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

As Ryin had guessed, there were a large number of the things gathered around the pit, inspecting it for residual energies.

The morning Renewal would have blown the vivus through the rest of the consumable materials, and basically it should have died out. Still, the guttering whimpers of whatever ley line effect it was tapped into might have kept it around.

Kris was effectively part of a tumbled building in the cold morning air (but not as cold as it should have been) as she watched them.

She could see faint trails of energy underneath the creatures, and there was something about them that reminded her unpleasantly of the Killer Drudge back in the north. The way the air seemed to ripple and bend about them also irritated her on general principle, like they were fucking with reality.

Definitely not natural creatures.

Their shells looked like vaguely monkish robes draped over them, and the carved masks like something a mime or stage actor might use... except she’d seen them take the things off, and then curved sickles whip out of their arms, scratch at the mask for some reason, and then put it back over a hood full of emptiness and a weird glow from the body area shining up through the neck hole.

Her gaze turned to the nearest buildings, where several severe slices and cuts into the wood now had a more obvious source than errant sword swings.

She couldn’t tell if the creatures’ ‘body’ was a shell or a draped cloth, their colors ranging from dark blue-gray to brown, black, and even one in bright red. The material certainly looked metallic, although it could have also been ceramic, and the ‘hood’ did not actually have a hard connection to the torso, floating just above the shell instead. Thus, the body could rotate like a top, which, when combined with the arm-sickles snapping out of nowhere, could be a very deadly fighting tactic.

Their spellcasting was monkish, too, putting together nominally empty sleeves and bowing slightly, the magic issuing forth as it was pulled directly from... somewhere. She wasn’t sure what they were drawing on, and even though it seemed to manifest as ‘normal’ magic, when they blasted the pit with minor magicks to test it, the vestigial vivus leapt up as the magic struck it, something it should have been largely indifferent to... unless it was contaminated with unnatural energies of some kind or another.

Somehow, Kris thought, that wasn’t unexpected at all.

The things buzzed and hummed together, what words were spoken sounded more like her memories of computer whines, buzzing wires, and broken records on stereo machines than anything human, or made by vocal cords.

As one, the meeting of the creatures bowed their masked heads, then split up in all directions, moving out to search all of the buildings here.

They weren’t computer-like in their efficiency, and obviously not a true hivemind. She watched as they didn’t disperse with complete perfect allocation of targets and speed, several initially choosing the same targets, pausing to reassess, and then breaking off to find their own. A couple of times, there seemed to be minor arguments between nigh-identical creatures of the same appearance over who searched what and where.

Inefficencies, egos, or just plain inability to think things and make instant decisions? Signs of Lawfulness without the proper overmind link working like it should have, especially since energy beings should have some superior forms of communication.

One of the lesser common models levitated past within ten feet of her, its false mask with the slightly glowing eye slits never wavering as it moved slowly through the house, inspecting it for signs of recent use, and even went downstairs to make sure nothing was living down there.

She and Ryin had already done a once-over of the nearer buildings, so that didn’t surprise her, but...

Her ear perked up as she caught the detonating skirl of a Whirling Blade going off, and was that the high-edged squeal of one of the dog-sized rats here? Something had stolen in here and not gotten the memo to run when the alien things arrived.

Well, such was life. There’d been tracks of both reedsharks and shreth, and even a couple ursuin, but none had stayed in the area... and she’d sensed more than a few bones scattered about by scavengers and buried under the snow.

The thing poked and prodded the stones and charred wood with the gleaming edge and point of its hand-sickles, and almost passed directly over her as it swept on by and moved to the next building. She noted it didn’t gain any altitude, and maintained a very fixed distance above the ground.

That was similar to geomagnetism and how it operated, a repelling from the ground. She didn’t feel that, however, more a repulsion from matter itself, directed down, keeping them out of contact with the ground.

She really wanted to jump on one and see what its suit was made of, but she didn’t have confidence she could kill it quickly enough.

That said, a Null Strike from her, if they were magical energy beings, would probably be horrendously dangerous to them. If her Interdiction worked on them, then they’d only be able to move by dragging themselves at ground level, too.

In time. For now, she took mental notes, stayed aware of how dangerous they were, and plotted and planned for the future. The heavier coats/shells of the more powerful ones with the off-colors and severe styling looked particularly unhelpful in the matter of killing them, but she wouldn’t know until she tried.

And she would definitely be trying in the future!

---

In less than an hour the whole troupe of floating colored armor shells completed their survey, then moved out and back over the bridge. Kris noted they paused and inspected the bridge at certain areas, as if checking on something, and filed that away.

Moving with purpose, they headed back to the town, leaving no guards or sentries behind. Having met no intelligent opponents, perhaps they felt they were in no danger?

