My first priority was anything incorporeal and flying, at the longest range possible. My second priority was the massive numbers on the ground.
Shambling skeletons and zombies were among the very weakest things we would have to face. Sleipner hummed to a stop as the first clusters of them filled the road ahead of us. They weren’t any slower than a normal person walking, flesh either withered by the heat or fallen off the bone entirely, but that meant slow, steady progress, even if they couldn’t run.
There’s a thing called Sniper’s Frustration, where you have too many targets to shoot at, and you can’t possibly kill them all. This was the immediate situation for the shooters, who started allocating firepower forwards. Guns were firing non-stop as walking corpses and bones pitched over, burning with vivus and very quickly starting to create obstructions on the ground for the undead behind. As those undead tried to weave through the vivic flames they instinctively avoided and were dropped, they filled in the gaps and created a virtual barrier for us, stacking themselves up and helping the rate of fire, as there was no way a shot could miss at that point.
When that happened, the clustered undead became a Swarm, and Swarmkiller Clasps triggered, doubling the overall damage to the undead by spreading all the excess done to any one target out among the other undead close by. A nice crit blowing apart a head could destroy two or three of our targets at a time!
We had no limit to our ammo, so there was no conserving it, an incredibly nice situation for any shooter. They’d been putting in a lot of hours of practice shooting, simply so they COULD shoot for long periods of time, and now was the time to make use of it all.
I made sure nothing of substance came from above, and if it was clear, I joined the slaughter, taking down up to fifty of the shamblers at a time in lines, arcs, and geometric patterns of exploding undead. A killzone covered by vivic fire began to extend out in front of us, driving the incoming undead back. Sleipner pulled up ahead of it, misting bones crunching and dusting under his wheels, the vivic fires steaming up around him, and if you looked, you could see the phantasmal figure of the unicorn interwoven with the motorcycle, unafraid...
Guns were going off, windshots were thundering, and low-order undead were blowing apart as fast as they were coming or faster. Vivic flames were curtailing them from swarming us, preventing them from heaping up on the ground... and if they stumbled into the fires, they began to burn rapidly, quickly becoming walking pillars of vivus that after ten to fifteen seconds just collapsed, if they weren’t finished off by someone in passing.
THERE’S A PLAZA AHEAD WHERE WE CAN MAKE A STAND, Fred reported, having joined some of the shooting, the booming call of his Grit currently as loud as any of the shotguns or rifles going off around us. As professional shooters, the noise of the guns was an indication that a certain direction was covered. Any faltering of the tempo would signal a problem...
Undead were coming from every direction, including in behind us, as we continued to advance. They were building up in alleyways and yards, but hung up on the vivus that was burning across the road we were on, covering it in hungry mistfire. A few shots into their clusters could start new bonfires quite easily, and I was happy to set off Chains in the middle of the thick press of corpses to do maximum damage in tight quarters.
We rolled into the middle of what had been the center of a small town, complete with a shattered fountain long run dry. It was abutted by what had once been the government building, and the toppled remnants of what had obviously been a church, among other things.
Sleipner headed for the middle of the place, parked himself, and Fred hauled the Obelisk upright.
It was Father Bower who cast the Circle of Protection from Evil, and the faint glitter of it shone out from our little toy, giving us a nice protective effect against sudden surprises, like, oh, a mass incorporeal rush. Silver Runes glowed on black stone, able to cover everyone standing on their Disks around it.
We made a burning road into the middle of the looser undead around us, and we began to expand that circle of vivus in all directions quickly, first cutting down the undead in an ever-widening circle to a safe radius of twenty yards, and then concentrating fire in one direction, extending that arc of death out clockwise like the hand of a clock, slowly spinning it around the fountain’s center point.
A zombie or skeleton corpse wouldn’t last more than ten minutes under the amount of vivus being popped out here, so the dissuading wall wouldn’t hold all that long. Also, if someone gave them an order to march forward regardless, the undead might actually be able to reach us before the vivus grew up high enough to devour them... but only for a short time.
That would, of course, require a directing intelligence, and there was no such direction evident yet. But there should be soon...
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“We’ve got a very strong Evil presence moving in from the west!” Sir Pellier called out, not stopping his continued head-sniping.
“Start pulling out north!” I said. “Master Fred, plow the road!”
Us moving didn’t stop our new protective field. I just hooked a foot on Sleipner, and we rolled off north through the mistfire, stopping the rotating arc of fire to start blowing a path back down the road we’d come in on.
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With a roar, a Wall of Fire in all the golden glory exploded up to devour scores of clustered undead with double damage goodness, dropped away, and left a narrow opening I promptly expanded by another twoscore exploding undead. Tight-packed undead from the side alleys were tossed into the air as Walls of Fire exploded up and then receded in narrow confines, stopping any potential rush from that vector.
Earthen Spikes popped up from the ground like some bizarre trap going off, impaling more undead and blocking the advance of others. I flashed a Chain through them; some exploded, got all over the others close by, and soon the whole thing was a burning mess that receded into the ground before repeating the effect further on.
