Naturally we were well past those conflict zones, and into areas nominally ruled by actual bad people.
That being said, traffic and trade meant money, and the vicious stuff all went on below the radar. Giving tourists and merchants a veneer of assurance that they wouldn’t be kidnapped and sold off to a vampire clan as a blood cow brought more money in than rampant kidnapping, which would rapidly evaporate all such traffic.
That said, the extra money that could be made here and there by snatching people was a thing. The crime barons tried to keep it restricted to the peasants who were helpless to do anything about it, but the possibility of a big payday motivated a lot of random elements.
No such elements wanted to mess with a Blooded Enforcer speaking fluent Spanish and Mestizo, as well as all the native Indian languages they tried to talk past him with. The Mick could Comprehend Languages, so the two checkpoints we’d encountered on the way had, in the end, waved us past without checking too closely after The Mick made it plain he could understand what they were saying, and he wasn’t too amused by it.
Automatic weapons didn’t stop a Curse, after all, and looking into the red growing in The Mick’s dark eyes was a daunting prospect for a soldier who wanted to go home and not find his whole family mysteriously gone, and bloody words hinting at their fate as blood cattle scrawled on the walls of his home.
Ergo, we got remarkably little interference. The Mick even had Bone Marrow’s top down, as the weather was plenty warm, and pure ostentatiousness has a formidable power all its own. “They’re with me,” was enough to make sure the van of Aruans and Father Bower slid on by without too much problem, too.
Naturally the Good Churches had affiliates, allies, servants, acquaintances, friends, sort-of-friends, people they could bribe, mercenaries they knew, and not a few people they could blackmail to get things done down here. The Church with the highest penetration rate was without doubt the Church of Amana, as only people with a death wish wanted to interfere with the Mother’s work. The number of people who had been healed by them was more than enough to ensure that if anyone messed with them, they abruptly went missing.
Killing or defiling a Mother was a death sentence. Every Good and Neutral person within a pretty large area, as well as anyone who had ever been healed by her, would be abruptly made aware of who exactly the person was, and what they had done. Typically, their life was measured in hours, or even minutes... the notified people would always know the defilers were out there, getting away with what they had done, and, well, that was a good way to turn millions of people against you really, really fast.
As a result, nobody messed with Mothers. They didn’t go around shooting anything but undead or Fiends or the like, so it was totally possible to tolerate them taking care of your overworked, enslaved peasantry, and if they got uppity, gently tie them up, escort them to the border, and dump them there to become someone else’s problem. Repeatedly, if you had to.
That said, the Mothers and their Hands were excellent sources of information, knew pretty much everybody, and arranging subtle help through them wasn’t hard at all.
The shopowner with the empty garage was there as we pulled in, all the cars without lights this late at night, and magically silenced to move with little more than creaks on the roads. He took the gold coin that The Mick flipped to him without batting an eye as everyone piled out of the vehicles, and made himself scarce as Weapons were checked, and supplies stacked up on the Disks which were covered with dark cloths to hide the silver Force they were made of.
I watched the Aruans put a minted, hand-made GAR360 on one of the Disks with a raised eyebrow, and had to ask Number One, “That have infinite ammo?” as I gestured at the bulky magazine.
“No, it’s too big for one,” the burly leader of the group admitted. “But More Ammo works on it just fine, and can keep up with the fire rate. When we heard there were Casters coming along, we got permission to bring it, just in case we needed some sustained automatic fire.” He flicked the Token tied around the barrel of his Grit Assault Rifle Model 11. “Move the Token with a Baneskull, works fine, and it has a lot more penetrating power than any of our handhelds.”
Well, a +I fully automatic machine gun was a thing. It wasn’t a full .50 Cal, but the Grit Automatic Rifles were monstrous enough in their own way. If you wanted to make them magical, you couldn’t manufacture them in standardized processes, you had to hand-make every part. As a result, magical machine guns were in insane demand, and pretty damn scarce. You didn’t have to spend any more on the magical side to make them, but on the mundane, it was pretty high and people-intensive.
Gritworks Firearms was the #1 supplier of magical firearms in the world, especially to militaries, for a good reason. The kind of personal expertise needed to make such things just wasn’t that common; Master Gunsmiths didn’t grow on trees!
And, I noted to myself, Sir Pellier’s Gun Spirit could make it Vivic. That thing wouldn’t be a total lawnmower, but it’d be close!
“Works for me!” I had already cast my Duskstopped Fly spell, meaning I would be able to fly at 60’ until tomorrow dusk. The Disks were tied to me and one another, lined up as everyone except Master Fred and Sleipner piled aboard one. I just floated and hung onto the backrest as the unicorn motorcycle rolled out soundlessly, and a gentle wind closed the doors of the garage behind us.
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We weren’t wind-protected, so Sleipner didn’t go too fast... but the edge of the Deadzone where nothing dared to live was only a couple miles away, and people in black gliding along either weren’t going to bother anyone, or if we were noticed, any sentries weren’t going to bug us.
Our target was actually twenty degrees rotation clockwise around the circle of the Shroudzone, as the area within that arc was basically infested with operatives of the Church of Shoul and the Warlocks that were trained and directed out of it. We weren’t in a massive hurry, and definitely didn’t want to tear a path through living foes if we could help it.
