Hagmother and Empress Tusk Annie now had a choice to make.

Us three had broken free of her encirclement... or at the very least, were On Top of it, which made it hard to get around us. If we collapsed on the Obelisk, she could certainly encircle us... but what had she just seen?

A ley line eruption had cut across her entire realm, blasting open a canyon hundreds of feet wide and deep, right up to the edge of the Greater Obelisk that we had been heading for.

Exemplar brains went to work, and she would instantly realize the dangers and the implications. While she had been out here trying to corral us, a more-easily defended Obelisk had been taken down with breathtaking speed. She had even siphoned off some of its defenders preparing to deal with us!

She had been played, and played very obviously, because she hadn’t had enough information. I heard her scream, and her infuriated mate/ride way over here roar in that grand mad villain pissed-off way that is so heartening to hear.

Brother AA, Briggs, and I didn’t tarry overly long. We dropped what we were doing and flat out booked holewards, laughing as we did. These giants were nothing now, just stanzas for the tens of thousands of goldweight we’d passed up in a song. Final moves were coming up, and she wasn’t in position!

There was no way she could get a force of giants into position to defend the Obelisk. She was limited by speed to dragons who were fast enough, and those who could ride them, plus any Hags who might be able to Teleport or Linejump into position. The Zone security measures were now going to be a bottleneck, but likely with enough Hags and Dragons the Ritual to pass it by could be done quickly. Then they’d be in the Undead Zone beyond, and her status as a Hag Empress and mistress of a Greater Obelisk meant she wouldn’t be bothered.

Naturally, those of us who had to pound along on the ground were still going to have to deal with a lot of ground undead... a lot of them animated giants and dragons, with dracoliches and Jotunbones among them, slaved to the wills of the Hags. So, invasion force be slowed...?

No, it was not a particularly happy circumstance for the Hags, and it was going to get even worse.

We watched the stronger dragons turn, and vanish off into the distance, Teleporting and Linejumping towards the holeward Zone wall... and burning some of their higher Slots to do so! I was sure Hags and Dragons all over the region who were strong enough were doing likewise.

Man, they were so not going to be happy with us, because naturally when you have high Level magic, you have high Level options.

Our group had over fifty Casters at Twelve now. FIFTY. Holy shiznit Batman, that was a whole bunch of spells that could do nasty stuff.

Granted, there were no spells at Six or higher in Valence. No, you were still limited to V’s, but all your Spells were Raised, and you got a +1 Metamagic of your choice that you knew at the moment of Casting. Raising a Fireball, a Valence III, to a IV, among other things, made it harder to resist, and increased its damage cap.

And look, all those Twelve Casters had a +4 Exemplar Lite Caster Level bonus. Amazing!

The only thing we had to do was get them into place on time. How hard was that, for a bunch of 12/12 Sorceress/Favoreds? They had Slots out the kazoo! The only thing they needed was a teleport point to Focus on!

They might have gotten word about how strong our force was. They almost certainly knew there were Void Brothers involved, who had quite the rep. But the angelic haror hadn’t made a big showing of their Casting prowess, because that would just be silly.

Wayfair could Teleport at will, if she wasn’t forced to Ride someone because of an Obelisk being there. That also meant she could provide an instant Teleport Focus for others at her destination, and given how flat the land was here, a Linejump was actually just as efficient as a Teleport. You just went as far as you could until you bumped into the Zone Barrier that stopped your forward progress.

Oh, and Brother Bonescythe had already Veilwalked his way to the last Obelisk. He dropped the Teleport Focus for them to scrylock, just outside the immediate interference area of the Obelisk.

When the draconian Obelisk fell, Wayfair came out and teleported to the corner of that Zone five hundred miles away, and dropped a scrylock focus. Fifty haror who had been careful to use almost no spells, not that hard with a killing force as powerful as they were accompanying, grabbed the Brothers that were there, the girls, the North Wind, and some Ironblood, and Linejumped directly over top of Wayfair.

Wayfair went back inside Amber, they crossed the Zone Barrier, and scrylocked the Focus that Brother Bonescythe had dropped.

A hundred of the most powerful mortal combatants the world had ever seen dropped down out of the sky just outside the defenses of the last Obelisk, bypassing all the defenses and undead armies in between.

Oh, and they were all Geared for undead. Just saying.

The Obelisk was pulsing and shining with a lot of power, as it was now the primary conduit disseminating ALL the force of the Grand Formation, as all the other links were cut. This agitated the undead, who could feel the massive power in the ground, and definitely knew something was up.

It actually didn’t help them all that much.

The haror put all their power as the chosen race of Sylune right on display, and the silver magic blazed down in the area as it had not dared for a hundred thousand years. The Light shone down and washed away chained spirits and animated corpses as massive Area of Effects cast in Ritual format covered acres of ground at a time.

The only troops not instantly annihilated were some Constructs of bones and corpses that had been added to the horde of undead specifically to address this weakness. Alas, the warriors who came along had also thoughtfully been prepped for Constructs, and swarmed them and took them down.

The spirits and liches that were there to defend were powerful, but they were not prepared for multiple Void Brothers coming in, ripping apart their magic, and using it to destroy them. Brother Bonescythe was particularly obvious in how he harvested them, his Helix the most horrifying thing the undead had ever seen. They were not susceptible to fear as living beings knew it, but they quaked to see him coming, and the weight of Final Death walking with him and his great curved blade.

