The bricks came to life, shuffling together with the lightness and ease of playing cards, and I directed them to stack themselves up on the cloth on the floor.
With speed and grace, they did so, stacking themselves up all across it with mathematical precision, while I joined up the next set of four. When it was done, I transferred the spell to the next set of cubes, and bid it do the same thing.
Rinse, repeat. I laid down more oversized Tapestry cloths as space was cleared, and as that mound stacked up as high as it could, I invoked the Tapestry, and shrunk it down to a gleaming and weightless golden image on the Tapestry.
Very satisfied, I rolled that back up, Itemized it to shrink it down to size, and proceeded to grab all the rest of the gold the same way, spending another Animate Objects to do so for each Tapestry.
------
I was actually kind of surprised that nobody flew down to bug me down here, nor had I felt an Interdiction come up. Were they so bored that they didn’t even investigate intruders?
Ah, maybe they thought I was going to be physically coming up the shaft with a load of gold. That was extremely amusing. No, no, that wasn’t going to happen.
What was going to happen was that these vampires weren’t going to be able to pay their untrapped living kin outside for blood. I could imagine how the next meeting with the starving vampires was going to go for them.
I rolled up the last Tapestry, Itemized it down in size, and looked around at the misty clean floor, nodding to myself.
I Dimension Hopped two thousand feet straight up, completely skipping by any retaliatory action from below. There was no Interdiction or anything, and I stayed under the Teleport restriction, which further amused me.
I turned my eyes northeast, and Linejumped off that way, and like I had been doing all along, harvested the spell with ki to get it back smoothly.
I was looking for something out here, and the last news I had was that it tended to come out of the Bronx River right about there...
----
Locate Object at IV was more than enough to find the rest of the creature.
It was like a moving white tree, a skeleton built thicker and heavier than a human, but still recognizable as humanoid. Where its left leg had been, a crude fake leg formed of multiple human skeletons fused together formed an odd pegleg of sorts.
It was closing in on thirty feet tall, big even for the biggest of giants. Crackling black and yellow-green lightning played about it as it moved towards me, having quickly felt me coming once I came in range of its senses.
In my hand, Clavus was responding to its presence, and the trapped and damned soul within it.
Being efficient, I had deployed flights of Shards to regain my full Pool of ki, obliterating a few dozen lurching walkers to get my reserves back. As the long-dead Storm Jotun - who knew where and when it came from? - lurched towards me, clawing for the bone of its femur, I calmly and thoroughly blew it apart.
Dozens of Shards impacted all over it, smashing ancient steel-hard bone to dust going vivic. Its fake leg exploded into nothing almost instantly. I blew apart all its joints even as it fell, and guided Shards up into every single bone of its spine. Ribs shattered and sprayed, and the last six of them detonated and blew apart the skull that had slammed haplessly to the ground as it was blasted apart.
The vivic mist began to swirl, and gather towards Clavus.
This wasn’t unexpected. I planted Clavus like the nail he was, the only remaining part of the dead Storm Jotun that had been cleansed of negative energies. Naturally the remaining vivified energies of it would gather to him.
I busied myself helping burn the disintegrating bones down faster and watching the energy flow into Clavus, while picking off any undead that got too close. I wasn’t worried about them seeing me. With borrowed horns out, burning scarlet skin, and demonic wings with holy silver Runes on them, they weren’t going to have any idea who I was.
By the time I showed the rest of the world this, the New York Shroudzone should be wiped.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
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I reclaimed Clavus, feeling him brimming with new potential, new energy... and a burning new antipathy for the undead.
Without delay, I Linejumped back over to Long Island, and came plummeting down back into that parking lot, now festooned with a couple shadows and a dozen zombies investigating the bright white spots of vivus there and inside.
I snuffed them all while coming down, and set down upon my Lived-Line.
Vivus swirled into the space I vacated as I stepped across dimensions to dump my gains, and then headed back to the caldera, unmissed by anyone.
--------
Windgraf Mochtal strode down the corridor that Lady Traveler had excavated out of the deeper rock under Heavenbound Hall. He had gotten a message from her to go investigate the empty room at the end of the corridor, set aside for later use for something... storage, probably.
That door was now brimming with some subtle and powerful magical Wards... not entirely out of place here in the Hall, but the illusionary addition was something.
He opened it up, gathered his Will, and forced away the very subtle Permanent Illusion trying to convince him the room was empty.
