“Shift it over here,” Kris directed, and I moved the circle so that it covered all the eastern islands, from Asheron’s Island, over the Aphus archipelago, and down and over the Vesayans. “Damn,” she muttered. “That is a LOT of area covered.”

“But only one point, which means one target to hit,” Briggs growled, seeing the most important point. “I take it this method is usually used on a continental basis, surrounded by well-secured buffer zones?” he inquired of me.

I wiped away the Holo, and replaced it with a map of a location only Kris and Briggs recognized after a minute.

The mitten-shaped peninsula was pretty singular, after all.

Four Pyramid Power fields winked up around the former state of Michigan, while lines of Obelisks popped around the periphery to supplement them. Shattered rifts and cliffsides warded against overland attempts to invade from all sides.

The view drew back further, and a land and continent no Isparian had ever seen before hove into view, Briggs and Kris sucking in their breaths as they identified areas in relation to Michigan, and the changes.

Then Briggs noticed the orientation, and swore softly. Kris followed his eyes, saw the compass point, and hissed.

Obelisk lines and Pyramid Power Fields ignited on location after location, centered on areas where people were living, settlements indicated with names nobody there except the three of us knew, gradually encircling and filling in area after area, filling in the hollow areas and forming an unbroken circle against intrusion. Green areas indicated completion, red still to go.

“Obelisk purpose?” Briggs asked, staring at the completed view of North America’s current state. There were plenty of holes in areas away from settlements.

It was a lot of continent to cover.

“Two-fold. Atmospheric filter, drops volcanic ash out of the air, stopping an ice age. Secondly was a pure Interdiction barrier between them. Stopped Fiends from Teleporting back and forth willy-nilly.”

“Well, we don’t have quite this much area to cover, so we can be more tactical about how we make things,” Briggs stated. “You can make smaller Pyramids, I trust?”

“Of course. A forty-stepper is the basic size for a civilized area, but Grand Central here was fifty steps high.” The very first PPF put up blinked for attention, noticeably larger than the others. “They also go up much faster.”

The maps all vanished, and a display of a Pyramid etched itself in Holographic detail in front of them. It started with a twenty-foot cube illustrated in scale next to an image of Briggs, connected to a line of them forty cubes long, and then thirty-nine more lines slapped into the side of it, forming a field forty cubes by forty cubes.

A second layer one less cube in dimension starting assembling atop it, cube, line, square, settled on top of the first one. The remaining levels stacked themselves up quickly, culminating in a single altar-like capstone.

“Aesthetics are highly mutable, as is the secondary purposes of the Pyramids.” I shifted the image to a more martial structure, complete with battlements, walkways, platforms, and multiple interior hallways, rooms, and storage chambers. This then transformed to a more administrative structure, with audience chambers, meeting rooms, offices, and so forth.

“Useful to know,” Briggs nodded, already drawing up plans in his head. “It seems you don’t want to build a massive Pyramid, either.”

“No. A mere ten-stepper can cover all the Vesayans, and can be erected in but a day outside Freehold. The Pyramids should be allocated to cover areas we control and can protect, not just for the heck of it. Another Pyramid in Hebian-To extending to Fort Overlook.” The map popped back into being as the Pyramids faded away, circles covering all of them, and meshing and merging into one another for greater areas of conjoined coverage. “When King Kresovus consolidates control of the Linvaks, make one in Kara, where I understand he is considering expanding to, now that Linvak Tukal is destroyed.” Another Sphere popped up, meshed and merged with those existing, now extending all the way to the southern landbridge. “When we can hold the Gharu’n and Aluvian lands, they will get Pyramids of their own.”

Briggs was running the math on the size of the Pyramids and the number of blocks required. “Am I correct in deducing that many smaller Pyramids are faster and easier to put up than large ones, and actually cover more area?” he inquired quickly.

I inclined my head. “At risk of more areas to guard. Every primary settlement could conceivably have one, and were preferred for use as secondary military holdings or temples, or combined for both. However, for Pyramid Fields to merge without disharmony, there must be a Central Pyramid and its lessers. It is the main reason you build a Grand Central first, and the others fit into its Field.”

“How long would that take to build?” Briggs asked reasonably.

“If I worked twelve hours a day straight with no breaks, about a month,” I answered easily.

“Just building up a mass of stone? Am I missing something?” Kris asked sharply.

“Ah, yes, you are. You’re conflating just whipping up six-meter cubes of stone and tossing them together with making a Pyramid. Let’s just say the Rune Circuitry needs to be put in at QL 50 or higher, there are six faces and the internal structure to Shape, and I need to purify any flaws out of it first.

“I can do about a Block a minute. I can potentially Shape a much bigger volume, but I can only Shape one Block at a time, and I have to know what I’m building before I begin.”

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Briggs grunted his understanding. “Changing the size of the Block wouldn’t speed things up, then.”

“A bigger one would slow me down, but this maximizes the volume and thus amount of power of the Pyramid for that many levels. Cut the cubes down to half-size, and you halve the radius. Double the size of them, and you slow down making the Blocks, and you only increase the radius fifty percent, even if you do make it stronger inside that area. A six-meter/twenty-foot Block size seems to be optimal.”

“Stone source?” Briggs asked reasonably.

“As long as there’s some in the area, that’s usually not an issue. Rock connects to rock, so the supply is basically infinite.

“On the other hand, if you want me to excavate a small lake with what I’m pulling out, it’s a good thing to tell me ahead of time.”

“Ohhhh, good point. You’re pulling out how much stone?” His eyes lit up.

“Over four and a half million cubic meters for the basic model.”