Military forces here didn’t use much in the way of lights, as more lights were more targets for the undead to home in on. Spotters had night vision equipment, sometimes magical, sometimes not, looking out into the deep and ubiquitous gloom of the sky under the Haze and hoping to not see anything coming from the south.
If anyone noticed us heading out into the area, well, either we were people associated with the Shrine of the True End, people who felt they could deal with a Shroudzone full of random undead, or we were suicidal. They were there to stop Walkers shambling in and maybe a stray undead getting out somehow, nothing more.
Our biggest asset here was actually Master Fred’s devilsight, as he basically ignored darkness. The whole area was the exact same light level to him, whether it was night or day, so he could see the undead, and everything else, a long way off... and undead didn’t have devilsight, either, so they couldn’t exactly see too far in the darkness, either.
I’d spent a II Slot on Casting Ultravision, which basically worked in tandem with my elven-equal eyes, building on low-light vision and darkvision when under the sky, directly doubling the range of both of them. So, I had daylight-equal vision to at least a hundred meters, falling off after that, with the guys using nightvision goggles at about half that range, and having to put up with light blindness and a lot more black and white and shadows.
It was cool enough, everyone was expecting it. Everyone touched the Death Ward Amulets they’d been given (even Topaz, who actually didn’t need one) as the warning markers for the edge of the deadzone went by, and the utter silence of the buildings around us, long weathered and beaten down by time and the elements, yawned around us.
If you were sensitive to the undead, like a certain person in the mirror, your hair was rising at the feeling of negative energy ahead. The Death Ward Amulet would protect you from the effects of it, but that was the energy of death, aging, decay, and destruction, not something you forgot... and if you were smart, you didn’t want to forget.
Flaming words, very bright in the night, burned over Master Fred’s shoulder, naturally drawing the interest of any undead watching... which was actually what we wanted.
TEN O’CLOCK HIGH
Everyone’s eyes snapped in that direction, looking for the ghostly etherforms or the writhing shadows of flying incorps, the only things likely to be out this far, aside from some animal skeletons or something.
That writhing darkness with the spark of red in its eyes was a Wraith.
My Darts flickered up, wound about with a very eye-catching swirl of multiple energies. They flowed down my arm, condensed into a single Ray, hit the prism, doubled, and reached out over four hundred paces in a long double line of death.
There was something like a cloudy explosion of unwhite light, and the wraith vanished forever.
Might as well have been shooting off a flare. Everyone hummed and nodded behind me, prepping Weapons as Sleipner kept trundling forwards.
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Our second biggest Asset was the Eyes of Heaven, which Sir Pellier had at III, and Master Fred had at IV.
Sir Pellier’s job was to scan through the forward arc, a range of sixty meters, while Master Fred kept universal range up, forty meters all around us, which would light up if anything Evil popped up in it. That was absolute knowledge ranges, of course, but large numbers of undead carried the pressure of their Auras with them, so we could also sense large numbers like vague dark suns of blargh in the distance, suddenly turning this way and coming at us.
The incorps and some flying Swarms were the first to arrive, drawn by my displays.
The incorps I engaged at range, first one at a time, then two at a time, and finally I Chained off a Dart series, which blazed multi-colored fireworks in the sky as it leapt between tightly packed wraiths coming in before one managed to avoid it and end the Chain.
That was fine. It was three hundred meters away, so I just shot the group again, and explosions of unwhite lit up the area for a short moment before being eaten away.
As for the Swarms, a Chain wouldn’t have been so effective without a Swarmkiller Clasp to spread the damage throughout the Swarm. The colony of skeletal dire bats flapping their way towards us exploded in shooting zigzags of multi-hued energies, and bones tumbled burning from the air as they blew apart.
Everybody here agreed that Swarms Sucked, and promised to let them know it, especially after Hermitage.
More and more incorps began to arrive, and I couldn’t pick off all of them, especially as they closed in from multiple directions. If they were in groups, they were my priority, but glowing, burning dots above Fred’s head now indicated the presence and direction of enemies, and Topaz actually took over calling them out as they closed in on us.
The men were good, and had been well-trained. While getting an incorp within a hundred feet of you without a Ward in between could be a scary thing, for these guys it meant they were skeet-shooting.
Guns popped and cracked, no attempt made to silence them. We wanted to attract attention, we wanted to kill.
Individual incorps coming in ran into shooters that could see them, and shotgun or rifle rounds with Blessed Vivic Baneflames punched holes in them that swiftly ate them away.
Helix stood out, standing on his Disk, raising his Windbow to snapshoot anything that fell into his arc of fire, his Windarrows laden with crackling electricity that were every bit as effective or more than the gunfire of those around him. Contrary to his normal personality, he was exceedingly calm and almost unmoving as he fired, sending shots snapping out to take down shadows and wraiths closing in.
Topaz shifted her golden shots in whatever direction was needed, typically trying to finish off something someone had already shot so they could move on to a different target. As she was using a handgun, she and Father Bower basically covered opposite flanks as the final shell of defense, save for Fred himself, who was standing on Sleipner now as we continued forwards.
Our progress was pretty easy to see, although the broken landscape of abandoned homes, withered trees, and rolling landscape cut by aged hills and stuff didn’t let anyone see the source. Old roads and streets were decayed and dust-covered, but not overgrown, as little if anything grew here.
The pulse of light from Fred got a glance from everyone. LARGE NUMBERS ON THE GROUND AHEAD
We were into the zone of the corporeal undead...