Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

“Something is coming,” I hissed, and jumped off the Disk abruptly, sending it around behind the tree. “Expand your Null. Suppress my magic!” I ordered her urgently.

A rock and an island in the field of magic swept past me and surrounded me in unmoving, placid reality. It wasn’t that there was no magic, it was that all the magic was quiet, in the background, dispersed and unable to do anything, a lake of serenity and silence in the midst of flows and surges and random concentrations of finger-flinging mages with silly ideas about manipulating it.

Even my Mask of Clarity fell apart under the wash of her Null, leaving me without decent night vision. Kris gave my face an approving appraisal, then turned her own sharp violet eyes back in the direction I was looking. “How do you know, and from the south?”

“Yes. It’s... like the magic was being bent, half of it forced away, half of it being drawn. Like a moving magical vortex of some kind.”

“There’s something moving along the road there. Moving fast. See those lights? By the way they are pumping, it looks like something held in their arms.”

“The hue is in the thaumaspectrum. It’s... weird. Like magic being drawn in and taken apart. Some kind of dispelling or anti-magic effect?” I hazarded at the point of light against the whiteness and black.

“It’s also moving faster than a normal man can sprint,” Kris judged, her eyes narrowed. “That’s some healthy foot speed, if it’s a biped.”

I happened to glance around, and poked her. She looked back and followed my gaze, then hissed in surprise.

It was some of the winged olthoi, except these were bigger than any either of us had seen yet. They were milling about on the hill on the far side of the river, but had not seen fit to cross. Now that I knew they were there, I could just barely hear the thrum of their wings... and as we watched, the swarming stopped, and the olthoi all sank down to just above the ground in silence.

We turned to look back at that swiftly arriving thing with lights on its fists, the angle of the road taking it up so it could be seen from the opposing hill, past the bridge.

“They don’t want to attract its attention,” Kris breathed. “That’s a huge acknowledgment of power if the bugs recognize it, and won’t cross into its territory...”

“Implications. What do you think the chances are there’s a whole bunch of other things watching from a safe distance, unwilling to go over there and be caught?” I asked in a low voice.

“No bet. I’d like to know who, however.”

“I’d lay you good money there’s banderlings on the opposite side of the bridge from the olthoi, watching from the brush.”

She glanced that way, the view mostly obstructed by the eastern span of the bridge. “Reasonable. They wouldn’t cross the bridge for territorial reasons, or if they thought the olthoi scouts were coming. They’d be too visible and easy to pick off.” Breath weapons of acid from above, far more reasonable tactics than the charge to attack of a Summons.

We watched the moving light reach the burning house a couple hundred yards away from us and pace all around it urgently, as if searching for something to kill that wasn’t there. A yowl of frustration, startlingly loud and piercing, reached us all the way over here, and the thing took its anger out on the house, lashing out at it.

“That’s a drudge,” Kris said slowly. “Did you catch the reverb on that?”

“I did. It was echoing in the manafield, I could see the magic curdling. That might have been a drudge once, but I don’t think it is any longer...”

The house didn’t last very long at all. The old timbers, starting to rot from fungi infestation inside and, well, on fire, collapsing quickly inwards as the pale figure tore through the sides and pushed them in, seeming to delight in the sparks, the billowing dark smoke, and the stench of burning mushrooms.

“I’m suddenly pretty glad we didn’t go rest over there,” Kris remarked softly, her hand thumbing Quaver in her hand, who was remaining scrupulously silent. She tilted her head slightly. “Is that... doesn’t it look like it’s inhaling the smoke?” she asked after a moment.

“The power of magic mushrooms doesn’t have to be magic,” I noted piously. “Indeed, if it were normal magic, I doubt it would have any effect on that thing.”

“You know how badly I want to test that thing out, don’t you?” she grinned at me.

“Yeah. I also know you ain’t stupid enough to do so until you have more information, and I’m not Assaying something like that, except from a good long distance so I can get away from it when it senses it.”

“Mmm. So, we hold off on what a killer drudge can do until we see more.”

“A wise idea, my royal companion.”

“Hey, watch the attitude, or I’ll pull my Null back in!”

“Of the two of us, one can turn invisible and leave no trace, the other can just run fast.”

“Such arrogance from the common-born!”

“Indeed, your Highness-ness.”

------

It was a good two hours before the drudge-thing squealed and yowled and tottered off back down the road to the south, clearly a wee bit unsteadier than when it had arrived. Neither of us bothered to move as yet.

The olthoi turned around and buzzed off after the drudge had left. I noted that not a single member of the swarm got above thirty feet from the ground, and nudged Kris. “Altitude limitations. They are using some from of geo-magnetism, not aeromancy, to fly.”

“Oh, that’s convenient,” she agreed. “Nice to know they can’t get out of Sharding range. Also, more visitors.”

I turned my eyes back on the house, still burning, but lower than before, not as brightly. I shifted over to my Vatic Gaze, blinked a couple times, and shifted back. “Necromancy and shadow magic...”