Kris whistled for both of them. “That is a LOT of rock…” she murmured.

“It’s about building a crafted hill of stone eight hundred high. It is NOT small,” I reminded them.

“We naturally would have to completely clear the area out of Summons and any patrols from the undead, shades, or virindi,” Briggs reflected. “Seems a good time to make a push to clear western Osteth.”

“That is not going to leave you much time to gain Karma or Craft,” Kris pointed out reasonably.

“Going down to eight hours a day would extend the time from a month to a month and a half, leave me eight hours for Crafting, and four hours for Karma. As long as the time was scheduled, it should be no issue, and Illusion magic can be used to conceal the Pyramid as simply a wooded hill from a distance.”

“Wooded?” Kris blinked. “Isn’t there supposed to be a Deru Tree near there, hidden behind a dimensional fold? Wouldn’t this force it back into reality?”

“Force it to materialize, or bar it from materializing,” I confirmed, and all their faces grew serious at the implications. “So we’re also looking at the return of the intelligent gromnies, or dragons, however you want to call them.”

“Boss-level creatures who might or might not be on our side,” Briggs nodded. “The tales told about the intelligent ones indicate they are revered and should not be hostile, at the very least… although how they react to this sudden change of dimensional mastery might render them quite uncomfortable if the Deru Tree chooses to materialize. Perhaps we can make it more palatable by killing hostiles in the immediate area, but as I understand it, the Deru tree is not friendly to any of the three existing powers.”

“Which means revealing them is not a priority we are worried about. How about the A’nekshay?” I inquired smartly. “The Field will also cover the area they claimed as their ancestral home of Neftet? They vanished during the Fall entirely, and the scouts report that the terrain that appeared so many years ago vanished with them. They will probably be forcibly returned as well.”

Briggs grumbled, while Kris just sniggered. “They can’t flee their problems forever. At least we can give them the chance to fight back. They are basically a part-elemental race of some kind, right? I think we’d call them a type of genasi? After being enslaved for so many years, I think the fact that they would be coming out free would be worth some consideration… and I think we’d be happy to give them vivic Weaponry to kill the undead and the shades…”

“Truth to that,” Briggs agreed calmly. “I’m afraid I am far more worried about a high magic strike or Summoning assault than I am over the feelings of any specific power that has fled the fight being dragged back into it. If they want a positive future, they should be fighting for it, instead of waiting for us to do the fighting for them.”

“The odds they wouldn’t come back after any real threats are gone is slim to none,” Kris nodded. “And… what about the Gear Knights, now that we are on that topic?”

Both Briggs and I frowned at that, too. “Have their been indications they were being reanimated?” I asked, having heard nothing on that score.

Kris shook her head quickly. “The scouts have checked the area by Al-Arqas thoroughly, and in addition collected as many stories and tales about them during the Fall that they could.

“The overloading of their aetherium cores basically destroyed their power sources and rendered all of them inert and immobile. The undead were observed to destroy and scatter the bodies of any Gear Knights they found, looting them of anything important. Given they are an acknowledged independent civilization, they probably don’t want the Constructs coming here to interfere.”

“Did they manage to save any remains at all?” Briggs frowned. “That seems very strange…”

“The least of the Gear Knights is a machine Construct wrought of metal and weighs over five hundred pounds. Given how chaotic the situation was, few would have had the capability of transporting inert shells weighing that much. The standard tactic was to dig them a grave, bury them, and hope to come back later to fix them.

“For the ones who were under the Deathstones, the destruction of them ravaged them beyond recovery, the same as any other corpses,” Kris finished, but her eyes had a special gleam to them.

“I see a useful secret there. You’ve the locations of some of these graves?” Briggs asked knowingly.

Kris inclined her head slightly. “We sent out word among the older generation that if they knew where some of these graves and concealed inert Gear Knights were, we would go try to recover them. We got quite a few replies, as the nobler of the Constructs were great companions to many of the adventurers back then.

“More importantly, one of the people who lived in Xarabydun back then reported to us carefully. They’ve been leaving in secret for fear of being found out and kidnapped or killed by the undead or virindi, but,” her pale violet eyes were dancing, “he was relieved to finally give us the location of where they buried Atamarr!”

“The leader of the allied Gear Knights? Primus of House Gold Gear itself, I believe?” Briggs asked, his bushy eyebrows rising. “That’s some really good news…”

“The news is also that Xarabydun is the area held most strongly by undead in all the Gharu’n lands. There was a lot of mining and alchemical work done in that area, and the undead have settled into it very strongly,” Kris added on.

“It’s because it’s built underground and they can stay out of the sun,” I sniffed.

“That still gets us an objective. If we can reanimate Atamarr, that would go a long way towards getting us some new allies to help things out,” Briggs pointed out thoughtfully. “The biggest problem will be getting him some aetherium, if indeed any is still extant after the Fall.”

“Hello, Magos here. Animating Constructs through alternate methods is not THAT hard,” I reminded them. “Expensive, maybe. I just need to be a Thirteen and I can probably get him moving without any aetherium whatsoever.” I paused in thought. “Although I will probably need a Gold Golum Heart or four.”

Briggs just laughed softly. “There’s hundreds of those things stacked up in Stonehold, all kinds of Golum Hearts awaiting any use we could have for them. You’re welcome to any of them and all of them.”

“Excellent. So we just need to schedule things out and move as we can,” I nodded. I brought Briggs back to Stonehold regularly, moving teams back and forth, so accessing that whenever I needed it would be simple, or more likely he’d just grab a supply of all of them golum hearts and just have them available for use…