Chương 533: BECMI Chapter 532 – Eternal Scaling

The war continued, now with some new reinforcements… and Delphans eager to leave their aging Empire became recruits to a land that needed them, but which was not dominated by Overmagi too stubborn to die still clutching onto power, and where Forsaken were saviors and defenders, not subjects of pity. It took another five hundred years to subjugate Swahib, but our population grew as we cleared it.

Fire Giants and Frost Giants, alongside dragons with fire or frost proclivities, became extremely useful with me dropping fifty-mile radius Iceblight or Sundrought spells on warped ecologies, turning lush jungles into frozen wastelands or sun-baked deserts. Dragons and giants would go in, ignoring the temperatures, and simply slaughter anything that couldn't get away, backed up by Imperial troops with magic to resist the environment.

On the other hand, the crashing storms and virulent fecundity of the land there was an absolute monster to fight against, the creatures came from all over the multiverse, and the mutations of the ecology were the most widespread and worse. The Carnifex turned everything they could against us, working hard and cunningly at all times… and the Forsaken hunted them through it all. I could only Blight or Drought an area once a month, and it was a very large continent.

Only Pyramids and their Domains let us hold a territory once it was cleared, and then we had to sterilize it further. But we did it, over five hundred years. Battle lines swayed back and forth as multitudes of mutant and alien creatures swarmed in fights for survival, and sometimes they chased us off the lines, frequently we chopped them down.

They stole into cleared areas and reinfected them, forcing broad retreats and sterilizations again, especially if they got into rear territories and surprises broke out there. But nobody was settling here, the closest thing being dragons claiming territories to watch over and fight anything trying to rebuild there.

But more population, more Overmagi, more Eternals stepped forth over the centuries to join and pass beyond mortality's limits imposed by the Immortals, and add ever more deep strength to the foundation of our efforts. The Delphans proved useful at slowly expanding the resettlement and rebuilding of Erto, and contributed well to the cause once they understood the stakes fully. It sucked… but when we were done, there was an entire world to resettle, plenty of room, and magic that could not be learned in Meandral.

From there it was on to the mountains of Rikada, where elites had gone to play and harass the Carnifex, for it was there they had put most of their Creches, and the most elite and powerful monsters were brought in to defend the place. Arktos was where nasty things were bringing in their own kind, beyond the control of the Carnifex. They were things the Immortals would normally have shut down, but now the Immortals held back and let them proliferate, leaving them for us to handle or not-handle.

Once we were all dead they might act, then sweep the planet clean and start over. Once we were all dead and they tried to do that, Heaven would likely wipe them all, but they didn't need to know that. ========"One fucking thousand beholders. Four goddamn Hive Mothers. Three hundred beholder variants, not including the eyeballs. By the Dame, I love this place!" the former Emperor Magni, now the Eternal Magni, roared in glee as I set down next to him.

He wasn't a Forsaken and would never be one, but a Torc made from the central eye of a Gargantuan Beholder and able to turn on and off a personal Graysphere was nearly as good as a Null. Throw up a Stillflight Field to ensure that they never got out of reach, and a truly skilled warrior could light into them with vim and vigor, which he most definitely had.

He had chosen the quasi-Path of the Polymath for his Eternal Road, turning his back on Tenya's road of conquest and empire-building and finding a path for himself in pursuit of excellence of mind and spirit. It allowed him to accentuate his Warrior Levels with those of the Thief, Cleric, and Wizard at 1/3 the levels, giving him surprising diversity and staying power as his Eternal Levels had risen.

He had also been able to indulge in personal combat for close to two thousand years now, against things that needed to be killed, as opposed to mortals to conquer. His mindset had changed greatly over this time period, and he had very formally switched his allegiance to Molniya, who reciprocated with ever more monsters to kill, complete with trips out into other planar Realms where such things came from, shutting them down from the other end.

The howling cold barrens of the bottom of the world blew around us, but nothing that lived here now cared about the cold, even in the areas where carbon dioxide fell from the sky. A fog of blowing snow particles filled the air and played with vision, but Masks of Clarity were down, Hazesight was in effect, and it all could have been a sparkling clear day. Magni's Mask looked like an upside-down crown, signifying the imperial throne he'd walked away from and had no use for anymore.

His heart was free, his future was open, and he decided his fate, not the whims of an empire. He could walk away from this fight, and had chosen not to.

"The Orbus must have grown them, preserved them in Quintessence, and released them as a group for maximum effect," I noted, having bombarded down a few dozen from range when they were looking the wrong way. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Emeritus, Magni's Named Blade, carved through the corpse of the Gargantuan Beholder he'd brought down, taking the expedient move of jumping into its mouth to avoid having to slice through a foot of stone-hard hide in the middle of a fight.

He'd already dug out the ten eye-stalks and massive central eye of the thing, and was basically engaged in splitting the thing open with Telekinesis from his Oathring to crack it open and get at the valuable internal organs. Goldweight was never left behind for the enemy to take advantage of, either for magic or for consumption by other horrors.

