-The high-end computer manufacturers are NOT going to be happy if we sell any of these,- Sama /pointed out. -All their very best cutting-edge stuff is going to be hopelessly obsolete as soon as we start selling them. I was reserving them for personal use, and stockpiling a few for when you might want to pull the lever and start marketing them.-

“Huh. I think we’ve made enough enemies for the moment,” he said thoughtfully, realizing the implications. “Power requirements, information transfers?” he asked shrewdly.

-Runs a lot of juice and needs to be super-cooled,- Sama /confirmed. -There’s no current information transfer tech that can keep up with it. We’d need a UV laser, custom information protocols per data batch, and basically flawless fiber optics or laser transmission.-

“Infrastructure. Right,” Briggs sighed. “So that’s what those sand purchases were for?”

-A mile of violet-grade nigh-perfect fiber optic cable per hour,- Sama /confirmed cheerfully. -We can make more Fabricators whenever you say so.-

“So you’ve been rewiring Coralost, instead of buying cable,” he nodded. “Finish that up, get the Fabricators into place. We’ll price the cable at a hefty level and market it at an ongoing basis. They can make the choice of pricey and compact, or buying fifty times as much and taking up a lot of room.”

-They are also Tempered.- Briggs glanced at me at Sama’s smug /voice. -Our little Magos is another compulsive perfectionist.-

“Don’t skimp on Artifice!” Briggs agreed firmly, holding out his fist, and we bumped, one Artificer to a Runesmith. “You’ve got all the wizards eager to pull Adept-mage so they can start brute-forcing all the different Elements and Patterns you came up with, and regressing them down to Novice spells again. Have you had success?” he asked, definitely interested in the project.

“Well, I’m the only one doing them now, so it’s limited... but, yes.” His eyes rolled back and he just grinned knowingly.

“Element?” he asked.

“Light. Easiest to work with here.”

“Uh-huh. Findings?”

“You know the additional spells by Element in the standard configuration exist. Well, there’s spells outside the standard configuration, too, and now I know where ALL the fear of doing mage-spell research comes from. Turns out that doing simple tests outside the normal spell configuration for Adept spells is a Star-popper for certain!”

“How so?” he asked, intrigued.

“The simplest and most obvious spell promotion is simply to take the Novice-class spell configuration(s) and replicate them another six times to form an overlapping, resonant Starmap. It’s simple, obvious, easy, and if it has no flexibility, that just means it is good at its job, right?”

“Makes sense,” he agreed with a nod. “So, what’s the problem?”

“The problem is the doubling paradigm, and Stars can only channel the amount of energy that they’ve been Ranked up to do so.” I flipped up the standard array of Novice-Class mage Casting. “First tier, 1 power. Second tier, 2 power. But third tier, 4 power.” I waggled my fingers. “Fourth tier, times eight! Fifth, sixth, and seventh Patterns at 16, 32, and 64 times, respectively!”

“Which you know because you have Tier-7 Stars in your initial Stardust,” he nodded, such an incredibly rare thing that probably fewer than a handful of people on the planet had the same, perhaps even none! “The point?”

“Resonance effects are also doublers, not additives!” I swirled up a surrounded hexagon Pattern of the Adept basic Light Spell, and then adjusted the spell so that instead of the six additional Star Trails being other seemingly random configurations that ended in exactly one different Element each, forming a Meta-Star that replicated the central Startrail, all of them held the exact same Startrail.

“A normal Tier-1 Adept spell channels approximately ten times the energy of a normal Tier-3 Novice Spell, or forty times the base Tier-1. That energy is allocated among damage, range, area, duration, penetrating power, Potency, targeting ability, and random special effects, of course. How much energy do you think this configuration represents?”

Briggs frowned as he stared at the very simple Pattern. “Okay, the simple logic is that each Trail represents a single spell, and adds to the whole, and you get a bonus for having a complete configuration, which bumps it all from sevenfold to tenfold. But you just said the bonuses are not additive...” He whistled that one single note again. “Wait, you’re saying this is a x64 power configuration, not a x10? Or x40?” he asked sharply.

“That is absolutely correct. And what do you think happens when those Stars start conducting that much energy through them?”

-They pop like firecrackers,- Sama /conjectured helpfully.

“Exactly right. This technique works precisely once for a normal mage.” Five of the six doubled Patterns faded away. “If you line up the Patterns face-to-face and spend a point of Mana for each Startrail, you get two Lights.” I held up my hands, and two balls of solid jet and silver Light, carefully down-toned, materialized on my hands.

I let them dissipate. “But if you do it with three Mana, you get four.”

A triangular Pattern swirled up, power pulsed, and suddenly two sets of two glowing jetsilver spheres were floating above my hands.

“This is not a ‘greater than the sum of their parts’ effect. This is straight x4 spell energy flowing through a resonant Pattern.

“A standard set of 3-tier Stars would instantly blow apart under the energy flow here. Since that would automatically include your Starter set, you’d basically be crippled in that Element forever.”

Briggs whistled in his one note, Sama’s mental one much more /melodious. “I hear a ‘but’.”

I nodded. “If your Stars are Tiered up, they can survive an additional stage per Tier.”

Briggs leaned forward despite himself. “Wait, then. Tiering up your Stars has no effect on higher-Class spells unless ALL your Stars are of the higher Tier. Even one Star being lesser means it’s useless, it disrupts the resonance...

