So, I was saving my intended family from a doppelganger invasion. Which, naturally enough, began to rapidly expand across the kingdom, then the Empire, as more and more of my Marked chimed in about certain people wearing jewelry with amberish gems with dark cores...

I punted the head of a Mana Weaver into a thicker mound of vivus, which accepted it happily. Its Spell Weaver master had been eaten by the Land, its two Staves now blazing white torches over there that no one wanted to get close to, and this fight was over except for the mop-up.

Discussion among the Brotherhood and officers decided that I was going to be fighting warbands with Warp Sorcerers who might bring in Demons, the better to give the Land a snack. Any bands located where I couldn’t get them readily would have such individuals quickly offed by the Brotherhood, who were also encouraged to remove certain elements of leadership for the fighting battalions sweeping in behind.

It was a novel experience for the Brotherhood, coordinating with forces on that scale. Shadowknife had also had me deliver certain messages using amicable Marked, and all the Brothers would soon be on their way to find us.

The doppelganger invasion was confirmed within hours when one of my Scouts, who happened to have retired to a prominent position as a smuggler in his hometown, offed one of them that very night, a rival he didn’t have a good opinion of anyway. The confirmation literally exploded across the Empire, chatboxes in my head were lighting up as efforts were coordinated to find and kill them with sudden savagery.

After all, there’d been both arcane and divine Casters among my Marked, who were extremely good at getting the word out to non-Marked.

Brother Firesword had Moved the Names of Weep and Cry himself, a Void Diffusion Pattern unique to them whose existence also seemed to turn him on his ear. He could Diffuse the magic of his enemies, or even rote gold, into his Voidbound Gear?!

As I told him as he left, fully intent on exploding the Arsenal and Slaughter on his new Sword to the limit, it was little things that turned things on their heads, taken over time and given power. He had a long view and could discern easily what those influences meant, but he’d never thought the principle would be applied to him!

People were moving. Elves were relaying that several Chapters of knights had troops shifting along the edge of the Sidhete, heading north, accompanied by Aruans, Harsites, and Valusar, along with White Hands of Amana. Adventurers were bringing their own styles of battle along, while mercenaries seeking loot and glory were coming to either get paid or rob their opponents of wealth in an arena where no one cared if they did so.

Other forces aligned to more Neutral powers, such as conquering Imprus, grim Hurn, and even dark Huul were sending agents to investigate, as the Warp had no friends among the other gods. Powerful servants of many deities were moving to oppose them.

Brigandry was going to rise as a result, as forces that should be allied would still prey upon one another if they could. Those who could be roped in and work together honorably might qualify to be Marked, maybe not. It wasn’t like I couldn’t restrict their use of the Markspace if I was so inclined.

But a good chunk of them were my Ironblood. Those whose roots were not too deep, and who were not too needed where they lived, were coming to join me, and I would welcome them once again, even as I had to start figuring out ways to support them. Such things hadn’t worried me in Dream, but logistics was just another game at this point, and I was already starting to make money in mercantile fashion as awareness of distant markets and products was already starting to produce movement in them, and the resulting coin would be money I could use.

After all, a few hundred Marked pooling their wealth to start forming a trade route to supply the fighters up here in the North had already begun. The Churches, Orders, and nobles were opening purses, and startled to find both elves and men cooperating to an unusual degree to get the route open and moving.

There had been a few elves, dwarves, and hynfolk among my Ironblood. Not many, all of them people who had lived among humans for generations and so could be drawn into a human’s Dream. But ‘not many’ were still contacts into non-human clans and families, which could blossom very quickly into additional backing. When Marked negotiated with one another for mutual benefit to all, terms were settled quickly, and things swung into motion.

I had Fall in hand as I strode through the battlefield. Tremble was Singing next to me, amplifying my Warlord bonus... across two other battlefields and a hundred Scouts spread across the map.

The Glory awards were much less than offing a Greater Demon, but consistent, and not kill-stealing in the slightest, passing over the direct Karma earned by the men doing the fighting.

I popped off some fool who thought Morphing his arm into a bear claw was something awesome, and a quarrel in the eye contested that.

Briggs had a field day taking down some guy using Transmutation who found he couldn’t teleport away, or fly away even when shapechanged, and tossing boom-pow spells at Briggs was next to useless. Briggs had even been nice and not thrown Endure at him, just crunching his way through the guy’s guards, splitting the skull of his smoke-breathing nightmare, and then let the guy bounce off his Armor Wut a couple times before tapping his skull lightly and sending brains spraying into the vivic mist all about.

These elite troops really didn’t seem to like dying to a Hammer wielded by a Neanderthal, either. Briggs, on the other hand, really enjoyed caving in their important bone structures with relentless blows. That guy with a fencing sword, that had been hilarious when he tried to parry and dodge, got his chest compressed back to his spine, and Estemar had tripped a fellow and impaled him through the throat on the protruding estoc... who uses estocs? Nitwit...

The smart ones tried to run away, and learned about elven magic and arrows the hard way, especially combined. Even minor combat magic is a very nasty thing when used by a hundred Casters at once...

