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

Edit: This is actually the correct chapter for #43. Tomorrow's was cut and pasted here early. Author never makes mistakes, nossirree.

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“That is nice to hear,” Kris admitted with a toothy smile. “I was worried you Powered gamers would utterly dominate everything back there.”

“Oh, don’t be fooled. Powered sit at the top of the stack because there is so much stuff we can do that you Forsaken can’t. But the bottom of the stack is best run by you types, and your peers are very aggressive at both taking care of themselves and proving they don’t need to have us around powdering their bottoms and wiping their noses, poor no-magic babies. They, uh, just want their dominance through superior firepower back, and I can’t say that I blame them.

“Coincidentally, if they can take care of most of the mundane business, it leaves the magically adept to take care of the truly nasty business. Superman Syndrome and its associated tropes kick in a LOT more than any world considers healthy, and Terra-Luna isn’t even done with The Fall.”

“How far along are the Stages? I vaguely remember them...” Kris screwed up her face at replicated memories.

“They were into Stage Five, invaders from other worlds coming in intermittently to settle/raid/conquer them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn’t that much different from the game. However, its still controlled, just... very active. Trying to defend a whole planet from the heaps of stuff invading is a LOT of ground to cover and be aware of. At the same time, they were trying to rebuild a better infrastructure, invent a friendlier level of magitech and artifice for people, and acclimate to the fact that some things tech just does better than magic. It was an ongoing struggle.” Couldn’t mass-produce magitech, for instance, it always had an individual element. On the flip side, once made it lasted a LOT longer.

“What do the Sama and Briggs there do?” Kris asked, interested.

“Sama’s big thing is heading up the Bloodguard, which is the most elite company of Nulls on the planet. They deploy everywhere, all the time. Lots of intelligent animals with them, too, integrated right into the company as full partners, the model for the elite mixed armed forces. Mostly Senior Nulls.

“Briggs is one of the huge forces driving the White Magic Zones Artificing, making the magitech that can make the stuff that helps the world recover. Gearsmithing and steamtech drive a lot of it, Sources making the path to a better tomorrow enthusiastically.

“Oh, and he happens to be overall Commander and Warlord of the Alliance Forces, but who was going to be able to stop Commander Briggs from taking that chair?” I asked reasonably.

Kris grinned widely. “Oh, good. I don’t think I could stand to see a Fuzzy sidelined after growing up watching Dad do his thing. Of course, the Casters back home are nothing like those in the game, as your perverse ability is already proving. Don’t make me regret being nice and tanking for you!” she warned me with a shaking fist.

“Yes, Your Highness!” I bowed deeply and automatically, and she just snorted in amusement.

A couple more drudge Summons were visible. We’d vivisize those Summons, just on general principle.

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The night passed long and eventfully, with me getting off hundreds of Castings of spells, sometimes offensive, sometimes defensive, sometimes utility. I had Metas to apply and rep counts to get in, which meant, among other things, three thousand Force Dart Reserves to shoot off at anything that looked like a reasonable target, which would get me to the 3d6, or 3 points of passive Renewal a round when I wasn’t actively Casting.

Or maybe if I was actively Casting, but only from the Isparian side of things.

It occurred to me that the Ward across the waters, cutting the shallows from the deeper parts, was a Force Screen, and that at Argent Savant Mastery/5 I could collapse a section without much effort... but that was for when I hit Nine.

For now, it was rep counts, as Aethra’s Salute passed by at dusk, and we continued skating on.

It was many miles later before we saw what looked like an actual town in the distance, a bridge arching over a river that looked to be emptying the entire lake.

Except... it wasn’t wide enough to do so. Just ignoring all the small streams and groundwater, the river up by the drudge city was wider than this one by a good margin. If a river this narrow were draining this lake, the speed of the outflow should have picked up tremendously, enough to sweep someone off their feet.

Kris caught it too, as she skated across the water into shore. “There’s a large underground flow under here,” she said softly. “Look at the bridge there. Notice something strange?”

“Of course. It’s just like the roads, maintained too well without someone working on it,” I said, eyeing the ruined buildings on both sides of the river. The west side seemed more built up than the east, but both had sprawls of farmhouses moving away from them.

They were also cold and silent, no fires burning in them despite the shelter they represented, which made no sense in the... huh.

“It’s almost five degrees warmer here than back up at the drudge city, and I don’t think the weather actually changed much,” I offered, and Kris craned her neck around to look at the sky.

“That’s... almost moving over a climate change zone?” she offered, and reached down to test the water beneath her feet. “The water is warmer, too,” she informed me, and I shook my head.

“That was, what, fifteen, twenty miles?” The shoreline was very uneven, and as we’d gone up and down and around it. I had to superimpose my lived-line record of it and then look at it from above. Since we weren’t in a hurry, it had taken most of our night, and we’d be calling it quits to get our two hours of rest in soon.

