The First Harem Tournament 30 – Towards the Finale [Magnus POV]

“Magus of the Hudson,” Magnus spoke the name aloud.

To keep their branching families as distinct as possible, he had chosen his own addition to their family name. A localized one, to make it clear who was royal and who was a mere aristocrat. The plot of land to name themselves after had been easily chosen. Though it would need to be rebuilt, the Magus Academy would stand once more in the area.

To his right, his girlfriend smiled slightly. Nina had advocated for his acceptance of the position as viceroy and nobility the entire time he had thought about it. It was clear that the additional status he had pleased her. More than once, he had caught her bragging about it to other women on the phone.

It wasn’t among her amicable qualities. Nina liked money and power and she wanted him to be around her regularly but also for him to work as much as he could to make sure their household had everything and more. All the same, Nina was his love. She was a reliable and beautiful woman with clear priorities and many talents – many of which she employed to help him in his duties (new and old) from home.

As the saying went: for every great man, there was a great woman by his side.

Their relationship wasn’t always easy and rarely perfect but it was theirs and that was all that mattered to Magnus.

To his left, Lee sat with her elbow on the railing. She gazed down into the fighting pit below, where Nia and Lu Zhi beheld the spinning wheel. It eventually came to a still on the word ‘orchard’. Orderly rows of trees soon rose from the ground. Compacted sand was replaced with grass and dirt.

“Magus of the Hudson…” Lee echoed the name. “Feels weird that we’re going to diverge, doesn’t it?”

Magnus shook his head slowly. “I expected something like this for a long time. Not in the context of an empire, but something like this all the same.” He reclined, an unserious anger settling on his face. “At least he waited until you were out of your teenage years to knock you up.”

The 20-year-old rolled her eyes meticulously. “You’re just happy I found a guy at all.”

“He did wonder if you were going to find one from your goon cave,” Nina chimed in, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear. “Though he is in no position to throw stones from his glass house.”

Magnus just grunted in agreement. By the matter of biology, men had a much more gracious timer to find a significant other. Still, for Magnus to have waited until his forties until he had started to make moves to settle down was quite the delay. At least magic had kept him limber in that time. He still only looked like he was approaching his thirties.

“Glad that you did find so many, weird as I still find it,” he said. “How do you feel, watching them fight?”

“Well… Lu Zhi isn’t one of us.” Lee’s dark eyes lingered on Magnus for a while, betraying the worst kept secret in international politics. Though Magnus had to admit that John was the kind of guy that would fake all of this for a different goal. The only reason, truly the ONLY reason why Magnus was 100% certain he and Lu Zhi were more than allied politicians was that the Heavenly Jade Empress was both cute and dangerous.

The Gamer never could withstand a woman that was both – until very recently. Magnus still wasn’t convinced that Esmeralda was off the table.

“That little detail aside,” Lee continued and looked back at the field, “I dunno, I don’t feel much at all? I know they’ll live and Undine will patch them up before the day is over.”

‘We really do live in different worlds,’ Magnus thought. At his standard of fighting, the only way to quickly heal an injury was to leave the Illusion Barrier and even then any excessive damage had a tendency to slowly surface while the mundanes couldn’t notice. His position afforded Magnus interaction with many of the monstrously strong members of the Abyss and it never ceased to amaze him how much their common sense was warped.

He could never enjoy the idea of two of his women fighting one another.

He also wasn’t one to enjoy the idea of having two women.

A wave of strangeness, more so than the end of John’s countdown, initiated the fight. Nia did… something. Magnus refused to even try to comprehend. He and Nina reclined until their backs pressed into the cushions of their chairs as if several Gs of force were pressing down on them. Lee barely even reacted.

“She’s straight to taking it mega seriously, huh? Nia do be doing Nia things.”

All colours in the middle of the arena were simply eliminated. All colours except the blue of Nia’s eye, glowing impossibly clear despite the distance between her and Magnus. It drew visible trails in the air as the pariah charged through the black-white landscape, her longsword swinging at Lu Zhi.

That was the last definitive action Magnus could make out. Matters moved too fast after that and the camera above was of no help. The magical recordings fizzled and glitched to the point that they were fully disabled and the mundane recordings could not pick up on the pariah.

