"You know, this is not nearly as fun as I thought it would be," Briggs commented, slumping down to a seat on a pile of fallen rubble. He kicked the head of a hacked carnoraptor out of the way with a sigh.
"These should not be here. Their time is long past... something must have brought them up from dark lands lost to time below, or they were drawn here," Brother Ancientaxe mused, sitting down next to the Ancient youth nearly as tall and broad as he was.
"Awwww, watsamatter, Briggs, you not get to dig into every hole and house and sniff out all the buried gold and ancient treasures that endured the millennia?" I asked him, skating over to take up my own perch.
"Snake!" he pointed out. I aimed Fall and held down the trigger as a series of bolts flashed out, each one manifesting after the one before it hit. The thirty-foot viper coursing in on us had great holes punched into it, and couldn't get into cover before the shots walked up its slithering diamond-scale patterns and blew its neck apart. Sparkie zipped over to pummel the head a couple of times and make sure it stayed down, its body writhing around on top of the T-Rex sized carnosaur that had somehow managed to survive here, and which Brother AA had opened up like a fish with severe disregard for its threat level.
"I haven't seen any real loot at all," he admitted, glancing around while barely moving his head. "I mean, seriously... there's even been few coins fallen into the soil and the dirt." He took a long step, drove a knife-hand into the ground, and pulled up a badly weathered copper coin between his thick fingers. "I don't know if someone vacuumed up the good stuff a long time ago, or it got burned away, or what... but we should have stumbled into something forgotten in a corner, and there's been nothing but scrap too rusted away to be worth anything, and certainly nothing magical."
AA nodded thoughtfully as Briggs sat back down. "That is true. This was a city of high magic. There should have been little magical trinkets and toys scattered here and there, a show of the city's wealth and joy. I have sensed nothing like that. Moreover... I've not seen any collected signs of the city's inhabitants, or a collective defense. Granted, the numbers of dead creatures may have obscured their bones and remnants, but there should have been some sign..."
"Well, that all depends on whether or not something removed them," I pointed out cheerfully. "This was a big city, and that was a lot of corpses that didn't get burned."
"Are you saying that someone came in and looted the city long ago?" he asked, crimson eyes narrowing. "Who?"
"Well, they would have had to be merciless, natives who could ignore the planar instability, magically gifted to sniff things out, inclined to dark magic, and, oh, probably with indefinitely long lifespans. Also probably experienced combatants, given the threat level of the native life, probably with knowledge of the powers behind the conflict so they could get into position... I wonder who fits that bill, who is known to be in the city right now?"
Briggs grimaced. "The Hags?"
"Uh-huh. Remember how Errant said he killed Zouma, a stormcrone, and she was a Legendary?"
"Yeah, she had some incredible pool of Health Qi. He had to facepalm her into the side of an air chute for two miles or something to burn it all away," Briggs nodded. AA's brows lifted in appreciation of the tactic.
"Well, records on the stormcrone only went back about two centuries." I jerked a thumb towards the middle of the city. "What you want to bet she built up all that power in the middle areas. You don't become a Legendary with a Qi pool like that without being around for deva's years.
"My personal guess is that they looted they city a long, long time ago, taking advantage of the temporal acceleration fields to do so, and they've been using the wealth to further their plans in the outside world. Just think of what it would cost to attract a Rift of that size here... and to set in motion what they are doing down south."
"And they animated all the dead?" Brother AA wondered aloud softly.
"They definitely had enough wealth to do it. Any mysterious runs on obsidian in the past five hundred years that all went missing?" I asked him.
"I'm sure if you asked Brother Bonescythe, he'd know." He looked at the blue sky that was far in the distance, taking its old sweet time catching up to us.
"We're at twenty times normal chronology already, and some of the side zones are even faster," I informed him. The temporal shift didn't stop my Marks, but I was thinking much faster than everyone outside, so it was like dealing with people in slow motion. Oddly enough, Tremble had no problem shifting her speed of thought, and was actually acting as an intermediary while I learned to do the same.
Briggs whistled under his breath. "This place is a leveling dream... if you can handle the action."
"Errant's bringing in some Warlocks, knights, and Priests from Zynozure to take advantage of the accelerated time, and the North Wind is moving the wall up. There's adventurers flocking to the place now, we let word spread. There's no cash loot to speak of, but if you want Karma, this is even better than the battlefield... if you can take the monsters."
"Grow in power or die." Brother AA was very familiar with the paradigm. "As long as they persist in the outer areas, and have good teamwork, they should be fine."
"So, we're two miles from the city center of the big hole, but we've traveled nearly a hundred." Briggs sighed. "It was nine miles after the first mile..."
"You're thinking what I'm thinking," I agreed, as Brother AA watched us. His eyebrow prodded an explanation. "It's increasing at ten to the power in miles closer to the center. The next mile is going to be near a thousand miles long."
"Ten thousand miles to the middle?" He was shocked, despite himself. It was like putting an entire world or more inside the ruins of the city!
"I'm pretty sure we're in the equivalent of a gestating new world here, and the Hags are trying to lord over and control it." I considered the implications. "This world won't just go away when we correct the time/space around it, it'll be shunted elsewhere... somewhere the Hags want it to go."
"They either sold off the souls or are setting themselves up as creation goddesses of a new world," Brother AA said, his eyes narrowed.
"And if the time acceleration is holding true, the next one there is a hundred times, and the one after that is four to five hundred. You can make some very, very long-term plans with that kind of time and nobody trying to stop you. Even just a year outside gives them centuries within to arrange stuff and make it happen."
"They could have made an army and marched out of here, practically unassailable," Briggs noted aloud. "No way we'd be able to keep up with their numbers..."
