Chapter 13-358: That Hollow Feeling (1/2)

(As of this chapter, The Human Race is officially longer than The Far Future!)

Legion kicked the remnants of a stone T-Rex or something down the steps of the Pyramid to join the other guards there in rubble and ruin. There was enough of an Aura of death magic here to keep normal creatures away, and long custom of not bothering the place with moving stone and bone defenders was probably long in place.

That did mean that the path from the Hollow World to up above was wide open and undefended, but even if they left, there was no doubt it was not going to be that way for long. Doubtless the Illuminati could mobilize some undead guards, or spend some time and effort to make a few more golems.

What was a dinosaur going to do, run the steps and try to get outside the Dome up top at four thousand meters underwater?

If Heavenbound Hall was going to occupy this place in the future, they’d first have to clear off the undead around it, regardless. Just crashing their way through sufficed for Legion for now.

They eyed the strange not-sun in the sky, shaking their head.

There was no way this was a real Hollow World, so there had to be dimensional shenanigans going on. Like Hyperborea, it had to be an isolated dimension located within and anchored to the planet’s mantle, some great personal realm cooked up by older powers for their own entertainment.

The sun was very reddish, but white-hot Runes played over it if you had Devasight, revolving slowly even as there seemed to be no sense of night. The sunlight was not as bright as the opened sky up above, only a little brighter than the Haze, but it was there all the time.

There were clouds and things, but they had no problem seeing through them or the atmospheric haze, and so could see the arc of the world bending up and away on all sides. 50x magnification gave them an extremely good detail of the terrain as they slowly spun around.

And right there was an area with a black cloud hanging over it. Oddly enough, the Haze didn’t seem to have taken place down here, but the inky-black stain of a Shroudcloud with constant hate lightning boiling inside it was impossible to miss.

They couldn’t see another such cloud, which meant it was out of sight, behind the huge revolving ball of the molten sun.

Just based on their observations, there seemed to be more land down here than open expanses of water. It wasn’t a clean reverse of up above, once they overlaid maps of the surface against this hollow world, but there was some correlation. The major bodies of water she could see were indeed largely in the same positions as the continents above.

That said, there were rivers and lakes all over the place, and judging by the greenery around, rainfall was frequent. The trees towered hundreds of feet high, the smaller ones the equals of redwoods in height at least, but festooned with all the color and foliage of a great jungle.

That meant there would be several layers of ecology involved, and obviously this place was magical and had never suffered the same kind of dispersing of magic that the surface had. That meant some terrifically strong creatures might exist down here, possibly even true kaiju... which Queen Rayetiz confirmed were terrifyingly strong, and hadn’t been seen on the surface for at least a thousand years. Or at least, no one had survived seeing them.

The lilitu’s suborned personality spent a lot of time dictating her memoirs to a couple devoted Chroniclers at Heavenbound Hall. She had filled in a lot of details about unknown factors and influences in the mundane and magical worlds for over a thousand years, her recollections concise and accurate despite the passage of time. She had evolved to lilitu status with her corruption of the Catholic Church over a period of hundreds of years, as well as subverting and splitting the rising Islamic faith into competing factions, dividing them even further and slowly making them ever more hostile to other faiths.

Inspiring the Crusades and the lingering hostilities from that series of events, which still endured to this day, had been another of her triumphs. Truly, she had been one of the most formidable influences in spreading Evil in this world, working against the influence of the Heavenbound and other interested bodies to reap souls and carnage for Demonium.

Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler had all taken advice from her, albeit unknowingly, and setting off World War I with quiet suggestions to a fanatic had been one of her crowning achievements.

Still, for all that, she hadn’t known about this Hollow World, and really, it didn’t matter too much to her, except from a curiosity standpoint. She was best at working corruption in a civilized society. The primitive savagery of a place like this was better suited for brutal sorts like the niogriz, maintaining a cruel and savage society designed to reap easy souls. The simple fact that the brute had been trapped by the Illuminati showed how vulnerable it was to more subtle thinkers.

It looked like they were going to have to circumnavigate this place, make a crude Map of it, and locate the second Shroudzone. They eyed the first one and the lands leading up to the curvature in the distance, measuring by eye.

Approximately six thousand miles in diameter. It would take most of a day if they stayed low, but there was no reason to do that. If there was no Haze, they could climb for height, every mile of radius shortened saving half again that around.

If there was an altitude cap, they could find that, too. Always good to do double-duty.

Black and white feathered wings unfolded out of nowhere, gripped at the air, and several flying powers activated together.

They blew skyward more like a rocket than a flier, totally ignoring gravity and wind resistance. It only took a second for them to rise above the canopy that ringed the entire clearing where the Pyramid rested and get a view of the local landscape, and the awesome, rolling sight of the horizon rolling up into the distance in all directions without the trees in the way.

The Pyramid was actually located on a low mount of some kind, partially elevated, and the stone beneath was undoubtedly why the trees around it were so... small.

Yes, the trees they could see were soaring to an impossible kilometer in height. You couldn’t make an organic material strong enough to bear that weight, so that meant there were gravity-defying magical effects built into the wood and the branches reaching out in every direction, each tree covering an area the size of a city block or more. Some interwove with one another, so the area of green for uncounted leagues around was all like one single interlaced organism.