The Pyramid now had a large hole in its side, and you could see the constructs through it. The silver skeletal… things couldn’t cross the divide between the blown-up inner structure and the pyramid wall proper. So they kept streaming toward the top. It was like looking at an ant farm. A very angry ant farm.

The First Gater was not pissed. Not really. Boys will be boys, and blowing up the side of the Pyramid was something nobody should be surprised by. But sometimes, one just wished the Gaters would be… more disciplined.

They could be. But when they’d reached the site and found the 90-elite constructs patrolling the entrance, some had laughed at the power levels worthy of mere thousanders, and decided to have “fun”. The description of dangerous foes from the doomed expedition now seemed underwhelming when facing the reality.

One of the expedition wizards was reaching the small mound from where you had a front view of the Pyramid assault.

“If any of you wizards damaged the mechanism of this Pyramid, I will be pissed. You know I want all of it. Not just a painted ball of stone.”

The wizard raised his hands in a peace gesture.

“Hey, I didn’t do it.”

“I fuckin’ know. You don’t have the power levels for it. Sakiskaster is my guess. I swear, the guy has the self-control of a little kid barely out from under his mother’s skirt.”

They both turned toward the Pyramid. A group of Gaters stood near the exit, cutting down the guardians who were coming out like clockwork. They would stay for about 15 minutes, then rotate to let the next group take over while they slowly regenerated their vitals.

So far, they’d seen mostly skeletal versions of the so-called Five. Shorter, or stretched… with those weird six fingers. The six-limbed chromed skeletons were weird also, just in a different way.

What was mostly interesting was the occasional non-five. So far, they had seen a 14-limbed crawly with a weird facial maw twice. A Greater Elite and a standard Elite. The harpoon in that “mouth” was horrifying in itself.

Then there was a long-legged skeleton with the legs bent the wrong way, what looked like nubs of “bone” at the feet, and too-short arms. The thing had been more dangerous than the rest since it had a bow and fired what looked like energy arrows instead of wooden ones. Energy arrows that exploded when they struck flesh, doing a massive amount of damage. Instead of climbing to the top, the thing had been standing at the hole in the Pyramid, firing through it, and it had required multiple casters to cut down from a distance.

The last non-five spotted so far was a four-legged, four-armed skeleton with radial symmetry. That one had been a caster “model” with the sphere metal ball “head” throwing lances of ultra-cold energies. One Gater had a limb frozen to breaking point and had to be rotated out. She was nominally healed at maximum vital level, but the arm would likely take a few days to regrow completely.

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The assault had now been going on for nearly two hours. Close to two hundred Pyramid guardians were demolished.

And their levels kept climbing.

In the beginning, when they attracted and slaughtered the first patrol, it was all 90-100s, with one or two just below or above. After nearly 10 minutes, there were none appearing below 90. After half an hour, the first 120 started showing occasionally.

At that point, it was obvious there was a mechanism inside the Pyramid that kept building more guardians, fast, and said mechanism ramped its constructs as they were defeated. At the two-hour mark, the average rank of the guardian reaching the top was now 150. This wouldn’t be a problem for a while, but the high-Reasoning math heads in the raid had noted that the rank increase seemed exponential rather than linear. So if that kept climbing, it might become a severe threat at one point, requiring the entire raid to deal with.

The best Psionics and Aetherists had been put to use with whatever remote sensing they had to try to find from a distance the machinery that created the guardians – hopefully – and then figure a plan to disable it. So far, nothing.

“You know, we can still retreat,” the wizard said.

“And then what? They pursue? The Pyramid regenerates its power levels? Something else? No, we keep the grinding up and hope someone spots a clue,” the co-leader countered.

A Gater was coming at a run. That probably meant news.

“Found it. Therominn got a fix on the spawners.”

“Good. What is it?”

“There’s some kind of… cisterns under most of the side rooms, in the empty space inside the Pyramid. The things seem filled with some stuff that is positively stuffed with Aether. And most of these seem to be about 3/4th full right now.”

“You’re sure this is the spawning system?”

“On remote perception, there’s a kind of squirt that occurs from inside the cistern, then a skeletal construct forms and moves out of that room.”

“Next thing, you’re telling me this is some kind of smart metal nanotechnology.”

“Doubtful, the mass isn’t enough to create the full skeleton. It’s definitively Aether-related. That’s why the broken skeletons melt and leave nothing after ten minutes.”

She pondered the news.

“So, six more hours of this, and it could be running dry. I don’t know if we can handle the ranks by then. Gotta be close to 300, if not more. Can we drain the Aether?”

“Dosarbas is top rank on Aether and near the 3k levels, but he doesn’t have the range for most of the cisterns. And besides, he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to absorb and dump that much Aether before it refills. It’s massive. And there are five of those.”

“It does refill?”

“He’s monitoring the flux on the closest, even if Aetheric Sense is basically more like a qualitative measure rather than a precise quantitative one with that amount. It depletes with each construct but refills slowly. It depletes faster than it refills, but still.”

She pondered the information, ears twitching.

“Change of strategy. We’re going in.”

“What?” most of the strategy team exclaimed.

“We need to cut short the time when they refill. That means destroying the guardians closer to their spawn since the Pyramid remakes one as soon as the previous is disabled.”

“That’s…”

“The levels keep rising. We need to make their spawner run dry and then disable them before they reach ranks like 400, and we get slaughtered like those veterans who found it. Can’t do it subtly? Brute force it is.”

The rest looked at each other, then nodded in unison.

“It will be done, Great Mother.”

“And stop that title. I’m First Gater, not Great Mother.”

“As you wish, Great Mother.”

“Fuckin’ youngsters. No respect.”

I don’t even have kids. Yet.