Chapter 16-414: A Walk near the Great Wall

Flensing claws splattered against his Sun and faded to nothingness. Well, it looked like they burned away as the Qi hit the pure proto-magic of his Sun and broke apart at the contact, but the effect was basically exactly the same as hitting a Null, just a little more overbearing.

They just disappeared when they hit a strong Null, which was more frustrating.

The Daoist who’d just launched the attack at him made a rather sickened face and turned to run, confident he could dodge something as big and heavy as a hammer.

A Hammer coming in faster than an arrow in a One Throw, not so much.

Bone shattered with a sickening crack, and the pulped body of the guy in black went flying limply as he failed to dodge in time. Even his vented Qi couldn’t soak the entire hit.

Just one more nail to be Hammered...

His other hand lashed backwards.

The Cultivator leaping out of the shadows at his upper back, two hooked knives out, ran right into the edge of Drum, and was clotheslined instantly, like he’d slammed his face into a steel I-beam. Dark Qi vented to take the slamming hit as the assassin was caught haplessly in mid-strike.

Briggs turned the Shield before the assassin could fall, and drove it and him down into the stony ground with a crunch and a splatter. Caught between adamantine Shield and the ground, the Daoist killer’s skull gave way and went splat.

Fire hissed along the edge of his Shield, searing the wound shut. Those coming behind would bleed the corpse dry, then vivisize it.

Drum beat happily as Endure tumbled back to Briggs’ hand. Every bone in his back shattered, the paralyzed Daoist lay unconscious as Briggs walked past him, covering more distance with every stride than it looked like, rooted as a mountain with every step, his armor making him a juggernaut striding across this field.

The Daoists had tried setting up avalanches here for ambushes, and his group had simply set them off ahead of time, filling the valley with rubble and dust that lightfooters had no problem moving over... and if the Daoists could fly, that only made them targets for multiple shooters totally willing to pick them off up there.

The teams were leapfrogging one another, always under arcs of cover fire, moving with the discipline of seasoned professionals under his watching eye, keeping their lines and fire control right on point. It looked slow, but it wasn’t, as these men were all Sixes and higher, with enhanced movement options ranging from lightfoot to flight. The crawl across the valley floor was moving at the pace a normal man could trot, and they were missing nothing.

There was some low Singing going on, too, as the Minstrels hummed along to Sama’s Singing in the distance, and his own Warlord Presence loomed over them all with dire focus, tracking, charting, nudging this way and that... and alerting people to threats around them through their own senses and positions that they hadn’t even noticed themselves.

Camouflaged ambush points, stealth attackers, snipers... the Daoists had been forced to urgently learn some tactics as they were slowly forced back, back, and back yet again.

The Chinese were very intent on clearing and destroying the Great Wall, whose Shroudzone was one of the anchorpoints of the Daoist defenses. There had been a major assault on the Shanhai Pass endpoint of the Great Wall, which had been defended by millions of slaughtered civilians from the lands about, as well as all those who died in the making of it. It had taken weeks to burn them all down... entirely by design, of course. Thousands of Chinese made Six before the first of them set foot onto the ancient configuration of the fortress there, and the Glory Award of victory swept over them with a headiness that had reduced many of them to tears.

Now they were opening up the Great Wall here in the east, and peeling open the defenses of the Sects relying on those to secure their flanks.

He looked over to where teams of Chinese and largely foreign Powered were cooperating to reduce the stone of the Great Wall to white powder that could not be rebuilt. The teams that had fought during the night would swap out for the demolition teams during the day, rotating on a continual basis.

Stopping Cultivators from coming in was the job of everyone else.

The Daoists had been pushed off of and away from Korea entirely. Great populations of civilians had been evacuated from their land, and from them more men and women had risen to fight.

The push to kill all the Cultivators had slowed. Perhaps the Daoists thought their will was weakening, because there had been many losses here, healing or no.

No, the losses weren’t keeping pace with the recruits coming in; they were just buying time for Shroudzones to be destroyed.

There was an alert from Notting, whose Commune with Nature was sweeping past them and alerting them of the position of the Qi-spewing Daoists. It was nothing like Traveler’s huge range, merely a ten-mile circle... but that was enough to alert them to many traps and line positions, Formations put in place, and the like, all painted into The Map and exploited.

A slender dark form fell out of the shadow of a tumbled boulder ten yards away, ridden to the ground by another dark figure whose Helices swirled around him. Gluttons behind them were notified and hurrying this way as the Void Brother rose to his feet from the fresh corpse, the rainbow colors of his Helices playing over his Sword.

“Brother,” Briggs rumbled, not breaking stride. “What’s a Firesword doing off the Plateau?”

Technically, the Void Brothers could be anywhere, but so many Powered around here made them superfluous to some extent, while they were appreciated and lauded up on the Plateau, where they were basically the strike leaders of hundreds of Forsaken each.

Also, the Phasma sucked, but it wasn’t nearly as revolting as the Qi-miasma around Cultivators.

“A bunch of Wayfists and us had the urge to come down here and take a look at things,” the young Chinese man replied. Like many of the Forsaken here, he was a Human Main, with nothing exceptional about him physically. Naturally, being a Void Brother meant he’d had no problem Leveling, even with an average starting Stat Line, and he’d put the work into getting as good as he could be, given the circumstances. Like most of the newest Brothers, he’d also been Awakened at Seven, so there was no going back and redoing things with Class Levels.

