The Power of Ten, Book Five: Versatile Wizardry

The Shades were naturally exploiting the Emperor’s and Beasts’ territorial lines to do strike-and-fades, stirring up conflicts and ill feelings as powerful Beasts rampaged into one another’s territories during hunts and chases, and certainly didn’t cooperate readily.

Using the Silver Foxes to get around that wasn’t hard. The Foxes could easily play on the pride and anger of any Beasts, and getting them to lay ambushes while the Silver Foxes directed fighting here and there into the traps of strong neighboring forces hadn’t been that hard. Likewise, leading raids into the targets they wanted to find, screening hunters from their prey until it was too late to avoid them, camouflaging ambushers for devastating flank attacks, and striking here while running away there, or vice versa, had been playing some lethal mind games with the Shades who weren’t expecting such actions from the Beasts.

But I chatted with the Beasts as I put multi-hued burning Eternal Lights on their claws and teeth, fixed their wounds, salved their spirits, and gave them pretty battle-scars to show off.

“You’re here to kill the Shades and get them off the Plane. That’s the will of the Beast Lord, no more, no less. Your Emperors know what the territories were before the Shadows came. Once the Breach is gone, those will be where the territories start anew, and yeah, you’ll be fighting one another then, as is right and proper, proving who has the strength to hold the ground.

“But until that point, there’s only one territory threatened here, and it is this entire beautiful world that you live in, that your Lord wants to protect so much from being despoiled, and which your children will inherit when you are gone.

“You’ve all seen what the Darkness does to the land and the Beasts who live here. You can’t let it remain, or the world you leave your children will be nothing like the wondrous, unmatched realm that you lived in yourself.

“This is the Realm of Beasts, not of Shadows, and they have to go. There is no other enemy for you to fight than the enemy of ALL Beasts, and no territories save those you deny to the Shadow, which is this world entire.

“Work together, and the Shadows will die. Fight one another now, and only the Shadows win. The battles among Beasts for land and position and strength and status can wait until the Shadows are gone.”

And they thought about it, realized it was right, and proved much more willing to undertake some coordinated actions. It helped that they were already doing so by setting the Tainted areas and carcasses on vivus, and their Rulers could all sense the results in the skein of the world as it pressed back against the Breach. They had realized that my words were totally correct, and they could Seal the Breach... all they had to do was burn more of the Darkness, and kill more of the enemy!

Wherever I went, burning claws and teeth exploded in numbers among the defenders, and the Shades and their allies quickly paid for it. Be it ambush hunters, stalkers, charging herds, baying packs, wandering brutes, raiding opportunists, or any combination of the above, finding some great Beasts coming out of concealment with claws and teeth on fire and ripping through them was a very unwelcome sight for all the Shades in an area.

Flowing Silver Emperor was moving me around, finding out that wherever I went, Shade activity and attempts to get to me and shut down whatever I was doing did indeed increase rather quickly, leading to a large number of entrapment and ambush situations the Foxes took gleeful advantage of.

There hadn’t been any real clash of armies or set-piece battles, because the Beasts simply didn’t fight that way. They used horde tactics or guerilla warfare really well, however, continually sniping off the edges of the Shades, while massed magic mired them in foul weather, incredibly forbidding terrain, and continual ambushes from the cover of said magic, tactics the Shades actually prided themselves on using.

Now, by the time the Shades managed any real distance of advancing, they were cut to pieces and burning vivic, leaving their numbers scattered over miles and contributing to walls of vivus exuding mistfire back into their lines, eating away at them and forcing them back, back ever further as they perished and were consumed forever.

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I was up on an adamantine Disk, sitting high in the sky so I could watch from the distance. Having Commanders around to grab Earth Tungsten and others to smelt the stuff made it possible to work even adamantine fairly easily.

The fighting was taking place about ten miles away. Eagle Eyes gave me basically a ringside seat as some heavy hitters from both sides went at it.

Despite not having the pure brawn, the Silver Foxes using teamwork were taking down the most powerful Shades with their combination of Void and Psychic magic, using windblades from their Air magic as sweepers for the lesser Shades. However, the array of Dark Magicks being used and the spillover could easily be lethal to any lesser Beasts around, so getting within miles of those fights was a bad idea. Anything Warrior-rank or less tended to get its mind or soul crushed just being in the area, so they fled the combat zones as fast as possible if they could.

Of course, if you could predict those panicked movements, you ended up with great ambush and mass slaughter opportunities...

Winkle was eavesdropping on my thoughts as I looked over what I could see of the battlefield, suggesting movements here and there. I had taken three Levels in Warlord recently just so I could contribute to the fighting, even while being forced to stand back from it because I was being hunted so much.

The Foxes and some of their brawnier servants were mixing it up with some powerful Shades, and the landscape was rippling under the force of their attempts to subvert reality. That was getting a lot harder with vivus eating Shadow and reinforcing it, and that included the Void Magic of the Foxes.

The Foxes, were aware of it, however, and so using Psychic power more, while the Shadows were burning a lot of extra power trying to establish Domains, bend physics, Summon their lessers, and do other stuff a reinforced Veil frowned on.

The great Cats, Wolves, Bears, Drakes, and other types who weren’t using reality-bending stuff weren’t having quite as many problems, and were mauling the fuck out of the Shadows as they outlasted the magic of their opposites.

