The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

The edge of the Rift came up, and she went right over it without stopping.

Visibility wasn’t great, as there was a lot of junk floating in the water. She noted that she had to be careful of where she swam, as many of the things floating there were put there deliberately, and if she got too close, they would bob in her wake and literally point in her direction like an arrow if they lit up in reaction.

Clever, clever. Snuffing them would remove them from their very simple psi-net and do the same thing. However, a being of elemental water of this world, not subject to needing magic to stay here, flowed through the web without any difficulty.

How would the Waterspears have penetrated this? She considered that they’d probably just drain down parts of the net and de-power them without alerting anything. The area would remain intact but quiet as the simple minds of the floating things interpreted no news as good news, without the shock that would come with death.

Something was definitely down here...

She poured herself down the slope patiently, spiraling on her course, suppressing her wake to nearly nothing with her water control until she passed twenty thousand feet down, and things started to come out of the haze below.

Pillars and buildings made for aquatic forms, entries that were doors and tunnels combined, sculpted from the basalt rock for purposes she was sure had to do with the defenses here, and probably more things she didn’t know about.

She paused as the waves of illusion hit her and tried to readjust what she was seeing to empty stone and waters. Consuming Fey and the hu hsaio had made her extremely sensitive to illusion and charm magic, especially after she ate enough of the latter to promote herself to Nine Tails. Devils were also pretty hard to fool with illusions, although still vulnerable to direct mental versions of the same.

Still, this was awfully powerful, and despite herself, she had to thank Traveler again for showing her the power of the Sun Saves.

She couldn’t equal her liege’s frankly terrifying ability to Concentrate, but as Traveler herself had said, she didn’t need to be that good, she needed to be Good Enough.

She’d put more Karma into learning the Sun Saves, consolidating her Martial Traditions, and taking the Concentration and Meditation Masteries than anything else except refining those creatures she’d Consumed for their Racial Levels.

+46 was definitely Good Enough for anything below the Shroud itself!

The number on this effect seemed to be about a 30, if the tests Traveler had set up were accurate. That was an extremely dangerous and powerful effect, which no normal mortal would be able to overcome. They’d just see an empty rift on the sea floor, and those down here could decide whether to leave them to report nothing, or surround them and annihilate them easily.

Very nasty, and since it worked at the mental level, replacing what was seen with the eyes, instead of painting over reality, something like True Sight wouldn’t see through it, and Detect Illusion would only indicate something was at work, not look past it.

Under her hyperfocused state of awareness, she saw the threads of magic trying to insinuate themselves into her mind, and broke through them with some contempt. The fading cyclopean tower she could see in the distance below, which had been wavering and trying to vanish, solidified once again.

She continued her descent, Refocusing and ready to blow another Sun Save at any moment, certain that this would be a layered defense.

She saw the muuk before the Will-based Aversion effect swept past her, creating a wave of loathing and unsettling fear in her that wanted to make her turn aside. She would simply create excuses as to what she’d seen, and the spell even helped dredge up creatures from her memories to fill in for what was really here.

Hyperanalysis of what it was doing via the Moment of Perfect Clarity disassembled the illusion and rendered it useless.

Muuks were fish-men, like the sahaug, but they had more resemblance to groupers than sharks, and had wider fins, bigger jaws and throats, and squatter, more muscular builds than the shark-men, along with a wide, short tail to help movement in water.

Supposedly, they were mutated from any sapient species that their makers, the lethomorg, ran into, and could even mate with their parent species to make more like them.

Muuks meant lethomorg. It was a dread whisper among undersea creatures.

They were old, old Aberrant creatures, with more in common with worms and slugs then terrestrial life. They reproduced by fission, the elders splitting off parts of themselves into new individuals armed with all the memories, if not the karmic power, of the old.

Reputedly, like many Aberrant creatures, they could acquire the memories of the creatures they ate, giving them extremely good insight into the various species around them. They easily learned how to manipulate them, deal with them, enslave them, and utterly dominate if not destroy them.

They were very, very bad news. Traveler would be so thrilled to find this out. They could assimilate creatures with Class Levels, and apply their own Karma to learn and adapt the skills to their own selves. On top of that, if an elder learned such things, any of its spawn could do the same thereafter.

They had no maximum age, just growing and splitting when they reached certain knowledge thresholds, growing bigger and fatter to hold all the memories stolen and inherited.

Consuming a muuk would probably drive her mad and slave her to the lethomorg, so she definitely wasn’t going to do that.

The Astral Ward kept her below their psychic radar, and she dove ever further down, painting every fold in the walls Pshaped by inhuman limbs over eons, letting the waves of psychic chatter flow around or through her uninhibited, and saw the numbers of the muuk and their masters increase as more huge and alien buildings congealed out of the murk around them.

