“The Squids are working with the Knights of the Temple?” a new voice broke in, and everyone turned to look as Traveler trotted up with the artificially long steps of a lightfooter.
“I took on a job last year which involved penetrating into a site with a suspected Felldeep access point. It turned out that the Templars had breached an abandoned Cephalid forward nest there, and were data-mining it. By dint of the equipment they had, they’ve been delving into psionics for decades, probably from before the Shroud. That is a Ceph Brainmold, a tool for spying from within the brain of a hapless dupe.” Sama’s lips twisted.
“Does he have a girlfriend, close family?” Briggs rumbled quickly. Affirmatives and a few names floated back to him. “Call the Temple, and get a team out there to scan them.” He frowned deeply at the nigh-headless body of his dead man. “I confess to being very, very angry right now, Sama, Traveler...” He straightened to his full height, looking around with eyes ready to leap out and kill anything he could hold responsible for this annihilation, finally settling on the rapidly-vanishing Swarm.
“So the Templars are talking to the Imprus. Good to know formally, we always suspected it, and the Templars aren’t into black magic or witchcraft, they’re going into psionics.” Traveler put her hand to her head, while Darts laden with holy energy and Banefire formed up around her left arm, and were sucked away into the bracer there. “Humanity on this world is base Primos, not Mentos. They don’t have psychic potential, it’s not in the genecode. The only way to truly tap psionic power is going to be genetic manipulation and adding it in...”
“Oh, isn’t that a wonderful slippery slope to head down...” Sama swore. “What about the bastards who set this up?”
“An Anotxgin, over thataway a klik or so,” Traveler waved in the direction she’d come from. “And a full Summoning Circle of Lawbound and Imprusar Clerics, boosting the Axiomatic’s Caster Level enough to bring it in... completely ignoring the fact it couldn’t go away and they’d inevitably lose control of it.”
“They sacrificed this whole town just for the chance to kill Sama Rantha?” Sir Pellier asked, a truly ugly expression on his face.
“Yes. There probably weren’t any Imprusar faithful in the town, so no loss to get rid of a major enemy of the faith, right?”
“And they reached out to the Templars for a tool to do it, going right into the ranks of Aru’s faithful to do it,” Briggs rumbled in a voice laden with coming doom.
“I can bring your man back in three days,” Traveler stated calmly, looking over to the whirlwind of the suicidal Swarm killing itself madly in flames of Chaos, totally ignoring the startled looks on everyone’s faces that resulted. “Let me fix up your van and those tires. I’ll fix up his corpse, Repose it, and I’ll be able to Quicken him.”
“P-Pardon me?” Helix had to blurt out in shock. “You’re... going to be able to bring Mulligan there back from the dead? Really?” He could have been looking at something weirder than the brainmold that Briggs had unceremoniously dropped, then booted into a pile of vivisizing beetles to poof into eager etherflames... after Helix snapped three shots of it.
“Yes. I’ll be hitting Nine. I’ll swap in my Healing Domain Slot for Raise Dead, burn a Life Diamond, and he’ll be back, shaken but good to go.”
She totally ignored everyone’s expressions with the calm of someone for whom such events are blasé, and Sama and Briggs were naturally the first to adjust.
“Damn Powered!” Sama grumbled good-naturedly. “How are you finding the diamonds?”
“Making them. Heightened Stone Shape at V, Concentration check at 40, Energize V Positive energy. An associate has a trunk full of crap diamonds for me to use.”
“Damn, that actually works?” Briggs blurted out, rolling his eyes. “So... you will literally be able to make money?”
She reached out with her Staff and knocked on his chest, like a teacher chiding a student. “Life Diamonds. Positive Energy. Singular usage. Useless for making most Gear.”
“Oh, right.” Still, Briggs’ face had a weird mix of joy, regret, and resignation. “Well, damn if isn’t about time we got a Nine with Divine magic running around!”
He didn’t say anything about just changing the Energization, which could allow the Life Diamond to instead be a Fire Diamond, Ice Diamond, Earth Diamond, Water Diamond, Lightning Diamond, and so forth and so on...
And even if that wasn’t true, who wouldn’t be willing to trade ten goldweight to be Raised from the dead, if they had it? They’d part with it in a heartbeat! Life Diamond equivalents just didn’t occur at the drop of a hat, so someone would have to supply them... and if Sama’s method for breaking Six worked, the world could be very quickly waking up to a bunch of Nine’s coming online...
Helix’s eyes were almost popping out. “You’re, uh, going to be a Nine? So soon? So should I...”
Her pointing finger cut him off sharply. “Swallow the envy. Swallow the anxiety. Swallow the impatience. You know what you are giving up if you walk away. Are you going to walk away?”
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His mouth flapped, and his sudden overeagerness vanished as quickly as it came. It was just another mountain to overcome. “Nope, nope! Forget I said anything, la la la, singing in the rain, not saying anything here!” He hummed loudly as he walked around to the opposite side of the van, everyone watching him in a moment of amusement, before their faces got grim again.
Briggs’ hand creaked on his Hammer. “Traveler, I’m sorry, but I can’t let this go.”
Traveler looked around at the devastation just once, silver eyes surrounded by the black of Curse magic, reflecting the burning light of the Wrathflames consuming the golden horde of constructed insects. They looked like stars surveying the world from afar.
