We arrived at the rendezvous point the next morning. Most of the other teams had beaten us there, probably because they had much weaker priests to deal with and mostly larger teams. We'd been expected to make due because of the concentration of elites we had.

Sadly, the major issue we discovered when we arrived wasn't related to our fellow outsiders, it was related to something...worse. Specifically, the MASSIVE army of undead cultists shambling around in the plane outside the central temple.

"Ok." I said slowly. "So...I feel like considering how many of those look like they used to be local worshippers, not involving the locals was the right call. Thankfully they're zombies, because I doubt we could stop the other teams from straight up murdering them to get to that central temple. They don't look so tough though, so there's that. I'm not too worried about scything through a few thousand random corpses."

"That's because you're not paying attention." Spat a nearby voice. I turned to find Templeton glaring down at the field of zombies. "They aren't there to slow us down, they're there to soak up damage and force us to use our energy before we reach our target. Soul strain and energy depletion might be minimal for one or two of those, but there are about twenty thousand down there. More than a dozen a piece even if we had our full complement of a thousand."

Which made sense. Shit. "Meat shields." I sneered. "Classy." I looked around for our resident expert, who was with us by virtue of us abandoning the fist mountain for this location. I spotted her telltale silver hair and waved her over. "Satala!" I called as I made my gesture. When she got close enough I nodded down to the shambling corpses. "So any idea where these things came from?"

She nodded. "If I had to guess probably the temple. They're most likely people that have come to try to break in over the centuries, maybe some cultists mixed in there." She frowned down at the bodies. "I can't believe my mother would disrespect her faithful in such a way. To have fallen so low. She must truly be suffering."

I personally felt like the mass murder of tens of thousands of Ascendants throughout the known universe was a pretty good indicator of dickishness. Still, it was her mom, so I didn't say that. I just sighed. Callie stepped up beside me, staring down into the valley where the massive black stone temple was housed. It reminded me of all the sub temples, but bigger, though there was some space warping going on from what I could see of the zombies walking patterns.

"This is going to suck." She said matter of factly. "It won't be as simple as twenty or thirty a piece. A lot of us don't have the skillset for mass carnage. We need to carve through them in the most efficient way possible, but without burning up our energy." She paused, thinking it over. "I think our best bet is physical combat. Rely on weapons to tear through them as quickly as we can."

In the end, we decided to charge the horde and wipe them out manually on the way inside. Jessie agreed to charge everyone up as they entered, effectively erasing any physical drain and undoing the damage from the trap. Of course, this was all predicated on no one getting injured in the fight, but it wasn't like we could wait. The ritual would trigger in a few hours and we needed some time to set up.

Yvette had some last minute alterations she wanted to make to the temple to minimize Suvaya's power when she manifested, something she hadn't expected to have time to do. Satala's information about the ritual had been invaluable to us so far.

So, with that said, we made our way down into the horde as a group, spreading out to present a single long front with plenty of room between group so we could clean them all up. I spun my staff up as we approached. "Is it just me, or are you kind of excited about this?" I asked my girlfriend casually.

She chuckled. "This part? Yeah. We haven't been in a real fight as a team like this in a while. The whole godslaying thing is a bit intimidating, but the coming fight should be good." As she spoke, a small subsection of the horde broke off and started to surround us.

Offering my hand, I grinned at her. "Well then, may I have this dance?" She laid her hand daintily in mine and I pulled, spinning her into a twirl. As she slid behind me she dropped into my shadow, vanishing from the field of battle. With a bellow of joy, I waded into the melee. As a regular mechanism of her ability her shadow port didn't strain her much over short distances, so using it for positioning should be fine.

Waiting for them to clumsily stumble into range, I saw Callie appear inside a group with her daggers. I lashed out in the low high combo move I'd learned earlier, sprawling one corpse into two other as Callie neatly severed their spines at the neck and the tendons behind their knees. A followup smash pulped their heads after she disabled them as she moved in to the next one.

I'd forgotten how nice it was to fight like this, the bond feeding me everything I needed to know alongside my understanding of my partner, losing the flow of battle as I blended seamlessly into her combat style and she into mine. Even with the new additions to our fighting styles we had Balam as a common element and combined with the bond we were easily able to keep up with each other.

Zombies aren't particularly smart, so we didn't need to do anything but play meat grinder. I could see Gabriel's people riding through the crowd, literally herding them toward us so we could cut them down. A few of the other groups that had proven particularly effective took up the same position, while the less slaughter oriented waited at the edges of the melee's picking off stragglers.

