The Umbral Knight Duke also hit the ground awkwardly, smashing and sliding and trying to get its feet under it after the terrific impacts of multiple Shards sent it flying. The top of its helm was shattered and fell away, shadowy flames that might have been some kind of hair billowing up in its place, and the straps on its shield had shattered, depriving it of that, not that it meant much in a magical duel. It had a score of holes in its mangled armor, mistfire burning at the edges of them, and its sword-arm was actually broken and wrenched about, although it had kept its sword in its gauntlet.

I think it was a bit surprised when it couldn’t fix the injuries to its arm or its shadowsteel armor. Blooding was such a pisser that way.

Its shield arm took up most of the weight of its weapon, ignoring the shattered bones and mangled metal that distorted its sword arm as it raised its weapon at me again.

Three great strokes of magical force were sent scything at me, each capable of inflicting grievous or lethal wounds on any creature short of an armored Emperor.

I was walking towards the Knight, and waved Noble in counterpoint; once, twice, thrice.

Ruptured bladewinds shattered into the air around and behind me like breaking glass, harming nothing, not even reaching the walls before waiting vivus wooshed up and devoured them in streaks of mist in the air.

“<And you call that swordplay, no doubt. One of my associates is a Grandmaster of the Sword, and she is mocking you so badly right now. Your stance, your execution, your grip on your weapon...!>” I shook my head as my Soulspear snapped out of Noble’s gleaming Soul Star Jewel and the Dreadskull atop it, dripping Dreadfire to the Undead. “<Are you going to keep using children’s tricks, or die like a warrior?>”

Well, that was certainly an easy way to get it to charge in most foolish manner, moving with superhuman speed and strength, and leaping into the air to deliver a crushing deathblow as the jet-black metal of his greatsword burst into shadowfire, doubling in length as it did so.

Noble snapped out and up and I froze, reaching out and solidifying my Stance, my grip locking to the bottom of my Staff-Spear and The Light blazing forth sharp and fast and complete.

The Archer Stand’s Thrust, do triple damage when braced for a charge! Find the Flaw, sub Concentration check for damage! And dump a Greater Arcane Fusion of two Greater Shards spells into it as touch attacks at the same moment!

“HAAAAAAAAR-uk.”

The shining point inserted right into the vizor slit of the Knight’s armor, and its bellow was cut off instantly as the point crunched on something and emerged from the back of its helm, all sorts of Lights blazing forth from every crack and crevice in the Knight’s armor.

Its blade still swept down, the flames long enough to reach me even if the sword itself was not, but Zeben’s TK pushed it aside and it cut down next to me harmlessly. It chewed into the obdurate stones of the Pyramid like tofu and the stroke continued on for another hundred feet as the shadowflames tore through the rock effortlessly.

The scene of the Knight hanging there, the flames on its overlong sword snuffing out, thrice my size and just dangling from the point of Noble’s Golden Spear up there in the air, was probably a really weird thing to see.

I retracted the Spear, and the basically empty armor, filled only with Shadowy essence being consumed and starting to break down from within, crashed to the ground in a heap.

Mighty Turk and a few of the Undead Hunters had poked up their heads enough to watch the whole thing, and I saw a few had been recording the whole thing. I just ignored it, walking over to the broken pieces of armor, kicking open the breastplate, and reaching down the neck hole inside to grab the brightly shining Duke’s Soul Jewel there.

“Make sure nothing comes out of that hallway over there!” I pointed at the second passageway out of there, half the size of the main one, with an ornate golden door sealing it shut at the present. The Undead Hunters snapped out of their reverie and moved quickly to make sure of that, while I stalked over to the currently inert archway where the Gate was attempting to reform and connect to the Netherworld once more.

I examined the Rune circuits and Formations wound into and about this thing, and shook my head. It was more complex than the majority of the work in the Pyramid, with definite signs that something more informed than the Pharaoh had taken a hand in constructing the thing. But the design was still old, and I still understood how to subvert it to my purposes.

“I am going to arrange this to blow up this archway, this plaza, and make it impossible for the Pyramid to re-anchor itself to the Netherworld without a lot of time and work. Make sure nothing comes out of that door or up behind us for the next hour!” I called out, flexing my fingers and my Shape Stone VIII+1 reaching out to do what needed to be done.

Oh, the Pharaoh wasn’t going to like me and what I was going to do to him...

------

I noted the Symbols and Glyphs going off below and sent everyone scampering towards the long passageway down and out of here at speed, laughing as they did so.

Well behind us, an Unbinding levered open the door to the Pharaoh’s level and the hordes of elite minions beyond waiting for us. The absolute storm of deadly magic that swarmed out was quite impressive, and likely would have taken almost everything we had just to resist it.

The Spelltrap Formation there that swallowed the magic, pumped it into the ground in exactly the wrong manner, and exploded did not have nearly the same problems.

The blast of arcane fire came barreling down a full mile of the connecting passageway, a testament to just how much Pyramid power was backed up and how much magic the Pharaoh’s forces had decided to dump on us up there. The whole Pyramid shook at the impact, and I was pretty sure those undead packed up behind that door had not enjoyed it going off in their faces at all.

