B5 Chapter 31 - Breaking (Patreon)

It wasn’t as difficult to engineer a break as one might have thought. With the knowledge he had learned from the Three regarding the nature of magick, along with what he had figured out himself along the way, Tyron was beginning to accrue quite a number of insights regarding the rifts.

How they interacted with magick being perhaps the most important field within his burgeoning expertise. 

After all, if he could use magick to shrink a rift, surely he could use magick to grow one? Of course, it was more complicated than that, it always was. Making a rift larger wasn’t enough to cause a break. After all, it was the accumulated pressure of kin pressing against the barrier that eventually made it shatter. It took years under normal circumstances, and would only occur if that pressure wasn’t regularly relieved by Slayer expeditions coming and killing the kin, keeping them away from the rift until it had stabilised.

Tyron didn’t have time to build that slow drip, drip, drip of pressure. He needed a break to happen in the next few hours, before those Golden skeletons-to-be decided to move away from Cragwhistle. So how could he do it?

The trick was letting the rift-kin do the work. All he needed was a way to gather a large number of monsters, then have them smash into the rift like a battering ram, shattering it in an instant. Doing that was a little tricky.

Tyron stood in a field of endless winter, snow and ice battering him endlessly. Wind blew so fierce across the sleet came at him almost horizontally, straight through the gaps in his bone helmet and into his eyes.

Despite everything, Tyron didn’t feel the cold that much. His inhuman levels of endurance had turned him halfway into an undead already, at least it felt that way. A normal person might have frozen to death beyond this rift in only a few hours, yet he felt he could endure for days, if not weeks.

“Are they done yet?” Dove yelled over the never ending blizzard.

“Almost,” Tyron called back.

“I hope so, my balls are almost frozen solid. My pecker has shrunk so far it's starting to invert. I think it’s gone into the Astral Realm!”

Tyron eyed the undead Summoner. Dove was, for a change, completely naked, as skeletons went. He held his arms against his exposed rips, visibly shivering.

“Why did you even bring me here?” he chattered.

Ignoring his idiotic behaviour, the Necromancer simply explained as he continued to monitor his minions using his magick.

“Because now that I have an idea how compromised you are, I’m going to keep you close so I can ensure you don’t cause any problems.”

Dove lept back, holding a bony hand to his chest.

“Me?! Cause Problems?! How dare you.”

“Be silent, Dove.”

For once, his former teacher listened, allowing Tyron to concentrate.

He couldn’t see through the storm, but he could keep tabs on the movements of his horde through the conduit that bound them to him. Communing with his demi-liches, he confirmed that work was proceeding as expected. Most of the horde had been brought beyond the rift to accomplish this task, via the Abyss, as the conditions and swarming kin made it difficult to do any sort of delicate enchanting work.

Crafting totems to bear the enchantments had taken a significant amount of time and without the expertise of Master Willhem, he may not have succeeded at all. Not in such a short timeframe at any rate. The Master Arcanist was out there right now, in the storm, directing the others and ensuring the magick would properly function. When it came to anything he himself had a hand in, Master Willhem was obsessively particular about ensuring the work was carried out properly. That, at least, hadn’t changed when he’d died. 

Tyron reflected on his Masters’ other prized student: Master Halfshard. If possible, he would like to reconcile with her, if only to bring comfort to their teacher. Better still if she agreed to work with him. When it came to enchanting, she was far more Skilled than he was, a true expert in many facets of the craft. Sadly, she was still furious that he had denied Master Willhem his final rest. 

After another hour had passed in the sleet and ice, the job was finally done. It hadn’t been easy to embed the totems in the ground, nearly impossible in fact. Under the packed snow and ice, the ground was unsurprisingly frozen solid. Ultimately they had melted and refrozen the ice to lock them in place. 

“We’re moving, Dove,” Tyron announced before he turned and began to trudge away through the snow.

“Wh-what? We’re done?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you need to perform some sort of fancy ritual?”

“No.”

“Well… that’s a bit boring.”

As tempted as he was to argue how intricate and complex the magickal network created by the enchanted totems was, Tyron decided against it. Giving Dove an excuse to argue was like giving someone permission to punch you in the face. When your head started hurting, you only had yourself to blame.

It was a journey of a dozen kilometres to return to their camp and there were many kin to fight on the way. That number would only increase over the next few hours, and he wanted to be as secure as possible before it happened. Long hours of painful slog through the snow later, they reached the camp and Tyron gratefully stepped into the tent his skeletons had erected for him.

