[Be Gone] Ch 45 – The Pyramid Progresses!

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More time passes...

            The great square was still hovering in midair, just beyond the lip of the Pit, the sparkles of great magic playing about it at the edges of the eye, still too much to truly look upon.

            Eight hundred more blocks had risen up out of the Pit, and began forming a second square, seventy-eight blocks to a side...

            And that was what the Magos did. For twelve hours, seventy-two hundred blocks of crystallized stone rose from the burning depths of the Pit of King Gravity. When he completed a square, it rose, moved over atop the previous larger one, and came down perfectly atop it, part of an impossibly obdurate and complex greater whole.

            Daimyo Ochotai made sure he was there to see each layer completed, and the Pyramidal structure rise.

            It was not a true Pyramid, of course. He saw the blocks that formed stairs, he saw others in what ended up being the interiors carved out or outright missing to form rooms and corridors that were soon covered up and unseen inside crystalline white stone. Seals and links crawled up and down the sides of each tier as they were laid down, and the Pyramid rose.

            Seventy-two hundred blocks a day. Each tier took less time than the one before, especially once the open interior areas saved yet more space.

            His engineers were plotting out each and every level with feverish urgency, breathless with how rapidly it was being built, and how the maker needed refer to no plans to do so. They pointed out circulation flows and designs, strange defensive formations, rooms obviously intended for storage and housing, and it was quickly apparent that this edifice going up was intended as a thing made for battle and conflict, not to sit in one place and defend!

            Those uncounted tons of stone were still floating in mid-air, radiating, growing to some fell purpose that was going to spell doom to all the Shadowlands, Ochotai was sure of it!

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            It wasn’t my maximum production level, since my Caster Level wasn’t at full power, but the Shugenja Levels getting the help of the Earth Spirits basically totally made up for it. As long as I could Shape a thousand cubic feet at a time, I could make a suitable cube, and I could totally do that. From there, it was simply plotting and planning out the structure as a whole, and the designs of each and every block.

            My fifteen Ranks of Architecture and Spellcraft were getting quite the workout. A Legendary Caster could have done all this with much less complexity involved, but needs must.

            More importantly, I felt the Faith start to flow, without me saying a word about it.

            Korbald had quietly reported that inquiries were being made by many korobokru about proper rituals, prayers, and ways to honor Mithar, and formal questions about the Pantheon the humans served. The Priests of the Tigers had been quick to point out that the Aruan Pantheon was not a Pantheon of Human gods, as Humans were just one of the peoples and worlds the Pantheon watched over. They were deities of concepts, completely different from the Ancestral Heavenly Courts espoused by the Jade Empire, which were all about the honored dead squabbling for favor for their own descendants.

            They watched me build a floating temple-fortress, and they could not help but believe in something greater as Profound Circuits linked up, Runes upon Seals upon Circles connected into a vastly more powerful whole, with magic woven into everything.

            I would have liked to say it was boring, but it wasn’t. There was too much going on for anything resembling boredom to set in. My Concentration was humming along at the edge of possibility, the manafield was Singing, and the Earth Spirits were forming a chorus of worship around me while I was working out of plans in my Visual File, assembling this whole thing from an incredibly detailed schematic.

            Even I couldn’t visualize the whole Pyramid at once, but I certainly could put together all the various small parts.

            Normally, making Grand Architecture on this level would require Legendary Power, but just add requirements in complexity in DC and carving the blocks, and lo, even a Ten could make a Pyramid, given enough time and power.

            This was what I did, as a Lord and Master of Pyramids. There might well be other Pyramid makers on this world, but odds were they were using manual labor and lots and lots of time to put theirs up, trying to make blood and sweat sub for quality and precision.

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            Jigoku wasn’t stupid enough to not realize that I was making something really, really ominous here, and naturally they started to whelm their forces to do something about it.

            That was also exactly what I wanted, and what the Bear and Horse did, too.

            I didn’t give Jigoku very long to do something at the speed I was working, which meant they had to send out powerful demons with their Spawn and whatever hordes they could impress and get there fast enough to maybe do something about it.

            The problem was that I was also fighting directly in front of them for several hours a day, reaping and Burning. Tainted Storms became Vivic Storms that consumed their own minions and the landscape. Tides of oni became crystalline sands and Burning breakwaters. Dark Magic slammed into Argent Magic and those who threw it Burned. Massive Formations of Casting demons were broken and Fed to the Land, and the shattering of their Rituals begat more demon-munching devastation.

            Then I’d leave, Jumping past the horizon, happy for their powerful to follow if they dared... and the Tigers at my arrival point would be plenty happy to see them, too.

            The silly mortal primates with the cat-themes fell upon the demons, and them stupid mortals too dumb to know oni were Eternal Fed them to the Land, and the oni found they weren’t Eternal, after all...

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Korbald...

