-They decided to come out to meet us. Impressive,- Brother Ancientaxe /murmured.

There were literally hundreds of drakes and dragons in the sky. Their main job seemed to be to pace us, as none wanted to get too close and pay homage to King Gravity.

On the ground were tens of thousands of giants, ogres, and more drac-bloods, forming a line about a hundred meters deep that stretched on for literally miles. More of them were gathering in and forming up as we watched, obviously following the Wake in the sky.

Everything within a quarter-mile of that line was basically in the range of hundreds to thousands of rocks and javelins. It was pretty impressive, and set in just a location for us to hit as it became morning.

Oddly enough, the stuff up in the sky didn’t worry us at all. The only major threat was the massed fire from the ground, which would be equal to an AoE attack. Saturate the area around us with enough stuff, and there simply was no way to dodge it all. Soak the damage or get pounded into mush.

There was no cover to speak of, especially against dragons watching us from all directions. The forces to the flanks were slowly advancing, intending to encircle us and cut us off, gradually drawing tight a circle from which we wouldn’t be able to escape, and kill us with tons of thrown rocks.

Basic snare tactics. We could easily outrace the ends of it if we desired, but that would cause a break in the Wake. Really, what we wanted to do was simply get into the thick of them... it was the safest place to be, and stay with them as they tried to retreat and open up fire zones from multiple angles, so they instead killed one another if they threw. They’d try to retreat in a circle and open up multiple fire angles, but if they did that, we could simply run and keep advancing.

Newcomers were gathering into a layered second line of advance, so if we pierced the first one, then we’d come under fire again. They’d make a third one as soon as they could.

This was great, actually. They were taking us seriously, and mobilizing all these giants meant we had their attention.

Going stealth was possible, but unlikely with the dragons having their eyes on us all the time, and so many of them fixated on us. The odds were that she had lines of giants extended out for miles, collapsing on all sides, and technically, it might be too late to retreat.

But, that was the thing. We could expand the Wake at any time, we could leave it here... it actually wasn’t all that critical. What was critical was bringing down the Obelisk. Expanding the Wake would just speed up the effect.

It was, after all, just a diversion.

Very pointedly, we could see the largest of the dragons in the distance, never getting closer than a mile to us. My eyes flicked that way almost irresistibly, for there was definitely a Hag riding on its back, and when I upped my Mask of Clarity, she was indeed very familiar.

Heya, Hagmom. Fancy meeting you here...

If the number of half-dragon Hags on the other dragons nearby, swapping in and out occasionally with us, were any sign, that mount was basically her chosen mate, a Mire Dragon Wyrm, if its size meant anything.

Despite its size, it wasn’t coming in to challenge us. Word might have come with how fast her sister empresses had died, and their daughters. Enough to make a paranoid, bloodthirsty, but very, very old Empress hesitant.

How old was she now? It wouldn’t surprise me if a hundred thousand years had passed for her here, or even more. She’d probably had dragon lovers grow old and die. No maximum age for Hags, they just kept going, getting infinitely closer to ‘middle age’.

You get that old, fear of death is hard to overcome... But an Exemplar would have the mental capacity to do so, and at the same time, not be as arrogant as she used to be. After all, we were just short-lived ants, what we had done was a fluke that could be undone with the accelerated time here...

Or maybe it couldn’t. Did she realize that time was going to synch up in this Shard of the Zone-ring? That space was going to revert to normal behind the Wake?

“Clockwise,” AA judged, and without a moment’s thought, Briggs and I bolted after him.

She probably thought she was clever, moving forces out of sight of us to complete the encirclement, but our abrupt turning, and leaving the Wake behind, caught her off guard for a moment. A couple arrogant drakes who couldn’t get out of the way in time plummeted down in our paths, we separated, and they died before they could stagger to their broken feet.

The others retreated, and tried to keep up with us, but only some of the dragons were fast enough in the air to do so. They did clearly parallel us, indicating our positions to the giants who were moving in the distance; I could read their movements by the vibrations in the ground, as could Briggs.

Unfortunately for them, this entire zone was marsh and swamp, occasionally cut by rivers, lakes, and small hills. That made for copious amounts of cover in the form of water, if not the many choked stands of swamp trees and reeds and rushes towering far above our heads. Olympian native life, yo, us be small widdle things...

They probably wouldn’t believe how fast we could swim, either...

However, there was no reason not to make an opportunity of this. AA’s Helices could really screw up visual sight if he browned the crimson, and there was no reason not to mess with them. Running under a set of trees over the shallow water, Briggs and I split off while AA continued ahead, zigzagging lazily and making the spotters work to keep line of sight on him. Naturally, they couldn’t clearly make out if I or Briggs was still with them.

So, when the four Mire dragons beat their wings and found out they couldn’t create enough lift, there was a bit of surprise on their parts. Screaming, clawing at the air, they fell from the skies.

Briggs and I rose up from the water, ready to greet them. They howled and screamed and beat at the air, then splashed down.

They were Mire Dragons, they could swim quite well. Unfortunately for them, the water here was pretty shallow, and we were waiting for them and their riders as they hit.

They sprayed their acidic goo at us, and then the smaller ones died, given no chance to run away. The bigger ones did try to run for it, but they couldn’t swim faster than we could run, and the drakes that instinctively swooped in to come to their aid all screamed as they plummeted down too, punished for their instincts and obedience to Mum and Dad. AA naturally looped back to help Briggs, while I set up a full volleying field of fire and went in with both Swords.

The number of our spotters thinned out remarkably after that incident, and as we paralleled a virtual wall of giants and drakes ahead of us, we pulled it twice more, forcing them to back further and further off, and making it harder and harder to track us.

