fs-test Chapter 2: pot6, a x-overs fanfic

Errant stepped out from the bounds of the Camp, trotting calmly along the packed trail that led towards the Rift, aiming to get out of the Camp's Interdictions.

A large winged creature with a dark head spiraled down out of the sky ahead of him, clearly aiming to intercept him at the edge of the safe zone. The Griffons of the Stormcrest Crown were helping the allies here with patrols and other things, occasionally swooping into a fight with flying Warp mutants to vent their ire upon them.

They had a great deal of experience with Interdiction zones, knew how fearsome losing the ability to fly could be, and very wisely shirked their limits. Errant was heading out to meet one personally he had been referred to in Marktell, a proud young griffon called Darkbolt, who prided himself on being the fastest of his Crown, and whose wing had been saved a few months back by Sama.

He was waiting as Errant stepped out of the Interdiction, a saddle and a couple other things piled up on his Disk as he walked fearlessly up to the haughty eagle-headed, lion-bodied creature.

"Good morning. My name is Errant, and I'm a Heavenbound Warlock. I'm here to request your services as a mount in the service of Heaven."

Wrath burned up around him, golden glory suffused with the power of the celestial realms. Despite himself, Darkbolt's golden eyes widened at the nonesuch sight and power of it, an ancient calling burning in his soul.

"Griffons are the sacred animal of Aru. When the greatest knights of Aru ride to battle, they call for griffons, no lesser steeds." Errant looked up at the darkly feathered eagle's head above him. "I would like to show you why griffons ride with Heavenbound."

The griffon's head tilted sharply in a birdlike manner, and almost despite himself, shrilled a curious assent.

"I am going to saddle you." He jerked a thumb at his own back. "As you can see, I'm wearing a pack, for the exact same purpose. It's a more comfortable way to carry something. I'll take the saddle off when we're done, and I'll also show you how to take one off." He picked up the oversized saddle, as the griffon was significantly larger than most horses, and the griffon watched closely as he set the blanket on, dropped the saddle, and cinched it tight with the griffon's reluctant approval.

He also fixed two greaves along the raptor-like forelegs of Darkbolt, who chirruped unhappily at them, while Errant's Disk folded up in leaves and went back into his Masspack.

"Say 'lion'," he said calmly, stepping back and crossing his arms.

Darkbolt chirped something, and there was a flowing golden light. His raptor's forelegs transformed into the muscular legs and paws of a great lion, matching those of his hindquarters.

Darkbolt squawked in alarm, bouncing up and down, lifting up one paw, then another in surprise and fascination.

"Try running and jumping around. You'll find them much more comfortable for walking than talons," Errant said patiently.

Darkbolt did just that, prancing back and forth for a few minutes, sprinting fifty yards, leaping to and fro, dodging back and forth, finding the experience interesting. Indeed, it was much easier to get around like this on the ground.

"Say 'eagle'," Errant told him, and a shriek later, his talons were back as they were before. Chirps and shrieks interchanged as Darkbolt watched his forelegs change back and forth.

"Now, let me get up on you." The griffon didn't move as Errant fluidly set himself up into the saddle. "Now, I'm going to speak a terrible truth to you, which you already know." He pointed back to The Camp. "Griffons can't fly." The griffon looked back at him with a turn of his head. "If you don't believe me, go forty yards that way. Nothing that uses magical means to fly can stay airborne... not griffons, not pegasi, not dragons, not manticores, giant bats, or whatever. But a simple, ordinary bird has no problem flying there."

Darkbolt protested the unfairness of it, but looked away. All the Griffons had experience with the Fields, Sama had insisted they know what it felt like to be in one of them. It was frightening being forced into a power glide that barely slowed their descent...

"What this means is that you are magical, especially your wings... and Heavenbound can share their Whim with their mounts." Errant shifted his position as he concentrated, sending a flow of Wrath down his tailbone.

Darkbolt jumped five feet into the air at the sensation, his great dark wings snapping out in alarm... and they were sparkling with golden light in between his feathers.

"First application of Angel Walk, Light as an Angel. Jump for as much height as you can."

Darkbolt obligingly tensed down, and with a shriek bounced for altitude.

The shriek became a little wild as he shot up, nearly weightless, over a hundred feet above the ground in only a second, far, far higher than he had expected, in only a single beat of his wings.

He felt like he weighed nothing. Shrieking in glee, he beat his wings, and his body bounced around like a fledgling.

-Come to a halt, and put your feet down,- Errant /told him calmly in Marktell, now that they were touching. The Marked griffon looked at his mental image, and there was a ripple in his mindset as he beheld the burning purity of a Senior Heavenbound. Errant wasn't Sage Sama, but there was something both grim and glorious behind him that she didn't have.

Heaven...

He looked down, his dark wings aglitter with gold, and found himself standing on the air, faint golden mist curling away from his feet. Hesitantly, he paced forwards, and found his progress sure and easy, the air like a steady road under his claws.

Slowly, he picked up speed, wings out to glide, kicking forwards, moving faster and faster with ease, no effort behind the motion at all.

-Angel Walk. As long as I ride you, you can walk on air, and hover endlessly as a result. You can also stand on vertical surfaces... see that section of the Ring? Go land on it.-

The mental instruction was clear and precise, and Darkbolt went winging down in delight, feeling his increased agility and speed. He pulled up at the sheered-off section of stone, set his feet against it, and found himself standing easily on the cloven stone face at a ninety-degree angle. Errant, still on his back, was also perfectly fine, not dragged down at all.

The griffon turned a few circles, careful to keep three of his paws on the stone at all times, his tail swishing as he pondered the odd view from this angle.

-Makes for good hunting ability, flatten against a tree or hill, waiting for things. And even works upside down.- Darkbolt squawked enthusiastically. -It works on water, too. Go head over to the Worm and try it out.-

Eagerly, the griffon did just that, winging the half-mile or so there fairly quickly, taking the long loop around the Wards of The Camp. He swooped down upon the translucent silver waters and alighted atop them easily, sliding a bit, but the waters were heavy and barely stirred up under wingbeats and his landing.

He pranced around a bit in interest. He would never have to worry about drowning like this, would he?

-No. If you find yourself underwater, just activate it and you'll go right to the surface... and it'll dry you off, too.- Darkbolt was naturally delighted to hear that. Griffons couldn't fly if their wings were wet.

-Get some altitude, and I'll show you a power dive and pull-up you won't believe.-

Impossibly light, he shot into the air once more, soaring a thousand feet into the sky in mere breaths, feet pawing at the air to move straight up in a vertical without effort, great heart pounding at the speed and power of the ascent.

They were a mile in the sky within a minute, an impossible rate of ascent in any normal circumstances. Who needed thermals?! Just have a Heavenbound!

-Now, dive, and don't pull out. Trust the Heavens!-

Darkbolt screamed his eagerness, and dove.

Six gravities surged, and they dropped faster than any stone ever. Golden flames blazed around his head, and the wind howled past them as they built up speed, incredible, how fast, curling into a dive, the ground was coming up on them, and the anthem was soaring in his head and he didn't pull up, he knew if he tried to brake at this speed, his wings would rip right off.

Faster than an arrow, they dropped down from the skies. Anything he hit at this speed would likely kill both him and his target. The ground was leaping at them, how fast, never so fast ever-

His head was a foot from the ground when the Arms of the Angels caught them and dispersed all their momentum in a ripple of light.

Darkbolt called out in disbelief as he reached out and landed gently on his foreclaws, the rest of his body falling softly to the ground and alighting easily there.

-You cannot crash while a Heavenbound rides you!-

Darkbolt's heart beat crazily from the thrill and the release. Speed! Safety! Agility! He had thought he was the finest flier in his crown, but what did he know? This, this was what it meant to soar in the heavens!

-Would you like to fight with me, Darkbolt? We will soar over the world, and show them the power of Heaven!-

The griffon screamed his ready assent to this. Great lands spilling forth before them, soaring with the Heavens behind him... what more could a griffon ask for?!

Errant's mere thought turned his head to the Rift nearby.

-A Warlock must fight, and a Heavenbound even moreso. We must be blooded, and learn how to fight together, and no better way to do so exists than to pit ourselves against the creatures of the Warp. Are you ready to fight?-

Darkbolt shrieked enthusiastically. Glittering wings spread, and he picked up speed, prancing ahead, kicking off, and shooting across the ground, only a few feet above it, his hind legs driving him forwards at an increasingly fast clip. Errant nodded at nothing and limbered Grace in her scabbard. His sister and the girls were getting ready to fight with the Jadeiron Company, and he'd be joining them in the battle.

With Feist watching over the girls, he wasn't worried about them. The hyn Master was a deadly foe, and the girls had proven themselves repeatedly to be canny and instinctual fighters. But a battlefield was different from an ambush or a delve, and they needed this kind of experience as well.

They'd cover the miles in just a couple of minutes. The Warped were about to get another unwelcome surprise, courtesy of Heaven...

BREAK

A NOTE...

Because all good adventures start off with easily killed creepy-crawlies.

The three of us stepped into the opened zone, and came to a halt at almost the same instant.

"Well, that's clever," Briggs mused aloud, Endure on his shoulder as his pale violet eyes scanned the buildings around us.

They were overgrown with vines and plants and things, but there'd been some resistance from the stone streets, so the growths were shallow, basically rooted in moss and decomposed leaves. Still, the buildings were in surprisingly good shape, although showing signs of some explosion, eruption, or just plain age in their slow decomposition and the fact some of them had crumbled here and there.

Remarkably clean, too. No visible signs or hints of danger.

"Damn, isn't it? Sure gets them a conga line of munchies. No wonder the Hags didn't have much to worry about," I agreed.

AA's Helices swirled out, ancient blood, and seemed to caress some invisible lines in the air, which became momentarily visible as the living tendrils of his Helix draw swept through them. He looked back and forth with his crimson eyes. "Can you see them?" he wondered.

Mine and Briggs' Masks activated with a surge of Essence flowing into them. Seeing the Invisible was the Mask of Clarity Mastery/3 alternate power, past Deva- and Devilsight. My black and white pattern contrasted nicely with Briggs' more robotic/faceless warrior one, making it look like he'd donned a visor with only one cyclopean white eye glowing in the middle of his forehead. Very intimidating.

"They are all over the damn place," Briggs informed him, eyes white in black now, same as mine from Devilsight and Devasight. "I count at least fifty, and needless to say they are coming in our direction."

The sky was grey-blue, swirling with temporal wishy-washiness and the intrusion of the world behind, but it looked totally open all the way around.

If you could see invisible or ethereal items, or where the stuff was anchored, it was quite a bit more crowded.

Because every damn place everywhere was festooned in massive, wrist-thick spider webs!

"Well, start killing them, then," Ancientaxe groused. "How much for me to get one of those Mask Tats?"

"The inks run about 2k in comps, but you have to Karma them up yourself," I said, snagging Tremble and switching her to Firephasing. "They use the Weapon table, so getting them to Five is fifty k-days. You can fight-Invest because they are a Tat."

He grunted, actually understanding all that, unlike 99.999999% of this world's inhabitants.

Endure was in fire mode too, and the incoming spiders, all of them with bodies bigger than a horse, and legs going out much, much farther, paused for a moment despite themselves.

Then we began to shoot them down.

A mental touch was all we needed to coordinate. AA got everything within sixty feet, the limit of his Helix sensory capability. Briggs took the right, and I took the left.

He didn't bother to throw the Hammer, just the Sharding, a big burning hammer shooting out as he swung it, and slamming into the nearest ether widow. The black hourglass on its crystalline white hide was clearly visible as 100+ points of fire damage plowed directly into its face and popped it like a steaming egg, even though it was still ethereal.

A Banestar swirled its way into the face of another on my side, spurted out its back. AA swept down with Zeitgeist, and a crescent cutting arc shot out, equal parts wind and force, and chopped halfway through another one.

Naturally, all the ethereal webs in the way lit on fire, even if they were ethereal. Banefire really didn't care.

At first, the spiders were incensed. Ether widows are intelligent spiders, and there were rumors of web-cities of them on strange worlds and deep in the ether, where they waged war on formian ants, bee-people, thri-kreen, manscorpions, and other intelligent races of insectile creatures. Supposedly there was a section of Strife devoted just to the unending cycle of eating one another that the insectile and arachnid races indulged in.

As rapidly as we could swing our Weapons, the spiders died. They were shocked first at being seen, then at being hit, and finally at being one-shot. After all, they were far bigger and stronger than normal members of the giant spider family, used to snatching up intruders and dining on them out of sight of the main road by materializing the huge webs around their enemies and attacking from all sides. If they were too numerous or powerful, the spiders just let them pass.

The three of us were instead butchering them right out the gate, and in passing, their massive spiderweb was coming down.

I'd already conveyed all of this to the people behind us, who were creeped out by the idea of hundreds of giant spiders and a web big enough to swallow a small town covering the very sky above us.

On the other hand, Fido and Shirley were already bounding up here to do some serious house-dusting, totally unafraid of what the giant spiders might do.

We all felt the impact of multiple great legs coming down, and when the massive sword spider hove over a wall and got ready to come down on us with its glistening black barbed and razored legs, a scything Glaive-crescent showed it the tenor of the age, and ripped it apart instantly.

The ether widows did have time to run, as our range didn't cover nearly the range their web did. On the other hand, we were burning that web down around them, so if they went up, it was collapsing about and under them.

Now, they were in the Border Ethereal, like ghosts, immaterial and coterminous, able to ignore many materials and move through them. They couldn't actually attack us without materializing themselves, nor could they flee beyond the confines of the zone due to the temporal and dimensional distortion, they'd probably be ripped to shreds by planar pressure. They also couldn't go below ground, so that left them going and hiding in the houses and buildings, trying to get out of our line of fire.

Shirley and Fido came up to the edge of the zone, and did a very light set of One-Two's. One target only, not cones. The fires and rime were oddly transparent and ghostly.

Heh heh heh...

By the logic of being elemental creatures who could breathe out monstrously powerful Cones of energy, why couldn't they breathe out monstrously less powerful Rays instead? While they were swimming around in the elemental energies of the Yin-Yang pond, they were practicing changing the form of their breath weapons constantly, with Marked Casters demonstrating spells in Marktell to give them some guidelines and examples to go by.

As a result, they now had five different forms of breath weapons they could use, which was not a welcome surprise to these spiders.

The first and least powerful form was the equivalent of a Fan, a short-range swathe of fire or ice. Not powerful... but they could use it constantly. They could also instead concentrate it into their bite for a powerful discharge of energy in combat, if they so desired, just like an Energy Grasp spell.

The second form was a Ray, turning all that energy into a single target attack once every twelve seconds. Given how powerful they were, that was a 12d6 directed energy touch attack to the face, bound to be enjoyed.

The third way was a spattering of small exploding balls, minute meteors of energies that exploded every which way. They weren't individually powerful, but when they came flying out at one a second for eighteen seconds, with the same amount of time before being used again, they could create some havoc.

Alas, no spitting exploding fireballs of great size...

Fourth form was the classic Bolt AoE, five feet wide, a hundred feet long, recharging every twenty-four seconds. The fifth was naturally their natural Cone attack, with the thirty-second recharge.

They were naturally bursting to make use of Metamagic Spell-Like abilities to grant additional power to their breath weapons on demand, and learning how to use them to power other effects, and were more than happy to collaborate with the Casters of the Ironblood on joint uses. Charging up a Fire Caster's fireball with a little extra Hellpoodleness hello-how-are-ya got sinister little giggles all around...

The ether widows were getting the hot and cold end of the Ironblood's universal loathing of incorporeal creatures. We hated the way they ignored armor, hated the way they used status effects, hated the way they moved through walls to surprise attack, and hated the way they did the same to run away or avoid retribution.

Ghostfire and ghostrime were indeed a thing.

Spectral fire pushed along the Veil, and right through material walls, burning and freezing its way through the ether, doing no harm to material objects. However, this meant that the spiders trying to find cover from our attacks literally had no cover.

Hell Hounds are infamous for their visual perception, and can see invisible and ethereal objects as casually as humans see normal things. Fido and Shirley could see these spiders everywhere within their range, and simply began to alternate breathing on them with punching out Rays of fire and frost.

From their collars were hanging six different Baneskulls apiece, adding a nicely somber air to their immaculate poodle-do's. The lads had been happy to contribute them to the cause, and Vermin from the Dichromatic Plains were definitely among them.

They began to pick the spiders off heartlessly. The Rays burned holes right through them, or froze their thoraxes and blood solid. Burning, shriveled cow-sized spider corpses floated here and there, while others were stiff and unmoving as the hellpoodles, the Fire and Ice of the Ironblood, went to remorseless work killing off the spiders that had escaped us.

Of course, we were drastically thinning the spiders out, and fiery swathes were burning down their big web, much to their dismay. Whole sections of the gargantuan web were collapsing, and as they did, ethereal mounds of bones and shriveled corpses, literal hills of them, materialized in, on, and about the stone buildings, crushing some and starting several collapses.

I'm talking hills, fifty to a hundred feet high. These spiders had been preying on stuff coming out of the inner part of the city for a long, long time, which, given their numbers, was not all that surprising. There was enough prey to sustain so many of them...

Alas, they couldn't get away, and they really couldn't get close. Briggs and I were killing one every two seconds up to a hundred and fifty feet away, and AA doing the same if they got within sixty feet. They were trying to reach us ethereally, maneuvering around their webs, and weren't able to gather in sufficient numbers to do so before they died... and then the dogs came up and added to their problems, Rays crossing the Veil to pick them off wherever they fled to.

Some actually decided to materialize to escape the dogs, popping inside buildings and houses out of line of sight. The poodles naturally noticed these malcontents who dared to not die helplessly, and their locations. It was a great excuse to set the stone on fire and collapse the buildings on top of them as they froze and shattered.

Ex-Nessian and Canian Warhounds are no joke.

I noted to the people we'd left beyond that the wealth of hides and ivory here was incredible. The place was already at a quarter normal time, time on the ethereal was a tenth that, so the corpses of the magical creatures these spiders had been slaughtering for years were still in pretty good shape.

There were shouts from behind as eager berserkers raced after the North Wind to wipe out the last of them and harvest poison and web glands for me, and maybe get stinking filthy rich on ivory power comps for their Gear...

BREAK

A NOTE...

Feist is a Shadow Stalker, remember...

Time to send the girls off to war!

Verd, Veis, and Amber had been in many, many combat situations.

They had done a lot of sparring against other humans, humanoids, and their pets, especially on the little missions with Feist that Hazé had dropped them off on.

Then had come the more exciting minor missions for the Void Brothers, where they ran into things that were very magical and which brought up coldly chilling memories from the depths of the Ritual of the Silver Queen, recognition and an enmity that went deeper than bone.

Their work in Zynozure with Errant, especially the stuff going down deep, had involved more and more dangerous versions of this, necessitating ever more caution... and greater rewards.

And now... everything they had fought before was standing right across from them on an open field.

Feist was standing before the three girls, up on his Disk, watching the Warped anthros coming towards them with indifferent, deadly calm.

The girls had been in some larger scuffles, but they had never been on a true battlefield, where thousands contested in life and death, and one didn't run out of foes in a mere handful of breaths, nor was there an easy place to retreat to.

This was a place of cooperation, of trust in the blades beside you and the orders of the officers who commanded you. Your willingness not to run could be the lynchpin that decided the battle.

The girls stared at the creatures coming towards them, reading them, realizing that these were mutated former humans, servants of the Warped devolved to bestial forms, blind in their faith and 'gifts' of their masters. Their souls were already lost, promised away for ephemeral blessings and zealous fanaticism, ignoring the fact that all that the Warp Gods gave them, they could have gained for themselves.

No one knew better the value of their soul than a Hagchild. Giving it away to entities who valued them not at all stirred a deathly cold fire in them.

"Missiles," Feist ordered calmly.

The Quiver on Verd's back disgorged her Bow, while Veis and Amber drew theirs from the holsters at their sides, deCompressing from Hand size to Light crossbow size, as did Feist.

"Pick your targets," he ordered, as they looked over the ranks of Rockborn Spears in front of them. Around them, other arbalesters got ready, more Autobows rising and getting ready as they pointed at the sky. There was a scream of harpies flapping their way over, but they were just target practice if they stayed up there. However, winging in from the side was something moving very fast that was really going to give them a bad time...

Their Autobows had seen more action than those of the Dwarves, and despite the Rockborn having much bigger Heavy versions, the ranges of their weapons were the same. All of them had Archer Levels, after all, and hadn't been reluctant to feed their Weapons.

A drum began to beat in their minds, as the Cantor of the Dwarves thundered through on his drums, a rhythm and beat deep from the heart of the Land, driving them on with the knowledge their ancestors were behind them and their hearts were one, giving everyone a cadence and pattern to fall into.

Lines of Rockborn, Gnomes, and even a striker force of vassal Ancients began to pivot and move, posturing up as the Warped closed in. Healers made ready, while the x-sprits of the Autoballistae began to thrum and hurl out dark and heavy loads into the distance.

Bleating and braying forms kicked over, impaled by hungry javelins. The great horned cyclops rose up from behind the anthros, hefted its Runeball, and keen-eyed gnomes watched and waited for the thing to be hurled out. Quick fingers and Featherweight spells were ready to render its weight down to a drifting mote and make it useless.

The ballistae re-angled to the new target. The brute would be down in a minute or two to the six autoballistae, but the fight on the line would begin before then. The bloodthirsty braying and howling of the Warped was already reaching them, but nobody cared, listening to the pounding drum gathering all the impetus of history and raising it before them, and the orders being barked in curt Dwarven through the Marktell, clear and precise in intent and meaning, no ability to misunderstand.

The enemy's centaurs were also unlimbering powerful bows, motile horse archers that could be extremely annoying to face... not that the shielded and armored dwarven spears cared. Those centaurs were going to learn a deadly lesson about the range of heavy crossbows, and the firing rate of autobows.

Targets were dribbled out, the arbalesters oriented, and the silent command came.

There was no sound on the dwarven side, no calls to command, no deep singing, no pointing and shouting. Only silence, everything in Marktell, and the arcs of the first volleys shot out at their still-distant targets.

The Rockborn were firing salvoes, but the girls and Feist were aiming calmly, keeping their own target picks tight. Dark bolts of glassy material, trailing Banefire from borrowed Skulls, arced out and slammed into the middle front of the anthro lines. Two of the creatures were jerked off their feet with startled bleats, opening a hole in the rather loose lines that had to be quickly filled by those trampling over the ones in front.

They racked hard, lined up, fired again.

The two goat-headed sots moving up into the opening jerked and fell as the quarrels hammered into them. They racked together, aimed together.

The centaurs were just approaching their range when the flat trajectory of heavy quarrels came buzzing in and scythed through them. Garbed in little more than some loose hides, they screamed and crumpled by the dozens, shocked at the driving power of the shafts. Still, they rode up closer, as they knew the reload time of heavy crossbows meant they might take a pounding volley, but they could ride out of range before the next volley went off.

Their own arrows had just taken to the skies when the next Rockborn volleys went off, and needless to say, they weren't out of range.

They howled in disbelief as the bolts ripped through them, and turned to flee.

They weren't happy to inherit a third, more arcing volley in their backs before they could get out of range, either.

Some centaurs came riding up on the flanks, easily screened out by walls of long spears. They unleashed shots at point-blank range, and the tings of dozens of yard-long shafts bouncing off dwarven metal spattered like rain over the silent ranks of spears. Without a word being spoken, the arbalesters behind rose up, the long spears knelt, the shooters leveled their autobows, and discharged at their taller enemies at point-blank range, punching the shafts deep into them with great bloody holes.

The spears rose to guard the shooters, the crossbows were racked twice to pump the heavy sprits back, poised to lift, and the spears dropped as one, autobows aimed and loosed as the centaurs tried to react in time. Their screams preceded their bodies tumbling to the ground at the flesh-punching impacts of the bolts.

To the left of the girls, the gnomes were using their own autobow variants. Being mechanically inclined and renowned for their gearsmithing, they naturally weren't satisfied with just the power of a rapid-firing crossbow. Their weapons were lighter than those of the dwarves, but they had gone with a repeater variant, meant for closer support of a battle line, and could fire two bolts in series before pumping twice. It allowed them to capitalize on breaks and unready targets.

The whole corps of gnomes was standing on folding seats and flat boards, getting them up higher than the dwarves standing in front of them, who were almost a foot taller. With all those Spears in front of them, the gnomes could and would fire with near impunity... especially at anything that looked like it was going to throw something at them.

The anthros had elite troops, of course: seven-foot tall fanged gorehorns, ogre-sized minotaurs, and two hulking greathorns, twelve feet tall and massively overmuscled. They had horns and claws and fangs and hooves, were tall, strong, and brutal, painted all over in weird patterns, with skulls and teeth bracelets and trophies dangling about them.

Unfortunately for them, the dwarves just didn't care.

The minotaurs and greathorns wanted to run right up into the dwarven lines, counting on the crude but heavy plates of their armor and their own strength and thick hides to punch into the lines of longspears. If they had been facing individual dwarves, they probably could have done so.

But, just to get into range of their axes and clubs would bring them into the range of two layers of gleaming Spears. If they wanted to plow in like bulls with their horns and toss dwarves in every direction in bellowing fury... three ranks, a minimum of six planted longspears... all of them with the hard silver edge of being Soulbound.

The gorehorns crashed into that hedge of death in their frenzy, and were impaled and killed before their own shorter weapons even came into range. Instead of trapping the weapons with their corpses, the Spears suddenly shrank to a mere yard long instantly, letting the corpses fall, and as the second rank impaled the next wave, the first rank shot out to full length once more, driving into the unprepared third wave behind.

The losses of the Warped beast-men mounted quickly...

The minotaurs and greathorns found that they were big, wide targets, attracting twice as many Spears at their size. One or two they could strike aside, but six planted Spears was enough to defy even the rumbling mass of the first greathorn that came barreling in, head low and horns glowing with bloody Runes to reap and slay.

The first two Spears were struck aside with its club, but there were four more planted, dropping to meet it, and punching into its shoulders and neck as it bellowed at them... and the boar-stops slammed into its bones, the Energized aluminum shafts flexed, driving deeper into the gritty grey, blood-soaked earth, and forced the huge minotaur up, up to its full height. Over a foot of spearheads were buried in its flesh, the metal shafts bending at its weight and strength.

The retracted Spears of the front pair of Rockborn coolly shot upwards into its throat from their advantageous position, butts slamming on the ground and reaching right up into its skull as they finished the job the dwarves behind them had started.

One of the ballistae behind them discharged, and the driving bolt blew the hulking corpse back off the gleaming Spears, sending it crashing down on the shrieking gorehorns behind.

None of the mutates wanted to get into the opening the girls had forced in their lines, as they were quickly shot down, even before they could hang themselves on the dwarven Spears. The dwarves all noticed it, and there was a subtle shifting in the Rockborn lines, helped by leaving some corpses hanging to block the view of the braying mutates.

The gnomish infighters streamed past the rear ranks of the dwarves behind the four, Rockborn shifting sideways just enough to let them slide past.

Feist and Veis took the middle, Verd and Amber took the sides. Behind them, the gnomes capered in with deadly little smiles and gleaming eyes, kukris held chop and stop pattern like wingblades, and they all suddenly drove into the mass of beastmen.

Veis and Feist were below their line of sight, just like the gnomes, and hacked and stabbed with crippling blows to groin, knee, and hamstrings. Beastmen bleated and collapsed, and kukris chopped into throats or plunged into eyes as gnomes scampered past.

Verd was stabbing and cracking, her Spear Hedge alternately acting as staff, glaive, or piercer, chopping down legs and bringing them down into the remorseless kukris of the gnomes. Heart-thrusts stabbed out, widening the road the gnomes were pouring into and past her, and then she was plying her Spear above them as the mutates brayed and tried to forestall the stream of undersized death that was cutting them down.

Amber just put on a display, distracting the mutates from the real threat of the gnomish infighters, killing with Elan, her Rose-style Rapier. It was a flicker of burning motion, never more than three inches of it committed as it sought out eyes, bellies, throats, hamstrings, and groins in whipping arcs of silver. She danced here and there through the press, her Thorn-dagger Style plunging in and out of inappropriate places with alarming frequency, in between blocking and turning spears, axes, teeth, hooves, and claws aimed in her direction.

Behind the infighters, the dwarves moved, advancing smoothly, cracking the mutate lines, and Spears began to split them apart, hitting them from the flanks, and then from behind as the dwarves moved with almost magical precision to start encircling them.

Getting cut apart from within and encircled from without, even the frenzied mutates began to panic and look for a way to flee. However, running a gauntlet of thrusting longspears to get away wasn't a good way to stay alive, and presenting their backs to the waiting arbalesters willing to pick them off even less so...

BREAK

A NOTE...

A certain white sheep has not been idle...

Errant hewed the head off the last of the minotaurs, and Darkbolt flung the corpse aside. Without pause, his Wrath lashed out and punched through a gorehorn, before splitting to cut down two more wounded ones fighting next to it.

The harpies that came with this group hadn't been at all prepared for a griffon-rider using Wrath, and he had cut them out of the sky, before turning his attention to the minotaurs who had decided not to charge pell-mell onto multiple Spears and were attempting to use the corpses of other mutates to force an opening.

Him diving down into their flanks had really spoiled that idea.

Wrath pulsed through him and down into Darkbolt, who trilled softly as the golden power mended his flesh of half a dozen spear wounds and one glancing axe-blow. In a couple minutes, he'd be fine. His beak and claws were coated in gore, but golden flames were slowly burning those away.

The griffon was very aware of how convenient this was, of course. As long as he fled, or just retreated from fighting for a moment, his wounds would clean up and he'd be fine. It wasn't like when he'd fought the dragon, when one claw and a tail lash had nearly killed him, rendering him unable to do battle!

"You know to not eat them. Corrupting energies flow through them," Errant said, a mental nudge and knee sending the griffon prancing towards the nearest group of gorehorns who hadn't had the sense to stop bleating and die yet. Errant's Wrath ranged out ahead, most of it devoted to healing, but enough was left, combined with Bane and Purity and Soul, to have some serious punch behind it.

With a call and an Oath, he reduced their healing to rip a Wall of Fire down the length of the mutate formation, a hundred feet of perfectly placed inferno that sent furred bodies tumbling this way and that as they were consumed, set others on fire, and generally played merry havoc with any semblance of a battle line they had left.

Darkbolt jumped suddenly as a group of mutates threw javelins at them. Lion-clawed, wings gleaming faintly gold, he bounced away as if he weighed a quarter of what he did, while Errant let the Wall of Fire lapse away and that section of the dwarven Spears rolled over the hapless, doomed brutes.

There was no way these hooved idiots could get away from Darkbolt, who closed on them so fast it seemed magical... since it was. The griffon smashed through them, ripping one's head off and tearing open two others, while Errant swept a head off its shoulders and discharged the Wrath in Grace to burn through the skull of a second who was too close.

Darkbolt went right, Errant turned left, and his Scepter Purity blasted one, forked into two others, and all three went flying back with holes through them. Darkbolt mauled the rest with savage abandon, Errant turning back to start killing and Cleaving on the griffon's right side, who responded by moving through the press as quickly as possible to give him more targets.

The mutates could only bleat, baaa, and flee. If they raised their javelins to throw, Errant promptly blasted them dead with Wrath. Darkbolt pounced on a few like a great eagle-headed cat, tearing them apart remorselessly, and then turned to watch the Wrath of Heaven pop them off in burning trios.

Errant withdrew, let the healing come back and continue working on the griffon, while taking a look over the battlefield.

The gnomes and dwarves had dealt with the Shaman of the tribe, the combination of ballista bolts and True Seeking a truly nasty combination, even at two hundred meters. Broad low magic combined with weapons could be just as powerful, used correctly, as mighty combat magic, and the two races knew that well. He'd've been happy to charge it and one-shot it, but no need. No demons were Summoned, and the Shaman's magic had basically been Countered or Dispelled promptly upon casting.

The hulking corpse of the horned cyclops was also proof of that. The lower-Level Gnome Casters had easily neutralized the power of its Runeball with casual Featherweights, bless their oversized noses, giving the ballista teams plenty of time to punch their loads into it. It had died without contributing to the battle at all.

Truthfully, he wasn't needed. The dwarven spear lines were practically impervious in real terms. The soldiers were heavy, strong, skilled, shieldplated, and disciplined. The Spears were all magical, however lightly, and Baneskulls were abounding, harvested from the heads of the more powerful creatures, the dead's own purified gold used to Infuse them in a slow but steady process of upgrades that was constantly ongoing.

The only chance for the Warped would be an equally obdurate spear line coming to meet them, and trying to grind them out. Good luck with that, especially with a Heartsong Cantor pounding out a +4 to-hit and damage to every combatant on the field, and the perfect responsiveness and clarity of the Marktell for conveying orders. The Warlord on duty wanted to strut his own stuff, after all, but not having Sama's power, was perfectly happy to let his Cantor contribute.

These Mutates didn't have a chance, and the dwarves knew it, which only further enhanced their confidence and resolve.

There were losses, of course, mainly lucky hits, crits in gamer terms, the law of large numbers coming down and wagging a finger. But the Healers were on everything, the Healing Traps could save anyone who was not dead. Healing Reserve could get anyone back to top physical shape within a minute, while Soak would return naturally.

The last of the fighting was a big blob over there, and Errant sent Darkbolt loping that way, high-stepping and half-gliding along, picking up speed without actually exerting much effort with a striding hover. It was like riding a furry Disk.

Yeah, the dwarves had folded around and had the conga line going, forcing the beastmen to run the length of their Spears to get away through the single break in their formation... where the arbalesters were promptly shooting them in the back as they fled.

The girls were in there, emptying out the middle with those steely little gnomish bastards. There was not much left for them to do as the Warped tried to get away, and the Rockborn politely put their hopes to rest. The Healers were moving in to attend to the wounded, and he dismounted smoothly, announcing to all and sundry that he was a Healer, too.

Quickly he had a line of those not fighting moving up, with triage happening as they walked, the most wounded at the front. Using the Wrath to heal others was almost exactly like Healing Reserve, with glowy golden flames instead of cool white mist, putting his hands on them and letting the healing power of Heaven burn away imperfections, fixing them up.

He quickly stopped a dozen of them from bleeding out, one after another, saved a couple eyes and limbs before they could further degrade, and then went back to the heavily wounded and started restoring them to the walking wounded. If they were quick enough, even severed limbs could be re-attached, the reclaiming of which was a priority when dragging away a wounded soldier from the field.

He ended up reattaching four arms, a dozen fingers and toes... and three big gnomish noses, bringing tears of joy to the little fellows. The other Healers were equally hard at work doing similar things, while around them the battlefield was being rapidly cleaned up.

The next group of Warped was already on the way, gathering up their numbers as they marched out of the Rift, and making ready to fight. Dwarven work crews and gnomish inspectors were scanning everything, corpses were burning vivic, and scraps were being gathered to be hauled off and dumped onto the increasingly large piles over by the Ring.

Errant eyed the massive collection of weapons and armor that had been heaped up by the battlefield cleaners. There was enough there to supply hundreds of thousands of troops... because they came off hundreds of thousands of troops. The ground here had seen an incredible amount of repeated slaughter, vivus burning over it drawn away into the Obelisks, the blue sky extending this way, the Land feasting...

His share of loot from the dead was dumped on his Disk by the cleaners, as they hastily cleaned and vacated the battlefield so the next army could get into position.

No defenses were allowed, be it pits, walls, stakes, fences, Wards, or mounds. Such defenses were excuses for the Warped to send more and more people, and were not worth the price that would be paid to keep them.

It was nonsensical, but totally necessary. The Warped had outnumbered them two to one in this fight, and those numbers were only going to rise. It was kind of a compliment to the dwarves, showing that they were elite and the enemy was treating them as such. However, it didn't take into account the power of the Marktell, the Marks, Soul Magic, or the Heartsong.

