The Power of Ten - Chapter 17-456

Pawlie Blakhamar stepped forward, his Hammerpick Deep at the ready. “Lady Traveler, we’ll make sure nothing survives,” he said quietly, but the absolute steel of that promise was not to be questioned.

I gestured up a flight of Disks for them, the silver of the Force Magic fading to translucency and thus darkness. “A horrid thing for a horrid people, then. Together.” I held out Clavus, and the skull of an Old God gleamed readiness, swirling with the unwhite fire of vivus and the necroic black of banefire against the undead.

A tight Chatbox shimmered in Markspace as the Grim Fellowship was formed silently. Tactical displays and Maps fed into it instantly, and points of attack, jobs, teams, and defenses.

Idiot, Burn, and a score of Named Weapons, all burning white and black with mine, crossed over my Staff. Then the Brothers slid onto their Disks, and I popped my wings with Legion and Shvaughn. An illusion shimmered in front of us, displaying clear air where we would be flying, and all three of us, none of us looking like angels at all, swooped down to within ten feet of the surface and towards the dying city that was going to die today.

Above us, the sun broke, and any possible connection to the surface faded with the Curse of the Sun.

“Dreams of the wind at dawn, a new day has begun.

Light chases back the dark, and the future lays before us.

Will it be something bright and new?

Walk the road before you now, and leave the night behind,

Today is a new day, and the light comes to warm you all.

Let go the shadows, and behold the sun!

The Light has come, as ever it must.

Behold the new day!”

The Salute to Aru trailed off, words like light flaring and dying into this eternal twilight that had never seen the sun.

“An insult to the Land, where stones groan and moan, and doom falls,” whispered Pawlie into the quiet of our very rapid yet almost windless approach, as we diverted all the windburn around us.

“Their time long passed, death walking and talking, their death calls,” intoned the deep voice of an urukhar whose biceps probably outweighed me, as did his Axe.

“Feed on the living, spirits damned, the life and strife, judgement yearning,” a gloomy, skinny young man wielding a ghostly long naginata added quietly.

“Fires are coming to claim you, Feed now the Land, and set souls to burning,” finished the dark-haired man with the long sword trailing the multiple colors of a rainbow Helix.

“Tremble, oh, ohhhhh, oh, tremble, we are coming…” came the chorus of quiet voices from the rest of the Brothers, and as the words dropped into inaudibility, even the turgid waters below seemed to become more still.

——-

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Once they’d been free-willed Deathborn; living, growing, and dying in their own dark ways, operating on a different paradigm than mortals of the world; close to undead, yet not.

Then the Shroud came down, and made them slaves and anchors to this world as the ghouls came from above, overwhelmed them with numbers and strength, and Doom claimed them with an eternity of slavery looming before them.

Perhaps it didn’t actually mean that much to them. Negative energy thrived on negative energies, so the anger, spite, despair, and dread brought on by their situation were just part and parcel of being who they were.

But a New Day was coming now, in a place that had never known the morning. And in this Light of Day, neither they nor the undead were welcome as the black and white fires came for them all.

I had Detect Evil up at VII, and could see them through ten feet of stone. The whole area was awash in Evil with the Shroud here, of course, but the Spell’s ability to enhance and filter improved with its Valence. I painted up targets for everyone and myself within range of the spell, not that my targets lasted long, and I had to keep moving.

Shards fell from the sky, went through open doors and windows, zipped along hallways, turned corners, went up and down stairs, and found their targets inside, exploding with an additional +4d6 of Kicker damage from my new Feat to bring them down. Survivors were marked and taken out by someone else… or a second Shard from the Fastcast follow-up.

I didn’t take out the larger crowds so much, because Legion just breathed on them, and 20d10+14d6 of dragonfire+Wrath basically toasted them all, so I didn’t have to worry about clusters of them. Watching that solid wall of light and fire coming out of their mouth like a plasma waterfall was pretty impressive…

No, I cleared out everyone with an accessway I could send Shards into, and Einz was reaching out, opening doors, lifting sewer covers, flipping windows open, and the like to give me that access. His Hexar, the hexagon-shaped adamantine hexagon Shields he could manipulate for offense, were spinning around deflecting the occasional arrow being sent my way, while his Telekinesis did its thing opening roads for me in every building.

Unlike normal, I didn’t Stillflight the area, and the Shroud served as the Interdiction. I just had to kill everything in range, while the Brothers either tossed open doorways in passing so I could kill whatever was inside, or went in themselves to do what had to be done.

The krovboynyar were Deathborn, so they had no Free Will, and were literally born Evil. Even the youngest of them pinged purple, while the adults ranged through the deeper shades of red, purple, and black.

If things were hiding behind stone out of reach, Dawncast Stone Shape at VII could make a one-foot hole a thousand feet long and basically reach anywhere it needed to, much to the surprise of the subterranean population down there. I drove holes down through the maze of tunnels below, sweeping Detects through them as the Brothers flitted this way and that down certain of those tunnels. I harvested the obvious targets, they removed everything else.

I wasn’t worried for them. They were all Tens and going Deep, magic wasn’t going to stop them, and they were murder in direct combat. If they needed to be healed, they could retreat with breath-taking speed.

