The failure to locate Daemon and the fifty missing students had rapidly devolved from a security breach into a political disaster for the Imperial Magic Academy and the entire Austrian Empire. Two weeks after the massive, non-magical explosion that had vaporized the Archangel Sanctum, the initial frenzy of the manhunt had curdled into a bitter, accusatory stalemate between the two powerful men responsible for the security failure: Chancellor Altdorf and Duke Steiner.
Duke Steiner's war room, situated deep within the Ministry of War, usually a testament to martial order and disciplined Aetheric control, was now a chaotic hub of frustration and mounting expense. Maps of the entire Eastern frontier were strewn across tables, crisscrossed with colored lines marking exhausted search patterns. Steiner, pacing relentlessly before a massive tactical display that showed no relevant information, had poured immense resources—both magical and monetary—into the pursuit. He was fixated on a single, flawed premise. "They must be using high-tier Aetheric cloaking runes!" Steiner roared, slamming his fist onto a map section detailing the Carpathian Mountains. "Fifty people simply do not vanish! The sheer mana signature of their travel should be visible for leagues! This is an unprecedented assault on our tracking capabilities, confirming the commoner's genius for high-level enchantment!"
His chief of the Imperial Tracking Mages, Master Borislav, looked utterly haggard, his face etched with two weeks of sleepless failure. "Duke, with respect, we have swept every known ley line, every remote teleportation nexus, and the entire land border three times over. We find absolutely nothing but the natural, chaotic traces of ambient Aether flow. We even tracked a group of commoner smugglers for three days just because they were carrying large metal boxes, which proved irrelevant. If they are moving across land, they are doing so with zero magical expenditure—an impossibility for fifty people traveling with heavy equipment." The sheer lack of mana residue contradicted every principle of Imperial tracking. The cost of this failed pursuit had already depleted the Imperial treasury's quarterly allotment for frontier defense, forcing Steiner to defend his choices daily to the Emperor's financial advisors.
This technological blindness was the core of the Empire's defeat: their total reliance on Aetheric power made them completely technologically blind to mechanical solutions. They were searching for a spell, not a machine. Steiner's only logical conclusion, constrained by the limits of his world's physics, was that Daemon was a magical prodigy of unprecedented villainy, requiring the most expensive and rare magical countermeasures. This continuously escalated the perceived threat level in the Emperor's court.
Chancellor Altdorf, meanwhile, was conducting his own, colder investigation from his heavily warded office in Austria. He was less concerned with the lack of magical traces and more with the logical impossibility of the escape. He remembered the steam engines, the metallic precision, and Daemon's constant, peculiar study of fluid dynamics and pressure—topics entirely ignored by the Academy. He was receiving scattered, confusing border intelligence that sharply contradicted Steiner's clean sweeps.
Intelligence reports from remote, mountainous regions—unimportant areas ignored by Steiner's magical trackers—mentioned "strange, low-flying objects that sounded like massive beehives" or "unnatural, oily smoke clouds" witnessed near the Balkan territories shortly after the explosion. These reports were consistently dismissed by the Constabulary because the witnesses were low-caste peasants and, crucially, the objects possessed no discernible mana signature. Altdorf mentally overlaid these reports onto a geographical map, realizing the flight path pointed directly to Ottoman territory.
Altdorf began to piece together a terrifying hypothesis, feeling a creeping sense of dread that transcended his usual political maneuvering. He stared at a simplified diagram of a bird's wing . If the commoner achieved flight without Aether, using only the brute force of mechanical combustion, he wouldn't leave a magical trace. The truth—that Daemon had escaped in rigid airships powered by two-stroke engines—was a concept so utterly foreign to the Academy's understanding of physics that Altdorf felt a physical twist of nausea. Admitting that a commoner had invented non-magical air superiority would instantly shatter the Academy's intellectual dominance and Altdorf's political career. He chose to keep his dawning, horrifying suspicion silent, feeding Steiner just enough rope to hang himself with the continued failure of his conventional, mana-based search.
The failure to produce either the missing students or the crucial M-1 production secrets necessitated an emergency session of the Imperial Council. The Chancellor and the Duke were called to justify the astronomical spending and the terrifying chemical explosion that had rocked the capital. Steiner seized the floor first, presenting a narrative of heroic pursuit against a miraculously cloaked enemy. "We have confirmed Daemon is an Aetheric master of the highest caliber, capable of masking fifty individuals. He must be neutralized before his terror network strikes one of our cities!" Steiner demanded an immediate doubling of the budget for high-tier detection artifacts, determined to throw money at the wrong problem.
Altdorf, ever the manipulator, played a more sophisticated game. He didn't refute Steiner, but subtly shifted the focus to the destructive nature of the initial attack. "The threat, esteemed nobles, is not solely Aetheric concealment. It is the chemical, non-magical power Daemon wields. This M-1 explosion confirms that our enemy is using weapons that anyone can learn to produce. It undermines the very foundation of magical superiority." Altdorf's argument resonated deeply with the Council's profound, deep-seated fear of commoner empowerment and the democratization of warfare.
The Council's eventual decision was a political compromise that satisfied neither man completely but successfully bankrupted the state further: Steiner's Pursuit was funded, committing the Empire to doubling down on the futile magical search for a phantom enemy. In parallel, Altdorf's Defense was authorized, granting him a massive budget to begin construction of a new, sprawling Aetheric Defense Grid around the capital, which he claimed was necessary to protect against non-magical chemical bombardment. This subtly secured his long-term power and funding, even as he chased his technical hunch. The rivalry intensified, becoming openly hostile. Both men had secured immense budgets, but both knew the terrifying, unadmitted truth of the failure. Daemon was not just missing; he had proved that the fundamental military and political superiority of the Imperial Magic Academy was obsolete. The Empire was chasing shadows, completely blind to the distant, un-magical roar of Daemon's two-stroke engines, a sound their entire worldview was not equipped to hear.