I watched the Wall of Fire get extinguished twice and the reinforcements charge ahead, only for the zigzagging Walls to sputter back to life and catch them all before they could leave the corridor and possibly join the fight.

I skated across the length and breadth of the room, making several circles at key spots as I did so, one thoughtstream keeping the Concentration necessary to keep the Wall alight, while various blade attacks tried to punch through all that Fire and were eaten up before they could do much more than spurt into the room a bit. The Undead Hunters gathered up Soul Crystals and stayed out of the way of said attacks while I glided swiftly about the room... and then up the walls and onto the ceiling to get things done.

Once the harvesting of Soul Crystals was done, they quickly gathered up in a Seven Stars Formation to more rapidly regain the Mana they’d spent. The vivus swirling about was a fine source to tap for this purpose, and Humans and Beasts sat there, eyes on the other hallways leading in, daring anything to come out of them, while I did my circuit of the room making stuff.

Given the size of the place, it was not a quick process, chasing down all the proper Formations and making my substitutions, erasures, additions, and modifications. It wasn’t hard, but volume of work is an annoyance all its own, and it took me a couple hours of non-stop work to do everything that I wanted to do and get it into place.

Once it was in place, activating it was as simple as connecting four different Formations that weren’t supposed to be connected, tapping into the Pyramid’s own ambient power sources and redirecting them nicely.

Everyone felt the sudden ripple and jerk as the space itself locked up. Smooth rotations and exchanges of spatial presence and incidence halted as metaphorical spikes blew up certain connections, while other Formations kicked into life and actively stopped any sort of movement of the various interconnected spaces.

Everything from the fifth floor and down ceased to move in relation to anything, the chamber we were in now stopping any movement on the sixth floor, and the ones below all fully fixed in place now. The seventh floor with the Pharaoh could move around as it liked, what did we care?

There were hoots and call-outs as I announced the lockdown of all the levels we’d cleared, with no need to worry about odd rotations and trying to decode the bloody patterns of randomly-realigned chambers any more. We didn’t have all the twenty-five chambers of level six discovered and cleared, but with this chamber unable to move, the rest were going to find it hard to shuffle automatically, meaning the Pharaoh would have to make any movements personally and make sure they didn’t involve any room with connections to level Five, as those corridors and connecting passageways would also not rotate appropriately now, binding three other rooms into partial place.

I’d definitely taken at least six and as many as sixteen chambers out of movement play, depending on how rigid the structure around here was with respect to moving who connects to what around.

The best thing was... there was no way to fight it! I’d manually reformed all the appropriate Formations and put them to functioning work. The Pharaoh could exert its will all it wanted to, nothing down here could or was going to move. They simply could not do so any more.

And then everyone got up and we drove for the top level and the Gate to the Underworld that was there.

------

I would have liked to say it was thrilling, dramatic combat, but no. It was explosive, it was showy, there was a lot of magic flying back and forth and shaking the demiplane, but mostly it was my people blocking the magic of Shades and Undead who were not their Casting equals, and me blowing the fuck out of them repeatedly and with great speed as they tried to resist being blasted, Disrupted, vivified, and tossed all about like ragdolls before unending volleys of Chained Bursting Greater Shards.

They were packed tight and backed up, stewing in front of the Walls of Fire and unable to advance. The few tough guys who tried to had been blasted down at the far end decisively, with maybe three in a hundred who tried to actually making it through. Them Holy Primal Radiant Flames really did do badly for them, especially at Tier-6 Stars.

Once we started to advance into them, they started surging towards us as fast as they could, but that wasn’t all that fast if they were trying to Cast, too. Overlapping Bursts and the Kicker damage basically did for all of the weaker stuff, and none of the tougher stuff could stand more than another volley or two, if the Archmages with me didn’t happily snipe them down explosively.

The Soul Gems of the Commanders were highly prized, after all, and I didn’t care much about the Warrior’s Soul Eggs strewn about. Commanders I was collecting to both upgrade my own Stars and agglomerate into Soul Jewels, a necessarily slow process, but the high incidence of Commanders among the Netherworlders was nice, along with the occasional Noble to beat down.

Like the one at the top of the stairs.

I waved the others to stay carefully behind me as we emerged from the deployment tunnel over the misting, vivisizing remains of thousands of Netherworld troops, the Chains of my Shards reaching up and over the edge of the platform above in their overlapping courses. A second volley had cleaned off the scattered survivors.

It was trying to cloak itself, but there was a Duke-level presence at the top of the stairs. It was trying to establish a Domain, but the vivus was eating the ambient magic and making that very hard to do, while I heard the tromping of more undead feet coming out of the top of the arched Gate I just had enough angle to see.

The Suppress Artifice smashed into the device setting up the Gate and shorted out every magical circuit inside the archway, venting any internal magic and completely shutting down the link to the underworld completely. The few hundreds of armored undead, these looking like armored skeletons with their fused ribcages of bone, saw me and instantly burst into motion for me, raising pikes nearly twenty-feet long, twice as tall as them, as they charged at me.

