The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

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Magic cycled, and Paired Hydroclasms blew out with holy water damage. An armored turtle the size of a small keep went sailing through the air like a softball, describing a pretty high and sharp arc as it came down on another pachydermal war Construct. Both of them shattered badly at the impact.

Below and behind me, the Melee crew powered forward through the heavily wounded undead. A Dark Minister failed to Bodyjump away as everything around it perished and Endure pounded its head into its soles with ominous finality, not even slowing Briggs down as he kept going. Heptoclasms blew past the undead with regularity, and added to their woes on top of what I was doing.

My Shards pattern started over, but that was fine. Wounded incorps were close by and stronger ones were on the way. I moved ahead, clearing the White Road for everyone else.

We were selling desperation and massive heroic effort in the best storyboard fashion as the timer counted down, and that huge maw descended upon the world to suck the life out of it.

The other Casters started doing the same, sending out single attack spells to wipe chaff undead for the ki, and then letting out Clasm spells of phoenix fire, holy water, or radiant Light to blow in every direction. Waves and waves of Heavy Area damage heaped on top of the undead, like running headlong into waves of acid, eroding them away even before they could reach the Melees.

By the time any of the undead could reach the battle groups, they had all taken 200+ Health damage. Even the advanced Congregants were not far from death, and so much easier to handle.

Incorps were coming in their thousands, and dying at speed as they did, liquid Light blowing past them and taking their essence in turn. Weakened savagely by the Hydroclasms, Chained Shardrays ripped any survivors apart.

Massive Constructs were flying through the air into one another with tremendous impacts, and their cannons were going silent or exploding as they did so, nothing but a blur passing between them as they were heaved into the air like toys.

Even Briggs clucked at the display. Amazon Lilitus at Twenty Hit Dice, too broken!

I touched a wall ahead of us, and it split open, Shaped open instantly. I knew everyone back there could get past it rapidly, as a ten-foot-wide passageway through a forty-foot wall was a stream to us, but a chokepoint to any undead force who wanted to follow us.

It was also a play for time, saving a few seconds, selling the whole fight. Forward, forward, creating the White Road!

I doubted any living force could possibly have headed into the maw of annihilation like the undead did at us. Waves on waves of Clasm spells crashed into them, killing the chaff, while my Shardrays harvested the incorporeals above and the Melees clove their way through the damaged Congregants and elites below without slowing down much.

Much, but still some. Heading right for that damn Formation over the dead ground, broken forests, shattered farms and fields, barren plains, and silent streams that we crossed. Crumbled homes from seven decades past, the remnants of barns and the crumbling roads passed us by as we advanced, making a road of white the undead following us burned upon, and they tried to get ahead of, or around us, but we were moving so fast...

The monsters had to clamber over dozens of their own walls to reach us, lesser undead forming ramps for them to do so, or they winged in and adding themselves to my airborne targets at great range.

They couldn’t approach those below me from the air, and the few who tried plummeted from the sky and nearly destroyed themselves against the ground. Entering attack range from Bows and spells made sure they didn’t get much further.

But whole tribes of zombie giants were pounding our way tirelessly, fallen crowns of griffons and tattered parades of hippogriffs were on the way, and several kinds of winged lizards were chasing us, too. Among the monsters on the ground were great raptor saurials and equally great primates of some kind, looking more amphibious than apish in death, with broad, flat faces and jaws that nearly bisected their skulls.

Pentaran undead and creatures, distinctly different from Earth’s history. The chaff undead were dominated by anthroids, humanoid in shape in general, but definitely not human, or even primates.

Tremble never stopped Singing, nor did Endure stop Beating. Weapons rose and fell, and the Heavy Magic Casters also became the locus of healing efforts as the Heavenbound began to address the wounded by standing close to the Heavy Casters and using their Wrath to fix the most wounded or exhausted combatants.

But, by and large, that actually wasn’t a problem.

The ideal for this team when we’d set it up was endurance, being able to literally fight for hours against the undead. That meant that they had to have some way of renewing their stamina, and some form of ongoing healing, and it had to work in a Shroudzone.

Healing Edge and Revitalizing both worked just fine here. A Potion of Vitality could keep a person going for seven days straight if it had to, and sipping it for a full day of energy was easy to do.

The White Road extended on, years of Construct creation crashed to the ground, incorporeals wailed softly and died, and hordes of undead became a pyre to greatness as they fell, all just to slow us down.

Sell the fight, sell the idea that we could break the Pattern, and the Shroud would force Guiogg away. Make it believe, make them all believe we just might do it, and so it had to stop us, or it would lose everything. Even if we died, there were so many more out there who could just slowly and inevitably finish the job.

No, it had no choice BUT to stop us.

We definitely had to get within the twenty-five-mile radius of its mouth, as I had no wish to be crushed to a pulp by the mass of a moon kissing the planet.

That wasn’t an issue. Despite all that was happening, we were making pretty good time, all things considered, and ahead of us I could see it was moving in Construct armies to stop us, hoping that our Clasms wouldn’t be so effective against them.

