Chapter 13-382: Legendary Benefits (1/2)

Base 4-16 damage for lilitu claws, as deadly as a greatsword. PLUS Improved Natural Attack, PLUS Draconic Claws upgrading the base, ending up at 4-24. Normally a ki layering wouldn’t stack at all... except they’d taken the Half-Dragon Template, and crashed through the Legendary Eligibility level, just like Sama and Briggs.

Profound Demonic Natural Strike was what the Feat was called. Seven damage advances to their claw attacks. 4-28, 4-32, 4-36, 4-40, 6-45, 7-50, and 8-55. They could idly claw through steel like it was papier-mâché, and rend armor plate like tofu.

Profound Weapon carried that over to Idiot. A Heavy Weapon was a damage buff equal to Improved Natural Attack.Draconic Claw was a die advance. Idiot was already a d10 vs a d6 base, so it got two more advances over their claw attacks.

11-66, averaging 42 points of damage before any other effects. Sama couldn’t get so high as a base... yet! She had proclaimed that an Amazon Heavy-Gravity Lilitu was totally cheaty, and Briggs had agreed emphatically. It really was a pretty freaking awesome set of physical enhancements as you went to post-Ten, and trying to equal it with Gear was hideously pricey and would take a long time.

Briggs had hopes, but it was some time down the road. Exoskeleton support from magic Armor was a thing for high-Level Melees, and he’d definitely be getting it. It would just take literally thousands of goldweight...

But as it stood, Legion was the most dangerous melee combatant on the planet at the present time, and by far the strongest. Still impossibly huggable, bless that nereid and those sirines with appetites for drowned souls...

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Sleipner actually pulled to a stop on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere, edges of jungle lowlands and rolling, old mountains all around us, just so we could see this better.

There were sixteen different dimensional Rifts tucked away here and there on the landscape. Not all of them led to the same places, either, and those that did weren’t necessarily close together inside, either.

In addition to a bunch of mappers recording everything for posterity (including two Hollow World connections that still weren’t the ones Professor Shellington had used!), there were a couple thousand eyes studying this scene, and a lot of heads shaking at yet another set of mysteries opening up that had to be explored, concealed from the rest of the world for so long.

To accent all that, the Felldeep of Africa drifting past in the Commune was just as vast and involved as that in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Whatever else it was, this Shrouded Earth had a lot more shit in it by default than Luna-Terra had. It meant a lot more could go wrong, too.

Pure random distribution meant that the larger Shroudzones were extremely unlikely to intersect with the Felldeep, and weren’t anywhere near hidden realms like these. That said, I didn’t have everything mapped out yet, so the odds that at least one Shroudzone wasn’t intersecting with the Felldeep was small... which meant that area would have to be purged to kill that Shroudzone.

We’d know if the surface of the world cleared and the Shroudzone didn’t go away... but that meant sending forces into the Felldeep, always a shitty job. Nobody in their right mind wanted to go into such places.

We also didn’t know what was behind each of these places, although if the rumors were correct, it was more areas with time-lost inhabitants, primitive creatures, and ancient cultures ignoring the rest of the world in their safe little habitats.

Not so safe under the Shroud, and probably very well-guarded right about now, I considered.

“There are probably a lot more, aren’t there?” Legion asked softly.

“Darkest Africa, Deepest Africa, and Deepest, Darkest Africa,” I replied in mock dramatic fashion. “Whole worlds of wonder waiting to be discovered by modern peoples! Who knows what knowledge and riches might be found by the lucky and determined?!”

“Ah, yes. No doubt motivated by all the best intentions for the natives, of course,” Legion agreed firmly.

“Your faith in the higher morals of humanity is very reaffirming.”

“Humanity does not have a good record of exploration and first contact. Motivations for such things are usually centered in exploitation.”

“There is a redeeming factor in that far too many of these time-lost cultures seem to be centered in the worship of Old Gods and the reprehensible traditions that go hand-in-hand with them.”

“Ah, yes, crusades. Another fine and inspiring example from history. We all love our religious wars.”

I gasped. “And this from a Heavenbound in good standing? Say it isn’t so!”

“Heavenbound fight fights. Wars we leave for even greater idiots than we are. Our wars have basically been a series of endless skirmishes. It is non-Heavenbound who go to war, and the forces that compel them are very rarely from Heaven.”

“You’ve got too many history lessons from the other side. It makes it much less fun...”