The Fire and The Storm - The Nexus of Kellaran #2
Chapter 166

Part 24

"It's either that or development or both, since we already know that magic capability has little or nothing to do with physical size." Fire pointed out. "Six must weigh twice me now, and he has twice my strength, but my power matches his and Val's pretty closely.

"Watch."

She did what Val had done, and was a bit less capable than her half-sister as a wizard, and a bit more as a warlock.

"See, there you are." she concluded with satisfaction.

"I'm trying something else." Mark said as he cast. "First I'm going to make my collection field so dense that almost no warlock source power gets through it, like I did with the Source and the heat when I blocked Zarkog. Then I'll expand that to as much area as I can. Measure my output versus my last attempt. Make sure you kids stay in front of me so you don't get blocked."

He cast, concentrated, and went as far as he could.

Povon gave the result. "You only covered about an eightieth of the area, but your power output was almost the same, just a bit less."

"Ah, good to know." Mark nodded. "Shall we move in?"

"How far?" Povon asked.

"Rather than a certain distance or a portion of the distance to the sun, I'd like to move in enough that the intensity of the sunlight is exactly twice what it is here. But I don't know how to do the calculation." Mark admitted.

"Like this;" Povon said, and demonstrated both the calculation and the group Translocation.

They repeated all the experiments, then moved in again, then again. At each stage their ability to cast collection fields was the same, but where the sun's intensity was eight times as much as where they'd started they found that venting heat from their bodies and brains was becoming a serious issue. They also found that maintaining such big collection fields and casting such incredibly powerful spells was starting to wear on their concentration.

They made one more jump inward and found that the sun's power at sixteen times it's intensity in the void above Kellaran was all they could process, and the maximum size of their collection fields was reduced.

"All right, that gives us our maximum power collecting and casting capabilities." Mark stated with satisfaction. "Now let's go back to where we started and try it with all four of us co-operating to cast one big collection field at a time."

They did so, and when the four of them were expanding the three children's collection fields for Source power for their wizardry, they did the same for Talia, Alilia, and the three dragons. They found that such co-operation increased their total power to more than the total of their individual abilities.

"Now I want to try it with automated spells." Val stated. "Let's go back to the beginning."

She initiated and guided their jump herself.

"Now, I'm going to make both my collection fields as big as I can, and use all that power to cast self-replicating copies of the sourceshine spell, each with it's own warlock collection field. And I'll make them self- directed spells under my guidance, so I can tell all the collecting fields to do something else, rather than just the sourceshine spell."

She cast until there were one hundred and fifty thousand of them, and had to stop.

"All right, that's about as many of those as I can do. It covers just less than eight billion square kilometers. More than enough to englobe Kellaran and a sizable volume of void around it, but a lot less than the surface of the sun. I can't make each one with the same size and efficiency as I can do myself, but it's not bad.

"In order to be able to change what they do, I have to keep a constant minor Link to them, if I want them to be secure. If I tell them to only change function when they recognize my psionic aura and I give a specific code or something, someone could copy that and take control of them away from me. This way I know instantly if any of them are altered or controlled by anyone else in any way, but the minor links to them I need is limited in number by my subconscious attention span. You multiply this amount of power by about sixteen, and you get the absolute maximum amount of magic power I could wield as if it was my

own.

"If I want to cast them so they're unalterable I could keep casting them until I had to stop from lack of sleep, and with Alertness spells that could be a long time. They'd have fail-safes so they'd just dissipate if anyone tried to alter them. That's what I did with the Work spell and the Healing, they can only do what they were made to do, and if someone tries to alter them they'll be gone, but other than that they'll keep multiplying until everything they were made to accomplish is done, or infinity, whichever comes first.

"We have to make sure any spells like that have a finite task, like healing or educating everyone on Kellaran. If you made them with a potentially infinite task, like just making these sunshine spells, they really would keep multiplying until they were using every bit of power available from the sun.

"We can give them a limited but still complex task, like killing every demon from our sun to halfway to the next closest one in every direction with our most efficient attack spells, and they will. They'll keep going until all the demons are dead, or they're using all the sun's power, or until the demons find a way to counter or alter that particular spell. That's the problem with completely independent automated spells; they lack flexibility. If the demons find a way to crack their protections, they're gone, and if the demons find a way to counter them then they're just wasting some of our sun's energy for nothing, except maybe distracting the demons a bit."

"All right, let's pool all our power and our will and see how much of the ones you have now we can do all together." Mark instructed. "That way we know how much total power we can generate together." A few minutes later, they had their answer.

"All right, we command the power of about twenty-eight billion square kilometers of source at this distance, times sixteen for maximum intensity closer to the sun. Still less than one one-thousandths of covering the surface of the sun, and far less than that at the distance from the sun of maximum usable intensity. We were still a very long way away from the sun at sixteen times normal sunlight intensity, which would make for a very big globe. We're still only capable of using a very tiny fraction of the sun's output of magic.

"But still, that's the equivalent of a normal-density power field at the distance of the sun from Kellaran with an area of about four hundred and fifty-six billion square kilometers. That is an absolutely colossal amount of power we have at our complete disposal, not to mention how many single-purpose independent spells of maximum power the four of us could cast in any given amount of time.

"Now it seems to me that the most efficient attack we could use with that power is Fire's modification of Tithian's Sun-Gate spell. We'll add functions to identify the best places to cast a Gate to the sun on the demons or on their craft, and how big it needs to be to destroy them. If they can get it directly on the demons' bodies on their most vulnerable place, I don't think the Gates would have to be very big at all.

"If the spells are independent the demons might crack the spells' protections and disable them, but I don't think there's much that'll counter a Gate to the sun. They might find a way to Shield against a tiny one that would otherwise kill them, so we'll have the spell just keep expanding the Gate over their surface until they're covered and consumed, if necessary. And if we keep them under our guidance so they can't be disabled they should be completely effective, period.

"Even with all the other functions, the Gate part uses almost all the power, so the spell is almost completely limited to the size of a Gate we can cast at the distance we have to use it. Let's give that a try, shall we? We'll cast the two portals of a gate only a hair's width apart so we don't risk anything. We can calculate the difference from the distance component afterwards.

"Fire, the Gate spell?"

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