The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

As I reached a few hundred yards from the surface, I noted that buried Constructs were everywhere. I noticed them because they had transdimensional existences and were visible solidly in the ether, doubtless there to guard against ethereal or incorporeal infiltration attempts.

Not to fear, I wasn’t going to use that trick against undead. I altered course to stay away from them, but not exactly so, as those symmetrical spots were like lures for other kinds of attention on the surface.

I hit the surface in the sloping ditch next to an old road, behind a crumbling rock, and zipped up into flight, looking above me, then around.

The Shroudcloud was thick and black, making this area as dark as night, save for the occasional flash of purplish-red hate lightning. Around me in visible range were quite a few devices tirelessly scanning the earth and sky, looking for intruders and surprises. I felt their mechanical eyes sweep past me, but they didn’t have enhanced See Invisibility, just going with the base, and they swept right on by me.

They were looking for magic and souls and other things, none of which they’d be able to sense on me. Somewhat reassured, I felt the weave of magic, and turned my head north.

The black threads in the ley lines, of which there were many, many, many of them, were all converging about a mile to the north-north-east. Guess who was in that direction?

There was also motion, and the sound of engines, even the crackle of electricity and the stench of exhaust fumes. The ground was vibrating from things working, heavy machines and large loads were rumbling back and forth.

There were walls of stone everywhere, and new trenches carved fairly recently, judging by the weathering. Wind was moving from the motion of things, where normally it would be stale and dead here.

They were indeed building stuff here.

There were things in the air. Not true drones, and built of bone as much as of metal or wood, they were humming up in the air with a touch of ozone about them, forming a ceiling of sorts... or a Ward from above, and I got the impression that anything that passed between them was going to ignite a blast of electricity, and there would go my cover.

Accordingly, I didn’t fly up too high, the ominous static hum about them a definite sign of something. I didn’t even get directly below them, as that might form a link to the ground, too.

A couple hundred yards of movement meant paying attention to my course, as these things seemed to be shifting positions on a regular basis to cover all areas in the sky. Just keeping me on my toes...

There was the Death Gate.

It didn’t look so impressive in the distance, until you realized it was in the distance, and it was still that big. It had been a great Arch, something like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (which had never been built on this Earth), but wider in arc and higher, reaching nearly a klik in height and a mile in width.

Only the massive ends were intact now, shattered by the death of a World-Angel. They were stumps of black stone imbued with the devastating necromancy of the Shroud-makers, able to wield the Shroud to warp to another world with life, open a massive Portal to there, and bring a Dead March through it to kill that whole world.

The Death Gate also formed the anchor point of the Shroud upon this world, connecting it to all other parts of the Shroud elsewhere. Without the Death Gate intact, the Shroud was not as strong as it could have been, as certainly the Curse of the Sun wouldn’t have found any purchase if it had been at full power.

Even now, the stumps were sizzling with black fumes and necroic lightning, hissing and spitting. The Shroudlord didn’t have the proper workforce or power to fix them, and in the end, the fact was irrelevant.

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It was already here, and the Shroud was still up. At some point the Curse would fail, it would be free, and this world would die. New Deathgates would rise, one at a time, to bring the extra dead of this world away to another, no doubt in possession of necrotech war machines this time, and claim another new tomb world for the expansion of the Realm of the Shroud.

Time to start charting this place out, but to really get a proper view, I needed to get above the monitoring bone-drones up there.

No problem. It just involved finessing a Ride the Lightning up along the electrical fields these things were generating over several rounds, keeping it very slight and subtle, then pulsing it through their fields in a momentary imbalance, like heat lightning evening out things between thunderclouds.

The crackle of purple-red electrical arcs snapped between the ground and literally hundreds of the floating bonedrones in a single second, percolating through the grid in a crackling display of readjustment. I noted the shift in the attention of the Shroudlord to the phenomenon, but as I expected, it wasn’t a unique thing, electricity being fundamentally untamable when dealing with magic.

I was also now a half mile above the ground, carefully Non-Conducting myself (a Transmutative version of Resist Lightning) so I wouldn’t be a very visible channel for the seething lightning overhead that was trying to reach down and touch the bone-drone network, only barely held at bay by the casual will of the Shroudlord.

The view was much better from up here, and if the scale of his bone drone network was annoying, I was already spinning out methods to neutralize it rather rapidly. It wasn’t like they were very tough... and they weren’t the only ones who knew how to build and guide drones. Artificers and gearheads unite!

Production tooling would commence immediately upon my return. We were already making weaponized drones for dealing with some of the bigger undead and Constructs, so this was nothing new, just more focused. We didn’t need a net of lightning a few miles wide descending on everyone to electrocute them en masse, so it was best to take it out with tech, while the tech was still working.

