Elder Arg massed more than all three demons together, and he was motoring with a Motion spell to accentuate his already tremendous natural foot speed. His Primal heavyfoot was also coming along nicely, and oh, what was that Strength of his? Base 39, with five bars of Philospher’s Might glowing hot on his furry forearms?

He tore off the Tempter’s pincered weapon arms with pure brute force before his jaws came down and bit off the demon’s screaming head. As he did, he was rolling.

His full weight came down on the two gluttony demons’ heads, driving them deep into the stone. He tumbled forward and rolled, still grabbing them, up and over and down, crunch! And then again...

Their heads exploded under the metal-clad impacts of his pawed feet, and vivus exploded all over him as all three demons went off at the same moment.

His roar of exultation was pretty loud, and demons understand most languages.

“PUNY DEMONS!” he hollered at all of them in Chakonic. Effective 60ish Strength Shadow Stalker Rolling Doom executed perfectly, boo-yeah! Grappling MMA ftw...

Alas, they’d not be sending any mail home to tell folks in the Pits about him. The Ironblood swept past them, and the bular’ri died the deaths of too many hatracks, not enough hats. The marilith’s ophidi’ri paramour was hit with two criss-crossing blows as the Hellpoodles swept past, momentarily glowing lines of crossing Valorous Weapons Smiting and One-Striking on a Spirited Charge effectively quartering him instantly, and then profound Thunder exploded out from within him and sent the burning pieces flying in all directions.

I gave Elder Arg a mental slap upside the head, and he looked around to see the rest of the company streaking past him. With an erp, he pounded after them and me as I swept by him, the marilith slammed down upon Haul, half her snaky body whipping along the ground as I fed her to my Mark, and not incidentally had some place to put all the demonically forged magical weapons from the demons and her twenty goldweight of magical accessories and other miscellaneous belongings.

He leapt into the air as lightly as a much smaller monkey, in midair shrinking down to one-quarter his height to land smoothly on Haul, which had no difficulty taking his weight. He grinned shamelessly at me, then clutched the rim of the Disk harder, latched onto the corpse of the marilith going rapidly vivic, and whooped as I kicked into high gear.

I had to swing out and around the company as I sprinted past them, all of them grinning behind the wind buffeting them, especially on seeing my haul, and in fifteen seconds I was back in my proper place in line.

Another fifteen seconds, the last of the marilith’s vivus swirled down into the Mark on my hip, it glowed in polite thanks for the free lunch. Elder Arg carefully bundled up the Weapons he was sitting on, taking care to only touch them with his gauntleted hands and paws. Tremble guided a rope over to wrap them all up, then bundled them into a dino-hide sack to pass back to the Ironblood.

---------

There were alarms going off all over now, fliers swooping our way, spiders coming down on webs from above, spells igniting brightly in our wake... but the fact remained that we were basically out of range within ten seconds or so, and the ones ahead of us still didn’t know what was going on.

We charged in, kept on going, and charged away. They were basically still deciding what to do when we were already gone.

The gate out of the city was designed to keep stuff out, not in. We eased our Interdictions enough to allow flight, especially after the first few dozen riders of bats, drakes, nightmares, flying worms, carpets, magic boots, wings, spells, and whatnot all suffered tragic falls as they came too near to us, their expressions hilarious as their innate levitation magic didn’t work either, and King Gravity added some more skulls to his throne.

Up the walls, over the walls, and looooooong jumps away from the wall while we slid down through the air on misting heels. There were a couple of desultory discharges of arrows and spells that Ward Walls from Reserve and Heavenbound graciously intercepted, and we were down, on the road, and booking for the tunnel out of here.

Yeah, there would be another fort in the way, but they weren’t going to be prepared for us to come through, either.

-------------

A few hours later, resting in a cavern...

“Wow, the lads have fast hands.” I was impressed, despite myself, at how much stuff they’d grabbed in passing. The elves had been looking hard for magic, and had Mage Hands out to grab and point as we’d swept past, sucking in all sorts of goodies in our wake. It was basically all the gnomes and hyn had been doing, too.

We couldn’t travel at our breakneck pace when in the actual tunnel, because it turned and twisted too much, which meant we might smash right into a rock-eater before we knew it was even there. Still, nobody else was going to be following us at much speed, especially after we spread out a few Explosive Runes here and there on stalagmites behind us. Just to keep things entertaining for the drow, of course. They needed some light in their lives.

Briggs glanced at the Spear he’d ripped away from the vulture-demon he’d killed, now being burned away by a couple of champa’ka to power up a basic magical Amulet to increase the toughness of their hide and fur. Little steps, little increments. “Well, it wasn’t like they didn’t have an effective teacher.”

Taking the wealth and magic of the enemy, burn it pure to increase your own Gear. Life lessons on the road to Ten. My little sisters were burning up the marilith’s jewelry, probably a gift from some besotted demon who might want to scry and track it, and who was going to quickly find it was dust. Only needed the mana crystals, not whatever the necklace actually did.

“Mmm. You see those human slaves?” His pale violet eyes were cold.

