The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

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Drawn to the surface by the focused gravitational force and energy draw of the Devouring Moon, the Pyramid hooked itself right into the center of the Formation and took command.

After all, it had literally been made to do so.

The reality-bending light around the Control Node occupied by the Aberrant inverted onto itself, and suddenly the Aberrant was Sealed as tight as a custom-made Binder’s Cage.

Negative energy was streaming past: the energies of the undead of the Shroud, sucked away and crumbling them to death by the millions. It all went up and ignited, and with a roar of the mother of all blast furnaces, headed up into the Maw above.

We saw the reactions on the inside of that abyss of a mouth instantly. The Maw wanted to let go, but it couldn’t. Its own unnatural energies started to ignite, it was trying to send the invading power out and down, and its own life and energies were starting to go with it!

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There was no fighting under the Shroud. The undead had all stopped and turned, staring at the Devouring Moon looming up hundreds of miles into the sky, the Shroud nothing more than a dim black mist around it at this point.

Eyes living and undead saw the vivus burst free, and if it was much brighter to the latter than the former, Eagle Eyes still spotted the unwhite flames spurting up, and starting to devour.

Furthermore, they saw the great jagged stones on the surface of the moon-creature begin to... sink.

The world-eater was itself being eaten, its power thrumming as it was drawn down into the core of the planet, and under that awesome amount of energy, Mother Terra Herself was beginning to stir.

Nobody knew what was happening exactly, but they knew something had, and they pretty much figured out who had done it.

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A wall of purest vivus blew outwards as all the energy in the Shroudzone was basically brought in here and set on fire, then sent up into the Maw of Guiogg to set more things on fire before being sent back down.

The surface inside the Maw was painted crystalline white, and its Maw was... getting smaller, even as portions of it were falling apart, cracking and plummeting and shattering into white dust as they did so.

The Devouring Moon was struggling now, its dream now become a nightmare. The Shroud was burning, too, its effect weakening, and doing so faster than the Moon itself. Still, the cost to Guiogg was definitely high. It shattered and collapsed inside, and I could only imagine what it looked like on the outside as the vivus ignited and ravaged it.

Also, that memory-wiping effect had to be awesomely powerful if it could keep the Devouring Moon almost ignorant of what was happening to it, despite the horrible punishment it was taking.

Something fell from way up high, plummeting down like a falling mountain. The way it was glittering, it was probably important. There was a momentous crash just a few miles away, and a mushroom cloud explosion and cracking of the ground from millions of tons of mass hitting the ground at speed.

The Formation finally shattered, and the grip on Guiogg’s will, the lure that had pulled it in, was released.

With startling speed, the Devouring Moon tore away from the planet, literal mountains of debris rising into the air as it pulled frantically away from the source of its pain. Given that celestial bodies generally move in miles per second, it was up and past the Shroud like a thunderclap, generating a windstorm that smashed across the landscape for a hundred miles in all directions, flattening just about everything that didn’t get to some very solid cover, including whole sections of the Shroudzone’s stone walls.

Then it was out of the atmosphere, pulling away, and the Shroud was starting to boil and thicken and gather in the sky, reforming from the disruption with all the tenacity of death and a Divine-Class Worldcurse.

We lost sight of Guiogg as the Shroud’s cloud, crackling with awful hate lightning, surged back in and cut away the early morning sky.

Dawn was coming soon.

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Behind us, a stepped-ziggurat Pyramid forty steps and four hundred feet high shone like crystal, purified and empowered by ungodly amounts of energies passing through it. The elemental windstorms that might have permanently changed weather patterns across the planet died down with startling speed, as if a greater hand had drawn the very energy that had created them away.

In front of us, sitting inside a scorched Node still radiating a wall of hard reality, a tentacled thing that existed in more than seven dimensions was pulling in and out of existence, various organs and forms extruded and absorbed, trying to get past the Veil that was harder than adamant here and now.

It looked kind of blasted, burned, corroded, and decaying. There was no similarity to the psychopomp that had guided me to the world, except that I could totally sense the feel of its Aura as familiar now.

The Thing. The psychopomp. All a big plan to get some of its power back from an alternate Earth, before moving on to the main course...

Multiple ocular organs of various types looked up as the Cerulean Sigil formed above it, and the blue flames of Creation’s Fire ignited on that Primal Rune. Further above, hate lightning crackling menacingly and harshly suddenly rang out like clarion bells, and silver flared amid the inky black.

Twenty Thunderbolts came down from above at once, passed through the Sigil, and jet and silver Sacred annihilation turned sky-blue as they did.