Step, shift, backspin. Attack, defend, counter. The forms that Willow had shown me were useful and versatile, and stupid clumsy zombies were an ideal training mechanism to improve. One would think that trying to learn complex patterns of attack while working around my girlfriend would be tough, but in fact it made it easier for me to comprehend the style.

Not only did I have my own experience and senses, our combat styles were intertwining perfectly. Through the bond I could feel her reactions to the moves I was making, and even sense her own responses before she made them, allowing me to adjust small imperfections in my combat flow. Callie's daggers worked with her Balam mastery surprisingly well too, the circular patterns of Balam not contradicting the striking maneuvers my girlfriend had learned.

The biggest benefit of the fight though was Callie's perspective allowing me to feel out what Willow meant about leverage. Every attack, every defense, all of them were vectors of force, acting on someone or something. With my staff I had a level that could enable me to act on those forces. Not energy, at least not yet, but physical forces and forms. A stab of the staff into the ground and then a snap could redirect a zombie into another, or into the path of a blow.

As I fought, I activated my overlay, and I felt all the disparate elements of my combat style congeal into one whole. My staff art, my stats, my experience, my instincts, as all merged into one big tapestry of information, and as I saw it, I found a Path forward. Striding through battle, slightly shifting the tide of battle for maximum effect. Fatewalker. This was possible because I was at an important point in history, granted, and even outside this battle I was involved in a historic task, but at this moment, I was ALL the way in.

My Path shifted and so did the overlay, and suddenly it was guiding me, showing me the way. I took two steps and then slammed my staff into the dirt, leveraging a chunk of earth up into the face of a zombie as the end came up and over, splitting one's head. Then the back end slammed in reverse, smashing in the nasal bone as my next blow shattered an ankle.

The zombie with the ankle toppled over and tripped another that fell into the backswing of my attack as Callie shredded one coming at my back without me ever needing to turn around. Callie wasn't on my Path, but she was keeping up with my movements at least. Finally though, the last blow landed, and as I turned there was no one. Gabriel called from across the field of bodies. "We're through, let's go everyone, time is wasting."

I blinked, looking around to see that yes, we'd demolished all of them. Granted, they were garbage tier undead, but still, I'd expected it to take more than a few seconds. "Shane!" Yelled Callie as she grabbed my hand. "Come on, we need to get inside. Satala said that when we start tinkering with the ritual the shields on the central temple will go up. If we don't get there in time we'll be stuck out here while the others are left to fight Suvaya alone."

Grinning as I came down from the weirdly charged state I'd been in, I blinked in shock as I casually checked on my progress before going in. While there was no stat gain, I realized that my soul had progressed a full FOUR percent during that fight. I was up to twenty three percent of the way through orange after that little Path experience. Granted, some of that might have been from my small Path interactions not too long ago, but still.

I made a mental note to check with Zeke and possibly Abel about this later. If the Path was helpful to soul strengthening I needed to know about it. This wasn't like just aimlessly training, my soul didn't feel strained right now, it felt ENERGIZED. It might be hard to enter that state, but if it let me train longer and more efficiently I should definitely look into this Path thing more. It explained how Abel's was so strong too.

There would be time for that later though, for the moment we had other things to do. Callie and I raced into the temple, finding Yvette poised outside the door to a room similar to the conduit rooms, except instead of a coffin, there was an altar in the middle of the room, underneath a skylight partially ringed by mirrors made of the rare silver we'd found in the mining complex, all aimed through a smoky and unusual lens that overlooked the room.

Around us, the symbols on the ground glowed a blazing silver-white, and Yvette stepped forward with a grim look. "The buffers didn't last as long as calculated, we only have a short time to finish the final alterations. Everyone, I need you to do exactly as I say. If you follow instructions, we can finish this in time to prevent ourselves from being killed."

My battle joy from earlier faded, replaced by resolve. Yvette started point out spots where we needed to be, positioning dozens of us for this one last push to prepare. As she did, those not involved took up their own positions, readying invocations to use to slow down the monstrous entity we were helping bring into the world.

Weakened, disoriented, unprepared, we'd made sure to arrange every possible obstacle we could in Suvaya's path. We needed to manifest and kill her before she tapped into the energy still in the ritual to create a proper body, or worse got to the mountain and used that. If she fully manifested she could use the severed connections in the ritual to link up to everyone who had gotten any of the Moonglow Dew and then she'd be on her way back to full power and we'd be dead. But hey, no pressure, right?