The Power of Ten

Chapter 7-192: Quiet Considerations

“Ah.” His pale violet eyes glittered. “That is indeed pretty useful. I hear a ‘but’ in there.”

“If experience is any guideline, I might be going sideways for some time before hitting Seven. Theurgies.”

“You’re a Fake Eleven, Casting at Thirty-plus, and you’re annoyed at the delay to hitting Seven.” He lifted his huge hands to the heavens. “Why me, Lord? Why me?”

“Meh. Wait until you have an army of ten thousand Sevens and the Karma is rolling in.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Is that something the original has?”

“Sama’s direct army on Terra-Luna is the Bloodguard, all Sevens and higher Primos. Briggs oversees the training of all forces that feed up into the Bloodguard among the Primos, and that is for the entire planet. He’s also the de facto Warlord of the Amazons there, which still astounds everyone, and every single one of those ladies is over Seven, too.”

“That sounds pretty odd,” he said thoughtfully.

“They didn’t want Sama directly in charge of them. Being the personal honor guard of Commander Briggs was an extremely acceptable alternative. He doesn’t actually order them around much, as they are totally capable of taking care of themselves, but they still take the obligation seriously.”

“Yeah, Amazons knuckling under to Hags, probably not the right way to go about things,” he admitted.

“She doesn’t have your Rantha Hag kit back home, either, but she’s been taking Lilitu Racial Levels, just because she can.”

“If I do the math right, that’s probably a foundation for the Rantha Hag Class,” he admitted after thinking about that for a moment. “You know Sama’s almost ungodly gorgeous if she loses the Brand, right?” he asked softly.

The distorting effect of the Brand was powerful, but it wasn’t really messing with me, being stuck between the Shroud and a supremely nasty Death Curse as I was. “I figured. From the back, she’s a knuckle-biter all the way. You can see a hint of it in profile, if you can ignore the Brand stretching her face against the bones.”

“Yeah. Is the Sama back there like that, too?”

“Pretty much. Aelryinth is married, so he didn’t really care.”

“Married!” Briggs huffed at the word. “I don’t even know if we can have kids...”

“If you can, they are going to be really special kids.”

“Ain’t that the damn truth.” He huffed again. “Wait... would they... be like us?”

“That is entirely possible,” I reasoned. “Or, she might only be able to have Hags, and somewhere, that triggers another Briggs to be born. Am I correct in that you basically have the same birthday?”

“Three days apart, but yeah.” He rubbed his broad jaw slowly. “Won’t know until we figure it out, and definitely not right now, aye?”

“You have no maximum life span. When you get around to it, I expect you’re going to have a horde.”

He beamed. “Big family. Bouncing off the walls! That’s what I want!”

“And if it’s all Sama-daughters?” I asked archly.

“I won’t have to do anything around the house at all, given how crazy a work ethic she has!”

“That is true,” I had to admit, him hitting on the key guy point. “You can Warlord, and they literally can take care of themselves as soon as they are old enough to walk...”

“Crazy convenient. Of course, tracking down my cloned future sons-in-law will be a chore...”

“Bah, leave that to them, and just get famous. They’ll look for you on their own.”

“That would make that simpler,” he admitted, considering the point. “Hey, you’ve got multi-world experience wrapped up in your head. How many places you think there’s a Sama and Briggs thing going on?”

“I have no clue, but according to her, the whole thing is Powered by the Hag Curse. So, anywhere it is, there might be a couple of you.”

“That is almost frightening to think about,” he muttered. “That’s a whole lot of us, Trav.”

“Well, considering how much work there is, I think it’s a drop in the bucket.”

He smirked despite himself. “I hear that. I’m going to be busy for at least the next century, the way I’m figuring things.”

“Assuming no setbacks. You’re very hard to kill, not impossible to.”

“Yeah, but we aren’t dumb, and we know how to think big. That’s why we didn’t make big plays until you came along. We can hide in your shadow.” He beamed at me.

“I’m aware of how it works,” I said drily, which only made him chuckle. “But you need those decades to max your Stats, especially if you can only invest a k a day. That’s over twenty years for just your Strength and Con, you know?”josei

“Thereby encouraging us to cross-Class minmax to our very optimal best,” he said in resignation. “Trust me, we know. Just needing to get to 30 Charisma to take that incarnation dive and find out who we were is so damn annoying!”

“But maxing Charisma will really help your Source ability to Make Fate, cement your Warlord influence, and drive your plans forward. Honestly, it’s your power Stat right now.”

“Yeah, and it’s what all this Karma is going into,” he sighed. “Pinkie promise, no leaving us out of boss fights!”

“Definitely a promise. I’ll let you know if it’s worth your time.” I shook his sausage of a finger that dwarfed half my hand, or something. Really, two of his fingers was a full handshake for me with him.

“Do you need to Ritual that Node?” he asked calmly, eying the crimson highlights that were now quite obvious on my face and hands.

“No, the huge draw when I Blighted it was a massive infusion. I’m done there, just need to hit the others... and Hallow it back.”

“Consequences?”

“It’s almost like Desecration, just not as friendly. It’ll draw in fiery undead to it for the lack of purity, if nothing else.”

“How long before you think you can clear it?”

