206 Chapter Two Hundred and Six – Wait, You’re GIVING us a Time Skip?! (1/2)
”You know, this is not nearly as fun as I thought it would be,” Briggs commented, slumping down to a seat on a pile of fallen rubble. He kicked the head of a hacked carnoraptor out of the way with a sigh.
”These should not be here. Their time is long past... something must have brought them up from dark lands lost to time below, or they were drawn here,” Brother Ancientaxe mused, sitting down next to the Ancient youth nearly as tall and broad as he was.
”Awwww, watsamatter, Briggs, you not get to dig into every hole and house and sniff out all the buried gold and ancient treasures that endured the millennia?” I asked him, skating over to take up my own perch.
”Snake!” he pointed out. I aimed Fall and held down the trigger as a series of bolts flashed out, each one manifesting after the one before it hit. The thirty-foot viper coursing in on us had great holes punched into it, and couldn't get into cover before the shots walked up its slithering diamond-scale patterns and blew its neck apart. Sparkie zipped over to pummel the head a couple of times and make sure it stayed down, its body writhing around on top of the T-Rex sized carnosaur that had somehow managed to survive here, and which Brother AA had opened up like a fish with severe disregard for its threat level.
”I haven't seen any real loot at all,” he admitted, glancing around while barely moving his head. ”I mean, seriously... there's even been few coins fallen into the soil and the dirt.” He took a long step, drove a knife-hand into the ground, and pulled up a badly weathered copper coin between his thick fingers. ”I don't know if someone vacuumed up the good stuff a long time ago, or it got burned away, or what... but we should have stumbled into something forgotten in a corner, and there's been nothing but scrap too rusted away to be worth anything, and certainly nothing magical.”
AA nodded thoughtfully as Briggs sat back down. ”That is true. This was a city of high magic. There should have been little magical trinkets and toys scattered here and there, a show of the city's wealth and joy. I have sensed nothing like that. Moreover... I've not seen any collected signs of the city's inhabitants, or a collective defense. Granted, the numbers of dead creatures may have obscured their bones and remnants, but there should have been some sign...”
”Well, that all depends on whether or not something removed them,” I pointed out cheerfully. ”This was a big city, and that was a lot of corpses that didn't get burned.”
”Are you saying that someone came in and looted the city long ago?” he asked, crimson eyes narrowing. ”Who?”
”Well, they would have had to be merciless, natives who could ignore the planar instability, magically gifted to sniff things out, inclined to dark magic, and, oh, probably with indefinitely long lifespans. Also probably experienced combatants, given the threat level of the native life, probably with knowledge of the powers behind the conflict so they could get into position... I wonder who fits that bill, who is known to be in the city right now?”
Briggs grimaced. ”The Hags?”
”Uh-huh. Remember how Errant said he killed Zouma, a stormcrone, and she was a Legendary?”
”Yeah, she had some incredible pool of Health Qi. He had to facepalm her into the side of an air chute for two miles or something to burn it all away,” Briggs nodded. AA's brows lifted in appreciation of the tactic.
”Well, records on the stormcrone only went back about two centuries.” I jerked a thumb towards the middle of the city. ”What you want to bet she built up all that power in the middle areas. You don't become a Legendary with a Qi pool like that without being around for deva's years.
”My personal guess is that they looted they city a long, long time ago, taking advantage of the temporal acceleration fields to do so, and they've been using the wealth to further their plans in the outside world. Just think of what it would cost to attract a Rift of that size here... and to set in motion what they are doing down south.”
”And they animated all the dead?” Brother AA wondered aloud softly.
”They definitely had enough wealth to do it. Any mysterious runs on obsidian in the past five hundred years that all went missing?” I asked him.
”I'm sure if you asked Brother Bonescythe, he'd know.” He looked at the blue sky that was far in the distance, taking its old sweet time catching up to us.
”We're at twenty times normal chronology already, and some of the side zones are even faster,” I informed him. The temporal shift didn't stop my Marks, but I was thinking much faster than everyone outside, so it was like dealing with people in slow motion. Oddly enough, Tremble had no problem shifting her speed of thought, and was actually acting as an intermediary while I learned to do the same.
Briggs whistled under his breath. ”This place is a leveling dream... if you can handle the action.”
”Errant's bringing in some Warlocks, knights, and Priests from Zynozure to take advantage of the accelerated time, and the North Wind is moving the wall up. There's adventurers flocking to the place now, we let word spread. There's no cash loot to speak of, but if you want Karma, this is even better than the battlefield... if you can take the monsters.”
”Grow in power or die.” Brother AA was very familiar with the paradigm. ”As long as they persist in the outer areas, and have good teamwork, they should be fine.”
”So, we're two miles from the city center of the big hole, but we've traveled nearly a hundred.” Briggs sighed. ”It was nine miles after the first mile...”
”You're thinking what I'm thinking,” I agreed, as Brother AA watched us. His eyebrow prodded an explanation. ”It's increasing at ten to the power in miles closer to the center. The next mile is going to be near a thousand miles long.”
”Ten thousand miles to the middle?” He was shocked, despite himself. It was like putting an entire world or more inside the ruins of the city!
”I'm pretty sure we're in the equivalent of a gestating new world here, and the Hags are trying to lord over and control it.” I considered the implications. ”This world won't just go away when we correct the time/space around it, it'll be shunted elsewhere... somewhere the Hags want it to go.”
”They either sold off the souls or are setting themselves up as creation goddesses of a new world,” Brother AA said, his eyes narrowed.
”And if the time acceleration is holding true, the next one there is a hundred times, and the one after that is four to five hundred. You can make some very, very long-term plans with that kind of time and nobody trying to stop you. Even just a year outside gives them centuries within to arrange stuff and make it happen.”
”They could have made an army and marched out of here, practically unassailable,” Briggs noted aloud. ”No way we'd be able to keep up with their numbers...”
”The creatures that are born here are living on primal Qi in the air and at accelerated temporal wakes, drawn from the Ether and Dream. They will not last long outside of such conditions... a month or so at most, aging away quickly and dying. As we break the temporal walls, we essentially are bringing their doom,” Brother AA said authoritatively.
Well, guess the Land had its own way of dealing with those born under grossly unreal conditions.