As infuriating as her arrival was, Lumin’s takeover of Kir’s duties beca a welco opportunity for him to carry out even bigger strikes against the Syndicate. By the end of the week, he’d burned down a half dozen plantations, careful to let the slaves know in advance so they could get their people out.
Lumin’s friend Quilliam did his work out of Kir’s sight, arranging passage for escaped slaves to Norneau, mostly overland along the lake shore, and Kir left him to it. The problem remained, however, that the Syndicate would remain in Amrita as long as they had gold in the city. And he’d promised Lumin that gold in exchange for her cooperation, long before her "friends" ca into the picture.
And to that end, he had Stella do him the favor of a little reconnaissance, which served as an acceptable apology for her cavalier attitude towards experintation on people. She found out from a custor of the Consigliere Trust that the building was as hardened as it seed and even more secure on the inside. It was reputable to the point that just to get a bank account, one needed a recomndation or an opening deposit equal to ten orichalc, and each custor received exactly one "blood key" that specially trained clerks had to handle in order to access deposits.
It was, from what Kir could piece together, technically the most advanced hogrown banking apparatus on the continent, and it was modeled after how Heaven used gold and credit to manipulate the finances of entire nations. But none of that mattered because the most important thing he learned was that the floor was just as physically and magically reinforced as the roof and walls; the entire building being one big, fireproof steel box with no basent. And one that eschewed the city’s normal wooden architecture in favor of polished marble and ceramics.
Thanks to Stella he finally had a plan that he felt confident enough to pull off, though it would involve a rather literal application of the notion of "liquid" assets.
On the night it was to happen, Kir put his plan into motion close to midnight.
He made sure his spare dinsional suitcase was on hand as he approached the structure, which was surrounded on all sides by a wrought iron fence with guards on each corner. A short way up the street, the lights of Heaven’s Embassy were still on, but the building was still rather dim.
Avoiding interference from them was first and foremost in Kir’s mind.
For the first part of his plan, Kir set up shop with the Trust completely occluding any view from the Embassy. Then he got to work.
One well-known principle of physics was that heat was present in all things. Anything that existed bore so form of heat, and even in the depths of winter, the coldest ice was far, far warr than the lowest possible point. But it wasn’t the cold Kir was planning on using... yet.
Having had a little ti to study the outside shielding, Kir noticed several things. One was that while the building was more than proofed enough against fire, it was not proofed against excessive heat. People had to work there after all, and so people needed liveable conditions.
What Kir did was to concentrate on enveloping the building in his own shield - careful not to let his mana interact with the layers and layers of protection as he then began to rapidly heat the building from without.
His goal: A uniform internal temperature of 1200 degrees Celsius. More than enough to lt gold, and well below the 1500 degrees needed to lt steel.
Because the guards operated outside the fence - the biggest fear of any bank was always the hired help stealing from the inside - none of them were in a position to notice the changing temperature as Kir spent minute after minute, hour after hour converting mana to raw heat, matching the rate of change to his rate of mana generation.
As the hours crept closer to dawn, Kir began to notice the growing sll of burnt paper, which should have long since passed given how quickly he’d pushed the temperature past the ager combustion points of both plant paper and parchnt.
He had no way of actually knowing if the building was heating adequately throughout. It certainly wouldn’t heat evenly, but he kept up his efforts from the roof of a building re ters away, until a sudden cry pierced the early morning air.
Soone had tried to enter from the front, and they were t by a wall of confined, superheated air that had instantly burned them.
Kir heard the sounds of confused conversation. There was no obviously hostile situation, and the seemingly passive wall of heat was bad enough that even a demon would die inside of it.
"You may want to crank things up a bit," Kiryu advised as a group of mages was brought in to inspect the anomalous heat.
Aside from the retention shield and the heat, the rest of Kir’s concentration had gone into suppressing his mana so that he could not be easily detected.
Raising the temperature even faster ant he was no longer holding steady, and he drained half his mana before he finally arrived at the point he’d calculated to be the most likely minimum temperature, with so sketchy adjustnts for the increased rate.
This was just as a trio of mages began to walk along the outer fence towards his position.
They way they looked about, they had clearly detected sothing in the area.
Just as one of them was about to look up, Kir let go of his shield and the heating, while simultaneously casting an even larger spell that would instantly whip up all the moisture in the air into a freezing mist - one of Brigit’s old favorites for playing hide and seek when Kir was a child.
The wintry air suddenly battering against the heated surfaces of the bank caused every window to instantly shatter, drawing the attention of the mages away from Kir as he ford a new shield to compress and force the cold air onto the bank’s skyward wall.
The massive temperature shock was too much for the marble facade, and it also shattered away to reveal the glowing but not-yet-lted steel underneath, which began to distort and crack with ominous plinks as the steel walls began to co apart at the seams.
Like most buildings, the business side faced the street, which was the center of the branch, so the backside faced the outer edges of the branch it was on as it sloped down.
It was extrely efficient for water and waste managent... And now as the magical alarms went off and the failing spells tried their best to seal a building that was disintegrating around them, liquid gold began to pour out from the seams and into the gutters, far hotter than Kir had anticipated judging by its lack of viscosity.
"Hahah! I love it when a plan cos together!" Kiryu declared. "I gotta say, you impressed on this one."
"Don’t count your eggs yet," Kir thought to his headward companion.
In preparation for this undertaking, Kir had carefully assessed where exactly the surface-side gutters would flow, and had positioned the dinsional suitcase given to him by Lumin right underneath the largest one, its lid open.
All he had to do now was wait until...
CRK... CRRRRKR CRACK!
As Kir watched, suddenly the entire branch began to shake as new but massive branches began to sprout. He watched in stupefied fascination as the world tree itself lifted the smoking, cracking bank into the air, its branches arcing towards him as if-
"Shit!"
Kir dodged as fast as he could deploy his wings as bits of masonry began to fall around him, hurling himself toward the branch edge.
A mont later he watched as the newly forming branches, so breaking through the building he was just in, pushed and pushed the smoldering, half-molten ss of a building until it was rolled off the edge, taking who-knows how many fortunes with it as it plumted through the morning air toward the roots of the tree.
"Holy Christ on a stick. What the fuck was that?" Kiryu laughed inside Kir’s head. "Did you expect that?"
"No. Not at all." No wonder fire was forbidden... the tree had its own ways of protecting itself, and Kir had just burned it with a building-sized floor of red-hot steel.
He’d just finished that thought when below, an explosion of lights went off as the bank’s many, many enchantnts began to fail all at once and in spectacular fashion.
New cries of alarm and a near-miss from a bolt of mana brought Kir back to the mont.
The shimring heat mirage between him and the now-guard-ridden street was the only reason he hadn’t been shot in the back for taking the ti to watch his handiwork...
Unfortunately, as he flew under the branch to retrieve Lumin’s suitcase, he found that it too had fallen, leaving a cooling stalactite of gold pointing towards its destination.
Swearing, Kir dove towards the ground, hoping to find the suitcase intact.
He had just spotted it falling ahead of him when sothing struck him from the side...
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