It was taking the Bunvorixian resistance a while to find the location of the dimensional suppression hub, which wasn't a big surprise. It would either be some sort of big tower, or it would be buried or multiple locations spread throughout the city or… well, any number of things. But aside from 'big tower', none of them were going to be obvious.

There was something I wanted to find that might or might not be the very same thing they were looking for. It was possible that whatever was ruining mana regeneration was also connected to this thing, or they might be disconnected. I was going to break both parts regardless. Assuming there was a thing making mana worse, and Bunvorix wasn't just awful. The bits of magic they had flowing around Midnight to restrain him indicated otherwise.

When I asked for a mirror or some sort of crystalline cube, I didn't expect to get a mirror cube. Perhaps I should have been more clear.

Still, I looked at the mirror cube in front of me. Technically, half a cube. One corner point of a cube where three mirrors intersected. For display purposes, it should be quite good, right? If I could make it work. The Bunvorixians provided three cameras directly facing each of the mirrors, and I could look in from an angle directly at the corner without getting in their way.

"So," I turned to Midnight. "I guess I just look for whatever has the most mana nearby? Because we absolutely want to break that."

"I don't see how that could be wrong," he agreed. "Though we do want to avoid too many extra targets given the circumstances."

We had bad mana recovery, and they'd find us eventually if we kept doing things. The Bunvorixian Freedom Initiative might also lose some people if we screwed up- or even if we didn't. But at some point, things had to settle down from freeing a high profile prisoner and destroying military vessels. Unless we were going to successfully do a revolution this week.

My schedule was pretty full with getting back home and stuff. There were probably other things I should do like… figure out what happened to Mided. Huh, forgot about him. Well, he wasn't anywhere near as important as Midnight and being alive. And he was going to be kidnapped or whatever even if I did nothing, so it's not like I could have made anything worse by showing up.

Right. Scrying. Did not having enough mana make my brain slow? Maybe it was just because I was spending so much effort on recovery. Or maybe it was the stress. Then again, wandering thoughts weren't that abnormal for me.

Midnight and I had mostly avoided Assistive Familiar Casting since we met back up. I wasn't sure if broken magic was contagious, or how we should balance mana proportions, or lots of other things. We didn't have the spare mana to test or a truly safe environment either.

Thus I just gathered twice as much mana as a Scrying spell should use. The other option was to potentially fail and have to cast it twice. It was expensive, but I had twice as much to work with so the real limitation was recovery… as usual.

I was a bit more careful this time, not simply throwing power at the spell in urgency. I didn't get bombarded with things I had never meant to see, aside from some minor shifting colors in the mirrors. Perhaps I could recreate the mists, but I didn't know their purpose.

It didn't take long to recognize a thin tower I'd vaguely seen. Not the one I teleported us out of, probably, but one of the tallest ones on the horizon. And if I'd gone anywhere close to there, I would have absolutely sensed how unnatural it was. I could tell it wasn't a Scrying anchor- I didn't know if there weren't any, or if I'd bypassed them. Instead, it was drawing in everything around it.

How horrific. Though maybe it was fine since the magic was probably already being monopolized by Spot and a handful of others. No wait, that was worse. I vaguely recognized that my Scrying 'window' was larger, though any number of factors could have affected that. I rotated it carefully, zooming in and out while observing various angles appearing in my strange setup. As far as I could tell, nobody was inside the tower. It was more of a radio tower than a tower tower.

It was still going to be troublesome to destroy, though. "Grand Home" extended quite far, with a high population density. I gathered as much information as I could before my Scrying spell ended.

Then Midnight and I consulted with Flopan, who had observed the process.

"I'm impressed," Midnight said. "Such a large construction project completed in a short time… I wouldn't have expected it to be possible."

"It's not," Flopan rejected the idea directly. "General Sporticus stumbled upon this magic of yours but a year ago. I recall this tower being built. Most likely, it has been recently modified- but I don't know which portions."

"Probably the top," I said. "Mana likes to go up."

"Why doesn't it escape into space?" he asked.

"Well, it also likes to be on things," I said. "And… I can't easily explain all the reasons." I didn't even know all of them- Mana Manipulation was less focused on that part of Mana. As it turned out, magic was an extensive topic. "Anyway, it's a problem for two reasons. First… that's a pretty tall tower, right? Spatial Rift has a pretty decent range, but it's not limitless." Should have picked Meteor Swarm. That could go a good bit further. "Also, it would fling a lot of debris around the city." Meteor Swarm wouldn't make that part better in the slightest.

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"That is quite a problem," Flopan agreed. "I don't suppose you can create a portal that just takes the debris away?"

I shook my head. "Not without significantly more practice that I absolutely can't get with it there. Or with me here probably."

"A shame," he said. "I doubt they'd let us set up a controlled demolition on an important building."