            The former outer hundred miles of the Shadowlands was now outside the planar field. A third of the Shadowlands’ territory had been lost in only a few months.

            Now, the amount that was purified and cleansed by vivic fire was far less than that, but the korobokru were working on it, slowly and systematically riding across the landscape with Firewall Sweeps, adding to the square mileage every day, and every hour, really. Riders were at the task around the clock, as there was just so damn much ground to cover.

            Like nails being driven into a disk, the lines of vivic fire Aelryinth had woven into the landscape and powered up with the deaths of countless demons and Tainted creatures had completely stopped the rotation of the outer levels of the Shadowlands, and the inner areas were moving torturously slowly, clawed at by the fingers of the Land.

            The massive jagged spike he was driving into them from the southeast had to really be hurting. And that Pyramid he was building at the old ogre capital...

            Korbald shook his head as he stood on the massive skull of an Akuma no Oni. While this wasn’t the original, it was the most powerful level of spawn that existed below the original itself, and was the commander of a dozen lesser spawn half its size... meaning they were only thirty feet tall.

            They were all blazing with vivus, their massive skulls split open and their brains feeding their triple tongues like wax feeds candles.

            These creatures were known as city destroyers in the Jade Empire, destroyers who leveled and polluted whole sections of land, things that could take on small armies of attackers easily. There were specific Rituals which could bind one and dismiss it, but they often required the life of the one Casting the spell.

            The Tigers hadn’t had much use for that method of getting rid of them, and the oni had been very confident that there was no other way to deal with themselves. Only one of them could be correct about that, and the dead Akumas and other demons sprawled across the landscape in burning hills attested to which.

            Bronze, Tread, and the others had done a fine job of reaping the strongest oni, to said onis’ great disbelief, and the younger generations had tested themselves on the smaller stuff with enthusiasm. With Rapman Singing out and Mother Bea backing them, they had set to with a terrific fervor that the demons had found quite disconcerting, to say the least.

            Mortals, after all, were supposed to fear them, and summon forth great reserves of courage to fight them, barely quelling the terror in their hearts.

            They weren’t supposed to be so happy and excited. It just... wasn’t right. A macabre finality and fearless embrace of doom, sure, that was possible. Enthusiasm to see them? Delighted at the prospect of being outnumbered, outweighed, and fighting horrific things whose forms were drawn from the depths of mortal fears?

            It was positively unnatural, and Korbald could tell it unsettled the oni, which he found absolutely hilarious to think about.

            Too, the unwhite fire was burning, lighting up for the oni, hungering and ready to drag them down and feed them to the Land...

            Yes, fighting the Tigers was definitely a very different prospect for the demons, and had been for decades. The arrival of Aelryinth had only made it worse.

            Korbald smiled as he held Titanfall, and looked at the shadows moving on the horizon. More demons were trying to hurry towards Watunzusji, trying to interfere with whatever was being wrought there.

            He’d ridden past the place himself, and seen the rising levels of stone splayed out over a huge area. It was a castle’s worth of rock floating in midair, getting higher and higher with every day, building something of such power even the strongest demons were going to tremble to see it.

            And the oni overlords still didn’t have a clue just how freaking dangerous it was going to be.

---

            It was almost dawn.

            The tiger-Mask of Clarity on his face gleamed with Devilsight and Devasight, night and day basically the same now. Korbald clicked over the bar to Sixteen, and felt the rush of his soul expanding, opening up, and his chi percolating as his internal power began to grow once again.

            He probably wasn’t going to reach Twenty before Ael left, but by the time the Shadowlands were gone? He was pretty sure he was going to be able to.

            Making it that one step past? He’d have to see...

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Aelryinth...

            In the end, there was no way the oni were going to get there in time.

            The ones which could have, the fliers, were the ones I preyed on most. Sure, the area they could spread across might be vast, but that was what Linejump was for. I was happy to harvest them, and send rains of burning vivus down over the lands below as they fell, those remaining fleeing madly or charging screaming to their deaths so those fleeing might get away.

            I didn’t let many get away.

            If they were in hordes, I just harvested them. Their masters didn’t think them worth anything, but when your army of millions gets cut in half, then quartered, then tenthed, suddenly you might realize that something is going very wrong. Those oni commanders had never faced a situation like this.

            Anything below 10 Hit Dice was just a harvest to me, and I treated it as such. The little oni who could be rebirthed endlessly from Jigoku... weren’t getting rebirthed.

            Endless numbers were no longer endless.

            Annihilation wasn’t something the lower oni cared about, but what about their intelligent commanders, sitting on their stolen Names, gloating in their individuality and their power?

            Looking out at the end of their eternity, and suddenly and abruptly realizing they actually faced death?

            I harvested the chaff, and the Tigers harvested the fruit. The incoming oni charged in, the Land Burned white, the border peeled further and further back, and the raging waves of their attacks petered out over the leagues and miles of their own dead.

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