Some Undead Nobles had managed to make it through the Walls of Fire blocking the other passages, and were waiting for us to return. Alas, they hadn’t managed to bring any companions, there were no Sages among them lest the might of ye Pharaoh be challenged, and we had a good number of undead-slaying Archmages among us, too.

Oh, and the Beasts were plenty happy to make things difficult for the undead in personal combat while the Casters blew the ever-Disruptive crap out of them, too.

It took about fifteen minutes of exploding spells and lots of blasting magic to get everything worked out in the main room, and the hit squad of probably-desperate Noble Undead was burning and reduced to falling dust, crystal skulls, and Soul Jewels. Their personal belongings were stashed away to be analyzed, exorcized, purified, and either reallocated or Burned if we could duplicate them without resorting to necromantic empowerment of souls to do the same thing.

Everyone would get their fair share, and figuring out how to duplicate uber Toys was considered more important than getting this or that fancy Toy for one’s self. The Artificers were always salivating at the chance to do breakdowns on some of the millennia-old stuff these undead had sitting around.

With that done, we buckled down and began clearing out and sealing off Level Six of this place.

------

Archmage Obai tossed the gold-and-black sapphire atef crown to me, the crystalline skull of the lich who’d worn it still inside. Zeben dumped it into my Pocket without batting an eye, reducing the honored and wise advisor who’d served the Pharaoh so unwaveringly for so long to just another battle trophy.

The Archmage smirked at how casually I could treat such wealth, both of us able to feel the power of the inverted Black Crown. I truly had absolutely no desire to test out its power for myself.

“Lots of Curse Magic on that one,” I told him, while a Cap Crown that had belonged to a royal female tumbled through the air to join it.

We’d had exactly one situation where an impulsive and happy-go-lucky Gabon Mage had decided to try on the headdress of one of the undead a couple months ago. After it had devoured his soul and Reanimated his corpse in service to the Pharaoh, we had to destroy him and Burn the thing away, with no way to get him back.

The appetite of anyone to use any of the Toys of the undead had cooled remarkably after that point, and even getting people to touch them became something of a test of courage... which was not inappropriate at all, especially on the stronger items. Lots of Dark Magic seething around those things, along with the boundless spite of the consumed prior owner.

“The Pharaoh is getting desperate if he is sending out his concubines now,” Archmage Obai noted, watching the second Crown vanish.

“Can you imagine the politics of who is going to be sent out to die next and prove their loyalty to the twat?” I asked, studying the scene in front of me.

The Pharaoh had used the remit of unlimited reinforcements to pack as many of the chambers and halls full of troops as he could, which meant literally millions more undead to punch our way through... but cut off by the Walls of Fire, those minions had literally no way to go but into the teeth of our magic, and they could not surround us and fall upon us from all directions.

The only ones who could pass the walls without being too-heavily injured were the Nobles, and none of the Nobles who’d faced us had returned to unlife at all, just like all the other lesser undead. They didn’t want to believe they could die forever, but the truth of it was staring them in the face. While undead were very hard to affect mentally and didn’t have the emotions the living did, fear was definitely not unknown to them, or Thanatopic Spells would not have been a thing.

Not that I bothered to use such things, but they were something on the back burner, just in case. After all, millennia of spiritual loyalty/slavery also meant millennia for resentments to build up against one’s not-sane rulers and peers.

The Sixth level had eight ‘marshaling rooms’ for going down to the lower levels, and eight ‘inner rooms’ where the Nobles had private chamber-tombs to dwell in, which in many cases included apartments of unchanging ornamentation adorned with shows of wealth and gaudy displays of prestige from their living years.

There were a LOT of nasty effects woven into those things against thieves, who the undead seemed to loathe with a passion and used to vent their paranoia. Actually, given the nature of the traps, it soon became obvious that they stole from one another as a pastime, testing out their own cleverness and skills against the defenses and traps of their peers, filching this or that personal item as a display of dominance and deftness.

So, I was now looking at a burial chamber filled with tomb-goods around a large and ornate sarcophagus. Even the canopic jars were wrought of mawt-gold and jewels, while the auditorium-sized room was also replete with hieroglyphs and tales from ages past of the might and power of its former occupant.

The Undead Hunters had learned to let me inspect things and look out my eyes through the Markspace while doing so. Archmage Obai shifted to that view casually, paused in midstep, and then pushed himself carefully backwards instead of coming up next to me.

There were hundreds of interwoven spells here, tied to everything in this chamber. Just looking at some of the stuff from too close could trigger some of the things that were going to go off, and those were linked to other spells, which were linked to other spells in chains and cascades of erupting magic of both the severely crippling and horrifyingly lethal variety.

“My word,” he murmured, blinking back and forth between what I was looking at and what he could see. He didn’t dare extend his Awareness further into the room, as I could definitely see traps that would seize on it and use it to drag his soul right out of his body. “Someone had too much time on their hands, Lady Fae?” he asked, watching me paint a mental image of all the stories emblazoned on the walls.