His family dealt across dimensions and worlds, and the amount of wealth he had seen coming and going was beyond the imagination of most mortals. Still, his dark and stormy eyes widened to see what was now occupying the room there.
-Start burning this for ALL the projects,- a quiet voice /whispered in his thoughts, and he could only nod.
Twenty thousand tons of gold. Eight million goldweight. Stacked neatly in four-foot cubes, waiting to be taken apart.
This would pay for the Investing or Infusing of a LOT of Gear. He reached forward, grabbed a heavy bar off the pile, weighed it in his hand, and then his folded Disk came up out of his Masspack, lotused out into concave carry form, and he began to fill it for the trip back upstairs.
It was going to shock the world with just how much gold Heavenbound Hall could burn once it got really going... and, if he was correct, how fast it could remove evidence of something somebody was going to be very angry about...
----
-Lord Mick, a thought for you to consider.-
-You have my immediate attention, fair maiden and dangerous scary woman!- he /replied instantly.
-There is a Vampire Clan with elders caught in the New York Shroudzone, is there not?-
-Yes,- he /nodded. -The Gulliotoni Elder didn’t leave before the Shroudzone was established, and most of his bloodspawn were caught with him.-
-He was pulling gold out of the New York Federal Reserve, doubtless using it to pay his living descendants to smuggle blood in to them.-
There was a slight pause as he digested that. -That’s long been a rumor,- he /agreed carefully.
-The Elder has just lost his gold source. The smugglers might be losing their lives to the Thirst. This might or might not be an opportunity for the Fuilcroi, and if it isn’t, I’m sure the news will be worth something to whom it is an opportunity.-
The Mick read between all the lines there. -Ye wound me, bright and nasty magos! Surely I would never have such thoughts of taking advantage of a time of weakness on me fine and upstanding kinfolk!-
-Of course not. But Blooded who collect blood to feed to vampires in a Shroudzone are neither fine nor upstanding. Perhaps the blood should come to them.-
The Mick realized he had just been given a little side quest that would definitely increase his status in the world of the Blooded. -Tch, I be struck to my heart. I’m be having to take me a mite vacation to get away from such high-minded nonsense, Lady Traveler,- he /replied in aggrieved tones.
-Indeed.- And that was all I had to say about that. Each to their own way of contributing to the world after the Shroud...
===============
Back to the present day in China...
The discovery that the gold vaults under the Federal Reserve were empty had been a mighty blow to people dreaming of looting it for goldweight when the New York Shroudzone finally came down, and to the government(s) looking to reclaim the wealth under there...
The goldweight of that haul was what was really fueling the Artificing at Heavenbound Hall, leaving the main wealth of the Hall to focus on other things. Tens of thousands of goldweight had already been burned away by now, and by my direct order, there was no effort to stop such things.
They weren’t wasting the gold, of course. The Gear it was being spent on was all necessary and much-desired. Reserves of crafted items were being emptied just to satisfy the ability to Imbue and Invest. Tokens, Baneskulls, and Amulets were high on the wish list, along with Swarmkiller Clasps.
There were many tons of stuff here, but the difference was that I had an Intelligent Staff here, my Ring had TK, and I could cast TK too.
I Infused Telekinesis into Clavus, and together my Staff, my Ring, and I began to dump this treasury into the boxes atop the cloth on the floor. Between the three of us, we could handle about a ton of material a second, and this lazy hoard of precious metal was jerked into motion. More to the point, I set up a Flow through the room, a floating path of motion that sent anything within it towards the end point.
What it meant to me was that I didn’t have to move the gold all that much. I literally had to heave it up a few feet into the Flow, and watch it get whipped past me towards the Box.
I noticed the Brothers had stopped moving, and I twinged my Sublime Chords, making them all jolt in shock.
“Create a localized discordance in the manafield around your ears and skin to protect against the Heartsong, Brothers,” I informed them, and watched them flush most cutely as they realized I’d managed to Fascinate them. I just winked at them, and they could only shake their heads and turn away. “If a couple of you could assess the loot as it moves past...”
Brothers Asiafist and Aussiefist moved over under the Flow, their Helices flowing in a semi-Kirlian pattern, like an external Dantian of some sort. I did notice them twitch as they felt my magic moving around them and just how strong it was, but didn’t feel I needed to push anything.
I would stack up all this stolen loot, and then distribute it to the Purgers, and they’d better put it to use Infusing and Investing what they needed to in order to get stronger...