The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

Shvaughn and Legion winked in right next to one another, dove right down into that mass, and began a true Firewall Sweep in the opposite direction from me. They parted with the long rods of a Permanent Wall of Fire grasped in one hand each. Suddenly the two of them were hugging two stone walls two hundred yards apart on parallel courses, and everything below a Congregant between them was dying... and if they shot them, the Congregants died too.

Commander Haru’Ara and the Angelos winked in and pulled apart, separated another set of extended rods carrying a Wall of Fire, and proceeded to do the same thing, chasing after and passing me by in a wave of extinction that took care of the thickly-packed chaff and let me deal with the incorps and Congregants.

Azaia and the Morningsuns zipped in behind Shvaughn and Legion, towed behind the Old Steed on Disks as Morningfire blasted in all directions with enthusiasm. Firecasters and Warlocks zipped in on Disk-trains behind their own fliers and streaked after them, killing the surviving intelligent undead and incorps mercilessly as the toughest undead staggered from the incredible burns delivered by that Wall of Fire.

More and more of the flying troops zipped ahead of the retreating undead, aiming to take out incorps and Congregants along the massive swathe before they could heal up, or turned around and put up Walls of Fire of their own for all those undead to run on through, forming massive burning lines of death to the Deadzone the undead were compelled to cross. Those on the other side were going to exploit them and kill them all as they passed through and were set on undead-hungry fire.

The nega-Lances, Bolts, and Bursts of negative Elemental attacks were starting to fly, but none of them bothered us. We all had Death Wards or the equivalent, and copious resistance to Elemental attacks, so they were sending spit balls at us. Trying to hit us with gunfire or spells didn’t work, because by the time they could see us to aim, they only had seconds before an inferno swept over them... or no time at all, if I was ranging ahead.

Things got even worse when I started adding Called Lightning to the mix.

Called Lightning actually had multiple forms. The long duration, very high damage, once per ten-minutes Thunderbolt version was optimal for long, drawn-out battles like this, but there were lesser versions that didn’t last as long, or shoot quite so many bolts, and weren’t as powerful, but they could go off every six seconds instead of six HUNDRED seconds. Given how spread out my opponents were, I often couldn’t reach them with arcing Shard volleys, as they were simply too far apart after their minions were blown apart by the Wall of Fire from the two angels passing by for a Chain to reach them.

However, I could easily hit any of those survivors with a cracking bolt of lightning coming down from the stars seething overhead, moon-white bolts of purity with all the Kickers that could pop anything within a thousand feet of me, giving me coverage area three walls wide to pick on stuff.

Yeah, the spells only lasted 90 minutes max, and topped out at 20 bolts maximum, which generally meant I was recasting them constantly, but they allowed me to blow away wounded targets, up to twenty at a time, while my Twinned and Repeating main volley of Shards still did for the massed incorporeals and any linked clusters.

I didn’t need to Pyroclasm behind them anymore, either. Happily, the area one wall east was all jam-packed with thousands of undead flooding forwards and back, so I shifted over that way.

Arcane Fusion at VIII: Cast one spell at VII, one spell at IV. Alternating Repeating Widened Pyroclasms with Repeating Twinned Lightning Clouds, offset with Dimension Door to move me 1000 feet in the direction I was going. Fastcast Shards was on follow-up clearing off anything still moving with Chained Twinned extinction, also kicking up to Repeat with Residual Metamagic, and I actually began to catch up to the two Angels in the other row, even as I was spraying death in all directions around me.

Massive dome of Fire clearing off a lot of chaff. If I spent ki for +7d6 of choral bell Might of Thunder Kickers on each of them, the undead didn’t seem to mind, what with their moans and shrieks drowned out by a harmonic chorus of explosions as they vivified. More Lightning Clouds were cast, and twenty Thunderbolts came down, also with the extra bells ringing, helping wipe the survivors who managed to get in between my Shardchains.

Shift forward 1000 feet so the edges of the Pyroclasms just overlapped, and do it again.

Towering domes of Fire walked towards the horizon at two miles a minute, while Chains of Shards blasted in every direction and wiped survivors away as constant jetsilver Thunderbolts descended from above to blow a score of others apart.

Karmic harvest, the wheel of karmic retribution was turning.

The funnest thing about all this? We were outside its Shroud, so even if the Shroudlord wanted to implement a Greyfield, it couldn’t do so!

Thousands of undead were dying every second, and there was nothing it could do about it, except actually pray for the dawn to come, and for them to be saved by the Sun coming in to wipe them away and beyond our reach...

--------

Briggs watched the bloated areas of O’s in orange up through blues getting wiped of anything below green, and then the sweeping train of X’s following up to pick off the wounded green and blue O’s blinking there, all ready to be fat targets.

Yeah, it was pretty murderously effective. The Casters were all piling north and south now, as phase two of the killing was starting.

Namely, erecting miles and miles of Walls of Fire, setting them up, forcing the undead to run through them all night, and killing them all. As the forces inside the Deadzone watched and stewed just a wall or two away, death was coming at a hundred mph with overpowered undead-killing Walls of Fire along the very, very packed edge of the Deadzone... an area that was only going to get even more packed when it got past the edge of the Dragon’s Teeth battle line harvesting forty miles worth of undead platoons for themselves.

The Curse of the Sun was letting them exploit the command radius weakness of the Shroud, the Opening of the Sky had forced millions of undead outside the control zone, and they could do nothing but flee to get back inside it.

The result was absolute carnage and a harvest of dead Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians like nothing any of the soldiers fighting here had expected. If it wasn’t risk-free, it was definitely much, much safer than playing hide-and-seek with undead kill teams in the Deadzone, that was for damn sure!

