The Warped were screaming, slugthrowers were filling the air with hand-held thunder, cloven hooves and heavy feet were slamming the ground, crude engines roaring... and Beat was moving like cracks of thunder, meat compressing and bone rupturing, while Chalice zum-zum-zummed, mindblade energies making her half again as long, and focusfocusfocusfocus as Sun Strikes went up and off and up and off and up and off...

Heavy brutes came apart, massive bodies went flying in disbelief, bullets whined off armor and thwapped heavily into meat as the brutes screamed, and we went right through them.

There was nothing slow about Briggs whatsoever. If anything, his Hammer was moving faster than Chalice as he spun it around. The Warped could only howl and shoot and watch their shots bounce off Full-Temp Adamant power armor as pulped bodies flew away from him. Several tons of heavy bodies hadn’t slowed down our mutual charge at all, and full-auto force-quarrels were spiraling out non-stop from Paten, spikes hissing out from my Tails, and I even flicked out two Shardstars as I came in, chopping them down.

The Grind was on!

----------

“Smell that?” Briggs asked, taking a deep whiff.

I sniffed as I looked out over the landscape ahead of us, sifting through the odors.

The tang of blood, acrid rust, nauseating rot, sickening Warp corruption, burning fuels that often had little to do with gasoline; conflicting elemental energies; the angry sweat of humans and inhumans and beasts and demons; gunpowder of various sorts; diseases wafting on spores, bacteria, and viruses; the cold pseudo-metal of necroic powers wandering about; the decay of flesh and offal and sewage mixed with musk of many beasts of burden, flesh, and war...

“Huh. Nope, I don’t.” The bitter odor of the omnipresent alkalines was not present. This place was corrosion-free in that aspect.

Of course, it was a freaking nightmare in other respects. There were diseases everywhere, backed by necroic energies, willing to prey on everything. Waves of Warp power in the physical and mental realm were sweeping past us, ready to spur mutation and take over minds, driving people insane with changes to physical brains and their very thoughts.

If you weren’t Forsaken or Protected from the Warp, this place was going to be very bad for you.

This whole paradigm went well with the fact that we were actually seeing trees.

There weren’t a lot of them, but they were all over the place here and there, as the inside of the plateau became the wild and crazy edge of an impossible landscape of hills, forests, scattered mountains, skies of different colors in different places, scattered plains... and pillars of smoke climbing into the air, along with the distant flames of things burning, bright sparks of other things firing, and brighter lights of things blowing up.

It trailed down and away from us, and around us we could see the gray, roiling wall, chopping off the landscape, a clear sign that here was the edge of the world. Nothing was visible beyond, but the leeching feeling of the Warp failing would make this area a dreadful zone for anything afflicted with the Warp’s energies.

That wall had destroyed the whole world, if our analysis was correct, and even altered the creatures inside here so they could survive if they passed through it.

Was the plateau really a crater, slowly rolling away from us? The Warp was free to play merry hell with everything, of course, so, sure. Judging by the spatial waves I could see, it got bigger, the further we went in.

How big, we had no clue. But it definitely seemed to be radiating from a specific point, and that would be the direction we would be heading in, finding out what was at the center of this world. As we did, we’d be locking in time and space as we went... and the vanguard teams would be coming in behind us to widen things out.

It was entirely likely we’d have to butcher every single thing of the Warp inside this zone and set it to vivus to get rid of it. The immensity of the task didn’t actually impress any of the boys and girls, who just saw ‘May-Joh Powah Levelling Zone, Komen Sie Hier!’

As, I admit, so did Briggs and I. We were so damn predictable about certain things.

I could see bats, wyverns, and drakes in the sky in the distance, the latter bigger than the former, and so likely why they hadn’t gone past the border, driving out unlikely wyverns fleeing from them and eating the bats? Maybe when there weren’t any more wyverns, or the bats couldn’t transition, or were too smart to run this way...

“That looks like demons playing,” Briggs murmured, and I turned my eyes on an area with flashes of stuff going on in the thaumaspectrum. “Given the colors... Klaw and jRaztl having a tiff?”. Brass and red against unclean rainbow striations... probably...

“Anything possible here,” I agreed. “It also means a wide-open, endlessly replenished Warp connection on this side of one sort or another... but it’s still the mortal realm.”

“So we can use vivus. That’s good.” We both stared out at the tableau of rumbling conflicts, and the pillars of smoke climbing clear to the horizon before us.

Behind us was a conquering army not at all intent on seizing and holding land, only clearing it. Land was ephemeral. The only benefit was Karma...