“The same, or different? Looks like up to ten individuals over there, but not the same groups...”

“That’s definitely the shades, and I’m 99% sure the other force is undead.” Lots of inherited experience fighting the undead.

“So... intelligent free-roving undead? That sounds pretty ominous...”

“Especially if they are the life-leeching, brain-eating kind?”

“Yeah, that. Shades wouldn’t have anything to worry about from them,” she nodded. Necros didn’t feed on shadow-stuff. They needed bright, healthy living stuff for that.

“Now I want to be the one to go over there and shoot things up,” I groused. “I’ve inherited a lot of traumatic memories regarding undead that are best assuaged by feeding them all to the Land.”

“Yeah? What prompted such a seasoned adventurer to have such a harrowing experience?” she asked whimsically.

“1% of the Earth’s population survived the Fall which started this whole mess, as the game turned out to be true. The rest were turned into undead, including pretty much everything that was in tombs and graves, and Aelryinth and company had to go out and kill them all.”

Kris gave me one of those long, hard looks. “Seven billion undead?” she asked quietly.

“Somewhere between ten and eleven when you include the animals that were Animated, but only about eight with old bones. All Leveling, if slowly, and Buffed up just like the Dead Marches in the game.” Plus the Fiends, the Constructs, the negative Elementals...

“So, you had to kill the whole rest of the world again, after they died?” she asked quietly.

“That pretty much sums it up.”

“Was the original Sama there?”

“Cleave-Training through the hordes of minions like nobody’s business.”

She looked off into nothing, imagining that. “One percent? A hundred or more to one?”

“Yeah, they ended up with eighty million survivors, give or take. Used some major magic to pull every living human from the rest of the planet to North America.

“North America itself was about half the survivors, as we had the biggest gaming population for Power of Ten. The rest of the planet was dispersed throughout the heartlands of the country.”

“Your food situation must have been horrifying...”

“We had to put eighty percent of the population into Stone Stasis so we could feed enough people to do the work to make the food, all the while having to fight the undead over the rest of the planet at the same time.

“It’s still not solved, but most of the people are out of stasis. Magic does help with a lot of things.”

“It makes the matter of my folks crushing the Viamontians seem like small potatoes.”

“You Forsaken do your killing personally. Magos kill armies, remember.”

“True. Let’s wait until these undead and shades go away, and get back to it, alright?”

“Heading south after the fearsome killing drudge. Sure.”

-----

Princess Kristie had new enthusiasm once dozing time was over. She had ten thousand gold-equiv in Karma to make every day to fuel her Stats, plus Naming Karma for Quaver!

While Summons weren’t as good as free-willed and unbound attackers of equal power, they still gave Karma, and there were a lot of them. Kristie firmly had her eyes set on a minimum amount of daily Karma, and if she so happened to earn a LOT more, that was perfectly fine, too.

If that meant staying busy, totally fine, she was a grindaholic in pursuit of her goals. If it meant fighting bigger, nastier stuff and growing to meet them, that was also totally okay with her.

I only needed Naming Karma to grow my Mark, I didn’t even have a proper Weapon at this point, which was irritating in the extreme. Hauling around goldweight with nothing to put it in, losing days in powering up Slots... yeah, it was annoying.

So, I was looking for something that might have a staff that I could use, or carve up to higher Quality Level. Either would work, I could keep refining even normal woods to 30, magical hardwoods to 35, and epically powerful wood to 40 or greater.

That would mean something living wielding one. Given it was a simple weapon to make, and these anthroids didn’t seem too sophisticated, I was hoping for some good luck.

We added some sort of killer Fey, sprite-like things called Zefir tossing War Magic with aplomb, to the lexicon of things we were running into. They were bright orange-red, freaking annoying, and I vivisized them and the Spots they sprang from, although I was sure they were marvelous pest-killers.

Happily, they were minute Fey, less than two feet tall, and if they had way too much Health Qi, they still died pretty quickly.

I, uh, just sort of hid behind Kris and let all their War magic just kind of melt into her Null and go away. Very convenient, that was.

So was them trying to Cast right in front of her, which earned them quick trips to the ground in pieces. She didn’t even bother to Stillflight them, no reason to. Of course, if there were swarms of them, she’d be much more brutal with them.

They were probably some of the pests that the Wasps picked off, I imagined, and vice versa. Ael had never had a lot of use for the Fey as a whole, and even the Good ones were flighty and rather unreliable most of the time.

We also ran into our first Ursuins, which were the apex predators from back home on Ispar, clearly not native. They might have looked comical for their bow-legged bodies, except they massed as much as bears and could grow to massive sizes, with sabertooth fangs sticking down from jaws that gaped very wide open. Their paws were the size of dinner plates, and they definitely meant business when they came charging in at us for entertainment value.

Why would anyone import them here, unless they wanted some really thick rugs?