Professor Schugel ignored Tanya's bemused stare. This test could be the last for both of them and Tanya didn't feel as confident as him. He stood behind the protection of three Mages, armed guards and a remote detonator to the explosive collar around her neck.
The only safeguard from the experimental operation orb's insanity-inducing effects Tanya had was her skill.
She also received a pair of dark-tinted goggles from the councillor.
"Item 95X can get…bright."
"Makes sense," Tanya quipped. At this point, it wouldn't have surprised her if pregnancy was another possible side effect of using the operation orb.
The googles did a good job blocking out the flood lights, but she couldn't see anything outside her well-lit circle through them, so she put them on without pulling the lenses over her eyes. She dismissed the councillor's concerned look without realising he wanted something else and didn't really care for her eyesight.
"Please, don't open the box until I get to safety."
Apart from the initial conditions, she had the right to dismiss every order she received for the duration of the test. She surmised that waiting for the old man to limp to the monitoring station would give her a few moments to get acquainted with the safety box Item 95X was deposited in.
Tanya's curt nod had the councillor smiling. "God bless you, child," he said as he turned to leave.
His words gave Tanya's imagination wings. She chuckled lightly, approaching the safety box. The beautiful material it was made of acted like a cage, protecting the world from the beast sealed inside. It had a tantalising feel that went through the thin ceremonial gloves Tanya was wearing. The beast wanted out. That was when Tanya recalled she hadn't worn such gloves to one type of special occasion–a funeral. Professor Schugel was a gracious host to offer her the unique experience.
No, councillor. God is dead, and so are you.
Professor Schugel clicked his ocular to check on the situation and hastily grabbed the microphone when he realised what was going on, "Safety crew, level three."
Tanya heard the meaty sound of the councillor's face smacking into a magic barrier. He should have thought twice before asking her to wait for him to get to safety. There was no safety as long as Existence X continued to stalk humanity. She'd have had to be insane to obey that order!
The brilliant flash Tanya perceived through closed eyelids exceeded all expectations. Item 95X had been emitting an extrasensory signal the entire time and its presence completely overwhelmed her when she opened the box. The lining was cast led encased in a magic-resistant alloy. It effectively prevented the operation orb's influence from spreading into the environment by sealing it inside. As a result, Item 95X was stewing in its own magic juice for so long that it turned the box into a type of pressure cooker.
Released from containment, Item 95X fogged up Tanya's senses as well as her affinity for magic. The scientists by the monitoring station may have only seen the flash since they were huddled behind three magic barriers, yet the operation orb's extrasensory presence shorted out some of their equipment.
Tanya's consciousness could relate to that. The goggles would have been of great help if her arms could tell up from down. Explosions disoriented her less than this. Worst of all, she didn't get the pain feedback that normally activated the body's defences.
Her options were to either wait for the sensory scrambling effect to wear out or go against her sound judgement and rein in the operation orb. The representative from the Inspector General's Office was observing her performance and she'd be a fool not to perform to impress.
Tanya guided her hand towards the operation orb's intensity without sight or touch to tell her if she was on target.
She grabbed it. The feedback was immediate and intense. What first felt like weightlessness suspended in sensory goo became a very solid, physical shock. Tanya gasped from the weight of her body, her eyes darting around frantically as she experienced the energy the operation orb had released sync up with her. The operation orb activated faster than Tanya's brain realised that she should do something about it.
Time dilation seemed to kick in. At this point, Tanya was aware that the operation orb was playing tricks on her and what she saw was not necessarily real. Her focus had to be on maintaining outward professionalism, which there was little of in a gasping ten-year-old girl with mad eyes.
It was hard to breathe. Tanya didn't have the strength to move her legs to make the few steps that separated her from the landing mat, supposed to function as her station during this test. She desperately needed good news to regain control of her physical responses.
Tanya struggled to amass the mental resources to resist the operation orb's effect. Her grip on logic was slipping, giving way to panic and dread of what her state could snowball into. The hatred she had for Professor Schugel blossomed into a sinister passion as the operation orb seemed to crush her with her own weight.
Professor Schugel was right to require extreme safety measures. In this state, she couldn't be sure if she was standing still or slaughtering everyone in a blind rage. Item 95X charged her imagination with untold colour, giving her images of the countless ways she could dispose of her spectators. At the same time, it juxtaposed the carnage against crisp visuals of her standing idly next to the landing mat.
She didn't give the operation orb the explicit order to process that information. An operation orb couldn't have processed that information even if she had given the order. Item 95A enabled seamless transitions between spells, but it couldn't multi-task. The best it could do was a series of spells.
That was when her irises regained focus and she blinked. Tanya had taken the wrong approach to this operation orb. Her apparent paralysis was the consequence of gross miscommunication. All she had to do was stop forcing the proverbial square peg in the round hole and let her mana flow as it saw fit.
Tanya tingled with excitement at the revelation. Four cores in one operation orb. How is that possible?
Once Tanya allowed her mana to course freely throughout the operation orb, she attempted to use it to manipulate the cores and regain full control of her body.
Item 95X responded with immense heat, much like its predecessor Item 95A. Tanya visualised the damage four cores going into meltdown could do and nearly screamed in her head when she realised the operation orb had taken her fear for a command. It was nuts. How was she supposed to work with a device that acted on barely conscious musings?
Just as she thought of that question, she felt the operation orb react by adding weight to her exhaustion. There was a pattern, an id-driven subconscious pattern.