The only real threat was clusters of incorps bypassing the Melees, but that was what all those Casters and Warlocks were for, and the Guns. Lots and lots of Guns, throwing Wrathfire’d black and white bursts up into the sky and popping insubstantial enslaved spirits like balloons as they did.

Child holding a spectral doll, a ghostly mother with empty eyes, wraith-like grandfather with his stomach torn open; it didn’t matter, they all had to die, as did their mindless corpses below them.

The Trembling Song was going off, ringing through the Alliance with Courageous and +6 to hit, damage, Armor Class, and Saves. Endure was beating time with it, morale was flying, Bards and Minstrels were taking turns singing their custom or favorite verses inside it, and the slaughter continued unabated.

The diamonds that represented Constructs were winking off everywhere as they were eliminated, focused kill-teams taking them out as the main platoons concentrated on cutting down the undead.

Everyone wanted to be at Briggs’ level and pound out the one-shot kills. However, these undead were tougher than the Shrouded undead following a non-Hierophant, and the vast majority of the once-human undead were two-hitters, with some of the more advanced ones at three, and Congregants at four and above.

Thus, a line of dragon’s-teeth, making the undead run the gauntlet. If the person in front, generally the most senior Dragon Warrior or Melee of the line, couldn’t one-hit them, then the ones behind hacked and hewed as the undead tried to run past them and brought it down. Only if there was a major surge of undead was there any way one would slip past the gauntlet, and packed masses were when the AoE spells and massed Gunfire started mowing the undead down, spotted well ahead of time so he could move assets in to support and weaken those incoming.

All of the ammunition had to be spent, right?

Briggs spun through a mass of undead, Hewing through the chaff to catch a massive serpentine undead in the forelimb, Cleaving through six of the fused-bone legs on this side and sending it veering off-course and down as he did. Timing somewhat broken, somewhat miffed, he brought out his arm and wrapped up the other six legs, taking the impact against his Crystal Dragon Heavyfoot and creating a tremendous clatter and din as they crashed together under the thing’s momentum.

The scuttling skelepede fell over on its side, and he smashed apart the six legs flailing at him before it could make much of an attack, two other legs crashing off his Armor and getting hacked off in flaming ruin for their trouble as he stood there.

Helix put two shots in the oversized, fanged head marrow-melded out of dozens of human skulls, and it stopped moving, head and legs all blazing en vivus for the undead coming around and behind to avoid.

=============

If you're not reading this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief. Please read it in its original home, it's still free! I have not given permission for this story to be posted ANYWHERE ELSE.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/35487/the-power-of-ten-book-three-the-human-race

=============

Briggs glanced at his next target, bounding off in that direction, Endure flipping through endless circles and sending any undead around him flying in flaming bits as he closed in on a Corpse Worm of some size currently serving as a bridge over the wall for an unbroken stream of undead. It saw him coming, and rose up, stopping serving as both tunnel and bridge, inside and out, for the undead, and belched up a truly momentous amount of acid in his direction.

Endure roared right down the middle of it, coming in like a cannon shot, and the bulging mass of its mouth exploded as the burning, Firephasing head of it converted all that kinetic energy into fire.

It couldn’t retreat. Helix dropped two shots into it as the blazing Hammer whipped back to Briggs’ hand, and the worm’s midsection gave way as the lightning-charged force arrows ripped it open, sending dozens of undead falling back to the ground as vivus began to swarm over it and them. The crunching of its bulk falling on top of and pinning them down made certain they weren’t going to get over the wall anytime soon.

Briggs’ inner eyes turned north and south, analyzing the carnage going on, the carnage coming, and the carnage that was going to result.

The undead’s only real threat was artillery, which was why the dragon’s-teeth line was out here, beyond any real credible range of such things. The kill-teams had found and destroyed numerous artillery sites very quickly, mostly mortars, but there were a few howitzers spread about. The artillery in the Deadzone was too far away to be a threat, and the Chaser teams were mobile and motile, moving around fast, completely beyond the ability of any kind of their fixed long-range weaponry to keep up with.

Tanks, now, Tanks could be a threat... but they tended to be highly visible, even if hidden and embedded, and while, yeah, nobody wanted to try Soaking a shot from a 72 mm turret, it was utterly remarkable how fast a Tank could be taken out by the right Weapons and men who could move just as fast as it and effectively shear through steel. Notably, shearing off the hatch and tossing a grenade down inside would take out a Possessed Tank as cleanly as a manned one. All that ammunition was still going to go off, as was whatever passed for its fuel.

They were old tank designs, too, and pretty vulnerable from above. Any external gun mount was just a vulnerability easily shot or hacked off.

Very deliberately, they had deployed to a point PAST one of the Shroudlord’s Construct storage barns. There was a lot of interest in seeing if the Shroudlord was going to spend the power to try to activate and deploy the things, or keep them still and silent and hope the living just missed that they were there.

Not that they weren’t planning on finding it and clearing it completely out, and had multiple ways to do so. Extended Improved Invisible Melees with Constructbane Configurations on Named Weapons could wreak a lot of havoc on Constructs who couldn’t see them or think for themselves beyond basic self-defense.

In the meantime, the Karma meters were pumping and rising steadily. The people left behind at the distant battlezones could only cry good-naturedly at missing out on this massive haul... but then they realized the same thing would have to be done at least twenty times over AGAIN, and in the long run, they weren’t going to be missing much.

As long as they fought hard enough to earn their daily allotment, maxing out one Level, one Health or Soak towards Max, one Feat, one Mastery, and their Named Weapons, they were staying right on pace with everyone else.

The massacre continued, and Briggs smiled as O’s vanished in long arcs to north and south, curving around the edge of the Deadzone, and the milling undead could only sit there and watch them come.