Chương 447: BECMI Chapter 446 – Severed Webs

"♪!" The Call came out of nowhere, and I had just enough time to register it as friendly, Immortal Power aside, before I was picked up and dragged across six different dimensional boundaries and unceremoniously deposited before the members of Mick's team. And Jorg, the Immortal Tek. I stood there for a long minute as cascades of temporal acceleration fell past me, smoothed out by Immortal Power, accelerating me with steady pulses of energy until I was in sync with whatever this demiplane was.

With a hiss and pop, the Immortal Power dissipated, and I was standing there, eyeing the blurs of motion that had resolved into normal adventurers and an Immortal sitting there waiting for me.

"I trust," I said dryly, one eyebrow arching magnificently, "that there is a VERY good reason for this."

"The very best, m'Lady Edge!" the Mick stepped forward.

"How'd you like to take possession of a x100, 000 time-shifting demi-plane?"

"Ah, you've reached the end. I would say that was quick, but you look like it's been much longer than that…" The Mick tossed a thumb on the other side of a rock there silently. I rose up into the air, looking that way. A temple of sorts, done all in place stone, and with the layout of the Ninefold Web, a three by three squared design with nine focal points. It loomed nicely big and ominous on the landscape, dominating everything around.

Motes of blackness were popping next to my skin as my Death Ward kept them away, although they were of no danger to me as a dhampir.

"You need me to take on the Mother Spider?" I asked archly. I actually didn't expect that.

"No. We need you to turn that temple into a Pyramid after we butcher her, and use her Immortal Power to invest this Plane and take it out of harmony with the Realm of Death!" Laurentine spoke up quickly. Huh. I eyed the black stone walls with some speculation. They didn't look to be anything special, although they likely had negative energy Taint I'd have to get rid of to use them properly.

"My Lord Tek, why are you here, then?" I asked him.

"There are at least a hundred thousand Tomb-Tainted humans living here as slaves under the undead and lesser demons. I propose to train them, work them, and repatriate them to the mortal plane through the standard Portal system, which should remove their necroic Taint and restore them to full mortality," he said firmly.

"And while doing so, mine the hell out of this demiplane for everything it can give us!" he added with a grin. I looked at the rotting black of the sky, clear signs of proximity to the Realm of Death, and eyed the curvature of the place speculatively.

"Looks like a forty-mile radius or so?" I inquired archly.

"The whole place is a scale model of the Isle of Kheper in one to twenty-four scale," the Mick said, his wife popping up a quick model of the island for me.

"I cannot make the Pyramid there, the domain of it has to spread over the island evenly." I promptly triangulated an area between the north, south, and easternmost areas, coming up with the small plateau near the East and West Canalport towns.

"What I can do is put up an Obelisk in the middle of that and cleanse the area when you kill her. It will store the Immortal Power and immediately apply it to shunt the plane away from Death.

"The Pyramid proper I will get to work on. It will have to be a forty-stepper, which will not take a small amount of time, but given how much work you all have, I don't expect that to be a problem," I added. The adventurers all nodded, as did Tek.

"We've a lot of undead to kill and folks to liberate, get them working to get out of here," the Mick agreed quietly.

"Tek said he'll start up basic infrastructure, mines and factories and the like, and turn this place into an engine of production."

"Do not make this place a computer-automated factory," I warned the Green Immortal, who actually blinked in shock, as he obviously had designs on doing just that.

"There is magic here. If you add in high-end computing and automation, you will end up with an Axiomatic Event and all of the machinery will spontaneously Awaken as intelligent and rather violent Constructs of the unfriendly type. The Barhund did not have the problem because it was constructed on a world with no or very little magic. That will not be the case here."

"I… see," Tek considered thoughtfully, rubbing his chin.

"But with the temporal discrepancy, using living beings will result in massive differences between here and the Prime Plane?" he asked, wondering what to do. I held up two fingers.

"Immortal Power can be used to take care of the temporal disharmony, and as this world is in active contact with 'slower' worlds, its temporal stream will naturally sync up and slow down. Based on your previous report, Lord Mick, you had to pass through Portals fed Immortal Power to arrive here?" The whole band of adventurers nodded as one, including their Hound.

"The Portals retain temporal insulation from one another. If we replace them with free-standing actual Portals allowing egress by will, they will rapidly move to a state of no more than twice the neighboring temporal velocity." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. Tek looked around thoughtfully.

"Then this world would move to a times-32 speed, rolling down from those connected to it… which is less, but eminently manageable versus a times-100K speed."

"The primary problem will be resources. If we move the realm into a neutral or Positive bias, however, it could easily become a breadbasket of agrarian production. But! …" I fixed him with a look.

