The couple of lightning bolts coming down might have alerted the Hags and Jotuns that something was going on in a different location. Of course, who would be dumb enough to keep using magic against Void Brothers?

Then a very angry lion flew up as some chuckling Rockborn Clerics turned the foundation to muck, tiiiiiip, and over the Obelisk went.

The ley lines here were a lot less rigid, flowing around and through the place like rivers and streams. Just like before, there were five of them: three heading out to the neighboring zones, one incoming from the Slow Shard, and one going Over There to a palatial estate in some redwood-sized banyan trees.

Poor palatial banyans. I will say that seeing trees that large being tossed a couple hundred yards into the air is pretty cool, and when they came down in all directions it was pretty impressive on the old Wrecked-‘Er Scale.

A thousand miles of ley lines blew into the sky heading north and south, a mere five hundred miles or so clockwise... and then an unknown distance backwards and through the sweeping wall of Slow Time looming over there counter-wise. Who knows just what might be happening in there?

But right now, we’d shut down two of the outgoing ley lines powering this Grand Formation. That meant all their power had necessarily been re-routed holewards into the only remaining ley line there.

Sever that Obelisk, and there would be a massive back-up of the energy being forced through this system. The implications were explosive, in a country-cracking kind of way.

Now, there was just to take out the Hags.

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They were the fastest to get here, of course, a combination of flight and dimensional magic. Of course, they came upon a scene of total slaughter, seeing thousands of butchered Jotuns, canyons splitting the ground, the Obelisk fallen down, vivic fires having a freaking feast, and the Wake punching a hole towards the sun in the sky miles wide and getting wider, cracking open a path towards the inevitable pressure of reality come to reclaim some territory.

Their screams and curses were indeed something to hear, and didn’t fade when they noticed the Lion and its blood was missing.

They were even less happy when they came plummeting down out of the air, and the Brothers, Briggs, and I rolled aside the corpses we were waiting patiently under, and made for them.

Everyone was now fully ego-satiated that they could kill one of these Hags alone, and given we were missing four Brothers who were out there leaving a trail of dead Jotuns miles long behind them, this was a time for as much slaughter as fast as possible.

That meant the Empress Hag had to die. There wasn’t much out there going to survive long when six Void Brothers, Briggs, and I converged on her.

The Hags were actually weaker than the shellycoat Empress’ get had been, being almost uniformly Lesser Exemplars, with a couple with daemonic bloodlines who were obviously ‘princesses’. No Pseudos, for some reason.

Empress Uraskalae was a full Exemplar, of course, even showing a hint of a mane in her scraggly hair from the stolen bloodline. Not that we much cared.

The strategy of the Brothers was pretty simple: feed the crits to me and Briggs. Briggs’ were bigger, but I got more attacks to use them, and both of ours were bigger than theirs.

It didn’t matter how fast she was, or how strong she was. She couldn’t fly, and she couldn’t Teleport. She couldn’t Cast at all, the magic was torn apart before it could ever take form with all those Helices on top of her.

The Health Qi venting off her was almost solid as she screamed in pain from the whirlwinds of attacks pouring in on her. She jerked and fell as Endure nearly cracked her knee before the Health Qi took the injury, and I blurred crits across her neck, up her face, under her ribs, and across her eyes.

Her daughters closed in quickly, some wasting time on spells or buffs, momentarily certain that their mother/grandmother/Empress could survive the horrifying round of attacks taking place long enough for the dozen of them to get in and relieve her.

Three or six attacks each by six Brothers, generating crits fed to Briggs and myself, resulting in six for me and three for him, plus Cutting her Life.

We came together in a splash and spray of hacking, thrusting, sweeping Weapons, coordinated impossibly well, feeding into one another, feeling every dip and dodge we had to make to accommodate one another, aid one another, nobody’s Weapon interfering with anyone else’s.

Her cry of disbelief didn’t do any good, as we blew through six thousand Health Qi in under ten seconds, and suddenly she was in seven pieces and falling apart as we came apart, and came back together on a ten-foot-tall winged and horned demon Hag with living vines for hair.

The Hag Princess had just enough time to gape in disbelief at the ruin of what was left of her mother before she was shredded in an explosion of Health Qi and the gore that came afterwards.

The incoming Hags slowed down precipitously upon seeing that, and our numbers split in both directions. Experience had showed us that the daughters tended to have two or three thousand Health Qi, which one team could burn through incredibly fast.

The Hags lost any magic they had going under violent Helix disassembly, flailed about with ripping claws, but because they hadn’t come in as a group, we swirled around them in flurries of Weapons hungry for Legendary Hags, and tore them apart.

It was about then that the survivors realized that they should run.

Now we fully scattered, and lo, there were eight of them, and eight of us. The Empress was the only one who could have outrun us, and we didn’t even let them get to the newly blasted canyons that were filling with water from all the rivers and marshes the ley lines had blown through.

