Gregor, King of the Broken Rock Clan, somewhere beneath Phoenix
“BLASTED GNOMES!” Hamil barked next to Gregor as he smashed another of the impishly fiendish creatures that seemed to be flooding in from a nearby dungeon they’d accidentally breached while digging their infiltration tunnels. The blue and red clad, white bearded demons were now flooding the tunnels they were working on. While the creatures were largely a nuisance, their numbers were the problem.
“Aye, they’re slowing us down. Ther’ be too many of the wild dungeons under these streets. Too much unclaimed territory between the cities.”
Gregor moved from Hamlin’s team to check on the progress of the diggers. They promised they’d be on target in twelve hours. And that was, of course, twelve hours ago. Now the diggers were saying they would need at least another four hours. They’d run into a patch of flagstone and granite that was giving their equipment fits. While the flagstone was brittle, easily ground down, the granite seemed to be infinitely dense, laden with mana and awaiting transformation.
The thing that worried Gregor the most about this was the fact that the only places in the universe they found this kind of granite was at the boundary of an evolved dungeon. He had no doubt who was responsible for that. Though it shouldn’t be too much of a problem this early in the life-cycle of the newly infused Earth, it could become a problem in the distant future.
The distant future wasn’t Gregor’s problem though. His diggers knew their jobs, and they knew them well, so when Camar called him forward with such a vague message as, “Boss, we gotta’ problem. Need you up here.”, a part of him irrationally dread what he would find. Camar wasn't one to call for anyone, for him to call directly meant it was a serious problem.
Gregor wove through the tunnels, eyeing the porous ceiling for any would-be little ambushers, but found none as he closed in on Camar’s position. Soon he heard the man’s voice, discussing the situation he’d been called forward for with his team, serious concern tingeing the man’s words.
“How in the Nine Hells did we end up here!?” Camar’s voice echoed back to Gregor.
Another responded, softer, feminine, “There’s too many damned dungeons, Boss. We’ve been trying to avoid their boundaries, you know this!”
“Aye! Tis’ true! But we be weaving and bobbing, it was bound to happen, and now this chasm…”
Gregor rounded the corner, startling the young woman and man with Camar who didn’t even look back. The reason being was the vast abyss that stretched out in front of them. Even in the inky blackness he could tell that the gap was nearly a mile across, and stretched a good three or four miles in each direction.
While the other teams would miss it outright, or come out on the edges and be able to avoid it altogether, his team had driven right into the middle of the nearly insurmountable obstacle. He was already calculating what it would take to go around and dismissing the idea. The only other option was to bridge it, which was possible with Dwarven ingenuity, but they would have to go back to the surface, get the material needed, then return and do the work. By then the battle would be over, with a lot more Winslow men dead or dying.
All of these issues were problems for a later time, for what really caught Camar’s attention, and now his own, was the single spire of granite rising from the dark depths. Sitting atop that spire was the familiar sight of an Eldritch Horror. One of the very creatures that drove his Dwarves from their home planet. Several of its eyes, sitting atop greasy grey stalks were ardently locked on his own group, drool already dripping from one of the many mouths the foul beast had across its body.
As he examined the formidable creature, he noticed where a finger of black granite reached out to touch the platform where it sat patiently waiting for all comers, a bridge to certain death. Also, probably their best option to getting across the chasm in a timely manner. Just have to destroy a creature created by the old gods.
Camar looked at him with a toothy grin, his pickaxe slung over his shoulder in what the humans would have referred to as some kind of charismatic super hero pose, “I see what ye’ be thinkin’. I’m of the same mind, King.”
The mousy woman with Camar looked at him, then Gregor, a moment later her eyes widened in terror, “NO! NO WAY! We can’nae take that! It shouldn’t even be here!”
The other man was slower on the uptake, “What? Wha- what are you guys thinkin’!?”
Gregor stepped up to the ledge, looked over unable to see the bottom, then looked at the granite bridge and pointed, “We get the lads and lasses, and we go kill us a horror. I ain’t ever seen a situation that a copious amount of high explosives couldn’t resolve, ‘cept for when there’s nothing to ‘splode. And looky there, somethin’ ‘at needs to ‘splode.”