“What is happening?” Nina asked.

“Uh… I can only guess, but I think Nia is burning the candle from both ends to disrupt the way Lulu creates jade. It effectively makes her magic useless and turns this into a purely physical confrontation.”

“Do you think it’s a winning strategy?” Magnus asked, pointedly ignoring that his sister had a cute nickname for the strongest woman on the planet.

“It’s an effective strategy, but Lulu is hardly a pushover when it comes to basic physical combat.”

Magnus tried to follow the action. When he failed, he looked over to Lee, whose hazel eyes were adjusting constantly, tracing the fight with some difficulty. That was another thing he often had difficulty digesting: that little Lee could lift him up and throw him across a football field without a care in the world.

Lee eventually pulled back from the railing, evidently bored by what she was seeing. A raised eyebrow was all her brother needed to show to prompt her to speak. “Lulu is going to win,” she explained. “Nia just doesn’t have the speed to take the empress down in time.”

“I see,” Magnus diverted his gaze from the field, doing his best to protect himself from the headache that watching Nia fight always summoned. “There was something you wanted to discuss?”

“There is something I want to discuss and something I kind of have to touch on,” Lee answered. “So, let’s do that first one… mind looking at some math for me?”

“Would that be productive?” Magnus asked. His little sister’s mind was operating on a level he could barely pretend to follow. She had always been gifted, a fact that the womb tattoo had hyper-charged (odd as that was to think about). The people called her the Lady of Shifting Dimensions. They called him the Reliable Iterator. Magnus wore his given title with pride and he did not envy Lee for hers. It was a simple fact that there was a vast gulf between them that was, plainly, unbridgeable.

“I’m still just human,” Lee said. “I make mistakes.”

Magnus could not quite stop himself from mockingly blowing air out of his nose. “’Just human’,” he quoted her and extended his hand to her all the same. She handed him a tablet. The document on it displayed a digital chalkboard, filled with several pages worth of calculations.

His eyes drifted over most of it with ease. He recognized the familiar symbols and the standard progression of mathematics that went into calculating the various elements that went into Illusion Barriers. Most people had no idea these calculations even existed. Most Fateweavers didn’t even bother with them. It was only when one wanted to achieve specific tasks or a grand scale that math was truly necessary. It was a lot like architecture in that sense.

Which made it quite odd that Lee had just handed him a calculation for a standard Illusion Barrier. 100 metres diameter, standard atmospheric height, no time dilation, no limited access or entry points, no empowered shell, nothing fancy at all. The only odd thing was…

“Why is the Gupta Figure negative?” Magus asked.

“What’s the Gupta Figure?” Nina asked.

“You know how two Illusion Barriers in the same area will eventually meld into one?” Magnus asked his girlfriend, who nodded. “The Gupta Figure is the number that determines how long this will take. The lower the Gupta Figure, the quicker it happens. When we make a Protected Space, we increase the strength of the ‘shell’ of an Illusion Barrier to push the Gupta Figure to absurd heights, pushing off the melding for years or decades.”

“But,” Lee chimed in, “that’s something Fateweavers can do, not everyone. For everyone else, they just make a standard Illusion Barrier that will meld with others in the area within hours.”

“What does a negative Gupta Figure mean, then?” Nina asked. “That you create the Illusion Barrier and it instantly melds into another?”

“That would be a theory. In reality, a negative Gupta Figure has never been recorded,” Magnus said as he went up the math to try to determine how Lee got to this outcome. “The primary influencing factor on the Gupta Figure is ambient mana. Even on top of the Leyline Fuses, it's not high enough to pull the Gupta Figure below 0.5… wait… ambient mana….”

“I see you got the news from the Ministry of Natural Barriers too,” Lee said. “What you see there is my calculation for an approximation for a barrier created at the Atlantic Fuse if its Ley Index stays the usual percentage ahead of the American average. According to this math, the Gupta Figure will hit negative there around March 9th.”

Magnus scanned the math again and again. What started as reading a standard calculation became akin to reading a dreadful prophecy. No, it was worse than a prophecy. Prophecies weren’t mathematical certainties. Lee had done him the disfavour of including the modelling used. Only the most cautious of predictive calculations included the Gupta Figure not dropping into the negatives at all. It either had to be that one or the climb in ambient mana had to come to a sudden stop.