“Morlocks. Degenerated mutates. It’s been a hundred thousand years or more here in this Zone-ring, fuzzy. They aren’t humans as we know them, anymore.”

His shadowed eyes dimmed slightly. “That’s what our species has to look forwards to?”

“One branch of it, that is dwelling underground, in areas with unknown radiations magical and otherwise, afflicted by temporal and spatial instability, dark energies from foul gods, and the presence of Evilborn and Aberrations, yeah.”

“Ah.” He managed to sigh. “It would have been nice to see something in the other direction, something to look forwards to.”

“There’s a future where humanity has a bright future? Really? Which story was that?” I screwed up my face, trying to think of one.

“Legion of Superheroes!” he answered immediately.

I pursed my lips. “Huh. Wow, okay, DC had one. Marvel... not so much. They have gods running around as heroes and still can’t do anything right without a Kryptonian around...”

“Wouldn’t that be cool if those universes actually exist?”

“Do you want to get retconned around existence every ten to twenty years? Fight things on the scale of Galactus?”

He thought about that. “Well, the thing is... in those places, you can become strong enough to do that, right?”

“Well, yeah... Do you really want to imagine me with a Kryptonian racial template?”

His eyes narrowed. “Well, that is pretty damn exaggerated...”

“You mean monumentally unbalanced.”

“Hey, so is Dragonball Z.”

“We are not bringing Daoist-style cultivators mixed with super aliens together into this, are we?”

“Ehhh, let’s not.” He picked up a rock the size of an egg, flicked it, and a three-foot centipede crawling out of a crack in the cavern wall went crunchy-splat. “But that does bring up the topic of breaking Ten.”

“Because Superman is a Three or Four who counts as Epic because of his race?” I rolled my eyes.

“It ties in, doesn’t it?” he prodded, undeterred in his examination of the condensed water slowly, slowly dripping off one of the stalagmites into the pool in this cavern below us.

It was a bit before I replied, “To an extent, yeah.” I flicked my eyes over at the dragons lounging nearby and chatting with several of the Casters with us. Forsaken made them uncomfortable, so there was tacit space between them and the Ironblood.

“You sound like you figured something out.” He was definitely interested. His mental prod opened up, and quietly I had open Markdoors to all the Brotherhood, Errant, Hazé, the girls, and some other suddenly Very Interested people.

“I’m pretty sure that base Humanity is too weak a race to get past Ten,” I threw out there, and backed it up with how Stat increases worked, particularly at the mental level, where post-35 meant you literally had to be thinking outside your head, and physical Stats meant your body was basically a magic item, because physics simply wouldn’t support that level of power. “Now, while the Land, or the gods, can simply come down and give you that moment of Insight to break Ten in your moment of Awesome, actually reaching out and taking it means looking at the races who can naturally break it, and using them as a crutch.

“I’ve got the wherewithal to break Ten right in front of me. That marilith I fed to my Marks is a Seventeen, with superhuman baseline Stats, and a +17 blanket Attack Bonus, both Ranged and Melee, with Skill Ranks and Caster Level to match.

“Look at the dragons; they are all in the Fourteen to Sixteen Hit Die range. They have that level of Attack Bonus, a Caster Level that exceeds Ten, and Skills that do as well.

“To Break Ten, you need to have one of those three things. I think our ancestors, and the current crop of post-Tens that are out there, just went looking for examples to emulate in one of those three categories.

“There are plenty of races that could display a base Caster Level for Casters. Many Celestials have natural Class Levels higher than Ten. One visit from an Astral Deva, and any Priest or Favored would see how being an Eleven works magically.

“Any Sorcerer would only have to find a powerful enough creature sharing their bloodline, and watch how their magic works, and they’d be able to borrow it and advance into Ten.

“The key thing for any Melee is getting that +11 Attack Bonus, be it Melee or Ranged. Once you understand that, everything else follows. The instinctive understanding of combat is very different than the learned one that Classes download, which is experience through a thousand failures. Instinct is experience through surviving ten thousand generations, the weak fall.

“But still, once you have that +11 in front of you, and know the end result, you can take that Step into Eleven pretty easily.

“Likewise, if some Celestial or Fiend telepathically shares to you what it means to have Eleven Ranks in Stealth or Perception, that’s going to light up everything else.

“So, Powered types can literally be sponsored to Eleven. Forsaken, we’re going to have to steal it with Evolutionary Levels. I’m not sure any Powered being can effectively share with us the Skill Enlightenment, so it simply may not be possible for Scouts to make Eleven on a pure basis for Forsaken... unless Luck or Fate play heavily into it.

“I’m looking at a +17 Attack Bonus from the fiendish side of things. If I can buy that up even one point, nothing is going to stop me from stepping into Eleven Melee.

“But, I’m pretty sure that’s a Hard Ceiling. As it relates to magic, +11 is an Epic-Level bonus, right? Going from +10 to +11 is making a huge hurdle in understanding.

“So, I’m pretty sure you’re going to have to throw Rank D worth of Karma at it to make it stick, Forsaken and Powered alike.”

Instant mental convulsions all around. That was a metric fuckload of Karma. That was making Ten multiple times over...