“A Source does what a Source does,” she replied without judgement. “Sama, you too?” She turned to look at the golden-haired Hagchild, the strongest Null in the world.
“I want to jump on that Karmic gravy train so damn hard,” Sama sighed, crossing her arms. “But, no, I can’t let this ride. You’re absolutely sure it was Imprusar?”
Traveler reached behind her back, and pulled out the hacked, severed head of the Anotxgin, and all its unnatural, strangely rigid beauty. Then she pulled out three gold-and-diamonds senior Cleric holy symbols of Imprus, and dropped them into Sama’s hand. “One hundred percent.”
“Ladies, gentlemen,” the gnome Gregorigori broke in on Sir Pellier’s phone. “We’ve already sent this off to the media and posted pictures on Heavenbound Hall’s website. All shit is breaking loose as we speak. It’s very, very obvious that the Church of Imprus did not expect to be caught at this. There’s state and national forces converging on the town as we speak, and the fallout is already starting.”
“Sama and Briggs are going to need a ride. There’s no other vehicles available here,” Father Bower spoke up, still on top of the van, but much more relaxed now, and he’d even let his own Warding Circle lapse in relief.
“Buy one from a local for too much money,” Gregorigori suggested without hesitation. The two looked at one another, and shrugged. “There’s a car lot not too far down the road, but it won’t open until morning.”
“Local forces are coming?” Traveler asked. “Well, we’d better get busy, then.”
“With what, Lady Traveler?” Sir Pellier asked.
Traveler gave him an odd look. “These bugs are Constructs. Made of gold and diamonds.”
Everyone blinked, and then slowly looked around at the heaps of tiny broken golden bodies laying in swathes about them.
Crickets... nope, the crickets were made of gold, and all around them...
“Does anyone have any objection to getting paid for landing a killing blow on the Church of Imprus that cost us one of our own?” Briggs half-bellowed, and received an urgent chorus of “No, sirs!” in reply.
“Well, then, let’s heap our winnings in the back of the van, it’s got the suspension for it. Sama, get your Floater set up and we’ll melt down as much as we can as fast as we can. Helix, get your Prestidigitation moving and scooping them onto Sama’s Floating Forge! I want 99% of this stuff scooped up and stored away before someone decides it belongs to a special fund for Imprus-haters! Who are not us...”
“Rebuild the town,” Traveler said firmly, and he turned to look at her. “You want to build a Forsaken training area, right?” She gestured right, left. “On about six different levels, this place is now the perfect place to do so.”
The two strongest Forsaken in the world looked at one another, and saw the agreement in the other’s eyes. “Good!” Briggs stated promptly, looked around, and saw no objections. “A ton of gold will be more than enough to do the job right, and that’s if we even have to spend it. Once we send out a call for what we are going to do, funding shouldn’t actually be an issue at all!”
“Just buy the land now. It has no value to anybody.” Traveler began Murmuring over the first of the wheels. “I’ll handle the engine last. Looks like some got up into it before you pushed them out...”
As the golden clouds of the Swarm converged and were finally gone a few minutes later, magical Eternal Lights spread around the obliterated city on the incoming roads, flashing red and warning any late-night drivers that, well, the road and a good foot of the landscape had just vanished ahead of them...
------------
Fucking with the strongest Source in the world. What idiots, I mused to myself.
Shvaughn had conveniently vanished, as had Master Fred. The latter would be name-dropped as appearing and moving on, just like Heavenbound tended to do; his involvement would be confirmed by the Hall.
The only people who knew The Mick was there were those to whom it would be useful to him to know. Likewise, the public didn’t need to know three people affiliated with a certain Traveler were present, and give away what might be going on to the overly curious. Helix was denied his moment of fame... but those who needed to know were informed, and that was all that was important about it.
Windgraf Mochtal was very approving of the pictures Helix had taken. He had a good eye for that stuff.
Helix’s picture of that one van full of Aruan Knights and Commander Briggs, in the middle of what had once been a strip mall’s parking lot in a small town, would be replayed over and over by all forms of media. The bodies of the Imprusar Priests, the Summoning Circle they’d used, the mangled corpse of the inhuman creature independently confirmed to be the thing Sponsoring the Imprusar Lawbound, and several shattered and rebuilt examples of the Golden Swarm were laid out for the world to look at, take measure, and show what the Church of Imprus would do to innocents who got in its way.
Briggs’s Source ability to Make Fate had unconsciously gotten them to move in the worst way, and now the backlash was hitting them hard. Oh, the irony of Axiomatics being felled by Fate going against them. No wonder they hated the idea of Forsaken!
The Imprusar who were smart emptied their accounts and ran pretty far and fast, even if they had no direct involvement in what had gone on whatsoever. There were plenty of crises of faith among the more nobly-minded Imprusar, and when they started to crack open the veneer of secrecy behind some of the things the Church had been doing, the façade of civility and noble demeanor of the Church fell apart rather quickly.
The multibillion-dollar lawsuits from the victims of its actions were also a great source of interest to a great many parties, and the wolves circled, smelling blood.
But that was what happened when you slammed head-on into a Source’s path that wanted to protect his lady. Tch!
Gregorigori got all the stories from all parties, relayed them to the proper authorities, and they were replayed for the people on the ground who wanted to ask the same questions all over again, just to drive the point home that they were wasting time...