Hlaeth Chapter 49 – On the Withdrawal

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“We’re done! Begin withdrawing to the Pyramid field border!”

The tempo of the fighting down below changed instantly. The forward lines immediately began to retreat and converge, folding back into one another, eliminating anything that still needed to be fought, sliding past the elder dwarves marking the Apertures, who immediately withdrew and hurried ahead of the withdrawing lines.

The creatures of the Yellow followed, of course, but the teams were condensing and layering now, especially the archers, and few of the Yellow had the ability to get into fighting range, and none of them survived more than a minute if they did, attracting missile fire and magical support from all directions.

I just watched as the Children pulled back with the smoothness of experienced combatants who had been doing this for a month, the process grilled into them repeatedly. Withdrawing in good order was a powerful skill in mass combat, and flubbing it up meant exposing people and both slowing and endangering others who both had to cover you and might be attacked themselves.

The Warlords below, basically sergeants and junior officers, watched the whole process like hawks, roaring orders to the undisciplined and heaping curses upon them to stay in formation, to cover others and be covered themselves.

No casualties during the withdrawals, the elder dwarves smoothly led the way backwards as the lines reached them one by one. If the desert seemed to come alive as devouring Yellow eroded away at all the white spots in the sands, and mutant things changed by exposure to extraplanar energies they’d never desired seemed to be all over the place, well, it was true.

I couldn’t tell what the source creature was for most of the Yellow. I assumed insects or small mammals that preyed on them, grown and mutated by influxes of power, driven mad by alien instincts and drives conflicting inside them. The Yellow never attacked one another, their lives seemingly spent wandering around blundering through more Apertures, seeking out more Yellow energy by following the flows of it… and thus slowly spreading out from deeper in the desert to the borders, especially here, where the Yellow was constantly being Burned away and so drawing them in this direction.

The line of warriors with Vivic Eternal Lights on their helms poofed slightly as they passed the Domain of the Pyramid, itself a shimmer and cascade of swirling mists in the air, drawn up along the Domain to the top of its dome and falling down in a misty unwhite waterfall onto the top of the Pyramid.

Magic strengthened, the Domain strengthened. Yellow energy flowed over the Domain, was vivisized, constantly fed the process.

“Everyone is inside the Domain.” My announcement in Magevoice relaxed everyone below even as they continued to retreat. Here and there explosions of fire, lightning, and acid blew through the edge of the Domain from Yellow creatures on the outside, but the first of them had touched the Domain, promptly lit on vivic fire, and withdrawn as they felt the planar energies igniting all over them, multiplanar existences crumbling and falling apart.

Even the biggest and strongest creatures trying to burrow in were afflicted, as the Domain was a sphere, not a hemisphere. Most of them exploded from the sands here, long since regressed from white to normal soil that was starting to bloom with green life, and urgently turned around.

Fliers either turned around or, if relying on feathers, often fell right out of the sky before they could make it as their wings Burned.

Most made it out before they crumbled apart, some did not, and Burned down in big misty piles, feeding the Land.

The grass would be growing especially thick there at dawn.

The chow line was already drawn up, and hungry Children and dwarves were converging on it.

In long, long lines extending to east and west, Vivic Eternal Flames Burned in braziers. Great Walls of Fire a thousand feet long, Golden and Vivic, had retired to ward sections of the barrier most attractive to the Yellow creatures, attracting their attention and punishing them if they dared the all-consuming flames.

Streaks of vivic flame adorning a lot of Crossbows thrummed out in volleys of two to five shooters at a time, the dwarven arbalesters finding targets in the night who ignored the greater draw of the Pyramid and Walls of Fire to test out the smaller Braziers.

The grass was growing particularly high along those fronts.

In the morning, the dwarves would go out, this time with many a human mageling or priest who had been drawn to the fighting, even Druids arriving when they heard of the fighting taking place. They’d pick up the hundreds of quarrels and arrows shot out in an area over the night, bring them back, fix them up, and prepare to do it all over again.

Thousands of dwarves and humans were staffing the fighting line over hundreds of miles now, and that was still growing miles by the day. Archers were getting in a lot of practice against unwholesome enemies in great numbers, but not in great swarms, an ideal situation for them. Undisciplined and unshielded enemies were the perfect targets for disciplined archers.

Potentially getting Named Weapons out of the deal was worth a lot, they just had to be Master’s Work to start with.

The vivic Burn if the Yellowed breached the Domain wasn’t fast, just a point a round, but it was still more damage than most of them could possibly endure before they reached the grounds of Pyramid proper… and they would have to endure it all on the way out, too.

From the steps of the Pyramid, floating there above the ground, we could watch stars flickering to life, then turning into white comets falling to the ground as maddened fliers following the Yellow hit the Domain and didn’t pull out like they should have, in too much pain or just not smart enough.