"The creatures that are born here are living on primal Qi in the air and at accelerated temporal wakes, drawn from the Ether and Dream. They will not last long outside of such conditions... a month or so at most, aging away quickly and dying. As we break the temporal walls, we essentially are bringing their doom," Brother AA said authoritatively.
Well, guess the Land had its own way of dealing with those born under grossly unreal conditions.
"Unless they can be forced into a new timestream that they can claim as their own, where the existing Land won't suck away all the power," Briggs observed.
"Or, more likely, the area can be sent to something really powerful as a snack or a breeding ground. But while Creation Goddesses is an option, I just don't really expect it of Hags, however ambitious. The Curse simply will not let them become divinities. Like it or not, their power is founded on the Curse; it would buckle under the power of a Divinity, and their souls would collapse under the pressure."
"The Hag Curse is very strong, but not enough to make a god," agreed Brother AA. "I had heard that one had become the Lord of a layer of Hell, but the power was not her own, and was taken away from her in the end, so that she might become the sacrifice for a true Lord to emerge. I think it was a hard lesson for the Hags... they truly cannot escape the Curse."
"Whatever it is, it sounds like something we can't let happen," agreed Briggs. "Is there really any way we can stop it, given the amount of time we have left?"
"There are a lot of scarily competent people coming to the North, who we can throw into this area or the fight against the Warped... who have been sending out more and more of their troops in response to ours getting tougher and tougher, in case you didn't notice. If we can set them up on clearing actions, using the time acceleration to our benefit... we can make the time we need by pressing in."
"The time we gain is not equal to the amount of area we will have to cover," pointed out Brother AA. "The inner areas are going to be simply immense!"
I snorted back at him, and pointed at Briggs with my thumb. "You didn't notice?" I asked AA.
He looked at Briggs, who looked confused. "I confess I did not?"
"His Source field is disrupting the Primal Qi in the area. It's like waving a big 'I'm an alien here!' sign. Why do you think stuff is always finding us all the time?" I kicked the rock underneath me. "The only delay has been how long it takes them to get here. They can follow the path we are driving through the Qi in the air like a burning sign, and everything here is hostile to us because of it. We're bringing the outside world, and they don't want it here!"
"Ah," both of them said together, looked at one another, and exhaled. "That does explain the sheer amount of slaughter we've been having to do. Everything really is trying to kill us, isn't it?" Briggs murmured.
"The herbivores may not be hunting us, but they are certainly hostile when they see us, as you noticed." We'd killed enough saurials, saurids, and saurs over the past virtua month to fill up a lot of meat lockers. And we might have tried different types of roast dino meat, from a purely investigative standpoint...
"So, we have to get the people who hit a certain level of ability in here, and they've basically got to kill everything," Briggs said thoughtfully. "The loot will be shit, but they can make it up in Secondary Class Levels. That will also control the invading Warped forces, if the strength of those they face stay at a fairly constant level."
I found myself screwing my face up. "I wonder what the Warp Gods would think, them being abandoned by the real fighters because they didn't grant enough Karma quickly enough..."
Both of the men burst out laughing. "Can you make it so? It will take at least another of my Brothers to work with a Null and Source to shatter the barriers ringing the city, and press inside," AA noted.
"They'll all be eager to take advantage of the temporal acceleration to grind up Levels. The problem will be having alternatives to them popping off any Greater Demons who show up. We're going to need clerics ready with Ritual Abjurations and stuff. I don't think anyone wants to hack them down the long way."
"We should bring Errant, Hazé, and anyone relevant up with us, to take greatest advantage of the time acceleration," Briggs said thoughtfully. "Hazé might be needed to do many things, but if we're working on a hundred to one scale... she can Linejump out of here, do the 'porting, and come back, and she's still going to get 8:1 time usage or better, if everything is prepped for her to move."
"And she'll be moving stuff quick, because she won't want to miss out," I agreed.
"What of the Warped? Might they try to get involved in this?" Brother AA wondered.
"To be honest, I hope they try. This place will grind them up like meat, they are even more alien then we are. It's an entire world in here. We are literally over a hundred miles of hungry forest and hungrier critters away from them. They are walking buffet tables, and they will be attended to by cheap and opportunistic gluttons, as is only appropriate."
"And we haven't even run into any truly organized forces, aside from the spiders at the beginning," AA said thoughtfully.
"Can't expect that to last," grunted Briggs. "The Hags will need hands to do stuff, slaves to make them feel better and generate faith and power for dark Patrons. That inner area is probably going to end up a war zone."
"At five hundred times normal speed," Brother AA mused, and his smile widened. "Ah, the irony."
"Going in to stop the Hags makes us incredibly tough to fight the Rift. They bring the Warp in, yet end up strengthening those fighting against them," I agreed. "Who knows, it may be part of the plan. Odds are the Warp Gods can't eliminate the Curse from them, despite all their promises, so the Hags don't trust them, and don't care if they fail, only that they got what they want."
"And what do they want?" Briggs asked me.
"They want power. It's the only thing that matters, in the end, to something that is Eternal. Power to stave off death, to fight against those that would hold them to their misdeeds. Everything else comes to those with power," I stated with certainty.
"So they got power from the Warp Gods... It is only for us to see what kind." Brother AA nodded. "We will need more bodies."
"I'm arranging things as we speak." I looked back along our path. "We've got one Renewal per spatial shard to do this, you know." That was how long it took for the outer world to push away and collapse the spatial zone here. Given patience and willingness to clear the shards, we could actually clear the whole city together, something the Brothers had not been able to do alone.
Even Brother AA twisted his face at my words. "That is a lot of time... but a lot of area to cover for that time."
"Yes. We need more superbly ready bodies. Your Brothers are going to be needed, with a lot of other heroes..."