Empire Southern Army HQ October 29th 1924

(Naomi Desraft)

I could feel myself finally calm down after drinking a bit of coffee brewed by our dear Visha. I still shutter at the thought of such a madman running around freely in the Imperial army, how could an army with such individuals carry so much weight into the battlefield. Maybe it was because they had such special individuals that their rise to power was so fast and furious. I could finally take in the sights of the aftermath, while Visha was brewing coffee and calming me down, it was Lt. Weiss that was in charge of the door and saved me from the madman himself. The child soldier was deep in conversation against the Lt. Col. as to something probably related to the madman.

"Feeling better now?" Visha asked me.

"Yes... thank you Visha, that was... something else." I could barely speak a sentence.

With a soft smile she simply stood back up and prepared more cups for pretty much everyone in the room, she sure is a solid boost to morale in her presence alone. We all took a break in silence for what seemed an uncomfortable amount of time, I could feel it that some wanted work to get done but at the same time knew that rushing would yield no results. I am the one who finally caved in, had to distract my mind and produce results if I were to keep this job, so I went back to the desk, cleaned up the bits and pieces that flew off in the initial impact and started fiddling around with things.

"Miss Desraft..." The Lt. Col started calling out to me.

"Just Naomi is fine, I don't wear the uniform yet and do not have an officer rank and even then would be your subordinate so any form of politeness would be exaggerated right now." I answered.

"Understood, well then Naomi, how does your rifle look by the current conditions?"

"Honestly? It can be fixed, the damage itself is not that bad, just burnt. It would be faster to build a new one but at that point I would also stress getting a good Imperial rifle instead of the Dacian musket."

"So you can build more?"

"Maybe, this is a task of reverse engineering, similar to replicating the interior design while trying to keep modern advantages such as mag feeding and semi-automatic functions. The main issues will arise from the bolt itself since it's concept goes contrary to the electromagnetic acceleration of my rifle."

"I am sorry, I cannot say I followed everything."

"To sum up, I need time to upgrade it to Imperial grade weaponry. My father's design is single shot but modern battlefields require more bullets to be effective since missing your only shot can be fatal. I am a living example that slow rate of fire against a good shield such as the Major here, effectively takes me out of the fight for far too long."

"Are you saying we could mass-produce this kind of weapon?" The child asked.

"Well, yes and no, the main issue is not mass producing but actually using it. This gun requires a pretty good amount of mana to get the power to do anything and even then requires good control from the user to not be a waste."

"Thus only useful for experienced and strong mages." She concluded, she was pretty smart, I will need to stop making fun of her cute face.

"Exactly, which brings us to our second topic of the day, where is my orb? I swear if you say I have to talk to that madman for it I will murder him."

"Lt. Weiss will handle the retrieval but unfortunately he will be observing for the sake of studying the orb, luckily enough research will distract him from you so we can focus on seeing it in action."

"I suppose I will have to make due." I grimaced. "Oh well I guess we can at least do some test firing with this gun for now, it should somewhat work although it may also explode in my face at the first shot, let's find out shall we?" I smiled as I hoisted the gun from the table, the mechanism wasn't that damaged to be impossible to repair but it won't hold out for too many shots either.

I was escorted out to the courtyard and then into a shooting range by everyone except Lt. Weiss who separated to escort the doctor from a distance. Once arrived he acquired the orb and gave it to me, instantly I attached it back to my belt and reopened my mana flow into the rosary, it felt good to be reunited and to just let it flow. Honestly speaking, cutting off the mana flow almost feels like you stop breathing, suffocating at first but then I got used to it. Now that I am letting it flow once more I can finally breathe and it showed as I probably gained a few colours back to my face although not changing my hair colour just yet.

"So we will finally find out how this gun was so dangerous to us." Lt. Weiss sighed.

"Prepare to be unimpressed." I chuckled as I dropped a slug down the barrel.

"Wait, was that just a regular musket ball because it looked a bit different?" Visha asked.

"It's a bit different, think of it as a full metal cylinder so in between a musket ball but not quite a modern gun round. It's real effect is when it is propelled its shape will alter and simply become a very mass object at high temperature to pretty much pierce whatever it hits."

"How does that work?"

"By magic, DUH!" I answered in a snap, and then laughed it off. They may not think its funny but I think its hilarious.

Show is about to begin though as I started to pour my magic into the rosary and channel it into the rifle to start the magnetic acceleration process, this of course created the effect of changing my hair to white and eyes to purple. It instantly created a wave of reaction in the crowd of mages, scientist and whatever other staff present. I continued loading the algorithms and variables to the target in front of me at probably one hundred meters at most and when it was ready it was simply a matter of pressing the trigger and it resounded very clearly with a crack and pierced the target and beyond. Not too bad for someone who lived off bad food and jail recently. I stopped the process, cut the magic flow to at the very least return my hair to the normal black.