The dwarves had chosen the subtler effects of Soul Magic. Boots to anchor them to the ground and make them much, much harder to move, or dark Gauntlets that increased the power of hands and arms, instead of crackling lightning about their Weapons. Feats to heal and toughen themselves up, too.

They had stood, and they had held. They didn't need a wall, because they were the wall!

The emergency cases addressed, Errant joined the others in a quick evacuation from the field of battle. The elves were coming up, brightly colored, chanting a musical song that stirred even Rockborn blood, saluting the dwarves and gnomes as they marched by.

In a short amount of time, it would be them retreating bloodily from the field, getting saluted by the next to march up.

They withdrew the full three miles to The Camp, making use of the plentiful Healing Traps there to walk all the wounded over them, and all the Healers gathered in the hospice at its center to treat them. Others listened to the musicians playing the Healing Harps, getting back their Soak more quickly, while those who were lightly or not wounded at all reformed their camps and lines outside.

Errant joined the healing effort, and wasn't much surprised when the girls came traipsing up to him for some mending action.

They had been involved in some very intense fighting, and all of them had multiple injuries. That obviously meant they'd blown through their Soak, Vigor Uses, and Combat Vigor, and even having Doc handy didn't keep up with their injuries. Behind them, Feist looked fine, revolving that Tier Two Moon Dragon Healing Technique to restore his Health and injuries easily, and his Soak would replenish itself with time.

Their Vajras had cleaned them up, so although their attire was a bit shredded, it wasn't all that bloody or gory. As for the pain, well, their Con scores were all in the mid-20's at least, and how could it compare to the Ritual? They just accepted it and waited for the healing.

Nevertheless, all three were very happy to giggle when he took their hands one by one. They pulled in their Nulls, and the golden fires of Heaven's Wrath washed over them. Cuts, scrapes, gashes, gouges, rips, and tears that sometimes went right down to the bone mended up, and they all sighed despite themselves.

"If you go to the brownies, they can fix up your clothes so you don't have to bug Hazé," he winked at them. They were the last of his patients, waiting patiently until the other wounded were taken care of, so he got to his feet and walked away with them.

They sort of rolled their eyes and looked at one another. "Tremble can fix them quick, too, big brother!" Veis chimed up at him. But of course, Tremble was rather busy right now...

He made a face of acquiescence. "Are you all ready to go out there tomorrow?" he asked calmly.

"Yes!" they all nodded together, grim determination on their faces.

He glanced over at Master Feist. "Your assessment, Master Feist?" he asked calmly.

"They'd do better as elite shock troops, skirmishers, or scouts," the hyn admitted firmly. "Then again, so would I. We are here to learn how to be something other than what is natural for us."

"Goals?" he inquired of them.

"Bracers!" the girls all announced, faces twisting. "We were getting hit way too much. If it wasn't for our Crystal Shields, we would have had to run!" Verd complained unhappily.

Errant had to chuckle. "You walked onto a battlefield with no armor, stylish clothes, fought through the whole thing, got your clothes a little ripped and your hair out of place, and you complain you were hit too much." He rolled his eyes theatrically. They were all sitting on at least DR 5/- and +4 Nat AC; hitting them was like hitting wood. Those little wounds he'd been mending on them would have crippled normal folks, especially women, who couldn't normally use the Crystal Dragon disciplines.

No such problem for Hagchildren...

"Says the living target on a griffon jumping about like a rubber ball!" Amber shot right back without hesitation.

"Oh, Darkbolt was getting hit way too much, too. If I hadn't been healing him, he wouldn't have made it beyond the harpies," Errant assured them. "He's definitely considering the finer aspects of some well-made barding, but only the best will do, of course."

"Of course!" all four of them agreed together, as that only made perfect sense.

BREAK

A NOTE...

Because annoyance factor in adventures is a trope, too. And in real life, when you fight the bugs and the forest, it isn't in little set piece CR-appropriate encounters.

Flikflikflikflikflikflikflikchokchoksqueeeeeee...

The blood mantis was huge, thorax well over my head, pincers the size of yataghans, and it was both fast and flexible. It stabbed down with its pincers, trying to impale me with a rain of blows, totally unlike the grab and crush it was supposed to be using... but effective, nevertheless.

Until I chopped off both pincers, it drew them up and realized they were missing, just as I hopped forward and up and split it from head to thorax in irritation.

I lashed out before I landed, and the Banestar flashed out to the ten-foot dragonfly buzzing around Briggs and demanding his attention. Compound eyes caught the motion and it barely dodged the streak of slicing energy that would have cut it in two... and unfortunately, Dodge Missile is a 1/round thing unless you've got the Mastery and can burn AoO's off to dodge more, meaning Briggs' hammershard ventured into its face and blew it into mush.

He, in turn, spun and let go of Endure, which hurtled out and caromed into the side of the big slicer beetle that was stick-leg-dancing towards AA, who had just succeeded in blinding another dragonfly with his Helices and cut off its head. Big mandibles were nipping for a quick limb to pinch off and run away with, when Endure crashed into the side of the deer-sized bug's head, lifting it off its feet and making it the subject of a smithing project, with a manor's stone border wall playing the anvil. There was a wet crunch, and Endure zipped back to Briggs' hands... just as he jumped five feet to the side and hammered down.

The burrowing centipedal creature came bursting up right through the ancient stones of the street, looking to dig some gleaming pincer-mandibles into his guts. The next moment its iron-hard head crunched to the ground, deforming visibly, and everything within it squirted out of there.

"Shit!" A dozen root-lances exploded out of the soil, and it was a damn good thing I was so skinny, contorting myself around to watch the poisoned things zip up, nearly touching my cheek, and I circle-hacked with Tremble, cutting them all down as I jumped away, and then rolled my eyes.

The ground caved in at my destination, and a big mouth down there yawned open, four tentacles writhing up in my direction, hungry for a meal, and not incidentally the dead mantis tumbling down in that direction.

I slammed to a halt five feet above it on misting heels, spun and clipped all those tentacles, and then cut two, no three, banestars down into its mass, feeling annoyed and-whoop!

You wouldn't think giant locusts would be so aggressive. I counter-jumped past them as they came down at me, and as the pit gulper convulsed and died, two, three, four locusts in multiple parts crashed into the slope and fell down into its gullet.

A swarm of moths spreading white dust, skull marks on their wings, flowed towards Brother AA, whose Helix swirled through them and Zeitgeist chopped down. The Swarm exploded into floating dust, which was blown away as the rhinoceros beetle charging Briggs was grabbed by its horn and thrown over his head, its short, thick legs scrabbling, and crashed through the cloud of poison dust, sending it everywhere.

I pulled out Fall just because I was irked, and Sparkie popped in, grabbed his Skull from my Masspack, and energetically started zipping around shooting the smaller stuff. Some great worm thing heaved itself out of the ground, three feet thick and looking hungry, covered in and made of green stuff and wood fiber and nope, didn't help it much when AA ripped it down the side, Helices and Glaive turning that cut into a withering, dying wound of ghastly power.

Endure sent it crashing over on its side, shattering what it called a head, just to make sure it couldn't turn and take a bite at the Brother. Briggs caught his Hammer as he arrived next to the beetle he'd thrown away and brought Endure down to stop its wild scrabbling and contorted attempts to turn back over.

Something that looked half-lizard, half-centipede, and all ugly came racing through the undergrowth in serpentine, many-legged motion, bringing with it a couple friends. They all reared up as they got close to me and spat out this really nasty-smelling cloud of poison and acidic goo.

Then I was past them, thanking them for presenting their necks, inhaling the triple dose of poison and using it to catalyze my Poison Healing and get rid of the blistering sores from the exploding stand of seed pods that had tried to turn me into a source of fertilizer for some new grenadier flowers a little earlier.

Our mental communication was naturally faster and more accurate than any shouting, which would be drowned out by the crashing bugs humming, droning, shrieking, chittering, rustling, grinding, and skittering all around us. We all had versions of omnidirectional awareness, Briggs and I based around Tremblesense, and AA with his Helixsense. We noticed, we reported, we moved, we coordinated, and bugs and animate plants and whatever died around us.

There was a lot of nasty pollens and seeds floating in the air we had to actively use our Vajras to keep out, and pretty much all the plants were poisonous to one degree or another, all the flying sap and little hooks on the leaves and squirting bulbs and lashing roots and exploding seed pods and poking thorns trying to invite us in to stay for a while.

They didn't seem to take rejection well.

Now I knew why the spiders fed so well...

They looked like reeds, but they were as sharp as blades, and seemed to hum around us as Tremble played machete and I ceaselessly hacked apart everything in front of us. Banefire reduced the stalks to withered scatterings on the ground, popping up from the ground like buried fireworks.

There wasn't any safe place in this area. Giant bugs laired everywhere, and where they didn't, it was because the animated plants were there instead.

The dimensional stretching was at least ten to one, we'd moved at least five miles and were only halfway to the temporal barrier. The amount of killing that we'd done had been tremendous.

It wasn't like we could leave all these bugs to go flooding towards the food source behind us, i.e. the berserkers. So, we deliberately had to stir up trouble and attract the most active predators here to be butchered.

The plants, now, they could have sat back and done nothing, let us trundle on past. But no, no, they had to get involved, too.

Briggs hacked Endure in axe mode through a hollow trunk, wood exploded, and the quickwood quivered from roots to crown as he drove his shoulder into it and sent it crashing backwards.

AA was just coming around the corner of a half-crumbled wall, and the truck-sized scorpion caught the crashing tree right on its main body, hammering it down to the ground and cracking its carapace.

I was coming in the opposite direction, the van-sized wolf spider on my trail a bit startled when AA slid underneath it and Zeitgeist opened it up the long way. I inserted Tremble into a crack in the stunned scorpion's shell as it made some effort to lift up the dead and burning quickwood, and fired off two banestars into important areas inside it. Plink-plink, Sparkie picked off two oversized glow-bugs divebombing me, which blew up in midair in a sticky, acidic mess, and Fall politely inserted two force-quarrels in a couple of lidless scorp eyes, just to be sure.

Briggs splattered a dozen lightning bugs in a rolling double circle of his Hammer, and then hacked into a shambling mound of unusual (read: a small hill) size that was now without its I-love-lightning healers and size-boosters. It exploded into rotting plant matter in regret, and he sighed.

AA spit a pig-sized tiger beetle racing at him at a mad clip, stepping back and letting it split itself apart on Zeitgeist as it went by at a breakshell pace, and also looked around.

Cut like a knife, this mass of green and daylight from a sun that had not changed its angle for the last six hours gave way to another barrier. Roiling clouds of temporal action at the far end were slowly shredding this moment in time, the cycle of day and night about to go back to normal.

"So..." Briggs asked, taking deep, long breaths.

AA did the same, looking all around for signs of motion, listening for approaches.

"Clear over here," I announced, hopping down from the tail of the bus-sized scorpion, where I'd just harvested its poison sac. "Oh, wait. Briggs."

I threw out a banestar. Endure's hammershard roared up behind it.

Juking and jiggling like a ball on a string, the twenty-foot tall daddy longlegs dodged out of the way of my banestar, and moved right into the path of the hammershard. It splattered nicely, sending its torpedo-sized body flying away, and the legs at least thirty feet long after it, back into the trees and hanging vines it had come from.

AA walked over towards the wall. Briggs was closest, and spun out his Disk to sit down with a sigh. The urkhar joined him on it as I skated over.

"You can't be not tired," Brother Ancientaxe glared at me.

I screwed up my face, scratched my head. "Dunno. You think there might be some benefit to having a working 42 Con with the Endurance Mastery, or something?" I looked back at him, my eyes dancing. "And don't you be thinking I didn't notice you drinking that Elixir of Vitality."

His mouth opened, closed, and he smiled ruefully. "Endurance fights are not the specialty of Void Brothers," he admitted.

"I know. Slogs are jobs for big dumb strong me-not-think-go-hack types. Fortunately, a true warrior excels at all modes of combat, because mastery of one-shot kills doesn't help too awful much when fighting a forest." I nodded much too seriously at him, and he chuckled again.

He glanced at Briggs, then down our backtrail, which wasn't actually too awful straight, but for some reason was missing a lot of trees in the way. Some of which were burning, with big clouds of toxic smoke that stuck to the ground and clung to the thick undergrowth. "Are you sure Lumberjack isn't your chosen trade?"

"I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay..." Briggs replied firmly back to him, keeping his voice flat. It was a bad idea to make Briggs sing.

"He sleeps all night and he works all day!" I added on with a slow nod, and much more melody.

AA looked at Briggs, then me, knowing something was going on. "Is there a joke here I am not aware of?" he asked slowly.

"Ah, I don't remember it all," Briggs admitted.

"I do," I piped up, and Briggs blinked at me. "Dream is probably closer to Terra, so the Minstrel Levels grabbed a lot of the old music."

He looked intrigued, despite himself. "Do you remember the skit?" I pursed my lips and looked up and around, and a big smile crossed his face. "You're missing a hairy beard and some scones."

"I recall there was a dance line of hairy brutes along, too."

"Well, we definitely have the hair between the Brother and I, but I'm afraid that we're off on the dance line." The bemused AA nodded agreement, having no idea what was going on... but he did have almost as much body hair as Briggs.

"I guess I shall just have to make do without it." Briggs grinned wider, and AA looked interested, while I could tell Tremble and Sparkie were VERY curious. I let Tremble float, drew out her Scabbard, deCompressed it to full length, and held it out before me.

"Well, the weather for the whole area..." (1)

"That was totally ridiculous..." Brother Ancientaxe mumbled, and both Briggs and I agreed heartily.

Google the Lumberjack Song. Then imagine a half-orc Void Brother's expression. Credit to the Mick for first bringing it up to me, who's not a lumberjack, but he's okay.

BREAK

A NOTE...

Them dem obligations getting in the way of my Karmic Buffet!

As I'm introducing one, there's an info drop on Amazons at the end.

Errant fought twice more out there, earning himself some battlespoils, and facing off against one of their champions wielding a greataxe an ogre might enjoy. He was clad in that stupid spikey dire harness, waving that Axe about like a willow wand, and crashing it into Errant with abandon, mad joy, and lust for combat.

He'd nearly split Errant open at one point, but then found out that Wrath pretty much went right through non-Energized armor, and his insides were reduced to ash. Errant then split the head of the big scaled dog with the anti-magic collar the bastard was riding on before it could rip Darkbolt apart, and the two of them sat there and healed together slowly as they watched the rest of the fight roll on around them.

"You need to take you some Racial or Melee Levels, Darkbolt." He chucked the beaten and gnawed griffon's jaw, and the big fellow could only chirp in agreement. That had been one nasty Axe...

Sama was out exploring Yle Tyorm... although exploration probably wasn't the correct word for what they were doing there. A shattered temporal space a couple blocks wide was ending up to be a mile or more across, and just absolutely filled with dangerous stuff they didn't want streaming towards the berserkers and the North Wind... not that a whole lot of the stuff wasn't doing exactly that.

A hundred Ironblood and a few more Healers had been sent the first day. Then a company of elves and dwarves each arrived to reinforce them, as nasty crap continued to flow out of the inner city.

In real distance, the trio were maybe a half mile in. The amount of slaughter they were going through was unreal.

He really wanted to be there, but he knew his place wasn't there.

Hazé blew in on a magic wind next to him, but did no spellcasting. Like the previous day, the dwarves were handling everything, and her sudden intervention would have been a fine excuse to suddenly inject some demonic fun into everything.

She had already popped a Greater Sluggor earlier that day, serving with the knightly Orders during her turn on overwatch. The Void Brothers responding to the presence of demonkind didn't have a chance to kill before all those Shardrays reached out together and obliterated the crawling mass of pustulence from a thousand feet away.

Everybody kind of looked at her differently now, imagine that.

"Need help?" she asked, watching the dwarves pincer and rapidly hedgerow lines of armored Warped humans who were finding it hard to get to real fisticuffs, and not liking being groin-cut, hamstrung, and gut-ripped by the gnomish infighters. The wee lads were really getting a hardline reputation for their brutally efficient close-quarters work.

Feist, of course, was just death on bare feet, totally outclassing anyone but a Champion... and as that Champion found out, if the girls were helping him, outclassed him, too. Between the distraction of Veis hanging off his antlered helm, Amber's Rapier inserting itself into some sensitive areas, and Verd impaling his oversized fanged horse to force the initial dismount, Feist's clean-up work had been pretty simple.

This group had brought along a couple wyverns, which had kept him and Darkbolt occupied for a few minutes, but the advantage of his ranged attacks was not so easily overcome, and Wrath-enhanced speed and maneuverability on Darkbolt's side meant absolute advantage in the air. That fight hadn't come to much, and then he'd swept down to hack into some horrifically mutated, soul-lashed abominations whose mass was almost enough to breach the dwarven lines.

Purity had popped them into great stinking masses of vivic fire, and then the Company Commander, his physics-ignoring Axe, and his improbable Armor had ridden over with the anticipation of a good fight.

"You need some healing?" she asked, holding up a hand as she hovered next to him. He sighed.

"Four forty-point hits," he told her, shaking his head, and she whistled. "Yeah, I'm out of Soak. But the fight's done, so no. Let's head for the wounded." He tapped Darkbolt, whose limp was now gone. The griffon paced quickly for the back of the dwarven lines, where figures in white were moving quickly from person to person, first saving lives, loading them on wagons or Disks, then healing them up further.

Hazé was, of course, the highest level of Healer on the field, with her Reserve capable of giving back ten Health per round, as only a healing spell in Valence V could achieve. It generally took her no more than two or three long breaths per injured person to get them back to full Health and send them off to reclaim their Soak.

"You blew your Vigors that fast?" she asked, concerned.

"I could have sniped those abominations from a safe distance, I suppose, but they died much faster up close and personal, and I didn't want the dwarves sucking in the pestilence and corruption that long."

"Generous." But this was a battlefield, trading time for injuries. His Damage Reduction took care of a lot of minor injuries, to the extent that he could almost ignore most missile fire, but Darkbolt wasn't nearly at his level of innate defenses, as the griffon had quickly realized.

It was too true. Pets and mounts, even at the level of a griffon, simply weren't as tough as a Senior rider, especially a Deep Ten. His lack of armor meant his ability to avoid damage wasn't quite up to where he would want it yet, given that a Warped Champion could beat him down that fast in personal combat, but that Champion would have dispatched Darkbolt in seconds if the griffon had been his target.

She eyed the Collar floating on his Disk, and the Champion's Axe and helm. "Scalehound beats griffon?" she asked in interest. Darkbolt's feathers drooped slightly. "Don't worry. Invest the Karma, get bigger and tougher, and beat it down the next time."

Darkbolt's black crest rose in golden-eyed determination. That had truly been uncomfortable, being overpowered by the demonic scaled brute and its huge jaws. He chirped at Errant, who glanced his way.

"Melee Level. Primary Weapon, IUS/Natural Weapons. First Technique, Profound Natural Weapons. First Training Technique, Toughness. For a Melee, those are based off Melee Attack Bonus, and yours is already high as a Magical Beast. You will notice a very significant increase in the damage you deal out.

"Then take the second Melee Level, Weapon Spec in natural weapons, and Toughness Mastery/2. You'll be on your way to badassness quickly. After that, take the Advanced Template. Your crown's leader has that. It's why he's bigger and stronger than the rest of you. He's just a superior griffon."

Darkbolt called out excitedly. He could get that powerful? This was definitely the way he wanted to go!

"Aye, kill powerful enemies, get powerful. It's the way of the world." The griffon softly chirped agreement.

"You will be leaving for the capital today?" Hazé asked calmly.

"Aye," he said, patting Darkbolt. "Estemar has said he'd ride Darkbolt into battle, and help him advance. I'd like to take him into Zynozure, but I'm sure some mages would chop him up for his pinfeathers and blood, so there's no way." Darkbolt made an irritated screech, and both of the young humans nodded back at him. "Yeah, the Empire is not a nice place, especially the city. Even having me around probably wouldn't save you, too much greed in that place..."

"Do you know why you're being pulled back there? I don't mind 'porting there to pull people out, but staying there until the Day..."

"Heaven knows. But I'll have faith and trust that I should be there."

She was an Archtheurge of Sylune. She could only agree.

Teleporting back to Zynozure after finishing up helping with the healing was much easier, as he came right into the Temple of Sylune's Star Chamber, where a bevy of attractive women in white and black soon clustered around the barely-teenaged Archtheurge who'd brought him in and kindly shooed him out of the way as they got to talking about important business.

Smiling to himself, he quickly exited the lovely white building, built high enough to allow an excellent view of the Throned below, the ships traversing it, and the expanse of the waters around it; the truest heart of the Empire, the source of its lifesblood.

There was probably something really bad going to come out of that lake, whose legendary depths were said to hold the tombs of ancient kings, and the burial ships of emperors consigned to its depths. Errant sighed at the view, and headed for the Temple of Aru.

The Order of the Ruby Heart was nominally a Templar Order attached to the Church of Aru and enjoyed its unstinting support. Finding out that the Grand Maester had been killed and suborned by a doppelganger had sparked a dangerous fire in the hearts of the priests of the God of the Sun and Light, igniting a wave of martial fire that was filtering into the clergy all over the Empire.

Then the Visions, Dreams, Messages, and Prophecies had started to quietly come in, with the kind of no-nonsense weight behind them that prodded them to start taking action. Word of the great fight up north, and of a new kingdom being founded there, a fight under the very walls of Yle Tyorm, made for a fantastic excuse to start Doing Great Things.

He wasn't involved in those movements, but he knew a great many of the acolytes and younger priests had quickly been dispatched to the north to get themselves blooded, guided by senior Priests who were quietly taking with them Relics and wealth of the faith, to preserve and to build anew.

As such, there were far fewer young men and women around, and they were quietly thinning out by the day. What were left were men and women in their later years, who'd grown into their power and their faith, and who had made the choice not to run.

The Sun was setting on the Rose of the Empire. More than once, he caught the elders of the Temple looking up and around, at this grand and brightly-lit edifice of light and hope, built by the faithful in adoration of their god and the bright future He held for them. The light from it could be seen clear to the horizon, a beacon to all coming to the Rose, even if that light faded away into the darkness eating at the roots of the city.

They would be the last witnesses to the fall of the Rose. The Temple of the Sun's Promise, the heart of Aru in all the lands of the Empire, would fall with it.

But the Sun would still rise, and these old men and women would see that the coming darkness would know the price of bringing down The Light.

Three sets of silver eyes turned to look at him, and one set of grey.

One was a young knight of the Order of the Golden Stag, who'd sought him out for training after a wandering Celestial had sponsored him to the Order of the Shield. The second was an acolyte of Flora, who was not Powered, and been offered a way to serve by a Harvest Angel, directed to come here before displaying her abilities. The third was a slender, hatchet-faced young fellow, his eyes burning with subdued outrage and rebellion, sponsored by an Ahren to the Order of the Song, and rather sulking that he had to wait on Errant's return at all, eager to be about confronting the evils of the city with his new power.

The last was a young woman, who had been sent to the followers of Aethra the Rider many years ago by a certain Archtheurge of Sylune, and had taken the path of an Amazon, which was a variant, special path of Warlock.

He'd been training the Heavenbound when the news had broken, and left them to their devices temporarily while he headed north.

The eyes that met him showed no fear, and that was good.

"I have returned from the North, and the fight there," he told the four of them plainly, sitting down on a bench across from them. "I will ask you this straight-forwardly, and tell you the truth. If you choose to go to the North, I can take you there. If you do this, you will gain Levels quickly, if you remember what I talked to you about.

"If you choose to remain in the city, gaining Levels will be less steady, and more dangerous. The foes we seek here are not right out in the open, and will tend to vary between very weak and incredibly dangerous.

"I would have dearly loved to have the years needed to make you truly strong with the Angel Weight discipline. But we do not have that time, so we must seek strength the more direct way.

"So tell me now, my Brothers and Sisters... what do you want to do?"

Addendum: Amazons

This is a self-invented 'Class' inspired by DC Comics' Amazons, the sisters of Wonder Woman.

Amazons are considered a Warlock Class, because they are empowered by divine energy and an Oath to serve the Goddesses who empower them. Like Warlocks, there is a hard limit of five hundred Amazons per Goddess per World (and it reduces the number of Warlocks they might sponsor), meaning their numbers are strictly limited. They are only found among humans.

Amazons take twice the Karma to progress in their Primary Class. This is analogous to the Karma a normal Warlock would have to pay to advance their Warlock Masteries.

Amazons are turned into genetically perfect humans once they take their Oath. They have base 18 in all Stats, no randomness at all, but can still pick their first Level bonus, which is usually to Strength. That means that a starting Amazon starts at 21 Strength, as strong as an ogre, and stronger than any man is naturally, or four average men!

This transformation alone means there is no shortage of would-be Amazons, as even the ugliest and weakest woman will instantly become tall, beautiful, and very strong! Indeed, the goddesses seem to prefer such applicants, as they know best what it means to be weak and ugly in a world dominated by men...

For every Primary Level an Amazon gains, they gain a +1 bonus to Strength, and half that bonus to Con and Dex (i.e. +1 per two Levels). The rule of the DC Comic Amazons is that they vary in strength from five to ten times the strength of the naturally strongest men (Str 20). Five to ten times puts them at a strength score of 31 to 36 at that top end, which is possible without any magical Strength enhancements at all for any and every Amazon!

Thus, without ANY magical help, Amazons rapidly become stronger than any man, and even Powered tend to have to resort to extreme buffing to equal what they gain without effort.

Amazons can gain a Vajra, but Soul Magic and Ki are not traditional avenues of strength among them, and will be shunned by most Amazons instinctively, i.e. they have no desire to investigate them. Those with Human Levels, on the other hand...

Amazons are physically near-identical, with no more than a quarter-inch in body shape between them, i.e. they can all wear one another's clothes. They are all right-handed, ambidextrous, have the same dominant eye, step forward with the same foot, and otherwise exhibit Cadence, able to move and interact with one another in perfect trust and harmony, like an elite squad of marching troops or dancers, all without effort. Seeing a few hundred warrior woman sprinting at you in perfect lockstep has unnerved more than a few armies...

Amazons are restricted to traditional Amazon garb and gear, meaning unarmed combat, spear, knife, long and short swords, slings, bows, and glaives; shields, and light to medium armor. Given the choice between a bow and an automatic rifle, they'll grab the bow every time. They can USE just about any weapon well, but they will ditch things like maces and hammers and axes at the first opportunity, even if they are magical. Likewise, they will ride a horse before a motorcycle, but if no trained horse is available, will make do.

Amazons have no other magical ability, it's all used for their Stat buffs and 'perfect state', although, like Primos, they can still use magical items (they are not Forsaken). Thus, they almost always advance as a Melee combatant, with Levels in Archer and Scout taken secondary. The fact they are genius-level combatants with extreme cunning and strong personalities means that they end up looking down on normal human combatants who don't have nearly the same Stat lines as they do, and tend to rapidly assume leadership positions among male-dominated warriors, often to the men's displeasure.

They tend to not take kindly to receiving orders from men who have not proven their superiority, which is quite the tall order.

There are evil Amazons, sponsored by the dark goddesses, but they are not frequent in number, as the dark goddesses are more into witchcraft, poison, and intrigue, not fisticuffs. Such Amazons usually end up as temple guards or bodyguards to their priestesses, and have no influence. On the other side, there are whole nations led by the Amazons of Eryl the Storm Queen, and the various Good goddesses, led by Eryl's daughter Aethra, the Wind Rider. Amazons of Eryl are guided to gather together and form nations, and Amazons of the other Goddesses usually sprout within those, guiding them away from pure martial sexism and conquest to higher purposes.

While Eryl's Amazons are neutral and friendly to all other Amazons, the conflicts between the Good and Evil Amazons are vicious, bloody, and impossible to rectify. As the Good Amazons tend to be much easier to get along with, this usually results in the Evil Amazons forming their own nations and societies, which generally end as conquerors, pirates, and slavers, despised by all their neighbors, and tend to exacerbate gender conflicts on all sides. The fact that Eryllian Amazons are far from unwilling to also engage in gender-based conflicts certainly doesn't help matters, and even the Good Amazons look down on patriarchal systems.

Amazons are all six feet tall, beautiful, and can only reproduce with the approval of their goddess, i.e. their purpose is like that of a Warlock, to fight, not to be a Mother. They can reproduce parthenogenically, i.e. with other women, but if they chose a man, the daughter will always follow the father's coloration, otherwise defaulting to olive-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed.

Amazons will only bear daughters, and those daughters will have a flat Stat line of 15 in all attributes, called Amazon-born. The daughters of Amazon-born will be normal humans. They only get the perfect Stat line if they swear the Oath, but unlike their mothers, they can be Powered and gain Caster Levels, which means that the prominent Casters in an Amazon society are almost always the Amazon-born daughters of Amazons.

Amazons have their own three Racial Levels, which effectively fits them ever more firmly into the trope of being an Amazon, i.e. strong, devoted warriors of their goddess, feeling completely secure in their role as the best warriors in the world. They notably lack much of the flexibility and versatility of thought of Amazons with Human Levels, as well as slowly losing understanding and empathy with normal Humans.

Among themselves, True Amazons are Amazon-born who have taken the Amazon Racial Levels; Sworn Amazons are Amazon-born with Human Levels; and Sworn Sisters are normal Human women who have sworn the Oath and become Amazons. Sworn Sisters are usually much more common outside Amazon nations, serving their Faiths or goddesses directly, and heavily biased towards the Good goddesses.

Amazon societies, while led by numbers of extraordinarily intelligent women, are also hampered by the conservatism of their own nature. Thus, innovation and advancement of Amazon society is almost always driven by the Amazon-born or the Sworn Sisters with Human Levels, who retain the versatility and adaptability of their origins, while the True Amazons end up serving as the conservative defenders and martial leaders of the nation.

Amazon societies are always defined by the horse or the sea. They will be either great horsewomen, renowned for their horse archers, or masters of the sea, renowned for their ships and naval warfare. An Amazon Empire will naturally be good at both. As the Patrons of Archery, Wind, and Storms are on their sides, this is quite natural.

Thus, most Amazon nations are island nations, or occupy great plains as formidable leaders of light to medium cavalry. Since Amazon nations are by writ backed by the goddesses they are sworn to, there is always a strong theocratic element to their society, which is always goddess-dominated. While Good Amazons will respect the male deities, the Neutral and Evil Amazons tend to ignore them or disparage them outright.

Amazons have a natural dislike of Hags, who come from literally the whole opposite end of the Dangerous Woman spectrum, and this carries over to Hagchildren instinctively. It is not something that they cannot recognize and overcome, of course.

There is an analogue to the Amazons sponsored by certain male deities, whose role is more of Shield Maidens. They are called the Erhiar, also named the Valkyrie, Air Maidens, and so forth among other cultures. Valus is their primary sponsor. They have a rivalry with Amazons, but tend to serve singly instead of in groups, going from battle to battle to fight alongside heroes, instead of being the heroes.

Because their assistance is often the difference between life and death, they are often called The Choosers of the Slain, i.e. they prevent heroes from being killed. Their role is more to inspire heroes to come forth, rather than BE the heroes themselves. In times of peace, they serve as god-approved messengers, trusted scouts, and inspire the warriors of the realms towards martial readiness in anticipation of the battles that will come.

Warriors of Valus and Mithar will follow an Erhiar without batting an eye, assured of entrance to the Halls of Glory if they fall in the battle to come.

As they watch over the souls of the faithful and guide them to valorous lives, Erhiar absolutely loathe undead, necromancers, and those who would profane the right of souls to proceed to their final reward.

BREAK

A NOTE...

Gamers don't know how to abuse temporal acceleration, uh-uh.

"You know, this is not nearly as fun as I thought it would be," Briggs commented, slumping down to a seat on a pile of fallen rubble. He kicked the head of a hacked carnoraptor out of the way with a sigh.

"These should not be here. Their time is long past... something must have brought them up from dark lands lost to time below, or they were drawn here," Brother Ancientaxe mused, sitting down next to the Ancient youth nearly as tall and broad as he was.

"Awwww, watsamatter, Briggs, you not get to dig into every hole and house and sniff out all the buried gold and ancient treasures that endured the millennia?" I asked him, skating over to take up my own perch.

"Snake!" he pointed out. I aimed Fall and held down the trigger as a series of bolts flashed out, each one manifesting after the one before it hit. The thirty-foot viper sidling in on us had great holes punched into it, and couldn't get into cover before the shots walked up its slithering diamond-scale patterns and blew its neck apart. Sparkie zipped over to pummel the head a couple of times and make sure it stayed down, its body writhing around on top of the T-Rex sized carnosaur that had somehow managed to survive here, and which Brother AA had opened up like a fish with severe disregard for its threat level.

"I haven't seen any real loot at all," he admitted, glancing around while barely moving his head. "I mean, seriously... there's even been few coins fallen into the soil and the dirt." He took a long step, drove a knife-hand into the ground, and pulled up a badly weathered copper coin between his thick fingers. "I don't know if someone vacuumed up the good stuff a long time ago, or it got burned away, or what... but we should have stumbled into something forgotten in a corner, and there's been nothing but scrap too rusted away to be worth anything, and certainly nothing magical."

AA nodded thoughtfully as Briggs sat back down. "That is true. This was a city of high magic. There should have been little magical trinkets and toys scattered here and there, a show of the city's wealth and joy. I have sensed nothing like that. Moreover... I've not seen any collected signs of the city's inhabitants, or a collective defense. Granted, the numbers of dead creatures may have obscured their bones and remnants, but there should have been some sign..."

"Well, that all depends on whether or not something removed them," I pointed out cheerfully. "This was a big city, and that was a lot of corpses that didn't get burned."

"Are you saying that someone came in and looted the city long ago?" he asked, crimson eyes narrowing. "Who?"

"Well, they would have had to be merciless, natives who could ignore the planar instability, magically gifted to sniff things out, inclined to dark magic, and, oh, probably with indefinitely long lifespans. Also probably experienced combatants, given the threat level of the native life, probably with knowledge of the powers behind the conflict so they could get into position... I wonder who fits that bill, who is known to be in the city right now?"

Briggs grimaced. "The Hags?"

"Uh-huh. Remember how Errant said he killed Zouma, a stormcrone, and she was a Legendary?"

"Yeah, she had some incredible pool of Health Qi. He had to facepalm her into the side of an air chute for two miles or something to burn it all away," Briggs nodded. AA's brows lifted in appreciation of the tactic.

"Well, records on the stormcrone only went back about two centuries." I jerked a thumb towards the middle of the city. "What you want to bet she built up all that power in the middle areas. You don't become a Legendary with a Qi pool like that without being around for deva's years.

"My personal guess is that they looted the city a long, long time ago, taking advantage of the temporal acceleration fields to do so, and they've been using the wealth to further their plans in the outside world. Just think of what it would cost to attract a Rift of that size here... and to set in motion what they are doing down south."

"And they animated all the dead?" Brother AA wondered aloud softly.

"They definitely had enough wealth to do it. Any mysterious runs on obsidian in the past five hundred years that all went missing?" I asked him.

"I'm sure if you asked Brother Bonescythe, he'd know." He looked at the blue sky that was far in the distance, taking its old sweet time catching up to us.

"We're at twenty times normal chronology already, and some of the side zones are even faster," I informed him. The temporal shift didn't stop my Marks, but I was thinking much faster than everyone outside, so it was like dealing with people in slow motion. Oddly enough, Tremble had no problem shifting her speed of thought, and was actually acting as an intermediary while I learned to do the same.

Briggs whistled under his breath. "This place is a leveling dream... if you can handle the action."

"Errant's bringing in some Warlocks, knights, and Priests from Zynozure to take advantage of the accelerated time, and the North Wind is moving the wall up. There's adventurers flocking to the place now, we let word spread. There's no cash loot to speak of, but if you want Karma, this is even better than the battlefield... if you can take the monsters."

