The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

-And a bunch more ghouls fall into the dustbin of history,- Sama /sniffed, not stopping her own running. Tremble flicked, flicked, flicked, and Constructs shuffling to life were sheared through and crashed back into motionlessness as the force of her Sharding strike carved into the stone, steel, and bone they were made of, disrupting the binding magicks and shattering all the connections.

It was still daytime, so there were no undead around yet, not without going into the Deep Shroud. She didn’t want to worry about zillions of incorps dogging her just yet, so that wasn’t something she was going to do.

She was jumping from wall to building to trench, getting some height here and there, spinning to paint everything into the Map and find some new targets.

Tremble was set to Construct-bashing mode (Slot Configuration 7!), and that meant Detect Bane was to Constructs, so nothing Animated or fully mobile escaped her Sword.

Briggs was a couple hundred miles north on a divergent course, doing pretty much the same thing: looking for patterns, seeing a lot of endless repetition and a lot of groundwork. -Good riddance to gluttonous rubbish,- he /agreed dismissively, checking one more box off the Shroudzones that had to be addressed. -This guy has been keeping busy.-

-One hundred miles of walls and trenches and counting,- Sama /agreed, taking another fifty-foot jump into the air to look around once, batting away or dropping down faster than a Construct nearby could track her. -Not seeing any reserve sites yet, but there’s plenty of ground to cover.-

-Aye.- Endure sent out a rectangular Sharding that blew a Possessed AA Turret off its mounting in flaming ruin. Ammunition started popping off loudly behind him. -This is going to be a total pain to keep traversing. We’re going to have to blow roads through these walls and stuff.-

-Sudden Widened Dawnstopped Stone Shapes?- Sama /laughed back, planting Tremble in the rumbling engine of a Possessed Tank that was trying to line up a potshot at her, and let off two Shardings one-two. Vivic flames crawled over the Tank as its engine exploded brightly, hurling her away and back onto her wanderings.

There was a lot of calculation of personality types and patterns going on as they inspected the repeated miles upon miles of fortifications. The undead had nothing but time and energy, so the Shroudlord had put his undead to work repeatedly and persistently, building up walls after walls after walls.

Such walls wouldn’t hold up under any kind of an artillery barrage, but they were meant to create impassable terrain, not really serve as defenses. Heavier vehicles simply couldn’t pass them easily, and humanity didn’t have the unlimited time and labor needed to take them all down.

It might be centuries before all these walls were gone, even if they won.

No, once the Shroud was down, they could start Summoning things in. Elementals could make short work of them, especially if they acted in concert. All those trenches needed to be filled with something, too...

Sama saw something at one hundred and twenty miles in, and changed direction rapidly.

It was nicely done, not even affecting the lines of the walls, but it couldn’t hide the fact that it had to use stronger materials for the ‘roof’ that supported the weights of the walls above, and the trenchline there suddenly became sharper and cleaner than it should have been, while the walls themselves weren’t reinforced and widened as they should be to accept shooters and possibly artillery fire.

She compared the entire section of what she was seeing to previous landscapes, and focused on the subtle placement of flak batteries in the area, and rather more Constructs than was statistically randomized.

-That whole wall there can be tipped over, shoved forward, and breach the trenches,- Briggs /confirmed as a gear-spider’s forelimbs exploded off its shell, Tremble hammered into its shell, and its internal damnation engine exploded. -Get up on the wall, get a look at the ground.-

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Sama ran up the forty feet of it effortlessly and crouched on the battlement there, looking left, right, and ahead, before turning back.

-It widened the walls gradually over the last mile, creating an easy access road,- she /noticed, fixed her eyes back on the walls ahead. -Those sections there are made to be tipped over and bridge the moat in front, they aren’t embedded properly.- She scampered down the side of the wall to the ground, letting her Tremblesense echo back and forth inside the endless cement, clearly showing things. -Yeah, look at that. This whole section rotates out to form a ramp.- She looked down through the cement under the light dirt beneath her feet. -No, no, that’s definitely not the concrete cap to an underground bunker of some kind.-

-See if you can find the edges, and then the access point,- Briggs /said, calmly going back through his own Mapping and altering course gradually. -We’re leaving tracks by wrecking things, so don’t let it know we know.-

-Yeah, yeah. Let me just take out a few more of these Constructobot Turrets... and see where the entry is while I’m at it.- She flitted away faster than any of the local Constructs could keep up. -Not seeing any Gearswarms, at least. Lack of ingenuity, not having any Drone fliers?-

-I expect they are being held in reserve. Those factories never stopped over all these years.-

-We’re gonna have to do plenty of flyovers to verify all of this.-

-I expect Legion will volunteer for the job easily enough, especially if the two of us can build out the pattern the Shroudlord is holding to and give them targets,- Briggs /replied thoughtfully.

-Yeah, they are pretty dependable about doing lots of tedium interspersed by intermittent explosively deadly violence. Part of that Heavenbound job description, I hear,- she /agreed.

Briggs rolled an eye at her words, and had someone check the job description of Heavenbound on the Trainee boards at the HH website on a hunch.

Yeah, ‘lots of tedium’ and ‘intermittent explosively deadly violence’ were right there in the job description. Probably written by a Tiirithi Minstrel...

-Wistfully thinking about becoming a five-Pact Warlock Grandmaster, too?- he /murmured to her understandingly.