It didn’t matter much, in the end. It just kept the less Talented Voids very focused on their end goals, and they Leveled quite quickly as a result, doing with higher Levels what the Talented were claiming with breadth.

It also meant they were more relatable to normal people who had the same type of configuration, and didn’t have the crazy Stat line that came with tons of Secondary Classes getting to Four.

The ones going Deep, almost always the oldest and most experienced of the Voids, didn’t begrudge them the Levels at all. They just appreciated the help and the workload being spread out.

They were also heavily bemused by the veritable inundation of new Voids being Awakened. Sure, they only occurred one in ten thousand. When you have a million Chinese alone Leveling up for that magical Seven, that is a LOT of Void Brothers. And since most of them were Human Mains, Leveling was not Stat-reliant, and so not an issue for their more talented Classed Seniors.

Fireswords were the most common branch of the Brothers, exactly twice as common as any other. Wayfists, rather rare by the numbers coming in from other continents, were the second most common among Orientals. The Chinese also had the largest orc population among them, and so the largest urkhar population as a result, meaning more Ancientaxes than others.

The Daoists had twinged early on that hyn made horrible Daoist Cultivators, and would have wiped them out if they weren’t such good farmers. They were still heavily repressed and abused, and the Shadowknives that rose from them had definite mean streaks for all sorts of Cultivators.

Alas, the Shadowknives and Ancientaxes had severe callings to the stuff up on the Plateau, as did the rarer Mindrings. Extradimensional Aberrants, ancient creatures of Leng, and phobos of dreams hit the radars of those Orders, and so Brothers from across the world had come here to fight up in Tibet.

Yes, creatures of Leng, especially moon beasts and gugs, were present up there now, as well as numbers of twisted Leng natives (possibly made from the Tibetans) and even ghasts, much to the displeasure of the Ghoul Sages, and they wore the sign of the King in Yellow... although the true Yellow Sign had yet to make an appearance, and likely wouldn’t have much power here, under the Shroud.

And unlike the phobos, when those creatures died, they didn’t come back.

That meant that the core had been reached, and was being weakened. Like wolves long searching for a hint of blood, a glimpse of the end was now in sight... and it also meant the Brothers weren’t as needed up there.

The Fireswords were the most general-purpose of the Brothers, going anywhere The Land needed some help, and specifically dealing with anything not generically mortal, of which class both the Powered and Cultivators fell into. The Wayfists concerned themselves with chi-use... and Qi-usage in opposition.

So, there was something going on that tripped both bars.

“To get your attention, that means that something has come into alignment among the Sects. To the south or north?” Briggs asked reasonably, letting his Wisdom thoughtstream do the talking while he continued to monitor the sweeping advance. He glanced at the Brother’s Sword, and recognized it as his own work, belatedly identifying the younger man as the Brother who called himself Black Rat.

Rats were tough survivors who could get in anywhere. Briggs didn’t find the name funny at all. The kid was already a Ten, and you don’t laugh at Tens. Given he had to have done it all within the last six months, he could call himself whatever he damn well pleased!

Black Rat turned slightly, and vaguely waved his arm in two-thirds of a circle.

Briggs’ eyes narrowed thoughtfully. The gesture included pretty much all Sect areas south of the Wall, and a few to the north of it.

“They are either communicating with systems or running messages across the Shroudzones during the day,” he rumbled thoughtfully. “My guess would be some sort of grand killing Formation between the lot of them.”

There weren’t any Sects within twenty miles of here, and they were separated by dozens of leagues... or right next door, if there were major population centers.

“We believe they have Summoned in Daoists from outside the Shroud. Perhaps only a few, but knowledgeable enough to do this,” Black Rat agreed.

They couldn’t monitor everything, and ever since the Sects had been getting steadily eroded away and pushed back, they had resorted to more extreme measures. There were tales of even those with weak meridians being conscripted now, and put to work supporting the more talented Daoists. More Qi was more Qi, after all, and being less carefree was only appropriate when millions of Chinese wanted you dead.

The Brothers didn’t socialize well, and the trait was the same across all of them. Whatever made them Voids turned them into natural loners. Their Markspace was focused largely on communication among themselves and their individual tasks by default. It was very unusual for them to be in communication with so many on a coordinated basis, like they were up on the Plateau.

So, Briggs wasn’t too surprised when the Black Rat here reported in person, rather than poking his head out of their Markchat and informing everyone blithely.

“You want Lady Traveler’s help?” Briggs asked. He had his job here, and information-gathering, scouting, and disruption, as well as wholesale slaughter on a massive scale, wasn’t his task. It didn’t mean he couldn’t do those things, but you didn’t walk around in Shieldplate carrying a big Hammer and Shield when you did that-

He lifted Drum, and a three-hundred-pound sharpened rock moving over two hundred miles an hour caromed off the adamantine Shield loudly, flying wildly into the air.

He centered the location of the Daoist who’d sent it flying, and three sniper Rifles on overwatch cracked within a second.

Golden-black-scarlet blood spurted out of thin air, and another Daoist in black Sect garb stumbled out of near-invisibility, clutching his shoulder as Qi vented to soak the killshots.

Endure roared in to relieve him of his pain and an intact skull at the same time. The Daoist hit the ground at about the same time as his killing missile.