The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

Twenty minutes, to reach the packed mass that was the edge of the Deadzone just past where the dragon’s teeth formation extended.

This area was utterly packed with undead, literally millions of them jammed tight and not given any viable orders to move in any specific direction. Since the Melees hadn’t thinned them out, they just rammed into the edge of the Deadzone, their compulsion vanished, and the only thing the frantic Congregants could do was tell them to keep moving as they stacked up on top of one another ceaselessly.

There were a lot more survivors of my Pyroclasms now, because there were tons more Congregants and other enhanced undead.

I changed tactics to compensate. The first Arcane Fusion became Twinned Widened Pyroclasm, combined with Widened Pyroclasm.

Three sets of hammering Pyroclasms and all those Kickers was enough to wipe out all the chaff, and seriously injure most stuff below the status of Dark Clergy. Plus, there was so much more packed stuff that my Chainshards could reach almost everywhere.

If they couldn’t, the second Arcane Fusion was Twinned Lightning Cloud combined with Dimension Door to move me along, and more Chainshards to reach out and touch the undead left behind by the Angels, or further to my east if there were enough spare Shards.

It cut my speed in half, but I still annihilated everything, which was the main condition here.

The Shroud needed chaff to support the greatness of its Shroudlord and empower its Congregants. It needed Congregants to channel its power and direct the mindless, obedient minion undead.

The slaughter of so many of them was shrinking the Shroudcloud at unprecedented speed, and I was going to keep it up with these areas so packed with undead that didn’t know what to do with themselves.

Legion and Shvaughn had likewise hit the outside boundary zone, and simply ignited their own Walls of Fire directly around themselves to deter any thoughts of extra attacks, keeping on with their Firewall Sweep and the destruction of maybe a thousand chaff undead a second.

Those behind us couldn’t keep up in the first place, having too many fat and wounded targets left behind to deal with, but that was fine. Wiping Congregants and incorps was exactly what they were supposed to be doing, not trying to prove who had the higher killcount.

Fellowship and Alliance Karma was fair, and just because you killed the most didn’t mean you got all that Karma.

Sama and Briggs kept everybody on point and on task, clearing out a huge chunk of area of any Construct defenses, while the undead who might return to populate it were slaughtered, which would open it up further in the days ahead.

On the far sides of the Shroud, watching eyes noted the blackness of the Hellcloud was rolling backwards, and with it the Deadzone, and the undead manning the defenses and doing the fighting there.

Gradually, inexorably, the undead were being forced to pull back from any fighting and retreat to the next wall... which might not be that easy to do if they hadn’t opened up pathways or weren't in numbers large enough to get over one. If that ended up the case, the undead just milled around at the base of the wall and were ripe pickings for the Purgers sweeping in to get rid of them.

Slaughter on the far side of the Shroudzone affected the fighting and made it easier all around. Those left off the main fighting laughed and took their gifts where they could find them, cheering on the main teams as they harvested hapless undead who couldn’t retreat in time, and the disjointed commanders trying to adjust to the situation hundreds of miles away affecting them and get commands from those above them.

Independent thinkers, Shrouded undead were not.

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Dawn arrived, and with it, the Curse of the Sun.

The Salute to Aru followed the arrival of the dawn as the world turned, and wan sunlight pierced through the haze. Uncountable numbers of undead flared and burned down to ash and less, along with all they held, and left the living alone and staggering as they vanished.

They would be back, thrust forth from the earth itself come dusk, restored by the Shroud to unlife and ready to fight once more.

But for many of them, that rebirth spot would now be moved, because the Shroud and its Deadzone had been pushed back, and they would respawn at the limit of their Shroudlord’s influence, and no farther.

The arc we’d cut through the Shroud was about a hundred and sixty miles long. Its Deadzone worked out to about a hundred miles long, while our dragon’s-tooth fighting line had been a straight line fifty miles across.

The DT line had outright massacred dozens of miles of undead making their way back to the destroyed Deadzone. The line of combat was stained white for fifty miles across two Wallzones, the fighters pulling back slowly all night to let the burning vivus help with the killing.

Casters with Walls of Flame had extended out from the ends of this line, and sat there in full Concentration mode all night, keeping the Walls burning and the undead dying as they moved through them, the tougher things becoming the victims of the elites who’d swept up to back the Casters up, and the many, many shooters ready to harvest them.

The Firewall Sweeps had simply continued all night along the Deadzone, consuming the stacking undead who built up along that edge, wiping them off repeatedly while I lagged behind and cleared off an even wider area of everything, including the incorporeals who could just fly up to avoid the Sweeps and watch them go by, even if they couldn’t do anything to stop them.

The Angels had been happy to simply Teleport back to the edge of the crowded area, shift one wall east as the Shroudzone shrank, and repeat the process on new arrivals. Shvaughn and Legion did the same, pretty much in tandem with the angels.