"What was that power..." Visha breathed out.

"Even I could feel that." Lt Colonel Rerugen was also in shock, was it really that bad? I could only tilt my head.

"Doctor, what were the readings?" Lt Weiss called out.

"HAHAHAHA SHE IS TRULY BEYOND US!" He was losing it over his machines.

"Care to clarify what you mean doctor?" The Major stopped his laughter.

"The power she released is the same as any other A class mage yet her effect were classes above our understanding, even her spell construction would be simply impossible with the Type-95."

"That means so little to me." It was hard to understand for myself and everyone else.

"We classify mages power levels with alphabetical letter, A being the highest potential, but spell construction is based on orb capacity. This means you are one of our top mage prospect and an excellent magic user and the cherry on top is your orb is peerless." The Lt Col explained, yeah this is confirmation that I fucked up my orb.

"It might help my understand to see your level of normal and what this Type-95 even is."

It created a few looks in between them but they all agreed so Lt Weiss showed me a few offensive spells from optical to explosive and it was true, it's power was inferior to mine but did not require much ammunition or simply enhanced its effect. Yet they explained he was using the Type-97 which still kept my question of what was the 95 but I can live with it I guess, it wasn't that big of a difference since I saw the latest 97 if I base off the numbers. At one point I noticed how the Lt Col was talking to the Major and after some discussion the big guy approached me.

"I dare say this was a productive day, once again I welcome you to the Imperial Army and I look forward to your contributions, for now I aim to keep you attached to the 203rd battalion as they are more knowledgeable than I am as mages and are already an experimental group so you can fit right in. Your skills are not inferior in terms of magic and with them you could experiment your reverse engineer weapon."

"Understood Sir, I look forward to our agreed upon conditions."

With that we exchanged a quick salute which was easy since I was already drilled on this and he retired for the day. Other than that rough rule establishing with the prison guards and the traumatizing moment with the doctor, this was a good day. I was then brought to the QM to get my issued gear and uniform, I borrowed Visha for that since I mostly needed her feminine help to measure a few of my sizes to get it right.

"Don't worry, you are still a growing girl, we are roughly the same age so it will be fine soon." She commented after measuring me, sorry I lacked the right assets, I was malnourished.

"I mean, I can't complain, I could be stuck like the Major so being this tall is good enough." plus big boobs are only good on other people, too much inconvenience for me to manage on an everyday basis.

"She is still a growing girl as well, she is only twelve or so, be nice to her even if she sounds mean from to time. She truly cares about her wing."

I can't say much, I only just got here, she was nice to me after the doctor almost violated me but she does have that very stern look every time I say I cannot take her seriously. We finished up real quick and moved to share quarters with her, away from all the men and safe from crazy doctors. Of course no Major since she was an officer, but I got a free ticket to Second Lieutenant which was nice, skipping the cadet step. We started spending the days with them trying to teach me spells and I was trying to record them into my rosary for future usage, the hardest one by far was the flying, I got all the offensives down but still had issues with flying which was their main spell.

"No no no, you cannot just brute force speed and altitude." I was admonished once again by Lt Weiss as I pretty much launched myself in the air to immediately fall on my face.

"I simply don't understand the formula, it literally just applies a force to a vector to an object of mass which is myself but it simply doesn't work, is it a constant flow or reapplication or propelling." The mages themselves just ran the spells and did not understand its formulae much themselves which was a fatal flaw in my opinion.

"Just pour your mana into the spell in your orb and then visualize where you wish to go, how does a genius like you not understand this?" He was getting exasperated, well this was the third day of my failing it.

"I keep telling you, my orb doesn't work by just visualizing, I need mathematics, formulae, variables, something fucking tangible." I was also getting tired of this routine. "Why don't I just use one of your orbs to fly and then mine to attack?"

"Running two orbs is impossible, not even the Major can do that and you think you can just because you are the Witch of Dacia?"

"Hey! I didn't choose that title and I am trying to find solutions so don't just shoot them down, just pass me a type-97 and let me fly."

"Fine, crash and burn for all I care." He threw me a type-97 which I attached to my neck same as them, cut the power to my rosary to experiment at first and then made it flow to their orb. I instantly felt drained, this orb was just sucking me dry but I managed to keep it somewhat under control and started pouring into the flight spell. I started to levitate a few feet off the ground, just enough to make me look over Lt Weiss head. This was a very exhausting process as I was trying to understand how it worked and not to fall flat again but also because it was absorbing considerably more mana than my rosary, this orb was considerably wasteful in resources. I was getting a headache from mana depletion because it was faster than I was used to but my reserves could still hold out for quite a while.