"Grow in power or die." Brother AA was very familiar with the paradigm. "As long as they persist in the outer areas, and have good teamwork, they should be fine."

"So, we're two miles from the city center of the big hole, but we've traveled nearly a hundred." Briggs sighed. "It was nine miles after the first mile..."

"You're thinking what I'm thinking," I agreed, as Brother AA watched us. His eyebrow prodded an explanation. "It's increasing at ten to the power in miles closer to the center. The next mile is going to be near a thousand miles long."

"Ten thousand miles to the middle?" He was shocked, despite himself. It was like putting an entire world or more inside the ruins of the city!

"I'm pretty sure we're in the equivalent of a gestating new world here, and the Hags are trying to lord over and control it." I considered the implications. "This world won't just go away when we correct the time/space around it, it'll be shunted elsewhere... somewhere the Hags want it to go."

"They either sold off the souls of the inhabitants or are setting themselves up as creation goddesses of a new world," Brother AA said, his eyes narrowed.

"And if the time acceleration ratios are holding true, the next one there is a hundred times, and the one after that is four to five hundred. You can make some very, very long-term plans with that kind of time and nobody trying to stop you. Even just a year outside gives them centuries within to arrange stuff and make it happen."

"They could have made an army and marched out of here, practically unassailable," Briggs noted aloud. "No way we'd be able to keep up with their numbers..."

"The creatures that are born here are living on primal Qi in the air and at accelerated temporal wakes, drawn from the Ether and Dream. They will not last long outside of such conditions... a month or so at most, aging away quickly and dying. As we break the temporal walls, we essentially are bringing their doom," Brother AA said authoritatively.

Well, guess the Land had its own way of dealing with those born under grossly unreal conditions...

"Unless they can be forced into a new timestream that they can claim as their own, where the existing Land won't suck away all the power," Briggs observed.

"Or, more likely, the area can be sent to something really powerful as a snack or a breeding ground. But while Creation Goddesses is an option, I just don't really expect it of Hags, however ambitious. The Curse simply will not let them become divinities. Like it or not, their power is founded on the Curse; it would buckle under the power of a Divinity, and their souls would collapse under the pressure."

"The Hag Curse is very strong, but not enough to make a god," agreed Brother AA. "I had heard that one had become the Lord of a layer of Hell, but the power was not her own, and was taken away from her in the end, so that she might become the sacrifice for a true Lord to emerge. I think it was a hard lesson for the Hags... they truly cannot escape the Curse."

"Whatever it is, it sounds like something we can't let happen," agreed Briggs. "Is there really any way we can stop it, given the amount of time we have left?"

"There are a lot of scarily competent people coming to the North, who we can throw into this area or the fight against the Warped... who have been sending out more and more of their troops in response to ours getting tougher and tougher, in case you didn't notice. If we can set them up on clearing actions, using the time acceleration to our benefit... we can make the time we need by pressing in."

"The time we gain is not equal to the amount of area we will have to cover," pointed out Brother AA. "The inner areas are going to be simply immense!"

I snorted back at him, and pointed at Briggs with my thumb. "You didn't notice?" I asked AA.

He looked at Briggs, who looked confused. "I confess I did not?"

"His Source field is disrupting the Primal Qi in the area. It's like waving a big 'I'm an alien here!' sign. Why do you think stuff is always finding us all the time?" I kicked away a rock underneath me. "The only delay has been how long it takes them to get here. They can follow the path we are driving through the Qi in the air like a burning sign, and everything here is hostile to us because of it. We're bringing the outside world, and they don't want it here!"

"Ah," both of them said together, looked at one another, and exhaled. "That does explain the sheer amount of slaughter we've been having to do. Everything really is trying to kill us, isn't it?" Briggs murmured.

"The herbivores may not be hunting us, but they are certainly hostile when they see us, as you noticed." We'd killed enough saurials, saurids, and saurs over the past virtua month to fill up a lot of meat lockers. And we might have tried different types of roast dino meat, from a purely investigative standpoint...

"So, we have to get the people who hit a certain level of ability in here, and they've basically got to kill everything," Briggs said thoughtfully. "The loot will be shit, but they can make it up in Secondary Class Levels. That will also control the invading Warped forces, if the strength of those they face stay at a fairly constant level."

I found myself screwing my face up. "I wonder what the Warp Gods would think, them being abandoned by the real fighters because they didn't grant enough Karma quickly enough..."

Both of the men burst out laughing. "Can you make it so? It will take at least another of my Brothers to work with a Null and Source to shatter the barriers ringing the city, and press inside," AA noted.

"They'll all be eager to take advantage of the temporal acceleration to grind up Levels. The problem will be having alternatives to them popping off any Greater Demons who show up. We're going to need clerics ready with Ritual Abjurations and stuff. I don't think anyone wants to hack them down the long way."

"We should bring Errant, Hazé, and anyone relevant up with us, to take greatest advantage of the time acceleration," Briggs said thoughtfully. "Hazé might be needed to do many things, but if we're working on a hundred to one scale... she can Linejump out of here, do the 'porting, and come back, and she's still going to get 8:1 time usage or better, if everything is prepped for her to move."

"And she'll be moving stuff quick, because she won't want to miss out," I agreed.

"What of the Warped? Might they try to get involved in this?" Brother AA wondered.

"To be honest, I hope they try. This place will grind them up like meat, as they are even more alien than we are. It's an entire world in here. We are literally over a hundred miles of hungry forest and hungrier critters away from them. They are walking buffet tables, and they will be attended to by cheap and opportunistic gluttons, as is only appropriate."

"And we haven't even run into any truly organized forces, aside from the spiders at the beginning," AA said thoughtfully.

"Can't expect that to last," grunted Briggs. "The Hags will need hands to do stuff, slaves to make them feel better and generate faith and power for dark Patrons. That inner area is probably going to end up a war zone."

"At five hundred times normal speed," Brother AA mused, and his smile widened. "Ah, the irony."

"Going in to stop the Hags makes it incredibly tough for us to fight the Rift. They bring the Warp in, yet end up strengthening those fighting against them," I agreed. "Who knows, it may be part of the plan. Odds are the Warp Gods can't eliminate the Curse from them, despite all their promises, so the Hags don't trust them, and don't care if they fail, only that they get what they want."

"And what do they want?" Briggs asked me.

"They want power. It's the only thing that matters, in the end, to something that is Eternal. Power to stave off death, to fight against those that would hold them to their misdeeds. Everything else comes to those with power," I stated with certainty.

"So they got power from the Warp Gods... It is only for us to see what kind." Brother AA nodded. "We will need more bodies."

"I'm arranging things as we speak." I looked back along our path. "We've got one Renewal per spatial shard to do this, you know." That was how long it took for the outer world to push away and collapse the spatial zone here. Given patience and willingness to clear the shards, we could actually clear the whole city together, something the Brothers had not been able to do alone.

Even Brother AA twisted his face at my words. "That is a lot of time... but a lot of area to cover for that time."

"Yes. We need more superbly ready bodies. Your Brothers are going to be needed, with a lot of other heroes..."

BREAK

A NOTE...

Since Alignments are a key part of the story, I'm going into more depth on them here. Since we live in a world without alignments and active gods, its hard to feel how real such things would be...

(This chapter is background, not a story. Feel free to skip to the next chapter!)

The forces of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos represent conflicting profound forces that define the multiverse with their struggles and conflicts in the Power of Ten. As forces that profound, they exist beyond the gods, and the Divine could be said to be what they are because they represent minor tropes of different aspects of the Alignments.

A LOT gets argued about alignments when playing RPG's. This is because it's hard to pinhole people to an alignment... especially optimizers who want maximum benefits. Getting the rep of the Lawful and Good while being able to do anything you want, like the Chaotic and Evil, is basically what is pulling at people.

The difference is that when people assign an Alignment to their character, they are saying they are going to play him that way. However, if they don't play them that way, said people get very upset with their Dungeon Master coming in and saying, "No, you're CN, not NG, if you're stealing from everyone you can." In the interests of friendships and gaming, DM's end up having to put up with the Lawful Stupid, the Stupid Good, Chaotic Arseholes, and all sorts of dumb variants of 'Alignment' that have to do with keeping the game going rather than any sort of reason.

However, in a literary world, the exact opposite is true. Players don't get to just say 'I'm Neutral Good.' No, Good and Evil exist on their own, they are not defined by the characters. Someone thinking they define what Good is, is the exact same thing as an ant screaming at the Heavens to stop raining. The Alignments exist in and of themselves. Your Alignment is how close you stand to them, proven by word, thought and deed. Your Alignment is the result of the choices you make, it is not what 'decides' those choices, completely the opposite of what an almighty Player Character thinks.

Thus, a story with real Alignments is dealing with fundamental forces as primal as gravity and light. They can't be avoided or talked around. They are real and have real effects.

However, this doesn't mean that what any particular person believes is Good is 'good', or that what is 'good' is Good. In Earth's own history, Law/Civilization was seen as inherently 'good', while Chaos/Barbarianism was 'evil', and indeed the conflict between them shaped a lot of history.

But in the Power of Ten, because Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are 'real', there are some tropes in effect, and NOT in effect, based on the power of the Alignments.

First of all, Human-style corruption of the Good gods isn't really there. You don't get Zeus going down to shape-change into the husbands of women and rape them to satisfy his libido. To be a Good god, you actually have to be Good and your choices resonate with it. The human desires and corruption would mean that god would make choices and move further and further from Good, falling into Neutrality. The searing arrogance and pride of the whole Olympian Pantheon means remarkably few of them would qualify as Good, among other things.

This fact of being Good means that things like War in Heaven between different opposing gods, angels, ahrens, celestials, devas, archons and whatnot... does not happen. Good people have many, many ways of resolving conflicts without resorting to butchering one another, and they have so many external enemies that there is tremendous incentive not to do so.

Good is also the alignment of empathy, compassion, understanding, and mercy. Because of that, Good is a higher power that can do something Neutrality and Evil cannot... they can bring the opposite ends of Goodness, Chaotic Good and Lawful Good, together in a greater understanding and recognition that all are parts of a greater whole, and no Alignment is inherently greater or more perfect or 'better' than the rest.

Oh, Good can 'compete' with itself... healthy competition is a matter of evolution, competence, and preparation, after all. But simply reducing war to athletic competitions, debates, setting goals in thwarting Evil, negotiations, mutual cooperation, trading of favors, or a thousand other ways means that Heaven gets along with its many parts on the wings of understanding, even if there is rivalry.

Secondly, Good stands against Evil. Oh, Evil may try to explain it away, especially devils who argue that they fight demons all day long, and isn't that doing Good by helping contain them? Yet the Hells, by their very existence, require Evil souls to make more devils, and those Evil souls generate the Sin that creates the demons. In effect, Hell is creating its own enemies by growing its own power... and despite Good getting involved in the war now and then, which should immediately turn the tide fantastically... it doesn't work.

Hell has no interest in stopping that eternal Law/Chaos war, or the flow of Evil souls. If that means competing with demons forever to do so, so be it. Managing an eternal stalemate is totally and completely within the bounds of Hell to do so, as long as it fosters Hells own survival!

Evil actions throw Good into stark relief. Good can be called the most restricted of the Alignments, for Good is defined by what it will NOT do more than any other Alignment. Things that Good will not do are deeds that generally generate the Sins that create the denizens of the lower realms. Evil, by contrast, is the least restricted of the Alignments, for the more Evil you are, the fewer the limits you place on what you will and will not do. Truly Chaotic and Evil people can murder a billion people as readily as they step on an ant.

Lawful Good people are the most restricted of Good folk, as obeying Good Laws naturally means that things like stealing from the rich and giving to the poor are quite out of line, among other things. It could be called the highest calling of civilized folk, since it has the fewest moral and ethical options open to it.

Chaotic Good folk, on the other hand, have the fewest restrictions of the Good on themselves, living as they will, with their own definition of what is Good being more important than what some sage or king or distant god says. Living with a clear and independent heart, they yet do not step over that line into selfish and uncaring behavior. Trying to do this without being affected by increasing communal bounds is often difficult, at least for humans.

Neutral Good folk see the benefits that both Law and Chaos can bring, and so try to take the best of both, and set aside what they consider unpalatable. In terms of numbers, most Good people are Neutral Good, as CG and LG are both extreme alignments that demand a great deal of those who follow them, and it is intrinsically HARD for a normal human to operate at those extremes of behavior long-term.

Because Good stands against Evil, it could be said that Evil makes Good strong. When people see Evil behavior directed at them, they understand there is a better way, and this is how Good prospers. In the end, Evil seldom truly conquers Good, because superior cooperation, trust, and harmony really are that powerful on the macro scale. Good is also capable of sacrifice of self that Evil is not, and if that means apocalypse on both sides, so be it.

What kills Good in the end is generally Neutrality, or the Grey. People like to separate the two sides into black and white, and the grey is what exists in between.

In real life, this is simply the people that take advantage of others, without being actively malicious about it, and think it's Just Fine... and get away with it. The worker who doesn't do their job, but still gets paid. The manager who gets the promotion because he drinks with the boss, not because he's competent. The merchant who soaks a client for every ounce of gold by whatever means, instead of treating him like a valued client. Viewing a stranger as a resource to be exploited, instead of an equal and a peer. Favoring blood ties over all else, and taking advantage of others to empower and enrich yourself without end, without necessarily using violent means, breaking the law, or such.

Such actions and views erode away the Good, as trust is not returned, faith is not restored, equality falls apart into various forms of justification and discrimination, and things start heading towards the zero-sum game where people can only prosper if someone else suffers. The idea of synergy where everyone benefits by supporting ideas becomes more and more difficult to take root if someone will benefit more than others by not going along with everyone else.

Evil tends to kill Neutrals, who generally are totally susceptible to the way Evil steps over the invisible lines of family, friendship, and community to advance themselves by more ruthless means. Subjected to such methods, Neutrals are likely to respond with the same, as such actions are often incredibly pragmatic and practical, and "get results". Coming up against Evil, Neutrals tend to darken over time as their own life choices taken to the extreme come back to bite at them, and they decide to bite the same way.

Evil people naturally don't think of themselves as 'bad'. They think of themselves as pragmatic and reasonable sorts who aren't bound by some kind of self-limitations or enforced morality dictated to them by others. They can be nice if they need to be nice, and they can impale a thousand babies as an object lesson, if they're Evil enough. This willingness to step outside moral and ethical boundaries others draw about themselves basically defines how Evil they are, and they generally aren't too concerned about it, and there certainly isn't anything WRONG with it, from their standpoint. It's just willingness to do what others are not!

Other implications of Real Alignments:

Rewarding Evil: Generally speaking, doesn't happen in the afterlife. Why? Because your boss is Evil. Alive, you are a potentially fattening soul, who can lead other souls to your boss. Dead? You're just a resource, like gold, to be spent and used as they deem fit. The forces that rule in the Lower Planes are Evil to a great and dark degree... in short, they are like you, only much, much worse, and they treat you accordingly. You have no value as an individual, no power to speak of, and are only a resource, which generally means being rendered down for more Sin, being agglomerated into a Fiend as a pawn in the machinations of those more powerful, used to power the furnaces and war machines of the Dark Planes, or tortured for emotional sustenance the doomed can subside on. You were rewarded while you lived. Dead, you pay it all back as the boss deems fit.

You are NOTHING, a disposable commodity.

Aural colors are not variable: Lawful Good is Silver, and Everyone sees it that way. There's no mistaking it, there's no interpreting it as something else, i.e. Chaotic Evil types don't see themselves as Silver and Lawful Goody-types as Black. LG is Silver. NG is Gold. CG is Rainbow or Orange. LN is Blue. True Neutral is Green. False Neutral is Clear or Brown. Chaotic Neutral is Grey. LE is Red. NE is Purple. CE is Black.

Creatures 'beyond Alignments' will still have resonance with one of these Alignments. They may have orange and blue reasonings, and consider themselves above such petty things... but those petty things define reality, so they aren't ignorable, and they will resonate accordingly... generally CE, as placing yourself above all morality and ethics is the highest degree of CE, however you want to justify it.

Celestials and servants of Heaven are not vulnerable to Evil: in 3rd Edition D&D, evil weapons are those that do the most damage to servants of Heaven, as they have damage reduction x/Evil. This is very dumb, from a logical standpoint, because Evil is what they are meant to fight the most. It is when Good does turn upon itself that it suffers the most, so in the world of Power of Ten, angels and celestials are most vulnerable to holy weapons turned upon them, and they have DR x/Good.

Likewise, the greatest enemies of the Evil are one another, not the Good. It is generally the fiend next to you who is most likely to get you killed, not some angel who could not care if he never meets you, and certainly doesn't want your wealth, power, or place in the lower planar hierarchy. Devils, daemons, and demons fight one another on unthinkable scales, and that is how the vast majority of them die, Evil preying upon itself. Heaven tends to fight Evil when needed, if it fights anyone, while the Neutral powers either stay out of things or act opportunistically, if at all, or have personal grudges/enemies they war against instead, staying 'above the conflict' which is so much larger than their own.

Thus, Fiends and the minions of Evil have the exact same vulnerability that Celestials do, x/Good, because Good is something they rarely run into; they need to protect themselves from one another!

The net effect is that Fiends can rip into one another, and find it difficult to kill one another with their DR, resulting in protracted battles of great violence. However, a single Angel can often defeat multiple Fiends, as they are both resistant to the damage Fiends inflict, and inflict damage that can cause them great harm. This satisfies the trope that Angels are usually seen as stronger than demons and devils of the same rank via a simple mechanics change.

The fact that demons and devils brought to the Mortal World often end up fighting celestials is a non-factor. Those conflicts are so small in the macro scheme of things they constitute a rounding error on the scales of the Divine.

Note that Evil and Good Magic are explicitly harmful to the opposing Alignment. Conversely, Evil magic also works just fine against Evil people most of the time, but Good Magic virtually never does.

Law and Chaos:

Law represents both the power of Fate, and the idea to subject all the multiverse to a single hierarchy and system of laws. It backs the power of science, civilization, discipline, unity, and inevitable progression towards a single perfect path.

Lawful Good is the force of Destiny, LN is pure Fate, and LE wields the power of Doom.

Law considers Chaos to be nothing but raw potential, waiting to be defined and ordered, perfected and refined towards the ultimate state. True Law considers any imperfection something that must be addressed and eliminated, and beings of Chaos should be dealt with immediately under this principle. Conflict within Law is evidence of imperfection, and dealing with internal divisions is merely refinement towards an ultimate state.

The fact that reconciling multiple types of Law is probably impossible until you end up in a state of total entropy at the heat death of the universe is not a concern of Law at all, they keep right at it.

Chaos represents Luck, individual choice, emotion, raw personal strength, conflict, and ultimate freedom. It backs the power of magic, favors individuals over the many, talent, drive, and endless variety and options, uncaring of where they lead among the many possibilities.

CG represents Good Luck, CN Luck fickle and fair, and CE very Bad Luck, indeed.

Chaos considers Law to be merely one option among the many possibilities available to reality, of no real importance save for its tendency to try to restrain other options and possibilities. Chaos acts on all other forces to open up defined paths back to infinite possibilities, gradually eroding away all other profound forces in a continual march towards entropy and rebirth. Law's attempts to restrain and limit it are met with passion and fury.

Internal conflicts within Chaos are constant, to be expected, and tend to be enjoyed by all concerned.

STRIFE: There are wars taking place between profound forces all the time. The place where most of these things take place is the realm of Strife (not yet featured in the novel).

Strife is a Plane of indeterminate size, exactly big enough to fit ALL the forces fighting there. These forces wax and wane as their corresponding forces in the mortal realms rise and fall, engaged in conflict unending on scales equally massive. The Planes are the source of the forces that fight here, the fighting rarely gets to the Planes themselves. Strife will expand to pull in invasions of the other Planes, removing them from the source and making it very difficult, if not impossible, for such forces to truly 'win' a fight against one another by always having wars occur on eternally neutral ground.

On Strife, Earth throws mountains at hurricanes from Air. Fire raises volcanoes and small suns in oceans of Water. World-trees do battle with Planet-spores, while Kaiju rage at both of them. Demons assault devils in a war as primal as time, while axiarchs build and anarchs destroy endlessly. Forces of Heaven confront Evil spilling off the Eternal War and attempting to corrupt all the other forces. Insect hive-minds consume one another ceaselessly, avians war on fish and furred alike, dinosaurs clash with mammals, sahaugin battle with mermen while Deep Ones prey on both, Jotuns continue their ages-old rivalry with Dragons, and life goes on.

Aberrants, Old Ones, and Elder Gods exist Outside Creation, and are not part of Strife. The Warp Gods exist in their own pocket universe, separated from the rest of Creation, where they toy with life as they wish. Both align with CE for the simple reason that they have no moral or ethical restrictions that would limit them, and their actions tend to confirm that disregard for same, even with rare exceptions that tend to end up being based on entertainment value.

Characters:

Sama: (L) NG – Lawful bias because of her enforced military background with the Ironblood.

Briggs: NG – Closer to nature and less constrained than Sama, and Sources tend to be more emotional than Nulls. His past and being an Ancient tends him towards N instead of Chaotic like many human Sources.

The Brotherhood: TN – Their whole existence is about bringing things back into Balance with the Land. They may want to be NG, but the things they have to do and the pressure they are under generally doesn't allow for the kind of slower, longer-term solutions being Good requires.

Estemar: LG – A Paladin is required by definition to be LG.

Animals, plants, uncaring people: False Neutral: Either they don't take a moral position from being unable to make such decisions, or simply don't care and follow their instincts. Most hiveminds are Neutral, instead of LN, for this reason... the lower orders obey out of instinct, not of choice, or simply can't think at all.

Errant: NG, a slight Lawful bias because of his family, but he's moving away from it once independent. Heavenbound by definition must be Good.

Hazé: Also NG, as the Goddess of Silver Magic is NG, and prefers that Alignment for her priests.

The Girls: Amber is CG, Verd and Veis are NG. Scut would also be CG. Mama is also NG.

Feist: N (G). He's quite ruthless, especially towards larger races, but the girls and Sage Sama have been softening him up with heroism, or maybe just antipathy for Evil.

The Ironblood: Most are NG/LG, due to being in harmony with Sama's Nightmare originally, i.e. the most moral of soldiers.

Rorn Greywolf: N(Chaotic) G. Most Northmen have a strong independent streak, but he's effectively rebelling against the traditions of his country and planning on conquering it to set himself up as a benevolent King and Source. Sama doesn't mind.

The average mercenary: N, LN, NE, LE. Concerned about paychecks and following orders to kill others, not much else. Oh, yeah, power!

Sorcerers and Rogues/thieves/scouts tend towards Chaos. Wizards and warriors tend towards Law. Barbarians tend to be quite Chaotic, especially Berserkers, while the vast majority of Monks are Lawful.

Any questions, leave them in the comments!

BREAK

A NOTE...

Nope, won't abuse it, nope nope.

Who remembers Gemjump and rogue stones?

In the space of less than a day, there was a tremendous amount of movement.

The Brotherhood brought out an ancient spell for Hazé called Gemjump. A Valence V effect, it allowed the Caster to recall precisely to the gem the spell was placed within, regardless of distance or across planar boundaries. It even worked through the dimensional soup of Yle Tyorm, once a 'path' had been Interdicted through it. Naturally, the rogue stones that were usable with the spell were incredibly rare... and the Brotherhood owned several.

It meant that Hazé could take advantage of the temporal compression of the inner spatial zones of Yle Tyorm, and was able to, for example, go through Renewals one hundred times faster in the fourth Zone-ring. With a full load of spells and Teleports, she could also do many, many more teleport retrievals and evacuations of the faithful. Thus, although she wanted to participate in the clearing of the inner area, she chose to instead vastly accelerate the withdrawal of people and precious items from areas of the Empire. She directly spoke with Summoned Celestials of many of the Good gods and powers to coordinate where to go, and her years of lived-line expansion throughout all the lands of the Empire were put to good use.

The dragons doing overflights along the Road through the Badlands and the Dichromatic Plains were hurriedly brought into Yle Tyorm. Their flying ability and combined magical and fighting power would be very useful there, for the distances to be traveled were immense.

The news that Yle Tyorm was open to exploration, and the danger and degree of the monsters found within it, soon had adventurers from half the continent flocking there on dimensional wings to hunt great beasts without limit or restraint. Indeed, the time compression meant they could earn fortunes, or their deaths, in a much shorter time than anywhere else! The clearing of the outer zones soon began...

Brothers Firesword and Shadowknife took it upon themselves to be the Voids necessary to open up a Zone for exploitation, borrowing Nulls and Sources from the Ironblood to complete the effect. Generally speaking, the time-accelerating Zones were those the adventurers didn't want to disrupt quickly, giving them time to clear out anything, while those where Time was slow or twisted were ripped open and they only pressed in after the realm was normalized to deal with the many powerful things that were left behind.

The requirement for entering Yle Tyorm was being able to kill one of the Warped commanders or champions, or solo one of the powerful drakes, manticores, chimeras, demons, or other powerful beasts. Learning that there was also an endless amount of these creatures that could be killed, without having to delve into a land of ruins and ambushes by unknown and effectively countless numbers of strange magical creatures, many of the adventurers instead joined the companies marching to war, raising their general competency level.

This was good, because the Ironblood took over command of the city entry and defense, and their companies were clearing zones where adventurers failed or were reluctant to. Too, many of the experienced elves and dwarves burned to take advantage of the accelerated time, and formed bands both single and multi-racial, looking for combinations effective against the endless variety of creatures in the fallen city.

This required massive reorganization of the defense. Sama and friends were down in the hundred-fold Fourth Zone-ring, both dealing with the numbers of creatures being drawn in to fight them, and forging and making Gear. Nine hundred miles long and a third of that wide, the wild space in there was a primeval wilderness with ancient and powerful beasts in numbers... and more of them were always coming in from the Fifth Ring, the innermost, which was moving at a colossal four hundred times normal pacing and believed to be nine thousand miles deep...

Reaching them wasn't actually that hard. After ripping through the zone of time/space and forcing it back into compliance with reality, it was only three miles down the road, and the area itself cleared of remnant intrinsic life.

However, the Zones to the sides were not cleared. One was a slow time zone and so little threat, while the other was another accelerated time zone of fifteenfold or so speed, but still popping out new monsters regularly, and so the preferred target of many adventurers.

If they made it all the way to the fourth zone, Sama was not far away on the other side, slaughtering the locals, administering new Marks, and forging away with breathtaking speed. A reinforced camp where master smiths were laboring away at a hundred times normal speed meant huge amounts of iron needed to be shipped in to keep them busy, and in return high QL and/or magical Arms and Armor were sent back out at improbable speed.

The number of Marked proliferated across the newcomers, instantly moving them into command positions across multiple forces, while units who were all Marked enjoyed a massive boost in their combat prowess on the battlefields, becoming the backbones of their armies. The massive influx of Clerics, Favored, and other healers brought in by Hazé helped expand the recovery ability of the armies coming in tremendously, a necessity when those numbers also included many that needed to be blooded on the field of battle, and casualties were much, much higher than before.

Happily, there were many prominent Clerics among those brought in, who were more than happy to Abjure away Summoned demons, lessening the need for Void Brothers. Nobody really wanted to try fighting such things straight up if they had a choice, as very few had anywhere near the power of Hazé or the Void Brothers when fighting the things.

And all of it happened in a mere three days outside.

Sama put down her Shaping Hammer, and all work around the smithing site stopped. Dwarves, gnomes, dhatun, even a couple humans, and especially Briggs, waited silently by as she reached out with her bare hand and lifted the red-hot blade from the Anvil formed from a dozen different Fire-biased metals.

Frost gathered about her shoulders, forming a shimmering cloak of rimeflame. The icy cold stole across and down her arm, gathering in her Vajra, and followed her hand down the length of the blade, carbon dioxide hissing and flaring into mist as the cold stole into the metal, and began to drain the heat far faster, and under far more meticulous control, than any dousing in water, oil, or other liquid.

They had been here three days in the outside world, just a short distance beyond the temporal barrier in the fourth Zone-ring. Kill teams had ranged for miles in every direction, slaughtering the many beasts here which kept converging on them, an endless task yielding up furs, blood, organs, and other salvaged gold value in great measure. Fortunes had been made... and burned as power comps into making more magical items, or making current ones stronger.

Three days had been nearly a year. A year had been enough time to do a lot of work. Most especially, it had given them time to get their own key Gear the QL upgrades they needed, at least partially. They still hadn't gathered all the many things required to make a suit of orichalcum skinplate... but the temporal Quintessence generated when a reality zone like this was fractured and returned to normality was one of those items, so they were closer.

And so, Sama had forged Tremble's ultimate home, with adamant and gemstones traded from the elves and Rockborn, who even now weren't sure they believed what she had made.

It hissed with the cold in the air, the red heat of it fading, and the Runes on it awoke with gentle power.

This Sword she had made Properly, in accordance with the tenets of her Grandmastery.

Thus, she had forged it as other weapons first, each time at QL 40, an exemplar weapon of each and every type. Each such forging took twenty-one hours of her time. Spear, lance, dagger, hand axe, battle axe, mace, pick, hammer, scimitar, chain-whip/dart, short sword, rapier, long sword, until finally it was time to make the bastard sword.

Seeing her lift up the same metal over and over into the forms of what most there considered to be perfect weapons at QL 40, only to melt each down again into another weapon, had driven the smiths there nigh-crazy with such unreasonable demands of craftsmanship. How was what she was doing actually making a sword? Any of the weapons she had made would be fit for an Emperor or great champion to wield for the rest of their lives, practically begging the magic to come into them and empower them.

But no, they had all been melted down, into bars of metal once more, and reforged anew.

And now, they were done.

Her breath skimmed across the metal. The fires in the Runes, uncountable numbers of them, Runes made of Runes made of Runes, swirling with layers and layers of power, beaten inside the metal and without by all the continuous reforgings, until they intermixed and swam together with a power like none of them had ever seen.

The eyes of these master smiths, who had been blessed to look upon QL 40 Perfect Weapons, only a tale to some of them, closed despite themselves.

The sight of it was... too pure!

The craftsmanship seemed to hit the back of their eyes, without actually having any power to it, impacting their souls with the sheer absoluteness of its existence. This was craftsmanship beyond the mortal, embodying the very concept of what a Sword might be, taking mortal skill and materials and pushing them into the realm of the profound.

"A Truly Perfect Weapon," murmured a dwarven master-smith in awe. Only the greatest smiths of the race were ever thought to have made such a thing, and if such Arms existed, they were stored in vaults, or delivered unto the gods for safekeeping until needed, to be turned into artifacts or legendary Weapons used only by those who were post-Ten.

They watched her moving her palms over and past it, the sword balancing smoothly as her hands moved back and forth, supported on her Vajra, not quite touching it.

Her Phoenix Cloak shifted to acid, washing across the metal, sealing, treating, adding layers to the Runes of measure and finality. The greenish, liquid flame flowed back and forth, doing no harm, only adding the most perfect of finishes to the alchemical slakes and treatments that had been part of the entire process, and the Sword responded by beginning to steam.

Then, another round, another change, as the Phoenix Cloak became a crackling thing of lightning, snapping arcs of electricity crackling around her, dancing over and through the metal here and there, wild dances of chaos that yet somehow found themselves drawn into some kind of a greater pattern.

Her fingers and palms wove different and dangerous patterns, the Sword tumbling about in her grasp as her hands moved in some strange exchange of a greater Form the other smiths there couldn't understand. There was heat and induction, conduction and transferal, energy moving around and opening up, or closing down, connections finalized and others sealed away.

Then once again, the cold and the ki, coming in to remove the heat, and guide the final cooling-down process as no quenching could ever emulate, the incarnated energy of a soul coming in to remove the heat and guide the Sword into a final form more perfect than any of them had ever seen.

It had taken her a full month of labor to make this Sword, and the many weapons that had preceded it. Given the amount of work she could do on lesser Weapons, that level of effort and focus was just unreal to those who had seen her at work.

And now she was done, and Tremble would be finding a new home.

BREAK

A NOTE...

Will a magic sword break the rules of magic?

Mastering my Phoenix Cloak so that it could manifest as other Elements was one of the two Masteries attached to that Tat. The other Mastery concerned how the Phoenix could manifest and be controlled, both of which were vital to this final quenching, heating, and controlling the fire while forging.

Without access to comets or similar celestial ice, relying on my own soulrime to quench the adamant was the best choice.

Fifty days of Karma to boost effective Soulcaster Level to Fifteen via Soul Mastery. Fifty days of Karma to pay for Phoenix Cloak Mastery to Five, giving me control to go with the power. Fifty days of Karma to open the Tat to Five, for the raw power needed. Twenty-five days to get the Elemental Mastery to switch elemental damage around, thus being able to use lightning, cold, acid, or fire damage as needed... and even radiant, for the micro-etching of the smallest Runes. Induction, quenching, slaking, treating, heating, melting... my soul was intimately involved in every step of the process.

Some of the things were done concurrently, but generally it was part of the massive time suck, which this time-hastened zone of reality did so much to offset.

And hey, I grew a couple inches, too. Time does that for folks.

The metal settled and crystallized in strange patterns, the very movement from molten to solid state another final circumstance to imprint Runes upon it. The heavy metal in my hand, as Energized pure Earth elemental tungsten is three times as heavy as steel, settled into its final state with waves of ki and cold going through it, chasing away the heat, and I was aware of it on so many levels.

This was the Sword I remembered from the game, the Sword I had been awaiting for over eleven years of Nightmare and reality.

"Tremble," I said softly, as I held the sword across the top of the fingers of my two hands, "it is time for you to come home."

Power pulsed in this thing, but none of it was committed. I could forge a thousand gold worth of work into a Sword in an hour, using all my skill, my Shaping Tools, Floating Forge, and Anvil of Silent Thunder. It was a monstrous amount of work; a magical Weapon every two hours of work, if I so desired.

Forsaken can add goldweight value into an item by pure exercise of skill, something Powered have to do with Karma and Gold. Yeah, it takes money, but only a third of the cost of what we were making, as opposed to the half of Powered, so us Forsaken Smiths have a cost advantage. However, not many mundane smiths can do five hundred gold worth of work a day, and match the speed of Powered when it comes to making Gear. Infusion is half the cost of Investing, so unless you were a really good smith, Powered did it better.

I was a really good smith.

A QL 40 Crafting represented twenty-one thousand gold, forty-two goldweight, worth of labor. I had done that work thirteen times, and the remnants and echoes of that work still hummed in the adamant.

Then I had made the final version, at the highest level I could, the very limit of what adamant could attain. No mortal material I knew could be forged better.

QL 55 Adamant, which meant a check of 65, due to the difficulty of working with the metal. A Truly Perfect weapon, literally a stereotype incarnate of a bastard sword made for me... and it represented an additional 63k of value.

Tremble floated in. A fallen knight's sword, refined and improved by me, still a pale and ugly shadow of the silver-edged, flowing black metal in front of me.

Tremble actually held a tremendous amount of power. As an Intelligent Weapon, she could allocate great amounts of the Naming Karma I earned with her to improving her special powers, and the allocations to Arsenal, Arsenal II, Armory, and the like sucked in massive amounts of Karma to expand her versatility. On top of that, there were many external powers that could be worked into a Sword that were actually Slotless, and she'd improved herself that way, too.

Indestructible, for instance, would cost 30k all by itself.

"I am ready!" Her humming voice was eager. She could feel the nameless power held within the Sword, more than three hundred thousand gold of raw value, enough to pay for a lot of stuff.

Each +III addition to Greater Arsenal cost 18k. Each +IV, 32k. +V...50k. Finally adding her Special Purpose Power... 90k!

It all wouldn't be going very far. All that gold value of my forging would be disappearing right into the black hole of Gear upgrades.