The Wolf and the Lion came out from cover at that moment, giving Brother Wayfist a hand with his target in classic wolfpack style. Watching the three of them go after her while she was down in a ripping, tearing ball of fury was enough to terrify all the surviving Hags, who had now found they could not run away from their attackers. Their Health Qi could absorb a hit, but not before steps faltered, knees buckled for a moment, hamstrings jerked, and they could only fight against a terrible foe whose motions they could not read, who magic did nothing to, and whose Helices were ripping away their lives.

Briggs was a thoughtful type, and slammed his Fiend-Hag into the one I had selected, sending them both stumbling and eliciting more AoO’s as they caught their balance, even if it took only a heartbeat.

I fed him crits, since his were bigger than mine, and we circled around the winged, tailed, horned, vine-haired Hags who were trying to snap and claw at us and getting nowhere.

Oh, they were also receiving a lot of missile fire to the face, which they didn’t much appreciate, and which opened up more opportunities.

Six melee attacks of mine would generally generate one or two crits, which I fed to Briggs, and when he came in with those 600+ Health hits to the cranium or ribs, there was an explosion of expended Health Qi that was incredibly impressive.

They couldn’t break, couldn’t flee, could only try and spin with us, and try to keep us in sight, as I cut red ribbons across them, and Briggs came in harder than any Jotun had ever hit them.

Then his hit blew through the last of one’s Health Qi and all the way through three hundred-plus Health, caving in her chest. Banefire exploded out inside her skull, and she dropped without an intact bone in her body. Briggs took a long step, spinning and anchoring, and drove Endure into the base of the spine of the other Demon Hag trying to protect her face from the unending stream of missiles plunging into it.

She screamed in agony, I heard the creak of bone rasping under the impact, and hopped forwards, striking up.

Her arms went flying. Five Tails pounded death into her skull, driving her over backwards, and Briggs watched her fall over backwards right down in front of him.

He pounded her chest flat against her spine, and she stopped screaming.

I grabbed Endure on the rebound, and he whipped and let go, while I took a free ride sixty feet away, Quaver and Tremble angling in as Valorous ignited out of Arsenal for that sweet, sweet Spirited Charge and Pounce damage multiplier.

Brother Ancientaxe slammed her arms up and out of the way, and both my Swords drove into his opponent’s chest to the hilt as he also fed me a crit, while Endure hit her face like a steel girder and knocked her over backwards in a splash of crimson Qi twenty feet high. Exemplar Lite Greenhag screeched, which was shut up as she started taking Tails to the face.

AA didn’t even bother to stick around, flitting away to help Bonescythe with his opponent.

Stand disdainfully swatted away her claws, and I butterflied her chest with what looked like a solid wall of spurting Health Qi and banefire intermixing.

Real blood sprayed in every direction, her arms flew off as a side effect, and banefire took her.

I looked back in time to see Briggs charging, heaving Endure at two Hags who were fighting Lightscepter and Waterspear right next to one another, showing a modicum of cunning.

Endure beat, beat a double-tap as it crashed off one skull, ricocheted to the second, and as the opening suddenly sprouted crashing double Rods and a lunging Spear, he was already in midair. The Hammer hit his hand and he came down as Lightscepter fed him a crit; something like eight hundred points of damage vented skywards in a plume of Health Qi, staggering the Hag, who had definitely never expected to be hit so hard in her life.

Briggs hit the ground, sinking nowhere as far down as the Hag who he had just slammed six inches into the tiles of the plaza. He spun around in what looked leisurely motion, but only took a second, and Endure hit her hip.

There was a natural crit of his own. Bone broke, her thigh was now connecting at an obtuse angle, and she lurched over and fell.

Rods crossed across her throat like blades, Helices ripped at her life, and flesh and iron bone parted as Lightscepter’s Test of Faith took off her head.

The other Hag tried to hurl Wavespear aside and flee, seeing she had three opponents to deal with, and instead found herself driving herself right onto his Spear instead as he flowed opposite her motion. She lurched to a halt against the stops on his Spear, and Briggs and Lightscepter came in from the flanks together as she frantically tried to free herself from being impaled.

It took her a bit too long.

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Errant was leading a casual extraction from the city, slaughtering everything in their path while the Jotuns’ leadership was occupied and didn’t really know what was going on. Looting was incidental, mostly limited to crude jewelry and magic, not allowed to slow them down. The company roved out the crude city holewards, heading for the zone border over four hundred miles of marsh, swamp, rivers, and shallow hills away.

The external team of Brothers came sweeping up on them a few leagues outside the city, having ditched their Jotun pursuers by a combination of being more than twice as fast as them and running over the waters, instead of through them. Once out of direct line of sight, it was easy enough for them to blend into the shadows and tall grasses, and the frustrated giants and ogres could only curse deeply after them.

Still, there was no doubt what direction they were heading in, as the Wake began to move again where AA, Briggs, and I led the rest of the vanguard team, leaving the nice burning vivic trail behind. The giants could follow, of course, and some did, but even those who were running could only watch the Wake in the sky getting further and further away from them.

One more Obelisk to go.