I had wiped a cool million incorporeals of all levels of strength at least, and probably ten times that in undead of all levels of power on the ground.

Perhaps tellingly, not one Dark Clergy had actually fallen in this whole campaign of ours, anywhere around the entire Shroud. Tens of millions of undead had fallen, many of them actually moved into the Ritual area ahead of time to help with trying to counter it, and instead were just set up for disaster.

The outer limit of the Shroud had retreated by over thirty miles in all directions. It didn’t push the area we’d Opened to the Sky back any further, of course, but it meant areas that had been in the Deadzone for over half a century were now totally free and clear, as were miles of area once inside the Shroud itself.

It was also the grindiest, highest-Karma, most endless fighting many of those here had experienced, save for the fighting on the Tibetan Plateau. There was a massive Karmic harvest that would be playing out for days and weeks for those under Ten, and even the Faux Tens would be grabbing at least a couple Levels in something here and there.

Briggs broke in on the Alliance /Overtell. -Well done, everyone. Before you go off to rest, there are tasks to be accomplished, most of which do NOT involve fighting. We need a primary road forced through the walls to bring in artillery and armored cavalry from the west. There are still thousands of Constructs and Possessed units in the areas vacated by the Shroud which need to be removed, and that should be done during the bright, bright light we have overhead. Those tasks are being allocated as we speak.

-The most elite Construct-killers, you are coming with me, and we are going to wipe away the cache the Shroudlord has in the Opened area. The Shroudlord didn’t release them, so it wants them to be a surprise at a later date. We are removing that surprise.

-Everyone take note that with the retreat of the Shroud, all those undead in the affected Deadzones and Shroudzone areas have respawns redirected to the leading limit of the Deadzone. When dusk comes, those areas are going to be VERY packed in any area they were not wiped from. If you were wondering why we were staggering so many of your combat areas, now you know! When they pop up, exterminate them! Your new assignments for the coming night are being passed down.

-If you need Leveling advice or Naming advice, send it up and we’ll send it back down. High Karma, high risk. Don’t waste this. Yes, goldweight off this is scarce. Focus on your Weapons and yourself. It all comes back in time.

-Again, well done and good work. No time to be tired. There’s more work to be done before dusk. Prove you deserve to be Tens, and get it all done!-

As he was a Ten with some nasty impressive Depth, his words actually held a tremendous amount of weight, not to mention he was the most impressive Warlord on the planet. All the fighting Monarchs and Warlords just went green with envy and knuckled under when Briggs was around, it wasn’t even a contest.

I just nodded as I floated through the air on flaming jet and silver wings. I’d been allocated to helping make a road, no Mapping today. As I’d finished up the entire continent just before the Ritual, taking that day off was nothing much.

I set down on the wall, and Reach Vivic Dawnstopped Double-Widened Shaping Stone VIII renewed itself and went down into the cement and gravel composite wall underneath me. Three thousand cubic feet of stone, earth, dirt, and variations thereof collapsed beneath me, flowing out into an opening in the wall as smoothly as if it had all just melted, widening out and forming into a smooth, wide open path through the wall, starting right at the edge of the Deadzone.

Other teams were locating the ‘swingblocks’ the undead had worked into the walls, triggering them permanently. The few who could Dawnstop and Shape Stone on a large scale were doing much the same as me, albeit at a slower pace.

Legion and Shvaughn were severing the walls at ground level with that method and the appropriate width, then either tossing them out of the way or dragging them aside, as they were able to. Teams with someone with just Dawnstopped Stone Shape could do the same if they had enough muscle to push the sections of the wall aside, and with this many Powered on the field, that wasn’t an issue.

Being able to Summon Earth Elementals or Treants or Jotuns or anything else would have helped tons, but I was perfectly happy not to use Summons if the Shroudlord couldn’t, or this fight would never end.

There were a lot of drudgework openings to make in this endless field of walls, but there were also tons of people to talk to as I did it.

The most important for the moment was The Mick. -Well, you throne-raiding upstart of a royal aspirant, how did it go?- I /asked him.

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Kiev, or what remained of it, stood exposed under the sun. The Mick had no knowledge of it, or its ancient buildings, and what history he knew of it his girl had taught him. Nothing about the ancient capital of the Ukraine struck much of a chord with him, but that was not true with Amaretta.

Ten miles to the south of the city had been the manor estate of her family. It was along that section of the battle line that the Blood of the Irish had been deployed, and very notably a whole lot of Blakhamars.

Even Old Man Hank himself was here. So were thousands of dwarves and men from across Europe and America, fighting behind the Blakhamar name, and that had been some impressive muscle, to say the least.

Many of them had lived in these lands when the undead came. The undead they’d been killing might have been their enslaved kin, and more than one instance of a spectre, phantom, ghost, or wraith that was the cursed soul of an old loved one had been recognized among those they’d slain.