----

We were picking through the belongings of the dead, looking at their vehicles and weapons for anything of value, not much of which was to be found. They used Warp Sorcery, and much of their gear had some affinity for or relied on it.

The two Vanguard teams were allowed in after everything was dead, adding their own impressions to everything, especially the two Psions, who were on definite edge at the feeling in the air and pressure in their minds, keeping very close to their Nulls to safeguard the pressure.

“Give me an assessment,” I told them. The Marks still worked here, but we were way out of the Quanta or Boole... but the Goldilocks could just shunt Marktells into the Quanta and give my girls and boys the feeds they needed.

Hags, hagspawn, humans, and psions put their collective heads together quickly, making their judgements, and came up with their assessments based on what I was telling them.

First, no Nulls less than Six, and they were to get to Seven as quickly as possible once entering the Warpzone. The pressure alone should be a great catalyst for doing so.

Second, active Psions or Cybered were going to need a Crown field, i.e. a personal Protection from Warp effect, to remain impervious to the corruption and degradation of this place. While a Forsaken Source or Null field would be proof as well, it limited them to staying close to their Forsaken, which could end up getting both of them killed.

A full Protection effect was thirty goldweight, but it included stacking defensive elements that weren’t totally necessary, just really, really nice. The warding effect could be had for five goldweight, and the rest built up as needed. Designs were already being drawn up as they responded.

Third, careful inspection of TL 7+ materials revealed the polymers and weird alloys were starting to break down, just like all the more energetic tech. Psionic reinforcement seemed to be slowing the effect, but not stopping it.

That meant armor had to be redone, and a bunch of weapons, too. Ceramics and crystals just weren’t going to cut it.

The boys and girls were in an electric tizzy. Smithing Ranks were needed! WooooooO! Briggs boys clutched their hammers and were all over getting a freaking awesome smithy set up to equip everyone who wanted to come out here.

---

“Hey, Sama, look at this firing mechanism.”

Briggs had one of their crude rifles in hand, inspecting it. I wandered over at his call, and he handed the thing, made for someone at least as big as him, over to me to inspect.

The metalwork was crude, but brutally serviceable. No rifling, which meant accuracy was shit, but the round was nearly an inch in size. So, made to punch reinforced bodies and armor, and accuracy was uncaring if they were close enough. Of course, firing it would blow a human right off their feet, and probably break their shoulder.

Blackpowder weapon, although I think they used dried blood imbued with fire magic instead, judging by the residue.

Huh. This didn’t use a matchlock or a firing pin. It used a cantrip plate, which activated with a spark when the trigger was pulled. Basically, it was sub-cantrip level magic, would take a Caster about an hour of work.

Now, versus economies of scale and full-production factories and tech printers, that was damn slow. But what it did is eliminate a moving part and the design problems that came with it.

And yeah, it would not be hard at all to replicate the effect with psionic circuits.

Tech and weird science, at TL 7+, had advanced to the point where technology could easily replicate many ‘magical’ effects. There were lightbulbs that wouldn’t wear out, batteries that could power a flashlight for a century, anti-grav, force fields, sensors, energy manipulation, the works.

But using psi in broad, low-scale tech was still not a thing. If you worked psionics into something, you generally enhanced what it already did and was made for on the tech side.

This was a pretty basic, floor-level tech deviation. Taking a simple magical effect, and readjusting the technology around it. Instead of being technology improved by being magical, it was technology that wouldn’t work without magic or psi at all.

In that way, it was very similar to the Compressed clips I used for Paten. Without Compression, I would have to put on each bolt by hand... or wait until I could get the +II Enhancement that manifested Force Quarrels, which was my standard go-to ammo, anyways, since I was basically rapid-firing without pumping the action.

But while my autobow would work without magic, just being as slow as any other crossbow, this gun wouldn’t work without magic at all, just for a key part.

Huh.

“This is like... a really subtle variation of psitech tree, right?” Gears were already starting to work. Certainly at the highest levels, having a firing pin that was literally a block of metal would be... very smooth, and save a lot of design time and considerations...

I could feel myself touching on the edge of something immense and profound, of technology, magic, spiritual forces, and psionics meshing together as surely and strongly as a Vajra.

Didn’t have the Ranks in synergistic disciplines to understand the underlying harmonics. I didn’t know what it would take to get there... but there were a whole lot of Ranthas coming up behind me and willing to give it a try when I did.

They were already building another forward base here, with the less overtly hostile environment. It would soon be expanding inwards as the Karmic Buffet... er, attacks got under way.

“You ready to do some exploring?” I asked Big Fuzzy.

“Boy howdy, girl, I sure am.” He clutched Beat, and side by side we headed off to the smoke through the trees.