Floating above me, she lowered herself point-down to the black star sapphire that was the eye of the waiting blade, touched it with her steel point.

Magic sparkled, and began to flow as Tremble transferred her Name.

Runes flared in polycolor glory on the new Sword. They lit up in series and combinations, representing every power and ability Tremble had and was bringing with her. The Sword hummed atop my fingers, my Soul Essence moving through it and making it Soulbound once again, my Item Familiar link transferring smoothly over through my connection as maker and wielder.

The old sword began to disintegrate as the magical meaning of it was removed. Flakes of steel shivered and fell apart, the gems inlaid in the guard shattered and fell to dust. From the pommel down, the old sword began to disintegrate, as the magic and essence of it poured down into its new home, less than the dust swept away by the breezes from the burning Floating Forges.

The last inch of her was blown away, and a flaring flash of completeness blinded everyone around who didn't have Devasight. I watched the Slots light up, one after another. Einz, Zvei, Drei, Veer, Funf, Zeks, Zeben, Akt, Neun... and Zehn.

A Ten-Slot Sword. The number of Ten-Slot Weapons in the whole of the Dwarven and Elven lands was probably measured on the fingers of one hand. It was just a massive amount of gold to be putting into a Weapon, a minimum of two hundred goldweight, gold that could be spent on many, many other things, instead of burned away forever to make a single Magical Weapon. One hundred magical swords, or one very magical sword?

In combined Naming Karma and Forging, Tremble was now well in excess of four hundred thousand gold in value, closer to five. It was quite unreal, but that's what happens when you feed Naming Karma into a Weapon for many, many days of battle.

"Mmmm." Tremble's stereo voice was crisper, clearer; still humming, but like it had gone to a much better set of speakers. "This is very comfortable, Sama!"

I smirked despite myself, as I flipped her up and grabbed her by the hilt.

She was a Heavy bastard Sword, admittedly a bit too long for me... but then, I hadn't reached my full height, and she could morph and pull back her length to current perfect size for me. Her weight was something that would break a normal person's wrists to use, but I had no problem with her, my Might effectively around 40. I flipped her about as casually as a willow wand... I'd have to do some katas to get really familiar with her again, but that was fine.

"Any problems with all the extra Slots? How's Final Arsenal?"

"Active without problems. I picked the defaults as we discussed, and a III, IV, and V to make Final Arsenal open and effective." She did a good false sigh in my hand. "You put so much into this, and it all went so fast..."

"A Grandmaster's Sword should be special, and you're all sorts of that."

"I think it's time to help Briggs with Endure," she said softly. Her True Perfection shifted to merely QL 40 Perfection dagger-form, and she zipped around to her comfortable old scabbard... I was going to have to make a new one for her, but it could wait.

I glanced over at Briggs, and the head and handle of the Hammer waiting in the Forge for me to get done. All the smiths in the area sighed despite themselves.

He'd only done five reforgings, as mace, flail, axe, maul, and pick, before coming back to hammer. But oh, did that Hammer look nasty... without being an oversized joke, as so many of the Warped liked to use. No, using a Hammer with an end bigger than your head is not necessarily so effective, given how well you are controlling it.

"Let's go, fuzzy," I grinned.

Three hundred days inside, three outside, had been good to him. He'd gained his Levels and the Masteries he wanted; the unending killing we had to do every day had been good for the soul, as it were. He'd hit Ten, topped off his Grandmastery, and he could now officially Wreck Face. Even the Void Brothers were very respectful when they talked to him now. The power of his hammer blows was just freaking insane. I knew that I was extremely deadly with a Sword, but his Hammer was just overwhelming.

And you know, that was fine. We made a good team, there was no doubt about it.

We were working on his ultimate Hammer, the same way I'd worked on Tremble. I still had to do Stand... that was my next project, and wouldn't take as long as Tremble did, but her little brother was already champing at the bit.

-So, what did you decide to go with?- I /asked her, as I readied my Hammer to help Briggs with his final poundings. His pale violet eyes were glowing with expectation.

-The four defaults will be +I, Water School Sword, Fire School Sword, and Courageous. All effects are constant and beneficial, but can be swapped out easily enough for Final Arsenal effects.

-I opened the +III paradigm with Speed, - !?,– and the +IV with Brilliance. The +V was Vorpal, of course.- Well, of course. Just in case we had to fight a Jabberwock. Blowing fifty days worth of Karma on that possibility... We'd had to bring in Ligaii, the male Valor dragon, for the Spellcraft Ranks for the IV and V effects, but if you can't take advantage of having a dragon in Marktell, what kind of person were you?

-No Healing Edge?- I was surprised. I mean, Doc was fine and all, but I seriously wanted that effect for my long-term staying power.

-I'm working on that next. It's redundant, and Speed giving you that extra attack is an offense boost I think we're going to need.-

Redundant?... -Okay. Go on.-

Delighted I'd not second-guessed her, she continued. -I upgraded Impervious to Indestructible, of course, since I don't feel like getting Sundered by a Greater Demon.- Mental thumbs up. -I picked my second Extraordinary Power to be Teleport, three times a day.-

Okay, that was a utility effect, and my greatest metagame disadvantage was a lack of long-range mobility. She could even upgrade this to five a day... with more Karma. It made my Visual File and Lived-Line useful. Naturally I'd have to pull in my Null to actually use it... but it also meant that she could pull me out of a bad situation if the need arose.

-I spent a lot on that Planecutting effect you wanted. There's two uses of it.- Excellent utility value with that...

-I picked Umbral as a supplemental IV, given these over-armored steroid-inhaling rejects we've been fighting.- Okay, another 32k gone, but being able to ignore all their armor was pretty nice. Potentially meant up to a +14 to hit, more if they used a shield, which they seldom seemed to do.

I knew she was going to make me wait, so I just smiled as I hammered with Briggs, our blows a cadence of destruction on the adamant. I was just adding the force and putting things in motion, his ki was the stuff doing all the directing. At this point, he was actually a better overall smith than I was, except with Swords, given how his Hammer Grandmastery dovetailed with smithing overall.

-I thought a long time about my Special Purpose Power,- she finally /went on. -Thwarting the Curse of the Hag allowed for a lot of flexibility.- Choosing a special purpose had been all her, I'd just gone over how to approach it with her. Until she chose the power to go with it, it didn't really have an Ego effect, but now she'd done it.

-Taking an offensive spell was very tempting. Fireballs in all directions would give me a direct effect on combat that could be used at close and distant range, I would always have something to do!

-Except when I wasn't fighting, and then it would be useless. It was too much like the Curse... all death and destruction, no life and rebuilding.

- I was going to go with Telekinesis, as that would give me many, many options in uptime and downtime to do things.- I nodded at that choice. -But then you told me that power was available as a Ring, which meant it could also be used in a Rod, and thus usable in my Wand Chamber, or added to my Pommelstone.-

Also true. No need to have the power twice, and it wasn't like I needed it right now.

-So I decided to completely break the rules and crash the magic. I picked Reach Cures.-

It didn't affect my hammering, but I mentally blinked. -In a V Valence?- I /clarified.

-Yes!- She sounded quite smug at the fact she had just crashed the system.

No wonder she said Healing Edge was redundant...

BREAK

A NOTE...

I know, I know, any Healer in a video game can do this... and it forces the bosses to be able to two-three shot most characters JUST to cope with it. If they aren't powerful enough to do so?...

And naturally enough, this amount of healing when applied to an army is stupefyingly powerful...

Unlimited Cure V's at will, every six seconds, in service to her Special Purpose of Thwart the Hag Curse.

She had chosen that Special Purpose with the clear idea that it put her solidly against all Hags, their plans, minions, and allies, AND it also meant supporting Hagchildren, the cast-offs of the Curse, and their plans, minions, and allies.

So, for example, it included me, all my Ironblood, and anyone fighting beside me.

Reach was one of the two Ranged Spell Metamagicks in the system. Distance, the first, doubled the range of a spell, and was basically used on long range spells to make them just ridiculously long range... or, if Weirded, to double the range of any spell for no cost.

Reach extended the range of a spell by one category, from Touch to Close to Short to Medium to Long, each increase costing an additional Slot to power the effect. A Touch Spell was effectively turned into a Ray, delivering the effect elsewhere. It couldn't be Weirded, unlike Distance, but that hardly hurt its power.

She was saying that she could use a Cure spell in a V Slot, with Reach. That meant there were five variations on the base spell she could use.

The V Valence Cure spell was Cure Deadly Wounds. It healed up to 5d8+5x Caster Level, max 75, hit points, meaning both/either Soak and Health. It also could return someone to life who had died within the past minute, making it truly able to cure deadly wounds.

The Heal spell was also a V, but both healed more damage and removed a lot of conditional effects, like disease, blindness, deafness, and the like. It couldn't bring back anyone who was dead, and it wasn't in the Cure line of spells, although it was in the Healing Sphere for Divine Casters.

There was also a Mass Cure Light Wounds effect, sort of like bomb healing. Roughly fifteen feet in radius, up to one person per Caster Level, a d8+CL in healing to all of them.

Being Soulbonded increased her effective Caster Level to 15 or so, so that's what her effects had been boosted to. They could go to 20, but Crafting reflected Reality, and I couldn't Craft in a CL higher than my Ranks. The spells had caps in effective Caster Level, but still...

Cure Deadly Wounds at touch, 5d8+75 Healing.

Cure Critical Wounds up to sixty feet away, 4d8+40.

Cure Serious Wounds up to a hundred and twenty-five feet away, 3d8+30.

Cure Moderate Wounds up to two hundred and fifty feet away, 2d8+20.

Cure Light Wounds up to one thousand feet away, d8+5.

Mass Curing of up to fifteen individuals in a circle up to fifteen feet in radius, d8+15, up to sixty feet away...

Repeatable endlessly...

-Is there a cap on this?- I /asked softly. Because this unlimited amount of healing magic was really, really broken. Healing Traps had unlimited use, but would only work once a Renewal for anyone.

Being able to zap me once every six seconds for 100 points of Healing, and even bring me directly back from dead? Health Qi could take a hike, I'd basically be unkillable except to a massive one-hit... and then be right back no more than six seconds later!

-I don't think so..?- she /replied, uncertain, and I breathed out despite myself.

-There's almost no way it's not, Trem. Positive and negative energy have some severe restrictions on them. I'm sure there's going to be a resonance effect of somewhere from three to five times a Renewal per person.-

-What? But I could have fireballed or lightning bolted all day!- she /protested.

-Which amounts to something less than five times a day per individual, right?- I /added knowingly. She made a strangled /sound.

-Okay, so Healing Edge isn't redundant. I'll start to work on it again promptly.- She sounded very disappointed. In the meantime, I could always use Doc in its setting on Stand. The girls had grown past needing him.

-Don't be unhappy. You're capable of saving an unlimited number of people from dying in combat, if you get to them fast enough. You've got area heals, incredibly long-range target heals, and incredibly powerful touch heals. You're literally as powerful as a dozen Ten Healers going at it, if not moreso. By yourself, you could heal an entire army in under an hour, and keep them on their feet during combat.

-It might not have unlimited use in personal combat with me, but you know what? You can save me from dying several times a day. That is huge all by itself. I'm fully capable of restoring my Soak over an extended fight, gradually, and with this kind of safety valve, I'll be doing fine. Get that Healing Edge back for eternal staying power, and we'll be fine.

-And you know what?-

My /voice had that conspiratorial edge she loved. It meant she was going to find out something else about the rules of the world that could be exploited. -What?- she /whispered back.

-Transfer Wounds counts as a Cure spell, right? But you're transferring the damage, not healing it, so there's no resonance...-

The star sapphire on the Sword at my back glittered with cold light. -Combine Healing Edge with Transfer Wounds, and we could heal others all day...- she /realized.

-It isn't like I don't have a stupid amount of Health, and if we turn Healing Edge into a cyclic pumping effect... well, it's not stupid broken for myself, but if I'm fighting with others, they are going to think so!-

Tremble shivered behind me, letting out a nasty /cackle I approved of tremendously. The Ironblood were going to get another notch on the unkillable cockroach scale when she and I were around.

And really, while I was away smithing, she'd be able to run battlefield healing support for any of the forces out there. I pointed this out, and she got excited all over again. The fact she couldn't give me unlimited healing didn't change the fact that she could deal out unlimited healing, as long as she could do so to different people.

It was a stupid broken Special Purpose Power, and really only possible on a Weapon.

Another thing was that negative energy destroyed resonance. So, people wounded by negative energy attacks, or fighting undead, could be healed multiple times, as the two energies rose in opposition to one another.

Mass CLW was also a mini-fireball against undead and negative energy life forms, which meant that she did have a limited unlimited offensive use to that effect. Sure, it would only wipe skels and zombies, but what did you need unlimited offensive power against when it came to undead? It wasn't like vampires occurred in the millions...

Yeah, I wasn't seeing the downside, as long as it was usable more than once a Renewal per person. I personally hoped three times, but we'd have to see...

If I could get myself a measure of Fast Healing, I'd be able to Transfer Wounds even outside of combat. Mmmm... what Templates or Classes gave that? It'd be like a back-end Healing Reserve, only really painful to Yours Truly.

Okay, Tremble had spent 50k on opening a V Slot effect with Vorpal. That Enhancement was basically only useful if you could barely hit. It required a nat 20, and ping, off with the head. The problem was, I had a x4 crit, and around a hundred damage a swing with my Grandmastery. So, it was only useful against creatures that had more than 400 Health, as a crit would kill them anyway. It would only proc one swing in twenty, and there were very, very few creatures that could stand up to twenty hits from me without a biiig pool of Health Qi... and if they had Health Qi, they could spend it to null the Vorpal effect, so it was useless against them...

Except against Jabberwocks, who had something like DR/30 and an insane regen rate against non-Vorpal Weapons. I might never run into one, but she had heard me mention it, and the V-Slot effects were... not spectacular for their cost, anyways. Still, needed them open to add in later Legendary +VI and greater effects.

Oh, yeah, demiliches, too. Hmm...

Bless the dragons for having Spellcraft Ranks equal to their Hit Dice. Inherited genetic knowledge was such a nice thing when you had the Hit Die to abuse it...

I could now have Courageous up all the time, and with Fire and Water Discipline, was provided an extra +3 To hit, each. That +6 to hit gave me a lot of room to trade off for Power Attack and Expertise if I so desired, which was entirely the point of it. The standing +I final Slot meant Tremble would be +5 base against all creatures, which actually bypassed most DR types on the face of it, and practically ensured Anathema would kick in for some extra damage on them.

If I was fighting extremely armored stuff, Umbral would mess them up badly. If I was fighting crap with extreme natural armor, Brilliant would do the same to the monsters. Umbral could be thwarted by Energized armor, but only people who hated touch attacks that ignored armor invested in such stuff. Like, oh, the Ironblood...

Speed would just increase my damage output against chaff and minions that I would hit anyways, or be good for long slog fights against bosses.

The net effect of all this was not a huge increase in damage. It did, however, mean that I was going to hit what I fought, as I could neutralize either the armor or the natural armor of my enemies completely, which was huge against specific foes.

Unless they were constructs, but that was something me and my Scarab vs. Golems could deal with...

Teleport would let me bop around and give me a bailout option in case things went really south. Very useful.

Planecutting, ah. That was a Mass Travel option. Using Tremble, I could cut the Veil to another plane and step on through, the Portal staying open for a couple minutes (150 seconds, to be exact). Then, on the other side, I could cut a Portal back through to home... or some other destination halfway around the world, if I could locate it.

Or another world or plane, if need be.

It was basically a method to move large amounts of men from one place to another. Just line them up at speed on both sides of the Portal, and run them through before it closed, then do the same on the other side. As long as I picked a 'safe' transition point, there wouldn't be any problem.

I was going to have to talk to some Celestials and see if there was a convenient marshalling ground I could use as a waystop...

If organized properly, I could move a lot of people that way. Evacuation, transport... trade... the uses were both tactical and strategic.

Tremble's power in combat had grown some, but not hugely. I was already at the almost auto-hit stage, there wasn't a lot of stuff that could avoid me in a fight. But I now had some powerful options open to me that most Powered couldn't even use.

And I would most certainly use them...

I loved time skips, and Forging Karma!

There were a bunch of us gathered in /Marktell, including every single Ten that was Marked. Rockborn Kings who'd come out to play, elven Monarchs thirsting for another post-Ten Level, Knightly heroes, respected adventurers, powerful Casters, renowned Masters.

Before us was an extension of the Map, now centered on Yle Tyorm, as scouted out by members of the Void Brothers.

It took a powerful Forsaken to walk through the higher temporal barriers of the Zones, or some very specific magic, and only a Void Brother could take someone along with them. As they were high Stealth operatives anyways, it fell to them to make a map of the whole city in detail, and figure out what the Hags were doing.

And now we had, and it was time to make a plan.

BREAK

A NOTE...

so what have the Void Brothers been up to all this time?

Those people outside the fourth Ring were just here to listen, as they were operating at a fraction of Sama's time and couldn't contribute effectively. They had to know what was going on to coordinate, but the decisions were being made by among the most powerful people in the whole Alliance effort... and were direct blows against the Hags that were behind all of this.

Members of the Brotherhood had gone into the Fifth Ring, and used Veilwalking to progress through the thousands of miles of territory to all the magical trouble spots, drawn by their Voids as none of us could duplicate.

There were massive Obelisk formations laid out through all the accelerated time zones, guarded by literal empires of humans and non-humans under the command of Hag servants. What these were intended to do precisely wasn't obvious, but they had obviously taken a great deal of time to get into place accurately, and the races of the inner realms were completely bent to them.

Close to the central ring, the areas were dominated by Aberrant monsters, cultists, inhabitants of Leng, and a whole lot of dark elves spun out on psycho-spores, and not a few being ridden by cerebrovores.

What was far more interesting is that there were ten zones around that central hole, and only six of them were fast time, varying between three and six hundred times normal speed. The slow time zones also varied by that ratio... in the other direction.

"Going from a fast time zone to a slow time zone at that level of temporal velocity is effectively impossible. The route that the Hags set up and that we are on is the only 'safe' way to reach the inner ring. Any other route involves detouring sideways multiple times to avoid slow zones in the way. Trying to breach a thousandfold or greater temporal conflict is impossible even for me," the Shadowknife said.

"So, this awesome master plan of theirs, putting up obelisks in a grand formation across multiple empires... isn't complete, despite having millennia to work on it... because the slow time zones aren't letting them complete it fast enough," Hazé observed. She pointed at the slowest of the time zones. "One six-hundredth normal time. It hasn't been even two years since Yle Tyorm fell in there. Even if they used Grand Rituals to send in monstrous amounts of people to set things up in there, the internal distances involved mean that there's no way they could be set up to the degree they truly need inside there."

"Correct," Brother Firesword agreed with her. "Notice the layout of the formations, and how irregular they are once they take into account the slow time zones. Their formation is quite vulnerable at all the junction points that cross the slow time barriers. We don't need to crash them all... we only need to take out these four in the zone that we have access to."

All attention naturally devolved on those. They were obvious conduits to and through the slow time areas to each side. I could imagine the cost in forces and materials that had been spent to run obelisks across the slow time zones over the centuries. The inner zones narrowed down some, but they were still a thousand miles across. They would have had to get those Obelisks up in the equivalent of only months, stretching across thousands of years of their own time, probably by flooding it with massive amounts of manpower to succeed. If the forces inside also suffered temporal shock, it also meant they were going to be advancing over the inevitable bones of those who died before them.

"What are we looking at there?" Sama asked briefly, and tactical maps as scouted out by the Void Brothers materialized at all four locations, there to be zoomed in on and details downloaded.

Now, there was no thought whatsoever of just hacking their way into the city. The populations of the places numbered six zeroes and higher. But that didn't mean they couldn't reach them...

"Site one, descendants of Hagspawn and half-ogres. The primary power is a legendary Green Hag. I believe she is Verd's grandmother," the Firesword answered calmly. "Site two are dark elves with fungoid traits, commanded by a legendary shellycoat. Amber's grandmother, I am presuming.

"The last is Jotunbloods, trolls, ogres, and swamp giants with mire dragon blood and Hagspawns among them, definitely the toughest of the three. I believe Tusk Annie herself is defending that obelisk, with a Mire Wyrm consort."

"Huh," was Sama's only comment. She pointed. "What's with the monkeys?"

"It's an ape kingdom. We expected a lot of demonic influence, as the Pits love intelligent apes, but these stayed surprisingly neutral. That led to some poking around..." Brother Firesword cleared his throat, and two locations on the map lit up.

"Oh." Everybody mentally bent forward to look at what was brought up. "Oh..."

"I don't know if that's good news or bad news..." Briggs commented to nobody.

"Given their nature, they won't even notice or care until something impressive happens," Ancientaxe spoke respectfully. "That being said... there is known to be an Elder Mu Spore down in that Hole, and if it's been taking advantage of the time dilation, it is very old, indeed."

"I really don't think they care," Sama pointed out, and everyone laughed softly, despite themselves. "So, what we've got to do is punch an Interdiction route all the way to Ringzone Five, nine hundred miles, and then crack open that four hundred-fold dilation and make it their last year of existence while we race to those obelisks." I glanced at the dragons, who were watching all this in fascination and great interest. "You can see the reports, lots of dinosaurs, drakes, and rocs in the air. Still willing to come?"

"The cost of us not assisting you is too high," the oldest Shield dragon demurred firmly. "We will be there!"

"Then we crack the barrier here tomorrow, and make the run overland starting then!"

Three days, she'd given the Brotherhood back then. Three days to get into the inner zone, and get stronger.

Over a thousand days. A time skip, a time acceleration capsule, something their opponents had been using, and they could take advantage of now.

Sama had said they were weak, and they weren't getting strong fast enough. The fastest way to get strong was slaughter, and there was a whole lot of powerful stuff in the fifth ring that had an early appointment with death. All of the Brothers could feel it, and they all went in on their 'scouting missions.'

The Fire and the Sword held up the blade of Weep, now a QL 40 adamant, Zehn-Slot Weapon. The parade of recent dead carried over with the dead held by the other two Swords that had borne its name.

None of his elders had racked up a kill total quite like he had. Everything in this shard of reality was an invader, barely real; killing them was like wiping film off the eyes of the Land. There were so many aberrant and foul otherworldly bloodlines, reaving through them had been a pleasure and a duty.

The Brotherhood had killed millions between them in those 'three days.'

They had raised the Names of their reforged Weapons to Zehn Slots. They had gained Levels. They had applied Masteries. They had picked Feats. There was enough Karma for them to do all that, the numbers of their foes so vast that it still didn't matter.

They had moved from assassins picking off targets to becoming agents of slaughter, slicing through hordes and armies, killing everything in their way, tanking in a way that no Void Brothers ever had before. Always clean, surgical, precise, killing and moving on to the next problem.

Nothing clean or surgical about this. A dirty butcher's shop, living in blood and slaughter.

He lifted up his hand, and the glowing spirals of his Helix swirled through his palm reflexively. Unseen, the Runes on his Endoskeleton glowed with power.

Magic to increase strength, dexterity, and toughness wasn't uncommon, but Sama had doubled down on the concept with her Heavy Gravity training method, a variant on the same thing the Heavenbound Errant had used. As they were all grown men, there was no problem with it, other than it taking two and half years to take effect. One Heavy Gravity belt with a slow self-healing effect to offset the damage the training did, large amounts of Karma, and putting up with ever-increasing gravity while wreaking havoc on a scale he had not imagined he could do before.

Sama had sunk the strands of gold and platinum into their bones, dancing delicate wires between muscle and sinew, setting them in place to soak up magic and Karma, binding ever tighter, to lock in the gains of the heavy gravity training... and to internalize the physical enhancements normally gained through gloves and belts, welding them directly to their bones.

An Endoskeleton. Biomagic, she called it.

All combined, +5 Enhancement to Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution, sacking all their magic items that did the same for the originals, then feeding the Endoskeleton with slaughter. A +5 bonus to the same Stats, with an effective +12 for Might on top of that to reflect the x6 gravity boost.

Four times stronger, more precise, greater endurance. All of the Brothers were now far, far beyond any of their elders in their records. They were capable of a type of open combat that was simply impossible before. They didn't NEED to be stealthy all the time. They could simply be blunt instruments, if they so chose.

They could just go up to their targets, cut through all their guards and minions and traps, and kill them. No need for shirking or stealth or too much cleverness.

Not that they didn't still prefer that style, and certainly wouldn't forget it. There were still things it was best to approach with every single advantage possible.

But he was very, very powerful now, far different than he had been before he had met Sama Rantha.

Sama and Briggs weren't full grown, and couldn't do an Endoskeleton yet, nor could the other Hagchildren. Soon enough it would be their time, and they would be going into the accelerated time zone, and picking up those years, for the last 'three days' had been transformative of many, many people.

Errant's group of fellow Heavenbound had all their arrogance smashed out of them repeatedly dealing with the monstrous attacks in the 100x zone. They'd had to get better fast, or die, and had been tempered faster and harder than they'd believed possible. Everything in this temporal shard wanted to kill them, was coming for them, and there was always fighting. Without vivus, this place would have been piled with hills of corpses from the dead.

That Amazon was so ridiculously strong it was hard to imagine, at least twice as strong as any human he'd ever met. He'd watched her catch an ankylosaur's tail and then club a King saurial with it. With a Girdle of Giant Power, she was rocking a Might of at least 50...

A good reason not to mess with Aethran Amazons, he considered wryly.

He had gone through fortunes, looting gems and jewelry and valuable power comps that didn't weigh too much, burning them into extra Gear to cement his defenses, utility items. Gauntlets, Bracers, Amulets, Belt, Boots... they all had to be Invested by standard means, and they required a lot of goldweight to do so.

The wealth of kings and emperors had sifted through his hands, and blown away as their power was Invested into his Gear.

As Sage Sama said in her unique way, he was now a strong character. There was still a lot of Levels he could take, advancing as a Ten was no easy feat... and there was always Eleven, and that first step on the road to the Eternal.

There had been multiple Legendary Hags in their own little Empire worlds around the pit, but they were irrelevant. As long as the key Obelisks were toppled, the whole Formation was worthless, and the oldest and the most powerful naturally guarded the most essential of the Obelisks.

Fighting a Legendary Hag. If what the young Heavenbound told them was correct, and Hazé had pointed out, they would have loads and loads of Health Qi. Tusk Annie had taken a shot from her of more than a thousand points to the face, and lived through it. The storm crone Zouma's pool must have been even larger... perhaps expanded when she found it difficult to grow her power in other ways?...

He would have to live long enough to hew through all that Health Qi, if he fought them.

He visualized a mental lever in his mind, a Feat called Beyond Law and Chaos. With a half-smile, he flicked it.

BREAK

A NOTE...

Power of Ten Orcs aren't all that.

"Raaaaaarrrrghhhh!"

Blackheart turned his head as a flood of yellow-skinned orcs smashed into the lines nearby, screaming their bloodthirsty little hearts out. The armored, mutated humans there, the Warped, took the charge with near-berserker frenzy, welcoming the fight with deep cries of their own.

Alas, the orc chief smashed into the heavily armored commander of the marauding invaders, there was a bit of discourse with over-sized Axes, and then the orc was chopped in half with impunity. Their chief slain, the morale of the orcs fell like their blood, and with every bit as much energy they'd had charging in, they fled yelping in fear.

That was fine. Blackheart pointed, and as the expected rout of the orcs occurred, the urgobs on the flanks of the marauders piled in with glee, swinging morningstars, flails, and tetsubos with energy and strength, ripping through the lines of humans with their greater strength and mass. The chief of them, a sly throatcutter called Nugglib, closed in on the Warped commander with his two favorite kidney-eaters along, rapidly surrounding the man. One of his flunkies was quickly chopped down, but Nugglib took the loss without a tear, his Axe relieving the Warped of his leg below the knee, then coming down to break his neck as he fell, even if his overweighted armor held.

The last of the goblin serfs ahead of them were chewed up by the elite troops of the enemy, all mutated with pincers, claws, tentacles, spikes, or horns, which they plied to deadly effect. However, those were all personal combat weapons, and not much use when tired and facing a shield wall of pikes. Grim higob soldiers in tight formation, knots of control on the battlefield, held up under the powerful blows of the enemy, spears finding throats out of which odd-colored and strangely reacting blood flowed out. Were there minnows leaping out of that one's jugular?...

To the sides, a howling band of hyen raiders mounted on horse-sized hyenas, their laughing cries eager as they hacked down, smashed into a unit of Warped riders tossing javelins around. The hyen were a strong race, and the jaws of a giant hyena were capable of breaking the necks of even the altered horses of the Warped. Bloodthirsty giggling presaged carnage, and only seeing the effects on those who had indulged kept the hyen from immediately partaking of a feast. Not very sane to begin with, the hyen whose eyes started glowing while they sprouted new appendages, and the hyenas that did the same, all had to be put down.

Their purified corpses made decent hyena fodder, however.

A massive horde of the wretched little dog-faced, scale-bodied kobolds washed up against a long line of Warped men, and shrieking little bodies went flying in several parts as the slaughter commenced. However, the little worm-eaters were small and clever, driving between gaps in the lines of the men, striking low and hard, and soon causing chaos in their lines as they dropped a soldier or two and swarmed over them. Soon, the hundreds of men were fighting kobolds in knots and clusters, separated from their fellows, and heedless of deaths, the kobolds piled in to kill them and be killed energetically.

-Worms must give them courage-, Blackheart thought, and raised his hand.

The bullox riders around him couched their spears and their heavy horned mounts began to rumble into motion.

The goblin serfs had locked the heavy armored unit of elites into place, and the goblins were hanging off their limbs, up on their shoulders banging on their helms, gnawing on their vambraces, and basically being as much nuisance as threat as they tried to find an opening to insert their crude knives and hatchets into.

Still, they did their job perfectly. Blackheart's line of heavy cavalry trampled right through the goblins, and if they couldn't get out of the way in time, that was their own fault. The Warped elites could only stare at the cavalry coming and riding right over their own troops, unable to disengage or brace for the charge.

Steel-tipped horns hooked and threw even as barbed lances punched home, and these painted chosen champions of the Warp Gods went flying under the impact of more than a ton of mount and rider, along with more than a few unlucky goblins in inconvenient positions. Massive hooves crushed down on Warp-forged armor, regrettably almost impossible to salvage and re-use without inviting corruption, and although a few lucky individuals survived, some even keeping their feet, their lines were broken, and their fate sealed.

Blackheart closed in on the mounted leader of the force, yet another mutate clad in impressively embellished and oversized demonic armor, wielding a Dire Axe in the demonic pattern. He offered a challenge with a flourish of his Lance, declaring the scornful spite of his people's gods with a curse upon the other's head, and charged him.

Naturally, he wasn't going to take this fool blow for blow in a formal pass. Sharing the power of divine wrath, Glumgrin swayed out of the side of the enemy's path, veering directly in to face it, trusting in his greater mass and strength to overcome the mount of his foe. The other tried to avoid the swift sidestep, but his bullox was inordinately quick and strong, buoyed by his own prayers, and Blackheart caught him on the turn.

His Lance punched right through the horse's neck as Glumgrin's horns caught it and lifted, throwing off the massive Axe blow aimed at the bullox's head, and drove through to crash into the rider. Massive armor and size and all, the mutate was still smashed off his horse's back by the impact, as Glumgrin bowled the dying mutant horse over and Blackheart let go of his Lance ere he followed it.

He pulled out his own long barbed dire Scimitar, in the very precise barbed pattern of Hell, while Glumgrin pursued the Warped commander savagely, head lowered and trying to gore and trample him beneath thousands of pounds of weight.

With impossible ease for someone in so much armor, the Warped human got to his feet, swinging his Axe and chopping into Glumgrin's neck, splitting the armored barding there and drawing blood. Glumgrin smashed into him in response, but proved unable to lift and throw the man for some reason... which hardly mattered as Blackheart's Scimitar came down once, twice, thrice, splitting the man's fantastic helm and sending him staggering back, but not before a backfist like a battering ram sent Glumgrin staggering and almost falling down.

Blackheart dismounted with speed and ease, giving his opponent no chance to catch his breath. The poison on his Scimitar would already be blinding the freak, despite his supernatural vitality, and the Illrigger surged to the attack.

Instead of taking the descending Axe on his shield, he parried it, turning it just enough to lock it away, and spiked shield and barbed armor screeched and skirled against one another, looking for weakness. Before the Warped could pull back his wailing demon-haunted Axe, Blackheart let go his Scimitar and drove in with his hand to the open and bloody wound in the man's massive helm.

Dark energies poured out of his fingers, the deadly touch of the gods sweeping through the half-blinded invader's brain, directly warring with and consuming the energies that animated him.

Purple-black flames erupted out of the champion's glowing crimson-blue eyes, and he lost his energy. The Warped armor about him creaked and began to settle, locking about him as it lost its animating magic, and Blackheart spat as he pushed the corpse backwards. As stiff as a statue, it fell over flat with a crunch of final impact, the higob pulling out the oversized Axe that had somehow reflexively bit into his side even as the warrior died.

"Now you know how a true chosen of the gods can fight!" the higob sneered, following that with a quick prayer to seal the wound and render it little more than a nuisance. Repairing the breech in his armor would take a little more work, but there was still killing to be done.

Another healing spell took care of the wound on Glumgrin's neck, and he remounted his bullox, surveying the battlefield as the last of the enemy's elites were barreled over and stomped into mush between massive hooves.

His horn-like call garnered their attention, and they finished up their enjoyment of the slow deaths of the invaders with some brutal thrusts and crushing of skulls, riding up quickly to gather around him.

There was another line of marauders swinging around to flank some orcish berserkers going off on more of the enemy, leaving themselves nicely exposed to another charge. The timing would be fine, hitting them as they attempted to sandwich the orcs between two lines. One rear charge deserved another!

The harvest was pretty good, and if he lost two-thirds of those fighting, he didn't much care. The majority of those who died were expendable, and their meat didn't need to be purified to feed their replacements. Thousands were still streaming down their narrow trail through the unnatural waves of stone and floating rock islands, and the silent yet lethal black plains and their ominous white pillars.

Threetusks had gathered up his tribe and clan, and invited in some trolls and ogres to help them out with some additional muscle. The boar riders were chafing to get into a fight, all of them staring at the meat being hauled off the battlefield hungrily.

Behind the battlefield, great pots and cauldrons were ready and waiting for their own dead, and the white fires there for treating the meat of the enemy... which, since they had so much of it, they ended up giving away to those incoming, to get them in the mood after the dangerous trek to the battle here.

Soulhunter's disciplined army of huul rested, waiting for Threetusks to take his chance for meat and gold, buttressed by several hungry hill giants, and the fearsome dire wolf cavalry of the huul. Lines of brow-beaten hyen formed the loose infantry lines, and a great number of the archery corps that would support them.

There had been a force of ogres led by an oni, with many giants in support, who had found themselves facing off against many demons Summoned in to deal with them. The resulting losses had been pretty bad, and so the bigger races now worked in support to the smaller ones, spreading out their power and appetites so the Warped didn't bring in so many dangerous forces to counter their strength.

There were other great tribes of higobs here, their own goblin vassals swelling in behind them, with the urgob strikers supporting, occasionally with a leashed drake, great lizard, or similar behemoth brought along to be expended against the enemy. Blackheart had considered Summoning in aid from the Hells of his gods, but knew that would just mean they'd be facing demons on the field, effectively negating the value of the tactic.

The fighting was done, his troops were heading home with spoils of meat, what metal could be purified and used in the next battle, and the magic of the enemy, to be burned down and turned into something useful by the Shamans. Another elder Shaman had died in battle with the enemy's Sorcerer, but his apprentice was very happy to take his accoutrements and possessions and prove himself in his new position.

It wasn't like the fight to the west.