“I’m guessing a week, plus however long it takes to kill what is inside.” Which I didn’t expect to take too long, because reasons. “Fret not, I’m going to be keeping busy making money, killing stuff, making money, killing stuff... and making money killing stuff, too.”

“Thank you for the financial support, it’s going to mean a lot,” he nodded, amused despite himself. I was basically a gold mine all by myself. “You are definitely going to have to explain this Perpetual Casting Engine once you get it moving to me, just so I can be agog over the perversion of the rules it represents.”

“I will. Everything I can deduce from what I have indicates it is sick, and much more flexible than Perpetual Spell.”

“Can you Send that off to your Progenitor?” he asked calmly.

I had to smile. “Way ahead of you. I would need a place the Haze isn’t blocking, at the very least.”

He looked up at the grayness that Shrouded the world, here accented by constant hate lightning rippling through the clouds. “The Solstice ceremony?” he guessed after a moment of thought.

“It’s going to be the biggest and longest hole in the Haze ever. I’ve got people getting ready for it just for the stargazing that needs to be done. We don’t know where we are or what we are doing here. It’s just a shame we can’t launch a satellite, because we’ll lose control of it when the Hole closes.”

He tilted his big head slightly. “You’ve got the power to keep that constantly open, don’t you?” he asked shrewdly.

“We do not need a hole in the Haze shit can look at us through, come down at us through, and crap can be Summoned through. There’s a reason there’s a whole Ritual for it... the whole area under the Hole is Interdicted.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I hadn’t thought about that. Yeah, there would be a ton of Casters trying to take advantage of the Hole to Summon stuff in, wouldn’t there?”

“Yes. There’s always movements of Cults and things trying to set up shop near the Hole, hoping to be able to reach out to their Patrons and get a powerful servant Summoned in to help them in their plans for eternal world domination, or just ersatz destroy everything. Luckily, the first Sisters figured that out, and added in the Interdiction, basically keeping part of the Haze’s power in place, even as we could look at the sky.

“That was remarkably wise and far-sighted,” he agreed. “Contacting the Divine wouldn’t do any good, they’ll forget instantly as long as the Shroud is still active, right?”

“That’s correct. Aelryinth tested it out on a World-Angel, and Communing with Aru Himself. They couldn’t retain any knowledge of the Shroud, or even realize they forgot it. It is a VERY powerful effect. He wasn’t sure, but he thinks the undead sacrificed the spirit of their world to power the spell.”

“That... is one heck of a material component,” Briggs observed.

“I concur. Add in millennia-long casting times, and millions of contributors, and the fact it gets stronger as more worlds fall to undeath, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.”

“That five generations of spreading it kind of raises the hackles to think about,” Briggs agreed. “Can we even beat it?”

“We can save worlds and wipe Dead Marches faster than they can build Deathgates and move their Marches from world to world... it’s just there are so many of them now to stop. In the end, it’s going to take armies of Tens and post-Tens optimized to kill them, moving from one world to the next to stop them. We can scale up, too... it just all has to be done at the mortal level.”

“’Where do all the high-level gamers go?’” he asked rhetorically.

“That’s about it. Sama said she doubts she could leave the world here to join it... she completely has no drive to do so.”

He nodded slowly. “Neither do I, which is totally strange. It’s the biggest Karmic Buffet you can get, aside from being stupid enough to assault the Lower Realms or something.” He frowned deeply again, that big crude face of his doing it so well, ancient and primal in his ponderings. “How are you going to get people to and from you?” he had to ask.

“Pyramids.”

“Pyramids?” he echoed in astonishment.

“Aelryinth’s main claim to fame back on Terra-Luna isn’t his Level, or Ringlordness, or anything. It’s because he’s the Lord of Pyramids.”

“Pyramid power!” Briggs smacked his lips and hammered his leg. “Damn, that’s an awesome idea! How did he do it?”

“He Shaped a whole lot of stone blocks at 56+.”

“Ha wah?!” Briggs blinked at me in disbelief. “He built the blocks, one by one, into Pyramids?”

“You didn’t think it was a coincidence that I’m so good at Shaping Stone, did you?”

“I... wow.” He ran his meaty palm through his thick, bristling hair. “That’s thousands of blocks per Pyramid! That’s like the definition of a time suck!”

“Depends on the size of a Pyramid. But if you can cast Dawnstopped Widened Shape Stone at Thirty, that’s 320 cubic feet of stone per round, or about a three-meter cube every twenty seconds. Keep your Concentration check high to stay focused, work an eight-to-twelve-hour day making the things without pause, like forming an integrated circuit, and you’re good to go.”

“Three a minute, 180 an hour, 1440 ten-foot cubes a standard work day... one and a half million cubic feet of stone in one day, carved at 56 or higher...” He shook despite himself at the thought.

“That makes a steep, low graduating Pyramid of fifteen levels,” I calculated for him. “Major Pyramids to defend a realm were at least forty steps high. That’s twenty-two thousand blocks, so you’re talking a few days of work. The biggest one he made was forty-five levels, which is 31k blocks. A bit over three weeks to make at a normal pace... and that’s assuming you need to make every block, which you don’t, because you definitely make spaces inside to do stuff, which, since you map it all out ahead of time and fit it together, means it actually becomes faster to make...”