The Ironblood were completely capable of dealing with surprises and holding them back, while the North Wind rapidly reinforced any positions that were lacking as the area around the Obelisk was secured. A single mass Casting of Rock to Mud turned the central plaza into a swamp, and fifty lightning bolts Called down from the brooding, dark clouds above at the same time smashed into the Obelisk at the same time.

It defied the damage, only losing a few stones, but the impact still pushed it over. Mass shifted, passed the center of gravity... and the haror fled with everyone else in tow as it began to fall. As soon as they had height and line of sight, another Linejump took them all away as the Interdiction fell, and the attacking force was gone.

The Obelisk hit the ground, crushing a few skeletons that had survived the harrowing assault of Light and fire, and the pulsing power within it seemed to pause.

There was a beat from below ground, and around the cracked base of the Obelisk, a pure, hot light of living energy suddenly shone forth, instantly burning a hole in the dark clouds above.

The Obelisk cracked all over, light shining through, and the hardened, enchanted stone began to crumple and fall, even as the energy pulsed again, brighter this time, and the ground shook.

It was falling apart even as it exploded, the watching undead unable to do anything, and the great eruption of the overstressed ley line fed back along that path, starting at the plaza absolutely saturated with high-level vivus from the undead.

It roared up in a wall of light and arcane power thousands of feet high, racing across the leagues in an eyeblink. Everything in its path was annihilated for hundreds of feet in either direction, ripping a yawning crevasse in the land, heading right for the massive Obelisk that had started it all.

------

Brother Shadowknife’s daggers stole a million years of time from the adamantine chains, and then applied it back to them.

They broke with pitiful little crinkles, instead of loud shrieks of protest, crumbling away from the edge of his long daggers.

It was time for them to end, after all...

There were guards nearby, but they weren’t looking at the massive chained Elephant with a great Cursed Lance driven into its side, continually spilling out blood. Nor did they notice the jar there sucking in that blood at a magically accelerated pace, and the moat of it dropping quickly.

The dark eyes of the elephant watched him patiently, trunk barely twitching, making no other moves as the small hyn stole around its bulk, little more than a shadow, quiet as a breeze, lost between the grunts and shifting of the massive bodies nearby, and the elephant’s continued breaths.

The last chain and bands broke. Runes went dark, and the Elephant trembled once.

Brother Shadowknife flowed onto its back, just as the Elephant heaved to its feet, sending the chains and bands that had kept it captive flying, tearing out the Lance with one jerk of its trunk, and then bolting into motion as the giants around him spun in disbelief, gaping at it.

The giants were actually quite a bit taller than the elephant was... but stronger? Faster?

His grey hide was stronger than steel. His tusks were more dangerous than a knight’s lance. He could rumble along faster than any steed ever born, backed by impossible strength, the favor of the Land, tons of mass, and even some magic.

He didn’t cry out. He just burst into motion with impossible grace and ease for something so big, and didn’t stop for anything in his way.

It didn’t matter that the giants were bigger, they still went flying when he struck them; batted aside like tenpins, crushed underfoot if they fell badly, or impaled and tossed like children by the infuriated Exemplar.

The plaza was a half mile across. The Elephant crossed it in thirty seconds, as astonished Jotuns, and three dragons, tried to stop him, and were smashed aside. The guards at the gate saw him coming too late to truly stop him; the blows, rocks, and spears of their kin bouncing off him uselessly or missing entirely, and even two drac-blooded hagspawn were smashed aside futilely as the Elephant charged through the gate like a great engine of destruction.

The giants were drawn up to expect an assault from outside the plaza, not from within. They didn’t get turned around in time, and their attacks were barely worth the pachyderm noticing as it hurtled by, Jotuns smashed away in all directions.

“That way. Quick, it’s coming.” Shadowknife passed an Amulet to the reaching trunk of the Exemplar Elephant. It was taken, the Elephant focused past the distant wedge in the sky, and broke it with a pinch of his sensitive trunk-tip.

The Linejump kicked up and sent them shooting away into the distance along line of sight.

Ten seconds later, a wall of annihilation cut through the land straight for the Obelisk there. The Jotuns only had time to gape for a second as they saw it coming, and then it closed on the Great Obelisk, swallowed it in the fury of the Land, and kept going.

----------

It’s not every day you see an elephant falling gracefully from the sky. Brother Shadowknife took it out of the Linejump almost directly above us, where we had ducked away from the searching giants. As it fell, we all turned to watch the Great Formation collapse.

Pointedly, the partial rupture from the Mushroom Zone hadn’t reached the Great Obelisk, nor had the one from the draconic. The first had barely crossed the Zone before petering out, the second had gotten almost all of the way there before the energy was redirected.

But now, now the blast was going in every direction.

And wouldn’t you know it, all that energy was flowing with vivus, and the Wake, the Wake was right atop that ley line, imagine that.

The blast at Hagmom’s base of operations was plenty big, rising miles into the sky and likely thoroughly obliterating it. The explosion naturally tore out Outwards and clockwise, completing those circuits, and I watched the Wake rip open hundreds of miles of sky in an instant... and then start branching.

Oh, yeah, didn’t need no Forsaken punching a hole with that much energy doing unwanted things...