The higob Illrigger's red eyes narrowed, debating whether he should follow the gouged line of hills around and observe the battles taking place over there again. He closed his eyes and banished the thought.

He did not want to see them win again.

The battles the forces of the plains and hills of the East fought were merciless and bloody. None of them ended without at least two-thirds of the forces of both sides dead, often as high as ninety percent. The Warped were fanatics, with the presence of their gods Right There, and the tribes themselves were united by the words of all their gods, and the call of so much endless meat.

The battles of the west... were nothing like this.

Those walls of dwarven Spears. Those merciless gnome infighters. The terrible precision of the dwarven ballista and crossbow teams. The eruption of hundreds of spells at once from the Elves. The lethal silver rain of their archery. The impossible precision of their pass-through marching, and even cavalry charges through their own ranks. The folding and surging of their lines, drawing in, collapsing, peeling this way and that, scissoring the enemy's advance as if one hand, one mind was drawing and guiding everything.

Their losses were miniscule, and their annihilation of the Warped complete. Any Warped who fled were chased down and eliminated without fail. No word of the tactics or lethality of their enemy was allowed to get back to those coming out of the Rift behind them.

They had hills piled up of the armor and weapons of the dead. Army after army slain by the same cycle of forces...

And the demons, and the Greater Demons...

His breath hitched. Disposed of. It was the only term he could think of to describe it. They would enter the battlefield, and they died. Seeing a burning, Axe-bearing colossus of a demon butchered...!

And his underlings complained about why they hadn't swept into the rich lands of the west and made them their own...

BREAK

A NOTE...

Tolkien had his epic run, but his runners were slooooow.

The Run began fairly quietly, but it got pretty loud, pretty quick.

AA, Briggs, and I tore open the Barrier, letting in normal space/time into this 100x zone and starting the collapse that would literally rip the zone apart and send huge portions of it tumbling back into Dream or Leng.

The smiths had all headed out, nearly a year of labor under their belts for only three days of time outside. They'd all made tremendous contributions, and the joint efforts and sharing of lore had all helped them advance their craft.

Some did look longingly at the wall of the next zone, so far there in the distance, the land flat and seemingly going on forever. Then they thought about running through nine hundred miles of fun, and kept going on the path out of there. There were a couple somewhat slower Zones that they could make it to, and take advantage of time still, although who knew how long they would last...

The magic of this world was gushing out. In one full day of outside Time, it would link up, and forcibly synchronize. At Aru's Great Renewal, the spatial collapse would drive forward under the rays of the sun, returning this area to the proper amount of space here, where so many millennia had passed.

Some of the creatures that were strong enough were going to be left behind. They would first fight one another, then they'd flee into other time zones, trying to get away from the sticky, slow chronality they found themselves in.

Or, they might go wandering around to vent their ire on something else.

Our job was to make it to the next barrier, and if we did it right, get it and this realm to collapse at the same Renewal. The only way to do so was to make a trail through the unstable time/space all around us, running ahead of the wave of synchronization going on behind us, outrunning it, and doing that for nine hundred miles.

Killing everything in our way. The extra vivus would help solidify the connection.

We couldn't fly, as without the Land as an anchor, any such trail we made would just disperse. No, this had to be on foot. We could be followed by fliers, as was appropriate, but us three Forsaken had to be the tip of the spear, driving the nail of reality into this unbalanced place, and in our wake a whole universe would be expanding inside.

We had twenty-four hours until Time synched up, and then to the Great Renewal after that. We actually did not want to give our enemies a lot of time to work with, if they could see this coming... and we knew there were spotters on both sides of the barriers, for just this reason.

Still, there was a lot of ground to cover, and we were going to create a lot of havoc.

Knowing this was coming, both AA and Briggs had been investing very heavily into Lightfoot and making sure their Con was raised. Technically, they didn't have to run this... I could do so, and push or drag them on Disks. That was certainly what we were doing with a number of people, including the North Wind, and my little sisters. Hazé could Linejump or Gemjump and catch up to us without much problem. The dragons were flying overwatch ahead, helping scout the path and alerting us to any problems.

Errant and his Heavenbound were on griffon-back. With Heavenbound buffs, those griffons could fly rings around anything in the sky. They'd spent a lot of virtual months getting a lot tougher alongside their riders, too. The Amazon he was training, Trella, was riding the Valor Dragoness, Kumusa, putting Lance or Bow to use as needed.

The optimal path was naturally AA leading, Briggs following, and me solidifying the temporospatial path they were blazing. AA tore apart what was there, Briggs burned away the energies supporting it, and I made the solid funnel that was going to be the chisel that would break this entire place wide open.

And so, off we went, the boys in the lead, and me trailing a flying wedge of Disks at multiple levels. Behind us, lines of hardened Men, Rockborn, Elves, Gnomes, and even Hyn waited for the flood of retribution and unrest that would be coming behind us.

This was all about movement speed and endurance now. The best overland lightfoot was the Wave-Skating Step, because it ignored terrain modifiers like rough ground, mud, water, and the like.

It didn't ignore vegetation and undergrowth, which is where Barus came in. Druidic magic in Ritual Format could put out a Pass Through Woodlands Growth that could last for hours... and doubled, an entire day. So, we could basically make most of a beeline for the far side, following rivers if they were convenient, crossing mud puddles that had grown into lakes, while constant Detect Locations from Liiss and the Dragons watching above made sure we didn't stray off course.

Base movement of a human is 30. Fast movement as a Class alternative is +10', to 40. The Fleet Feat was increased by Armor Mastery, +5' to base move multiplied by Armor Mastery, which was base 2, increased to 3 by Combat Genius for +15'. Lightfoot is based on spiritual and ki development, which we all had topped out now, +1/3rd of base movement for every three Monk Levels or points of MAB. So, doubled at +10 MAB.

Base 55, doubled to 110 with lightfoot. Add Swift Soul Feat, +5'/Essence to speed when running, 4 Essence invested. Cruising along at 130' movement, which meant 520 feet every six seconds running, and we could sprint to 650 if needed.

It worked out to an overland speed of about sixty miles per hour, which wasn't bad for being on foot.

We all had the Endurance Mastery, and Con scores of at least 30, by hook or by crook. Couple that with using Revitalizing Strike on creatures in passing to eliminate fatigue, and we simply didn't bother to stop.

We didn't get into pitched fights. We were there to run, and only the fastest things in the skies could possibly stop us... and the fastest things in the skies would have taken a look at five dragons up there and griffons flitting about like swallows, and decided they had something better to do.

Even a good ambush predator would have a hard time dealing with us, considering that any jump from us was going to span at least a hundred feet, about as easily as skipping a step. Running into a web simply wasn't going to happen, and by the time a snatch-and-grab ambusher could even sense us, we'd either be right on top of it or past it, so there was nothing.

Under Barus' magic, up there being towed behind by AA as he concentrated, the thickest of thorn patches, clusters of vines, walls of ferns, fields of reeds, and mazes of roots opened up just enough to allow us passage, and we zipped on through. No matter how dense or unreal the vegetation was, we went right through it.

The rest of the broken terrain we simply handled with lightfoot. No matter how broken or wet it was, we could skate over or through it, and cracks and crevasses, unless they spanned over a hundred meters, we could simply jump and skim down and across without a problem, arcing and sliding through the air.

In our wake, we pulled a thread of reality, which would only grow as the weight of the universe came in behind it.

Did I mention the Hellpuppies were pulling up the rear? Oh, that's right; they weren't on Disks, either.

Hellhounds with Monk Levels. They hadn't wasted the last year, either. Mastery of Breath Weapons and Monk Levels had been the big things they learned. Base 50' move, buy +10 of Fast Movement, add +5 of Fleet, Run, and then +4 Swift Soul, and they could cruise at 600, easily able to keep pace with us.

The biggest thing we had to worry about was all the bugs hitting us... but everyone was wearing Bracers of Force Armor at +5, which was basically drawing the equivalent of a suit of chain mail all over us, and the many, many bugs just splatted against us. On the Disks were shields breaking the wind, helms, and bowed heads against the draft, if they didn't have the same.

I would have liked to say the scenery was fantastic and strange and I could ooooh and aaaah about it... but it wasn't. Sure, the trees were freaking huge, and when you're running down a mile-wide river and there's thousand-foot trees rising up to either side, that's certainly impressive. When you're skipping across tree roots that span half an acre, that's nice, too. Seeing spider-webs a half-mile across, witnessing a land wurm measuring two hundred yards in length sidling between them... yes, yes, all quite fantastic. There were rocs up in the sky that veered in to investigate, got three blasts of lightning to the face, and decided that maybe land wurms were better to play with.

There was a whole lot of stuff that got very excited when we blazed through and past them, massed fire from the Disk Train occasionally popping a critter or two for that nice shot of vivus to help the Land out. Some were creatures I didn't know about and had never seen before, and just filed away for reference.

None had much time to do anything about us. When you're traveling two hundred yards in six seconds, and putting out a respectable amount of firepower, first instincts are to flee and/or hunt cover if you are an animal. By the time they peeked out again, we were well past them and vanishing into the distance.

We did pass giants on more than one occasion, wandering among the trees and surprised to see us. They didn't try to chase us more than a few steps before realizing they couldn't catch us, but they did chuck stones after us in irritation at us not stopping to slaughter them. I did avoid them conscientiously, debated satisfying their urge to die, and kept on going.

I noted to Hazé that this was the biggest waste of nine hundred miles of lived-lining in like EVER, and now I could actually take advantage of it! She laughed at me with no sympathy...

Ahead of us, the turbulent wall of 400x normal time loomed ever closer, extending clear across the horizon and up to the sky.

Nine thousand more miles to the Hole past that. Not that we were going there right away. No, this run was to make sure the Land got all the way to this Barrier at Renewal, and started on the process of tearing it down when we broke it open. If we needed to make it to the Hole to bring it down, well, we could do that... but our mission objective was off to the east, such as it was, and the three key Obelisks that had been put up there.

Testing on the other shattered spatial shards had shown that the Land only resolved them slowly if a wake like ours wasn't put in place. There was simply too much distortion, possibly being fueled by outside sources. Putting to vivus a whole lot of stuff sped up the process nicely, however, but unless we punched all the way through to the Hole, wrapping up the space was a slow process.

There was a caveat. There was no telling what was going to happen when we took those Obelisks out, especially if we led a Wake right to them. If they went vivic, and that vivus flowed along the Wake, well, things could break down rather quickly.

If and when that happened, things were going to get very interesting, indeed.

Eighteen hours of skating, fading, jumping, pumping, sliding, gliding, veering, steering, sprinting, sideswiping, dashing, almost crashing, diving, and skidding, our destination was in front of us.

So was an army of about two thousand dragon-blooded lizard-men. Mire blood, too...

It might have been because a very narrow but perceptible line of blue sky started following us on our grand trip, splitting the clouds above us visibly. Given the flatness of the land, it was visible from a great distance away. An hour was plenty of time to muster a response, and this area of torn-up ground formed a natural chokepoint that we had headed right towards.

But you know, that was okay. The dragons saw them way ahead of time, and there was really no reason we had to face them. They and the drakes and dinos they were riding certainly weren't enough to catch us, and we could have gone around them.

But we needed a warm-up, and overpowered lizard-men were definitely one way to get the kinks out of our muscles...

Acid resistance all around, Shamans identified, and the whole shebang started off with five dragons diving down on them, which certainly wasn't good for their morale.

Each dragon had two riders: one lancer, and one ranged. As they made the best lancers and support in this area, all of the lancers, save Kumusa's, were Senior Paladins from assorted Orders, brimming with pride to be chosen as Dragon-riders. As they made the best dual-duty ranged attackers, all the second riders were Elves who were excellent archers and Casters. The combination had been proven repeatedly in combat in the air and ground to be immensely effective, and the trios had gotten a great deal of practice in together.

Estemar and General Moonriver were riding the big male Valor dragon, Ligaii. Estemar had been branching out in many directions, as Powered could, and the amount of support he could dole out was impressive, while he hadn't let his fighting ability slide at all. General Moonriver had put a lot of effort into upgrading the killing power of his archery, above and beyond what he had achieved as a Ten, and a year of slaughter in the 100x zone had certainly helped with that.

Down they came, and it was on.

BREAK

A NOTE...

"And all of you will each get your own little kingdoms, divided up by terrain and type and whatever. Yes, it'll be weird, but this is our world, and we can arrange it as we like!"

===Zones in reality.

Okay, an average lizard-man is a 2 HD scaled humanoid (lizardoid? Okay, bipedal sapient carnivore). They've got a decent bite attack (as in, it would rip off a normal human's face), and weak natural claw attacks (they'd put holes in your hide). They're stronger than humans, but slower afoot, excellent swimmers, and prefer swampy/wet environments... and naturally there were subspecies with magical bloodlines that existed in other terrains.

Historically, large lizard man settlements end up dominated by gator-men, or Kroks, who are a head or two larger, and mass what an ogre does, with about the same strength, and have six to eight HD.

Adding dragon blood thickened their scales, gave them acid resistance for their Mire bloodline, maybe a breath weapon, and made them stronger... much stronger, if they were full half-dragons, with wings and everything.

Maybe they had 2-3 more racial hit dice, being part of a draconic kingdom ruled over by dragons. But in the end, it really didn't matter when they were slammed into by a wave of tricked-out Tens.

Yeah, I had a few of them behind me. Namely, fifty berserkers crazy eager for a fight. The North Wind. One hundred Ironblood axe and shield, bracing fifty elite dwarven spears, fifty elite elven archer/swordsmen, a score of gnomes on the Autoballistae, and twenty hyn infighters and hole-pluggers.

The order of battle was very plain and I had hammered it into them on multiple occasions.

The strong killed the weak. The weak ganged up on the strong. The really strong killed the really strong.

This was naturally completely at odds with what you were supposed to do, going up against foes of equal power for glory and proving you were better.

These foes were here to be slaughtered, not to be dueled. We were here to massacre them, not teabag them.

That meant the big berserkers with individualistic Totems began a cleave-fest on the weakest of the lizardmen, one-shotting them and reaping on to the next. The big Kroks or mutated commanders were double and triple-teamed by the pack-oriented berserkers, and taken down from multiple angles in seconds.

The dwarves crushed forwards in a line, a stalwart wall anyone could retreat behind, a moving juggernaut of punching longspears that let nothing past. Behind them, staying on their Disks, the elves drew endless arrows out of One More Arrow quivers, sparkling with various magical Reserve energies, and nailed them point-blank into the writhing walls of scales in front of them. Spears retracted, scaled bodies flopped and writhed, spears extended, and nailed boots crunched onto their scaled heads. Anything that managed to move past the dwarven spear line found itself instantly attacked on four sides by leaping hyn, and ceased to be a threat within two steps. The archers hardly bothered to glance at them...

My Ironblood kept the flanks of that spear advance clean, and swept up after the rampaging berserkers with unmoving expressions, sweeping past to rescue those held up improbably, finishing anything on the ground, and available to dogpile anything that looked particularly tough.

The North Wind roved and played favorites with the enemy, Casters being free in their loosing of spells, be it fogs to interrupt line of sight, fireballs and lightning bolts to open up lines, or Rays of death at specific Casters to tear them down instantly. A grizzly bear the size of a small elephant was sending lizard-men flying in every direction, Jhon and Talatha were cutting down the toughest commanders in seconds, Grym and Feist were shadow and fire in a driving wedge, leading my little sisters in a wicked, weaving dance of cutting blades, driving Spear, and roaring Hammer.

I was wielding Quaver, an adamantine longsword I'd also made at QL 55, but with a distinct catch. Quaver was +I Main Gauche, which meant she reflected the magic of the other Weapon to which she was attuned... which was Tremble.

This was because Tremble was flying around bestowing Cures on anyone who was too wounded. This was especially true of the Berserkers, who weren't too focused on defense when Raging away like they were. Through Quaver, she could initiate Transfer Wounds if need be, and I could simply heal them up with Healing Edge while on Cleave-trains. The berserkers were the main beneficiaries of this, as zipping Transfer Rays or AoE effects would wipe away the marks of ironwood spears, nasty bites, claw attacks, tail swipes, and hacking stone axes and clubs, and I'd be pummeled by the same... yet when I Supreme Cleave'd my way through a score of shrieking lizard men and buried Quaver in the skull of a Shaman who couldn't believe I could get through them so quickly, 20d8 of healing would inevitably wipe away the Health damage, and open wounds would vanish as fast as they were inflicted on me. Ow! Ahhh. Ow! Ahhh. Ow! Ahhh...

The berserkers were the only ones who weren't all Marked by me... although a few of them had evolved their viewpoints and taken that step into fighting for a greater cause, and helped lead the rest. Nevertheless, they were inside my Warlord Aura, and to a man, they all had Courageous Weapons, Greater Soulbound, and Furious, the last giving them +2/+2 while Raging, which was all they did. +5 To Hit, Damage, AC, and Saves was only a shade below +6, and with Tremble singing overhead and dispensing heals to everyone, their chances of dying were slim to none... which only spurred them to even greater frenzy when killing.

We'd learned that there was indeed a per person limit on Tremble's Cures... one per Valence Level per day. So, five Cures, from Light Wounds to Deadly Wounds/Mass CLW in step... or unlimited Transfers. If I was willing to take the hits, I could take it all.

In mass combat and with Healing Edge? Yeah, I didn't mind at all, and I had the Health to give a massive shot in the fundamentallum to even a dragon. When the big Shield Dragon Corgun, being ridden by Sir Harbrom, saw me take a 100-point six-foot long, scale-peeling and flesh-rending wound from him, and then Healing Edge it away in under six seconds, well, even the dragon was impressed by that... but not enough to stop him from ripping apart the mammoth-sized Behemoth Shadow Rhino that had given it to him back then, while I left a whole lot of wisps of Dire Shadow Rhinos burning behind me through the stampeding umbral crash it was leading...

And yeah, that had freaking hurt...

So, Tremble was taking over very active healing duties, and had a little sister who could borrow her combat powers, so I wasn't lacking for anything.

They outnumbered us better than five to one. Alas, it just gave the lads more bones to chew on.

They lasted about three minutes. The Mass Acid Resistances from the elves basically took care of their breath weapons from Ancestor Dearest, and after that, this bunch of buffed-up and impressive scaled bastards just died. The opening breath weapons of the dragons wrecked their formations; the berserkers got into the middle of them; Briggs, AA, and I blew through their commanders and Casters in a spray of scales and gore, and there were loud complaints that we weren't to do any more Cleave-runs before the main line smacked into the reeling scalies and displayed why you don't mess with an armed force of Geared-up Seven through Tens.

Tremble flitted here and there, healing any large injuries, while the Healers among the Elves dealt with the rest. I could Transfer while fighting and even during downtime, if Healers worked on me together, so I could even reload everyone's Soak as quickly as the Healers could bring me back up, converting Health Healing of the Reserve into the Soak Healing which Transfers could do.

What goldweight there was to salvage was quickly snapped up while the healing was going on, some blood harvested from the true half-dragons for power comps, and after about ten minutes of recovery, everyone mounted their Disks again, and followed after Briggs, AA, and I as we trotted up to the Barrier at a leisurely thirty mph or so.

Nine hundred miles in a day. I was impressed despite myself. In a 100x temporal zone, that amounted to like fifteen minutes Outside. Behind us was an almost straight line of solid reality intruding in, reinforced by incidental vivus, and now anchored by this huge vivic feast of drac-blooded lizard men we were giving it.

"I can feel it growing," murmured Ancientaxe, looking up with his crimson eyes. The clouds above were distorting, a sign of reality readjustment ongoing. It would still take the full day and Renewal to get through the full spatial distortion... but the temporal shifting would precede it.

"Then we don't want to stay here." I pointed ahead of us, and felt the hum of expectation coming from those behind.

From the moment we entered it, we would go from 100x to 400x, and basically had a year to travel thousands of miles to the Obelisk cities and foil whatever the Hags were planning to do.

We'd just proven we could run nine hundred miles in a day. We could definitely do it.

AA grunted, and drove Zeitgeist into the wall of sliding time in front of us. Everyone tensed as his multi-red Helices spun out into the flow of time, grabbed, and began to twist, test, and pull.

In addition to being more energetic, the distortion here was also harder, but AA wasn't the same Void Brother he'd been a virtual year ago. His Helices moved with grace and precision from one point of temporal flow to the next, subtly twisting, distorting, crashing the irregular and naturally imperfect flow of time against itself, aided immeasurably by the weight of Creation streaming down a nine-hundred-mile Wake behind him.

With a grunt that brought a spray of crimson from his nose, he threw his arms wide. His Helices writhed, locked, spirals in gigantic concentric patterns flared across the Barrier, and he tore it open with an awful sound of plastic space and time being rent by applied Eff You.

"Rah!" Briggs brought his Hammer down, and everyone here was a Null or Caster of some sort, even if it was only Soul Magic. His Source Interdiction erupted out like a wave of invisible sunlight, forcing its way in against the power flowing out from within, turning the jagged edges of the breach into a smooth tunnel, pushing and burning away whatever forces were trying to keep it intact.

-UP!- I raised my foot, and all the Nulls in my Ironblood did the same. -DOWN!-

"FUCK YOU!" we all shouted out together, as we all Put Our Foot down.

The Veil blazed with our Interdiction, vivus blew through the dimensions and locked them down tight as adamant, visibly making the Casters twitch at the sensation of massive indomitable spiritual weight crystallizing all around them. The writhing, burning edge of the Barrier trembled and stilled as the Veil solidified into something far, far harder than it was before, and time and space seemed to spin around everyone for a second, before settling into something old and mighty and Proper.

Maximum length of a Forsaken Interdiction was one day. But we'd driven a spatial nail into here from outside, had a nice offering of vivus to make it stand and lock in place, and so that One Day was Real Time, not this unbalanced 100x shit.

Three hundred ninety-six days awaited ahead of us.

The view ahead was hazy with an early night, but we'd already seen a lot of this through the eyes of Void Brothers scouting our path and targets.

It was a fog-shrouded land, with all kinds of terrain. Forests hundreds of thousands of years old, both plant and fungal; blasted hills and desolate moors, improbably steep and high mountains, yawning chasms, howling cold steppes, and sun-scoured deserts. Whole areas swayed with interplanar instability to Dream and Leng, and the nightmares of unclean things lived alongside the bent and twisted descendants of the city and those who had come up from below. Empires warred, mortal creatures died, and timeless things looked on from the shadows and laughed while the sacrifices of millions fueled a vast scheme beyond their knowledge...

And we were going to tear it all down. Mwahahaha!

I pointed. AA took point, Helices extending out, and the most powerful Source and Null in the world followed behind.

The nail in the sky grew longer behind us, a clear path to follow, a Wake of reality, if but the natives were fast enough to follow it. Who knew if any would take up the challenge...

BREAK

A NOTE...

The thing with Encounter Zones is... it becomes a lot easier to optimize against the inhabitants...

In the course of an epic journey to equally epic conflicts with some of the most elite fighting forces imaginable, it is of course necessary to have conflict zones.

Such areas are replete with dramatic scenery, and fell foes that must be overcome on the road to uberness, little smelting trials to make you worthy of the fight at the end, won in the blood and deaths of your comrades and followers.

They were a goddamn pain and we did everything we could to make them as undramatic as freaking possible.

Naturally the Void Brothers had scouted out our path (Voids guide!), so we knew which way to go. That didn't mean the way was easy, because this was basically a 9,000 x 3,000-mile little world, a quarter of a million years old or older, filled with nasty shit vomited up from the Felldeep, or twisted by the influence of both the Hags and Leng.

That didn't mean we avoided fights. On the contrary, we made sure to include at least one fight a day. Naming Karma didn't manufacture itself out of nowhere, and why waste any day you might get stronger? Every single individual here was fully cognizant of how the wonderful baseline magic of Naming Karma and Renewals, of once a day Feats, Masteries, and Levels worked, the restrictions thereof, and how to make use of them. A day without Karma was one day lost on the road of apotheosis, and while that didn't matter as much to the longer-lived races, it left the humans champing at the bit to fight more.

Which was fine. After all, I liked to fight, too. It's just the whole army complained when Briggs, AA, and I did anything other than wipe out the really dangerous things. I was only allowed one Cleaving run to open up the enemy formation, and then my job was to sit aside and Warlord everyone while Tremble kept everyone healed, and Briggs and AA went on idle 'Oh my are they trying to spring a surprise? Splat!' duty, disposing of certain undesirables who would mess up the fun of those behind us.

Even the dragons, those elemental-breathing, flying, hexa-limbed engines of destruction, got in on the whining, once they saw how the three of us would steamroll anything that looked like a proper fight. With two riders each, the dragons were extremely confident of taking on just about anything, and watching us mulch down some terrifying opponents that looked like they might provide the dragons with a good tussle and an ego boost was something they were quick to get snarky about.

Naturally, when there was stuff up in the sky that only they and the knights in the air could do anything about, we didn't hear a peep about sharing. That was okay. They could only look on, depressed, when their enemies zipped into the Stillflight Fields of our continuous Interdiction and went plummeting to the ground. 20d6 ground-saying-hello damage and a few Spears to non-mushed parts later, and the various mutant avians, reptiles, insects, worms, polyps, drakes, dinos, humanoids, plants, swarms, elementals, jinns, undead, flowers, towers, shadows, Radiant Ones, canines, felines, bovines, ursines, rats, bats, and other twats that defied easy description went aaAAaaAA in disbelief at Reality insisting that no, a multi-ton brute with no wings and a poor mass-to-area ratio really could not fly, and King Gravity agreed from up there on his Throne of Interdiction.

The Nulls in our company scrupulously kept their smiles off their faces at such things. But still, everyone enjoyed watching the pageantry of swooping griffons and dragons speeding through the air with improbable agility, setting up one another's charges with ease and experience, Wrath flashing here and there, burning arrows flying out, and multi-ton engines of destruction smashing into other equally impossibly big fliers and doing a claw-claw-claw-claw-bite-wing-wing-tail flurry of ripping destruction and quickly disassociating key body parts.

Despite their egos, the dragons were also team players, and it was repeatedly pounded into them that they couldn't abuse the healing capacity of the group, in case we had to, oh, fight five times in one day, and didn't have time to heal up in between the scalefolk on the ground, the spellcasting Rimmer Cones, the swooping flock of monstrous bats, the charging raptor riders, and the avalanche elementals thundering down the side of the pass we were going through.

"Sooooo... is everyone else smelling what I'm smelling?"

Everyone else pretty much flared their nostrils at the same time.

"Trap." "Trap." "Trap." "Trap." "Sacrifice." "Ambush." "Trap." "Enfilade." "They think we're stupid."...

I sniffed again. "Yep, smells like it. Shall we smirk?"

Smiles teased at the edges of lips as everyone looked over the situation ahead of us.

The canyon was over a mile across, going down into some howling gulf that might or might not have a bottom in this dimension. Certainly the winds coming up out of it smelled/felt/sounded/looked/tasted like something not exactly of the mortal plane, and the non-Forsaken indicated that they felt like something down there was looking up at them, and it was a mite bit eternally hungry-like.

There was a single long arch crossing that gulf, old rock shaped by unhuman hands, big enough for a wagon to cross, but bereft of anything sensible, like, oh, handrails... Gusts of roof-raising wind blew this way and that, and playing in the unholy winds were a whole lot of wind walkers, a-wailing and a-whooping in a-nticipation.

The dragons and griffons, having the best eyesight, pointed out a dozen aether-wendigos leading the worship services to something Man Didn't Want To Know in the howling winds. We waved to them...

The fort and small city behind us were mostly empty of life. The Leng natives and ghouls that had made up the city and the fort respectively had long since ceased to burn vivus, and a disconcertingly blue area of sky had opened above the city, with wan sunlight now filtering through the temporal-dimensional soup down upon us, no need for sunscreen.

Leng ghouls were powerful undead. We'd harvested enough heads for Undead Baneskulls for all the dwarves, gnomes, and Casters by now, with the Tokens going to the elves. When we ran into more of them, they'd swap who got what. Our rest period had been about burning a whole lot of goldweight from the belongings of the natives, and converting it into things that could kill them better.

...Fine, we plundered them thoroughly, just like respectable murderhobos should. Unfortunately, we couldn't trust most of the food, so it was clerical manna-with-spices and some Really Good Apples/Berries/Oranges once again.

The dragons had informed me that the moonbeast in charge of everything tasted like mushroom and chicken pie after I fixed it up for them, and they were looking forwards to more. Not having the I-can-eat-rocks-and-dewdrops-mwahahahaha physiology of a dragon, the rest of us demurred on the dish. More for them!

The constant susurrus of the winds, interspersed with expertly timed wails, howls, groans, and shrieks, would have had quite the deleterious effect on any normal troop. Alas, the combination of fear-immune Heavenbound, Aura of Courage Paladins, and Tremble not having to make fatigue checks for playing morale-boosting Courageous music meant the maddening, terrifying chorus of unholy paeans to forbidden powers was running into the wall of something like an extra +18 bonus to save against fear and horror, and everyone was pretty much ignoring it in favor of some rather transcendental elevator music.

Oh, and Minstrels/Bards can sub their Skill Checks for Perform skills against sonic effects to everyone who can hear their music, which means there's no automatic failure on a 1. Guess who had a base Song check of +34 before other modifiers, and just Took 10, making a no-roll average effort? Additionally, the Cantors and Bards among the dwarves and elves could assist if they so liked, for an additional +2 each, up to +6.

Let's see. Take 10, add 34, add 6, and then tack on 18 for fearlessness, Courage, Courageous, Warlord Bonus, Save buffs...

Hmm. With a 68, all the hordes of Hell could be sitting in front of us, and we'd be humming along to the elevator music, and were trying not to sway along to the melody right now.

Tremble, oh ooooo oh tremble, we come...

"Confirm no flying through that mess?" I inquired.

"You'd need Windbound to cut through that," Errant promptly replied. "We'd be blown all over the place. The Walkers will rip apart any kind of aeromancy put into effect."

The dragons conferred with /Marktells and subtle movements of wings and muscles. "We could reach the other side, but we could not be certain of our course," big Corgun spoke for all of them, proudly, yet admitting they didn't have the strength to overcome it all.

"Which is totally the idea. Likely there's a Blessing or Ritual that's formed to propitiate the wind walkers, probably having to do with sacrificing some slaves to them, in order to cross," Briggs noted. "We'll have to rope it across, the gusts are mostly from below, but there's some nasty crosswinds coming across, I'm betting?" The dragons and griffons confirmed it immediately, looking annoyed that they'd have to claw it across. No hooves, couldn't hoof it, hee...

"Oh noze, we shall have to sacrifice some of our own to cross the dire bridge to nowhere," I said, clasping my cheeks, and more than a few chuckles spread out behind me. "Might we, how horribly, be ambushed as we cross, roped together in single file, so vulnerable as we cross this ageless bridge to the other side, where yet more fell foes await us? I canzt not think of what to do, woe, oh woe is uz."

More of them chuckled.

"Okay, get the wings of the fliers bound tight so they don't get caught by the wind, and get the roping done. Let's make this as hilariously anti-climactic as possible, I trust everyone agrees?"

There was effusive and amused agreement.

March march march, humming softly as the Odes of Heaven calmly fended off the subsonic, quasisonic, psionic, and sensionic waves of fear, horror, terror, despair, apathy, insanity, madness, craziness, mad enlightenment, disenchantment, bleakness, weakness, and overall eminently critic-worthy bad vibes coming from below.

A few criticisms promptly got made into anti-Aberrant specialized stanzas, as the music-makers took the opportunity to collaborate on something new and interesting. Hey, a +2-4 modifier in the future against Old One sonic effects could be useful to someone, why not?...

The smallest folk and elves were hanging grimly onto the Rockborn, who had low centers of gravity and Heavyfoot, and were in about as much danger of being blown off this bridge as if they were walking boulders. The humans largely all had Heavyfoot to one degree or another, more than enough to secure themselves.

The dragons, once their wings were bound, were in no danger, their claws and mass letting them advance with sure-footed, powerful grace. The griffons had all gone lion claws, but their riders all had shared Heavyfoot up, or Wards flicked up to deflect the winds that could come from any direction.

March march march. Wail-howl-moan, look at them all gathering up. Why, there must be thousands of them. What were they saying in Aklo? Dire threats? Devoured souls offered up to which of the Old Ones? How horrible. Really must do something about their invitations to dinner and religious services, how did they expect to recruit new worshippers with such stuff?

March march march, we be a-moving and a-grooving, nobody paying attention to the winds that were definitely trying to shake us, effectively deaf to everything but the Elevator To Heaven music playing in our heads. It really seemed to be pissing off these things, which were anticipating a hearty meal of fear, dread, horror, terror, and other flavorful sesquipedalian synonyms while making offerings to their foul and benighted master...

Hey, why weren't air-based worshippers offering screaming souls to something Up There, instead of Down There?

Everyone looked up at the same time, pursed their lips, and puzzled over that before glancing in ridicule at the thousands of wind walkers and their wendigo masters gathering around us.

Ah, right, non-Euclidean geometry; it is a thing with this set, the Valor dragoness Kumusa pointed out with just the right touch of levity.

Okay, we were all on the bridge, halfway, couldn't get away, and we were not-so-subtly pissing them off. They all did the moany-shrill howl-tornado rumble thing and exploded at us. Less than a hundred yards to reach us, moving pretty fast there, somehow all the winds blowing at us from every direction at the same time without crossing.

March-march-march. -Oh, fine, put your foot down.-

March.

The Stillflight from the spread-out Null Interdictions went off when they were about ten yards away. The equally spaced Casters released their Ward Walls to cover the entire length of the column from those diving from above, angled nicely to deflect certain falling entities off to the sides.

It was impressive seeing that solid wall of elemental spirits and doomed hunger-makers suddenly take a dive all together. The astonishment on their rather indistinct and wispy faces had to be seen to be believed, exaggerated as it was.

BREAK

A NOTE...

The best way to deal with Mythos shit is snark.

For some strange reason, I was absolutely sure it was coincidence, the winds didn't blow them out of the Stillflight area as they fell. Amazingly enough, the winds were all suddenly blowing in and down. These elemental creatures of air, who should have been able to tread the winds like the lawn I didn't have, dropped like stones. Well, soapstone or pumice, maybe, but that just meant the winds had more effect. The semi-corporeal wendigos, materializing to get some food for perpetually empty bellies, found they couldn't go back ethereal, nor ignore He Who Is King gravity anymore.

They smashed into our meteor shelter of Ward Walls, bounced off to the sides with rather shocked shouts of pain, and scrabbled instinctively at the stone with claws of solid air and congealed ice, hanging on in shock and disbelief as the winds dragged them down...

March march march, crossbows held at arms swinging down. Poinkpoinkpoink!

Damn, that +15 (or higher) or so penalty to climbing checks to an unskilled climber from taking damage was truly nasty. Aieeeee... off they went on their pilgrimages.

Zipzipzip, Shards flew out; a few Fire and Lightning Reserves detonated; some breath weapons disdainfully played over the stone and cleaned off the sacrificial offerings to their no doubt delighted master and Patron. Waaat, they didn't know how famously uncaring the Mythos masters were?

Well, far be it from me to withhold a fine instructional moment from such eager and willing students, so zealous and eager in their fanatical devotion. I'm sure they appreciated the enlightenment, judging by the amount of fear, dread, terror, and so forth ad nauseam wafting up from below, which their master would no doubt dearly enjoy, given the amount of effort they'd put into trying to generate some for It.

I strongly admonished everyone not to peep over the side for the umpteenth time, as they didn't really want to see what was down there greeting the eager devotees.

March march march. Hey, the winds died down! Wow, their Master really did approve of this offering of theirs. No doubt It wished It had more such zealous servants serving It so faithfully...

A thin line of blue crept across the sky, and if the shadows down below seemed to pull back a bit, we could only regret that we didn't vivic some of the eager worshippers. Their master might have taken it as trying to steal food from Its mouth, after all. Gotta be polite about this sort of thing, y'know. A little respect for immortal Entities from Beyond keeps a Null healthy and sane, after all...

