Chapter 18-461: Forming Up (1/2)
As I reached a few hundred yards from the surface, I noted that buried Constructs were everywhere. I noticed them because they had transdimensional existences and were visible solidly in the ether, doubtless there to guard against ethereal or incorporeal infiltration attempts.
Not to fear, I wasn’t going to use that trick against undead. I altered course to stay away from them, but not exactly so, as those symmetrical spots were like lures for other kinds of attention on the surface.
I hit the surface in the sloping ditch next to an old road, behind a crumbling rock, and zipped up into flight, looking above me, then around.
The Shroudcloud was thick and black, making this area as dark as night, save for the occasional flash of purplish-red hate lightning. Around me in visible range were quite a few devices tirelessly scanning the earth and sky, looking for intruders and surprises. I felt their mechanical eyes sweep past me, but they didn’t have enhanced See Invisibility, just going with the base, and they swept right on by me.
They were looking for magic and souls and other things, none of which they’d be able to sense on me. Somewhat reassured, I felt the weave of magic, and turned my head north.
The black threads in the ley lines, of which there were many, many, many of them, were all converging about a mile to the north-north-east. Guess who was in that direction?
There was also motion, and the sound of engines, even the crackle of electricity and the stench of exhaust fumes. The ground was vibrating from things working, heavy machines and large loads were rumbling back and forth.
There were walls of stone everywhere, and new trenches carved fairly recently, judging by the weathering. Wind was moving from the motion of things, where normally it would be stale and dead here.
They were indeed building stuff here.
There were things in the air. Not true drones, and built of bone as much as of metal or wood, they were humming up in the air with a touch of ozone about them, forming a ceiling of sorts... or a Ward from above, and I got the impression that anything that passed between them was going to ignite a blast of electricity, and there would go my cover.
Accordingly, I didn’t fly up too high, the ominous static hum about them a definite sign of something. I didn’t even get directly below them, as that might form a link to the ground, too.
A couple hundred yards of movement meant paying attention to my course, as these things seemed to be shifting positions on a regular basis to cover all areas in the sky. Just keeping me on my toes...
There was the Death Gate.
It didn’t look so impressive in the distance, until you realized it was in the distance, and it was still that big. It had been a great Arch, something like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (which had never been built on this Earth), but wider in arc and higher, reaching nearly a klik in height and a mile in width.
Only the massive ends were intact now, shattered by the death of a World-Angel. They were stumps of black stone imbued with the devastating necromancy of the Shroud-makers, able to wield the Shroud to warp to another world with life, open a massive Portal to there, and bring a Dead March through it to kill that whole world.
The Death Gate also formed the anchor point of the Shroud upon this world, connecting it to all other parts of the Shroud elsewhere. Without the Death Gate intact, the Shroud was not as strong as it could have been, as certainly the Curse of the Sun wouldn’t have found any purchase if it had been at full power.
Even now, the stumps were sizzling with black fumes and necroic lightning, hissing and spitting. The Shroudlord didn’t have the proper workforce or power to fix them, and in the end, the fact was irrelevant.
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It was already here, and the Shroud was still up. At some point the Curse would fail, it would be free, and this world would die. New Deathgates would rise, one at a time, to bring the extra dead of this world away to another, no doubt in possession of necrotech war machines this time, and claim another new tomb world for the expansion of the Realm of the Shroud.
Time to start charting this place out, but to really get a proper view, I needed to get above the monitoring bone-drones up there.
No problem. It just involved finessing a Ride the Lightning up along the electrical fields these things were generating over several rounds, keeping it very slight and subtle, then pulsing it through their fields in a momentary imbalance, like heat lightning evening out things between thunderclouds.
The crackle of purple-red electrical arcs snapped between the ground and literally hundreds of the floating bonedrones in a single second, percolating through the grid in a crackling display of readjustment. I noted the shift in the attention of the Shroudlord to the phenomenon, but as I expected, it wasn’t a unique thing, electricity being fundamentally untamable when dealing with magic.
I was also now a half mile above the ground, carefully Non-Conducting myself (a Transmutative version of Resist Lightning) so I wouldn’t be a very visible channel for the seething lightning overhead that was trying to reach down and touch the bone-drone network, only barely held at bay by the casual will of the Shroudlord.
The view was much better from up here, and if the scale of his bone drone network was annoying, I was already spinning out methods to neutralize it rather rapidly. It wasn’t like they were very tough... and they weren’t the only ones who knew how to build and guide drones. Artificers and gearheads unite!