Roughly a mile every eight hours. That was how long it took to kill what we needed to kill, to scan who we needed to scan, and to free who needed to be freed.

  Also, to slaughter yet another horde of incoming Eaters ceaselessly circling the inner ridgeline of mountains and chewing through the constant heavy respawns with vim and vigor.

  Realistically we could only get in twelve hours of fighting a day, what with our other obligations, the need to rest and eat, and so forth.

  Sustaining Rings took care of part of that, the Rituals to make them for our followers one of my late night/early morning obligations I also held to. The power of the Rings to replicate the go-go-go energy of adventurers before the Fall was another one of the things that lured people to us.

  Getting Marks and Soul Tats was another, too. Plus we had Fiuns and freed Viamontians to usher off to places of safety that didn’t involve Eaters coming around to feed on them. The backtrail we cleared was enough to shepherd most of them to safety for the day, although tomorrow could well bring another Eater horde through.

  The retreat through the Jumpgates didn’t bring us directly back to Eastwatch first. Instead, we went to Ayabar’s Tower, and the Fiun within it.

  Ayabar himself was among the maddened Fiun who were still stuck in respawns within the place, or perhaps it was a Deathstone return effect, it was actually hard to tell with the condition many of them were in, hovering between life and death and half-animated by the rampant magical energies unleashed by their maddened state. The Regeneration I put each of them through actually had to restore ravaged bodies often stripped to the bone and only kept alive by constant flows of magic.

  That said, we cleared Ayabar’s Tower completely of Spawn Points, and freed every Fiun within, all of them captive souls with names, from the System.

  Then we Jumped everyone to Eastwatch.

  The Fiun were shaken and still recuperating from their ordeal, even if the nature of the System made it all timeless and dreamlike to them, scarce able to remember what had happened to them, only that it had.

  It really didn’t matter, as the first priority was getting them out of there. The freed knights peeled off their armor and weapons, throwing them into a great pile, and watched numbly as the things slowly faded from sight, disappearing as the ectoplasm they were made of turned unstable as it left them.

  They were of House Nenati now, with a bloodline that came only from Dream, regardless of who they had once been.

  That naturally didn’t mean we expected them to not reach out to former family members, ties and memories being all that. But the Oaths and the Geases which bound them made it clear those old ties were not binding, and placing old family over new was betrayal to Briggs and to those Oaths.

  Betraying that Oath meant fading away like their swords and armor as the Geas ravaged them. He wouldn’t have to do anything, and if they respawned somewhere as a mindless minion, they’d be vivisized without exception in the future.

  House Nenati was growing in size very rapidly, it was…

  -------

  “The Ducal Sword, eh…”

  Princess Kristie was leaning against the new wall I was erecting across the bottom of the long rise atop which Eastwatch had been built. It was twenty feet thick and thirty feet high, big enough that no Eater horde could clamber up enough to come over it, with double walkways, archer slits, and I even built a lever-action ramp and set of stairs that could be cycled up and down to accommodate people coming in and out from the downslope of the other side.

  “It respawned continually, like a lot of other Quest items. However, that mechanic has to be based on the real Sword, somewhere. I figure when a Null grabs hold of it, that will be the real Sword, and there will be no others,” I told her, as more stone flowed up out of the ground. I had about a hundred feet left to go.

  The whole company was strolling the top of the place, the Silyun knights shaking their head at how rapidly I came up with fortifications like this.

  A number of Nenati had dutifully stayed behind to man the walls for new arrivals. I’d thrown up barracks and put down Eternal Flames to heat the places, giving them a measure of comforts they’d not had for two decades and more.

  They weren’t there to fight, just to raise and lower the ramp for new arrivals, and thumb their noses if stray Eaters wandered in this direction, beyond the random Summons visible in the hundreds from atop the wall.

  “I… don’t want it or need it. I’m not Eleonora, I WAS Eleonora,” she said quietly. “She feels like the closest sister I could ever have, not ME,” she tried to explain, and I just held up a hand.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I did not so presume you would want power over a Viamontian House like that. What I did presume is that the Sword was defiled and used to cut out her heart and send it to her father.

  “I presume you wanted to purify it by doing the same to King Varicci II before returning it to the Bellenesse.”

  There was just a moment of a pause, and then eight canines gleamed in feral appreciation.

  “That, that I will do!” she agreed, her voice all razors. She looked downslope, along the path we’d be carving out today.

  It had been agreed that clearing a route to Eastwatch from Ayabar’s Tower was the proper way to do things, instead of returning straight to the hardpoint in the pass. That way the Fiun and Viamontians we freed would have a relatively clear route to travel to safety from further Eater hordes.

  Good people, doing things right. Freeing them only to send them into the jaws of an Eater horde was just stupidity.

  Black and yellow posts to hammer into and signify Sealed Summons Points were now stacked up. We’d not Marked our previous ones from the day before, an oversight on our part, but we had the points known in Markspace and they could be located with Detect Location.