“Yer’ out yer’ mind!”, the mousy girl exclaimed, but Gregor just walked back down the hall, the pillar of confidence his people needed him to be. Inside he wasn’t certain they could do this, at least not until they got a closer look at the beast, however, if he did nothing then all the deaths above would be on his hands, his honor. And that was not something he could allow, ever.
“Maybe, but will your honor allow you to flee, girl?” He called out as he rounded the corner. No response followed him, indicating his point had been made. “Carve us a path to the landbridge, then wait for my return.”
As he walked towards the sound of battle, he directed his VPA to compose a message, “Karl. We ran into a problem. May not make the Eastern Fortification at the prescribed time. All other teams will be in position. If you don’t get an update, we didn’t make it.” Rather than explain the situation in detail, he ordered his VPA to also attach pictures of what he saw to the message. That should be enough, he thought, now to get a war party together.
Allison Green, Spook, Leader of New Phoenix, New Phoenix Capitol Tower
Allison stared out the window of her newly appointed office at the top floor of the New Phoenix Capitol Tower. Over the last week since the Governor had been assassinated right in front of her, measures had been taken to ensure the safety of the city’s newest leader. While the office sat in now appeared to be like any other office of glass and steel, in reality there were no windows on the top three floors of the building. She was currently staring at a wall of the highest resolution video panels that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.
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With the assistance of her VPA, she had managed to hack into the surveillance satellites of several countries that, based on what she’d seen from them, essentially no longer existed. A battle similar to what Karl and his people currently fought just several miles away from where she currently sat had completely engulfed the English isles. Someone she’d only heard of on the System network called The Highlander was currently fighting a pitched battle all along a resurrected Antonin’s Wall against forces her VPA had indicated were being led by the Second Horseman of the Apocalypse, War. Currently that fight was stalled with neither side able to strike a decisive blow against the other.
In Japan, a beautiful white haired girl, referred to as The Radiant Avenger, was currently carving her way through an endless deluge of angry Yakuza with naught but a simple iron longsword. The Yakuza head was running for his life, shoving his men into the path of the girl in the hopes another body would forestall his inevitable death. “That one’s only going to die tired.” She muttered to herself.
Across the East China Sea, the Second Korean War had broken out when super powered North Koreans invaded Seoul. The city was a smoking wreck, though elsewhere in the country, what remained of the U.S. Military was struggling to push back the North Korean warmachine while rallying the South Korean troops. “Just doing what needs to be done, right?” She asked no one in particular.
To the West, China was a growing concern. It seemed that a country of 1.5 billion kung fu practitioners treated the System Integration as any other Sunday. While they certainly took a hit in their overall population, it wasn’t nearly as severe as had been anywhere else across the world. Over six hundred million patriotic Chinese men and women remained, all led by a single young man who was currently positioning troops to invade both India and Pakistan. Taiwan had already fallen, first to what appeared to be some kind of Kraken-like creature, then finally to the inevitable Red Wave of Chinese troops. These weren’t the forces China boasted before the System of course, dragons had wiped those out, these were just the reservists. “When your reserves are more powerful than fifty caliber machine guns, however…”
She turned her attention further north to Russia. Several things were going on there that she wasn’t certain about. Most concerning to her pre-System priorities was the landbridge that had surfaced connecting to Alaska. While a land connection between one of America’s oldest adversaries was problematic, the patch of just blackness stretching from Russia’s eastern coast to the outskirts of Stalingrad was baffling. At least until she managed to dredge up some first hand accounts of what was actually happening there. On her screen was what could only be described as the literal specter of Death, the final Horseman of the Apocalypse. “Pale horse and all, this shit… let’s flag that one as a priority, China too. The Koreans will have to fix their own shit.”
“What about Conquest, and Iran? If they go unchecked, they will seize all of the Middle East and the African continent.” Her VPA asked in her head.
