In the space of less than a day, there was a tremendous amount of movement.
The Brotherhood brought out an ancient spell for Hazé called Gemjump. A Valence V effect, it allowed the Caster to recall precisely to the gem the spell was placed within, regardless of distance or across planar boundaries. It even worked through the dimensional soup of Yle Tyorm, once a ‘path’ had been Interdicted through it. Naturally, the rogue stones that were usable with the spell were incredibly rare... and the Brotherhood owned several.
It meant that Hazé could take advantage of the temporal compression of the inner spatial zones of Yle Tyorm, and was able to, for example, go through Renewals one hundred times faster in the fourth Zone-ring. With a full load of spells and Teleports, she could also do many, many more teleport retrievals and evacuations of the faithful. Thus, although she wanted to participate in the clearing of the inner area, she chose to instead vastly accelerate the withdrawal of people and precious items from areas of the Empire. She directly spoke with Summoned Celestials of many of the Good gods and powers to coordinate where to go, and her years of lived-line expansion throughout all the lands of the Empire were put to good use.
The dragons doing overflights along the Road through the Badlands and the Dichromatic Plains were hurriedly brought into Yle Tyorm. Their flying ability and combined magical and fighting power would be very useful there, for the distances to be traveled were immense.
The news that Yle Tyorm was open to exploration, and the danger and degree of the monsters found within it, soon had adventurers from half the continent flocking there on dimensional wings to hunt great beasts without limit or restraint. Indeed, the time compression meant they could earn fortunes, or their deaths, in a much shorter time than anywhere else! The clearing of the outer zones soon began...
Brothers Firesword and Shadowknife took it upon themselves to be the Voids necessary to open up a Zone for exploitation, borrowing Nulls and Sources from the Ironblood to complete the effect. Generally speaking, the time-accelerating Zones were those the adventurers didn’t want to disrupt quickly, giving them time to clear out anything, while those where Time was slow or twisted were ripped open and they only pressed in after the realm was normalized to deal with the many powerful things that were left behind.
The requirement for entering Yle Tyorm was being able to kill one of the Warped commanders or champions, or solo one of the powerful drakes, manticores, chimeras, demons, or other powerful beasts. Learning that there was also an endless amount of these creatures that could be killed, without having to delve into a land of ruins and ambushes by unknown and effectively countless numbers of strange magical creatures, many of the adventurers instead joined the companies marching to war, raising their general competency level.
This was good, because the Ironblood took over command of the city entry and defense, and their companies were clearing zones where adventurers failed or were reluctant to. Too, many of the experienced elves and dwarves burned to take advantage of the accelerated time, and formed bands both single and multi-racial, looking for combinations effective against the endless variety of creatures in the fallen city.
This required massive reorganization of the defense. Sama and friends were down in the hundred-fold Fourth Zone-ring, both dealing with the numbers of creatures being drawn in to fight them, and forging and making Gear. Nine hundred miles long and a third of that wide, the wild space in there was a primeval wilderness with ancient and powerful beasts in numbers... and more of them were always coming in from the Fifth Ring, the innermost, which was moving at a colossal four hundred times normal pacing and believed to be nine thousand miles deep...
Reaching them wasn’t actually that hard. After ripping through the zone of time/space and forcing it back into compliance with reality, it was only three miles down the road, and the area itself cleared of remnant intrinsic life.
However, the Zones to the sides were not cleared. One was a slow time zone and so little threat, while the other was another accelerated time zone of fifteenfold or so speed, but still popping out new monsters regularly, and so the preferred target of many adventurers.
If they made it all the way to the fourth zone, Sama was not far away on the other side, slaughtering the locals, administering new Marks, and forging away with breathtaking speed. A reinforced camp where master smiths were laboring away at a hundred times normal speed meant huge amounts of iron needed to be shipped in to keep them busy, and in return high QL and/or magical Arms and Armor were sent back out at improbable speed.
The number of Marked proliferated across the newcomers, instantly moving them into command positions across multiple forces, while units who were all Marked enjoyed a massive boost in their combat prowess on the battlefields, becoming the backbones of their armies. The massive influx of Clerics, Favored, and other healers brought in by Hazé helped expand the recovery ability of the armies coming in tremendously, a necessity when those numbers also included many that needed to be blooded on the field of battle, and casualties were much, much higher than before.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Happily, there were many prominent Clerics among those brought in, who were more than happy to Abjure away Summoned demons, lessening the need for Void Brothers. Nobody really wanted to try fighting such things straight up if they had a choice, as very few had anywhere near the power of Hazé or the Void Brothers when fighting the things.
And all of it happened in a mere three days outside.
