[Hlaeth] Ch 16 - Humanity Knows How to Fight!

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            “Mmm, no.” I considered how far to go with my reply, and shrugged. “You saw my history. The first part of that, the undead? That was the population of my homeworld, slaughtered by the Thing,” I stutter-stepped, half-coughed, went on, “as our entire world was ripped out of its home plane and deposited into a universe of new magic. Our planetary population had no other sapient races than humans, and there were over seven billion of us, spread across the globe.

            “Ten years later, there are somewhat in excess of sixty million of us left, if you count a lot of new children. Where once we were spread across the world, we are now concentrated in the center of one of the continents.”

            I idly whipped up Holos to accompany my words, showing the population spread of the planet, the white dots going black one by one, the emigration of the living to North America as the axis of the world twisted sideways, and the movement of the black as they aimed to conquer one another and march upon us to become masters of the world.

            The black was expunged, one by one, by the far, far smaller numbers of white. The onlooking courtiers had interesting expressions when they realized I was using magic inside their Legus, too.

            “My Allegiance dominates this area.” I showed them all the lands of Michigan and surrounding territories, the many Banners of other Monarchs, some successful, some not, casually zooming in from the planetary scale down to the merely continental. “So, no, I am not an emperor. In the days before our Fall, there were cities who had populations greater than all my people, small nations with more people than the existing planetary population, and great nations with over a billion souls under them. Compared to our former standing, I am scarcely of more power than a local governor was.”

            They all glanced at one another, relative standards and all. “I see,” Elder Styllari spoke up slowly. “And what brought about this Fall?” she asked, very curious now.

            “Our inability to defend ourselves against the appetite of a creature from Beyond Creation,” I replied simply, and they all blinked. “That’s it. That’s all it was. A creature from Outside Creation stumbled upon our world, saw seven billion souls ready for a light snack, and barged in to kill us. We were dinner for a world-ender.”

            The Holo of Earth in front of us shrank down to scale, and writhing tentacles reached out, boring right through the Moon and closed in on us. The scale of it had the dragons hissing and looking skywards in shock.

            “But, we got lucky. There was an Archmage from a great and powerful Tradition of Magic on our world, and he saw what was coming. He took steps to protect us and punish the… and save who he could.”

            They watched the Great Seals light up, the icosahedron envelop the world, Earth get drawn out of orbit as the moon shattered into glittering rings and falling meteors, dimensions tear open, and the Mazakeem come flooding out to enjoy a meal of their own.

            Earth was sent spiraling out the random dimensions, still wreathed in magic-devouring fields of d20 magic, until it came out into a new place, around a great red world, glittering rings from the shattered moon in place around us, tilted on a new axis, and the world raging from elemental catastrophe.

            Then everyone who had died starting getting back up dead, and the fighting started.

            “Gods of Heaven and Hell,” Commander Tellusian let slip from the back, staring at the carnage implied by mile-high tsunamis, floods that tore out the heart of a continent, shorelines buried, polar caps melting spontaneously, volcanoes erupting around the world, floods and fires…

            And the Marches, filling the land to the horizon in all directions with the walking dead, eager to turn the new Terra-Luna into a graveyard.

            “And how long ago was all of this?” the thunderstruck Styllari asked softly.

            “As of the time I left Terra-Luna to go to another world that was trying to invade us, ten and one-quarter years.” Tongues conveying perfectly how long that was in their own reckoning, of course.

            Commander Tellusian and Fyanyl almost tripped behind us, the dragons looked aghast. “You… killed seven billion undead in only ten years?” Elder Clangrill blurted up from behind me.

            “No. We killed the Dead Marches in only one year.”

            I could almost feel their blood run cold. “It was only twenty thousand or so undead apiece, on average. Some of us killed more than others.”

            They’d all held my Staff and seen the millions I’d taken down. They pictured those numbers, and even the dragons could not say they were not impressed.

            “That is a feat of battle for the ages!” Elder Clangrill, the Bronze Wyrm, spoke up slowly. “How did you possibly win such a war, Magos?” he had to ask.

            “We optimized against the undead faster than they grew and adapted themselves to us, Elder,” I replied honestly. “Looking back on it, the greatest benefit we had is that they were simply undead, and not well-armed and armored undead. Our basic foe was simply an average man, woman, or child whose body was Animated, reinforced with the power of the Dead Marches, and sent after us with only claws and teeth to use on us.”

I flicked up the Soulspear on Mortus, two feet of Golden soulfire as hard as adamantine, wound about with undead Banefire, vivus, and layered Holy energies, as well as Wrath and Fire Reserves.

            The dragons and elves all stared at it, studying the power there, and just how plain deadly such a Weapon would be against the undead.

            “A bit better than most.” I let the Reserves and Wrath fade, the rest remained. “This was the average Weapon we ended up wielding against the Marches over time, to say nothing of the magic we wielded against them. If you know your foe, aligning your Weapons and tactics to destroy them can reach an extreme level of deadliness, Elders.”