She was a thousand feet from the bottom before she saw her first lethomorg, a whale-sized brute with six tentacles hauling around a boulder weighing several tons, five narrow lidless eyes arranged in a T formation giving it a wide angle of view as it moved powerfully through the water. Several muuk carrying blocks of stone in a jointly held net swam slowly after it.

Jaws like a worm, leathery fins, a swimming motion more a wriggle than using its tail. Mmm...

Trailing after the big brute was a smaller one, but the psychic Aura about it was more intense, and it was plain it was much more mentally adept than the bigger and stronger lethomorg.

Shvaughn didn’t get within sixty paces of either of them, constantly looking around and feeling the water flows with her own stolen expertise. The smaller one was the size of an orca, the bigger one larger than a humpback. They pushed the water about with impunity, announcing their coming, so she had no fear of one sneaking up on her, only one laying motionless in some corner where she might fail to make it out as she approached.

She was pretty sure she could kill one very quickly, but psychic alarms would go off even so, unless she could block them first. Expending power to block them meant she wouldn’t be able to kill it so quickly.

She smiled at the conundrum, but she wasn’t here to kill anything. She was here to Detect Location, paint all this into a Visual File, and set up these bastards for a nuke to the forward cerebral lobes.

Also, to find out if they had a connection to the Felldeep, which they almost certainly did. The muuk were going to live somewhere if there were going to be new ones born, after all, and four miles under the sea was less than an ideal location to do so. Whether that connection would be obvious from out here was a separate concern.

She had been informed that her Astral Ward would make her nigh-impossible to detect with any form of Divinatory power, but that it was only superb at defending against mental and telepathic assaults.

Willpower was what made up a successful Warlock, before all other things. She was looking forward to something big and alien getting into her head, and then burning itself to madness on all her Pacts.

Yes, an alien horror getting in her way deserved all the sweet pain that she could feed it, before she cut it apart.

That happy thought inspiring her as she kept her senses open in all directions, she swam further and deeper into the Rift, looking to see what could be seen.

If she had to, she could Earthjump to the connecting caverns outside the Ward and enter that way, but entering through the heart of their power, where they didn’t think anyone could, and getting out to tell the tale only made her more determined to do so.

She had personally lived for over two hundred years, and she had acquired tens of thousands of years above and beyond those years, always staying young of mindset and current with the times. She was aware on many levels that the reason things got old was because they were meant to die, and things this old, alien, and evil definitely deserved to die.

She wondered how they’d like the Shroud, and laughed to herself again...

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Every last figure that came flowing out of the ground was Forsaken, save for the mass of Mr. Burble providing the Teleport Buff that brought them all here at the same time, and Azaia Morningwind, who provided the Earthjump that had brought them here.

The other Morningsuns would be following after the fighting started, in order to not set off any alarms before then.

There had been some clam-crab-tentacle-faced things inhabiting this cave system, Aberrants all, and Pawlie had disposed of them violently and with a clear heart, watching them burn away in cerulean and vivic flames in satisfaction. Their former home provided a decent enough place to assemble outside the awareness of the cephalids.

Those coming were all Europeans, naturally enough, having done a lot of time in Tibet, which was now entering its final days as miles after miles of the phasma were chopped free, and the influence of the King in Yellow was being sharply curtailed. The Brothers-led Forsaken were closing in on the avatar’s center of power, and as a backhanded benefit, all the phobos were now being generated in smaller and smaller areas.

Only slightly declining phobos numbers in smaller areas meant more constant fighting, which meant more Karma and growth. The healers behind them were always shaking their heads at the constant supply of injuries they were fixing up, but the Nulls, Voids, and Sources just went straight back to the fight, applying Karma and getting stronger by the day.

Briggs and Sama stepped forward from the group, as did half a dozen Void Brothers, including another Mountainhammer Dhatun, an urukhar Ancientaxe, three Mindrings, and one Waterspear. “Brother, lead the way,” the Source Warlord said, his Sun radiating from him and pushing away the last vestiges of unnatural influences around.

Pawlie Blakhamar turned around and headed for the entrance. Quiet and silent, the Forsaken trailed after him.

The Waterspear, an Englishman by birth, held up his hand as they reached the entrance to the cave. “There is something out in the water,” he confirmed Pawlie’s instincts. The muted silver of his Spear burned a faint and reality-affirming cerulean. “I will take care of it.”

He took a flying jump, clearing sixty feet and diving cleanly into the barely rippling waters below, leaving almost no splash circle.

“Over the water, under it, or on the walls,” Briggs growled soft as a whisper, but everyone heard it. “Mr. Burble, you have your Rings?”

A section of the shoggoth’s body turned transparent, revealing a pair of very humanoid hands in a clear space inside its bulk, both limbs wearing Rings, but very much not vulnerable from the outside.

“Excellent. Warn us if you spot or see anything.” Dozens of various types of eyes popped up in all directions, while various versions of hands and appendages saluted stiffly. “Let’s go harvest some brain-eaters, people.”