The grandmaster’s army will be the last to arrive as he is skirting around to pick up the last of the stragglers and create a plan to take me down. More likely he just wants me to be weakened when he actually arrives. The joke is currently on him as I’m letting the Orcs take the brunt of that preliminary dying. The hive and gid having stalemated each other have taken to hunting the pyg, in a futile attempt to hold their current position as more arrive. I can tell the both of them have maximized their current defenses; well their passive defenses as their active defenses can still be filled out temporarily.

I poke around the bottom of their anchors for their patterns and a slime that will counter them and find the essence of a metal slime. I get it brought home before I bind it in having the entire realm become more active with the movement of slimes in hours. By the next day I’ve crushed all three of the Gid lords by proxy and have secured the slimes that did that for the essence they have accumulated. The essence might have been higher quality but most of it got converted in the slime’s stomach. The hive take this as their que not to wait any further.

Ever see a hive on a march? That’s rhetorical, by the way as either the hive breaks itself on you or it chews up the thing it was going after. A hive knight is the first to go down into my dungeon and shreds anything that engages it on the first floor. It, having been informed about the path, soon arrives on the fourth floor with the gate. The knight looks at it for a moment and feels her options, before taking its scythe arms to the door and breaking it down. The door just starts threatening it as though the knight used the Delver’s ability to bypass the door, while the knight doesn’t have any delver levels. It surprisingly works and the knight merely crosses the threshold and is weakened severely enough for Apocynum to eliminate the trespasser.

Two things happen after that in quick succession: the first is that I get the knight hive morph as essence, and the other is a blast over the lord’s intercom. “Lord walker has a blaster on retainer; How were we supposed to know that when you are so passive and nonreactive when things are going down in your realm. A bit of warning would have been nice.”

I then proceed to dump Apocynum’s response into the lord’s chat: “Was I not supposed to do that?”

I respond by replying, “It doesn’t matter.”

We then hear the undead trying to figure out how to stop blasters that we do not even have. Most of my common elves are harassers, and not true combatants at all. The first true melee combatant I’ve received is Myrry’s new knight and even that isn’t particularly strong. The shades operate on a spiritual level, while slimes are a standard endurer. I have nothing but friction to convince an army to stop, while I have even less for a more supernaturally enhanced opponent.

The grandmaster arrives at the head of one such army, and proceeds to kick the butt of everything that isn’t a necrotic slime. As the monster moves through my territory it is increasingly apparent that I can refine my undead responses to his intrusion. His essence blazes like a firestorm, all I have to do is pick up some warmth. By the end he can tell that if he does not win decisively that he will never win. He is a real fighter though and just keeps going, until he can continue no longer and is immobilized in his unerring descent. His presence also reveals another perk of just basing the get down, others of your faction can follow behind you and not have to deal with the brunt of the suppression. His army moves and secures as much as possible in following him.

I check above and the head paladin has cleared out the entirety of the surface from undead. That doesn’t help me any as he can focus all of his energies on me, and then hope to get back to win against the others later. In turn I have the disadvantage of being pinned in my own realm as the grandmaster’s blitz range is just outside my boss room and the enclaves. The rest of the army is trickling down to bolster the undead lord’s final push into my realm. His presence is suppressing the necrotic slimes as much as possible, which only should be the case above the gate.

I focus on the gate and feel the breaks in it and start knitting the hairline fractures together, using the lord’s energy as collateral for the failures. The monster responds by exuding an aura of death; and proceeds to increase my death affinity. A second pulse occurs, and then a third. As he has pulled all of his minions in, he charges to my boss room with all of them and leaves them on my doorstep. They charge into Blobby’s chamber as the entire space is cut in half, and soon the encapsulation is filled with the necrotic slimes that can no longer be held at bay. The mass of essence they contained hits me like a wave and I use what I can to strengthen myself.

I watch as the Head paladin rebuilds their order, after dropping by to tell her that the grandmaster is dead. It takes the rest of the week to get the mess the undead made cleaned up. And then it is time to drop into the chorus. I get awebanged by the angels who have a bone to pick with me, so I curl up into a ball instead of receiving my reward for killing the undead lord. To the point where they dump an angel to awebang me again in the letter. I, having noticed the problem beforehand, instead open the letter at the entrance of my dungeon and move to the bottom after the seven seconds are up. The angel takes this poorly as it is supposed to get the message to me, and I have received the awebang message loud and clear.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Oh? That wasn’t the message the angel was supposed to convey? I think I’m going to take a nap.