It was right, but Construct-killing was either active via Baneskull on many Weapons, or could be swapped in via other Baneskulls or Arsenal effects.

They weren’t Golems, and so definitely weren’t immune to magic, and they had no Constitution or magical reinforcement like Soak, meaning that in some ways they were actually weaker than many of the undead and their negative energy ecology.

Still, there were a lot of them, and as we progressed, there were only more of them getting thrown at us, since they didn’t have to worry about the vivic trail of our White Road burning them. Well, most of them. Lots of bone and guts had been used in many of them...

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It was an open area a couple miles wide, right on the edge of what would be the maw of Guiogg, and we had to get past it to get inside the maw and not be crushed insta-dead. We had less than an hour to go.

There were at least five THOUSAND Possessed Tanks with barrels lowered, ready to unload as soon as we breached that wall. The only reason they hadn’t fired on us was a complete lack of arc of fire, owing to their own sixty-foot wall cutting off line of sight.

I had been adding the long-term Call Lightnings to my rotation, just to get rid of more surviving undead and blow through Constructs that Legion didn’t get to in time. From three miles ahead and up in the air unleashing Shard spirals, I saw the spread out there and swore, -Briggs, you are a fucking prophet of a fuzzball.-

He glanced at my eye-feed as a tentacled zombie that was part humanoid worm, part octopus was divided in two by Endure, and he surged right through the burning gore of the remains to the next one of the massive creatures, not slowing down. -Well, duh,- was his succinct /reply. -Bastard likes his tanks. You damn well better clear a way, too.-

The overlapping Clasm attacks from below were doing a good job of weakening the undead, and the Casters had pounded out their own Rapid Ritual Call Firebolts/Lightning/Acidfalls on top of that, freeing me up to deliver more direct Shard attacks on the stronger undead, and especially the still-coming incorps.

I was moving so I wasn’t on top of them, into swarms of incorps, undead, and Constructs, letting off the Hydroclasm and killing everything that moved, occasionally swearing at how much this Greyfield restricted my firepower and mobility. But I was still fast aflight, Wrath making me even faster as I had Angel Walk buffing my speed now too, and I could move from one area to another and maximize my kills with great speed.

Hydroclasms flared out like walls of holy water to the undead, just acid to the Constructs. Extra Kickers rocked and tore at them, and Shard volleys with Kickers burned in all directions in jet, silver, and rainbow lights and flames.

I was killing a lot of shit, gravely weakening the rest for those following behind, and making a fine show of a desperate attempt to reach our goal in time.

I had to kill everything in the air before those tanks opened up. I studied the ground ahead with Eagle Eyes and realized they’d pre-sighted a lot of the area, and there were plenty of undead around to serve as relay spotters. The undead being shoved into that area to face us were also... Nazi soldiers, their uniforms still intact, Corpsecrafted up but obviously still chaff that the Shroudlord didn’t care at all if they were blown away. They were just there to muck us up so we wouldn’t notice the annihilating bombardment coming our way in time to do anything before we were pounded into pulp and dust.

Looked like they had a max range of about a mile and a half, probably inefficiencies in the necroic combustion effect. They were basically serving as artillery, so accuracy and penetration wasn’t a problem.

I kept moving forward as those behind me did as well, not having time for delays. We were playing the game, and drawing a whole lot of attention to the bright displays of magic I was putting on. After all, thousand-foot spheres of holy acidic death are real easy to spot when they go off, as are the burning fireworks as incorps explode.

My forward range with Shards was a full mile, so I could definitely clear a road ahead and around, and I was burning through incorps ceaselessly with my multiple volleys and Chains. They were still trying to overwhelm me with numbers, and didn’t realize that they could have totally shafted my kill rates just by spacing creatures out more than sixty feet apart and totally breaking the ability of my Chains to arc to the next victim.

Of course, doing that meant the infantry would have just driven forward that much faster, so, do what you need to do, I guess.

We were approaching that combat range. I could almost taste the readiness of the Tanks ahead as their barrels adjusted, waiting for us to move into the center of a massive bombardment area...

“Lo, did the Valkyries call, and hark upon their Ride

Wagner played his tribute, and all the warriors sighed.

Magic was a lance, composed of jet and silver,

Its Sacred Light shone forth, making them all shiver,

And Destiny battled Fate, as their Doom arrived.

TREMBLE, THEY COME!”

I was good at planning for myself, not so much for armies. I could Make Big Things, execute grandiose plans, and I was a total whiz at logistics and production.

But Briggs had been the one to notice that the number of Tanks we had been facing in the previous weeks was totally out of line with what could be expected after so many years. That number didn’t rise even when the length of the front line was pulled back, and Tanks that should have been stationed elsewhere didn’t arrive.

So, that meant the Shroudlord had a massive reserve of them somewhere, and they were waiting.

But, this was the modern age. The great tank battles in Russia of WW2 had never happened. It thought it had an invincible amount of firepower against a small force, and had no idea how much technology had advanced.

I was the diversion, generating lots of sound and light, and now it was time for the air cavalry to save our bacon.