Humming and Not Looking Down, any vertigo and agoraphobia finding the Muzak Elevator To Heaven just too hard to climb and taking a polite rest off to the side, we marched on across this mile-long arch of warped stone towards the far side.

Now, the Brotherhood had zipped across this thing by Veilwalking, pausing only just long enough to see what was on the other side, and then they were on the way again.

Naturally, it couldn't be more undead to let us use all these nice new Baneskulls and Tokens in proper field tests. Leng natives are kind of rude that way.

No, this was an opposing faction of Aberrants, namely the cerebrovores.

These little brains-on-legs are pesky little fuckers. They can eat the brain of a sentient, then occupy their bodies and animate them, using surface memories to sub for their victims and infiltrate their societies. Naturally, they are completely amoral about such things, considering it their right and privilege to do so, while the rest of us are just walking livestock existing to provide them additional experiences to savor and a new set of meat clothing.

They're also approximately as hard as granite somehow, as well as extremely resistant to most forms of energy, including magic, and so a true pain in the ass for most people to butcher and grind into spell components properly.

The favorite ride of cerebrovores are xenosyms. These creatures bear a disturbing resemblance to Aliens from Da Movies, which only served to reinforce my opinion that Giger was one of those mad artists tapping into the dark dreams of Mythos entities and painting out stuff nobody really wanted to exist.

Cerebrovores didn't have to eat the brains of xenosyms. Nope, symbiotic relationship, they could scuttle in right under their skull-crest, and there was a nice little shielded hollow with cortex access they could plug right into. Lo, now you have some existential psionic brain-eating genius horrors plugged right into phrenic acid-spewing chest-bursting horrors... with extending jaws and claws and nasty tails who could scuttle along walls with blindsight.

Needless to say, these creatures were not something you wanted to fight with a standard line of infantry. Aberrant phrenic shit is just a total pain in the ass to deal with, worse than most magical creatures that at least take a decent amount of time to mature.

I did say most...

Of course, the folks I had fighting with me were anything but a standard line of infantry, and as they say, knowing is half the battle.

Mind control was the last thing I was worried about. Any successful mental attack like that was blindingly obvious in /Marktell, meaning only some of the berserkers were vulnerable, and trying to mind control them in rage was completely impossible, as they had been very careful to learn how to resist such. The rest would just get shouted back to awareness by their buddies, getting somewhere between zero to two hundred or so extra saves against mind control, at most costing them a moment of hesitation, or not even that if I noticed and just bid them attack something other than the creature that had just tried to control them.

Certainly I wouldn't notice such a blindingly obvious intrusion against my Marked, nope, nope...

Topping off their Will saves was my Warlord bonus, enhanced by my Resolve/Courage bonus for a happy +10 extra, and with Soul-boosted Mindwarding saves adding +3-4 more, well, the success rate of such things wasn't going to be too high.

The Forsaken, of course, basically ignored them. Nulls work perfectly fine on piss-I-on-ics.

Acid resistance took care of that horribly acidic xenosym blood, and, well, both silvershine and blueshine slakes rendered the Gear so subjected completely immune to acid. I certainly wouldn't have been so foresighted as to insist that everyone have their Gear treated that way, right? I mean, with all the rotting, corrupting, decaying, molding, rusting, and other effects prevalent in Mythos and Chaos-infested areas. Nope, nope, not me, my 32 Int and 34 Wisdom is Totally Fer Show. I r stoopid, hur hur hur, I iz.

Corgun traipsed up behind me, Briggs, and AA, while some esoteric energies were trying to get past Null, Source, and Void, and basically just fading into nothingness ahead of us. There were a few catapults unleashing their loads, and the Casters behind us were taking turns Featherweighting the big rocks and watching them blow away on the winds into the void beneath us. After a few minutes, there was a crack of some inverse-note thunder from below, the ground trembled, and even the cerebrovores in charge didn't keep sending more offerings of just rocks down to whatever was below us.

The big dragon wasn't exactly comfortable in three overlapping Forsaken auras, but tolerated it out of pure superiority... and knowing we weren't going to attack him. -There is a Queen atop the wall,- he /pointed out helpfully, with that tone he used when wanting to wheedle a good fight away from us.

I'd already seen it, my Mask up now that we were past the canyon and there was no chance of me looking down low and Seeing Something I'd have to lobotomize myself instantly to forget. -Yeah, I'ma throw Briggs at it,- I /replied, ignoring the way the dragon's surprisingly mobile lips fell. -I need you to be a mobile siege ladder, not a combatant here, until we get multiple Disk Stairs raised. The last thing I need is for a dragon to be caught in tight quarters and assaulted from all sides. Xenosyms are armor-rending sons of lungs, and they'll chew up your scales quick. Once we have a foothold, I'll need the dragons to get around to the front and make sure nothing gets in or out. You can cover one another in formation there, and you'll be out of the winds if they try to swarm you.-

-Hmmm.- The dragon ran a few scenarios, I helpfully /supplied him some numbers, his eyes flickered, and he decided that being attacked by a dozen xenosyms ripping away his scales was probably not a good tactical decision... and it may or may not have got him thinking about actually investing in some barding, which the proud dragons had been rather skeptical of acquiring when magic was so sufficient.

Big difference between +4 from Force Armor and potentially +11 from mithral Plate Barding, and if it was well-made, it would look totally badass on him... and it wasn't like they hadn't built up a heap load of goldweight credits for battlespoils.

We weren't dumb enough to actually give the dragons coins for their hoards, of course, as they'd never spend the damn things, and they would be completely impossible to haul along while we were traveling. It was just a mental tally, but they salivated over the shining numbers in Markspace as if they were real.

-I know this isn't your specialty, AA; any problems?- I /inquired, bringing my left hand back, and Tremble slowly slid forth from her scabbard, immediately beginning to chime with the notes to our Song, which Endure patiently picked up with ringing emphasis.

Quaver slid out eagerly, happy to be fighting with her older Sister.

Soul Essence flowed over the Belt at my waist, flared as it turned my hips into extra shoulders and two vaguely spider-like arms coalesced out of a third of the symbols encircling my waist, electrum against the white of my Marks. They crossed, clasped, and Fall and Stand lit up in eager anticipation as I drew them.

Corgun pursed his scaled lips warily. He'd seen me fight with a Sword, and rarely a Sword and Shield. He'd never actually seen me pop the Arakne Arms. Sir Harbrom and Vialeste, the Elven Magebow riding crossbow, were also very interested.

A kite-shaped silver decoration on my waist-length hair dropped down, and sealed itself just below the Mark on my spine, right on the tailbone. Soul Essence flared on the other third of those Belt-Tats, and Compressed mithral extended out in serpentine segments, arcing out and up and over my head.

Sparky flared into existence, and promptly zipped into the widened last segment of what looked like a serpentine Tail that had lit up with the same assortment of multi-hued flames as my two Swords. Three spikes of solid light gathered around the Tail, and Sparky formed a watching eye up there, ready to attack with his own now-considerably buffed energies.

We had an Interdiction up, so Tremble couldn't float free, which meant hack and slash time it was.

-I'll just clean up in the wake of the two of you,- the Void Brother /chuckled, without a bit of shame.

-Errant,- I /called back softly. He traveled over the intervening troops and dragons by bouncing from Ward Wall to Ward Wall, landing weightlessly on Corgun's head, since space was limited. The dragon just rolled an eye at him.

-Go!- and Errant took off. I followed on his heels, AA paced me, and Briggs paced heavily behind, each step planted like a descending stone... or a boulder rolling downhill.

Errant wasn't as fast as I could be, but he was definitely not slow. He stayed just within my Null, so the cavalcade of piss-I-on-them energies coming down faded into nothingness right in front of him, and if they were mind-churningly bright and nauseating to look at, well, that's what Devasight is good for.

It was two hundred yards to the walls. They got off one volley of arrow fire, which rattled against the stones behind us as we kept picking up speed towards those hundred-foot walls of basalt that were bending and twisting as we looked at them.

Errant held out his hands low to the sides, palms up.

AA and I took two steps, and left the ground. Our ki was nicely harmonized, juked into Errant's, and without stopping, he heaved at the same time he jumped, the Philosopher's Might on his forearms burning to life.

An effective Might in the neighborhood of 60, sufficient to lift a main battle tank, hurled us skywards.

He hopped into a handstand at sixty mph, Angel Walk took his momentum away an inch from the ground, he hit, crouched his legs.

Briggs came down perfectly on his soles with both feet, and they kicked off one another with massive force, enough to send Errant's hands crunching into the ground, and Briggs took off like a rocket.

Author's Notes: Giger is of course the name of the artist who inspired the design of the xenomorphs in Aliens, and a master of some really disturbing imagery.

Customizing to a foe, Aliens ain't nearly so dangerous to Tens.

BREAK

A NOTE...

High level people assault castles very differently.

AA and I were still shooting up towards the walls, tossed up like softballs, when Briggs shot right on by; last to jump, first to get there. His broad shoulders rotated Endure back to his right as he came over the edge of the parapet just as the Queen Xeno was looming forward to get a look over the edge.

His right foot hit the ground, anchored him as if he weighed ten tons with Crystal Dragon heavyfoot, and Endure came around.

Well, that's what it looked like, at least, because Endure was on his right side, then it was on his left, and the head of the Queen was spraying out in a burning cloud of acid over everything to his left side. It was literally just an eyeblink. Mixed in that spray was a shattered and pulped cerebrovore the size of a small pig that had just been enlightened on what it meant to be a Hammer Grandmaster first-hand.

Briggs' left foot descended, a step forward and down. His shoulder hit the Queen's headless carcass, sent it flying back off the curved and knurled stone of the walk she was latched onto with her immense lower claws, and away she fell, wheee...

She didn't get much of anywhere before AA and I alighted.

There was a horde of the things on the walk, on the walls, down in the courtyard, and the psionic backlash of their Queen dying was now reverberating through their hivemind. They were at once directionless and going territorially berserk. The cerebrovore in charge dying had also disrupted the telepathic network of the little neo-peabrains, and now they had to work out a new hierarchy of command. Given their Evil nature, exactly how seamless a transition was there going to be with that?

Maybe in the future I could advise them that they might not want to put the commander of both themselves and their rides in the same place. Why it had risked itself out here was another bizarre mystery I'd just chalk up to sheer arrogant overconfidence of someone riding a 15 HD giant xenosym...

Briggs and I saw the subtle motions of the horde dividing between competing factions instantly, picked out the three warrior-class drones being piloted by the second-rank 'vores clamoring for authority on their tele-bands, doubtless making their cases for I Be Da Boss with great urgency while also trying to direct this horde of dispirited and woe-is-us Queen-less xenosyms.

There just might have been a little bit of a multi-tasking problem we took advantage of.

Welp, change of plans. AA went left, I went right, and Briggs dropped down after the Queen. Battleplans surviving first contact and all...

I let go with pretty much everything.

They had carapaces as hard as good steel, which might have impressed me if I wasn't currently wielding a set of +VIII Weapons made of adamant, which meant very, very sharp, i.e. tracing lines of spatial cuts behind them, and also very, very hard.

The normal xenosyms had eight or so hit dice, giving them a high end of about eighty Health, freakishly tough, with DR 5/- or so. Their claws were psionically empowered by the same phrenic forces that allowed their unnatural physiologies to exist, doing improbable amounts of damage, very similar to having ki-boosted weapons and fighting skills. When cut, poked, or getting their carapaces broken, their acidic blood sprayed out under high pressure, powerful enough to eat through steel like cheese, but strangely not so effective on the greasy basalt underneath my feet.

It also sloughed off my Vajra like rainwater, as my Swords began to trace arcs of it in flowering sprays of death.

Quaver and Tremble were Singing with me, transcendent music pounding at the ears of the xenosyms with awful angelic rhythms in Aklo, letting them know that the wrath of the Heavens was upon them in Cerulean words.

Trust me, to the 'syms, the words Definitely had Color.

Intimidate check at +50, swift action if you kill an opponent. -5 to apply it to everyone in sight. Sneak Attack damage applying to all frightened opponents...

Stand slammed into a thrusting jaw hard enough to snap it closed on the extended teeth, cutting them off and spraying acid at me, which I ignored. Sparky turned the Steel Manticore Tail and drove two spikes into its skull, Anathema blowing it apart, and exposing the cerebrove riding it. A third spike punched into the turkey-sized thing, and then two rays of Soul Light hit that spike of force, punched into its innards, and blew the supernaturally tough little brain-eater into spraying pulp.

Sparky really loved the Tail!

Fall's trigger was pulled, the Arm holding it able to rotate unnaturally and keep impossibly steady as it pumped out a steady and endless stream of Force quarrels at whatever was beyond my shoto and convenient as I moved along the walk surrounded by flowering sprays of phosphorescent yellow-green blood, hissing stone, and xenosym carcasses igniting like tinder.

Vivic fire loved to feed phrenics to the Land, too, even if it didn't do any extra damage to them.

Two seconds after our slaughter commenced, Errant had completed his somersault, shifted to full Angel Walk, reduced gravity to one-sixth of normal, leapt after us, shot up a full hundred feet, and landed on the parapet behind AA. Boy had springs!...

Now Grace and Purity came singing out. He flowed off the battlement to the walkway, and Grace hissed through the heads and necks of two xenosyms crawling over the edge there in an arc of decapitating Wrath. He swung onto the flank of Brother Ancientaxe, who was plying Zeitgeist like a reaping scythe of death as fear shot through the screeching, writhing horde of xenosyms on Cerulean words from Reality and Heaven come calling.

Hey, Cutting Life operates off base Sneak Attack damage dice. You mean the Brother got both Cutting Life and ALL his SA dice on these Intimidated Aberrations, too? Man, what dumb Hagchild thought up that combo?

Behind us, the rest of our forces were charging down that OSHA-noncompliant arch and onto the broken ground behind us, led by Corgun and his riders, lining up even as they charged forwards into the breaching formations they needed, under strict finger-wagging from Warlord Sama's Mark-glare of Tyranny.

Corgun reached the proper point first, turned and put his shoulders down, and his tail up into the air.

Pursuing elven Casters cast their spells rat-tat-tat, and a line of Mass Disks winked into existence above him, extending from the end of his tail all the way up to the edge of the parapets above.

His two Riders were the first ones up that slope, running up his broad back, up the extended tail, and onto the Disks.

Flowing up after him were the elven archers, interspersed with Ironblood to block for them, going up his claw, shoulder, back, and tail in a smooth, easy stream.

Sir Harbrom hit the parapet, charged into three xenosyms who had crawled up to block him, and Thunder sounded in a place never meant to hear such purity. Sunlight punched a hole in the clouds above, xenosyms screamed at the touch of it, and shattered carcasses blew back from the ramparts, yay-us!

Vialeste was exactly one step behind him, hopping up for height, two arrows leaving her bow at ninety degrees to one another, striking down and past him on either side.

Lightning gathered up the remnants of Thunder and blew down the sides of the walls, hammering through the hordes coming up the walls as she came down.

Two more archers came up behind her, and everyone moved left, making room for those behind. Two arrows punched through the skulls of smoking 'syms coming over the edge, sending them off the walls as the first Ironblood arrived, shield and axe at the ready. More elven archers danced up the battlements behind and above him as he brought his cerulean-burning Axe down upon a smoking skull, treading sideways to make room as arrows hissed past him and nailed two more wounded 'syms through the head.

Don't watch the bosses, don't watch the bosses, don't watch the bosses, rang through all their heads. Follow the music, watch the paint, keep moving, make way for those behind you...

They very, very much wanted to watch their bosses slaughtering everything, just stand there in awe at the fact any living beings could actually wreck that much carnage on everything before them... before the inevitable, acerbic -Why can't you do the same thing?- /came along to kick them into action once again, and they remembered that they too were some of the deadliest warriors alive, and it was their job to kill!

Errant hit the parapet above about the same time as Briggs hit the ground below. His heavy boots and weightier heavyfoot slammed down on the carapace of the Queen, radiated sideways, and blew out her shell with the impact of his Heavyfoot soles. Soul-soles? Acidic innards blew out in a flat stream in all directions, and xenosyms screamed and smoked under the deluge.

His Tremblesense radiated out like sonar in all directions, locating every clawed foot, every shift of weight, and tensing of talons on the ground, reverberating up into those unnatural bodies pulsing with phrenic energies, and reading them, noting which ones were unnaturally reinforced and strong, painting them into the Marktell for sixty feet around himself.

There, There, and There were in range.

The handle of his Hammer grew to ten feet long, and his arm moved up and down.

From behind him, Endure was now in front of him, along with the head of a 'sym with a 'vore rider that had been reduced to the thickness of a pancake beneath the impact of his Hammer, creating a nice dent in the ground.

The rebound lifted Endure as Briggs took a precise step and pivot, and the Hammer arced up and down, and then another pivot, up and down, and then a rotation.

Whamwhamwham, three 'vores were flattened to spongecakes, the Hammer only seeming to get faster and faster, and he spun in a circle as his ki and motion seemed to pull their heads into a line. He completed a full circle and let go of Endure.

Six heads exploded in passing, and Endure smashed through two more skulls, sent two more careening away, and a warrior drone starting to rise up from their mass got caught right in the eyeless-face, which promptly decided to flatten itself against the 'vore behind it, and that thing decided to take a brain nap against the unflinching and supportive basalt of the wall behind it.

There was a beat, and Endure was back in his gauntleted hand, drumming happily around, covered in steaming acidic gore that had absolutely no effect on either of them. One more beat, and the acid was blown off the Hammer by Briggs' Vajra, and he casually took a step fifteen feet long, and struck out.

Carapaces shattered like brittle glass, and 'syms swarming instinctively to the attack went flying back, their own acidic blood coating their kin.

Beat, step, left. Beat, step, right. Beat, step, left. Beat, step, right, release, flatten another head against a wall sixty feet away, watch the telepathic shudders and loss of control ripple through the horde.

Beat. Left. Three 'syms around him found four arrows each punching through their heads, and the 'vores also impaled there didn't seem to like it too much. Acid fed back, and mount and rider liquified explosively in that classic cranial out-all-the-orifices way.

Four more arrows bracketed him as he took two more steps towards another drone at the entrance to the hive fortress. He pulled his Sun in, and four fireballs went off all around him, flat Disks overlapping in multiple areas, pulling up just shy of him with perfect placement of the AoE effects. Xenosyms screamed and died, and two revealed 'vores were nailed to the ground a second later by unerring arrow fire. A step, wham, and a toss later, they were shatter-splattered, and his unhurried, irrevocable progress continued.

There was a momentous hiss as a couple brood guards, almost as big as the Queen, rose behind the drone. Unlike the drone, their narrower heads didn't allow for a 'vore rider. They had come hurtling up in response to the death of the Queen, and without hesitation, the massive things bounded towards him.

Step left.

A crossbow quarrel, three spikes, and two Rays drove into the side of the head of the one on the left, smashing its head to the side and throwing it off pace as Briggs took another step, and brought Endure back as it overstepped, looming up on him, blocking the other one trying to lunge at him-

A leaping 'sym's head disintegrated, so did the narrow head of the brood guard as its extending jaw bounced off his skinplate, and Endure continued on through into the shoulder joint of the second, shattering it like glass and smashing it away from its course as acid spurted from the broken carapace.

He didn't look back as a shining Shardstroke sliced down from above through the middle of the second's head before it could find its feet, cutting its foreskull and brain right off. Up on the battlements, Errant continued after Ancientaxe, not breaking his own warding of Brother AA's flanks.

Glossary: Phrenic is the psionic equivalent of spell-like abilities. Any creature born with natural psionic powers is phrenic. A creature with psionic talent, but who gets their powers from Class Levels, is just psionic. So, Marvel's X-Men mutants would be considered phrenics (and psionic), but Moondragon, who got her telepathic powers via training, is merely psionic.

BREAK

A NOTE...

Because what goes up, must come down.

There were now two lines of Disks forming steps racing up to the walls. The dragons all waited until they were together, and then used the Amulets of Spell Knowledge they were wearing. The spell within, naturally enough, was Spider Climb.

It was like we planned how to get dragons up over the walls in a no-fly zone, or something.

The dragons swarmed up the side of the basalt walls every bit as quickly as the xenosyms could, poured themselves over the battlements at the top, and triple lightning breaths scythed through the masses on the walls in their arcs of fire. Silver jaws reached out to crackle and crunch a couple 'syms who were too close and too full of themselves.

They went over the walls, and started down them, and suddenly the wall-crawling xenosyms found some really big competition for wall space, and some big-ass tails and wings flinging them down fall-go-splat.

The Valor dragons didn't bother wasting their breath weapons, as the syms were quite resistant to cold damage. They just bit, clawed, buffeted, and smashed while on a vertical plane, not at all put off, and bulldozed a path through shrieking 'syms.

The Torcs their Amulets were hanging from flared repeatedly as mind-control magic went the dragons' way. Betrayed by the psionic displays, the guilty 'vores and their rides were promptly hatracked by archers waiting for those very signs. The dragons were also very curious about how the 'vores were going to taste...

The Rockborn, being the slowest of the troops, arrived last, with one of the Priests with them whipping up a wall of stone in spiral stair format, forming a tight rising stairway to the top of the walls. The dwarves tromped upwards tirelessly, their Spears held tight, their cadence on point with every step, reaching the top at a trot and pouring out onto the battlements in a steady stream.

An elf dropped over the side of the wall, immediately followed by a dozen berserkers. Five feet from the ground, the gentle white cube of a Featherweight Zone went off, and everyone hit the ground softly in the midst of writhing xenosyms.

Berserkers zerked, jumping away as another dozen of them came leaping down with excited cries, hit the ground, springing away as the next wave came down.

Right after them came the dwarves, to set up the relief line behind them. Brawling berserkers found Rockborn Spears driving into the guts of the writhing aliens they were hacking into, and soon the hedge of Spears was up and the dwarves were taking ground, as the berserkers pulled back to get healed.

The scampering dragons made every effort to catch up to AA and Sama as they made their way around the walls in explosions of black carapaces and glowing green blood. Everyone made mental homage to the Casters who'd doled out the Mass Resist Acids for everyone, given how acrid the air was becoming, and as the dwarves and berserkers below followed after Briggs, the rest of the troops secured the walls and battlements.

The griffons and the Hellpoodles were the last ones to come up the Disks, following in the tracks of everyone else. The griffons were annoyed by the Null Interdiction keeping them from flying, and occasionally got to mix it up with a xenosym and further realize why they didn't like not being able to fly. Captains Fido and Shirley stayed alert for any surprises to the flanks, which their slavering jaws and massive crackling claws were more than happy to greet with fire, cold, and lightning.

With Errant keeping his flanks solid, and dragons playing flick-the-wallcrawler below him, Ancientaxe made very good time, his Glaive Zeitgeist happily vivisizing a bunch of angry Aberrants. He naturally didn't give a damn about the 'vores in charge, their psionics finding him less substantial than a ghost, and he picked them out anywhere in his Helix, no matter how hard they hid, painted them into the Mark-Up Display, and the archers hatracked them if they were out of his reach.

Sama reached the far side, and sent three shrieking strokes of Tremble through the door in front of her. Psionic energies shattered shrilly in protest, some things inside started boiling out at her, and she went right in after them.

Quaver and Tremble's ominous notes didn't stop at all, and the sounds of whatever was inside there contributing a stanza to their Song would probably have caused a lot of nightmares if everyone wasn't humming along with Heaven's Elevator Music.

The great drawbridge over the naturally unfathomably deep moat slammed down, severed chains with jagged ends falling down to dangle above the depths. The dragons slithered up over the walls, down the outside of them, along the gatehouse, over out onto the bridge, and across it quickly, facing the new xenosym and 'vore forces coming up from the settlement below.

A good number of the cerebrovores were riding sentients instead of 'syms, including humans, apes, lizardfolk, anthros, orcs, ogres, and even a couple Jotuns, Drakes, and other monsters.

That was totally fine. AA, Errant, and Sama bounced off the walkway, skipped along the walls, leapt out to land lightly on the dragons' backs, bounced again, and Void and Null landed right in front of the walkway just in time to meet the barrage of spells, psionics, and natural abilities from suborned hosts getting tossed at the dragons.

It was an explosive display, very colorful, eyecatching flames and crackling arcs of power, rings of energy, mind-bending auras and waves. When it was all done, and people could open their eyes easily, Sama and AA stood there unharmed, his Helices up and spinning blacks and greys, while Sama just looked annoyed.

The heads of five dragons rose behind them, looking very smug, while Errant just looked amused.

And then all the spells went off from the elves on the walls.

Acres of ground vanished from sight under a lot of fireballs singing with banefire, swallowing every part of the small army out there. Although the cerebrovores riding the skulls of their hosts were mostly unharmed by the magic, the same thing couldn't be said for their host bodies. Overlapping flames tore into them from every direction, burning to ash what was only still living by psionic energy, and suborned throats screamed in irritation at this event happening, and maybe just a little pain from the feedback... which was a new and splendid experience, and so not nearly as off-putting as it should have been.

What it did do is get rid of a whole bunch of xenosyms, and Brother Ancientaxe and Sama were off like launched bullets. Lines of 'syms in the way parted ways like cloven waves, gouts of corrosive blood flew into the air... and no, the stolen bodies weren't immune to the blood, either. Might they possibly be taking the splash effect into account when cleaving? My, they would have had to be pretty damn good to do that...

Glaive, Swords, and Autobows went hunting for 'vores, shearing through skulls and splitting them inside their rides. For those whose rides had died and were extracting themselves from their carriages of charred bone, streaks of spinning Helices and wrathflame divided them, and their wielders kept going.

The dragons, however, were bellowing for attention, and the surviving xenosyms reacted to the stimuli, swarming toward them in a wave of gleaming, writhing black alien bodies.

Dragon tails and wings are incredibly strong and quite heavy. The dragons flowed into a five-part circle of motion while Errant began picking off 'vores here and there who, it just so happened, were not immune to The Light of Heaven, and Purity blazed like a small star as chained Rays of radiant energy speared out and let their thoughts out into The Light.

Massive wings and slamming tails scooped and hurled xenosyms sideways with great energy, lunging jaws grabbed and hurled them like sides of beef. They hiss-wailed strangely as they went hurtling over the side of the moat, were pounded past it with crushing tail-swipes, and swept flying with hurricane-force winds picking them up and sending new offerings down to whatever Thing existed down there in the darkness.

The wind coming up from the moat stopped, too...

Standing up there on a small Ward Wall just above them, Errant ripped Walls of glowing fire right and left, chained bolts of Wrath, and picked out the 'vores for the archers ready on the walls behind him to hatrack with True Seeking Arrows. There were a lot of them, but ten of them were basically dying every breath, stolen skulls transfixed by quintets of arrows as their wounded host bodies staggered and tried to attack before being brought down by uncannily accurate arrow fire.

AA and Sama were moving with appalling speed, zigging and zagging from 'vore to 'vore, narrow lines of destruction exploding in passing, and 'vores were getting to investigate Life's Final Mystery in numbers as the two zipped hither and yon, and split skulls and the squirming things within were flying in their wake.

Cold swallowed a cluster of 'syms, two of them, doing scarcely no damage to them, but the follow-up lightning bolts went through them as if supercharged, blowing many of them apart violently as superconductivity did its thing. Valor and Shield dragons glanced at one another, made little neck shakes that amounted to 'hee hee hee!', and continued flinging 'syms and some overconfident 'vore host bodies over the lip of the moat and down to their doom.

The inner gates groaned slowly open, and Briggs marched out at the head of the infantry corps and the griffons.

He saw me glance at him, his helm opened slightly so I could see his grin, and he patted his chest. Probably three or four pounds of gory remnants of things fell off his Skinplate with a hissing, wet squelching.

Tremble started flashing, hands went up, and the Healing was doled out quickly. There had been some impressive traps and psionic energies used inside, but the Healers were on them, and the White Staff had already brought back two berserkers and a dwarf who'd been reduced to meat paste, a blasted corpse, and nearly bit in half, respectively.

The force outside had a fair amount of carried Gear and jewelry, as bling seemed to be a vanity statement for 'vore host bodies. Nobody protested their odd tastes in style, as we were just going to Invest or Infuse it all, anyways.

"Got some nice spoils. Although some of the shit makes my eyes want to bleed." He picked up a coffer of some slick, greasy pseudo-metal. Some kind of Void-Energized palladium, I thought...

He'd naturally relayed most of his finds to me, a huge chunk of it in weird trade goods bartered for passage, in addition to a lot of coin from tolls cum offerings. What was in the coffer had to be pretty nice, given how warded up and sealed it had been in a corner of their secure storage area.

He popped it open with his thumb, and a cool, pale blue light rose from within. We looked at a pentagrammic star inlaid with a very unique Rune that pulsed with an inherent strength of reality, and disdain for those things not of Creation.

"A Cerulean Seal." I smirked despite myself. "And they didn't throw it into the moat, why?..."

"Probably it made them forget about it. It represents just how much Creation doesn't like them, after all." He snapped it closed, and tossed it over his shoulder.

Barus, who was just walking up, caught it reflexively, startled. "It's made for Druids. Enjoy."

The Druid of the North Wind's eyes lit up, and he bowed shortly before hustling away, Brown ambling like a small hill after him.

A Cerulean Seal was essentially a minor Artifact designed to really piss off Aberrants. It had Greater Bane effects, sensed them nearby, could Turn them like they were undead, trashed their spell resistance, and generally made them feel very unwelcome here in Existence. He'd be able to do some major bullying of Aberrants with the thing. As its origins were Druidic, it only made sense for him to be the bearer of it.

Vivic fires were everywhere, burning merrily. We'd gotten some blood and organs off some of the more magical monsterish hosts, the dragons were trying out different seasonings, frying, boiling, broiling, roasting, and mincing the crunchy cerebrovores left all over the place.

The little sisters trooped up, their trim outfits of deep green, burnt crimson, and bright white and blue with ribbons had some gashes and gouges in them, which Tremble would fix up when she got a minute or three.

"Oh, Sama, was that 'vore surprised when I punched it in the jaw and got all the way up to its brain!" Verd buffed her fist proudly.

"Sooooo irritating," Amber sniffed in contrast. "They run around naked, and only have like three good places to stick them. No style at all." Her scarlet eyes fixed on the town a mile down the hill with interest.

"Everything in that town is ridden by a cerebrovore," I informed her blandly, and her face fell again. How was she supposed to get any Night Rose practice in with Aberrants riding hosts everywhere?

I looked down at Veis, who looked so cute in her outfit, totally out of place here. Of course, it could morph to a ninja body-stocking in a heartbeat, but that hardly meant she was going to give up her loli cuteness if she had a choice.

"Two 'vores!" she chimed up, her twin Kukris flipping up like ready snakes, and just as quickly flipped back down into their scabbards. "They were trying to run away. They look really funny when they run," she added in a stage whisper.

"They do," I agreed, knuckling her head. Ribbons and bows... "We aren't done, of course."

Their eyes joined a bunch of others looking downhill. "We have to purge that?" Verd asked grimly.

"Basically," I agreed. "Really, just get past it, loot, plunder, kill everything in our way... you know, Heaven's Brigands."

They all smirked despite themselves. "Murderhoboing?" Amber cackled despite herself.

"Yeah," I agreed with a lop-sided smile that didn't reach my eyes.

"And that'll wrap up this zone," Briggs contributed with a glance at me.

"What? All this is one zone?" Verd spoke up in alarm.

"Both sides of the bridge, yep," I informed Busty Little Sister.

The girls looked back, thought about everything we'd killed, how much more we had to kill, and pursed their lips.

"So..." Amber drawled, "how many more of these zones do we have to go through?" she asked slowly.

"Twenty?" I asked Briggs, who made a 'thereabouts' shake of his hand. "And of course, the three super-zones around the Obelisks."

"So, this was just light exercise," Veis piped up.

"A casual harvesting of alternative draconic culinary fact-finding components," I answered with a straight face.

"I bet those things would taste really good in 'sym acid blood that's been gently electrified," Verd mused, and went off to volunteer that to the dragons, her sisters darting after her with great interest, coming up with a half-dozen more totally weird and inspired suggestions on the way. Hag Akasha at work...

Briggs smirked after them. "All of you are characters," he supplied helpfully.

"Well, duh." I glanced at Errant at the far edge of the temporary camp, speaking with Estemar as their combined Eyes of Heaven scanned for any sign of intruders incoming. "Freaking predetermined combat zones. So glad the Brothers scouted us right into them."

"I'm more worried about the stuff we are avoiding," Briggs admitted, and I couldn't say I blamed him...

BREAK

A NOTE...

Because it would have been tedious for all of us to go through each fight zone by zone.

Zone 2...

"So, I count two hundred visible super-worm tunnels through this pass..."

Zone 3...

"Um!" Verd pointed at a castle-sized toadstool in the distance. "Is that mushroom moving?"

"Yes."

"Oh." Everyone stared at the landscape covered in a thousand types of fungi, seeming to undulate as if alive, despite the fact there was no wind, only a lot of spores in the air... and some of those winged things in the sky had no heads...

Zone 4...

It was cold, and the wind was howling through the pass ahead of them. Snow blanketed the ground, and the trees were heavy with white snow.

Shirley and Fido sniffed and growled. The dragons nodded agreement.

"Thousands of them," old Corgun murmured, his wings wrapped tight against the nearly gale-force wind.

Everyone looked up at the long, narrow Wake of the Land riding above us. Yeah, no way they didn't know something was coming.

"Should be fun!" Veis chimed, enjoying the climate, and everyone laughed softly...

Zone 5...

"Well, don't these look familiar," murmured Feist, shrugging off his new yeti-hide cloak. There were a lot of them, stacked on Disks as loot, they'd fetch a good price back home. Hazé, busybusybusy with her evacuation duties, would be popping in with an Item Tapestry to take them all off their hands, and distribute them to Sama's goods-hungry burgeoning mercantile empire. There were, after all, far more of them than they needed to make everyone here cold-resistance items, no reason not to send them back to make more of the same... or make a whole lot of money, as long as they could be distributed around the continent.

And, well, Hazé was definitely bouncing around the continent, coming into the 400x zone, getting Renewed, and Gemjumping out to punch through the spatio-temporal hijinks. She'd already done a dozen Teleport Runs, bringing in hundreds of people and colossal amounts of goods through coordination and Marked in key places helping communicate. Popping up and dumping off a few/dozen/scores of prime yeti hides wasn't even an imposition, although most of them simply got dropped in The Camp and were snatched up to make Cold Resistance items for the Ironblood there.

The company was parting with them because the plain in front of them was dotted with large mounds. They were all at least a mile apart, but they stretched straight to the horizon. And there were already dark blurs wriggling out from each of them...

"That's a lot of formians," Briggs observed, side-eying me.

"Is it? Prep for poison, everyone..." I half-grinned.

Zone 6...

Hazé looked behind us, at all the insect mounds littering the plains, the ones underneath that blue line in the sky kind of half-crumpled, with a clear line of white on the ground matching the skies above. She glanced at the stacked-up square Stone Shaped containers, lifting up the plug on one and sniffing.

"Ant honey." Her eyes fell on the containers made from white stone. "Royal?" she asked, pointing.

"Well, their nests didn't need them anymore," Briggs said with a straight face. "We kept a bunch for Healing Potions, and Wand charging..." As a power comp, the magical royal honey meant you didn't have to cast the spells to charge up a Wand, like normal; you just sacked the Honey to it. Given how much we'd recovered, charging up a couple Wands of Cure Serious Wounds made for a nice emergency reserve... and now everyone in the army had at least two doses to drink in event of emergency, too!

"Right." She looked ahead, where the sparse grass of the ant-ridden plains gave way to desert, the sands turned remarkably dark remarkably quickly, but did not venture past this hill line, as if held at bay. "And what's out there?"