I flipped up Illusions of the basic undead, rote Shamblers, Gazers, Drowned, Brines, Parched, and the like. The dragons and elves looked on in silence, which grew deeper as for a moment another Illusion swirled around us, taking over the whole world for a visual display.

            We were above a great Wall, and in front of us was a seething mass of black-burning undead. It extended miles away, clear to the horizon in all directions, with no end in sight to it.

            The front of those undead was advancing on the Wall, and they were exploding.

            The salvos of magic and blazing arrows were as regular as clockwork, girt in triple fires of Soul and Banefire and vivus, black and white and Colors, and the undead were being mowed down with incredible speed. The mass of undead coming in was erupting with magic that thinned them out long before they could get to the packed ramps of stone and bones that led up to that Wall, and the men and women atop the Wall struck them down with speed and power.

            The pure savagery and ferocity of the bombardment of magic against the undead, and the lethality of those fighting, rendered them all mute as they regarded it. It was plain that this was a moment drawn from memory, not something artistic.

            “Five to ten million an hour at optimal speed,” I said softly, remembering the tableau before me. “Billions of undead. It was not a short fight, but we endured long enough to kill them all.”

            “Only humans?” repeated Elder Laufengel, looking about the Illusion. “I see flying soldiers…”

            “We recruited griffons, hippogriffs, pegasi, and later even Great Owls and Great Eagles,” I confirmed, withdrawing Mortus’ Soulspear. “But they came after the Fall, created by wild magic or simply growing to size they could not attain before.

            “They were only tertiary forces, helping those who could not fly to do so. The true power was all in the infantry and the Casters. The cavalry saw great use when there was ground to maneuver, but it should not surprise you that with an average Dead March size in excess of one hundred million corpses, ground to maneuver can run out extremely quickly.” Eagle-eye views of flowing streams of blackness spreading out and out and out to envelop, encircle, and attempt to close in on faster and much smaller cavalry forces flowed through the Holos in rapid fashion, generally ending up with the cavalry fleeing and setting up behind walls to take the grinding fight.

            They were still staring at the image of the primary fighting, the unrelenting cascade of magic tearing through the undead, the sheer amount of savage willpower that it would take to endure that fighting and face down such unbelievable numbers. I slowly let it fade away, replaced by pastoral bliss and the graceful elegance of the elven gardens about us.

            “You are a people who know war intimately,” Elder Clangrill acknowledged softly. “Has this… changed your people?”

            That, that earned a smile. “Elders, of all things I might say, what I say next is going to be the hardest to believe.” I flicked my hand and brought up an image of Earth. “Observe my world before our Fall.”

            I played for them the showcase of cities grander in size and scale than what the elves had here, if not so pretty. Ships the size of towns. Airplanes larger than Dragons. Rockets ascending into the sky and satellites about the world. Walls hundreds of miles long, projects of infrastructure and millions of miles of roads, telephone and power lines, sewage systems, art and statues and tributes and ancient monuments.

            I let all of it fade as they grappled with processing the sheer scale upon which my world had once operated. “What did you not see in all of that, Elders?” I asked quietly. “Other than the reason why I don’t consider myself an emperor or the equal of one.”

            It was Captain Fyanyl who spoke up. “Magic. There was light and fire and such things on display, but there was no true magic in anything you showed us, Master Aelryinth,” she said softly.

            “Just so.” They all shivered. “We were victims of the… because there were no gods, no demons, no magic on our world. There was just us, and a horror from Beyond Creation come to eat us. Everything you just saw was accomplished with science, and science alone.

            “I was born in a world with no other intelligent species than humans, and with no magic whatsoever. The level of magic on Terra was not much above what I believe you would call a Dead Magic Zone.”

            I watched them all grimace as they pictured living in such an empty, hollow, lifeless world, at least from their perspectives.

            “Without magic, we naturally took science to incredible levels.” 

            Firearms. Helicopters firing rockets. Jet planes streaking by at unbelievable speeds, firing rockets. Machine guns shredding targets, tanks firing and crashing through walls, falling bombs blowing those tanks apart, cannons roaring and distant clouds erupting in series, bombs falling and leveling city blocks…

            The towering, annihilating eruption of Bikini Atoll, and multiple movie renditions of atomic bursts going off in cities and wiping them away.

            They all watched in shock and horror at the scale of the destruction we could unleash.

            “We had the power to annihilate our whole world two or three times over. Science has that power. But it was useless against the… as we hadn’t taken it far enough, high enough, to have any chance.

            “We were dinner, and without the Archmage basically using what mana was there of the entire world, then sucking in the power of the… and energizing our whole world to defy it, we would have died.

            “With it, a small fraction of our population survived.”

            There was silence as we slowly and silently continued walking. At last, Elder Coronus spoke up, “How does one defy such a thing normally?” he asked.

            “The gods kill them.” They all twitched in surprise. “Aye, it’s one of the duties of the gods, wiping things like this when they intrude into Creation. If we had been a magical world, with gods and the like, what happened to us would never have happened!”

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