Chapter 18-462: Distractions and Maneuvers (1/2)
Now, if the Aberrant started fucking with things, getting itself into an exposed position... yeah, I’d probably take a run at it, especially if I could get Sama, Briggs, and Commander Haru’Ara in on it. It wouldn’t like that much, and it definitely didn’t want to endanger its plans.
Us killing the Shroudlord too soon would mean all this was for naught. Given the scale of the Shroudlord’s fortifications, that wasn’t going to happen in normal circumstances, but a nuke to the Pattern definitely could force its hand to more active work.
So, the trick was to get what I was doing alone into place, and just make sure everyone else was as busy in as many directions as they needed to be.
We could have gone the nuke route, stepped up our offense, and simply made it impossible to complete the Pattern. That probably would have set off some waves of catastrophe, likely alien plagues or something, gutting the civilian population completely and making taking down the Shroudzone an affair with ghastly costs attached to it, depopulating the rest of the world in order to do so.
It didn’t want to kill us, as mortal souls were just more nourishment for it, so I didn’t want to give it the chance to do so. Aims aligning, how ‘bout dat?
Controlling the pace of the assault wasn’t difficult, as there was just too much shit we still had to do in the Felldeep and the Shattering Holes, and they required elites to do it. Given the mystique cavern-crawling and dungeon-bashing had somehow managed to acquire, there was no end of volunteers to leave off the tedious undead-flaming, Construct-trashing, and wall-grinding fun that was the Russian Shroudzone and go someplace even more actively dangerous for Karma and removal of threats to the mortal world.
People do get kind of weird when they have superhuman durability and healing magic around, along with great resistance to fear. Strange, that.
But everything otherwise looked like it was building towards a massive military effort to use combined arms and vivus to erode away the Shroudzone, an effort which would only hasten as the outer walls were passed, the undead were killed, and the Deadzone shrank with them. It was slow, steady, methodical, and guaranteed to work, and it allowed more people to Level.
------
Only one of the five points I needed to confirm was built, but nothing said I couldn’t investigate it. I zipped over that way, waited until another static charge built up, then Rode the Lightning back down past the bonedrones and atop it, sending my tremblesense in to look at the internal layers of the thing.
Ah, yes, there it was, out of sight, twists in the molecular structure of the fused stone and soil here, out of sight and impossible to see with a surface inspection. A thread of hair-thin divergences went ahead and knit together as they turned off and away from the focal point, poised to expand and become a massive current if need be.
That was one. I would confirm the others over time, but for now, it was time to leave... leave, and set up my own offensive measures.
I wanted to punish them ALL. The Shroudlord, slaved to the Shroud, driven to kill this whole world. The Devouring Moon, an Ender of Worlds. And that Aberrant player, likely related to the Thing which had attacked Terra-Luna, making it pay even more for what it was doing.
It wasn’t going to like us much. That was fine; we didn’t like it at all, and it was utterly remarkable how much things didn’t like it when what they spread around came back on them.
We were coming around.
-----------
I had to work directly below the center of the Pattern, as all the power was going to flow through it, and that was what I needed. It needed to hook into the Pattern, modify what was going on, and then use the entire planet as the repository for what was going to happen.
I had no doubt the planet would appreciate it.
Would it kill the Shroud? No, not at all. Magnitudes of order different. Wouldn’t even clean it off the planet here.
But that wasn’t the intent. We could beat the Shroud by getting rid of its unliving anchors, sending it off this world. Sucking a lot of power off it in the process was definitely part of the plan. But we could probably win that fight without it. Vivus and the Curse of the Sun were on our side.
But the world-eating Moon and that Aberrant... yeah, they were definitely going to get the shaft.
------
I set up shop about two miles down.
I had to set up a Formation to bend space around my workplace, as I both didn’t want them sensing me at work, and I didn’t want random incorporeals wandering through where I was working.
Not having much usable air was a non-issue. My Ring of Prime Elemental Command subsumed the effects of a Necklace of Adaptation, and I had no problems surviving in any natural elemental conditions.
I also didn’t need to make much room, as the stone around me was the material I was working with, so I simply took from the sides of the space I opened, and began to fill it with the ziggurat Pyramid.
The design of the Pyramid was fairly crude, being a basic four-sided step version, but the power wasn’t in the design, it was in the integration and the stacking, as well as the individual design of the cubes.
Making three-dimensional Runic Structures that hook up with others on a massive scale was not a simple thing to do, but I literally was taking a chunk of ground, splitting it off from the surrounding stone, and proceeding to Shape it inside and out to do what I had designed, in effect creating a Pyramid that was multiple modular stones assembled into a Rune Engine of incredible size and power.