The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

It didn’t seem that fast, since the Stormbound were taking care of wind resistance, but we weren’t that high up, so the ground a hundred feet below began to start moving by very quickly. I started hearing murmurs as we passed a hundred mph, and didn’t slow down the acceleration at all.

We had over a hundred and twenty miles of ground to cover to get past the blast lane, currently full of superheated vivic dust and de facto not under the Shroud simply because of the amount of vivus there.

Then we were going to slam into the rest of his defenses, which the Shroudlord was no doubt urgently mobilizing to try and pour in front of us.

We were going to sell this, and sell it hard. The last desperate lunge to stop this world-ending event from happening, what was not to believe?

Four hundred mph, the overlapping Wardwalls all around holding back the screaming winds and superheated air that was soon boiling past us with streams of sparkling vivus falling hungrily to the ground. Legion just bulled through it all, and the Disk Train followed in a flying cone of superhuman warriors checking their ammunition, healing Potions, and other resources urgently, while those who needed to be healed were brought to full strength, courtesy of the many Heavenbound and Priests along.

Be there in under twenty minutes. The undead could do nothing to stop us, and then there’d be some fighting.

I watched the descent clock of Guiogg, and tried not to smile. Sell it, sell it! Smother it in the oncoming flood of Destiny spearheaded by Sources, focus on what we are doing, where we are, how hard we’ll be fighting!

“Heavy Magic Amulets out.”

Another selling point. Forty-five goldweight each, the Amulets were removed from their lead boxes, and clasped securely about the necks of those Casters who knew the Ghost-Eating Ki, which wasn’t everyone... but the rest were all blademages or bowmages who didn’t rely just on Casting for their power, and had definitely seen to their other skills.

For ten feet around the Amulets, the Greyfield was cancelled out. You could Cast there, your Buffs stayed active, and if you could Cast Heavy Magic, you could Cast out of the sphere.

Us bringing these out should sell the fact that we had been caught by surprise. After all, if we’d known we were on a tight clock, wouldn’t I have slapped one of these on long ago and pushed deep into the Shroudzone? Our ‘slow and steady push’ had been designed to minimize casualties, with occasional surges, so there’d been no need for these.

Now, they were advertising that we were too little, too late, but we were going to try. In particular, I was going to head straight for that Formation, and it was going to have to throw the book at me to stop me.

Legion and Shvaughn both had one, mostly so they could still fly in the Greyfield, as you couldn’t make Wrath Heavy... normally.

After all, I didn’t have much need for my Wrath. Letting Legion draw it off to wrap around their own was perfectly sensible.

Below us, a white road over a mile wide, formed of craters bleeding into one another and rained on by hot vivisized debris, rolled past as fast as a terrain-following aircraft, swirling the vivus in our wake.

There would be undead watching, and relaying what we were doing.

Sell it, baby.

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The dark end of the whiteness came up with rapid speed. Legion casually spread their wings while Disks tilted up, and we all decelerated at something like eight gravities, smashing us into the Disks we were riding for a few long seconds as we skidded to a gliding fall towards the line of undead waiting ahead of us.

-Scatter,- Briggs /ordered quietly, only grim determination in his voice. He had left most of the peripheral Warlording to those left behind, who had played the game of chasing the Compelled undead and killing them before, and so knew what to do. Even now the Shroud behind us was collapsing by like a foot a second as thousands of undead died relentlessly just as quickly.

I looked at the war Constructs gathered back there, several of them the size of titans, and the Zombie Colossus there, a hundred feet tall and made from the fused corpses of at least ten thousand corpses... and standing in its own Greyfield.

Like a fine sculpture unfolding, the Disks spread about, and their riders dropped away, falling to the ground in their teams and squads. Weapons flared to black and white life, and a bunch of other colors and energies, as vivic dust fell from the sky and sparked at the magic.

Some of us stayed up in the sky, magic gathering about us, but notably The Mick and Amaretta were down below, Blood Magic best delivered in person.

Endure began to beat. Tremble began to Sing as Sama moved up next to her man, and he bent over for a kiss from her on the cheek.

“The end of the world, say you?

The Reaper come to take His due?

The heroes’ hapless ride, once again too late?

Death whelms again to devour Fate?

I name you a fool who only knows naught

Of mortals who have ever striven and sought!

This is the path all legends have strode

Of Glory, Honor, and Greatness, and the endless White Road!

TREMBLE AND SHAKE THE ROAD, FOR WE COME!”

Then the Heavy Chained Shards slammed into them and extended the White Road, while Briggs roared out something deep enough to send the dust floating into the air and shot out like a cannonball, Sama keeping pace with him effortlessly, while the teams of the finest melee combatants in the world followed him with Weapons aflame.

2WEI - All in 【GMV】 - YouTube

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A IV, a II. A Repeated IV, a IV + a Residual Meta, a Repeated II, a II+ a Residual Meta.

It was all I had to play with, but I was burning stuff and getting the Valences back with ki.