Iran was currently making a mad push to smash its way through every Middle Eastern nation in existence. The only ones giving them a solid fight were the Israelis, and they weren’t looking too good at the moment. The Iranians hadn’t made it to the African continent yet, but it was clear Egypt was next on their list once they were finished with the Israelis. “Let’s hope the Israelis can pull off a miracle, if not…” She let the thought stand unsaid.
“It’s a matter of numbers, as well as the backing of a Trial.”
“Karl dealt with one of those trials, hell, he has the… man? He has Pestilence actually working for him.”
“Truly. Apparently not all Trials are equal.”
“Agree to disagree. Actually, how many refugee groups have found Sanctuary across the world?”
There was a slight pause, “Less than a dozen. The Highlander has given Sanctuary to three different groups of Refugees. It was how he was able to resurrect that ancient wall to stall War.”
“How many still remain unaffiliated?”
“Less than a hundred, here’s the closest of such groups, all others have been eliminated or chosen to go Rogue.”
On another wall, she watched a large group of badger-like creatures with four arms making their way across a significantly widened Mississippi River while fleeing from a much too large alligator with what looked like steel plates of armor where its signature scales would have been. Oh, it was also belching fire left and right, setting fire to what was now referred to as the Louisiana Jungle. A Human woman that the System identified as Kelly Hart was herding the beast away from the refugees with some kind of air magic. Her VPA informed her that this was another group of refugees coming to seek the sanctuary of the Warlord. Her class allowed her to tap into deeper information streams revealing certain types of meta-data that others didn’t have access to.
Allison pursed her lips in thought, “Anything else of note in our neck of the woods?”
One of the window displays flickered, then the live overhead image of several cities appeared. Each looked like a bulldozer had gone through them. Then the image zoomed to the streets where formerly amorphous dark shapes resolved themselves into the broken and bloodied bodies of the town's inhabitants. Every man, woman, and child lay dead in the streets, or hanging out of the rubble of the buildings. Wild scavengers picked through the bodies, stripping them to bones, a path of destruction and viscera leading further north into the desert.
“Seems Karls friend, Phillip Sumpter, has made good on his word about killing every Mormon he sees while in the hunt for the Blood Prophet. All of these Enclaves are on the border of Arizona and Utah.”
“Ah, Christ. That man is deeply broken. Karl probably doesn't know about this. And he probably shouldn’t until a much later time.”
“Noted.”
“Alright, show me space.”
This was the real reason she’d tapped into all of the former spy satellites and remaining government computer systems. She needed to confirm Karl’s tale of meeting space aliens that intended to conquer the planet for themselves. So she additionally hacked into the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as the James Webb and a few other undisclosed observation or tracking satellites that cluttered Low Earth Orbit.
She sucked a breath in between her teeth in shock, “Christ! So many.”
Her VPA began populating the screens with images of various ships of all sizes and configurations. Some looked clearly meant for war, various protrusions that were clearly weapons of varying types and sizes dotted their hulls. While others appeared to be some kind of cargo ships, nothing more than a long spindle with storage pods similar to shipping connexes tacked onto the outsides. A flurry of activity around Mars and Venus where hundreds of tic tac shaped ships dragged asteroids of iron, nickel, or mostly ice to drop on the planets.
“How many?”
“Nearly a thousand, quite low considering the bounty of natural resources. Though to be honest, the mana tides are rather thin this far from the center of the galaxy. Many other beings will find it not worth the time and effort to come this far out. What you have here are the zealots or the desperate.”
She slumped slightly in her seat, “We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
Her VPA didn’t respond as the sound of high velocity projectiles hitting the side of the building snapped her back to attention. The wall screens shifted to show what was happening just outside her building, then zoomed in on Lord Shubin who was currently dismantling a nasty looking mech with his bare hands only a couple miles away. She observed as more of the mechs were taken down by Karls forces, spewing high caliber death as they fell, the rounds flying wild to smash into the tallest buildings in their way or sail off into the desert on the other side of what was once referred to as the Greater Phoenix Metroplex. Her nerves calmed and the tension eased from her shoulders as she realized her building wasn’t under direct attack.
“Seems those are just strays. We are… relatively safe… for the moment.”