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Sama put down her Shaping Hammer, and all work around the smithing site stopped. Dwarves, gnomes, dhatun, even a couple humans, and especially Briggs, waited silently by as she reached out with her bare hand and lifted the red-hot blade from the Anvil formed from a dozen different Fire-biased metals.
Frost gathered about her shoulders, forming a shimmering cloak of rimeflame. The icy cold stole across and down her arm, gathering in her Vajra, and followed her hand down the length of the blade, carbon dioxide hissing and flaring into mist as the cold stole into the metal, and began to drain the heat far faster, and under far more meticulous control, than any dousing in water, oil, or other liquid.
They had been here three days in the outside world, just a short distance beyond the temporal barrier in the fourth Zone-ring. Kill teams had ranged for miles in every direction, slaughtering the many beasts here which kept converging on them, an endless task yielding up furs, blood, organs, and other salvaged gold value in great measure. Fortunes had been made... and burned as power comps into making more magical items, or making current ones stronger.
Three days had been nearly a year. A year had been enough time to do a lot of work. Most especially, it had given them time to get their own key Gear the QL upgrades they needed, at least partially. They still hadn’t gathered all the many things required to make a suit of orichalcum skinplate... but the temporal Quintessence generated when a reality zone like this was fractured and returned to normality was one of those items, so they were closer.
And so, Sama had forged Tremble’s ultimate home, with adamant and gemstones traded from the elves and Rockborn, who even now weren’t sure they believed what she had made.
It hissed with the cold in the air, the red heat of it fading, and the Runes on it awoke with gentle power.
This Sword she had made Properly, in accordance with the tenets of her Grandmastery.
Thus, she had forged it as other weapons first, each time at QL 40, an exemplar weapon of each and every type. Each such forging took twenty-one hours of her time. Spear, lance, dagger, hand axe, battle axe, mace, pick, hammer, scimitar, chain-whip/dart, short sword, rapier, long sword, until finally it was time to make the bastard sword.
Seeing her lift up the same metal over and over into the forms of what most there considered to be perfect weapons at QL 40, only to melt each down again into another weapon, had driven the smiths there nigh-crazy with such unreasonable demands of craftsmanship. How was what she was doing actually making a sword? Any of the weapons she had made would be fit for an Emperor or great champion to wield for the rest of their lives, practically begging the magic to come into them and empower them.
But no, they had all been melted down, into bars of metal once more, and reforged anew.
And now, they were done.
Her breath skimmed across the metal. The fires in the Runes, uncountable numbers of them, Runes made of Runes made of Runes, swirling with layers and layers of power, beaten inside the metal and without by all the continuous reforgings, until they intermixed and swam together with a power like none of them had ever seen.
The eyes of these master smiths, who had been blessed to look upon QL 40 Perfect Weapons, only a tale to some of them, closed despite themselves.
The sight of it was... too pure!
The craftsmanship seemed to hit the back of their eyes, without actually having any power to it, impacting their souls with the sheer absoluteness of its existence. This was craftsmanship beyond the mortal, embodying the very concept of what a Sword might be, taking mortal skill and materials and pushing them into the realm of the profound.
“A Truly Perfect Weapon,” murmured a dwarven master-smith in awe. Only the greatest smiths of the race were ever thought to have made such a thing, and if such Arms existed, they were stored in vaults, or delivered unto the gods for safekeeping until needed, to be turned into artifacts or legendary Weapons used only by those who were post-Ten.
They watched her moving her palms over and past it, the sword balancing smoothly as her hands moved back and forth, supported on her Vajra, not quite touching it.
Her Phoenix Cloak shifted to acid, washing across the metal, sealing, treating, adding layers to the Runes of measure and finality. The greenish, liquid flame flowed back and forth, doing no harm, only adding the most perfect of finishes to the alchemical slakes and treatments that had been part of the entire process, and the Sword responded by beginning to steam.
Then, another round, another change, as the Phoenix Cloak became a crackling thing of lightning, snapping arcs of electricity crackling around her, dancing over and through the metal here and there, wild dances of chaos that yet somehow found themselves drawn into some kind of a greater pattern.
Her fingers and palms wove different and dangerous patterns, the Sword tumbling about in her grasp as her hands moved in some strange exchange of a greater Form the other smiths there couldn’t understand. There was heat and induction, conduction and transferal, energy moving around and opening up, or closing down, connections finalized and others sealed away.
Then once again, the cold and the ki, coming in to remove the heat, and guide the final cooling-down process as no quenching could ever emulate, the incarnated energy of a soul coming in to remove the heat and guide the Sword into a final form more perfect than any of them had ever seen.
It had taken her a full month of labor to make this Sword, and the many weapons that had preceded it. Given the amount of work she could do on lesser Weapons, that level of effort and focus was just unreal to those who had seen her at work.
And now she was done, and Tremble would be finding a new home.