Lyric Metamagic could ignore the metacap, and ki could sub for it at a hefty cost which I could fortunately get back. Infusing Clavus with Artificer magic could add another Meta, which I spent on Paired Spell.

There was a Dark Cardinal, Bishop, and Minister together buffing all these things up. Sure, not a lot, maybe +21 Health... but if that moved something from one-hit to two-hit range, it halved our kill-speed and gave them a moment more to strike at us.

Legion went right for the bigger Constructs. The things weren’t going to like dealing with them.

Volley one, IV+II. All the I’s and II’s, all the Holy Metas going off, maxing out the Kickers. Ripping out Paired Topped Repeating Chained Bursting Shards + Fastcast Paired Repeating Chained Shards.

Chaff here were elites compared to the native undead, but I had a LOT of Kickers, and this was some very nasty anti-undead magic I was using here. 72 Shards, Chains 25 targets long, 936 Bursts, and undead flying in every direction as Toppling blew them off their feet. Residual effects raged over them, burning them for an extra twelve seconds at +9d6 per six seconds, enough to overcome their extra Health.

The elites here went flying, too, and burned, but they didn’t die.

The incorps up above started forwards, and that’s where the rest of my spells headed as the melee lines crashed into the undead, and Sama and Briggs began their Cleave Trains.

Legion slammed into the car-sized head of a quadrupedal Construct that had to weigh hundreds of tons. Their fingers sank into the crude steel, and as if they were handling a kitten instead of a machine ten thousand times their weight, they rolled in the air, the entire Construct spinning over impossibly in midair, metal shrieking as inertia complained about how much power it should take to do that. They were still moving as they brought it down on a second sphinx-like Construct there with a boom that at this range fairly rivaled the atomics going off, flattening both Animated devices.

That definitely fixed the attention of the incorps on them, but Legion was both totally unafraid of them and much faster than such spirits as they headed for the next of the oversized Constructs. If such targets were trying to track Legion and shoot at them with mounted cannons, well, it is really hard to properly track things that can move that fast with cannons... and hitting a Stormbound with +10 AC against missile attacks is just an exercise in frustration.

Salvo two, add the Repeats, finish off the wounded with them, and further damage the Congregants and soften them up for the arriving Melees to take care of. Bloody explosions went off, and Heptoclasms expanded past us as Bloodfire raged past everyone... and hurt nobody, as holy water effects do nothing to the living, but seared thousands of undead simultaneously: 2-12 +18 and +8d6 or so of Kickers each as The Mick and Amaretta let them have it.

My true volley went into the face of the thousands of incorps coming in, and filled the air with whiteness as Admixture joined the combination, doubling everything with fire. Already wounded, when they ran into the two erupting Heptoplasms, the incorps were wiped in Bloody multi-hued fire.

I was unsurprised by the lack of relative artillery and cannon fire that might have been difficult to deal with, except mounted belatedly on the Constructs that were being taken out quickly by Legion.

More monstrous undead were coming from the distance, but they had literally thousands of undead to pass by first, unless they were flying. Just because you want to move your undead fast doesn’t mean they can do so...

Everyone flying behind me dropped to the ground, and I switched up, DimDooring up ahead out of range of the Interdiction and Stillflight that abruptly rose around the Forsaken. They landed on Disks, grabbed up by Void Brothers in passing as they entered the conflict with Helices spinning, Cutting Life and giving it back as death to the unliving.

The Paired Hydroclasms with Kickers were five hundred feet in radius, and blew away everything about me as I painted the ground white with vivus.

I was making the White Road grow, easily covering those on the ground behind me as the massive AoE’s expanded and sent the undead bouncing irresistibly, while the weakest died to the double-dose of Kickers.

The Repeated boosted Shards narrowed down into single points of light as Lyric Spell bought Split Ray for literally a Song, and I aimed at the incoming Zombie Colossus.

The spells were already Heavy, so the Greyfield the horrid thing toted around meant nothing to the spell.

Paired, Admixtured, and Split, 18 Shards from two spells became 18 Shards in sixteen Rays, at 15 points per die plus Kickers. Just because I could, I added Might of Thunder with a ki point, and 16 x 2d6 more damage onto the stack.

It was a big thing with lots of Health, but five thousand points of Blessed Force damage to the face was not something it was supposed to take, and all that wonderful Health Qi seemed somewhat suppressed in this Greyfield from the Shroud.

One hundred feet tall became eighty feet tall as its leering head made from so many amalgamated bodies blew apart, hundreds of chunks of burning meat shrapnel actually reforming partially into flaming corpses before they even hit the ground, exploding like bursting flowers in all directions as they hit the ground ahead of the slowly toppling monstrosity.

To add insult to injury, the Chain was still on the Shardrays, and scattered around the Colossus were various Gargants coming up to its knees and suchlike, or massive undead beasts waiting to be sent in at us.

The Shardrays bored through them, at least two per creature, often four or more, and in a spiraling cascade, popped them all in great gory fireworks.