"That sounds reasonable," he agreed, glancing over as I pulled up a razor-edged wall of stone in line with what he was doing. He promptly bounced back, shoved and heaved the vaguely round carcass weighing many tons over, and advanced it rolling down the length of the giant razor, leaving a fast-freezing slick of gore on it behind as he did so. ============== What is not reasonable is having to post these again. Novel Bind and other sites are scraping my stories (and others!) without permission again.

If you're not reading (or hearing) this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief. Please read it in its original home, it's still free! You get the foreword and afterword, author comments, and answers to people with questions! I have not given permission for this story to be copied by a bot and posted ANYWHERE ELSE. ============= He shoved the last of it away, and the massive carcass fell in two halves.

He waved a barrel out of Masspack storage, a gesture sending the internal fluids flowing into the Exsanguinating Tube that would separate and partition them into the Barrel for later dispensation.

"They are drawing on the resources of a temporally-accelerated realm, Edge," he pointed out to me with the familiarity of many centuries, even as he started slicing out the massive brain of the multi-lobed creature with expert strokes.

"Is there a reason we haven't shut that down?" he asked without judgment. The Spell of Preservation didn't reach here, at the edges to the true Icedeath zone were no mortal magic worked at all. Eternal Warriors were the only ones prowling into the areas past there, where massive and deadly creatures of frost and nightmare alike waited for them, no spellflingers around who could spoil their fun.

"They've already got the coordinate locks. We could do nothing more than momentarily disrupt the link before the Entities on the other side re-established them. Leng's connection isn't going to end quickly unless we kill the King, and we aren't going to be able to do that without the full power of the gods," I informed him.

"How many times have we tried now?" he squinted, tossing out the first brain's asymmetrical half onto a waiting Disk.

"There's been a dozen attempts that have actually made it up to the Plateau, but the endless hordes end up pushing them back. Stamina and Healing run out, there's no choice but to retreat, and they never lift the Dead Magic Zone. There's endless numbers of things of Dream and Nightmare that can even intercept the likes of Sif and Thor and bog them down until they have to withdraw." Magni's own wounds had long since cleared with Eternal Fast Healing, although his Soak was slower to come back.

Still, he'd spent a lot of time upgrading his Warrior Class to that of a Melee, picking up Masteries and Feats to turn into a truly dangerous master of combat, fully embracing a return to his gladiatorial roots as a Champion of Molniya now, and a true hunter of monsters. He was on the Quest against Evil, and that Quest would never end!

"So, we need your Pyramids here," he judged, two more organs of magical providence tossed onto the half a brain, before he idly hopped the twenty feet to the other side of the corpse, easily dodging the multiple strands of the Tube draining the corpse dry of valuable ichors.

"And holding a Pyramid against Leng's forces will take the full force of the Empire. There's no chance we can build a Pyramid ON the Plateau… we can only ring it, and when the ring is complete, Seal the connection and push it away." He was silent as he considered the implications of that.

"There's nine ways down from that Plateau for an army," he said at last.

"Nine endless armies it can pump out into the Zone to stop those Pyramids from going up."

"Yes. The amount of high-tech weaponry that will need to be in place is impressive, to say the least, and it's entirely likely Leng will employ bio-weapons of similar power in counterpart once they start encountering ours. You know they have it. Remember that last push? The Flesh Walkers?"

"I do," he agreed with a nod, slicing around the other squirming lobe, residual magical energies defying the subzero frost around us.

"We had to swarm the bastards, and it was good we had the gravsleds along with force field generators to draw the cannon fire. That could have gotten very ugly." The Dead Magic Zone shut down spellcasting, spell-like natural abilities, and triggered magic item effects, but didn't affect passive magical powers of items, especially weapons and armor.

It also had no effect on technology at all, although technology grew increasingly unstable the closer to Leng it drew without magical stabilization, requiring proper Investment or the attention of Artificers. Still, even the colossal walking bio-tech creatures with biotic equivalents of plasma cannons, spore grenade launchers, spike missile racks, and transpsionic force fields had proven vulnerable to Mythos-Bane and Sundering adamantine Weapons in the hands of Eternal Warriors.

A biotech Construct was still a Construct, a biological machine, and the warriors had rapidly found the weak points and carved into the massive suckers, bringing them down to the ground and eliminating their ability to fire before digging out the various Aberrant things that controlled them.

"And if we didn't vivisize them, they would have Animated them as Corpse Titans and sent them at us again," I noted professionally. I'd been with those pushes, because I had a Heavy Magic Torc of my own which could defy the power of the Icedeath Zone and allow magic close to me. Among other things, that included Healing Reserve for everyone, so I could keep people alive, and I could open an evacuation Gate right in front of me when it was time to go.

I couldn't employ magic at range outside the Heavy Magic bubble without using Infuse Magic or similar supplemental spells, but I was plenty capable of taking care of myself in melee range, as a whole lot of creatures had found out… with all the most dangerous ones meeting those even more competent in combat than I first, of course!