"Temple to Apep," Errant replied, silver eyes shining expectantly.

"Sooooo... lots of snakes."

"Especially Fire Snakes!" he agreed enthusiastically.

"Well." There was clear longing in her voice, but she was doing Good Work, and earning no less Karma than him in so doing. "Be about your snake-hunting, I suppose." She sat down on her own Disk, shaking her head, and watched our troops gliding past on Disks, alert and ready to fight. She could rest from the spellcasting she was doing, go through an accelerated Renewal, and be off to another evacuation.

There had been deaths, of course, but with the White Staff, we'd managed to recover most combat deaths, and there were several Clerics among the elves and dwarves who could bring the dead back, as long as we recovered a body. Given how damn tough this troop was, and how much Healing we had available, it was actually really, really hard to perma-kill anyone as long as formations were kept and teamwork was adhered to.

And of course, Hazé could Gemjump in to the rogue stone Errant held, and provide even more help on the revivification side of things. With Tremble able to bring back anyone who died within the last minute, as long as she could reach them, we still hadn't lost anyone permanently, despite some very energetic attempts to make it so...

Zone 7...

"That would be a real bad idea to go in there," Errant mused, accepting the new boots of Fire Snake hide I handed him. He sat down on his own glowing Ward Wall and swapped out his tooled leather ones calmly. The flames that poofed up from them when he put them on were certainly eye-catching enough, although they wouldn't set fire to anything unless he wanted them to.

The desert had rather abruptly given way to a dark and brooding old forest, rising out of the sands over the course of a mere mile, splayed around a winding river that gave some wet to the dry sands.

Apep had one less temple and was pissed at us, no doubt. Those had been some big Fire Snakes, but the Valor dragons had had an absolute heavenly time, freezing the burning neo-cobras and stuffing themselves silly on them. Fido and Shirley had just gone off on them, as such things were fairly common in certain areas of Hell, and rather bemused, the rest of us had just followed their lead as they rampaged around.

"Agreed!" Barus and Verd spoke up together, and Silent Jhon nodded, as did every single damn elf and halvyr there. Nobody wanted to go into that place. Broody and hungry, everyone could feel it.

"Barus, Commune with the Land, not the forest! Find out if this place can be purified. If so, where the heart of the forest is, what we need to do, and we'll alpha-strike it with a strike team, and run everyone through while it's recovering..."

Zone 8...

Horns blew, shrill and high, haunting and soul-chilling. I cocked an ear at them, noted how the eyes of the elf-bloods went wide.

-Hey, old crow, that horn what I think it is?- I /replayed the sound for Noir Rabe, still Way Back There, veeeeeeery slow.

-The Lost Hunt!- he /identified the horn immediately. -Be wa... Ah. Let them entertain you...- he /caught himself in time.

If they were caught in this zone, then pretty much anything dangerous had probably been hunted away. As long as the zone could be crossed during the day, it was probably perfectly safe.

Alas, we had come out in the evening.

"So, who wants to come with me to kill a Fey Hunt?" I asked freely, and the elves all looked very uncertain, while Brother Ancientaxe just looked disdainful, and Briggs and Errant totally expectant. Everyone else just kind of pursed their lips, looked at the stats in Markspace, and wished us well. The dragons were already scouting ahead, no need to turn back and engage with this... unless the Hunt was dumb enough to pick them as prey.

Not that I'd give them the chance...

Zone 9...

Mutated and malformed bodies, parodies of natural animals and bipeds, warped with aspects of other creatures, swollen muscles, gaping jaws and extended claws, and the occasional extra mouth or limb, were everywhere, now burning vivic.

The demigod was sitting atop a mound of burning corpses, His eyes glowing as he regarded Briggs and me.

He looked like an Ancient, with more teeth and claws, dressed in leathers from some beast I'd never seen, His famous Spear, and of course His stag-horned head.

A dozen warped versions of Him were burning away under our feet, and many of the creatures we'd had to kill were mutated versions of His green-fire-eyed Hounds. Of course, there were literally thousands more of the creatures dying throughout this barren place, where even the lichen and moss had been scraped off the stones to feed the hunger of the Gargovian Mother ensconced here.

She had to be limited to this zone, or she would have eaten the world by now.

I kicked the skull of one of the replicants, probably made from eating His corpse after He died. As a demigod, He naturally was Renewed to Hunt again, but if the Mother had been able to make multiple versions of Him, that meant He'd died here multiple times, and had been brought back to hunt again.

"Briggs greets the Elder!" mah Fuzzy said, bowing to the ancient god of the hunt. Lord Herne studied him, His bloody wounds healing quickly, and nodded slowly to this junior, His eyes flicking to the Hammer beating softly in Briggs' hands. His eyes turned to me, and Tremble zipping around in the distance, dispensing rays of gentle white light... the same rays of light that had kept Him alive during this very long and bloody fight with a dozen of His doppelgangers.

By transferring his injuries to me.

He gestured us both closer, and, totally unafraid, we stepped up within arm's reach. His hand reached out, and dark claws bit into Briggs' shoulder (he let it). The bloody scar flashed with harsh red light, healing up even as He carved it. Briggs didn't even grunt, as he had half-a-dozen deeper wounds on him right now.

He did the same to me, and when the scar flashed and closed, so did twenty-two different faded claw and bite wounds all over me, which He didn't fail to notice. I'm afraid I quirked a smile at him, and He exhaled long and slow as he looked over the two of us, and nodded.

"Girls, clean Him up and make sure He takes the rest of the night off." I snapped my fingers and pointed.

There was a fire in the eyes of all three of my little sisters as they came forwards, and there was no way the demigod was going to miss that light. The three of them pulled Him to His feet, and there was a thick set of cover not so far away...

Briggs watched them go, not knowing whether to laugh or not. "So... her first time will be with a demigod?"

"They are so envious of her," I chortled, leaning over against him as if he were a tree.

"And you aren't indulging because-?" he asked.

"Mah Fuzzy is way more dangerous than some ancient demigod who can't even kill a bunch of Gargovian dupes of Himself. Exactly why would I prefer Him over you?" I gave the rock of his ribs an elbow, and he politely grunted... and lengthened it into a groan.

"I so need puberty to start and get done with like yesterday!" he growled, reaching a big hand out to drape around my shoulders and drag me in. He smelled my hair, all nice and sweet with vivisizing gargovian guts. "Aren't you as old as Veis?"

"I'll turn mine on when yours turns on," I patted his hand. "It keeps them happy thinking they are all bigger than me because they went first."

He sniffed the air, thick with primal vitality and ancient energies, stirred up by the presence of the Hunter. "We're going to have to declare a night off after this, and break out the beer. The elves are getting restless..."

I laughed deep in my throat, and he shivered. "Come on, let's give that Mother the final treatment. You ever kill her in game?"

"Yeah, made a couple runs. She probably won't look anything like that, though..." He hefted Endure, I drew Quaver back out, and we started in the direction that Fido and Shirley were indicating.

The rest of the troops fell in behind, and didn't look back to where the girls and the demigod had vanished to...

Author's Notes: Small zones range in size from 50 x 150 miles to 100 x 300 miles. Major zones are 300 x 900 miles.

Zone 2 – I was channeling Dune, but not so big. There are spots in the Felldeep where lots and lots of purple worms gather...

Zone 3 – The killer fungi zones in Vault of the Drow, only worse.

Zone 4 – Last module of Rise of the Runelords, there's a yeti camp. Yeti can be verrrry tough in Pathfinder...

Zone 5 – I was thinking the bugs from Starship Troopers as I wrote this...

Zone 6 – Big Fire Snakes are the Cobras from Gods of Egypt. You can't ride the little ones. Totally overpowered breath weapons from the little ones.

Zone 7 – This is based on an old Dungeon Magazine adventure where if you don't purify the heart of the forest in time, it animates the WHOLE FOREST to kill you.

Zone 8 – I saw the stats for the members of the Wild Hunt from Paizo and went, aww, I just got to do this...

Zone 9 – And if you run into a Poser Hunt, you should run into the real thing. 15 HD demigod, kill him or die if you're the target of his hunt. It's okay, He just rises anew to hunt the next day, and holds no grudges.

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Because slogging through encounter zones that are supposed to tire you out and use up all your resources is a thing.

Oh, wait, they're making us richer and stronger? Never mind. Bring on the zones!

Remember that taking a few minutes to give a good review helps me out, even if you don't want to support me on ! I'd dearly like to get my rating up over 4.5 for the people who stuck with the story, instead of those who read the first few chapters without paying attention to the synopsis, keywords, and glossary, and wonder why they can't understand anything...

Veis was looking a lot older in the eyes as she and the girls stumbled into the tent in the morning, and they all promptly fell asleep together without saying anything.

Briggs kicked back on the side of a hill, the vivic fires eating away at the remnants of the Gargovian nest also helping to make the sky blue and faintly sunny, a nice day. "He must have popped away at dawn," he observed to me.

"He did. And without dupes of Him here, shouldn't be coming back." There'd been literally hundreds of dupes of Him to kill, although they happily exhibited no teamwork, and didn't have the Health Qi of an actual demigod. Just big, strong, lots of claws, and inordinately tough. Wolfpack them and they went down pretty easy. "She probably made a dupe of Him every time He died, and He was drawn back here by them after every real hunt, until the true Dusk in the outside came to steal Him away for a Hunt. Really, getting brought back over and over to kill gargovian dupes of Himself and his dogs, for who knows how many times?"

"Well, not evolving and adapting to the times is a bitch. Hopefully His Favored Enemy Slayer/Aberrations is up nicely, or at least he got Foe Hunter out of all this. If not, eh." He glanced at the scar on his shoulder. "So, what do you think this symbol does?"

"Well, according to Noir Rabe, it's the Mark of Herne, which makes us the equivalent of people who have bested the Lord of the Wild Hunt in battle. He sounded a bit envious."

"Huh." Briggs rubbed his nose. "Well, I suppose having a modifier on Diplomacy and Intimidate checks against Fey can't be all that bad. He doesn't have any real enemies, as I understand it..."

"No, he's older than both Courts, and beyond their control, a servant of Nature Herself. The Fey Hunt is a smarmy attempt to imitate Him. He could probably tell we'd wiped one of them." I smirked, and he laughed low and roughly. Damn, he really did have to hurry his hormones along...

"How do you think the Hags trapped a Gargovian in here for so long? Seriously, giving a Gargovian that much time, it should have eaten the planet a long time ago."

"I imagine that it has to do with the Formation they started, and the Mother being pinned by its influence. It just ran out of biomass and has just been sitting there cannibalizing its children, slowly starving unless idiots come in to be eaten. Herne must have somehow come in to hunt one of her kids, and been trapped and killed many, many times over."

"Yeah, even a classless demigod has fifteen Outsider Hit Dice. Even with no gear, those things were pretty mean." They could have been a right terror if every one of them wasn't basically fighting at least six Sevens or higher at once, and simply wasn't allowed to kill one of them before it died.

The Mother had definitely gotten addicted to demigod flesh. It had morphed into a canine tauren, three dog heads with burning green eyes and stag horns, furred femalish torso, six legs, huge clawed hands, moving with divine speed and energy.

Oh, and twenty feet tall.

Alas, its instincts and constant spewing out of more Gargovians meant it ended up fighting in a birthing chamber, without the area to run around with its vast speed and really be a threat to our forces. We'd simply plugged up the main way out with a lot of shining steel, and then Bane of Legends, Bane/Aberrants, Enmity/the Unnatural, and Greater Soulbound combined for +X on our Weapons as we carved into the planet-eating spawn-spewing thing.

Had a lot of Health Qi, did a lot of damage. It was really, really shocked when all three of us straight up shanked it dead, and it had real problems dealing with us.

Well, me. I was the one with the Shield blocking for the boys, Transferring wounds with Tremble and just concentrating on hitting it as many times as possible for Healing Edge to do its thing. Stand intercepted dozens of attacks that could have really done a number on us, bearing up under the impacts in his new Indestructible QL 50 Adamantine home.

Bane of Legends wasn't a Slaughter effect, it used a different type of Rune. It was basically an evener, a quintessential fight of the little guy against the powerful, there to compensate for enormous, unnatural power. As such, it fit into Arsenal, and now a lot of the Ironblood had the chance to add it to their Weapons... which might trigger a fatal surprise if something that thought itself obscenely strong and them not at all dangerous went reaping into them...

Good lads. Most of them were just sitting down and doing casual maintenance work from their kits right now.

AA was off taking a look at the Obelisk in this zone. Scholarly interest? Brothers found it almost impossible to relax in normal areas, let alone in some place as humming with distorted magic and reality as this.

We didn't have to worry about residual taint. The Mother would only allow its spawn to escape if it had sufficient reserves, at which point it would have evolved into a Great Mother and would send out Mothers of its own, which would grow in size, and then come back for a big battle Royale, turning into a Grand Mother which could then literally start the process of eating everything alive on the planet.

Yeah, Gargovians were not shit to mess around with. Happily, this batch had been mostly predictable, as the only biomass it had had for a long time was Herne and His hounds, which basically supplanted the other, lesser bioforms it could have used. So, hounds, dog-demigods, and demigods, all with that wonderful Gargovian touch, had formed ninety percent plus of what we fought.

Zone 10...

Great brutes roared hard enough to shake the leaves of the trees.

The earth trembled from the mass of great bodies thumping across it.

Boulders crashed through the trees, exploding against mighty trunks and bouncing and plowing holes along the crowd.

Blood flowed in great gouts and streams, staining the ground with streams of it, flowing out of massive bodies.

It was Jotun time!

The most numerous of our attackers were ogres, coming in their hundreds, with the hill giants behind them looming over them. Driving those twelve-foot brutes on were their thirty-foot tall mutant cousins, the mountain giants, using whole stripped trees as crude clubs, with their Jotunblooded ruler looking like he was made out of black gneiss or something in charge.

You'd think a bombardment of that many thrown rocks would be dangerous, but since we knew they were coming and were there, well, all it meant was a lot of elves had to stop the rocks in midflight and send them falling to the ground in front of the befuddled giants, while Rockborn longspears held an uncompromising line and the command crew lit into them, with Ancientaxe proving devastatingly dangerous against things the heart of his Order was made to kill...

Lots of Gauntlets and Girdles material to salvage from here, as well, and yo, Jotuns have, by hook or crook, decent loot...

Zone 11...

We watched the hunting pack of Tyrant Raptors, literally a dozen of the great carnivores hunting together, threading their way between massive herds of sauropods grazing along the riverbanks, and making their way in our direction. They spread vestigial black wings, and black acid was dripping from their jaws as they hurtled our way.

Bane to Dragons swiftly began to arise on the Weapons around us... because those sauropods were also turning to look our way, and they had vestigial wings, too!

Draconic brontosaurs and Tyrants, and a half-dozen other types of dinos, and that wasn't even counting the magical ones, like the Thunder Lizards.

The mood of the five dragons in the sky was very, very bad. This was why they killed all evil dragons as soon as they could, because the fuckers would mate with anything and totally infiltrate the ecology with dragon-spawn.

Briggs pointed silently, and a great black-scaled sauropod two miles away turned to look at us. The wings it unfolded weren't vestigial, and were wide enough to basically span a football field. Nor did it have the flat teeth of a plant-eater, as it bellowed out a challenge that had every single mutant dino in the land raising its head and contributing to with lungpower that was definitely on the excessive side.

Ancientaxe wasn't off-put, he just sighed some. "That's a lot of meat to hack," he murmured, with the air of someone who'd seen this sort of thing before.

We were definitely, definitely going to be able to add to the Dragon Baneskulls from this area, in addition to the ones being harvested off the Warp Dragons...

This zone... might take a while just from the sheer amount of meat we were going to have to cut through. No wonder the border with the giants was strewn with so many bones...

Zone 12...

There were massive reptilian bodies playing out there in the waters of the lake, which was wide enough that we couldn't see across it. That wasn't a terrain problem, as the three of us could all run across water, towing Disks with the troops behind us.

It was that there was a whole lot of plesiosaurs and wako in the way out there, a considerable number of which had dark scales and vestigial wings.

Up above in the sky, Wrath was flashing, frost and lightning were flaring, and pteradons, pterosaurs, and similar flying wedge-headed dinos were tumbling from the sky, with many a large scaled body in the waters below surging to the sites of their splashdowns.

Damn, there were a lot of them.

It wasn't that we couldn't outrun them, either... we certainly could, but sound traveled faster than we did, and if they warned the ones in our way, well, we were stuck in an open area with unlimited attacks from below possible. Not the most advisable way of doing things.

This lake spanned almost the entire width of this reality shard. We'd have to go through at least five other zones to get around it.

We could punch past the dracosaurs here, sure, and outrun them... but they'd roar warnings to their kind ahead of us, they were smart enough to do that, and we'd find another wall of sneak-attackers ahead, possibly with some deep-water dwellers of size, to make things difficult.

But that was fine. It was still better than going through the additional zones to the sides, at least one of which was thick with incorporeal undead.

There were a lot of sentient eyes watching us, ready for us when we made a move. That meant they weren't watching up above, and so when the Shield Dragons came swooping down to unload some lightning on their acid-resistant, lightning-vulnerable hides, their surprise was great, reactions instantaneous. They dove and fled, opening up a path... and Ancientaxe led us right out there to face it, Glaive at the ready.

Wrath manifesting as lightning added to the chaos, as did a few spells, giving the massive bodies underwater more shocking surprises, sending more than a few heaving and convulsing out of the water in their death throes.

We surged past at sixty mph, skimming across the top of the waters, a wedge of Disks behind me, the Wake of Reality driving us forward as we escaped the shoreline carnage and headed out into the deeper blue of the lake.

Behind us, frustrated roars rose, signaling those deeper in the waters, and above us, griffons and dragons flew grimly ready, swooping energetically ahead to look for surprises and help us avoid them. We chewed up the waves and spray as we surged forward for the opposite shore, fifty miles away.

Beneath us, dark things in the waters began to stir into motion...

Author's Note: Tauren is a term for any creature that is half-man/biped, half-animal, like a centaur or minotaur. An ogretaur has an ogre upper body and bear lower body, for example.

Anthropomorphic is a variety of tauren where animals are 'evolved' into humanoid form, so your cat-folk, dog-folk, rat-folk, etc. Many of the wild, feral races are anthros, like the hyen (hyena folk, i.e. gnolls) and the huul (savage wolf-folk). Orcs can be seen as pig-folk, there's frog and toad folk out there (grippli and bullywugs) and so on, with croc-folk, lizard men, and serpent folk also prominent.

Sauropods are the big plant eating dinosaurs, like brontosaurs.

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wdc543 Wrote:

Hello I'd would like to know the specifications of the Shards spell please.

If you play D&D, Shards is a slightly changed version of the 1st level magic missile spell! 1 Shard at 1, +1/2 levels, max of 5 at Caster Level 9.

Instead of 2-5 damage per missile, it does 1-6. It is short range, auto-hit by default, and does force damage.

If you change it to requiring a touch attack roll, you get +1 missile.

If you require a full round to cast it (i.e. can't move), you get +1 missile.

If you have Shards Mastery, that is the equivalent of the Force Missile Mage PrC, and you can get up to +2 extra Missiles per Casting.

If you Raise the Spell and cast it from a higher slot, the number of missiles you can get increases.

If you use the Delimit Metamagic Feat, the adjustment in Valence is +1, and you can potentially get five more missiles, if your Caster Level is high enough.

If you have Spell Thesis/Shards, all Metamagicks for your Shards have their costs reduced by 1. If you start stacking them on your Shards, they get very powerful, indeed...

Shards is the spell that allowed mages to work out the rules of magic, Stats, and Skills!

AA hit the side of the cliff with a running vertical, and Briggs and I zipped right into his wake and did the same, momentum redirected with physics-ignoring aplomb. No full Interdiction meant we could wiggle our noses at King Gravity, too... we just had to keep the dimensions strong, not Da King, as we ran.

The roars of frustration behind us shook the stones, and a lot of hissing black liquid was spewed in our general direction, to a complete lack of effect. The Disks turned vertical, but the riders were perfectly aware of their Retention ability, and remained glued to the Disks, personal gravity switching with them, heading right up the side of the cliff after me, more than a few making rude noises at the reptiles following us.

Oh, and the barrage of One More Arrows didn't stop, no need to conserve ammunition. The beasts trying to corral us certainly appreciated the fact.

They'd herded us nicely, tried to ambush us from below several times, but in the end, we moved too fast and knew they were coming. They'd sent us into this harbor here, cliffs a couple hundred feet tall around, crowded with seabirds, and thought they had us trapped.

Yeah, running up the cliff had certainly annoyed them.

It also meant we had a quicker way to the far side of the island than they did... except for this antediluvian Shrine to some nasty shit in front of us, and an Obelisk looming above the trees there. What do you know?

No doubt there was something big and horrible there, and the sky grew rapidly and unnaturally dark as we loped unerringly across the island towards it, our fliers swooping down to join us grimly...

Endure came down on the dark altar, and it exploded into dark shards and rubble in all directions. Vivic flames blasted everywhere as they fed on the unholy energies instilled into the thing, and then Briggs expressed his displeasure at the event by punting the rest of it over the edge of the cliff beyond.

Various aggrieved roars spread out from the dracosaurs below, and Briggs spit in their general direction.

A lot of the company was down, shredded by tentacle-waving dinosaurs of impossible strength and speed for their size, physiologies completely warped in horrid and unnatural ways, obviously products of other planes, and horrifically strong.

Our poor lads had to delay them while Briggs, AA, and I cut them down, using shield walls as best they could and digging in with heavyfoot to restrict their movements. It was really hard for the troops to even make contact with them, and if they did, the wounds healed very quickly unless they had a Blooding Weapon.

Tremble was zipping everywhere, doling out the healing. She'd saved at least twenty people from death in this fight, and we were still going to use up the White Staff and all the spells of the clerics we had with us to bring the rest back... and then again come Renewal.

AA was making sure nothing of the creatures survived, Briggs was grinding stuff to dust, and I was inspecting everyone for contagions... and finding some, much to my displeasure. That meant more magic from the Paladins and Priests to burn the unnatural stuff away...

The Obelisk was down there in the water, shattered on the many rocks and not making anyone happy. Briggs had been very enthusiastic when he was bashing it over...

Estemar flopped down next to Briggs, who was now seated on the moldering stone in front of the former altar dais. He had pried the stones beneath the altar up with the help of the dwarves, and the loot hoarded below was being passed out to those who would be burning it up. It was a king's ransom, centuries of offerings, and in eight hours, it would all be dust and mist.

"So... that was a Legendary Template, the Pseudonatural?" the prince asked, his expression wan. He'd used up all his disease-curing on others... and all his basic healing for himself and the dragon he rode.

One! One of the unnatural things had nearly killed a Valor Dragon over twice its size. The blow to the egos of the dragons at how they would have been thrashed without their riders and healers keeping them alive had them sulking yet.

"Yeah." Briggs' pale violet eyes were flat and unhappy. Killing the unnatural raptors, things Summoned in from Outside Creation, had caused more injuries than when they'd chewed their way through hundreds of Jotuns. Without him, AA, Errant, and Sama here, this whole troop, probably the most elite band of soldiers that had ever existed on this world, would have been wiped.

"Please tell me why they were so dangerous," Estemar breathed out, his hands clasped before him.

"The crux of it comes down to advanced Insight bonuses," Briggs told him grimly. "In short, they are looking ahead through time to see what you are doing, so they know where to strike, how to strike, how to dodge, exactly as if they knew where and how you were going to move. The rest is just an unnatural anatomy tougher than anything real should be."

"Insight bonuses, looking through time." Estemar looked over Briggs. "I notice you were not that injured..."

"No, I wasn't, nor the other three of us. Insight bonuses do not work on us."

"Oh?" Estemar's eyes widened. He considered his words. "If Sir Errant can do this, it's not a Forsaken effect... Diamond Vajra?" he asked quickly.

Briggs nodded. "It's a powerful Feat working off the Vajra. There are two versions of it, both related to the Great Alignments. The first, and most infamous, is Beyond Good and Evil. The second, which we are using, is Beyond Law and Chaos.

"The first makes you immune to holy and unholy magical effects, and Divine power, basically denying the gods and the judgement of the Alignments as having any relevance. For instance, you wouldn't be able to Smite someone Beyond Good and Evil."

Estemar pursed his lips, eyes narrowed. "That sounds quite powerful..."

"It is, but you can only take the Feat if you're of the Grey." His holo flicked up with the nine-point graph of the Alignments, streaked across the middle horizontal layer. "Supposedly there's an Epic version which allows someone strong enough to transcend Alignments and be immune to all Alignment-based effects, but that's for Eternals.

"Beyond Law and Chaos means severing yourself from Fate and Luck. In other words, you're a sentient being and claiming control of your own destiny from the uncaring forces of predestination and chance. The net effect is immunity to most Curses, karmic backlash, prophecy... and Insight and Luck bonuses used against you."

"Subtle, but powerful in its own way," Estemar reasoned, thinking that over. "So, the effects of what you do cannot be predicted in prophecy?"

"Correct. We can really muck up Fate, and it doesn't matter how lucky someone is, we don't care." Briggs half-smiled. "Which is why these things died to us so fast. They couldn't see what we were going to do, or how and when to hit us back. Just meat on the plate, hard-hitting but not that bad to deal with."

Estemar heaved a sigh. "Is there a defense for us against such 'insight' effects?"

"Yes." The young Paladin immediately brightened. "It's a psionic Feat, but I'm pretty sure you can replicate it with Soul Magic. It's called Unstable Mind. It basically wraps you inside a field of aggravated probability. Someone trying to use Insight against you basically ends up seeing all futures instead of just the best one, effectively giving them no information at all via probability overload."

"Master Briggs, I think that everyone who experienced combat here should love to shut down such a hideously powerful advantage that such entities have," Estemar told him.

Briggs grunted agreement. "Sama will broadcast the details to everyone. Something like this isn't something we want to see again, either." He saw her golden hair flicker nearby in acknowledgement.

"You look like you want to go hit something again, sir," Estemar noted.

Briggs turned around, got up, and walked over to the edge of the cliff overlooking the rocky waters down below, now swarming with dozens of large scaled bodies moaning around their fallen Obelisk, who all started to scream and roar at him when they saw his figure there far above them.

"Yeah," he said thoughtfully, and his knuckles cracked like breaking rocks as Errant strolled over next to him, looking down. "Yeah, I do want to go hit somethings."

"You know, I never do like being chased," Sir Errant also mused aloud. Behind them, Estemar found himself smiling softly, and sighing. Brutal, sustainable power. He was not there, not yet...

A little distance away, both Ancientaxe and Sama also smiled at the same time.

AA removed the head of a plesiosaur with a massive arc of Zeitgeist, Briggs brought Endure down onto the skull of a dragon turtle and shattered it, and Quaver opened up a gash in a mosasaur a dozen feet long and two feet deep as they swept by. Wrath and arrows made for burning hatracks, and the group swept ashore, finally off of the lake.

They hadn't been followed from the island. The amount of blood they'd harvested from the drac-bloods that hadn't wised up and finally run away had made a lot of Healing Potions, many of which were condensed down into Cure Wands and passed out to the group for further healing reserves. That whole harbor had been stained a very dark red... until it was all set to vivus, and then it became unnaturally clear, contrasting nicely with the dark waters surrounding the island.

The blood, hearts, and basic fundamentallums of the dracs were nice acid resistance power comps, too. It wasn't like they didn't have a whole lot of blood to contribute, so nice they were so big...

Not-A-Zone 13...

Massive fists beat on chest, a roar of challenge to buttress it all. The great silverback letting out the challenge also happened to be twenty feet tall on all fours.

The rain forest was alive with apes, some like gorillas, some like chimps, and some like baboons. They were on all sides of us, sending up a screeching, shrieking, yowling racket that was really rather ear-splitting.

Of course, it all amounted to 'go away!' 'we kill!' 'our land!' 'fightfight!' 'youbad!'

Nobody was really all that perturbed. The Elevator Music to Heaven was on the job, and the first volley of things they threw at us magically went right back and bopped the throwers on the head. So did the second, and they didn't try the third.

I walked out from the orderly ranks of those standing on Disks, the unnaturalness of the show just one of the things that was spooking all these apes. Of course, all the metal and bright shiny colors didn't hurt, and the fact we hadn't attacked anyone until now certainly didn't hurt.

Buuuut... these fellows had no demonic or unworldly aura. As a matter of fact, there wasn't even an Obelisk in this territory. It wasn't so much a Zone defined by an Obelisk as a no-Zone where the Hags didn't dare to put one up.

"You know," I said, my voice ringing with ki, and cute little whiskers on my cheeks and black on by dose, "there are better ways to greet travelers through your lands that mean you no harm."

The cacophony of sounds cut off like a knife. They had all heard me, and more pointedly, understood me perfectly. Now they were looking at me in confusion, then one another, and then they all lit up with hoots and howls, naturally all of them questions and challenges and curses and what-not.

"I believe your elder wishes to speak."

Once again, the hooting all cut off like a knife. The massive silverback, with protruding tusks a gorilla didn't normally have, huffed like a steam vent going forward, his eyes fixed on me suspiciously, but he was confident and powerful, looming up right in front of me, and looking down from his naturally superior position.

He also gave the hairy eyeball to Fido and Shirley standing there, tongues lolling and freezing/burning drool dripping down with corresponding hisses. They were obviously magical animals, but they didn't seem at all upset or wary of him at all.

He was about to say something when I stepped up with one foot, mist congealed, and I walked up in mid-air in front of him, making his eyes go wide as I stepped up in the air to right before his face.

Author's Notes:

Zone 12 – Pseudonatural is a very powerful, epic-level template that can turn routine creatures into Mythos horrors from beyond space and time. Basically the second most powerful stock template you can slap on something you want to kick ass with.

www.

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Do we have to fight the monkeys? Of course we don't.

"Good morning, elder," I greeted him, looking him right in the eyes as he inhaled and found absolutely no trace of fear on me, which to a big thing facing a small thing would be very strange, indeed. "Me and my friends are simply traversing your territory, moving from one area to the next. We have no intentions of claiming your land, disturbing your people, eating your food, killing your prey, or taking what is yours. If we may but pass in peace, we shall leave and disturb you no further."

He stared at me, grunting, but couldn't find anything suspicious about me. He pointed and huffed and grunted.

"We killed a lot of the drac-bloods." I pointed up, and his eyes turned to where the dragon and griffon riders were circling overhead. "They are our friends, and waiting for us to move along. They have no intention of swooping down and preying on your people." I leaned forwards. "They've been getting stuffed on drac-blood meat and are getting kind of picky..."

The behemoth of an ape hurfed under his breath, baring his teeth.

"Yeah, Mire Drac-bloods taste horrible, there's no accounting for taste," I agreed. "So, how about it? Can we just sidle through, no need to fight? We'll be out of your fur in no time."

He waved a tree trunk of an arm, paws definitely big enough to wrap around me twice, gesturing up at the sky. I looked up to the Wake punching through the brooding clouds, pausing above us.

"Oh, that's the world outside. We're going to break the grip of the Hags on this place. We already knocked over one of their Obelisks... we're going to collapse them all and kill them."

His amazed huff blew me back five feet in the air, like wind in a sail. "Well, if it was easy, I wouldn't need to bring friends along now, would I? You want us to show you some of our skulls? It's been a long trip, and we've still got a ways to go."

He sufficed for sniffing me all over, then bounding up and sniffing over Briggs and AA, moving down the line to inspect members of all the different races... who didn't have Vajra to clean themselves up like we did. He could smell the blood of a whole lot of things on us.

They all watched me handling this multi-ton ape with amusement. I really wasn't afraid of the big fellow. If things got violent, well, we'd be trying monkey...

He was getting a bit excited, calling out and stirring up the apes all around as he identified who we fought.

I watched him bound away, and several older apes who were actually wearing necklaces of crude beads and bearing carved staves came out to meet him. They immediately got into a hooting and jabbering raucous discussion with great animation.

I fell back down to ground level as Briggs and AA stepped up, and everyone waited patiently. The Whiskers of the Wild on my face were glowing slightly, and I had no trouble understanding any of them.

"I think the big guy wants to help," I murmured to them, lifting their eyebrows. "It sounds like he's seen the Obelisks, and they know there's bad magic involved with them."

"We should tell them what's going to happen if we succeed. That elder of theirs can probably save them without much thought."

"Yeah, that's what I thought." I screwed up my face. "If so, we're going to have to figure out a way to bring him with us, or he'll slow us down."

"What, Kong's cousins aren't built for marathons? Who would have thunk it?" Briggs was pretty amused, despite himself. "And okay, I give, you were right."

I sniffed at him. "You and him are gonna be buds. What pattern you want?"

"Hrm." He looked around. "I was thinking mandrill."

I lifted an eyebrow. "Interesting..."

"There's mountain apes back home in the tribe. We get along pretty well with them. Not quite as bright as these fellows, though..."

"Yeah, if they stick with us, they'll be completely ruined," I admitted cheerfully. "Haul could hold him, but we'd need to build him something to stand on, he's too big."

"Which would probably bend under his weight."

"Sixteen tons capacity. He probably masses ten or so?"

"So there's some room. He's gonna have to eat, though..."

"Like we haven't been passing by boundless light snacks for him..."

"True, I don't want to have to feed him a ton of bananas a day or whatever."

"Tusks. Canine teeth. Him ape, ape omnivore."

"Think he'd like a pair of battlefists?"

"If he can tolerate some armor, he'd be a great line breaker. And shouldn't a big monkey have a stick?"

"I think we have plans for the little fellow..."

"I'll boost his Int with a Mark. That should get him to around human average, at least."

"Just make sure they know to stick to their elder when things start going wrong..."

"This whole Zone is probably 'close to their elder'. I don't think it will be a problem."

"Good enough for me."

Author's Notes:

wiki/SRD:Behemoth_Gorilla

The toughest basic gorilla in D&D. And then you template him... Yes, he can straight up butcher a T-Rex in not much time at all...

King Kong from the 2005 Peter Jackson movie is about the size of a Primordial gorilla. The most abusable thing is, of course, that he has 21 Hit Dice, which means he can reach post-Twenty in Skill Ranks... and take Legendary Feats...

Taking a day off and having a feast of fruits and nuts with the intelligent apes wasn't a waste of time, especially when you have a few dozen helpers assisting you with making a pair of battlefists for a twenty-foot gorilla.

Still, what really set them off was the Marks, and getting Opened to Soul Magic. Naturally enough, I couldn't stop at just him. He had over twenty Hit Dice, and as a Primordial gorilla his life force and vitality were astounding. He only had to gain Levels and start taking Feats.

He Shaped in his Lightning Gauntlets atop the battlefists we made him, and I swear the jungle almost exploded with the monkeys going off in excitement. Glowing Soulbound battlefists wreathed in green-white lightning, worn by a brute that big and awesome... what wasn't to love?

And, of course, the fact that mentally I towered over him like he did over us physically meant he was a puppy in front of me. Always good to have big friends and everything.

Since they weren't Zoned in and limited, the apes here actually raided other Zones, and loathed them all. Having new weapons to do so, and the Markspace to talk to far more intelligent and learned outsiders who weren't trying to make slaves out of them, they looked at The Map and just gawked at how big the World Outside really was.

Naturally, I couldn't and wouldn't do all of them at this time. But any Int bonus was a major uplift to them, and just giving it to their leadership meant word surged out explosively to all the tribes in the jungle.

The times, they were a-changing.

Zone 14...

This was a containment Zone, meant to hem in the monkeys and make sure they didn't stray too far.

It was filled with undead. Thousands of years of accumulation of undead.

The apes raided it regularly, because if they didn't, the numbers grew and grew until they pressed in on the great escarpment the jungle of the monkeys had ended up being built on.

