Chapter 17-452: Digging into the Darkness (1/2)

The Ghoul Kingdom of Navar Nevrend.

Before the Shroud, just a myth, a city of undead led by Ghoul Sages from Leng, discretely robbing graveyards for their munchies, or maybe haunting the battlefields where dead lay strewn about, and carrying them off into the dark and countless hidden tunnels. They were only whispers who avoided the living and were avoided in turn as they cleaned up the leavings of the numberless humans dominating the world now.

After the Shroud, it sank into even more blankness, cut off even from its own kind by the Shroud of the world above, and the free-willed undead who fled rather than be enslaved.

I had started the full mapping of Eurasia on November 20th, focusing first on Europe, since it was so highly populated. The Shroudzones at old battlefields, mass graveyards, and centers of plague and disease had mostly been cleaned away over the last year, tasks energetically pursued by weaker newbies who wanted to get stronger, and which were eventually completed.

London and Paris both were still Shrouded, but not by much, and not for too much longer, slowly and steadily whittled down by fresh troops and volunteers with constant vivic fire. As the numbers whittled, the power of the controlling undead faltered as well, and the Bishops or Fellbishops at the center of them fell precipitously in status.

Without the Shrouds getting in the way, the full spread of Commune with Nature could reach out in every direction and all the way to the Strata below, and lay the whole of the Felldeep bare with excruciating detail.

There were a lot of ghoul tunnels into the Felldeep in Europe, and there was a lot of stuff down there they didn’t want to see, but were now going to have to do something about.

Germany itself was the last huge Shroudzone, and even that was getting beaten back now, as two Shroud Nexi had been destroyed, opening up nearly half the country to the light for the first time in over seventy years. Fighting undead Nazi troops with necrotanks, nihility-spewing artillery, and ragged ruined prop-jobs diving screaming from the sky all aflame was certainly an interesting experience, and giving people an idea of what to expect when we moved further east.

Thanksgiving with the Blakhamars came and went, and I was back on the job.

The Felldeep here was more organized than in America, with obvious trade routes and tunnels carved over centuries, if not millennia. Watching them converge towards Moscow was surreal, although the amount of information we’d received from Gilcruks and his cronies on the ancient ghoulhold was extensive, to say the least.

Clavus had finished Slot Zwolf, raising him to default +IV before anything, and I had begun the transition to making him a Staff of Battle, having the belief that my super-convenient Ghost-eating Ki trick wasn’t going to work in other places, and I’d need to be able to crack skulls to get my ki back and keep my infinite casting loop going.

Specifically, I wanted the Missile Absorption power of a Staff of Battle, so as to completely frustrate any sniper trying to shoot me with a one-shot-kill. It would take me a month to get what I wanted, fueled by me ‘porting to a convenient Zone and slaughtering a thousand undead before getting back to work.

In Russia, all the deep roads led to Navar Nevrend... but I couldn’t see them, since they were very, very firmly under the ink-thick Hellclouds of the Russian Shroudzone.

Most of the Ukraine and all of central Russia were under overlapping Shroudzones, formed from the initial slaughter of arriving undead sprawling across thousands of square miles of territory. They had moved with tireless speed, incorporeals ranging out ahead seeking the living and slaughtering them all, raising more undead to continue the process.

The initial surge had gone out for over a hundred miles in all directions, slaughtering everything. Then negative energy had reanimated dead men and machines, and they had turned out and roared forth, now independent of need for fuel and ammunition, and expanded the zone even further.

Then the sun had risen, and the Curse sent them all back to where they had either arrived or died.

The following days had been lessons in frustration as the Shroudzones boiled up, and the Deadzones had come into play. Yes, an undead army on necromechanical vehicles could travel a long way in just a few hours. But they couldn’t pass the Dead Zones away from their Shroud Lord, and their Shroud Lord always got sent back home... and so did they.

Still, if the living couldn’t run away fast enough, the undead could just leapfrog a killing path, making more undead to carry the Shroudzone forward, and more Shroudlords... until they entered the great plains and mountain areas, and there was too much ground to cover in one night, and the number of people in them was too few... and as those few were claimed by the Shroud, so as not to be freed when the sun rose, and there was no Shroudlord in range when they came back at night.

Also, the undead were unkillable and always came back, but that wasn’t true for their rides. The burning planes with flaming-skulled pilots could still be shot out of the air, and they didn’t come back when they were. While they were impossibly agile for their condition in the air, they were also slower than truly mechanical planes, and the desperate defense by all factions in those first few weeks of the Shroud were still legends of bravery and sacrifice.

Most of those who’d fought the ghost planes of the Shroudzone had ended up joining them, but they’d destroyed the air force and vastly restricted the range of the undead in doing so. That had only become more and more important as the decades went past, and the undead made more planes to send out, and survey their lands...

Thankfully, undead found innovating and creativity a grand and tedious affair. Like automatons, they could experiment and refine, but truly grand leaps of insight and progress were few and far between. That was the strength of the living, after all. So even after all these decades, they still hadn’t stumbled into atomic weapons, advanced missile tech, or even decent jet fighters. Most of the people who might have had the intellect to design them, and the rest who could engineer them into existence, had been necrofied into nigh-mindless undead who were only good for brute labor and killing.

The Shroudlords could get Congregants to manage factories, but maintaining such things was a chore, and improving them an impossibility.