The Greater Shards blew through them all and annihilated them before they could do anything in tightly-packed, overlapping Bursts that swallowed them all in fractal Force, Firefrost, half-a-dozen other energies, and they were blasted to dust and less, only condensing Gems gathering quickly in the mists on the floor.

The arc of shadowy force that hacked my way was incredibly powerful, a scything force attack that could have swept an army off the field with precious little effort.

It was a Sharding attack in my view, just another weapon strike turned into a magical arc of force, and so something supremely stupid to use against an Argent Savant.

I waved my hand at the lethal stroke, which would have cut right through me if I couldn’t outright counter it, and the whole thing shattered instantly into disintegrating black shards that sprayed past me like obsidian glass fragments, dispersing against my own Hexar Shields and Force Armor as I stepped up onto the landing.

The Shadow Swordmaster there wasn’t that much bigger than its compatriots, although its armor was heavier, more ornate, and bulkier, with the helm being, well, almost a meter tall, complete with massively overdone spiked pauldrons and the like. It was on a true Nightmare, half again the height of a standard human horse, the underworld equivalents of Unicorns in some ways, exhaling blasts of crimson and black flame from burning nostrils as it caught sight of me.

The Shade was wielding a greatsword twice as wide as it should have been and with a blade two meters long like it was a willow wand. Size didn’t matter much, in the end; true power meant this only slightly larger-than-human creature could manhandle the much larger Shades and Undead servants of his masters with his blade strikes, and its mount was likely fast enough and tough enough to take similar but lesser attacks without flinching.

“A Mortal dares to tread here?” it called out in barely restrained wrath, pointing at me with that overlong blade in one hand, a shield big enough to be a tower shield gripped in his other hand. Good thing the mount was so big, as it needed the room! “You shall die for your hubris in daring to come to this place, witch!”

“<A mere Duke of the Knights of the Umbral Guard says those words to me?>” I responded in Necrus, taking up my own stance opposite it at the implied challenge, and then flicked out Noble.

It didn’t look like much, a raven-sized Bird of some sort diving at me. But there was Chaos Magic at work there, creating an illusion of distance that simply wasn’t there, and the plummeting Vulture coming at me was a fraction of the distance it appeared to be away, and about to come right on top of me with its Roc-sized body, talons, and screaming, brain-shredding attack.

Except that it ran into eight Shardrays, right to the face, punching through the illusion and punching deep into the Ruling Skullscream Vulture with the force of combined Archmagicks naturally greater than any normal Sage spell... and then all the Disruption and Firefrost and other effects on top of that.

Oh, and Holy Primal Radiant energy, too.

The Shadow-wielding Knight cried out in pain despite itself. It could see through any darkness, but this was The Light, the purest and most spiritual illumination in the world, and it could no more tolerate that gaze than it could let go what remained of its soul.

The Skullscream Vulture slammed right into all eight of the attacks, stunned, and was even more stunned when it died.

It smashed into the plaza just in front of the Gate, both its wings spiraling away, cut right off its body by a Shardray each. The other six had burned into its eyes, its shoulders, and its breast, respectively, and as it slid and tumbled between us and kept going right off the raised platform with its momentum, shooting right over the edge and crashing into the edge of the chamber with a loud rumble not too far from where the Undead Hunters and their Beast companions were waiting and watching below, the Umbral Knight only watching it go past.

“<A Sage, and one who knows the Pure Tongue,>” the Knight conceded with a sliver of respect, helm turned as the Vulture was already starting to collapse from within, the horrific damage from the Shardrays eating it up with fantastic speed. “<Unexpected for one of the slaves to the Illuminus!>” it mocked me.

“<Three Archangels of the Synod have fallen at the hands of me and my companions, and your gutter-calling names me a servant of their blasphemy and cowardice?>” I returned in equally solemn measure, startling it with the declaration as I turned my attention back upon it. “<It does not surprise me that you are so ill-informed that you do not know The Light when you see it, but I thought the Umbral Guard’s elders experienced enough to realize the difference between the wan playing of the Lords of Nirvana, and the True Light of Heaven!>” I mocked it back, more shining glory starting to build around me as Seals and Thaumaturgic Circles began to expand in layers around me, the vivus sweeping into them and empowering them with pure Mana here, right on the virtual steps to the netherworld.

“<Heaven? What is Heaven, but a dream and delusion to those desiring to be slaves forever? Die, witch!>” the Duke Knight bellowed, leveling his massive sword at me and spurring his mount to the attack on flaming hooves that the vivus couldn’t quite approach, even if it billowed about the two of them.

I could see the edges of a Spell Turning field about them, any magic used on them going to be sent back at the Caster. I just shook my head and wove in the Resonance with Arcane Fusion, and this Dueling Field it had whipped up did nothing to stop my Shards as they slammed into the Knight and its mount, bending around the shield it instinctively raised to catch them.

I guess there were times size mattered. I not only stopped its charge, I sent mount and rider flying from the impacts, as if they’d run into a Titan’s fist multiple times over. The Nightmare screamed as it died, its legs torn off and burning ribs opened to vivus as it was flung away through the air, mistfire consuming it and its scream as it smashed to the plaza and slid away.