“This means... instead of shooting off spells that are 1, 7, 49, or 343 Mana apiece, fixed and rigid, you could be shooting off spells with 2, 3, or 4 Mana... right?” His awed voice showed how impressed he was with that discovery.

“Exactly. And the Tiering effects stack with Resonance. So, instead of shooting off a basic Pulse Laser at x320 with Tier-6 Stars, using 7 Mana to do so, I personally can simultaneously shoot off eight Lasers at x64 each for 4 Mana, because I’ve got four sets of Stars at Tier-7... or I could do sixteen at x32 with Tier-6’s, for 5 Mana and the same net effect.”

“Huh.” His pale violet eyes gleamed nonetheless as Briggs considered the Star Pattern in front of him. “So the KIA boys have Tier-5’s, their Core Set at Tier-6. They’d be tossing eight Lasers at x16, for 4 Mana, versus one big spell at x160 for 7 Mana, the big spell improving to 320 and then 640 before it tops out.” He considered the whole thing, his eyes unblinking. “Mana Efficiency favors multiple high-Tier Stars, then. It means you can take two or three sets of Tiered Stars and get a LOT of mileage out of them.” He wasn’t slow on ammunition computation. “Heck, Fae, even discovering you can spend two Mana on a spell is great!”

“The normal comparison would be someone with, say, three sets of Tier-4’s, versus the normal spell. So, 4 Lasers at x8 for 3 Mana, versus 1 spell at x320 for 7 Mana. The reason the two-Mana version isn’t known is simple: the configuration. You have to run it mirroring atop one another, not side-by-side like the standard spell array.” I brought up the standard six-around-one of the normal Adept spell, and the natural adjacent Pattern most people would use if they dared to try this. “This Pattern pops them if they try it.”

“I imagine you came close to popping your Typeless Stars doing this?” Briggs asked quietly.

“I had insulation of one Tier because of the testing configuration. I ran a full seven Startrails exactly once in test config, and it popped. Someone else trying it likely would have blown up their Element and themselves from the feedback,” I confirmed.

“So without the right configuration, this is also extremely dangerous. Still, if you have three sets of Tier-4 Stars, you have absolute Mana efficiency over an Adept spell, by a factor of three... I don’t think I need to tell you how incredible that is, Fae. Even just getting one or two extra sets of Stars beyond your Core to Tier 4 or 5 will massively increase both your offensive power and your staying power.”

I nodded once. “Broad, low power.”

He took a deep breath and shook his head. “And this is on top of your new Adept-Class spells.”

“And new spell configurations...”

He looked at me, then at the holos floating in front of him. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but if this resonance effect is true... the tenfold increase between the tribulation Levels is a limiting effect? All those extra non-resonant Patterns are there to provide a limitation and insulating effect to the spell, so as to keep the Stars intact?”

“Very good!. Yes, that is exactly it! A standard spell is indeed a ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ effect. It actually has the exact same amount of energy flow as a Resonant Pattern does, and then wastes most of it so as to keep the Stars stable. So, a potential x64 multiplier falls all the way down to x40, just so you don’t blow out your own Starfield!”

Briggs considered that soberly. “Could you do it as a final detonation?” he asked logically.

“I’m not going to test it out and try. I’m not sure the spell could complete, but it’s definitely a way to suicide.” And if you were going to die anyway...

“Since this works... it is entirely possible to believe that spell modularity isn’t in tiers of seven, but in individual Startrails, up to multiples of seven, right?”

I nodded again. “Yes, that is my belief, but there’s so much to work on, and I’ve not done anything with Mage-class stuff.”

“And you’re alluding to the fact that different configurations exist, beyond the complex insulating default one, and this internally lethal resonant one.”

“I know at least four others.”

“Mithar and his Mighty Mutt,” he swore, looking down at me with another chagrinned smile. “It must be so damn nice to be able to work at magic all the damn time!”

I had to grin. “It is! I can do what I love all the time, and I’m not even an Egghead with all the bonuses to do so!”

“Are these sort of like Metas for Adept spells?”

“No, yes? They are multipliers to specific factors of the Novice spells.” Which was something like Metas, sure...

He blinked. “Times sixty-four multipliers?” he asked for confirmation.

“Up to, yes.”

-Mithar and his Magnificent Mount,- Sama /purred. -However did the Novice mages on this world ever get along without you?-

I just smiled, and whipped up a new spell configuration.

It was a Laser, but it replicated the basic spell seven times over, so a Resonant Effect. However, none of the Patterns ran within any single set of Stars. Instead, they ran between the different Stars, with Light in Stardust One connecting to Lightning in Stardust Two, to Fire in Three, and so forth. In contrast, the mirror Patterns in Two through Seven all flowed through the consecutive Elements in One, the second Star in Two’s Pattern being Lightning in One, while in Three, the third Fire Star was taken from One...

As such, the Startrails extended back and forth between the different Stardusts, forming an elegant yet haphazard Starmap configuration of Startrails that were all the same, yet were not.

“Huh. Okay, the core Adept spell is inefficient by wasting energy on inappropriate Patterns and Stars. This... is wasting energy by jumping between Startrails, and only allowing the multiplier effect to occur in one direction?” Briggs deduced.

Yeah, he was not slow. “Exactly so. This is the Scatter Bomb version. It multiples the area of the spell up to double for each additional Startrail.” The additional Trails fell away, all but the one starting the process out. As I added each back in, the Trail seemed to fan out slowly around the initial Startrail, with long initial and ending radiating patterns. “Configuration AND Star connections important here.”

“I can see that...”