But someone was always reinforcing these undead, be it priests outside the Zone, or the undead inside the Zone after being given new corpses to work with. Tied to the Obelisk, they couldn't leave, couldn't grow... except in the direction of the monkeys.

But Mithar and his mutt, there were a lot of these things...

It was pretty plain we weren't going to be able to run through this place. The number of undead here had to reach into the millions, and it was slowly and surely coming our way. Not just humans or humanoids, of course... most were non-human natives and beast-bones, particularly larger ones. The only thing holding most of them back was the fact they couldn't climb, and the winged apes secluded in the center of the plateau came out to take on any skeletal fliers.

Yeah, there were winged apes. I started humming Follow the Yellow Brick Road, and there were some knowing guffaws...

So, it meant we had to arm up. Since we had an enthusiastic army of monkeys here who were totally ready to fight, and we definitely needed the additional offense, well, why not put them to use?

Baneskulls and Tokens could both be fed with Naming Karma.

Every Intellect Mark I made was a potential Smith, Bonecrafter, or someone with Spellcraft. If they were talented enough, they could directly become a Shaman recruit, and if not, they all wanted to be Soulshapers. Even if they couldn't get a big pair of battlefists, having Lightning Gauntlets Shaped, plus Banefire on top of them, made for a very impressive sight.

And so, we started killing undead, for hours and hours on end.

The undead were packed up, had killing instincts, and were commanded by the more intelligent among them. Said intelligent ones were hatracked by Token-bearing Archers, leaving some very big and stupid skeletons around to be mauled by ever-increasing numbers of monkeys with sparking fists.

The apes were enthusiastic, to say the least, and they really didn't get tired of exploding all these old bones that kept coming for them. Of course, they were rather lacking in tactics and strategy, so I didn't let them fight without oversight, and Elder Arg was there to keep them in line. Still, apes with ghost-fired, crackling fists bouncing all over the place, wearing Baneskulls about their necks and Tokens at their hips, made for quite a sight.

The fact we could Cure them from basically anything short of death just utterly wowed them, even the Shamans were awed by that level of Healing ability. Apes go running out, flail around and kill a lot of stuff, come pounding back to get Healed, go out and do it again. Elder Arg was particularly enthusiastic about this tactic...

Which is about when Hazé returned for another night of quick power-up. She'd been gone only an hour or so in the outside world, but given a four hundred times temporal modifier... eh, it had been days here.

Just inside Not-A-Zone 13...

I watched Amber, Verd, and Veis teaching a bunch of she-apes how humans danced, which was only fair, seeing as how the she-apes had been teaching the girls their own dances. Having toothy smiles, the apes took a big shine to us Hagchildren, and naturally Briggs was totally their own hairy buddy, especially once he got his Whiskers and could hoot and howl freely with them.

He was over there now, teaching them how to throw using sling staves. With their strength, and some Returning ammunition, they could wreak havoc from range with them, which the smaller apes, the champa-ka, were all for.

The chakon, the gorillas, were much more into the melee mindset, which was fine, because a lightning-handed gorilla can fight any way he wants to, thank you.

Errant was watching his sister and a champa-ka swaying to a waltz from a very straight-faced elf who had pulled out a lyre, while another ape nearby was deftly setting a drum tempo for them.

"So, I see Hazé is initiating the Shamans into the greater world of the gods," Errant mused as he sat down next to me, offering me a gourd of fruited water.

I glanced to the side, where a holy light was playing down from the stars, and some apish Celestials were discussing things over with a whole lot of awed Shamans who were completely bowled over by seeing monkey-ish Heavenly spirits.

"It's a magical world. They are going to evolve fast once they get out of here," I noted to him, clinking gourds and taking a swig. It wasn't booze, but not half-bad, really.

"And be part of Sama's growing empire?" he observed, silver eyes seeing all.

"Some will join me, sure. But like anything else, most of them are sedentary. I've been asking if there's some primeval woods at the heart of the Sidhete, and been getting good responses. The elves won't mind some decent neighbors with strong natural biases."

"You're going to have an entire race in your Marktell and practicing Soul Magic," he observed slyly. "Like, holy shit, Sama. Kingdom-building much?"

Author's Notes:

The champa-ka are a variant of a Paizo/Pathfinder race of ape-men under demonic influence called the charua-ka, with great throwing ability.

The chakon are variants of a forgotten monster from the 1E Fiend Folio, the dakon. They are LG gorilla/chimp ape-men. They'd be bros to Tarzan. Inspired by Gorilla City.

Flying winged apes are statted up in Paizo, the derhii.

As the Void Brothers noted, no demonic influence here. Strange, that...

BREAK

A NOTE...

No, not as toothpicks.

Still hanging in Zone 14...

"If I'm gonna uplift 'em, might as well go all the way, right?" I narrowed my eyes in the direction of the holy council taking place. "They've got good intentions, such as they are, and are very malleable. Last thing I want is some demonic butcher-god getting into their heads, right?"

"Truth. Gonna keep Hazé around to help with the undead?"

"That depends. I'm hoping she earns enough brownie points off this to get that Perpetual Spell meta direct from Sylune. If she gets that, and her Soul Magic is to snuff... well, undead are the perfect practice targets, no? And we've got like a hundred-mile crawl of that shit to go through... I don't want to be hung up here that long."

"Especially since there are other Zones of them to go through after we're done with the Obelisks?"

"I wouldn't be making sure everyone has the Baneskulls and Tokens all good to go for a reason, would I?" I snarked back.

Errant just laughed softly. "I wonder if Hazé knows how you're steering her around. She's already irked your mental Stats are so high..."

"She's probably figured it out. The key part of being the servant of a god is serving the god, something hard for us modern types to get into. She wants to go out and butcher things with magic like a super-powered gamer... but that's not what Sylune wants. By doing things which further the Cause of Good, she's suborning her mortal impulses to a higher cause, and Sylune is seeing it.

"She's making crazy Karma and beaucoup brownie points doing this. She just has to fight the urge to act like a gamer and stay the most powerful mortal servant of Sylune that we know of."

"And just maaaaybe she realizes that her talents are even more useful outside of combat than in it?" Errant ventured. Because, you know, we could fight like all the Angels in Heaven, but we couldn't Teleport like her.

Well, Tremble could, but nobody needed to know that. Tremble was floating out there with Quaver, adding whistles and bells to the music, which the apes really appreciated. "Says the man who can cast Walls of Fire all day?" Errant's smile was cheerful, indeed. "Even if it's only one active one at a time, that's still impressive."

"And given the numbers we're facing..." I just nodded to him. "I'm just so glad there's nothing like a lich among them. There might be some undead Knights, but I haven't seen them yet..." Nothing like a Death Knight lighting you up with a twenty-die fireball to say 'Hello, how are ya?' after all...

"That Wrath treatment working on the dragons?" Our five genius flying energy-breathing spellcasting not-dinosaurs were having a time of it. First some pipsqueak pseudonaturals half their size nearly butchered them, and now there were so many undead they were abusing their fundamentallums trying to strafe as many as they could... and not really making a dent in their numbers.

"I think so. Takes a solid half-hour of treatment to get it back to steady, but that's better than forcing them to go gorging. Isn't there some sort of mental disorder tied to overuse of breath weapons?"

"Apocalypse Gluttony. Pyre Dragons revel in it. Eat, breathe flame, eat, breathe flame. The more they eat, the more they burn."

"Oh. So, Riggibuhl and Klaw having a puppy together."

I tilted my head at that mental image. "You know they can hear you." When he said their Names. Hear him, not me. Him not Forsaken.

"And I'm sure they find the concept of having a puppy together fascinating." Naturally, he wasn't afraid, and they couldn't act directly against another faction's Warlock, anyways. We tunked gourds again.

"So," he asked, giving me the silver eyeball, "exactly what course gets us through them in only fifty miles?"

I could have come up with fifty miles being all they could stack in our path, but I just smiled. "The one that leads to the Obelisk, of course. Pretty damn sure there's more pseudos there, and the lads are just spoiling for a rematch."

With Baneskulls, Totems, and Bane of Legends to help out. Gear up properly, own the bastards!

"That could get really nasty if they are Knights," he pointed out helpfully.

"If the three of us have to go up there and hack them down by ourselves, we will. But I highly doubt the Hags wanted anything that could be a magical threat to them in charge of stuff. So, I'm thinking just Skeletal Warriors."

He rolled his eyes. "Almost magic-immune Nines to Twelves. I suppose it fits the theme of animated and forced to serve..."

"See, we're doing a great good deed, sending them back across the Veil," I chirped at him.

"Indeed, indeed, my dear young woman!" he agreed, speaking through his nose in a bad high-class pontificating accent. His eyebrows rose as Veis and her partner exchanged dips, chortling with one another, and he shook his head. We both looked at Amber, who had discovered that the primary visual sexual focus for the champa-ka were teeth, arms, and shoulder hair. Out came the alchemical dyes, teeth were being painted, shoulders curled and braided and colored, and clickers and jinglers being put around wrists. Add in some grass skirts in colors for the swirling motion, and when they suddenly spun into the circle, all the male champa-ka almost lost their eyeballs on the ground.

Amber started putting them through what amounted to a not-so-toned-down stripper dance, and the jungle erupted in pure primate appreciation...

La la la, Zone 14, still grinding...

In the end, it took ten days of building up before they made the run for it.

AA led the way, as he had to, Briggs following and driving the Wake after him, and Sama had to follow and lock it down.

Behind her was Errant and Hazé, and a line of meditating Heavenbound. Meditating, because they formed an interlinked Wall of Fire around themselves over sixty feet across, burning a path through whatever remnants of the undead managed to survive the slightly-staggered carnage being wrought by the Forsaken in front.

Elder Arg rose over the center of the flying wedge behind them. They'd elected not to stick him on Haul, but simply have Hazé cast Enduring Flight on him. The delighted ape was zooming along two feet above the ground, arms spread wide, and anything that got past the three in front and the rings of fire was smashed to the ground by his bulk... or bulldozed and held in those rings of heavenly flame, cooking to nothing in mere seconds if it tried to fight.

Two Healers were on his broad back, making sure he suffered no lasting injuries from the fighting.

To either side of him, the Hellpoodles formed the outer edge of the wedge, being big enough to slam aside any of the man-sized undead, and fully capable of blasting down much of the bigger stuff.

Anything too huge, the dragons were strafing ahead of time, slamming frost and lightning into the animated bones in their own One-Twos, and the skeletons of great dinosaurs and beasts blew apart in great moving explosions ahead of us.

The center of the formation was generally clear, things collapsing from the edges were the only real danger. The circles of divine fire from the Wrath of the Heavenbound consumed all the weaker skeletons as they raged past them, ready spears and arrows caught the leapers and lungers, and other arrows hissed out, whist-whist, as Reserve Casters let loose at short range in endless salvos.

The griffons were spotting out ahead, looking for the undead that stood out, big ones obvious, smaller ones trying to hide in the press not escaping the eagle eyes of the griffons, who knew what to look for.

Sama's calm voice was issuing silent orders as the Marks-Up Display interacted with the Visual Files of the troops, and painted over their vision with a wild worldview of information from all sources. Positions of everyone, ranges, threat levels of the enemy, coverage and motion, coordinating missile, magic, breath weapons, following the terrain, scouting information in real time, allocating targets and converging cross-fire...

The more intelligent members of the group realized they would have cracked under the intellectual load of Warlording to this level of threat and efficiency. The Elevator Music of Heaven was the Elevated Music at this point, drumming out a dire beat which had long imprinted on the bipeds fighting, and now had claimed the hearts of the primates who were coming with them, now pounding on drums with beats that even had the undead wavering as they came.

Intimidate checks at -20 can affect even the fearless if successful, and at +55 to start, the penalty was still far from what the undead could withstand, orders of their masters be damned or whatnot.

The dire beat and endless Song resonated among many magic Weapons, which added their own hums and songs and beats to the melody. The bardic-types took turns with stanzas new and old, adding ever more to the lexicon as they beat a requiem for all these undead, who shuddered to see flames black and unwhite coming for them, and final rest for their tormented souls at the end.

They trembled in hate and relief and fear, and True Death came for them.

Okay, it's the middle of Zone 14, finally...

It was made of stone, but it was still a tower shield, albeit one sized for a giant. Elder Arg heaved it up, and the massive fireball detonated against it, splashing away and to the sides, sparing the soldiers and apes behind the great gorilla.

Two streaks flashed by on either side of him. A pale white ray flashed down on him from a Sword floating in the air, and stole away his burns and the impacts of half-a-dozen boneshard arrows punched deeply into him, forcing them out of his flesh, and redistributing the wounds through Quaver into Sama.

Twoscore reinforced skeletons and wight guards blew apart in wrathflame explosions, positive energy from Healing Edge wiping away the wounds almost as fast as they were inflicted. Elder Arg bulled forward like a bulldozer, crushing and trampling the undead in his path, many of them made from fallen apes and great lizard men, his mailed feet trampling them flat with no fear of sharp points at this time, and exploding balls of Fire Reserves exploded non-stop along the sides of the furrow he was making.

A cone of cold flashed down one way in front of them, a bolt of lightning came down an eyeblink later, conducted out along a greater width than normal, and blew apart a whole line of elite corpses of great beasts gathered to meet them. The hellpoodles howled and cleared away the chaff to the sides, and the burning Weapons and fists of soldiers and apes poured up the steps of the landing towards the Obelisk.

Sama slammed into the formation of ogre and Jotun skeletons, weaving between scything weapons, crashed into the skeleton of a Tyrant raptor being ridden by a skeletal Bone Knight, and three strokes collapsed the animated beast and sent its rider into a free fall... which would not have harmed it at all if Briggs hadn't wandered up that way, striding through a press of dozens of skeletons that were exploding around him, and Hammer met skull on the way down to immediate deleterious effect.

Elder Arg continued forward behind his shield, too big and strong for anything less than the skeletons of great saurials to stop him... and those were the instant targets of a dozen fiery Rays coming in from all directions.

The wedge drove up into the central plaza, where the leaders of this place were waiting for them... some few of the Knights, and the twisted, distorted, tentacle-waving skeletal figures of cursed warriors beyond them.

Errant, Briggs, Sama, and Ancientaxe converged on them in streaks of banefire and vivic flame. The misshapen skeletons, each bearing three extra bony tentacles with spatial-shearing barbs on them, leapt to meet them with distorted, impossible agility... and found out that their otherworldly insight didn't work against these foes...

BREAK

A NOTE...

Says Elder Arg. We're not going to argue with him.

Yep, Zone 14 still...

Hazé stopped her strafing and brought up two Walls of Fire in front of two of the six entrances to the complex, forcing the undead into taking double-damage banefire'd flames to the face to get to them. The Heavenbound immediately sealed off three of the others, and General Moonriver the last.

The dragons had swooped in to join them as the last of the wedge came flying through, spreading out with the hellpoodles to cover each of the entryways. The archers and the Casters flanked them, and as the toughest of the undead managed to make it through the Walls of buffed-out flames, salvoes of undead-eating arrows, magic, and breath weapons, coordinated to maximum effect, slammed out to meet them.

The dwarves and Ironblood converged on the skeletal warriors not being taken apart by the previous four, mobbing them with shields and thrusting in for what damage they could inflict, reinforcing one another and not letting themselves be thrown back like they had before. Shields screamed as bony appendages and their rotting Swords and Axes that shouldn't work crunched against the troops surrounding them... but this time, they held, smashing their victims to and fro, taking advantage of their lack of mass and heavyfoot to render them off-balance.

Tremble floated overhead, while the griffons ripped the last of the skeletal bats and pterosaurs out of the skies with burning claws and beaks, watching the unlimited horde that was converging from all directions. It was covering the ground for literally miles around with rushing undead bodies big and small.

It took less than two minutes for the Big Four to rip their way through the dozen skeletal warriors, each of the ones enfolded by the troops turning in anticipation as they saw the Shields opening up... and then seeing nothing coming for them, only to be surprised by the sudden arrival of Grace, Endure, Zeitgeist, and Quaver, all come to play.

"Take it down!" Sama ordered, her voice cutting through the thunderous, collective moans of millions of undead, resonating through the Elevated Music. The apes howled together, vine ropes were snatched up, and they climbed up the rough basalt thing glowing with yellow-green Runes, shrieking in fear and loathing as they touched it, but still continuing.

The fighting lines quickly reorganized as the Healers tended to the wounded fast, forming up shield and spear lines before the six entrances. The dragons and hellpoodles pulled away to the Obelisk, while the griffons above alighted on the stone columns ringing this plaza, eyes sweeping everywhere, missing nothing, warning everyone of what was coming.

Long vines wrapped around the top of the Obelisk, layer on layer of braided vines extending down into the ready hands of the strongest apes, and Elder Arg. Briggs decided the angle, and then the One-Two-Threes started.

The elven Casters with Fire Reserves poured the power into Captain Fido, who sent a steel-melting Topped blast of fire into the side of the Obelisk. An inhalation later, Captain Shirley and the Two Valor Dragons slammed it with enough combined cold to freeze helium. An inhalation later, triple blasts of lightning from the Shield dragons hammered at the black stone, sending shards flying in every direction.

Fire howled down on it again, and overstressed rock expanded and disintegrated. Cold came, it crumbled, and lightning followed, to explode and shatter.

The apes were all pulling steadily, feet wide and braced, heaving back on multiple creaking rope vines, feeling the Obelisk tremble.

The magic-resistant stone cracked and crumbled and shook, as a huge bite was taken out of its base.

The breathers poured over to the other side, at closer range now, and began the bombardment again, across a narrower strip.

One, Two, Three, repeat...

One minute, two, shredding a narrow path across the base of the Obelisk, and the apes heaved opposite them.

There was a very loud crack, spreading through the base of the Obelisk. It began to sway and tilt. The apes howled and surged, muscles popping and sinews straining... and the tower of stone began to fall.

Shrieking with glee, the apes got out of the way, Elder Arg giving it one final pull before leaping in the opposite direction. The lines of shields and spears moved out of the way as the Obelisk tottered and fell, slowly, grandly, the Runes emblazoned all over it going out, right between two of the six pillars forming the entrances to the plaza. The griffons thereon didn't even move out of the way, just narrowing their eyes at the rush of wind as it fell past... right onto the forces of undead and the Wall of flame burning there.

The impact jolted the entire plaza, enough to send the Casters and Archers stumbling, while those with heavyfoot largely staved off the impact.

The undead outside all seemed to slow and mill around as a visible shockwave swept through them. The pell-mell rush to surround and overwhelm became more of a trot or walk, as whatever uniting force the Obelisk held over them vanished.

Now, it was target practice time.

Yawn, Zone 14 again?!...

In the end, it took almost twelve hours to burn them all away.

As the only living things in the Zone, and definitely creating a commotion, they still attracted all the undead there... hundreds of square miles of them.

As they died, the vivic fires feasting on their remains spread out over the plaza, eventually becoming a virtual bonfire of unwhite fires, wiping out the weak skeletons before they could even make it to the plaza.

Like moths to honey, the mindless undead kept coming, stacking up their bones... and getting burned down literally as fast.

The intelligent undead were instantly noticeable because they stopped. Archers on Disks up beside the griffons on the columns took note of them, and hatracked them with burning arrows.

Hazé, flying in the air, did the same. Endless streams of Shards and Shardrays continued pouring out from her, getting in the rep counts she would need to Weird the price of her Perpetual Spell down a level. Ten a minute, six hundred an hour... and one million twenty-four thousand to get to...

She was covering a third of an arc all by herself, spells flying out from her endlessly, multicolored eruptions among the undead, just target practice for her. Anything flying she started dealing with hundreds of yards away, and flocks of hundreds would be reduced to scattered numbers easily shot down before they could reach anyone.

Okay, seriously, Zone 14 is taking way too long...

There really wasn't much to do. The entire plaza was now surrounded at about a hundred paces out by burning undead heaped more than thirty feet high, the vivic fire glowing with a sepulchral light, heavy mists wrapping knee-high through the area. The undead charging in never got down the mound before collapsing under the force of the flames, expanding the hill further out as they did.

Archers and Casters on Disks up in the sky were poking down any intelligent undead who might stop the incoming horde, but that was about all that was needed. Nevertheless, a lot of Casters were working on rep counts with their Reserves... why not, with so many targets? Aiming practice on top of it all was always a good thing...

The apes were up on the fallen Obelisk, or up atop the pillars not commandeered by the griffons, watching the endless undead marching blindly to their dooms. The vivic mist was as thick as soup, almost liquid, the hill of undead grew ever higher, ever further away, as they marched in mindlessly and died... or maybe willingly, as the sight of the vivic flames was seen very differently by the living and undead, perhaps beckoning them...

Even the Heavenbound were out there, practicing the uses of Wrath, making use of the casual time. With the undead having no ranged attacks, just endless numbers, it was a decent use of down time.

"I have to admit that this is a first even for me," Brother Ancientaxe said, seated on the steps to the dais and gazing at the thick vivic mist that stopped just below his heels. "The Land is feeding very well today."

I pointed up. He and Briggs glanced that way, where the clouds were getting lighter and lighter, prying apart that pale line the Wake was drawing through the inky clouds. There was a lot of negative energy here, and even with the millions that had died, the cloud cover hadn't broken yet.

"Given a couple years, this would be a nice not-a-Zone for the apes to expand into, if it weren't all going away," Briggs observed sagely, eyes more on the Marks-Up Display than anything else. Lines of red and orange x's, interspersed with the occasional yellow or green, were marching up and going away as they hit a blurry white line. Countless shapes were crawling to the top of the hill, igniting unwhite, and crumbling down, and the mound expanded further...

"Is there really a need for us to stay here, other than killing the intelligent undead?" Brother AA asked.

"Glory Award," Briggs and Sama said together, emphatically. The urkhar Brother lifted a dark eyebrow. "You'll know what it is when you feel it. It's the reward from mass combat, when you finish the job, drive or break your enemies before you, and accomplish a great deed in concert with many others. It's the reward of a Warlord, and those that fight with him," Briggs went on. "So, we see the deed through, and get our reward. How much longer, Sama?"

A couple of the dragons were a-wing, scouting the edges of the Zone, measuring the pace everything was moving at. "Six hours, give or take."

"Well, a rest is not unearned, but could we speed it up any?" AA asked archly.

"If the three of us went out there and chain-slaughtered until they were gone, we might speed it up by fifteen minutes," Sama informed him blandly. "Six hours of effort for fifteen minutes of reward..."

"Any harvests?" AA glanced at a small mound of unnaturally warped skulls sitting nearby. The undead Knights and pseudonaturals would auto-Invest as Lesser and True Baneskulls respectively once Carved appropriately, but naturally needed someone with the skills to do so. QL 30-35 didn't just stumble by...

"Other than the Weapons and armor of the bosses, no," Briggs sighed. Those were already being burned away by the apes, who really had a long way to go on their Gear... although not as much as a week or two ago. The weapons of the skeletons tended to be bone, obsidian, stone, or ironwood, so not much to salvage from those, and that was if they didn't use just naked carpals and teeth.

Sama grunted, bounced to her feet, grabbed one of the misshapen skulls off the pile, and sat down against the column nearby. She fixed her gaze on it, her nails began to caress the steel-hard bone, and white dust began to fall away.

"Let's do something a little more complex with these," she said to them, not looking away from the skull. "Qualifies as Undead and Aberrant Bane, or stacks on it as a Bane of Legends." Her fingers moved like delicate spiders over the bone, etching subtly, strongly, and already there was a glitter of fell blue-black light in the unequal sockets.

"Ohhhh, that sounds interesting. Give me the Pattern," Briggs said, also rising to his feet. AA grunted agreement, getting up as well. This sounded like a very useful tool.

One of the things that the Brotherhood had started investing Karma in seriously was Expert and Vizard levels. Even they had downtime, and one thing they had never lacked for was raw materials. Being able to Craft their own stuff during downtime had surprisingly come across as very relaxing and rewarding to all of them. Carrying around enough Tools to do so before had always been something of a problem, but now they were happy to Craft, stitch, sew, paint, mix, and assemble during their rest.

There was plenty of stuff that needed full workshops to do properly, and they certainly didn't have the time to stick around in one location to do that kind of work, but carving wood, bone, and stone traveled easily, and rewarded those who had steady hands and keen eyes with something other than placing a length of sharp metal into the vital points of things that had to Feed the Land...

It was a pause, a moment like drawing in a fresh, cold breath. That instant when the deed was done, the mission accomplished, the goal achieved.

Victory.

It blew across their souls, perceptible, obvious, a recognition by the Land of accomplishment, of achieving a Great Thing, above the Karma of individual effort. This was the end results of souls coming together and accomplishing a Great and Worthy thing through combined strength, not individual strength.

This was Glory.

To those who'd never tasted it before, it was truly an awesome experience. A feeling of being connected to all who they had labored alongside, of collective undertakings rising up to do what must be done. To those with the most accomplishments, the greater Glory, but the true Glory was what was given to them all, standing together and fighting together.

Many of them had tasted lesser Glory on a battlefield, against the Warp Bands... but nothing like this, the purging of literally millions of undead from the land, a totally lopsided battle that they had somehow managed to engineer.

The Glory, even for the more seasoned souls, was overwhelming. They had done an awesomely Great Thing this day, and the Land had taken notice!

"So, this is what Warlords live for," Ancientaxe mused aloud, savoring the sensation, his crimson eyes glowing brighter. "And Champions, and those who lust for battle..."

"Yes. Eternal yet fleeting, powerful yet ephemeral. There is nothing like it... and little to rival it in the course of gaining Levels," I answered him. "Glory Awards are addictive, and why generals want to fight, fight, and fight. Glory is truly something that men strive for."

"So... this shattering of the Hags' ambitions, the destruction of the Warp Rift... these will also generate Glory?" he asked in understanding.

"Yes, and it should dwarf this. This was merely a slaughter, after all. Defying a millennia-long scheme, thwarting Divinities... yeah, much bigger," I replied knowingly.

He laughed softly to himself. Naturally, I was still power-gaming, even after all this. Or really, the power-gaming was meant to facilitate this...

BREAK

A NOTE...

Other people are doing stuff, they're just at 1/400th the speed of Sama and Co.

The house looked subtly different from before. The many birdhouses were now mounted on the porch, for starters, and the small gardens and flowers had been left to go wild.

There was still a lot of traffic going in and out, as many women and few men bustled about here and there, getting ready for things.

The exclamations as Hazé came walking in from the back acreage were enough warning of her arrival, and she eyed the changes being made archly.

It was subtly jarring, being around people who weren't Marked, and who she couldn't just flick a thought at to give orders, acknowledge, or converse with, even while doing other things. With Sama's Mark, she'd broken the 32 Intellect barrier, and had the four thought streams, which really, really helped with multi-tasking.

Still, it was just a shift back to an older paradigm, and she smiled at the women doing final gatherings of herbs and plants as she stepped up the back porch to the door.

"Mama, I'm home!" she called out, already hearing Mama giving directions from the former living room area.

"Oh, my sweet little girl!" Mama's smile was as infectious as ever, turning and sweeping up to embrace Hazé warmly.

"You look like you're lagging behind a bit, Mama," Hazé said severely, looking about. Much of the furniture and ornamentation had been stowed away, taken over by storage cabinets, chests, supplies, and the like.

"We can up and leave in five minutes, dear," Mama told her calmly, waving towards the kitchen, which still had a couple stools to perch on. The two of them sat down at the station in the middle to talk.

Hazé's brow furrowed. "Then why are you still here?" she asked calmly. "The time is but days away. It will be difficult for you to bring more people away if you delay. Northmarch will be in chaos, even if you reach it in time..."

Mama sighed, reaching out to take Hazé's hand. "It is because of you. You are a horrible influence on the women, once they found out you were one of Sylune's own, and fighting against the filth that has risen up everywhere. They refuse to just leave everyone behind like that.

"When it comes time to go, we will withdraw, but we will not flee!"

Hazé heard the steel in her voice, and had to smile despite herself. There was a whole world of difference in those two words. "Well, then..." she reviewed what she had seen of the outside of the house. "What would you like me to help you with?"

"Ah! Well, there are a great number of things, but they will take several days worth of Valences..." Mama replied carefully.

"I am in a rather unique situation right now. I have a tie to a temporally accelerated area where time passes four hundred times faster. I can go through a Renewal roughly every four minutes, if need be."

Mama Greta froze for a moment. "Sweet Sylune..." she managed to whisper after a moment. "Then... then it is best if you Cast as many spells as possible as quickly as possible, no?"

"I have been evacuating people from churches literally all over the Continent. I have an hour of time before they have more sites prepared for me, and I must go."

Mama Greta promptly jumped up, still holding her hand, and burst out running towards the back yard, and the barn outside. "Then we must hurry!" she said over her shoulder to her little girl, smiling broadly. "Oh, there is so very much you can do in an hour..."

Clutching her Staff firmly, and quite bemused, Hazé let herself be dragged along by Mama Greta enthusiastically, already analyzing what Mama was doing, and what spells she might be needing. No doubt she would need to be Casting literally hundreds of Valences over the next hour of real time...

Rorn Greywolf's Sword Mournfang took the Champion through the eyeslit, banefire eating away his warped brain and ending his fanatic devotion to Amourae in a last twitching, spastic dance, before the vivus ended that final bit of piety, too.

It had not been too many days since they went into Yle Tyorm, but the change on the battlefields was subtle, even wary now.

Truly, having Sama and the Brotherhood around had relieved a great deal of stress on the part of those fighting. Who wouldn't be stirred, seeing those people cutting down Greater Demons more easily than the normal soldiers did Lesser ones? With such people around, there truly was no foe too terrible to worry about.

But they weren't here now. They were driving into the depths of Yle Tyorm, where tales of endless monsters, fell beasts, undead horrors, living forests, and other things in endless numbers flowed out with powerful and skilled adventurers who went in, and most of whom came back out alive, albeit much bloodier and warier than they had been, and they had not been overconfident entering to begin with.

It was endless battle in time-accelerated Zones. The amount of combat experience to be harvested there was simply incredible.

The soldiers looked at the fell beasts, powerful monsters, and most mutated of the elite troops they were facing on the field, listened to the tales where such creatures were the least and weakest of the creatures being fought inside the city, with no gold for a reward, only the harvested carcasses of the slain, if they were lucky... and they decided to stick with the fight they knew.

The average soldier stepped up, goaded on by those tales, by men who certainly weren't any better than they, right? The numbers of Warped they were facing were growing steadily, trying to balance out against the increasing skill, Levels, and Gear of their opponents, balanced on some paradigm of the Warped Gods that still couldn't take into account the Marks, the Forsaken, and the boosted Warlord bonuses that applied to everyone on the field.

Rorn was satisfied.

He'd sent away the strongest men of the Kalden, the berserkers, and the North Wind. There had been complaints and protests, which he had silenced with curses and challenges to the courage of every loose-lipped, lazy shirker who dared call themselves a child of Kalden, daring them to be strong enough to not need those crutches.

Were the North Wind going to be there when raiders came in the night?

Were the berserkers going to save their villages from things come clawing for food in the winter? When out a-hunting? Would they beg and scream and cry for the North Wind to save them when brigands struck on the roads? Perhaps they could whine at the feet of the dwarven spears to fight for them, or bend their knees to the frippish elves, surely they didn't need to fight for themselves any more...

He was a son of Kalden, a wolf among men, and if they wanted to be sheep bleating for a shepherd, let them go find one! Their time to be shorn, gutted, and roasted would be coming soon enough!

The complaints dried up. The grim men of Kalden settled down and did their jobs. No berserkers, no magical heroes. Oh, there were Skalds, there were priests and clerics, mostly Southerners, there to heal them when they were wounded, or counter the spells of the enemy.

But this was a fight to be won with Axe and Spear, Sword and Hammer. By normal men, strong of arm and stronger of will, fighting back against these freaks and mutant things from the Warp. With the fury of their ancestors, who were looking down and telling them to surpass their forefathers, to become something greater than Kalden had ever seen before!

Yes, the monstrously strong Heroes were engaged in some gods-damned Quest to the heart of Yle Tyorm, and the tales whispering back through the Marktell raised hackles at what they portended. But their fight, here, could not be finished until that fight was done, or all the horrors in Yle Tyorm might be unleashed upon the world, sweeping away everything.

Now, they had to fight, they had to kill an ever-increasing number of Warped fanatics and anthros, their very numbers indicating that they were better, stronger, more capable of killing, a salute, and a challenge to get even better!

After all, Rorn was right there. They knew his tale, they knew his background. Was he any better than them? Born of heroes, blessed by the gods, a fountain of luck, a child of destiny?

No, he was a Man. A Source. He made his own Fate, neither Valus nor Hurn was sitting back there showering him with gifts and destiny and good fortune.

And these gods-cursed Warped aliens were not going to keep him from achieving his dreams!

His howl of triumph carried over the battlefield, and drew many eyes. The light dimmed in the demented eyes of the Warped of Amourae, a greater fire lit up in the eyes of the Kalden fighting them.

He tossed the overwrought pink and yellow helm aside, and charged towards the nearest battle line, his shield leading the way. His countrymen cheered to see him coming, the enemy wavered and turned to greet him, and Mournfang sang an old, grim dirge of blood and steely doom as he hewed into them.

But not berserk, never berserk, roaring his orders and tracking the field, fighting with his countrymen, leading them to further glory.

Back in the North, somewhere...

"You will go back."

Cold winds rose at his words, swirled in the air, stirring old powers, ancient eyes turning this way.

The ghostly mounts of the Fey before him pawed nervously, able to sense his power, while the victims of the Hunt, captured and twisted into its Hounds, whined with both fear and hunger as they looked at the raven-winged erlking floating before them.

They could, of course, run on air, so flight was no escape from them. But this was an Erlking, a Fey of status equal to the Master of the Hunt, and not chosen prey.

"Neither Seelie nor Unseelie may command or deny the Hunt, only make a request of it," the unperturbed Huntsmaster called back, dark eyes unflinching, his long and deadly Spear raised. "Be off with you, erlking. You have no place here." His tone was mocking. An erlking was strong, but no match for a Hunt. Indeed, an erlking was meant to fight those who were often victims of a Hunt themselves, mortals intruding on Fey realms.

"You are no Hunt. Your wits are stirred by the things of the Warp, hooking you on your bloodlust, drawing you in to become slaves of the Warped Gods, fighting against those who would deny it entry to our realms. Return, or be deemed traitors to both Courts, Huntsmen, and sentence will follow!"

The cold wind blew again at the harsh rebuke, and the Hunt shifted uneasily. Those were not light words among the Fey.

"And how shall you stop us, erlking? You think your force of arms sufficient to even slow us down?" The Huntsmaster was unimpressed. "The Hunt goes where it is drawn!"

He edged his mount forwards a step, and at his will, the other eight members of the Hunt, Huntsmen and Hounds alike, advanced with him.

Noir Rabe did not sigh in regret, only grimaced knowingly. How did she know? Damn Hags...

His taloned hand drew a silver crown, a circlet, set with five black jewels, out from the purse at his side. He placed it on his head, and the world changed.

The Huntsmaster's eyes widened in sudden shock and fear when the golden eyes of Noir Rabe opened, for now he saw that he was the erlking's prey!

Noir Rabe's shriek as he drove forwards with leveled Spear was laden with the strength of the ancients. Or, as Sama would have put it, his +10 Favored Enemy bonus against Humans had been transformed to a bonus against the Fey, accentuating a Spirited Charge and One Strike. His Spear and Sword were Named, burning green and grey with soulfire, not throwaway Weapons like others of his kind wielded. His Armor was actually enchanted separately, not merely empowered by him wearing it. Essence seethed in the air, glowed in lines on his arms, in his Weapons, and unseen about him; Soul magic the Fey, and other erlkings, had never used...

Today, a King was on the hunt, and they were the Hunted... and he knew all about them...

BREAK

A NOTE...

The Zones are going by, but this last one...