Eagle Eyes roved over everything I could see below. Possessed bulldozers, diggers, and trucks were at work, clearing away literally everything in the way below, demolishing it, and either trucking it away or moving it to areas where it would be mounded, fused, and shaped into the appropriate pattern when the undead returned and Congregants could go to town with pyreflame, sanguine acid, and the like before carving it closer to the desired form by hand.

At large scale, it was actually pretty hard, as minor imperfections had to be cleared away, and with this much area, there would be a lot of them. Time and persistence, two things the undead specialized in, made sure that whole sections had still been completed, and I could imagine would be swarming with undead come sundown, polishing, chipping, melting, and grinding them all correctly.

I doubted this level of detail would have been needed in normal circumstances. Predators don’t usually require perfection to sense potential prey. But this Calling had to radiate out through the Shroud, reach the Devouring Moon out somewhere in the Void, and pull it in.

Happily, this level of detail also gave me a very easy way to see if the Pattern had been altered, and how.

The Congregants and probably Fiends that were working on this were definitely skilled enough to do the job, and if they had to take it slow and careful, what did they care? They were interrupted every twelve hours with a painful death and reformation, but that had been going on for years, and they were likely resigned to it happening anyways.

The two variants of the Ritual I had meshed into a Spellcraft check at +56, no magical bonuses whatsoever, a whole bunch of thoughtstreams dissecting the fundamentally disturbing patterns and the way the energies were supposed to run through them.

There, there, there, there, and there.

I would have to get closer, and have Commander Haru’Ara check the higher fundamentals of these minor alterations. I focused on a corner of the asymmetric pattern that, unless you were hitting a 50, looked like a gathering node for energies of the world, cycling through the whole pattern.

If the way it was connected to the other four alterations were adjusted slightly, it was instead the actual center of the effect, offset so that the center of the pattern was the target, not the receptor, of the actual flows.

If you didn’t have the actual Patterns to compare and contrast against, a 60 or 70 check might not have been high enough. The level of subtlety involved in this made me sure I didn’t want to engage in a straight-up conflict against the Aberrant behind this... but that was par for the course. It was pulling a fast one over on the Devouring Moon, which meant it dared to do something against an Entity I didn’t want to face. The way you beat such things was either with outside help, or brains.

Brains I could do. It obviously lacked raw power, having to deal with a Shroudlord to accomplish its aims, but it was doing the same thing I needed to, playing this planet-conquering undead warlord AND a World-ender. That required some balls, or the knowledge that even if you failed, it wasn’t going to kill you.

After all, powerful Aberrant Entities didn’t fear death, but they did fear oblivion. Death was this minor nuisance they could just work around, given time.

I probably couldn’t give anything here oblivion by what I was planning, but I could definitely give them some hearty death.

There was only to add another dimension to the equation of what was going to happen when this Pattern was activated, and I’d have to get at least a couple things into place to do so.

Still, there was months of work yet to go here, judging by the QL they had to hit. One nuke to the face could set it all back, if we dared to do such a thing, but we didn’t know how much longer the Curse of the Sun was going to last.

We had to beat the Curse of the Sun’s time limit, because we wanted to make very Good use of that thing, enhancing it all the way up, so it could affect the Shroud pretty much anywhere we went.

It was one of the things I was going to work into the Pyramid I created. Wondrous Machines were such useful tools.

A wave of attention swept past me, saw nothing. Tiny figure, very disguised, extreme range, not using magic to draw attention.

Wasn’t the Shroudlord...

I didn’t look in that direction, because that would have been a bad idea. The Aberrant was over there, not far away from the Shroudlord, maybe overseeing some digging and checking all parts of the Pattern.

It had indeed come into Moscow physically, which meant it could move into and out of the Shroud’s Seal without too much problem. Maybe because it didn’t have a soul or spirit, or it came from Outside Creation, who knew?

Didn’t matter; it was here, and that confirmed dealings with the Shroudlord.

I was very glad I was Beyond Law and Chaos, as even suppressed timesighting might have detected the change in possibilities happening with me up here looking at stuff, confirming what to do, and making plans that were going to wind out into the world beyond.

The Aberrant would also be able to move out into human society and make sure that everything out there was on course to apply pressure to the Shroudlord. As long as it observed nothing that would threaten its own plans, it simply wouldn’t care, and it likely had subtly charmed, dominated, or just plain had true believers supplying it with current information.

It was one of the reasons I made so much information public, and wasn’t underhanding a lot of stuff, even openly planning for beyond the coming of the Shroud, like bringing it down was inevitable and it was going to happen. Just feeding its informants what it wanted to hear, and what the Shroudlord did not...