Shadow construct in the style of Caravaggio, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 30: We've got a bigger problem now

  Bergen, Norway, Erd dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (visitor time)

  Days and nights fused into a neverending gloom as the Special Circumstances agents stayed continually awake to study the shadows they had captured and keep the inner box perpetually afloat. They had spent a long time just looking for traps, and when they started probing the alien magic for real, they found that it was incomprehensibly chaotic. Eventually the sort of tiredness that Perk enhancement cannot lift you out from started setting in. It did not help that no one really knew what they were hoping to gain from all this work.

  For a while, it was exciting to study the alien magic, and they made some progress. Then the Spark started losing some of its effect, and although the continual Perking kept exhaustion at bay, the agents were deprived of the refreshment and memory consolidation that a good night’s sleep provides. They kept following false leads and found themselves having to return to start. After several days of this, people started getting fed up.

  One evening, Watson had the idea of feeding enough energy into one of the shadows that it would start replicating itself. They spoon-fed some energy from a small hoard they had brought along – as it turned out, not much was necessary. It was interesting to watch the added energy spread throughout the shadow-form, but nobody understood what it meant. The shadow moved faster around in the box as it got energized but never tried going outside its metal walls – and then it suddenly split into two. It was the first time the shadows had done anything other than just swirling about in a small, enclosed space, and the replication process allowed the agents to see how many different minor strands, spread throughout the overall flow without any coherent organization, activated in interaction with each other. The process proceeded in pulses, and it seemed that the shadow form and the replication ability manifested first, then the vampiric curse manifested as a separate function. Mapping these pulses of manifestation to the activation of strands in the magic of the source shadow, the agents belatedly started to understand more of how the alien magic was structured.

  On the eighth day, their work was interrupted as they noticed something moving on the other side of the lake. The movement was a group of shadows headed towards some of the shadow-occupied houses there. As the agents followed this development, they were startled to notice that the incoming shadows attacked the other shadows, sucked them dry, destroyed them utterly with a cancellation attack, and then replicated. But it took about three defeated old shadows to produce one of the attacking shadows. The old shadows did not defend themselves and did not seem to regard the attacking shadows as a threat – they just allowed themselves to be sucked dry and annihilated. Sherlock said that the smell of rust was getting stronger, but it was slightly different than how it used to be.

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  Then the attacking shadows moved on to the next house, continuing until there were none of the old shadows left, at which point the attackers spread out in various directions. One group headed in the general direction of the agents, but did not seem to have observed them or the shadows they had captured.

  “What do we do?” Bob asked tersely.

  “Fight or flight,” said Sophie.

  “I say we attack them.” Charlotte was impatient.

  “How?” said Watson.

  “Same way as before. All are go?”

  It was more complicated to repeat the attack when they already had to keep an eye on the previous shadows, but the new shadows made no aggressive moves or any attempt to defend themselves. A metal box was created to trap them, then lights scared them into the box, and a second box was conjured around it all. They placed the second large box next to the previous one then, carefully at first, looking for traps and hidden dangers, started probing the new shadows.

  It was soon clear that this looked like Confluence magic. The magic was structured in an entirely different way from that of the other shadows, looking orderly, intelligible, and elegant. Also, these shadows had added functionality, the most obvious thing being a cancellation attack.

  “This could be the counterattack they talked about in the interludes,” Sophie observed.

  “I think you’re right,” said Bob. “Does it mean there will be a counter-counterattack from the other side?”

  “Could be. Things are heating up. We should probably leave, right? Observe what happens from a distance instead of standing in the middle of it.” Charlotte was anyway tired of the gloom, and she missed being in touch with her family and group.

  “Aye,” Watson concurred. “We’ve got what we came here for. No need to take unnecessary risks.”

  The two others murmured agreement. As Sophie triggered the return and the agents disappeared from the Erd dimension, they abandoned their lights and metal boxes. Within milliseconds, the attack shadows started consuming the three other shadows.

  Shadow construct in the style of Abstract Expressionism, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Shadow construct in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Shadow construct in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Shadow construct in the style of Félicien Rops, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Shadow construct in the style of Gustave Moreau, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Shadow construct in the style of Mikalojus Konstantinas ?iurlionis, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Shadow construct in the style of Mikhail Vrubel, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.