10 minutes to alter the existing Magical Energy Negation Plane Fusion formation into one that would create a sphere, a shape that he was familiar with due to his other Fusions, and then add on a third Effect that would transfer energy coming from the inside of the sphere to the outside. A fourth Effect was added near the end when he realized that having an energy negation field surrounding a transport would effectively blind anyone inside, as the field wasn’t transparent; so, an illusionary effect was added similar to his Protection of the Void Fusion, which would detect the appearance outside of the sphere and project it inside. This would allow those inside to see an illusionary copy of the world outside as easily as if the sphere were transparent – but it would also make those looking in from the outside only see an opaque field surrounding the transport. He thought about making the Effect work both ways, but decided against it; the harder it was for the enemies to make out what was inside, the more it would be difficult to hit something vital with something like a physical projectile. Making it invisible, such as with the Camouflage Sphere, was an option, but would require yet another expense in its creation; he left that off until he knew whether he could afford it.
The new Magical Energy Negation Sphere +1 Fusion was born shortly thereafter, and it surrounded the small steel plate he had used for the formation. At that Magnitude, the field was continually disrupted because it physically touched things around it, but he was able to secure it upon a rod that he placed upright on the floor, and after it stopped moving for a while, the field largely stabilized – despite the rod sticking through the sphere on the bottom.
Looking at its costs for a simple 1-foot-wide sphere made him slightly worried about how much it would require to create one that could encompass an entire transport – because it was much more than he expected. It appeared that changing the shape from a flat plane to a three-dimensional sphere greatly affected the Pattern Cohesion cost, to the point where it was even more expensive than Protection of the Void at Magnitude 1. The biggest difference between the two was that Protection of the Void would be considerably more expensive to increase to the size he needed, as containing the void was much harder at higher volumes.
Mana Cost: 2,000
Pattern Cohesion: 600
Fusion Time: 2 hours
While the Sphere’s size wouldn’t be directly correlated to its Magnitude, so a Magnitude 5 Sphere wouldn’t be 5 feet wide, but would instead be around 11 feet when the Magnitude was applied directly to the shape portion of the Effect, in order to cover a massive transport, he estimated that he would need a Magnitude 13 Fusion for it to work. If he were to try to cover the same area with Protection of the Void, he estimated that he would need something around Magnitude 20 or 21 to cover it, which was so incredibly expensive in terms of Pattern Cohesion that he couldn’t even comprehend it.
As it was, some quick math told him that the base Pattern Cohesion needed for a Magnitude 13 Magical Energy Negation Sphere would be 750,000; with his bonuses from Specializations, this was taken down to 300,000 – which was, unfortunately, just above his current maximum Pattern Cohesion by just over 10,000.
Well, crap. Maybe it doesn’t even work; let me try it.
Using his Focused Light Beam, he dialed the output of the Beam to its lowest setting, as the negation field wasn’t very strong. Once that was done, he shot the Beam toward the Negation Sphere…
…and nothing came through the other side.
In other words, it was a success.
He tested a few other Fusions, such as launching a stream of Magnitude 1 flaming balls from a VREP staff, and he watched as they appeared to be absorbed by the negation field, but instead saw the Mana invested in each flaming ball suddenly disperse into the ambient environment upon contact with the sphere.
So, his theory worked, but now he had a problem he wasn’t sure how to solve. Is there a way to reduce the size of this and still get it to protect a transport? Is there something I can cut out of the formation to make it cheaper? Or should I be looking into creating a stronger Omni-Boost Fusion to give me more Pattern Cohesion?
That last option seemed the most likely to be an answer to his problem, but the more he thought about it, creating a stronger Omni-Boost Fusion seemed like a stopgap measure rather than the correct solution. When he started thinking about the other Fusionists that he’d found in the Sanctuary, as well as the up-and-coming Fusionists just now learning how to create Fusions, he realized that they also ran into this same problem constantly. They might be able to replicate some or most of his Fusions, but even the best among them struggled to match the Magnitudes necessary to have them be as effective as his own.
Eventually, they might reach his same stats and have the Pattern Cohesion to be on par with his own, but that could take years or decades of time to develop that far. But now even Larek was finding his own Pattern Cohesion pool to be inadequate for what he needed to create.
Just as he was about to give in and start creating a higher-Magnitude Omni-Boost Fusion, Larek stopped as a thought occurred to him. At first, it seemed extremely ridiculous and unlikely to work, but the more he thought about it, he didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t – other than the fact that no one had likely tried it before.
Of course, that had never stopped him before.
With renewed resolution to solving his problem without having to resort to boosting his stats, the determined Fusionist began brainstorming his way into revolutionizing the entire Fusion-creation field.
Again.
