Chapter 18-466: Shrinking Shroudzone (2/2)

Child holding a spectral doll, a ghostly mother with empty eyes, wraith-like grandfather with his stomach torn open; it didn’t matter, they all had to die, as did their mindless corpses below them.

The Trembling Song was going off, ringing through the Alliance with Courageous and +6 to hit, damage, Armor Class, and Saves. Endure was beating time with it, morale was flying, Bards and Minstrels were taking turns singing their custom or favorite verses inside it, and the slaughter continued unabated.

The diamonds that represented Constructs were winking off everywhere as they were eliminated, focused kill-teams taking them out as the main platoons concentrated on cutting down the undead.

Everyone wanted to be at Briggs’ level and pound out the one-shot kills. However, these undead were tougher than the Shrouded undead following a non-Hierophant, and the vast majority of the once-human undead were two-hitters, with some of the more advanced ones at three, and Congregants at four and above.

Thus, a line of dragon’s-teeth, making the undead run the gauntlet. If the person in front, generally the most senior Dragon Warrior or Melee of the line, couldn’t one-hit them, then the ones behind hacked and hewed as the undead tried to run past them and brought it down. Only if there was a major surge of undead was there any way one would slip past the gauntlet, and packed masses were when the AoE spells and massed Gunfire started mowing the undead down, spotted well ahead of time so he could move assets in to support and weaken those incoming.

All of the ammunition had to be spent, right?

Briggs spun through a mass of undead, Hewing through the chaff to catch a massive serpentine undead in the forelimb, Cleaving through six of the fused-bone legs on this side and sending it veering off-course and down as he did. Timing somewhat broken, somewhat miffed, he brought out his arm and wrapped up the other six legs, taking the impact against his Crystal Dragon Heavyfoot and creating a tremendous clatter and din as they crashed together under the thing’s momentum.

The scuttling skelepede fell over on its side, and he smashed apart the six legs flailing at him before it could make much of an attack, two other legs crashing off his Armor and getting hacked off in flaming ruin for their trouble as he stood there.

Helix put two shots in the oversized, fanged head marrow-melded out of dozens of human skulls, and it stopped moving, head and legs all blazing en vivus for the undead coming around and behind to avoid.

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Briggs glanced at his next target, bounding off in that direction, Endure flipping through endless circles and sending any undead around him flying in flaming bits as he closed in on a Corpse Worm of some size currently serving as a bridge over the wall for an unbroken stream of undead. It saw him coming, and rose up, stopping serving as both tunnel and bridge, inside and out, for the undead, and belched up a truly momentous amount of acid in his direction.

Endure roared right down the middle of it, coming in like a cannon shot, and the bulging mass of its mouth exploded as the burning, Firephasing head of it converted all that kinetic energy into fire.

It couldn’t retreat. Helix dropped two shots into it as the blazing Hammer whipped back to Briggs’ hand, and the worm’s midsection gave way as the lightning-charged force arrows ripped it open, sending dozens of undead falling back to the ground as vivus began to swarm over it and them. The crunching of its bulk falling on top of and pinning them down made certain they weren’t going to get over the wall anytime soon.

Briggs’ inner eyes turned north and south, and the carnage going on, the carnage coming, and the carnage that was going to result.

The undead’s only real threat was artillery, which was why the dragon’s-teeth line was out here, beyond any real credible range of such things. The kill-teams had found and destroyed numerous artillery sites very quickly, mostly mortars, but there were a few howitzers spread about. The artillery in the Deadzone was too far away to be a threat, and the Chaser teams were mobile and motile, moving around fast, completely beyond the ability of any kind of their fixed long-range weaponry to keep up with.

Tanks, now, Tanks could be a threat... but they tended to be highly visible, even if hidden and embedded, and while, yeah, nobody wanted to try Soaking a shot from a 72 mm turret, it was utterly remarkable how fast a Tank could be taken out by the right Weapons and men who could move just as fast as it and effectively shear through steel. Notably, shearing off the hatch and tossing a grenade down inside would take out a Possessed Tank as cleanly as a manned one. All that ammunition was still going to go off, as was whatever passed for its fuel.

They were old tank designs, too, and pretty vulnerable from above. Any external gun mount was just a vulnerability easily shot or hacked off.

Very deliberately, they had deployed to a point PAST one of the Shroudlord’s Construct storage barns. There was a lot of interest in seeing if the Shroudlord was going to spend the power to try to activate and deploy the things, or keep them still and silent and hope the living just missed that they were there.

Not that they weren’t planning on finding it and clearing it completely out, and had multiple ways to do so. Extended Improved Invisible Melees with Constructbane Configurations on Named Weapons could wreak a lot of havoc on Constructs who couldn’t see them or think for themselves beyond basic self-defense.

In the meantime, the Karma meters were pumping and rising steadily. The people left behind at the distant battlezones could only cry good-naturedly at missing out on this massive haul... but then they realized the same thing would have to be done at least twenty times over AGAIN, and in the long run, they weren’t going to be missing much.

As long as they fought hard enough to earn their daily allotment, maxing out one Level, one Health or Soak towards Max, one Feat, one Mastery, and their Named Weapons, they were staying right on pace with everyone else.

The massacre continued, and Briggs smiled as O’s vanished in long arcs to north and south, curving around the edge of the Deadzone, and the milling undead could only sit there and watch them come.