I wake up from my nap a week later and discover that the angel has been bleeding essence into my cultivation replacing the undead as the biggest troublemaker in my realm, and I’ve improved my resistances to all of its shenanigans accordingly. I analyze if my power debug is affecting the angel and after determining that it wasn’t hunker down to fix that. After teasing out the difference and fixing the problem the angel’s ability to generate awe has plummeted. As It’s low enough for my resistance to mitigate it I go back up to give my greetings.

“Ready to behave yourself?” Real smooth me, making friends now.

“Do you really believe that this is right?” The angel asks me.

“You cannot awebang me, so yes this is an improvement.” I don’t think the angel’s recovery is capable of creating any aura at this point.

“Fine, delivery of back pay.” I take the delivery of the packs and go back down.

“Wait, that’s it? Why all of the fuss for what should be a routine delivery?” The Head paladin muses as the angel leaves. The first pack is filled with monsters as the angel replaced the pack’s contents over time to spite me. Jokes on them though, as I’m okay with that. The second is filled with core stats, while the third was filled with armor upgrades, of which the most interesting is the auto-tracking autocannons for my wings.

All of that doesn’t matter if I never use them so I do not really focus on them for much longer. I instead focus on using my aura on my surroundings to get connected with the greater area of territories controlled by people. It takes a couple of tries to get the connection to stick, as the attempts before got cannibalized by the paladins above as our territories interconnected. Accumulating space like that garnered a lot of attention and a couple of pyg warbands, but beyond the worst of that; which I didn’t even feel I did eventually get connected to a larger realm. Said realm was not a realm that worked for the get back to earth linkages, but they do chatter with each other so I was helped along. I think I got more essence from them leaving than I got from their presence.

In the end I was used like a ferry as I moved along the coast to more dangerous shores. The paladins sort out who is going where as we travel and take all of the currency as they point me in the right direction. I think they are deliberately steering me in the wrong direction, but I’m correspondingly accumulating the core stats related to navigation so I’m not as concerned. I also start tracking out the areas I’ve been going and see if I can figure out its curvature. As this is going my realm expands as it deals with the stress of me trying to analyze the void around it. Something in the void crashes into me but I just wait for it to give up. It doesn’t and an incursion takes place. The paladins deal with it and we continue on to safer pastures.

Eventually we make it to a place where the linkage does occur so I can piggyback on the linkage to send messages back home. Since I’ve linked up I’m counted as a major ally of the champion in residence. I do have to clean up several monster territories as I cross his realm but neither of us mind the delay. Eventually I make it to his capital and my realm is placed as one of the lord’s dungeons. I save up the energy to create some potions and then I leave my retainers in charge as I leave to make the connection.

Part way up the connection, instead of being led back to terra firma, I’m led to my father’s room in the medical ward. I end up having to use the antidote potions to remove the malice of the Alchemist’s mafia and then use my yellow potion to restore the parts that are hard to restore. We have a heart to heart and when I mention that I have not made it back he offers for us to go together.

We are both vetted as we go back home to our original vessels, and I discover that it has been several years with angels controlling my vessel, to take care of it. I’m so badly desynchronized that I cannot stay in it for long. Even dad can no longer recognize himself, and that is with all of my ‘dad is wrong’ sanded over by the actions of the angels. I’ve also been married in my absence and she is beautiful. Our child has our family spark. Mom tells my wife that dad’s having one of his weirdness episodes again. “He’s not the only one.”

“That’s nice dear, what’s next, you claiming that you were astral projecting to heaven and that you met an angel.” My wife is acting like she has a sense of humor.

“Don’t humor them, it makes them think you can do what they call ‘making the crossing.’ I’m going to make dinner, don’t give your son any ideas.” She then leaves in a huff.

I look down at our four year old son as dad says, “Do you have better luck with the angel’s aura?”

“I’ve taken to calling that aura the ‘Awebang,’ haven’t been flashbanged outside of a video game yet but it’s coming.” My wife’s spark blinks awake at my comment.

“By the way, I’m the champion of the realm you are in.” We exchange information on the forums and I’m integrated into her clan. This occurs because she apparently received a spontaneous inheritance and needed a weaker male inheritance line to have any inheritance rules. We also meet our in-laws for the first time, and have what amounts to a fraught accounting of our clan’s troubles and alliances. They end up making us one of their protectorates and therefore let me and my dungeon have enough time to increase my formulation for tutorialization to make it a perfect training ground. In the end, my life is pretty good as my wife retires to be the matron of my training ground to train the next generation.