"A x100k realm has some extreme uses that could be very handy in emergencies. I posit that we leave this realm at its full acceleration, and simply bump up those connected to it, making active use of those instead.

"Of course, doing everything needed to get everyone out of here is fine. We just have to determine what we are going to leave behind here. I propose an alteration to the temporal reality that time does not pass at all here if not witnessed by a sapient being. As long as we pull every thinking creature out of here, we can leave the realm behind and nothing will change when we return. It will probably even alleviate a great deal of temporal stress upon the place, helping it stabilize."

"Your experience with the Other Shore is showing through," Tek grinned at me, and I inclined my head.

"Very well. I'll get started locating any resources that can be tapped here. You all start handling the mortal end of things, and we can get to work!"

The Mick's team smashed into the temple with a will and a lot of deadly magic behind their Forsaken leader. I instead took on the outside, un-Shaping towers back to base stone while sending thorned vines growing over the place and wrapping up many a spider and werespider as I did so. While the Mick's team smashed through the primary defenses and defenders, I made certain the reinforcements got all chewed up, and nothing was able to follow him from without.

The Temple was built over a massive pit that went down over a thousand feet, and at the bottom of it was where Mother Spider retreated to with her strongest servants as the Mick carved his way through the rest.

There would be some tricks and traps and other things, but I trusted in them to do the job as I began raising an Obelisk right in the middle of the damn temple, with flying buttresses right over that pit and waiting for resolution to Mother Spider's wasted Immortal life to come blasting up and through the place.

The Obelisk was fairly small, only two hundred feet high, but that was higher than all of the towers I'd cut down, and the Runes in it stabbed at the eyes of the undead who noticed it, encouraging them to stay away… not that such worked once the Mother Spider started sending out orders and alarms to her undead servants to rescue her. That necessitated me blasting down a whole lot of undead with lots of hurled Skull-Darts packed with a Reserve or two for the recalcitrant.

Chains of Disrupting Darts Burned through the undead, while I saved the higher Valences for any Nightwings or greater undead coming in, who would be resistant to the Cantrips. Of course, they tried coming in both ethereally and invisibly, but that didn't save them. I had my ivory-and-crimson feathered Mask on, could see them all coming, and was perfectly happy to slaughter them all from where I was standing atop the Obelisk.

It was a freaking game. The Mick just shook his head, striding over the web-like layout of the game Mother Spider was trying to involve them in. Vampire Mystics, wow, and that looked like the very first corrupted Pharaoh. None of the others could break out of the single-location emphasis of the game, but he was Forsaken. The will of the Immortal couldn't hold him, and if Jace was playing the game and setting the others as pieces…

the Mick just strode out onto the place and made for the nearest Revenant that thought it was important. There was a screech from the Mother Spider, a blot of blackness on the middle of the far side, as he moved over the board, completely free of restrictions, while both she and her minions were also limited by the stricture of the game. Place one piece, or move one piece one step.

If you formed a line of three pieces, you could Smite one of the opposing pieces, which meant being able to launch a ranged spell attack against it. If you moved a piece atop an opposing piece, it would normally be 'captured', but in this case meant a fight started. He didn't have any worries about his people in a fight against these things.

Revenant werespiders, vampire werespiders, mystic werespiders, vampire mystics, a druj, and the Mother Spider herself, who naturally was cheating since she was nominally immune to most mortal attacks. Unless you shouted out her Truename as you attacked, which she didn't appear to enjoy very much. Also, it was really hard to make an effective line of her minions when one of the pieces of the other side was butchering them out of turn!

Laird was a blur of motion, chewing through the spidery things as he utterly ignored the Mother Spider's spells completely. Soon enough Jace had a line of three and could Smite every other round, mostly by moving Bestie forward and then back on the simple map. Laurentine was more than happy to play the Smiter and drop some sunfire on anything undead, and screaming undead minions went flaming off the gamefield into the very deep pit below.

Pharaoh Arkenpetoh the First had a nasty grimace on his face as he confronted the Caer swordsman in his black-and-silver adamantine armor, Laird Burning with vivus and switching lightly to the black Baneflames of Bane to the Undead, as opposed to the shifting flames of Shapechangers for the werespiders.

"You… what are you?" the undead ruler asked, staring at the Mick, his mesmerizing gaze sinking into nothingness and going nowhere.

"You dare defile the game of the goddess with your presence, ignoring the proper rules like a barbarian!" The Mick just pointed Laird at him, his Claymore lighter than a willow wand in his grip.

"Now, now, yer worshipfulness. Not all of us have to play by yer rules, and remember, all's fair in love and war, an' this be a love o' fighting!" The vampire took the first hit from Laird in a flicker-cut, then leapt in as close as he could, trusting in his undead nature and the power of his fists to energy drain and pummel his opponent to oblivion!