The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

Now, if the Aberrant started fucking with things, getting itself into an exposed position... yeah, I’d probably take a run at it, especially if I could get Sama, Briggs, and Commander Haru’Ara in on it. It wouldn’t like that much, and it definitely didn’t want to endanger its plans.

Us killing the Shroudlord too soon would mean all this was for naught. Given the scale of the Shroudlord’s fortifications, that wasn’t going to happen in normal circumstances, but a nuke to the Pattern definitely could force its hand to more active work.

So, the trick was to get what I was doing alone into place, and just make sure everyone else was as busy in as many directions as they needed to be.

We could have gone the nuke route, stepped up our offense, and simply made it impossible to complete the Pattern. That probably would have set off some waves of catastrophe, likely alien plagues or something, gutting the civilian population completely and making taking down the Shroudzone an affair with ghastly costs attached to it, depopulating the rest of the world in order to do so.

It didn’t want to kill us, as mortal souls were just more nourishment for it, so I didn’t want to give it the chance to do so. Aims aligning, how ‘bout dat?

Controlling the pace of the assault wasn’t difficult, as there was just too much shit we still had to do in the Felldeep and the Shattering Holes, and they required elites to do it. Given the mystique cavern-crawling and dungeon-bashing had somehow managed to acquire, there was no end of volunteers to leave off the tedious undead-flaming, Construct-trashing, and wall-grinding fun that was the Russian Shroudzone and go someplace even more actively dangerous for Karma and removal of threats to the mortal world.

People do get kind of weird when they have superhuman durability and healing magic around, along with great resistance to fear. Strange, that.

But everything otherwise looked like it was building towards a massive military effort to use combined arms and vivus to erode away the Shroudzone, an effort which would only hasten as the outer walls were passed, the undead were killed, and the Deadzone shrank with them. It was slow, steady, methodical, and guaranteed to work, and it allowed more people to Level.

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Only one of the five points I needed to confirm was built, but nothing said I couldn’t investigate it. I zipped over that way, waited until another static charge built up, then Rode the Lightning back down past the bonedrones and atop it, sending my tremblesense in to look at the internal layers of the thing.

Ah, yes, there it was, out of sight, twists in the molecular structure of the fused stone and soil here, concealed and impossible to see with a surface inspection. A thread of hair-thin divergences went ahead and knit together as they turned off and away from the focal point, poised to expand and become a massive current if need be.

That was one. I would confirm the others over time, but for now, it was time to leave... leave, and set up my own offensive measures.

I wanted to punish them ALL. The Shroudlord, slaved to the Shroud, driven to kill this whole world. The Devouring Moon, an Ender of Worlds. And that Aberrant player, likely related to the Thing which had attacked Terra-Luna, making it pay even more for what it was doing.

It wasn’t going to like us much. That was fine; we didn’t like it at all, and it was utterly remarkable how much things didn’t like it when what they spread around came back on them.

We were coming around.

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I had to work directly below the center of the Pattern, as all the power was going to flow through it, and that was what I needed. It needed to hook into the Pattern, modify what was going on, and then use the entire planet as the repository for what was going to happen.

I had no doubt the planet would appreciate it.

Would it kill the Shroud? No, not at all. Magnitudes of order different. Wouldn’t even clean it off the planet here.

But that wasn’t the intent. We could beat the Shroud by getting rid of its unliving anchors, sending it off this world. Sucking a lot of power off it in the process was definitely part of the plan. But we could probably win that fight without it. Vivus and the Curse of the Sun were on our side.

But the world-eating Moon and that Aberrant... yeah, they were definitely going to get the shaft.

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I set up shop about two miles down.

I had to set up a Formation to bend space around my workplace, as I both didn’t want them sensing me at work, and I didn’t want random incorporeals wandering through where I was working.

Not having much usable air was a non-issue. My Ring of Prime Elemental Command subsumed the effects of a Necklace of Adaptation, and I had no problems surviving in any natural elemental conditions.

I also didn’t need to make much room, as the stone around me was the material I was working with, so I simply took from the sides of the space I opened, and began to fill it with the ziggurat Pyramid.

The design of the Pyramid was fairly crude, being a basic four-sided step version, but the power wasn’t in the design, it was in the integration and the stacking, as well as the individual design of the cubes.

Making three-dimensional Runic Structures that hook up with others on a massive scale was not a simple thing to do, but I literally was taking a chunk of ground, splitting it off from the surrounding stone, and proceeding to Shape it inside and out to do what I had designed, in effect creating a Pyramid that was multiple modular stones assembled into a Rune Engine of incredible size and power.