The vivic explosion didn’t awe anyone, given what we’d just seen, but it did cover everyone in another blast of unwhiteness of shocking purity.

I felt a whisper across my soul, as something burned to life that had been stilled, pushed by a dreaming Will that had locked on the shining Pyramid over yonder, and the sad little thing that had made such a silly thing.

A Title. One that Aelryinth had been very proud of, and which I had just gained again.

Champion of Creation.

Briggs had turned away, glancing once at the towering stumps of the Deathgate that were now blazing with vivus, and then beyond them to the east. Sensing something important, everyone blinked away the explosion, ignoring the pale blue crystal seared into the ground in a flawless faceted star as the Ancient Source squared up and faced the pale horizon.

“Dreams of the wind at dawn,

A new day has begun.

Light chases back the dark, and the future lays before us.

Will it be something bright and new?

Walk the road before you now, and leave the night behind,

Today is a new day, and the light comes to warm you all.

Let go the shadows, and behold the sun!

The Light has come, as ever it must.

Behold the new day!”

As His Salute to the Morning finished, Aru poked His head over the horizon at one thousand mph, Natural Renewal washed past us, and light streamed underneath the Shroud, illuminating us, making the air dance with hazy vivic sparkles, and washed on by us as we turned despite ourselves.

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It didn’t take long for it to catch up to the undead out in the distance, the ones now far, far beyond the Shroud, which had shrunk down to a mere three miles in radius.

A mass rout was going on out there. Every undead creature that had been within the Maw, save for the most powerful, was basically vivisized and gone. All those outside the Maw were now running, running to get back into the Deadzone at the least... except there were at least thirty miles of no relay undead at ALL there.

The sunlight streamed over them, and they did not burn.

“The Curse of the Sun is gone!” It was good news at this point. The five-hundred-yard rule of control links was in control, and wouldn’t go away. Those undead would have to run for miles and miles and miles to get here... and in the meantime, the incorps, who were naturally still vulnerable to the sun, would be powerless until they reached the Shroud.

Everyone’s eyes snapped up to the Shroudcloud... which was moving!

“Form it up!” Briggs snarled, and if his voice was as grim as ever, all fatigue was gone and excitement was running through it.

Everyone was already on Disks, lashed and hooked together into Disk Trains. Briggs and the lightfooters sat down on theirs, Shvaughn and Legion spread their blazing wings, and took off.

It wasn’t going to be hard to find the Shroudlord. It was going to be at the middle of the Cloud, after all.

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There was a new, unnaturally-shaped hill rising about a mile from the White Pyramid. Its surface was seared with white and crystal, an odd combination of organic nodules, bumps, and protrusions, scattered with refined crystals and the gleam of metal. My Assay was bleating crazily about its value for... stuff, and I just looked at Briggs and Sama over there, who nodded once.

The whole world was going to want a piece of that thing, but whoever controlled it was going to be VERY important.

It was right next to the only fully empowered Pyramid and its Power Field on the planet.

The instant the Pyramid had Empowered, another Title had risen up on my Assay.

Lord of Pyramids.

I had to smile in satisfaction.

Over the horizon, the million-strong army of soldiers had picked themselves up and were chasing the undead, or chopping down the leaderless Constructs left behind. There were tens of millions of undead still left to kill, but that was a much easier task to undertake when they were all fleeing back to the Shroud, only the Constructs running interference slowing things down.

Ahead of us, a dark blob was moving across the white ground. Black flames ranged out ahead of it, clawing at the blindingly-white soil to nullify its burning of them, leaving a grey leached path behind them as they tried to escape the very white, very clean, no-Formation-remaining-here landscape.

There were quite a few humanoids, all dancing with dark flames. I could make out magmawights and winterwights; two dread knights and three death knights, by the flames under their helms; a couple elder mummies of races I didn’t know; three dracoliches, including an elder Pyre who looked to be a Wyrm; at least two nightshades that had probably been made from balors or malebranche; at least eight different anthroid and inhuman races of Dark Clergy, and of course the Shroudlord itself, which was an armored creature with three darkly glowing tentacles extending out from where its arms should be, hovering along above the ground.

It bore a resemblance to some of the alien creature undead we’d killed, only smaller and more humanoid. It held oddly-shaped swords in its arms, double-bladed things made for basically ‘three-hands’ wielding, dripping with all the dark energies you could shake a fresh thighbone at.

Some large golems rounded out the mix, all of them made of iron, and with cannons for arms. Clever...

They weren’t moving nearly as fast as we could, and the hundred-some undead, the last remaining Dark Clergy and bodyguards of the Shroudlord, halted to consider the thousand or so of the living coming in to intercept them.