"Is that like when buildings crumble directly down?" I asked. I'd seen something like that.

"If you do it right, yes. The upper layers will crush the lower without anything twisting. But even if we could secure the explosives there would be no way for our experts to manage that."

"How big is the base?" Midnight asked. "It looks pretty skinny."

"A few great dogs across," Flopan said. We clarified that those units were approximately meters. Quite approximately, but that was good enough for Midnight.

"I didn't notice any support wires," Midnight continued. "Is it really free standing at that height?" It seemed to be at least seven hundred feet height, more than the surrounding buildings that were a few dozen stories tall.

"Of course. Advanced Bunvorixian engineering can do more than that… probably. There might be some sort of distortion dampeners around? For winds and stuff."

"Seems pretty frail," Midnight said. "What if someone broke the base?"

"What if someone broke the base of any tower? I believe the base is fortified. I can get some pictures in a couple minutes here. Just have to perform a roundabout image search."

Oh right. Internet existed, and people liked taking pictures of big buildings. Including the Bunvorixian government, probably. It was kind of hard to have the street level view of a huge tower be secret.

As it turned out, the base did have some supports. If anything hit it a hundred feet up it would still collapse, but below that it was well fortified. And there was a whole building at the base.

"That does make my plan more difficult," Midnight admitted. "I don't think we can take out the whole thing."

I frowned for a moment. "I don't know what you thought could take out the whole thing before now," I admitted.

"Gate. Just turn it on its side and let the tower fall through."

"It can't go through solid objects."

"Can't, or shouldn't?"

"Well… doesn't. When magic is working right." Which pretty much meant Midnight couldn't do it. Opening a portal inside of something would likely strain my magic even if I could do it, though. "And isn't there dimensional suppression?"

"Spatial Rift worked," Midnight pointed out. "We just might not get to our destination or have our destination tracked. Obviously they could guess we were going back to Earth, but if it allowed them to open up a permanent conduit somehow…" Midnight shook his head.

"So far, they haven't with Spot. But it's a reasonable worry."

"Anyway," Midnight said. "If it doesn't work, we run and hide. If it does work, we have magical freedom. Maybe."

"It sounds like a solution with many possible dangers," Flopan said. "We must think carefully on it."

I also had to think about it. If I destroyed a tower by shoving it through a Gate, did I get destruction experience? Assuming we could even get that to happen.

-----

Our plans came in three waves. First, Midnight and I found our way there in person. Midnight was disguised as a small Bunvorixian- specifically a young one, because trying to act with the arrogance of a Bunvorixian commander would make us more likely to be exposed. I wasn't capable of looking like even the largest of Bunvorixians convincingly, so I was just supposed to stay in an alley disguised like a mastiff.

Midnight walked around the whole place with barely a worry in his heart, while I looked from a single angle. That sure was a tall structure, huh? It really wasn't terribly wide, but it wasn't a skeletal structure like true radio towers. How did they deal with wind and stuff? Did they really just have better materials? Were all the buildings around it enough to help?

I barely even understood 'modern' tech, so advanced tech was a bit beyond me. Either way, even if it was strong enough to stand up to any natural effects, some intentional damage could be big.

In which case it might topple over. Which would be… bad. We would need to yank the bottom along somehow. If I made it fall onto another part of the planet… except Gate wouldn't naturally do that. I didn't want to drop it on Earth or Mars. Maybe Jupiter?

I didn't have a good connection to Jupiter, though. Earth I'd been to, and I only went to familiar places. How difficult. Maybe I could toss it at some random star I could see. As long as I didn't ignite the planet by putting it too close.

So there were some kinks to work out, and I wasn't completely sure I could make a horizontal portal. Then again, what was vertical? Like, actually. Oriented towards gravity? The core of the planet? I hadn't really tried to do anything but convenient portal directions. Did Portal Theory or Dimensional Magic talk about whether that was a requirement?

I'd seen Wrickle drop a whole set of stuff out of Storage in a perfect arrangement. I could turn a Gate. Especially with broken magic. It was just a question of it being a good idea. Was I going to cause more destruction by being less destructive?

-----

A quick review told me that Gates could absolutely not go through 'very much' solid matter. Which was basically the same thing as saying it could go through solid matter. However, super reinforced future tech towers over ten feet across seemed like it qualified under any definition of 'much'. So we had to come up with a plan.

It was so crazy you might have thought I came up with it, but half of the insanity was from Honey Badger and Kick. They wanted to test out their new cutting abilities. Adding on Flopan who thought that the Bunvorixian Freedom Initiative should be contributing more to their own cause. So we now had Flopan and some sort of explosives expert with us. We were limited to '5 people' because that was the price of a Multicasting of Fly. If we wanted one or two more, we might as well get another 5.

As for the plan… it was pretty much just the plan I'd already come up with. But I had a rock, and we were going to mess with the tower first.

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