Chapter 63 – Unexpected Bounty

Having a large pool of SP had its advantages for sure, thought Adam as he Shadow jumped across the forest about a hundred feet up in the air – a bit like stop-start flying. But it was still not fast enough for the distance he had to travel – increasingly he felt his power leveling needed a spike – no superhero should have to take the bus. What he actually needed were proper portals, that is, if Libby could set up some for fast transportation across this dam place – it would surely be a more efficient use of SP, he postulated, as wasn’t that what space magic was for.

Libby said she could set up gates that were hidden from prying eyes and would only activate if they were near – she developed on the fly a lock and key approach that no doubt had been used before for scripting. He wished he’d thought to ask before – this made him consider the fact that he was greatly underutilizing his team of essentially AI gods. Maybe he should give them some new orders to further their aims.

“Libby, is everything going fine with the alchemical herb and food production Pocket Dimension?” I queried as a preamble to the meat and veg of the matter.

“Yes, all is in hand, but even with the time dilation, it will be a few days before we get our first crop,” said Libby, a bit apprehensively. She wondered if he required some of the crops already – it was hard keeping track of Adam’s thought processes.

“In that case, can I give you some new projects to work on? – to be delegated as you wish. I need you to work on defense for the village and protection for all those within our group. Do you have anything you could use from the scrolls you researched?” said Adam hopefully. He knew Libby had, pretty well, purloined everything.

“Yes, I will get on it straight away, Adam; thank you.” Said Libby taken aback a bit. She knew Adam always preferred to talk to her, but in their hierarchy, Echo was the leader. She wondered how he would take her being in charge of delegation.

Adam felt a bit bad that he had just been thanked for handing out work – but things had been so crazy for so long that he’d hardly had a chance to do anything but spur-of-the-moment planning. Now that they’d made Binyon their official base, they needed to get things in order. Especially now, they had potentially pissed off a local faction that apparently had national backers – that reminded him he needed to dump the faction flunkies’ bodies somewhere, and this was as good a place as any. Although it was unfortunate, it was so far from Binyon – it was a shame he couldn’t put up a sign to help them find them; they had, after all, been dumped in the death energy zone to make it look like an accidental death.

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Dumping the bodies on the ground in an artful manner, one against a tree, one slumped face down, and one… as he was about to dump the last body, he saw a guy running, ricocheting from tree to tree like an incensed cue ball. Adam stopped mid-throw and tilted his head quizically – it looked like the guy was on his last legs, his clothes all torn up, and he reeked of death energy – from Adam’s energy sight, it looked like he was glowing. Tossing the last of the bodies absentmindedly behind him, he walked up to the guy – catching him as he fell limply to the ground.

Behind him, a great swirling mass of death energy moved in a wave toward them – at this point, they did not have time to set up script arrays for absorption, so they switched to the Shadow realm to avoid the wave hitting them. In the shadow realm, they placed the beast cores and scripts they would need, then transferred everything at once to the physical plane – leaving the limp-guy safe in the shadow zone.

It was a good job that they had muscled out of there as the death energy was as thick as pea soup when they returned, and to start with, he wasn’t sure if the arrays would get overloaded – thankfully, they started to thin the energy in the surrounding area noticeably within a minute or two. Adam had taken up his meditative position in the center of the array – soaking up the converted energy into more lovely SP – it seemed it was the forest that just kept giving, he thought, trying to theorize where it could all be coming from. Maybe there is more necro-mumbo-jumbo going on?

This time around, they had no worries of overloading the system – now Libby had become more finessed with PDs, that is. The faster the energy came, the more they stashed in PDs all they needed was an object to use as an anchor in the physical realm, and as Trey and Meca had become experts at producing mundane artifacts – they could make some nice little trinkets, and Libby actually had a perfect idea for their usage – protective amulets, that packed one hell of a punch. Though she did have to wonder where all this energy was coming from as it didn’t seem to be slowing down at all.

***

It had been an hour or so, and Mi Quo had woken up and had been wondering where exactly he was, not the afterlife - that was for sure; necromancers did not get that easy a time in the hereafter. Nope, it must be somewhere else – embarrassing images floated into his consciousness of falling into the arms of a stranger; oh my god – did the world’s shame hold no bounds for the likes of him.

He wondered whether to stay or go. Or, more to the point, which way to go? He sat back down to meditate for a bit, but the area was devoid of death mana – it had…shadow energy, well as a very close relative that would have to do. A few hours passed, and after checking through his few meager belongings, for some scraps of food - his meditation turned into a well-earned snooze.