“How are we doing, Master Aelryinth?” Kord asked, between bites of a hearty stew. Creating manna was still possible as a lesser spell, and mixed with the stew satisfied a lot of appetites while stretching supplies out to help minimize the cost. All the priests, especially the dwarven ones, knew the value of fighting the Yellow, and contributed as much to the feeding as possible to offset costs.

The sunken dwarven gardens were not infinite in supply, after all, and we couldn’t harvest the slain creatures for food.

I hadn’t passed any Sustaining Rings out yet. Soon.

“You’re getting better at coordination, which is important in this fight. The main thing holding you back is access to more Healing power,” I said neutrally. “You’re managing Soak and Health much, much better, but I’m sure you all have repeatedly seen that more recovery ability would drive the engine of improvement more.

“Healing Reserve kicking off is going to help that immensely, for the Clerics that have it active. However, they have little ability to heal at range, and the speed of it is still slow.”

The officer/Warlords nodded all around. Warlord awareness of their commands made them acutely aware of bottlenecks in their ability.

“Your damage infliction is improving steadily, if not rapidly. You’ve all seen how well Wolfpack Tactics work, even if improving the group slows down improving the individual. Stay with it. Working together to greater effect is one of the great things that bind the Children together.

“Your tanking ability still needs work, but that’s as much about the Gear and Levels as anything.” The smiths were basically getting to work as the warriors came back, so much metal pounded, melted, corroded, and hacked that needed to be fixed. On the flip side, the smiths were also getting better, as their work in this fight was earning them Karma, and if all they did was pour it into their Tools, they were getting better, faster.

Yeah, I’d spoken with them, too. Karmic weight into Master’s Work Tools was a fine way to improve the speed of your smiths! And the faster they worked, the more weapons and armor they improved or repaired, the more Karma they earned faster in a virtuous cycle.

Dwarven smiths hundreds of years old, crafters who would never bother to forge work for non-dwarves, leaving such matters to apprentices, were out in the field now getting ‘improvements’ by doing the work directly and applying the Karma positively.

It helped that I was a Sixteen and could critique their work with scathing accuracy if need be. Just because it was dwarf-work didn’t mean it was up to my level of quality, and they didn’t seem to know Jadework here, either.

“How long before we can stand on our own, you think?” Kon asked bluntly. He had a fierce independent streak that had never gone away, but he knew better than to challenge me… and he owed me his life about six times over, now.

He also knew I didn’t need him, them, ANY of them. Not many of them had seen me unleash on the Yellow at all, but if I wanted something dead, and a squad or two was in danger, Shards came streaking in, and whatever it was died, just like that, while painfully hot or cold Healing burned either way and kept people from dying.

I sighed patiently. “You don’t have the ability to bring back the dead, either the recently-killed quickly, or the longer dead with goldweight. That is the major impediment to not ‘needing’ me anymore. It is the major thing you cannot replace.”

None of those fighting had stayed dead. None of them could really believe it, but I could get to anyone who died, and bring them back, as long as their bodies weren’t completely destroyed… and if their bodies were destroyed, I could bring them back, but it cost goldweight.

“As you all know, there are also things in the Yellow that are just incredibly dangerous without multiple squads and overlapping teamwork, too.”

The most dangerous thing today had been a centipedal chillworm with icy razor spines all over it, scuttling across the ground and shooting ice in all directions, attempting to swallow people whole, moving with speed and ferocity. Getting close hurt, staying away hurt, it was fast, it could dive under the sands and resurface, and it had lashing tendrils edged in some really sharp chitin that could carve into anything close to it, long before they reached weapon range.

I had been constantly Healing them while they worked out the tactics to kill it, got Resist Cold up on people, Shield-users tanked the tentacles long enough for Axers to take them out at the root, Spear-users filled its double-jaws full of shattered Weapons, and True Seeking spells found holes in six inches of chitin as hard as stone, tracked it underground, and blocked enough of its icy barrage to enable the archers to contribute.

It had still taken ten minutes to kill, rampaging over a half-mile of ground as they chased it. A dozen of them or more would have been flat-out dead without me.

“Could you have taken that wurm, sir?” the towering Hano asked around a bite of ham.

“Yes. You noticed it bounced most Ray attacks, and Shards, too. I would have rendered Shards down into a touch attack, and come straight in on it with Mortus Dius.” The Spear on my Staff snapped out, hissing and gleaming with a seething mass of energy around it. “My first hit likely would have popped its head like an over-filled bladder, and spread down its body segments, tearing it apart from the inside.

“But that’s me. I have a little bit of a head start over the rest of you on this killing business.”

There were wry chuckles all around at the truth of that statement.

“So, we’ve made acceptable progress?” Shirrazor spoke up, as always at Pounder’s side.

“Given the restrictions you labor under? Yes. If the gods were here and able to act freely, their Priests not so restricted… you would be doing better, not the least because there would be more Priests among you, and the amount of Healing you would have access to would skyrocket.

“I am not one to leave my work half-done, so you WILL be able to stand tall on your own when it is time for me to depart. But you also know that I must go south, as the Empire of Rhonidum also calls for my attention.”

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