The Waveskating Step was particularly useful when on all fours. Just push the ki out your hands as well as your feet, and you could go skating when down flat. Kris wasn’t about to go wading and get caught in the oddly shallow river that bore none of the speed something draining a lake of that size should have, nor try to run across open ground while being pursued by levitating Aberrants. They didn’t need to know she was around yet.

She paused at the end of the bridge, looking out, but the creatures had moved past the first ring of houses, towards the city center and the open square there.

Flitting from the shadow of one house to the next, she closed in on them to see what they were doing.

The first thing they did was perform the same kind of inspection of all the buildings here that they’d done on the other side. Nothing seemed stupid enough to have stuck around, and finally the creatures converged on the open square in the middle of the town.

There were cratered areas in that square, two or three of them. She saw another of the Greekish buildings with columns, once again fallen into a great open pit beneath it. The creatures had gathered around an almost organic extrusion of rock, extending down into the ground, and were... reinforcing some kind of magical Ward around it?

Well, now. Isn’t that interesting. Just eyeballing the ground around the thing, heaped up to its sides, that looked like another dimensional pocket that had been forced back into reality. Whatever was inside, the creatures didn’t want coming out... or they didn’t want people going in?

Depending on the severity and absoluteness of that desire, it explains why they keep everyone else away from the place, Kris thought, assessing the situation. At the same time, there’s obviously enough dangerous stuff around that they don’t dare leave guards or watchmen around, unless maybe they are Summons, as it would just display to all and sundry that something important is inside?

Or maybe they just don’t want to be killed unnecessarily. Kris smirked at the thought, but didn’t discount it. Posting extremely powerful guards who couldn’t be killed readily just indicated how important the place was. Not posting guards, but getting rid of anything that lived here was actually a decent compromise. If something went in and came out, they likely would be warned by the Ward about it, and could simply zip over here to quickly investigate with appropriate numbers to indicate to the intruders that it was a bad idea to remain here...

------

Kris watched the creatures complete their magical maintenance, scatter to scour the remaining buildings, kill a startled bunch of shreth who’d made a bad choice of lairs with massed spell effects blasting them dead in seconds, and then zip off into the west in an orderly line, ignoring the road and heading straight overland towards some other destination.

Then she turned back to go get her mage companion, and inspect the larger side of the town.

-----

The western side of the town had more buildings, including what were obviously the governmental offices. Or had been, before they were blown all to shit in some ferocious fighting. It looked like some banderlings had gotten some ideas into their catlike skulls and paid the price for it.

Lots of razored, slicing cuts around, and what banderling bones we found were either blasted and scored, or chopped right through like something an adamantine sword might do.

There were multiple trade buildings around the town, and like our arrival point, more of the odd devices that tapped into ley lines and had exploded, taking out the buildings around them and leaving small craters to indicate they’d been in other locations, rather than crashed through walls and languishing in the burnt and blasted basements of the adjacent buildings.

They’d had a protective green Statue and pedestal in the center of the overgrown town square, once a parklike place, now marked with several blasted and fused craters of imploding space, the mound-like structure the Aberrants had been obsessing over, and the hacked, chopped, and toppled pedestal the Statue had used to rest atop.

The bronze Statue itself was blasted apart, chopped to pieces, and then seared with powerful fire and acid magic. It wasn’t putting itself back together, ever. You could vaguely make out the fact it had used to resemble a mosswart, but there wasn’t anything else intact about it.

The town also had another of those arcane pyramidal structures, still faintly venting some violet light, but shattered and cracked along all four sides, clearly ready to fall apart with even some token bombardment. I had to wonder what it had meant and represented, and just shrugged and shook my head.

We split up and looked through hundred of buildings, spread through the town and the surrounding area. I scanned everything for Precious Materials, and found next to nothing, mostly scrap gathered up by whatever residents had come here which had been obliterated by the next visit from those Aberrants, judging by the remains left behind in bone and blasted buildings.

Kris didn’t find much more than I did, and her Disk came back bearing maybe a couple hundred Air Gold coins and some geegaws on them that might or might not be worth much in goldweight.

All in all, it was disappointing but not unexpected. Unlike the drudge town, this place looked to have been abandoned in time to escape a massacre.

We looked down into the pit where the Grecian-style building had collapsed, much like the structures in both cities up north had done. Simple deduction was that there had once been an extra-dimensional space connected to all the buildings, they had phased in underneath the structures they were linked to, at once throwing the stone structures into the air from the dimensional pressure, and then collapsing as hundreds of tons of stone came down on them and collapsed their ceilings from above.

Groundwater leakage had turned the whole thing into a stagnant pond, likely draining off into the nearby lake, so its level would never rise too high.

There remained only the one thing to look over seriously.