When we reached the shores of a marsh and vanished into the twenty-foot high reeds, there wasn’t anything they could do about it except send in the drakes and croks to tear them apart and find us.

Wearing alchemical rebreathers in between being able to hold our breaths for copious amounts of time, we played Vajra torpedoes.

The Brothers had already scouted out the primary nature of all the Zones, and were given more than three years to travel through them all and get done what needed to be done. That also included testing out a lot of stuff, and one of those tactics was Vajra swimming.

A Vajra was basically a frictionless field of soul surrounding our bodies. It defied outside energies, and rebuffed fluid and unaffiliated matter. With a Vajra, you didn’t need to worry about rain or most winds. A Diamond Vajra basically meant you didn’t get wet by being immersed, and a hurricane would just blow on by you. Just by expanding your Vajra, you would immediately pop to the surface of the water due to water pressure... so, we turned that effect sideways.

Instead of having the water push us up and out, we let it press in on one side, and let the other be frictionless. As it worked out, the deeper we were, the faster we went, the water driving on our soles and shoving us in the direction of our words, while our Vajras slid us through the water smoothly.

The stronger the Vajra, the deeper we could go, and the deeper we went, the faster we could go. Granted, the waters here weren’t very deep, and they were occluded, but that didn’t bother any of us. AA’s Helixsense, and Briggs and my Tremblesense, worked perfectly well in water.

While they could track us at a great distance if they had line of sight, once they lost it, they were hosed.

Being opportunists and wanting to keep their attention, Briggs and I surfaced in the middle of the line of giants, while AA surfaced near the Hagspawn commander who would be barking orders. Havoc instantly ensued as we waltzed across the surface of the water they were wading through, and they began to die energetically, in circumstances where their companions didn’t have line of sight to mass throw rocks. If fliers came in to investigate... they got a close and personal view as one of their last duties in this life.

We moved through their lines, hunting the aerial scouts, Hagspawn, and Hags, Brother AA having the proper feel for the presence of the latter, and I left them to him, Tremble and I snickering at the Hags’ fate. By taking out their commanders, the giants, who had no feel for tactics, didn’t scatter like they should have, but came running eagerly in to die. The more of them there were, the faster they died.

We kept the line of battle moving, not allowing the more astute commanders to wrap around behind us, tracking the movements of the lines by the power of those huge footsteps pounding on the ground. Advanced Tremblesense is a wonderful thing.

We broke through the main line of giants, but instead of turning towards the Obelisk again, which would just result in us being encircled by multiple layers of giants, we turned and started killing along the flank lines, sticking to cover to break sight lines through either bayous of trees or fields of reeds, with water escapes in easy access, and simply began to reap.

Lines of unwhite flames burning on submerged and sunken corpses backlit our trail as we came together and split, coordinating our efforts and maximizing the confusion of our presence. The flying scouts backed further and further off as we continued to dip in and bring them down if they got within a half mile, which we could reach if they lost us for only thirty seconds. Our trail wasn’t hard to follow, after all, and even if they could only track us by following the dead, they definitely didn’t want to see us coming their way.

We listened to the horns, the bellows of giants and dragons carrying across the miles, conveying where and what and marching orders. Hovering well in back, the Empress and the Emperor flew patiently, watching and waiting as we indulged in all-out slaughter of their minions, not taking action themselves as the day wore on, the miles passed by, and our tally of kills grew.

We were too near the end of her battle line, she couldn’t encircle us unless moving on an even bigger scale, and the ground wasn’t showing those kind of troop movements. She was just chasing us away from the Wake... which didn’t matter, in the end.

-------

The collapse of the Zone to the clockwise was pretty catastrophic.

There was a lot of ley line energy passing through that lesser Obelisk, half the flow of the entire Great Formation. When they brought it down, this time in the middle of a Ritual empowered by fifty angelic haror, the flare of it blew miles into the air. The ground being almost perfectly flat in this expanded Shardzone, naturally we could see it, even if it was three hundred and fifty miles away. Then the four ley lines connected to it exploded, significantly higher than the ones from the previous Obelisks that had collapsed.

Naturally, one of those eruptions led right back towards the Obelisk in this Zone, and there were a whole lot of eyes watching it blow the length of the zone towards the distant Obelisk, hurling trees, earth, and water hundreds of yards into the air as it followed the ley line back to the last junction.

Out from the four ruptured ley lines, the power-stealing energy ripped into the dragon-corrupted swamp, and all the polluted life energy was torn out of the greenery. While it didn’t have much of an effect on the creatures living there, the base ecology was pretty much annihilated.

It also lifted those haror to Twelve. Two more and they’d top out their Racial Levels, and then use Levels of Mystic Theurgy to cement themselves as dual Fourteen Casters, with +14 AB to supplement them for fighting, a terrifyingly strong force.

Sylune was probably cheering for the Hags after they helped deliver her such an incredible gift. Wayfair’s vengeance on the Hags was reaching an incredible level, and she understood ALL the implications, thank you, bows all around, please send roses.

That wall of greenery-devouring energy swept across the horizon, turning the land into a sea of vivic fire chewing up everything but the living creatures... who began to go mad as the nature of the Land changed beneath them to something hostile to the draconic bloodlines they bore.

The defenders of the Obelisk, that Pseudonatural Dragon and all the Exemplar Lite drakes, drak, and whatnot? The Brothers took the one, and the company took all the rest. Some of the dinos were pretty big, but when the haror were casting at Seventeen base, with a Whole Bunch of extra Spell Slots and Pool, let’s just say the AoE spells were VERY impressive...