-Yeah...- she /trailed off. -I love what I am and what I can do, and gods know we got handed power-ups that are gonna take us right up to the edge of the Eternal with no effort. But it being the only course we can take is a bit of a downer.-

Endure swept across, and another Turret blew apart as his Hammer Sundered it in explosive style. -I hear you. But if you could take a Pact, you’d be a Hag, and I’ve been a Source since I was born. It wasn’t in the cards. Besides,- he /grinned as he looked around, narrowed his eyes, and sped off in a certain direction where the walls seemed to be subtly overspaced,-We’re gonna run this whole planet one day, Empress Sama. No backsies!-

-Moi? Backsies? When have I ever not delivered on my promises?- Sama /sniffed, sliding down through the air to hit the ground and accurately race right over the edge of the sunken warehouse as displayed in her Tremblesense. She hopped forty feet up to the next wall’s surface, turned all her forward momentum sideways, and zipped along it without losing any speed, bouncing down to the ground to let the concrete and the empty space below scroll past her. -I’m gonna run this world and they’re gonna love me for it, or I’ll break their faces!-

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Briggs huffed in amusement. Sama was definitely not a passive personality type by any stretch of the imagination, and it seemed to be hard-wired into her. Even when she was being sneaky, subtle, or sly, she had a predator’s glee in pulling things off, never got tired of succeeding at something, and when she didn’t succeed, would put in literally superhuman efforts to overcome whatever she was facing with relentless determination.

If what Traveler said about the core of their personalities being taken from the transferred and adapted actions of deeds of two game characters... well, wasn’t that a huge not-surprise. The games here were nothing like in Traveler’s former home, but even the simplest role-playing games tended to have a lot of focus on bloody combat, and the ones on computers were basically endless violence, crafting to make money or Gear, and then more violence to earn more pay or plunder and keep the cycle moving.

The process was so natural that not being able to fight and get stronger left him feeling irritable and depressed. He liked being able to be violent and unleash his strength on those who deserved it. It helped him be gentler with those who needed a kinder hand.

Thinking about the future, he realized that it was a good thing for him that the future was expected to still be extremely dangerous and violent. The people who weren’t going for Levels were going to regret it in many ways, but that just meant more Karma-hungry people motivated to fight and hopefully not die.

Planetary population was still at least a billion, they were estimating. That was even with the increased death rate, two World Wars, the Shrouds, and even with the plagues that had ravaged the old and weaker parts of the population. Kids had been born, risen to fight, and done what they had to in order to hold back the tide.

But that was all nothing like they had done once they could permanently put the undead down. The Karmic rewards were just so much higher, faster, and broader that, combined with the knowledge on how to approach Leveling, things were entering a whole new stage.

He and Sama were two of those kids, leading the new charge that was going to change the world again, because the Shroud coming down was going to demand those changes.

He felt some sympathy for older folks who believed in democracy and elected representatives. The whole alternative of magical Allegiances completely surpassed anything the old governments were capable of, and the corruption and favor-trading that resulted from them. They could try to cling to them, but their own feet would soon start walking to better alternatives.

If they didn’t, they often became huge liabilities to the rest of the people, trying to sponge the benefits without making the contributions. That meant sidelining them, marginalizing them because they refused to go along with greater society. Their standards of living would fall, which would generate resentment, and the whole cycle of anger and class conflict would rise up out of them. The Allegiances they joined would be designed to thwart the system instead of contribute to them, and the Dark Gods would laugh and take their share of Free Will with hearty laughter.

He could see it all playing out, but there was nothing he could do about it. The Alignments wanted conflict, and there would never be total harmony and brotherhood in any realm with active magic that could empower all the crazies to take out their resentments on the rest of the world.

His booted feet slammed to the ground on one side of a wall, and in his Tremblesense, he saw the corner of a concrete foundation extending both north and west. He took off north, like Sama figuring that the ramp out would lead to one or more hidden loading ramps, and aiming to plot them.

The undead of these ‘outer’ Shroudzones had given the experienced undead slayers from China, India, and lesser Shroudzones plenty of surprises. All of them had been Corpsecrafted basically to the maximum extent possible, making them far faster and tougher than the mediocre basic undead raised by the Shroudlords of most Shroudzones. That wasn’t surprising, as those Shroudlords often had no idea what they could do, and had to be informed or experiment to discover their capabilities. Being unable to communicate with one another, that meant they had to develop on their own, maybe helped along by a Congregate or enslaved undead who had retained their intelligence.

Faster, tougher, stronger, empowered with necroic cold, armored, and blowing up on their own deaths while healing the other undead nearby... and that was ignoring any intrinsic abilities, like burning bones, volt heads, energy drains, paralysis, fear, Possession, and the like.

There was a lot of negative energy resistance being built up here, even moreso than before. After all, there were literally millions of incorps around here. If the Shroudlord had done things correctly, then every living person who had died here was now an incorp, AND their bodies were serving it mindlessly, in addition to their souls.

Add to that all the dead pulled from centuries of graves and graveyards, often amalgamated or Constructed into greater horrors, and yes, there were lots and lots of undead and incorps that had to be killed.

He was firmly of the opinion that the undead in the Last Shroudzone were a greater threat than all the undead in the rest of the world put together, an opinion shared by many, including Sama.

There hadn’t been any other Shroudlords reinforcing their undead like this, nor engaging in continuous assembly of Constructed reinforcements. It was going to take time to kill them all, and they didn’t know how much time they had left...