  We just had to wipe out the Eater hordes so the Marker Teams could come in and do their jobs, and there were so, so many Summons to either clear or free from servitude.

  Weeks of work, even by committed teams.

  Regeneration was V Valence, which was fifty mana to Renew the Slot I spent to use it. Doing ten of them basically wiped my Mana Pool and reduced me to Aurora Stance for twenty minutes to get it all back. Thera and Nippo had to alternate with me, and then there was the matter of the Geases, also V’s, backing the Oaths to Briggs the Viamontians made. Kris had an impressive Mana Pool I could draw on, but she had to buy back the Mana point by point by sacrificing Constitution to do so, then healing back up over several hours or by spending Vigor uses.

  Thus, there were limits on how many of them we could free every day. Also, every Spawn Point we Sealed was one less cluster of Summons the Eaters could eat, which sped up their rotations and brought them into conflict with us that much faster.

  Well, it was what it was.

  “Master Oswald will lead you there. I presume it won’t take very long, and you can just Teleport home once you are done.”

  “I’ll do it when you Divine for the Mick. Fuzzy has already said he’d be available for the attempt, if needed.”

  “I do pity anyone who gets in their way,” I nodded to that, more stone flowing up out of the ground and closing towards the cliff to the side, which I would Shape mirror-smooth to make sure no silly ideas of going around the wall with mundane means was feasible, and extend the wall down at a tapering able to reinforce that.

  Not an amateur at making fortifications was I, I was not.

  -------

  Return progress was swift, the patterns already worked out. Wisps were shot down before we even got close. Skeletons were assigned to the two big Lugian Vanguards, who bashed them down with the hammer side of their Axes and their big Shields.

  Undead, Glacial Golums, Penguins, and Ruschk were sent to Kris’ Knights, who went devoted Firephasing to handle those Spawns. The Silyun Knights took point for all the Eaters, with the Roaches softening them up once they were pulled, although the Knights definitely didn’t need the help to kill them, only to kill them faster.

  Banderlings and Shades were killed by whoever was closest and convenient to do so. Actually, the first few Summons were allocated to us mages for Naming Karma, cheap Isparian War Magic enough to do the job for Thera and Nippo, Darts for me.

  For Viamontians and Fiuns, the Mick, Oswald, Kris, and Briggs took point on with Mercied Weapons. If they passed the Assay, and not all of either groups did, Thera and Nippo handled the Regenerates, alternating so one would go into Aurora Stance to regain mana and the other would cover the Melee teams.

  If not, the Mercied were couped, culled, and set free in the other way.

  I covered the Geases, to keep the load on Kris down. Having to pop ten or more points of Con damage to regain the mana she spent was a horrendous load on her, and she naturally shared with me what it felt like to tear open the basic vitality of your body to convert it into an internal store of magical energy.

  I asked before taking her mana, and I shared it with her. Bondmage duty, I wasn’t ever going to take mana from her lightly, and she appreciated it. The reason she poured Karma into her Null Druid and Null Shifter Classes was to have more Mana for me, on top of what the Isparian System allowed her to accumulate in her Null Mana Pool.

  She was hauling around as much or more mana as any Caster, but had no means to access it or use it, save through our Bond. The biggest downside was that she couldn’t Renew it, she had to sacrifice Constitution points to regain what Mana she expended.

  But, the fact remained that she could DO it, that she did have basically over two thousand points of Mana squirreled away between Valences, Slots, and Mana Pool, and she could power a whole lot of magic on demand if she needed to.

  I also accented the Assay V with Detect Non-Good V, which was actually a fairly quick way to rule out a bunch of the Viamontians, and even some of the Fiuns. Soulless Viamontians were a particular hue of Blue-Brown Lawful Neutral unthinking obedience, and similar Fiuns were a counterpart shade of insane Gray-Brown Chaotic Neutrality reflecting their madness.

  Evil Viamontians we simply weren’t going to bring back, and those numbered at least a third of the royalist clans we discovered, with Red and Ruby particularly strong among the Corcosi’s direct vassals. Such folk were sent off to the fates they’d earned, as we didn’t have the time or inclinations to convert them now.

  The number of Bellenesse faithful on the Island of Ruin was almost non-existent. The people of Silyun had lost far fewer troops than the royalists, but they’d still lost some. The general agreement was that the Viamontian soldiers scattered around Silyun and its islands would likely number more of the Bellenesse forces, while all these were almost all royalists who’d died in the service of Varicci, with the rare Silyunites those who’d taken up service with the king reluctantly after Eleonora had been killed.

  There were numbers who considered their oaths of loyalty to still be in effect, and so preferred to die rather than break those promises.

  Princess Kristie gave them a sword and cut them all down without emotion or exception. They Burned away, nothing left behind of them but a patch of clear ice or white stone on the ground.

  ============================

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