Flowing Silver Emperor was sparring with something over on the horizon, thirty-some miles out. Mountains were coming into and out of existence over there, the landscape was moving around, and shadows and light were mixing and separating as two different types of reality were warring.

The wind blowing vivus non-stop in the Emperor’s direction was still there, and heavy reality was being encouraged His way, rolling up against the Shadow and lending some extra power against the Shadow’s attempt to subvert dimensional rules.

Winkle’s head suddenly rose. “Goldentusk reports seeing Undead at the edge of his senses!” The irascible Auric Boar Noble was an ornery and tough Great Beast I’d helped patch up a dozen times by now, always happy to get back to the fighting.

“Send word to Flowing Silver Emperor that an Undead Emperor is probably going to erupt from Below onto the battlefield!” I said urgently. If undead were here, that meant another Lord was contributing forces, doubtless in reaction to the appearance of the vivus suddenly halting the Shadows cold.

It was probably all set up ahead of time, and Flowing Silver had been lured to a place with a dimensional Formation already in place, just needing to be powered up.

But how much power?

I smirked at the idea. “Can we get that White Wind blowing? If Flowing Silver Emperor can reinforce the Veil, we can make the incoming Emperor’s appearance cost waaaaaay too much energy.”

Winkle looked to the side, where a vortex of vivus was starting to build over one of the battlefields as the Air controllers there cooperated in forming a stiff breeze to fan it. Carcasses of Shades and Tainted Beasts, like the Cerebri, Manscorpions, Spiders, and Hydras the Shades loved to use, were being heaped up into mounds, building bonfires to generate more of the vivus.

The White Wind began to blow ahead with great strength into the heart of the Shadowed area, where the air was thick with the stuff needed to sustain the vivus.

The Breach had come through into the Beast Realm in the heart of a large forested area the size of a continent, replete with natural shadows and so easy to expand into and through. The plant life here had long succumbed to Corruption, and now a wildfire of vivus was crawling all over it, pulling out the Taint and feasting on it. If the trees were weak, they were falling and crumbling to ash slowly, just as if they were on fire. Sparkling mists were falling from above and devouring all the Taint below, and the vivus happily chased it right down to their roots, the water table below, and into the stone and rocks where normally the stuff would seep and congeal, enduring literally forever.

Nope, nope, vivus was VERY hungry for all that stuff!

I felt something smack and tear into reality all the way over here, a truly awesome amount of power expended to rip through the reinforced Veil and disgorge another powerful combatant. It was vomited up out of the ground, three hundred feet tall, looking like a withered humanoid corpse with an ornate headdress proclaiming its power and status, the desiccated corpses of serpents a thousand feet long coiling about it as it was spewed up into this world.

It came in just as a wall of whiteness a thousand feet high swept through the mighty trees and forest around it, and instead of cutting off the sun, sent the light wildly diffracting all through it, cloaking everything in glowing whiteness that the Dark Magic could not actually suppress. Indeed, the Shadow Magic reached out, was cut apart by uncounted pockets of vivus, diluted, and only fed the inferno more!

Now, it wasn’t going to really harm two creatures as powerful as Emperors, giving them little more than the equivalent of a sunburn. But what it did is play merry havoc with their senses and Awareness, as suddenly the world around them was absolutely filled with Light and vivus. They couldn’t see anything, sense souls, or hear anything above the howling of the wind!

I couldn’t see anything, either, but that was fine. Flowing Silver was a smart-smart Emperor; it was how the Foxes kept their status.

Instead of flitting about dimensionally, Flowing Silver just relied on His great speed. His Psychic ability wasn’t hampered at all, so He could track His opponents without a problem. He increased the weight of the Veil repeatedly, and the vivus gathered thickly as He brought the skein of the world crashing against the Domains of the two repeatedly, driving the intruders back, eating away at their magic, and reducing the power of the waves of Dark spells being hurled out into the glowing fog.

Great windblades, tornadoes turned on their sides and razor-sharp, were coming in, too, dragging hard, sharp reality with them, chewing into the mighty beings and exacerbating the vivic fires nibbling at them.

Really, it was one of those frustrating fights the Shades were supposed to be best at, fighting where their opponents couldn’t see them, striking and fading and sniping, only now it was turned on its head in the brilliant white haze.

I figured between the White Wind and Flowing Silver’s Void Magic, they were spending at least four times the normal amount of power to do anything.

Ranks upon ranks of undead were appearing across miles of the landscape, tightly-packed and possessed of powerful bodies that could shrug off lesser Elemental attacks like nothing.

That is, except for the Light.

Butterflies, great Stags and Beetles, and many species of Birds gathered, and then sent Light down upon them.

It wasn’t powerful, per se, merely Purifying and strong, chasing away the Darkness that clung about them, making them shield themselves and burn slightly as it shone down upon them.

Oh, yeah, it also weakened them so the Elemental Magic coming in beat the shit out of them!

Great Beasts with burning claws and fangs ripped into the undead, spreading vivus, which kicked up into whirlwinds here and there, tearing burning undead into the sky and raining more vivus down over the area and setting more of the skeletal and corpse-like creatures on mistfire.

The Beasts with command of Light shone down, and the rest of the Beasts fought the shocked and weakened undead while vivus blazed all around them.