Tanya had to admit that it was a feat to create an operation orb this sensitive to the user, but she had to maintain absurd precision to keep it from going haywire. The operation orb continued to wreak havoc on her mind and body as she got more acquainted with its properties.
Her knees were shaking and the uneven breathing was another concrete sign of exhaustion. The operation orb didn't give her any hallucinations after she had picked it up; it merely sucked more mana out of Tanya than she ever held at the ready.
Item 95X was insatiable and Tanya was yet to figure out a way to reduce its appetite for mana. She acknowledged that four cores ran on a multiple of the mana a standard orb required. The need to constantly displace her mana reserves to have the operation orb dispose of them without doing anything useful, though, irritated her.
The indignation seemed to help because the operation orb cooled down. Tanya hadn't pinpointed the trigger, but she suspected it had to do with her background desire to stop the operation orb from trying to burn through her hand. The operation orb's surreal reaction was overshadowed by that of Tanya's audience.
Everyone stood in breathless silence, unsure whether this was the beginning of the end or a breakthrough. Professor Schugel glanced at his watch to note the time.
For once, Tanya could relate to the crowd. She had no idea what the operation orb was capable of in her hands, but there was one way to find out: she attached it to the operation orb holder below the collar and concentrated.
Working with individual cores would have required constant mind fragmentation. Tanya wanted to avoid that outcome, considering that she'd need four different fragments to perform the same task. If she were to dedicate the logical component of her personality to the task, it could fail after being broken in four and she'd need another piece of it in the background to keep her impulses in check. The damage this would cause to her psyche was likely to prompt Professor Schugel to use his ultimate failsafe and blow her up.
There had to be a better, more intuitive way. As if aware of her quandary, the operation orb guided her attention to the clockwork mechanism that distributed the mana between the cores. The machine synchronicity it achieved reminded Tanya of modern computers from her previous life. As long as she supplied the right amount of mana at the right time, the mechanism would do its job. She still needed to pay close attention to the mess of thoughts and emotions swirling in her head because the operation orb flared up like a fireball the instance her concentration lapsed.
To her dismay, Tanya realised that she didn't have the skill to prevent the operation orb from draining her mana and the angular momentum trick that helped her with Item 95A didn't work due to the multiplied pull of the four cores.
Item 95X was beginning to have an adverse reaction to her thoughts, which led Tanya to a regrettable conclusion: Professor Schugel told her the answer when they first met.
Focus on the matter at hand.
Her blooming hatred for Professor Schugel bore fruit as she scattered her thoughts and reservations to dedicate her undivided attention to the clockwork inside the operation orb. If it failed, she would die in a spectacular explosion, but she didn't care. She didn't have the strength to care.
Invariably, her mind cracked in two. Her feet made their way to the landing mat, her hands pulled the protective goggles over her eyes and her face fooled those watching into thinking that she was in full control of her actions.
The information trickled into her senses, but her mind wouldn't acknowledge it. The world could have dissolved into formless white, or maybe it was just the effect of the flood lights all around her, she didn't care. The fissure in her consciousness was unintended, so she couldn't tell which parts of her were capable of interacting with the environment and which were preoccupied with running the orb. She didn't ask the question; she would only answer the order and her order was to fly.
Professor Schugel's voice disturbed her in the distance. "Second Lieutenant, what is your initial assessment of Item 95X?"
Tanya giggled. Her hands quivered as she spoke in a childish voice that seemed natural to a ten-year-old girl, not the stern bearer of the Silver Wings Assault Medal, "The four cores hit like a truck."
She was unaware that she giggled non-stop after addressing him. Tanya didn't register the worried looks she got from the scientists and especially the guards aiming at her. Even if she knew what was going on, either the flood lights or her dark goggles would have prevented her from seeing their reaction.
Professor Schugel hesitated. His microphone was on the entire time, so Tanya could hear him via her headset. More precisely, her body reacted to the sound, but the person inside was in no condition to make sense of it.
The sight of a small giggling girl wearing an explosive collar and an insanity-inducing operation orb was unusual even for Professor Schugel, but he ultimately conceded that it was up to the anomaly in front of him to validate his research.
"Proceed with the flight test."
She stuffed the operation orb to the brim with mana upon hearing the order. She would have fed it more if she could scoop it up quickly enough. Tanya didn't know what was going on, but there was chatter on the radio. Item 95X emitted a vibration she hadn't encountered before. The vibration's frequency was so high it pierced through everything in its path, barely stopping for steel or concrete.
Aerial Mages were told to have a sixth sense for mana. Item 95X covered everything else on the sensory spectrum. She didn't need eyes or ears as long as the operation orb gave her something superior to flesh. It even let her peer into her own body, highlighting the internal damage left from the previous test.
"… Target elevation achieved. Counting down."
The operation orb caught movement down on the ground. The representative from the Inspector General's Office departed without giving Tanya a chance to talk to him. The soldiers lowered their bayonets, yet tension continued to linger while Tanya levitated in fixed position exactly six feet above the ground. The vibrations coming from Item 95X made it very easy to determine her distance to everything in the hangar, and even parts of the environment outside.
"… Countdown complete."
They didn't applaud her this time. All eyes were on Professor Schugel, who checked the still-functioning equipment to make sure he had the necessary data. His assistant was sent away with machine printouts as a precaution, should the electronic records fail.
In the end, Professor Schugel returned to the microphone. He was shining with glee as he spoke, "Second Lieutenant, why are you not gloating yet?"
He didn't realise his mistake until the ten-year-old girl he was speaking to disappeared from view and the unopened explosive collar rolled on the concrete floor towards him.
Fufufu.
