Blinded, unconscious, dead, and post-Ten psions went flying like chaff. The living fetched up against walls, their souls pinned there like ants by the force of the magic streaming past and through them, and all the tech.

Mana, the Breath of the Land, was here.

It pulsed, again, and again, pouring out in batches of Valence XX effects, and filled the Mountain.

The nihilaen held it in, amazingly enough, its inertness actually taking the shock, although the plascrete foundations were trembling as the waves knocked into them and came washing back.

Filling the Mountain with Life.

Everyone across the city was forced back against the nearest solid surface and pinned there by the surge across their souls. Most of them fell unconscious instantly.

The exception to this was the Voids.

They didn’t know what was coming, only that something was. They could feel it whelming up and rising before them, turning unerringly to it as awe and wonder and fear filled their faces, whatever was in their hands dropping...

Their zoot suits were shredded like wet paper, and exploded into useless strips as they were overloaded by power far beyond anything they were expected to contain. Magic poured into the Voids... and swept right on through, purer than anything they’d ever felt in their lives.

The Breath of the Land blew across their souls, and their Helices rose in response.

I prodded a couple of their dazed eyes open so I could see what was happening.

The burning multicolors of the Fire and the Sword. The crystal and quicksilver of the Mind and the Ring. The liquid blue and green of the Wave and the Spear. The azure, grey, and white of the Wind and the Arrow. The ink and bone of the Bone and the Scythe. The Gold, Sapphire, Grey, and Black Alignments of the Light and the Scepter. The all-colored and none of the Way and the Fist. The earth tones, metals, and crystals of the Mountain and the Hammer. The scarlet and timeless feel of the Ancient and the Axe.

They hadn’t purged all of them yet, so all the human-possible Brothers were present. No halvyr, dhatun, or urkhar to be Awakened to those roles, as would happen in a more magical place.

No hyn, so none of the Shadow and the Knife.

Mom let loose that wall of mana twenty times. The Void Brothers could only collapse in place and let it pass through them, their minds exploding with the feel of the Breath of the Land upon them, never to be denied again.

“ANYTHING ELSE?” Mom asked in a clipped yet warm voice. I could not help but reach out to give a drifting knot of golden hair stronger than steel cable a gentle hug.

“No, not really.” She was already hooked into Markspace, which was the other Big Thing I wanted to accomplish here today. The idea that I could Summon her using Tremble’s Song had come to me, and had proven true. It had taken a bunch of years, but now she wouldn’t be lonely in the Warp anymore.

Although she was going to have to tamp it way, way, waaaaaaay down...

“WELL DONE. CATCH ME UP WITH WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON.” That cable of hair lifted me up, deCompressed, and precisely and gently set me down off to the side.

The floor under her was already giving way as the dimensions yielded under the weight of her Null. Reality just couldn’t hold her long enough.

“We’ll get you out of there some day,” I swore to her, as the Veil yielded under her, and she began to fall into the Warp inevitably.

“WORKING ON IT FROM THIS END, TOO,” she winked at me, just a flicker of something that was full of stars...

Then she was gone, the floor heaving itself back up as space reformed, no doubt wiping its brow at being out from under a load that heavy.

I looked at it, feeling the golden-haired Sage Sama Rantha, the first of us, progenitor of the Rantha Hags, exiled to the Warp once again.

There was grim satisfaction coming from the other side of the Mark. All the girls were holding their breaths, looking at it and wondering just how immense the mind behind it was.

And seeing for themselves just how she’d been totally fucked over by the Divine ‘rewards’ given to her.

I turned around.

Any tech above TL 6 in the city wasn’t working, and would never work again. This area was basically under a total Interdiction and Null from Mom’s presence, just like Wendlerton Academy where I’d popped up back in Janus Prime.

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At the same time, it was seething with the purest mana in all of Creation right now, held tight by the nihilaen dome, and being passed through the bodies of thousands of Voids right now... and they were taking their first Void Caster Levels, and building their Matrices under the force-feeding, pretty much helpless about it.

There wasn’t a non-Void left alive, except for me, in the place. Their souls hadn’t been able to take the force of the waves of pure mana, and they’d been swept away, cancelled out, and only left empty shells behind.

Even processing their brains wouldn’t yield anything now. They were well and truly gone.

...except for some post-Ten psions who’d held on longer than the rest of them. I found myself smacking my lips in grim amusement for what was coming next.

Perhaps some of them were innocent, or were salvageable. Maybe their loyalty to their Assassins was higher than to the organization or the Empire... but that was unlikely. They were raised to care for living weapons with a shelf life, watch them, make sure they didn’t go wild and free, and in the end, watch them die when it was their time.