Amateur song-smiths were competing to add stanzas to Tremble, We Come, and Tremble was naturally vetting them all and quite happy to add them to the collected verses. After all, if we were going to fight the same foe over and over, an hours-long section of applicable stanzas wasn’t at all out of place.

Of course, when the Bards found out just how many stanzas of the Song there were, and in how many languages, they were kind of stunned, but that was a different matter.

Half my head was running fights and allocating chatboxes, leaving me to fight and wonder about how all this had happened with the other half.

Everything had scaled very quickly, indeed. Sure, a Deep Ten was capable of a lot of stuff... but I was now engaged in international business, espionage, counterintelligence, message transferal, as well as directing multiple engagements in this theater of combat.

I really hadn’t expected this level of responsibility so fast and soon. I was hoping to at least get to full growth before that happened. Granted, with all these elves around I didn’t feel short, and I was rather impossibly strong for my size, but still...

This was a lot, and I was doing a lot.

But when your mental Stats are 30+... well, it wasn’t overwhelming. Sure, people had high expectations of me, but they were naturally configured to expecting results of someone in the low 20’s, at the very best. The fact I could do better made me awesome, but I hadn’t really pulled out all the stops and taken advantage of my Stats.

I still Sang at morning, evening, and midnight. That was my thing, my pacing, keeping myself and my lads centered. The gods couldn’t hear me, but they could hear Tremble and the boys, so it was cool with me. The belief that the gods were there, listening and taking action, was a very powerful motivation, so I was totally on top of making sure that got through to my boys.

Jumping into the game of thrones Out There, well, that had been totally unexpected. It was a resource allocation game that STARTED with four thousand different moving parts, and those different parts all had connections and resources of their own, families, friends, and countrymen. I wasn’t going to exactly tell them to commit treason... but nobody had problems with making money, and if my communication system was faster than anyone else, that was my advantage.

Indeed, forming a news service was definitely something on the agenda. I’d need more Marked to do it right, and travel more...

I was also receiving a very quick education in what was nominally Local History, for the whole continent. After all, I had some very highly educated people among my Marks, who weren’t averse to going to libraries or talking to other informed people about things, and assembling a rapid history of the whole continent which I stuffed into a corner of my mind the curious could access if needed.

In no time at all, I basically knew the names and faces of everyone in power basically everywhere on the continent. I had hierarchy lists, I had genealogies, I had organization structures.

I had Marked who wanted to be about and Doing Things, too.

Never had I gotten in so much gaming, and never with such total realism. I had a kingdom-building economic engine thing going on, effectively an intelligence organization masked behind a mercantile empire that was literally springing up out of nowhere everywhere at once.

I had an overview that probably no non-Divine entity in the world had. Given the effect of Diplomacy, Bluff, Sense Motive, Intimidate, and Martial Lore Ranks that I had, the strategies and tactics I could come up with for the meta-game of factions were dizzying. I had also designed Sama as a go-for-broke, supremely determined character whose primary attribute was endurance, mental and physical.

Living through Nightmare had driven that into my bones. I simply didn’t know how to give up now, and there was no way I was going to stop.

I was also a Human/4, an Atlantean Human, even if I was a Hagchild. My racial drives were off the chart, and the way Human/1’s and /2’s responded to me adjusted accordingly.

I could not walk away and make this about me. Conversely, no one could look at me and say I was doing this for myself, either. The stuff I was doing for myself I was literally doing for myself, by myself.

What I wanted was to get to full size, finish out my Gear (a never-ending mess), get any and all of my back Karma paid off... and kill anything in existence that threatened the human race, maybe breaking Ten in the process.

What everyone else wanted is for me to lead them on a life that was larger-than-life, with a clear focus on doing things that bettered the world for everyone... because those were the people I Marked. They knew I was enormously capable, and they were willing to serve me to benefit from those capabilities.

------

As the last of this Warpband was put to vivus, I turned my eyes south.

-Brothers,- I /asked nicely in their private chatbox, where I had been learning a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff, -Do you know what is going on in the Central Kingdom of Rosencrux?-

It was a dying Empire. The Marked I had there weren’t many in number, because the place didn’t breed them. It was like the end of the Ottoman Empire; a place bloated with corruption, cronyism, and decadence, wallowing in centuries of wealth and the trappings of power, rotting from within as rivalries between nobles prevented anything from happening. The seams of conflicts between families, races, and castes boiled and seethed, barely held in control by the iron fist of the legions of the imperial throne, and the knightly Orders who supported them.

The Good Churches were failing or shadows of what they had once been. Imprus led the decay with its stratified hierarchy and beliefs catering to the entrenched nobility at all levels, pushing away the egalitarianism of the Good Churches and becoming more accepting of the Dark ones. The worship of Huul was quietly gaining ground among the more merciless of the imperial troops, opening the door to veneration of darker powers that the Church of Harse no longer had enough presence to stop. The cities seethed with the trademarks of sin beneath the wealthy veneer, and dark currents flowed through the Empire from them.

The Empire was sagging but mighty yet, no one stupid enough to think they could get through the Four Kingdoms to the First without paying a terrible price... but the energy and drive that had dominated its history was now insular and arrogant.

Something was going on...