The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 747

White magic was never fragile. Once, it stood undisputed at the pinnacle of the Seven Towers. Its downfall wasn't a flaw in the art, but in the practitioners, who abandoned true cultivation for cheap, instant strength.

In the long game, white magic outshone all others; it just demanded years of refinement, and the world had grown too impatient to wait.

White took the students nobody else wanted and taught them to be useful in quiet ways, and every other tower had smiled at it for so long that they'd forgotten what the colour actually was.

White is the source light.

Not a spell. Not an element. The thing every other kind of magic is a shadow of — and there is exactly one thing in this world that a shadow cannot survive.

Black Tower had spent five hundred years building an empire out of the dark.

They had just walked four thousand of it into the light.

...

Merrick's second went for a curse and nothing came out of his hands.

Nothing. Not a weak one. Not a flicker. He said the words twice and stood there with his fingers spread like a man who had forgotten how to close them.

"Say it properly," Merrick snapped.

"I did say it properly."

Down the line it was happening everywhere at once. A woman who had held a Black seat for eleven years tried to raise a shadow-wall and got a smear of grey that came apart before it reached her knee.

Two brothers on the west flank tried a rot-hex together and one of them started bleeding out of his nose instead.

Their magic wasn't being blocked.

It was being drained — out of the air, out of the ground, out of them, pulled thin and washed pale by a light that was coming up through the flagstones and had nowhere in that courtyard it wasn't reaching.

Merrick looked at three thousand of his dead coming apart around him, and at a thousand of his living who suddenly couldn't cast a candle.

He got there about four seconds too late.

"Run," he shouted. "Everyone out. Out, now — it's a trap, it's a trap, get to the gate—"

...

They turned around, and the gate had things in it.

Thousands of drones had been in the dark outside the wall the whole time.

Waiting is what they're best at, because waiting costs a machine nothing at all, and there were more of them than anybody could count in the second they had to count.

They came over the wall in a single motion, all along its length, like the top of the wall itself had lifted off.

The first man to reach the gate took a needle in the throat and went down asleep before his knees knew about it.

The second took one in the shoulder.

The third put both hands up and screamed something that would have stopped a man's heart at forty feet.

Nothing stopped.

...

That was the part they could not get past.

Black magic works on minds. That is the whole architecture of it — five hundred years of refinement aimed at one target, the soft wet thinking part of a person, the part that can be filled with dread or grief or the absolute certainty that your own hands are rotting.

A Black magician doesn't beat you. He convinces you.

Machines cannot be convinced.

A man called Osric, who had broken three men's sanity in his career and was rightly feared for it, planted his feet and threw the worst thing he owned at a drone twenty feet in front of him.

It kept flying.

He threw it harder, ignoring the sudden, blinding rip behind his eye. It kept sailing, missing its mark entirely.

"It's not working," he said to the empty air. "Why the hell isn't it working—"

He was still saying it when the needle went into his neck.

...

They tried everything. That was almost the worst of it, watching them work through the whole catalogue in about ninety seconds.

Fear-hex: nothing.

Blood-curse: nothing, and it needs a heartbeat to bind to, and there wasn't one.

Rot: rot needs something that was alive. The drones had never been alive. There was nothing in them for it to hold on to, and the spell simply slid off and went into the ground and was eaten by the light.

One of them tried to negotiate.

He stood in the middle of a collapsing army with his palms out and said, "We surrender, we surrender, we're leaving," to a machine with no ears, which shot him in the thigh and moved on to the next man without altering course by a single degree.

Five hundred years of accumulated terror, and not one page of it had a chapter on this.

...

On the top of the Amberly tower, thirty people stood at the rail and could not speak.

Pell had her hands over her mouth.

Below her, in a courtyard she had swept two days ago, four thousand attackers were going down in rows, and the thirty people who were supposed to have died in the first ninety seconds of this were watching it from above like an audience that had wandered into the wrong theatre.

"They can't do anything," the old groundsman said.

Nobody answered him.

"Look at them. They can't do anything."

A Black magician directly below the tower threw a killing hex at a drone at a range of six feet, and the drone went through the space where the hex was and shot him in the collarbone, and he sat down in the courtyard and fell asleep with his mouth open.

Pell made a sound that started as a sob and finished somewhere else entirely.

The White Tower was not going to fall tonight.

Somebody had known that before the sun went down.

...

It happened thirty times.

Fifty miles away, Alex watched thirty screens go quiet.

Not dark. Quiet. Thirty courtyards full of sleeping people, lit white, the light already dialling itself down now that there was nothing left in any of them to unmake.

"How long do they stay under?"

The room's light shifted.

"Twenty-four hours," Alex said, to Elias, who had come down at some point and was standing very still in a room he did not understand at all.

"Minimum. Nobody's going to be hurt and nobody's going to wake up. In the morning we'll have thirty thousand people asleep on White Tower ground and their families will know exactly where they are, because we'll tell them."

Elias couldn't speak for a moment.

"We won," he managed.

"We defended."

Alex looked at the clock on the wall.

One hour and four minutes since the first foot crossed the line at Amberly.

"Now," he said. "We'll start attacking the Black Tower."

...

Elias turned around so fast he had to put a hand on the desk.

"With what?"

It came out louder than he meant. He'd spent his whole life in a tower that had never attacked anything, and the last four hours had already broken every idea he had about what his own people could survive. Defending was the plan. Defending had been an astonishing enough thing to hope for.

"Grandmaster, we have thirty buildings and no army. Our students are at home. Every fighter we own is a machine that just spent an hour working, and even if you have a hundred of them—"

"Elias."

"—we cannot cross the states tonight—"

"Elias." Alex turned one of the screens around.

Underground. A hall, and beyond it another hall, and beyond that something the old man's eye couldn't find the end of.

Racks running away into the dark in both directions, and on every rack, in rows, in thousands, small black shapes sitting perfectly still.

They had been coming off the line since the week the White Tower's walls went up.

Every day. All day. Nobody had asked what the second and third and fourth factories were for, because nobody had known they existed.

"Five hundred drones for each of their branches," Alex said. "That's the number I built for. Black Tower has two hundred and fifty buildings in this country."

"Two hundred and—"

"Fifty. They're eight times our size. That's why nobody was ever going to beat them." Alex was already moving toward the door. "And tonight every single one of those buildings is empty, because Dorren Ashe called every fighter he had to the field at the same time."

He stopped with his hand on the frame.

"He emptied his house to burn mine," he said. "So we will take their tower now."