"Not that hard when you use a real orb instead of a dud now is it." He taunted me. "Now fly higher."

Instead of doing what he was telling me, I landed and booted up my rosary instead, this I regretted. The mental stress instantly had me dizzy and fall to my knees, similar to a severe headache as well as after drinking a dozen beer within a half hour. I was dry puking and coughing as I shut down both orbs to try to recover. The Lt immediately ran up to check on me and rubbed my back for a while until the symptoms subsided.

"Shut up... you win... this round." I managed to say since he did warn me the effect of double orb running.

"This is not the time to show off, you need to get used to our basics as soon as possible to be of use and not be called a wage thief by the Major." He was showing me pity now, fuck this guy.

The training continued and while I now had my rosary with a type-97, I never ran them together ever again. The Imperial orb was far less efficient but at least it could run their spells so I could be somewhat of use, and while my rosary had their spells integrated it needed work to make them work properly since its computation was too different. It was like trying to make a Windows OS work on an Apple computer, it CAN work, but that doesn't mean you SHOULD do it. Unfortunately I barely had time to convert the spells much since early November, we got the news, the wing was being deployed to Norden, the express method and I must say they give their news in a very scary way. The Major does her speeches in a very charismatic way for the military but her smile, while fitting for the uniform does not fit a child her age, the combination was deadly. I got a bit insulted that Dacia was considered a live fire exercise instead of a war, but then again, it was just a jungle lane for these mages I guess. In the end, I was the only one inflicting losses it seemed. The Lt Col did not tell me lies, as the mission consisted of a new tactic so this wing did run experiment, the brutal way but also the only way, under direct fire from the enemy, I can respect this dedication to military perfection.

The part that really got me worried is how the Major mentioned other powers being involved with the Federation, is she tracking a World War? Isn't it too early for anyone to even know of such a concept? Even back in my world it was a thing no one believed until it was all said and done and it still got repeated. Either she is a military and political genius or she herself got some guidance much like a said Doctor that was kept away from me even through all his efforts. Oh yes i spotted him trying to barge in more than a few times and he had many guards escorting him every time he did magical tests at a good distance. The whole order dispatch scene ended in joy as everyone was motivated, which was a bit worrying for myself, these are a bunch of war maniacs both officers and soldiers, how long can I survive here?

I was hoping to leave quietly but it seems that God wanted for me to pay some of my dues, I was enjoying some coffee in a lounge with my Rosary opened up much like when my father walked in with a few screens open as I scrolled through the source code looking to better understand the Imperial spells and find inefficiencies. That is when the good ol' Doctor walked in and there was no one else around. I immediately panicked and booted up all possible physical enhancement spells to help me fight back and escape, much to my surprise he simply had his own coffee and sat in front of me, on the other side of a table. I was not going to drop my guard, he was up to something.

"Would you be so kind as to spare a moment to this misguided sheep?" He spoke softly as he took off his steampunk monocle.

"What is it that you want?"

"I know we got off on the wrong foot and would like to apologize."

"Yeah okay no, not buying it, what is it that you really want? Prove me you turned a new leaf? I don't believe it especially as you almost violated me that day in your crazy outburst." I was raising my voice a bit but this was very suspicious.

"This is why I would like to apologize, I was just so overcome with joy that somehow was speaking to God for so long to progress in science to create such a marvelous piece of technology." He was batshit crazy in his faith, that is now official.

"You are aware it is my father that created my orb and not myself right?" I had to play this card already to get him off me.

"My child, think about it, much like I created the type-95 for the Major, your father created your Rosary for yourself. That is because the Lord intended it to be used by those chosen and not by the engineers yet you assisted your father as you said, you were there at every step of the way and were guided to accomplish what the Lord intended. We both know your father was but a channel so that you could be guided and accomplish your orb and potential in the eyes of the Heavens." Oh shit, he saw right through it, why are the crazy people always so fucking sharp at the worst moments.

"Fine, let's say I received a bit of guidance, so what? Have you not seen for yourself how my potential goes from A with my Rosary to almost C class with the type 97? Also I keep hearing this Type-95 yet no one has ever shown me what it even is."

"The Type-95 is the unique orb, that God himself guided me to build for Major Degurechaff and she wears it as a good apostle of God everywhere."

"Oh snap no wonder no one showed me then, it's because its unique and it belongs to her of all people' I sat back into my chair and turned off a few of the enhancements, my eyes were getting tired and muscles were cramping from being jerked but not moving.

"I also believe your potential drops with the type-97 since it is far inferior to your rosary and thus your powers are much lower and crass when going through such impurities."

