Chapter 18-476: The Dead March Goes Grey (2/2)
The amount of gunfire coming up at me was sporadic, and couldn’t hit me anyways, basically finding all other sorts of places to be other than where I was.
Ten million undead slain passed by me. I was passing over massive companies of undead, organized and sitting around waiting for commands, who were shocked when I flashed in from miles away above them and exterminated them. If Congregants were left behind with the speed I was killing at, oh well.
Twenty million, and the red hate lightning flashed throughout the Shroudcloud, clearly annoyed as miles and miles of the Shroud were peeled back by my slaughter. I continued pressing, sweeping everywhere for signs of the undead, filtering perceptions of Understand the Will of Darkness, Detect Evil at VIII, which could literally sense strong concentrations of Evil from the horizon, and moved to a new set of victims with a bang and instant unloading of Repeating Spells and Fastcast follow-ups to give me space in all directions.
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There you go, look at all those monstrous undead there.
I was a hundred miles out from Moscow, and I finally saw the mobilized forces of the initial Dead March from Pentara.
Dragons, rocs, winged serpents, chimeras, manticores, and many other flying beasts not in the classic lexicon, all of them now undead zombies or skeletons, were flying around there in perfect formations and massive numbers. They seemed to be marginally alert to the white flashes on the horizon, but they, the countless incorporeals, and the legions of black-boned, burning-eyed undead of non-human races below were reacting slowly to any possible threat.
It turned out that even after a millennium of undeath, chaff undead were still chaff undead. My Shards blew through them, even reinforced and Clergy-buffed like they were, and left the ground blazing vivus. The native Terran undead were actually more dangerous, as they actually used guns, while all these could do was use arrows, spells, or try to melee me.
The airspace close to me was soon empty of life, burning monstrous undead beasts falling from the sky as they went vivic, be it swarms of killer bats or massive rocs beating moldering wings. Down on the ground, Congregants screamed up at me, enough of them that I felt good using a Shardray and blowing through a couple dozen of them at a time, while around me the sky detonated with incorporeals being consumed by Light and vivus.
War machines unloaded at me, but I avoided them, Einz TK’d the shots aside, or he deflected them with his Shells. Magic I basically ignored, moving too fast to really be tracked, and my Spell Resistance was too high for anything but powerful Dark Clergy to even have a chance of piercing it.
I killed two million of his ‘elites’, undead painstakingly corpse-crafted to perfection over a thousand years, and the Shroudlord finally had enough.
Crimson hate lightning crackled wildly through the cloud, and negative energy began to gather. I felt the ley lines all begin to sway and dim as the death in the air began to overwhelm everything, and with a triple boom, I hit the horizon with a Ride the Lightning,Rode it again, and then a third time as the darkness behind me absolutely lost all color. A wall of grey chased after me, trying to catch me before I could flee outside it.
I materialized a hundred yards beyond its grasp, just beyond the edge of the Shroudcloud, and watched the wave of chiascuro spread out over the horizon towards us.
Behind and below me, the undead milling around there lost the residual black flames of their Clergy Buff, and the Congregants sniping with negative energy Lances in the distance stopped shooting entirely.
The Greyfield swept right up to the edge of the Shroudcloud, glowering all the way up to the inky black clouds, only a hundred paces away from me.
Smirking, I unloaded on the undead still below me, out in the Deadzone they hadn’t been able to retreat from fast enough as the Shroud kept receding.
The only thing the attackers had to fear now was gunfire. All the March’s magic was now being devoted to a Greyfield, and the only magic that worked inside it was passive, non-activated stuff.
Stuff like static Weapons, Armor, Tokens, Baneskulls, and Amulets.
The conduits of power that had flowed to the Ministers and Congregants outside the Shroud were now still, their power weighing down on the ley lines. They still had the chains of command, but the raw power streaming out from the heart of the Shroud and the core of the March was now gone.
They were weaker, and they’d lost their own magical punch, yet in the Dead Zone we still had ours.
With a complete lack of care for anything resembling Karma-stealing, I proceeded to start obliterating all the undead I could before they could get back under the Shroud, and everyone who could do the same proceeded with the slaughter, spending Valences freely now that the Shroud couldn’t respond.
They only had guns, and every Caster had defenses against gunfire at this point.