Hlaeth Chapter 50 – One Step Back

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“Sir, if we can chase the Yellow a few hundreds miles south, that will take you right up to the Empire without ever having to leave us!” Hesty piped up in her normal irrepressible tones.

“Indeed!” I agreed, taking her words completely seriously. “You may find it telling that the Empire will not be asking for any of the Vivic Braziers, because the things which guide the Empire are nigh as susceptible to vivus as the creatures of the Yellow are.” Kon especially fidgeted when he heard that. “So, yes, we will be driving the Yellow south, but it will not be driven in much from the east. The west… that is far enough away that it will be a matter for the Rockborn to decide how to handle. The Walls of Fire may suffice to cut off the expansion to the west and force it back.

“We shall just have to see. The Yellow has had centuries to expand. We all know we are making headway, as their numbers are high, but not infinite, and the Priests can feel the lessening of the pressure against the Mountain Ward.”

The vivic consumption of the Braziers, the Walls, and the Pyramid Domain was 24/7, constant and voracious, a constant cyclone overhead of the last as the Yellow was sucked in from all directions and sparked and guttered to mistflame in all directions in the sky. The ground had naturally been largely purged clean, but infused Yellow being drawn up from below kept the sands largely lifeless… for now.

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A few hours later…

I was a couple hundred miles south, and there was a horde of Yellow streaming to the north. I would have likened them to an army ant column, but they were far too variable in size and nature, with thousands of planar combinations among them. They covered the sands and shrouded the sky, cries of alien origin of all kinds a mad cacophony that was underscored by the buzzing and flapping of countless wings.

I hit them hard and mercilessly.

Interdiction was my only Area defense, as I preferred to be able to fly here. It made things easier to do when fighting a horde spread across several square miles of land and sky. Some of these creatures could Blink, Dimension Door, Jaunt, Linejump, even Teleport, and I didn’t need them popping up on me like that, coming out of phase or ethereal states, or anything that would allow them an instant surround.

Shards lit up the sky and the ground, and I began to slaughter them.

As always, the Kickers did most of the damage, but the Shards themselves were also incredibly powerful, sure to do damage and thus unleash the Kickers. Elemental energies would normally be resisted, but infused with Arcane, Primal, and Divine energies, rote immunity didn’t work at all, and needed to be combined with active elemental resistance to the same energy to have any effect.

Shards fell like singing, blazing meteors in a score of shades and hues, hit their primary targets, and blew in all directions for twenty-five more targets, scouring massive areas clean of hundreds, then thousands of targets. Paired Admixtured Echoing Shards combined with Fastcast Paired Echoing Greater Shards, 162 potential primary targets, over four thousand secondary targets.

Anything big and tough inherited an arc from each set of spells, which was usually enough to do for it. If not, Pleiades or my Manticore Tail could easily send down a shot, Boosted with Force Reserves and/or Windfire to finish the job.

Magic detonated around me, but Mystic Sphere took care of anything below VIII, which was basically everything they were tossing at me. The sheer variety of energies and effects was impressive, everything from holy Celestial energies to malevolent Fiendish powers, the whole panoply of elemental powers, including exotics like Void, Force, Desiccation, and Dissolution, and even temporal and spatial attacks, although the latter hit the Interdiction and absolutely failed.

The mental attacks were the most numerous, and my Reprisals against the assaults formed a crackling silver web of lightning spitting back against the sources thereof, my Wrath raging through the Reprisals and leveling the usually large-cranium creatures using such attacks on me.

Fans of Shard attacks blew through the sky, clearing the area around me. If there were tens of thousands of fliers, some of them the size of elder dragons, that was fine. None reached me, intersecting arcs of Shards keeping them Burning alive from thousands of feet away, before they could make it to me, and they were falling in great flaming piles from the sky, blazing en vivus as they fell to crush the hordes swarming over the land below.

They couldn’t even be devoured by opportunistic members of the horde, falling to white dust and ash as they were.

It took only two minutes for the sky to be clear in a mile radius around me, and I began bombarding the horde below.

There were a lot of them, but the Chains could Seek them out regardless of how many there were, only true Burrowers traveling underground able to avoid my barrage for the moment.

Shards rained down, and then exploded out laterally in all directions, able to travel up to five hundred paces in total in all directions looking for victims, occasionally criss-crossing on the larger ones, and filling the area of the horde with spots of blazing whiteness and thousands of corpses.

The Yellow horde kept advancing, and I kept moving to keep the numbers in range of my spells.

I started from basically the southeast corner, and worked across and in. Soon enough I was occasionally splitting my attention between ground and sky again, as other fliers came in from the west to test me. As long as a few of them flew low enough, I could Chain from earth to sky or vice versa, causing streaks of geyser-like eruptions or funnels of descending doom to rise or fall from scrambling horde to flying swarm, or vice versa.

