Chapter 18-461: Forming Up (2/2)

Production tooling would commence immediately upon my return. We were already making weaponized drones for dealing with some of the bigger undead and Constructs, so this was nothing new, just more focused. We didn’t need a net of lightning a few miles wide descending on everyone to electrocute them en masse, so it was best to take it out with tech, while the tech was still working.

Eagle Eyes roved over everything I could see below. Possessed bulldozers, diggers, and trucks were at work, clearing away literally everything in the way below, demolishing it, and either trucking it away or moving it to areas where it would be mounded, fused, and shaped into the appropriate pattern when the undead returned and Congregates could go to town with pyreflame, sanguine acid, and the like before carving it closer to the desired form by hand.

At large scale, it was actually pretty hard, as minor imperfections had to be cleared away, and with this much area, there would be a lot of them. Time and persistence, two things the undead specialized in, made sure that whole sections had still been completed, and I could imagine would be swarming with undead come sundown, polishing, chipping, melting, and grinding them all correctly.

I doubted this level of detail would have been needed in normal circumstances. Predators don’t usually require perfection to sense potential prey. But this Calling had to radiate out through the Shroud, reach the Devouring Moon out somewhere in the Void, and pull it in.

Happily, this level of detail also gave me a very easy way to see if the Pattern had been altered, and how.

The Congregants and probably Fiends that were working on this were definitely skilled enough to do the job, and if they had to take it slow and careful, what did they care? They were interrupted every twelve hours with a painful death and reformation, but that had been going on for years, and they were likely resigned to it happening anyways.

The two variants of the Ritual I had meshed into a Spellcraft check at +56, no magical bonuses whatsoever, a whole bunch of thoughtstreams dissecting the fundamentally disturbing patterns and the way the energies were supposed to run through them.

There, there, there, there, and there.

I would have to get closer, and have Commander Haru’Ara check the higher fundamentals of these minor alterations. I focused on a corner of the asymmetric pattern that, unless you were hitting a 50, looked like a gathering node for energies of the world, cycling through the whole pattern.

If the way it was connected to the other four alterations were adjusted slightly, it was instead the actual center of the effect, offset so that the center of the pattern was the target, not the receptor, of the actual flows.

If you didn’t have the actual Patterns to compare and contrast against, a 60 or 70 check might not have been high enough. The level of subtlety involved in this made me sure I didn’t want to engage in a straight-up conflict against the Aberrant behind this... but that was par for the course. It was pulling a fast one over on the Devouring Moon, which meant it dared to do something against an Entity I didn’t want to face. The way you beat such things was either with outside help, or brains.

Brains I could do. It obviously lacked raw power, having to deal with a Shroudlord to accomplish its aims, but it was doing the same thing I needed to, playing this planet-conquering undead warlord AND a World-ender. That required some balls, or the knowledge that even if you failed, it wasn’t going to kill you.

After all, powerful Aberrant Entities didn’t fear death, but they did fear oblivion. Death was this minor nuisance they could just work around, given time.

I probably couldn’t give anything here oblivion by what I was planning, but I could definitely give them some hearty death.

There was only to add another dimension to the equation of what was going to happen when this Pattern was activated, and I’d have to get at least a couple things into place to do so.

Still, there was months of work yet to go here, judging by the QL they had to hit. One nuke to the face could set it all back, if we dared to do such a thing, but we didn’t know how much longer the Curse of the Sun was going to last.

We had to beat the Curse of the Sun’s time limit, because we wanted to make very Good use of that thing, enhancing it all the way up, so it could affect the Shroud pretty much anywhere we went.

It was one of the things I was going to work into the Pyramid I created. Wondrous Machines were such useful tools.

A wave of attention swept past me, saw nothing. Tiny figure, very disguised, extreme range, not using magic to draw attention.

Wasn’t the Shroudlord...

I didn’t look in that direction, because that would have been a bad idea. The Aberrant was over there, not far away from the Shroudlord, maybe overseeing some digging and checking all parts of the Pattern.

It had indeed come into Moscow physically, which meant it could move into and out of the Shroud’s Seal without too much problem. Maybe because it didn’t have a soul or spirit, or it came from Outside Creation, who knew?

Didn’t matter; it was here, and that confirmed dealings with the Shroudlord.

I was very glad I was Beyond Law and Chaos, as even suppressed timesighting might have detected the change in possibilities happening with me up here looking at stuff, confirming what to do, and making plans that were going to wind out into the world beyond.

The Aberrant would also be able to move out into human society and make sure that everything out there was on course to apply pressure to the Shroudlord. As long as it observed nothing that would threaten its own plans, it simply wouldn’t care, and it likely had subtly charmed, dominated, or just plain had true believers supplying it with current information.

It was one of the reasons I made so much information public, and wasn’t underhanding a lot of stuff, even openly planning for beyond the coming of the Shroud, like bringing it down was inevitable and it was going to happen. Just feeding its informants what it wanted to hear, and what the Shroudlord did not...