It was February 15, 2021. The Map of the World was largely complete.
I didn’t do the Hollow World, leaving that task for others in the future, a downtime play for Azaia and others reaching higher Levels.
There wasn’t the time left to do so.
Its Pattern had to be nearing completion, and through the waiting Pyramid sitting in a fold of space doing naught, I could feel the thrumming in the ley lines around it, starting to gather, and to Call.
It was now time to seriously PUSH.
Briggs and his people had pushed back the Shroudzone another hundred miles in radius, leaving hundreds more of the endless Walls wrapping the dark clouds standing there cold and empty, holes punched through them as the Deadzone pulled back, and back, and back.
Everyone had seen the storm of crimson hate lightning crawl across the Shroud, presumably when it realized that its armories of Constructs had been found and destroyed. Yay for Divinatory Obfuscation concealing the fact for days. It had likely been forced to dispatch another Construct to one of the isolated storehouses we weren’t monitoring all that closely to find out what had happened.
There were still hundreds of millions of undead left to kill, but that was fine. We had a huge battle line to face them on, and they couldn’t occupy or march out into the Deadzone anymore. They could try to and did set up traps and ambushes in the Shroudzone as we pushed forwards, but a sallying attempt into the Deadzones generally didn’t take place, as anything that might be threatened by such a move was very good at running away... and I, I was very good at getting there, especially if massive numbers of incorporeals were involved.
As far as the Void Brothers could tell, every major and most of the minor cephalid bases had been destroyed and fed to vivus. All of the drow major cities, and all the minor settlements that Legion could track down linked to them, were now empty of everything other than ex-slaves.
Over a thousand haror were now in Ælfheim, including three dozen adults, impressively enough. They were a bit out of sorts after their homes were completely wiped out, but the ruthlessness of their homelands came out in their pragmatism as they quickly adapted to the surface realm and the strange elves there, and began to build something new.
The effect of Legion carrying around so many souls was so pronounced that everyone pretty much forgot they’d ever not looked like they did now. Going through multiple rounds of Atonement had tempered them like the finest alloy, and if over half of the new souls couldn’t take the price of forgiveness, it was still far better than all of them.
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My Mapping was done, I was on Shroudzone duty now, and I was going to force the Shroudlord into action, make him spend his trump card now, or never spend it at all.
At least half the native dead of Russia had already been expended against us. They had taken to firing real artillery from the distance, hoping for some kills, and helpfully giving our own vastly superior artillery something to shoot at.
I, I went out there and slaughtered everything I could as fast as I could. I started with the thickest numbers of incorporeals that I could find, and proceeded on from there.
Shardchains filled the skies with arcing jetsilver streaks as flying Casters towing shooters trailed behind me and cleaned up my leavings. Vivus erupted over dozens of acres at a time on the earth and in the sky, and I killed every single damn thing I could.
Our Opening of the Sky Ritual had proven that we could push back the Shroud many miles if given targets who couldn’t fight back, and we could slaughter them extremely quickly. Now we were gathered up against numbers of undead who could fight back... but to me, that didn’t matter. They were just victims who couldn’t reach me, there to be harvested as I sought them out.
I killed everything that I could fast, and the literal thousands of people trailing after me cleaned up any survivors, Constructs, or the like. The infantry line raged ahead, pinning defenders in place as I swept past behind them, and the undead were obliterated, unable to shoot me at the distance I was killing them at, only able to wait as winding Shards and bending Chains Seeking them sniffed them out in their tunnels and cul-de-sacs and trenches and walls, and killed them all.
My kill totals rose very rapidly indeed. I was absolutely merciless, and if that meant Linejumping across the horizon to continue the slaughter by myself while those trailing me turned back to support the infantry and mechanized cavalry line blowing a path forward, that was fine.
Above us, the Shroudzone was again retreating as undead died in massive numbers.
The more the undead came and converged on me, the more Congregants filled the air with negative energy blasts, and the more incorporeals wailed and tried to surround me... the faster everything died.
Aelryinth had never really unloaded like this. In ideal circumstances, he would just serve as another ranged attacker for the push, letting his juniors reap the Karma and experience of the fighting, satisfied with the Glory Award and the pass-up coming from below as he waited in support and reserve against disasters. There had never been this kind of total need for obliteration... until he went to Pentara, and top-end slaughter was the name of the game.
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My kill totals climbed and climbed, and kept going. I didn’t care where the undead were; I went to where there were more of them, and they died, filling the sky with rainbows and white, and covering the ground in vivic fire that blazed for a long time after I left.
Those fighting below watched the Shroud recede visibly, faster than they themselves were advancing. All around the Shroud, the many forces were trying to kill undead as fast as they could, sending a message in fire and vivus, the front as wide as we could make it so we could kill as many as possible, leaving the undead fighting outside the Shroud as it retreated above them.