Hurled spikes, darts, claws, and other body parts were also flung, spat, shot, and hurled at me, turned right around and went back at their shooters as Reverse Missile did its job. My Reprisals were constant cracks of Silver and Gold going off at their mentalists, who were failing to affect me and helpfully pointing themselves out for attention as they did so.

I cleared acres of ground space and hectares of flying space over and over. The seemingly numberless army of Yellow creatures shrank, and shrank, and shrank again, the landscape below dotted with uncounted numbers of blazing corpses, roiling thick with vivic mists blazing and Burning further as they started small bonfires of their own on the vivic-saturated soil.

The Apertures here were closer together and more numerous, a side effect of being closer to the source of them, converging points whose center I had little trouble calculating and verifying repeatedly. All such points on the field were ablaze as Shards passed through them and set them alight in the intense Yellow atmosphere.

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It took me an hour to wipe them all, save for the true Burrowers underground who wisely stayed that way. They I’d have to force out of the ground one by one by hardening the ground, forcing them into a rising detour that would bring them above ground to be eliminated. Those that were Earthgliding or similar states that relied on dimensional phasing and the like had naturally been forced to the surface by the Interdiction or forced to detour or retreat, and if the former had died with the rest of the horde.

Most of the things couldn’t dig through actual stone, and if they could, only very slowly, certainly not enough to travel. Bringing them up required patience and persistence, using Sieged spells to solidify the ground and force them to the surface, but that was fine. I had both measures in spades.

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My Linejump came in over the horizon to the edge of the Pyramid’s Domain, and Feature entered it, immediately beginning to drop under the Stillflight, invoking Featherweight and gliding down under complete control as I stood atop him. He could easily make the mile-long distance, and if not, could simply hit the ground and continue at a casual serpentine pace.

Dawn would be coming in an hour.

The spotters easily saw me coming, and I noted there were rather more people awake at the main ramp down than was normal, especially dwarves. I emphasized a good sleep schedule to rest and digest the meals and Karma of the day before, although those who were Sustained with Rings were naturally able to skip much of that, serving as lookouts while others rested or Meditated.

Feature obligingly hit the ground and wound his way forward, furling his wings as he moved just above the sands on a version of lightfoot and geomagnetism combined, just barely not touching the sands and stone below us.

He delivered me right in front of Kord and Patriarch Goldhammer, both of whom had expectant looks in their eyes as they waited at the main ramp to the Pyramid.

“Yes, gentlemen?” I asked them both, guessing what they were about to say, but also totally willing to let them have their fun.

“Master Aelryinth,” the Patriarch said urgently, stepping forward. “The Braziers! They advanced a foot!”

I would have blinked had I the eyes to do so. Feature helpfully did so for me. “So soon?” I was a bit surprised, despite myself.

“Aye, magos. The markers on the ground do not lie, and we sent out word to verify it was true across the Ward. We await word from the farther kingdoms, but for a hundred miles west, it is confirmed, and more are answering by horn, hammer, and drum.”

I considered that slowly, calculating factors. “Ah. It seems the Mountain Ward was being pushed back as well, as opposed to standing firm. We’ve consumed enough of the Yellow that its pressure has fallen, and the Mountain Ward is forcing its way back to its original extent. I don’t know where that is, but presumably not too far, given the power of the Ward, and its design to hold instead of retreat.” I could still feel the full force of the Yellow streaming in past the Pyramid’s Domain, as strong as ever and full, a sea battering against a breakwall, not a lake slowly drained dry.

They all looked a little crest-fallen as I whipped up an image, showing how the consumption of the Yellow was reinforcing space and eating up the inflow of the Yellow and more, reducing the thickness and outgoing force. The Mountain Ward, the pressure on it being relieved, was naturally expanding back out… but the Yellow itself was still all around, and had not decreased in the slightest.

“It’s still a first step, though, sir?” Kord asked, fishing for positive news.

“Aye. It’s that moment in the duel when your bigger, stronger, superior enemy that has been pressing you relentlessly suddenly has to retreat that first step to gather himself… and you step forward to take back the ground he took from you.” I clapped him on the shoulder and looked down at the Patriarch.

“You may tell the Rockborn that we have passed the tipping point now. We are eating the Yellow faster than it arises, and we are Burning away the sea of it little by little, feeding it to the Land, and that speed will only grow as more Braziers go up, more Walls are lit… and the Domain of the Pyramid expands.”

Everyone turned as the pile of stones hovering above the ground behind us shimmered, the Rune Circuits of the stones flaring and pulsing in a complex pattern that washed down from the whitefall of vivus from above and spread down each level, one by one, until it blazed softly with an eye-watering assembly of magic coming to magical, vivus-fed life.

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