Chapter 17-457: Running Along (1/2)

-And a bunch more ghouls fall into the dustbin of history,- Sama /sniffed, not stopping her own running. Tremble flicked, flicked, flicked, and Constructs shuffling to life were sheared through and crashed back into motionlessness as the force of her Sharding strike carved into the stone, steel, and bone they were made of, disrupting the binding magicks and shattering all the connections.

It was still daytime, so there were no undead around yet, not without going into the Deep Shroud. She didn’t want to worry about zillions of incorps dogging her just yet, so that wasn’t something she was going to do.

She was jumping from wall to building to trench, getting some height here and there, spinning to paint everything into the Map and find some new targets.

Tremble was set to Construct-bashing mode (Slot Configuration 7!), and that meant Detect Bane was to Constructs, so nothing Animated or fully mobile escaped her Sword.

Briggs was a couple hundred miles north on a divergent course, doing pretty much the same thing: looking for patterns, seeing a lot of endless repetition and a lot of groundwork. -Good riddance to gluttonous rubbish,- he /agreed dismissively, checking one more box off the Shroudzones that had to be addressed. -This guy has been keeping busy.-

-One hundred miles of walls and trenches and counting,- Sama /agreed, taking another fifty-foot jump into the air to look around once, batting away or dropping down faster than a Construct nearby could track her. -Not seeing any reserve sites yet, but there’s plenty of ground to cover.-

-Aye.- Endure set out a rectangular Sharding that blew a Possessed AA Turret off its mounting in flaming ruin. Ammunition started popping off loudly behind him. -This is going to be a total pain to keep traversing. We’re going to have to blow roads through these walls and stuff.-

-Sudden Widened Dawnstopped Stone Shapes?- Sama /laughed back, planting Tremble in the rumbling engine of a Possessed Tank that was trying to line up a potshot at her, and let off two Shardings one-two. Vivic flames crawled over the Tank as its engine exploded brightly, hurling her away and back onto her wanderings.

There was a lot of calculation of personality types and patterns going on as they inspected the repeated miles upon miles of fortifications. The undead had nothing but time and energy, so the Shroudlord had put his undead to work repeatedly and persistently, building up walls after walls after walls.

Such walls wouldn’t hold up under any kind of an artillery barrage, but they were meant to create impassable terrain, not really serve as defenses. Heavier vehicles simply couldn’t pass them easily, and humanity didn’t have the unlimited time and labor needed to take them all down.

It might be centuries before all these walls were gone, even if they won.

No, once the Shroud was down, they could start Summoning things in. Elementals could make short work of them, especially if they acted in concert. All those trenches needed to be filled with something, too...

Sama saw something at one hundred and twenty miles in, and changed direction rapidly.

It was nicely done, not even affecting the lines of the walls, but it couldn’t hide the fact that it had to use stronger materials for the ‘roof’ that supported the weights of the walls above, and the trenchline there suddenly became sharper and cleaner than it should have been, while the walls themselves weren’t reinforced and widened as they should be to accept shooters and possibly artillery fire.

She compared the entire section of what she was seeing to previous landscapes, and focused on the subtle placement of flak batteries in the area, and rather more Constructs than was statistically randomized.

-That whole wall there can be tipped over, shoved forward, and breach the trenches,- Briggs /confirmed as a gear-spider’s forelimbs exploded off its shell, Tremble hammered into its shell, and its internal damnation engine exploded. -Get up on the wall, get a look at the ground.-

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Sama ran up the forty feet of it effortlessly and crouched on the battlement there, looking left, right, and ahead, before turning back.

-It widened the walls gradually over the last mile, creating an easy access road,- she /noticed, fixed her eyes back on the walls ahead. -Those sections there are made to be tipped over and bridge the moat in front, they aren’t embedded properly.- She scampered down the side of the wall to the ground, letting her Tremblesense echo back and forth inside the endless cement, clearly showing things. -Yeah, look at that. This whole section rotates out to form a ramp.- She looked down through the cement under the light dirt beneath her feet. -No, no, that’s definitely not the concrete cap to an underground bunker of some kind.-

-See if you can find the edges, and then the access point,- Briggs /said, calmly going back through his own Mapping and altering course gradually. -We’re leaving tracks by wrecking things, so don’t let it know we know.-

-Yeah, yeah. Let me just take out a few more of these Constructobot Turrets... and see where the entry is while I’m at it.- She flitted away faster than any of the local Constructs could keep up. -Not seeing any Gearswarms, at least. Lack of ingenuity, not having any Drone fliers?-

-I expect they are being held in reserve. Those factories never stopped over all these years.-

-We’re gonna have to do plenty of flyovers to verify all of this.-