“I see blue sparkles.” She pointed to the east side of the river, where fewer buildings gave more lines of sight.

“That’s the right hue for the craters,” I agreed. The ones she’d before seen I’d blasted all to heck, so this would be her first time. “I don’t see anything organized about the Summons, either.”

“Militarily speaking, bridges are key points of control, even if a river is fordable.” She started skating carefully towards the other side, as we had come down following the west shoreline. “Someone should have grabbed it, if only for moving supplies more easily. That is why you make the damn bridges in the first place.”

“Alternatively, someone could be stopping them from doing so?” I hazarded, narrowing my eyes as we drew closer in the night. “Everything is damaged, burned, and blasted, and it doesn’t all seem old, Highness.”

She glided in towards the shore, skating to a halt just shy of the sands, inhaling deeply through her nose, testing the winds and whatever else she could smell.

“Possible. The smell of the char isn’t old... but it isn’t new, either. It looks like systematic damage, but nothing was razed... residual magical reinforcement of the buildings, possibly?”

There were other possibilities. “Causes? Undead and shades don’t need fires, nor cold-dwellers and a lot of magical creatures.”

“Residues of them, but old. What about on the thauma end of things?” she asked me, stepping forward, both of us on high alert now.

“I see residues of death and shadow, but... something else, too. I don’t recognize it, which by category makes it Aberrant.”

Kris grimaced nastily. “More magical Aberrants? No relation to the seafood?”

“No.” I turned around, and looked back to the other side. “There’s something over there spewing out some very unusual bandwidths.”

She inhaled again deeply, but the wind was in the wrong direction. “Let me take a look at this glowey sparkling stones place, and then we’ll take a better look at the digs.”

I just nodded, and up the steep hillside we went, her misting heels digging in as easily as if it were a set of nice, clean steps for her to traverse.

The pit wasn’t too far from the line of the hill. She glided up to it, and spent a moment just staring at the horrific tableau of skeletons fused, melted, burned, and broken, impaled by large chunks of blue crystal that were still thrumming to the bitter pizzle of energies fizzling up out of the center of their formation from three holes in the stone.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was quite unafraid as she reached in to one of those blue crystals, and with strength totally beyond human, wrenched it out of its hole, tossing it onto one of our Disks. She also pointed at the energies fizzling at the center of the crater.

“That’s an omnidirectional blast pattern, but we aren’t seeing any blue crystals surviving outside this crater. That means that energy is keeping them intact, and that one I broke off is probably going to start degrading. Any familiarity with that magic?”

“It’s got alteration, necromancy, and vivimancy involved, but the source of it is so corrupted I can’t track what it came from.”

“Corrupted, or that’s the source?” she repeated back to me.

I opened my mouth, then closed it to study the energy further. “I can’t tell. It could be a corrupted source, or a source that’s corrupt.”

She pointed at the crystal. “If it was originally pure, would these things have survived being hit by a corrupted version of the energy here?”

I pursed my lips, and flicked the crystal she’d retrieved to my hand.

“You’re right, there’s already surface instability.” I glanced at that fizzling energy source. “I thought it was tapping a ley line, but there’s no way a ley line is channeling that kind of magic, Kris. It would crack open the landscape. What you’re seeing is a drizzle that’s being rejected by normal matter.”

“But not the dead, and not those crystals.”

“No.” Now I was starting to grimace. “I don’t know if the crystal channeled that power to appear more palatable or presentable, but clearly it is unstable without it.”

“And vivus reduced it, so it is clearly neither natural nor harmless, and so is attacked by it.” She frowned heavily. “I see what you said about multiple races, and this does look like a really bad teleportation mishap. It’s like everyone decided to teleport to this location at the same time, then the crystal at the center blew up and killed them all in mid-transit, forcing them to materialize inside one another and making the local matter unstable enough to fuse with them. The only ‘real’ thing was the blue crystals for a moment there.”

I hopped down off the Disk and put my hand on the nearest set of bones, pulsing some arcane energy through the stuff, which resisted the flow. “I need a very good read of your Tremblesense. Are these bones fused into the rock, as in the rock is actually melded into the bones themselves, or are they IN the stone, barely fused to it on the surface?”

She reached down and tapped the warped skulls and bones, also frowning. “Okay, I did misspeak. They are not melded WITH the stone, there’s surface fusing.” She paused for a moment.

“Dimensional merging would either push the stone out of the way, or there would be complete melding,” I supplied shortly. “Surface fusing means there’s no microfractures of the ground being pushed out of the way, right?”

“I’m not seeing any,” Kris admitted slowly, black nails tapping a non-human, long-faced skull thoughtfully.

“But they do extend into one another.”

“Yes.” Her nails skriiiiitched over, scoring the bone, touching areas where skeletons overlapped. “Bone density is greater where they cross. They are completely interwoven.” She glanced at me. “Got some horrific idea of what happened?”