NOVEL NEXT Time is on our side
6/10 afternoon
Once Doan and I had both finished learning the bimbofication incantation, I checked in with Ironaya on her progress with the ritual structure. The palace of Lordaeron was being disassembled rapidly; this seemed like a good point in the process to grab her. “Can you get me into the Halls of Origination?” I asked, pulling her aside.
“Assuming you take the form of a watcher, most likely. They will assume the worst if you appear in a compromised, fleshy form.” Fair enough. Titanic construct chauvinism.
“Ok, but I meant the stealth field around Uldum that makes it impossible to perceive.”
Thanks purely to communication talent, I sensed she was conflicted from the short pause before she began speaking again.
“I believe that we have a copy of the Plates of Uldum in Tyr’s Vault, but that’s currently sealed deep underground. We will need to excavate it.” She spoke clearly, but with a hint of hesitation.
“Out with it.” I prodded, “What’s wrong with my question?”
“Prime designate, I feel impertinent for asking, but have you actually checked to see if the Defenses afforded to the retinue are sufficient to pierce the perception filter?” Oh. Yeah. That was definitely worth checking. I had a few of my dragon riders in Silithus do a scouting mission, and as it turned out double mind defense was actually enough to see the desert for what it was.
The Halls of Origination were a gun held to the head of Azeroth in general, a reset button just in case the Old Gods got the upper hand. Almost as important, it was staffed by a team of titanic watchers themed after the Egyptian gods; lower ranked than Archaedes but higher than Ironaya. It was definitely worth hijacking.
While Ironaya made her way there, I took the time to go over my books. I had… honestly an unholy amount of energy. Well over 90k. The centaur and random civilians from Undercity were not individually worth all that much, but there were so many of them that my energy cup overfloweth. Once I had control of the Scourge, I’d probably end up with so much energy I’d need to offload the job of spending it all. Hell, that was probably already for the best.
I focused on spending the essence first, and got a pleasant surprise: the drones were converting biomass into essence. The four I had trained yesterday were able to take the giant pile of skorpid, Silithid, and worm byproducts and turn it into essence at a rate of 1 point of essence per pound. Each could only process around 50 pounds a day if they treated it like a full time job, but that was a hell of a boost in my essence stores, bringing me up to 2200 generated per day.
A full compliment of mountain giants, huntresses, and fairy dragons ate up a bit less than half of that, leaving enough essence to finish upgrading my spiderlings. Out of curiosity I burnt almost 500 essence to train 7 two headed ogres into Chimaera, just to see how it would work out. The last of my essence went towards building five ancients of wonders; it would be better to have more than I needed than not enough.
With an increasingly negligible amount of energy, I could crank out soldiers that could run as fast as a horse, regenerate as well as a troll, take hits as if they were outfitted in thick leather armor, hide by burrowing underground, and tear through flesh with their bare hands. They weren’t elite units straight out of the box; the average Stormwind soldier could take on two fresh spiderlings in a spar most of the time, but the average Stormwind Soldier had modestly enchanted weapons, armor, and months of intense training. My spiderlings had martial talent, so the training gap could be closed very quickly. Equipped with mass produced skorpid scale armor, magic wands, and weapons smithed by the Dark Iron clan? They were easily on par with elite soldiers in any army you could point at with a few days of drilling. The queens started on par with a rank and file sentinel archer, but could take a hit far better and heal; with training, they became extremely dangerous and could multitask well. Their tails flung the spines, so if they didn’t need to aim carefully they could use their hands to cast spells.
I checked in for an update on the overlords, and was pleased to find out that they were quite promising. They were useless offensively and their flight was comparable in speed to a brisk walk, but they were fairly durable and could fly with peerless mobility in any direction, no matter what form they took. The lack of offense could be compensated for with soul talent, and the extremely high maneuverability was a huge edge over something like a dragon that flew more like a bird, but the really fascinating edge they had was their synergy with my shadow ops team.
Overlords could psychically contact my shadow priests and each other; as well as anyone in the retinue who was able to psychically link to other people, like Remulos. It took enough effort that they couldn’t do anything else at the same time, and it wasn’t as big of a deal as it would be if my jewelry didn’t come with a telephone, but it was still a rather large advantage. In addition, my shadow priests reported that mind vision was dramatically easier when the target was an overlord, requiring almost no mana to maintain. To top it off, they could use shadow words through the link with only a very modest mana surcharge. In terms of utility, they were pretty up there. I signed off on the purchase of a few overlords that were spawned instead of trained; they didn’t have a supply cost, after all, and I wanted to know what a functionally mindless psychic relay might be useful for. Who knew, maybe I could pull some shenanigans with mind runes.
The rest of the energy for the day, after units and upgrades, would be going to the construction of a large defensible structure directly in front of the Scarab Gate. Whenever I finally opened that bad boy, I wanted to force the Quiraji to storm the beaches of Normandy before anything else. It was an army large enough to threaten all of Kalimdor; I wanted to rip them apart with nerubian antipersonnel guns and flak cannons before they even got to my actual troops. I’m sure Broxigar would be happy to handle them.
••••••••••
Chromie tried to focus on her work. The timeline she was currently in, one in which Medihv had successfully been cleansed of demonic influence early in life, thus averting the opening of the dark portal, the forming of the Alliance, and the arrival of the Horde and Scourge on Azeroth, was a probably-doomed experiment. One guardian of Tirisfal, even one as powerful as him, couldn’t hope to overcome the old gods without the assistance of the Horde.
It did provide an excellent staging area for remote maintenance on the current “main” timeline, though. Andorhol was a perfectly nice little city here, and temporal echoes of herself could be sent to disrupt the anomalous energies in a corresponding location. They didn’t last long, but they were entirely disposable; useful when you need to run diagnostics in a city overrun with the undead.
She’d heard about the quarantined timeline of course; nearly ten percent of the entire bronze dragonflight were compromised out of nowhere. She was on guard, but generally trusted her precognition to let her know if anything dangerous was on the way. She could see a few minutes into the future by letting the timeline advance without her; anything more and she’d start doing damage, but bronze dragons could get away with stuff like that. It almost always worked, so she was extremely thrown off when a bracelet was tossed into the open window next to her.
Without thinking she popped it on. The little blonde gnome’s eyes widened as she realized what just happened. She’d been briefed on these things. The quarantine must have been broken somehow! She rapidly rewound her personal timeline, leaving a disintegrating temporal echo to put the cursed bracelet on. She was, apparently, susceptible to the ensnaring power of the amulet. No one in the bronze dragonflight knew what made someone vulnerable, but forecasting had shown that many high profile VIPs could be forced to put one on just by perceiving it. Chromie bugged out; she was more of a liability than an asset here, with a weakness like that.
••••••••••
Alurmi smiled as she walked through the portal next to Soridormi. “It was an absolute success, mother. I don’t appear to have tripped any automatic sensors, and Chronormu didn’t even notice my presence until she saw the amulet with her naked eye.”
The brown haired elf was pleased, checking the profile for herself. “Good, good. So she’s wearing it? Did she try any funny business?”
“Yes. She rewound herself, but it turns out that the jewels can even follow someone through time. She doesn’t even realize she’s still wearing it.” The mental slight of hand Jewels of Discord did passively was quite impressive, really.
The matron of the Bronze Dragonflight hugged her whelp. “You’ve done well, Alurmi; I’m sure the master will be pleased. He seemed particularly interested in Chronormu.” It made sense. She was merely proficient at manipulating the timeways, but Chromie might be the single most powerful micro-level chronomancer in the dragonflight save Nozdormu himself. It seemed like the kind of thing Erich would want.