I idly brought down stone chambers, walls, towers, pillars, and fortifications as I passed above ground, collapsing buildings down into the tunnels below them and the beings sitting in them, destroying the environment around them.

Ghoul warrens were not an impediment to me, unless they blocked the holes leading into them. I was totally aware Leng Ghouls were far tougher than most undead, and if that meant getting three salvoes to make sure they died, than that was what I did, although two Primary Shard hits was basically enough to resolve most of them.

I went through the most densely populated areas first, especially the new pit area where the ghoul warrens were the densest. Bright lights shone in the darkness, and ghouls died with Heavenly speed as zigzagging Shards crisscrossed through the dimness.

I attracted all the attention, at least until Shvaughn was escorting a Wall of Flames through their ranks, heaving boulders at them, or Burn was chewing through them like their final fate come up to bring them to flaming punishment.

Cones of plasma or massive eruptions heralded Legion at work, who would occasionally chuck a tower-top at one group or another, or pick up a massive statue and bludgeon a crowd to death with it before flinging it a quarter-mile at another group gawking at the display. If they occasionally flew right through a cavern column or a few Shaped stone buildings as if they were built of straw or something, well it came with that Strength score.

None of our enemies could flee, as the Shroud wouldn’t allow it. Instead, as they died, the Shroud forced them closer and closer to the Congregants commanding them. They didn’t have the raw numbers to support the greater powers of the Dark Ministers, especially after I scythed through the first ten thousand of them in just minutes.

A lot of knowledge and lore and secrets dark and mundane went up in vivus. The city was inundated with negative energy, and the unwhite fires burned at every stone, the blood and pain comfortably infused in every rock was burned free, and rock crumbled into white powder and dust.

A lot of the black stone of the city was going white.

The shouts and calls and screams were dying off, the silence of a New Day and the soft whiteness was stealing across the black with its own form of new light.

——-

We didn’t loot anything more than the most cursory stuff, but the Interdiction was down, and setting up a Seal Focus so I could bring in a looting team via Earthjump wasn’t that hard to do. Nothing was going to wander by randomly and investigate a city under a Shroud, so they would have plenty of time to pull out valuables of various sorts, Burnable and lore-wise.

That which didn’t burn up in the vivus, of course.

Then we headed on up, no more than a five-minute delay.

——

The ghoul Shroudlord didn’t have the Curse of the Sun… but it couldn’t move out of its Shroudzone, and if it fled above the Strata, it’d be exposing itself to rulership from above… meaning its back was against the wall.

I didn’t know if the Shroudlord tracked the Natural Renewals like that, maybe probably since it was what had freed it long enough to escape under the Strata.

Still, it was trapped, couldn’t run, and couldn’t hide.

We went up the Great Pit, destroying everything on the way that was hostile. Chain Dispels tore through hundreds of ready magical traps, ChainSpellflares blew apart ready Formations, and anything I couldn’t deal with quickly enough, the Void Brothers took care of.

The ghouls and what Constructs and servants they had were much easier to deal with, in comparison.

A bunch of the ghouls were spellcasters. They couldn’t get past my Spell Resistance, and the Summonings which they would have relied on in normal circumstances weren’t going to work here. They could Stillflight to slow us down some, but everyone here had highly developed lightfoot, including me, and running up walls was just a small trick.

The ki I spent going up and disposing of their traps and defenses was rapidly replenished as ghouls burned and died, expended Slots were refilled, and the carnage continued.

I didn’t know at what point they realized they were going to have to flee above the Strata into eternal slavery to survive, but by then it was too late. Mountainhamar Pawlie and the Ancientaxe Jorg were already up ahead of them, Deep and Ending raised and ready to stop them all… and they did. Then Shvaughn and Legion joined them to ring the entire Pit with one of my rod-bound Walls of Fire, although some could duck out the many interconnected tunnels underneath the ghoul warren of the city itself.

Said tunnels being open, and Seeking Shards totally able to track them down and kill them within.

They were collapsing the sides of the pit, while I was bouncing from facing to facing, Dispelling and shooting as I did so. The ghoul Casters were perishing to Helix-bound Weapons or incoming Shards. Their basic defenses wouldn’t stop my Shards; if they were Casting offensive spells they weren’t Counterspelling, and I didn’t need to switch things up… and the Casters were the ideal targets for the Void Brothers, as they were the most exposed, even if they had bodyguards.

The city of Navar Nevrend itself was beautiful, if macabre. Much attention was paid to making sure the bones, especially skulls of all kinds, were anatomically correct. Some were real, but many, many were carved right from the stone by extremely hard and sharp claws.

They’d even carved the massive roof into semblance of oversized ribcages, linking subcaverns together in a complex fashion which made the entire roof seem like the inside of some monstrous octopoid wormlike thing miles in size… like you were living inside a vast and cold, motionless god-corpse.

I imagine it made them hungry, looking up and seeing all those false bones, and imagining rotting meat hanging off of them.

There were capillary-like chains hanging from the ceiling ribs, moving slightly in the temperature differentials, festooned with hooks. There was literally nothing left on those fermenting hooks, where the bodies of the dead had been hung until they were rotted properly. The smell of rotting flesh – not all of it human, but pretty much all of it sapient – was imbued into every stone.

Vivus stole over the finely sculpted stone with quiet hunger, and it all crumbled away in the misty light of a New Day.