Outside it was important, as my kill totals rapidly passed a million, two million, three...
I was going further into the Shroudzone, deeper than anyone had ever gone while still living, reaving as I did. The undead seemed to be shocked when I flashed in above them and unloaded, the first reaction of their commanders being to turn and fire at me, and as their slow-witted troops followed suit, they died as the Shards came streaming down and exploded on the targets they’d made of themselves.
The amount of gunfire coming up at me was sporadic, and couldn’t hit me anyways, basically finding all other sorts of places to be other than where I was.
Ten million undead slain passed by me. I was passing over massive companies of undead, organized and sitting around waiting for commands, who were shocked when I flashed in from miles away above them and exterminated them. If Congregants were left behind with the speed I was killing at, oh well.
Twenty million, and the red hate lightning flashed throughout the Shroudcloud, clearly annoyed as miles and miles of the Shroud were peeled back by my slaughter. I continued pressing, sweeping everywhere for signs of the undead, filtering perceptions of Understand the Will of Darkness, Detect Evil at VIII, which could literally sense strong concentrations of Evil from the horizon, and moved to a new set of victims with a bang and instant unloading of Repeating Spells and Fastcast follow-ups to give me space in all directions.
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There you go, look at all those monstrous undead there.
I was a hundred miles out from Moscow, and I finally saw the mobilized forces of the initial Dead March from Pentara.
Dragons, rocs, winged serpents, chimeras, manticores, and many other flying beasts not in the classic lexicon, all of them now undead zombies or skeletons, were flying around there in perfect formations and massive numbers. They seemed to be marginally alert to the white flashes on the horizon, but they, the countless incorporeals, and the legions of black-boned, burning-eyed undead of non-human races below were reacting slowly to any possible threat.
It turned out that even after a millennium of undeath, chaff undead were still chaff undead. My Shards blew through them, even reinforced and Clergy-buffed like they were, and left the ground blazing vivus. The native Terran undead were actually more dangerous, as they actually used guns, while all these could do was use arrows, spells, or try to melee me.
The airspace close to me was soon empty of anything not alive, burning monstrous undead beasts falling from the sky as they went vivic, be it swarms of killer bats or massive rocs beating moldering wings. Down on the ground, Congregants screamed up at me, enough of them that I felt good using a Shardray and blowing through a couple dozen of them at a time, while around me the sky detonated with incorporeals being consumed by Light and vivus.
War machines unloaded at me, but I avoided them, Einz TK’d the shots aside, or he deflected them with his Shells. Magic I basically ignored, moving too fast to really be tracked, and my Spell Resistance was too high for anything but powerful Dark Clergy to even have a chance of piercing it.
I killed two million of his ‘elites’, undead painstakingly corpse-crafted to perfection over a thousand years, and the Shroudlord finally had enough.
Crimson hate lightning crackled wildly through the cloud, and negative energy began to gather. I felt the ley lines all begin to sway and dim as the death in the air began to overwhelm everything, and with a triple boom, I hit the horizon with a Ride the Lightning, Rode it again, and then a third time as the darkness behind me absolutely lost all color. A wall of grey chased after me, trying to catch me before I could flee outside it.
I materialized a hundred yards beyond its grasp, just beyond the edge of the Shroudcloud, and watched the wave of chiaroscuro spread out over the horizon towards us.
Behind and below me, the undead milling around there lost the residual black flames of their Clergy Buff, and the Congregants sniping with negative energy Lances in the distance stopped shooting entirely.
The Greyfield swept right up to the edge of the Shroudcloud, glowering all the way up to the inky black clouds, only a hundred paces away from me.
Smirking, I unloaded on the undead still below me, out in the Deadzone they hadn’t been able to retreat from fast enough as the Shroud kept receding.
The only thing the attackers had to fear now was gunfire. All the March’s magic was now being devoted to a Greyfield, and the only magic that worked inside it was passive, non-activated stuff.
Stuff like static Weapons, Armor, Tokens, Baneskulls, and Amulets.
The conduits of power that had flowed to the Ministers and Congregants outside the Shroud were now still, their power weighing down on the ley lines. They still had the chains of command, but the raw power streaming out from the heart of the Shroud and the core of the March was now gone.
They were weaker, and they’d lost their own magical punch, yet in the Dead Zone we still had ours.
With a complete lack of care for anything resembling Karma-stealing, I proceeded to start obliterating all the undead I could before they could get back under the Shroud, and everyone who could do the same proceeded with the slaughter, spending Valences freely now that the Shroud couldn’t respond.
They only had guns, and every Caster had defenses against gunfire at this point.