My Stone Shaping was at +48, but I would be using Imperial Artisan to sub my Concentration Modifier for it instead, greatly increasing the speed I was working at. +94 was at the level of Eternals, and that was without using any extra magical modifiers.

The power of doing it in increments is that you can do finer detail on each part, and if you can integrate them properly, the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts, like separate magic items coming together to form a conjoined Set.

I was making a Set item with literally thousands of pieces. The effects when they all came together was going to be something. If I made it as a single massive block, I’d get one effect that was really, really strong, and that would be about it.

The big thing was getting the golden ratio right, as the more geometrically precise it was, the purer the end result would be and the higher the QL. Getting all those separate parts moving together to that end result was part of the challenge, and the reason why the end result was so impressive.

This was the real use of Stone Shaping. Trying to do this with tools just wouldn’t work out well. You needed unreal amounts of time and practice, had to have the spell at high Valence, and you needed to work on a lot of stone at the same time.

A thousand cubic feet at a time was a nice starting point, and thus I began Shaping the foundation blocks for a forty-layer Pyramid. It was a big one, the extra levels meaning thousands of extra blocks had to be made... but this was going to be the Pyramid that defined the planet, so I had to do it right.

Anyways, I had inherited plenty of experience at this kind of thing, had all kinds of designs available to work with, and I definitely had the Caster Level to pull it all off.

In the absolute darkness two miles underneath the heart of the Russian Shroudzone, in a bend in space that random incorps ghosting by went right past without a clue it was there, I began to make the last and greatest thing I ever would on the planet, the truest use of my downtime.

When it was done, my endgame gambit was going to be in place, and then it would just be all about the distractions and conventional means.

I was all alone here. The only way to get in was Earthjumping to the right Seal, or forcibly tearing open a fold in space which basically wasn’t there, anchored to a molecule-wide band of stone. I’d even smoothly merged the flows of stone together on the outside, so there was no sign a chunk of reality had been removed here.

You’d have to know what you were looking for and be able to earthglide to find it, and that would require being literally right on top of it.

If it was found out, that would not be good, and we’d likely have to nuke the Pattern, doing things the much harder way.

No slip-ups, no errors, no lapses in focus. This had to be done right, or I expected the retaliation of the Aberrant was going to be apocalyptic.

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“Are you certain you’re okay?” Legion asked me softly.

I made a sort of noise as their tails didn’t stop the massage. I was using TK to do sort of the same thing to them, but they had to really relax to allow it to work, relative strength and everything.

Riding Sleipner had gone from being my dolorous time of tedium to being my time to relax. The whole Allegiance kind of got up on their toes when I went into full Concentration mode during my ‘eight hours of downtime’. It was very, very hard for the people to NOT stay on focus and intense during those eight hours. When I came out of them, some of the people not used to being so intense would actually collapse in relief.

Rearranging a lot of sleep schedules, I was.

The mapping of Eurasia via Commune was almost done, its grand and glorious Felldeep above the Strata all laid out, and the Deepsea beneath it mostly in place, which was Legion’s big project.

Joining me for this kind of ride, just watching The Map expand, was relaxing for Legion too, while Sleipner rolled along just above the ground across thousands of miles of plains, hills, and forests, Sustained engine humming happily.

Greatest Lived-Line evah. Unfortunately going to be useless when I left, at least to me.

“Is fine,” I finally mumbled into that impossibly soft, strong, and comfortable shoulder, their hair all gossamer caresses, smelling like wood smoke and seaspray and after-storm and all the wildflowers and sunshine... “I can maintain that for days straight if I have to. It’s actually how old Aelryinth does most of his work. Great for keeping chatter down. You don’t bug the Monarch when they are sitting there like a diamond sun in the sky, so intent your thoughts kinda bleed if you think too much at them.”

“Well, you’re shutting down all /tell traffic, so we expect we’re just getting residual awareness, too.” I smiled into my pillow-shoulder. Heaven’s Wrath was now playing in both directions, my side woven about with sacred magic and positive energy, theirs with Purity and layers of other Pacts. Much more equitable exchange now.

“You’re sounding very tense. Something happen?” I asked calmly.

They sighed, which is quite impressive in a few thousand subnotes. “We discovered an enclave of dark elves,” they admitted softly.

They’d been searching out some of the sub-Strata areas under the Spanish lands, crossing under Gibraltar and messing around in northern Africa. I wasn’t surprised yet another new race had popped up, even of elves. “Drow, I’m assuming?” Judging by their tone.

“Ninety percent of the genebase has demonic bloodlines. There were two dozen succubi among them, over a hundred half-demons, and they have a seeming demigoddess watching over them, a child of Erichidnea, who is a Pact Patron.”