He may be able to endure the cold, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it. Frowning, he turned and spat.

“I think my saliva started to freeze,” he said aloud.

In the distance, he could already feel the totems working their magick. So could Dove.

“So… this just… works?” he asked, stepping into the tent and conspicuously standing in the entrance, leaving the flap open.

With a mental command, Tyron had one of his guards kick Dove in the back, sending him sprawling on the ground and thankfully allowing the flap to close.

“It will ‘just work’,” he said. “It’s designed to work on a timed system. The first array will look to the kin like a big, juicy rift. They’ll come from all over, a nice horde of them. Of course, most will scatter when they realise there’s no rift there after all, but they won’t go far. After a day, the first array will fail and depower, then the second which we placed around the actual rift will turn on, lighting it up like a festival lantern. The horde will sprint over there and smash into the rift like a bull hitting a farm gate.”

“Very scientific,” Dove observed from the ground.

Tyron shrugged.

“When you want to break something, the process isn’t nearly as delicate as building something.”

So they waited. It didn’t take long for the kin to start gathering, rushing past the camp toward the strengthening beacon of the totem array. Some managed to stumble into the camp and were set upon by the undead, but Tyron was able to spend most of the time studying.

Twenty four hours after it had started, the first array began to fade, the powerful sense of magick it emitted ticking down. This was the signal Tyron had been waiting for.

Spreading his undead out, he found the point where his gate had been created and had them wait. Right on time, a small gateway opened to the Abyss, a hole in reality punctured through to the realm between. A small army of rather disturbed looking Slayers marched through, Worthy at the head. Armed and armoured for battle, they were prepared for the fight of their lives and even the Abyss wasn’t going to be enough to sway their determination.

That was good.

No sooner had the tear in the veil closed than a new magickal signature began to rise in the distance. Even from a distance of over a dozen kilometres, Tyron could feel it clearly, and he knew the kin could as well.

Kin would only head to a rift that they felt they could fit through, or that they felt they could widen far enough to grant them passage. A tiny rift like the one at Cragwhistle didn’t attract that much attention from the monsters normally. However, right now that rift felt quite different. No longer tiny, it was a bright, blazing star, a wide open door for every kin in range to feel it. 

And there were many.

As he’d hoped, they stampeded towards it. Even through the blizzard, he could feel the ground tremble, the snow shifting as the monsters thundered into the distance.

He would have loved to have seen the moment they reached the rift. What would it look like as they all threw themselves at it? How would the dimensional weave hold up? Not well, he suspected. Not well at all.

After ten minutes or so for the closest monsters to clear our, Tyron gathered up his horde and set out, the Slayers forming their own column not far from his own.

He felt the moment the rift broke. There was a distant crack as something broke, then a strange vacuum sensation as the magick around them was sucked away in an instant. 

Tyron gasped as the array on his chest suddenly failed. Pressing his palm against it, he fed it with his own magick, keeping the device running as the air around them continued to be void of power.

It was the break, he realised. The magick around them had been sucked through to the other side when the rift had burst open. 

Two hours after the break itself, the two columns arrived at the rift. Tyron examined it, fascinating. No longer appearing as a shimmering portal, it more resembled a wound, jagged edges bleeding one reality into another. As much as he would have liked to have stayed, there was work to be done on the other side.

Worthy gave him a nod and Tyron nodded back.

Then his uncle raised his hammer, bellowed his warcry and charged through, the Slayers right behind him. The moment the last of them was through, Tyron followed, emerging into the familiar sights of the mountain top where his parents had died.

There was no time for sentimentality. The gold ranked Slayers were already charging down the slope, whooping and roaring. The surrounding woods and scrub had been devastated by the break, even the stone had been shattered by the force of it, and it was clear to see where the horde can gone, charging down the hill toward the former village.

Quickly ascending to the top of his battle platform, Tyron quickly began to weave his magicks as his horde marched. When they met the Golden Legion, he wanted his undead to be at their full strength, so he piled on every ritual and spell he could, drawing his own mana down at a rapid pace.

The Slayers rushed into what remained of Cragwhistle, largely flattened by the kin, then staggered to a halt. A moment later, Tyron realised why.

The army of the Emperor was gone. Their camp was empty, what little remained had been trampled by the kin before the monsters had continued their rampage down the mountain.

Tyron blinked.

“This is a problem,” he muttered to himself.