I didn’t really want to know how long Topaz had been around to get Masteries of so many stolen Pacts to Five, but eh. Just another way of going Deep, I supposed, subbing Amazon Stat buffs for Gear...
Our retreat from the oncoming Clergy, which was certainly taking command of any undead it ran into across the way, and likely rapidly extending that control through incorps, was going smoothly. The undead had indeed encircled us completely, but were unable to contain us when we decided it was time to move.
Master Fred pointed behind us emphatically. CONTROL FLAMES FOUR HUNDRED METERS BACK!
Buff range of Dark Clergy was their personal control range of five hundred meters. They could relay control much farther, of course, but five hundred was the range of their flames.
“Is that the primary source of Evil?” I asked calmly, not stopping my shooting in the slightest.
“No!” Sir Pellier verified. “That one is off that way at least a mile or two!” He pointed further west at a different angle. He had absolute clarity within sixty meters, but Big Powerful Evil Looming in the west could be felt for what it was, like seeing a tsunami coming Over There.
“Fast-moving Dark Minister, maybe an elevated ghoul. Be expecting a Spectral Rush!” All the Disks were staying tight.
“Time for the GAR?” Number One spoke up.
“Give it to Master Fred. He knows how to shoot one and can see far enough away to really make use of it.”
He looked a bit disappointed at not being able to use the big gun, but the Disk with the machine gun floated up next to Master Fred, who just looked at it, and dropped his Grit on it.
There was a swirl of magic as his Grit melted into the bigger gun. I pursed my lips, and noticed his somewhat-sly side glance at me.
“Cool!” I had to admit, as he brought the Disk up to manageable height, chambered up the first round, grabbed the trigger handles, and waited.
“Father, you give him the first More Ammo,” I said, and the Priest nodded, not stopping his endless acquire-shoot, acquire-shoot display of exploding deadheads.
We weren’t moving fast because we didn’t need to be; we only needed to move faster than walking base undead. As the Dark Minister’s control radius came closer, I could see the circle of dark flames sweeping closer, buffing all the undead and making them harder to kill.
However, all these people were optimizing to kill undead, and had been for some time. Their Weapons were geared for the same, and there was only so much Buffing you could do of your undead when you were letting them wander all around out of control and didn’t care about corpsecrafting them into stronger minions.
Really, I was totally unimpressed by this Mexican Shroudzone.
It wasn’t long before we escaped the encirclement, and were casually retreating. Sir Pellier was picking off anything on the ground coming from ahead of us, while the whole crew of Aruans was unloading behind us non-stop, carpeting the road behind us in sprawled mistflaming bodies.
I was alternating between picking off incoming incorps and Chains through the mass of undead. The incorps were trying to sneak up by using the fallen buildings as cover, or maybe emerging from the ground... but that’s what the Circle (Sphere, really) was for. They erupted out of the ground right next to us, ran into the Circle, and had to materialize or be unable to pass through it.
In that six seconds of coalescing, they were blown to bits, as were their friends. Their presence couldn’t escape the Eyes of Heaven watching for them, and those bits of light above Fred were very useful to the rest of us for tracking them. Not only were incorps tougher than rote zombies, they moved faster and were in inappropriate locations, so they weren’t that hard to pick out. They couldn’t flit so quickly when moving through objects, either, and really drew the eye if they moved that fast...
Seeking Spell ignored cover and concealment as long as there was a path around it. If I knew they were there, I could hit them... and even the arcs of the Chains could wind around walls, through windows and doors and so on to find targets. It was perfect for picking off ambushes and hordes hidden behind cover and things, and at +I, I was using it for free.
The undead were not enjoying it... and then Master Fred started shooting the GAR.
The deep burping of the machine gun was only matched by the line of solid fire that started to belch out of its barrel, shooting at things way over there.
Bullets laden by Wrath and with the enhancements of his Grit moved VERY fast, and seemed to home in on their targets. Things began to ignite in midair as long and very hungry lines of fire, looking very much like blessed burning serpents seeking targets, started to punch into a whole lot of incorps of all kinds zooming in our direction.
My Shards spun up in full sequence, a full thirteen of the things, ten around three. I set my targets against the backlight of burning incorps he was setting up for me, and let fly.
The Shards flashed out to their full range like lightning, overtaking bullets in mid-flight instantly, and slammed into their targets... whereupon they promptly Chained in all directions.
There was a crackling roar, like hundreds of firecrackers going off all at once. Multi-energy blasts of jetsilver Force blew through a wild web of contacts just above the fallen rooftops and up in the sky, lighting up the whole area like a great luminous tree of energies holy and elemental.
Burning incorps blew away like clouds of glowing smoke, hundreds of them. I smiled and cycled my ki, reaching out and regathering the energy I’d just expended, and this time, the Chain was free.
The Consecrate was extra, however.
There’s a bit of difference between 6-36 damage, and 36 damage. The second shot of Shards was even more glorious, coating the sky in gold and silver and winding flames of all hues around a sparkling web of jetsilver, and it slaughtered even more of them!
Those that didn’t die, strafing serpents of the Wrath of Heaven punched through and finished sending them on their way. They were all burning, and made pretty easy targets for the volume of fire from the GAR.