I could regret not being able to test them, but the Land was righting something here, and if they had any inclination at all to stop it from happening, they were dead regardless.

-When you sots are done gaping all slack-jawed, your littlest brothers are in their cribs and need to be taken care of. We also have to get all of you out of here before the Empire catches on that its favorite murder weapons are free for the first time in six thousand years.-

They all jerked as one. Oh, right, Sensei Sama was Right There... and now, so was that bright light Up There.

-Let’s get this done right, boyos. The dead need to be incinerated before something decides to take up residence in those empty meat shells. Class Nine and Four, down to the nurseries and get your Little Brothers...-

The Grandmother of the Mountain was now in business...

------

Nadir Rantha sat back comfortably into the seat of the Captain’s chair of the ISS Indenture.

The other stations on the bridge were empty, because their occupants were all laying on the deck, some in multiple pieces, some with holes in them. Occasionally the deck beneath them shook with some distant impact, but the fighting was winding down very quickly.

After all, this frigate was the last to expect any kind of incursion inside its hull while in realspace. A Briggsboy-led elite team of G&G mindclawed Nulls who knew this ship inside and out was just not in the cards.

The fact she had stolen inside a few times over the past year and installed some surprises into parts of the systems they didn’t bother to check surely didn’t help.

-Vivify the lot of them, except this Captain.- Using the dop ability to eat someone and take their memories was a very powerful ability that had to be used very carefully to not lead down a very slippery slope.

But... a year had certainly not been enough to get a full and complete look at the whole Assassins organization and this Void-harvesting network... and suborn it, of course.

That simply meant taking their place and keeping the machinery working... sort of. Replacing something as secretive as this from the inside out could not last long, of course, as the true heart of it was safe on Tellus... but removing the Mountain and then completely suborning the Void Collection Network was going to put a severe crimp in a certain part of the Empire’s power.

When those Brothers grew up and started acting on the will of the Land, well... there were big changes coming in the future...

-------

It took less than a day to empty the Mountain of Voids. Some volunteers came in to keep the communication systems running to fake it being in operation, while others thoughtfully analyzed the missions coming through to see about taking care of them... or forcing the Empire to make moves in other ways.

Harley Rantha was perfectly willing to take over being Grandmother of the Mountain, and cleaning up the creatures in the Crater while she was at it. It was one of the finest training facilities in the Empire, if you didn’t care about enslaving alien races for generations to be victims for you.

However, if those aliens got out of the crater, they were going to massacre the natives of the planet, who were totally clueless that they were there. Luckily the power sources for the fields dividing their living zones were outside the Mountain and still working.

G&G and fighting teams went in to clean them out if they were terribly violent. As for the rest... they were eventually shuffled into the Underweb and let go, there to add to the interesting experiences of the drow. Given the primitive conditions they’d been maintained at, in a generation or two this would all be fables.

That said, the story of the fire-haired woman with the singing Sword opening them up an escape from the hellish existence they had to live, giving them a chance at life again, would be persisting a long time...

-----

The first true outside cargo ship in centuries pulled up outside the decrepit waystation of Mountainspace, dubbed ‘Little Rock’ by one of the girls.

Bering and Nora had cleared the station out themselves. It was massively undermanned, and the residents certainly weren’t ready to deal with a B&R team letting off some steam coming out of nowhere.

Brams Briggs deployed to the station and began the upgrades to it. After all, it was a productive world, and without needing to supply the Mountain, all that food had to go somewhere. It was time to upgrade the tech level of the inhabitants, the productivity of their farms, and turn it into a real asset.

Upgrading this wreck of a station to something phenomenally dangerous was just one more step.

Interestingly enough, Harley Rantha also found herself in command of an utterly remarkable thing called the Annual Spending Budget of the Mountain. The funds allocated for this were quite substantial, and could be used basically any way the Mountain desired to perform their black ops.

Or spending freely on whatever we damn well pleased. Indeed, the requests we could make for official Imperial forces to do this and that were quite impressive...

I could not tell you how many faces split into open grins at the sight of all those zeroes and the requisition powers that were there to be abused. Oh, yes, the Empire was going to pay, and then all that money and what it bought was going to just vanish.

We could carry it out until the Grandfather had to make a personal appearance on Tellus. Given that such an occurrence might be for his abrupt retirement, or the sign of a power grab, such a thing was not something either side of the operation actively desired.

As for the other Assassin branches, there was quite some jealousy towards the Voids, and teamwork and esprit de corps were more like along the lines of murderous suspicion. After all, the covert branch made a habit of trying to infiltrate the Mountain. If they were caught early, they were sent back coldly. If they were caught late, they just vanished.

Two had died when Grandmother Sama swept the city clean...