"While I agree its efficiency is lackluster it still seems like a powerful orb considering how the Empire is maintaining its reputation of power with mages and it single handlely destroyed Dacia."

"Isn't that what you were fixing though? Before I walked in you seemed absorbed in your Rosary."

"Damn, yeah I was trying to find inefficiencies, Imperial magic is interesting in how it brute forces many things instead of calculating to adjust to its surroundings, before we go further are you capable of purely scientific magical formulae discussions?"

"Why yes of course, I am willing to share my knowledge if you were so kind to respond and share the guidance you received."

"Deal!" This was a quick and dirty thing but he was good at his stuff, that is what I learned in the short time here, when he isn't violating little girls such as myself. "Can we establish as a base that magic works from a person flowing mana from themselves into a medium to enact on the physical world."

"Yes the psyche will flow through visualization and spell formulae to change what is reality into what they themselves desire.

"So now, why does half the imperial spells ignore physical conditions, for example the optical spells do not consider humidity and physical form such as clouds, water or target consistency?"

"Optical spells are just a line of energy sent from the caster to a target, it can also refract if the user is skilled enough in energy manipulation."

"Basically it is not actual light, just a bright version of mana ejected from the mage?"

"Why yes that would be the soldier's way to describe it."

"Are most spells simplified to soldier's way of seeing things? If so that will explain the simplicity of many things."

"Not all but many for ease of learning and access, the specifics are known more to researchers such as myself and the soldier's only have to focus on pouring their mana, quite basic if I say so myself. You would not be thinking of not learning their functional beauty and to just simply keep it as a mere tool are you?"

"No, just trying to learn the reasons as to why the formulae were so... lazy? excuse the lack of a better term currently still trying to master the language completely. They lack reasons, countermeasures, safety, variables. They simply act out without any cares of anything and it really rubs me the wrong way, it is almost like they just want to throw out as many as possible instead of making each one count. It is a doctrine of quantity over quality."

"You would be correct, especially considering the current state of affairs, the Empire desired to send out as many mages as soon as possible. Even before that it was more of a question of how many soldiers can they keep for all these possible enemies."

"I see, well to be fair I will answer why the Imperial spells run badly on my orb." He noticeably moved in anticipation and his eyes light up. "My orb currently has eight core... "

"EIGHT!?"

"Let me finish, they all do not fulfill the same job or have the same power, think of it more like two cores being equivalent to engines of say tanks, two having the power of cars and the other four being just enough for a bicycle."

"How does having various power core even work, would they not be unable to share the burden?"

"Not quite because you have to keep all of them busy but not all spells require the same amount of work, why use the engine of a tank if you are only moving a person on a bicycle?"

"I see so you don't use them synchronously but rather asynchronously and completely separated almost like eight different orbs."

"Correct but I can do either all together or separated for example some of the spells will both track a target and then fire the optical laser so I would use a car engine to fire a good optical bullet but a bicycle engine to track since it is easier."

"Delegations of task based on purpose, fascinating."

"This increases efficiency, reduces manage usage and overall improves efficiency."

"This is very fascinating as a concept, truly beyond our real of comprehension." Of course it was, this is software engineering and not hardware which is still beyond this world by a solid fifty year. Surprisingly the doctor left me alone soon after to reflect on what he had just learned and did not try anything funny but it did not ease my heart. I had released all my enhancement spells when he walked out and was still on the edge a half hour after just in case he returned since he knew where I was but I was too scared to move in case of an ambush. I need more coffee, and more Visha, maybe just more Visha, her coffee is the best and her calm personality. I finished a bit more tweaking before packing my new uniform and ruck to load onto a train to deploy to Norden, should be fun to see the battalion battle from their side this time and collect some data, maybe bullshit an engineer boost to them or two to make myself useful and bullshit the desk job for a bit in the safe rear line, doubtful to die with these kinds of people at my front keeping me safe. This showed how little I understood about my position.

Author's Notes

I am not apologizing for the delays, okay yes I will, I am legit very sorry but in good news, I have a job now in the Canadian Armed Forces (military) and it has soaked up all my time, even the discord server only sees me from time to time. Real officer training is no joke, stories say 3-6 months no problem, real life? been 14 months and I got another 9 to go, fun fact I currently hold the rank of Second Lieutenant and am NON DEPLOYABLE, so Tanya being one on the Rhine makes me laugh.

Side note to that, with real training came real knowledge and then came real cringe as I read back when I had written. I will fix it going forward as much as possible to be as real as possible.

Anyways will try to update as time allows with proper knowledge, hope you guys enjoyed this chapter filled with more specifics on magic and setting up good old Norden arc, I missed you guys more than you think, it's a crazy world out there so stay safe during COVID