Magnus knew that the cause was the Great Re-Alignment of the Abyss. The only way to stabilize the current, rapid rise in ambient mana was to cull the Abyssal population down to pre-awakening levels.

He looked at that negative number. An unexplored phenomena, equal parts enticing and dreadful. No one could actually say what would happen once it reached that point. It wasn’t as if Illusion Barriers could meld with each other before they were made. The infrastructure of reality, governed by Gaia, strictly forbade such messing with time. Many had tried.

“The Gupta Figure cannot go into the negative,” Magnus stated.

“That’s my thought as well,” Lee said, “though that leaves us with two possibilities: either we are wrong on that assumption or the formula is wrong.” She gave him a long, inquisitive look. “You’ve studied the classics way more than I have… is the Gupta Formula known as being 100% reliable?”

Magnus suppressed his instinct to answer with yes. Whichever way he sliced it, something was wrong. He handed the tablet back to Lee and pulled out his phone. He did not trust himself enough to pull figures from his mind. His memory was good enough to know where to find something again, not exactly what had been found.

In the arena below, Lulu’s victory was announced.

“What is the awkward matter?” Nina asked Lee while Magnus scanned through the digitized archives. It was quite lucky they had put so much of the library that their father had brought to the Hudson to pixel.

“…Has Metra spoken to you about… stuff?” Lee put it carefully.

“You mean the suggestion that we can be lewder in public?” Nina asked.

“Yeah, that… really awkward to bring that up with family.” Lee shuddered. “I did promise Mat I’d ask you about it though.”

“Nina isn’t opposed,” Magnus grunted his answer absent-mindedly, scanning through the list of indexed authors. He could not quite remember if the man’s name had started with a C or a K. He was certain that he had been English though. “I am still thinking.”

Magnus was not a horny person. He had the body and the urges of someone in their mid-twenties, true enough, but compared to John ‘forgot how air feels on his dick’ Newman, he was practically chaste. The idea of doing it in public was odd to him. It went against how he was raised. Simultaneously, given assurances that the young were not in attendance, he struggled to find a good reason to restrain himself like that. It wasn’t like he had never thought about just doing it by the side of a hotel pool or something similar.

“Why be insistent that I make a choice?” he wondered.

“’Cause you’re a known hard-ass,” Lee mocked him like only siblings were allowed to mock each other. “If you follow that example, so will your fellow stone-faced conservatives.”

“Mhm…” Magnus just grunted, the argument registering at the edge of his mind while he kept digging.

He was still looking after the break-time event concluded. Only when John gave the countdown to the next fight did Magnus manage to pull it up. “Fluctuations in the Gupta Figure near Natural Barrier hotspots by Kelsior,” Magnus read the title, then looked out into the field. “Do you want to watch the fight first?”

“I’ll be real, this one is not worth watching. Beatrice is immune to electric damage, so Sylph is entirely reliant on wind and physical force… which could get her the win, but Bae just needs to get one or two good hits in with her time-manipulation BS, so.” Lee shrugged. “Give it to me, what’s the study about?”

“It was largely ignored because the Gupta Figure has always been accurate enough to do what was wanted,” Magnus explained, mostly for Nina’s benefit. “I can send you the exact tables, but Kelsior went through the trouble of doing exact Maybel measurements for various Illusion Barriers that he made from the Pale all the way to the Atlantic Fuse. According to the summary, he noted a 2% difference from the expected outcome near the Atlantic Fuse.”

“When was this study done?”

“1903.”

“Ambient mana in the world was lower then as well… Still, if the study is correct and there was a 2% difference from the expected result at the time… where was it the highest?”

“Closest to the Atlantic Fuse.”

“Then there must be some kind of ‘outlet’ that pushes the Gupta Figure up to prevent it from ever going into the negative,” Lee reasoned. “Some part of the formula or some kind of magic that we haven’t discovered yet.”

“Or we are wrong and it’s going to go into the negative,” Magnus kept that option open.

“Or we are wrong… isn’t this exciting!”

Magnus preferred ‘dreadfully sudden’.