I spent a ki point and gathered in the expending energy through Spirit Captures Mana to regain one of the expended Slots. It meant not firing for six seconds, but also meant a point of Ki suddenly became something that could wipe three hundred undead.
I figured it was worth it.
Focused on their shooting, half the team hadn’t noticed anything, but the other half couldn’t help seeing the utterly massive web spun by all those arcing Shards flying in all directions, seeking victims to Feed to the Land.
“Tiirith!” blurted out Helix, gaping at the show.
“Keep shooting!” I told him calmly, and he shook his head, raised his Windbow, and with many, many dreams coming to mind, kept up with his harvesting.
The Fellowship Ritual meant everything I was killing he was getting a piece of. Maybe someday he’d be able to do the same thing... or close to it, or something. Who knew?
The incoming mob of incorps had been drastically thinned down, and was running straight into a whole lot of big, powerful, and Mighty Ghost Touch bullets laden with +11d6 of Wrath and other kickers. They weren’t enjoying it all that much.
I popped three volleys of Dartrays before they could close in on us. None of them actually managed to reach us, burned by dancing arcs of jetsilver Force or popped by serpents of burning light with extreme accuracy.
Not wanting to waste the More Ammo, Master Fred swung the Disk behind him, everyone got out of his way, and he proceeded to start punching rounds into the horde behind us.
That was an impressive sight. The undead basically had no resistance to the passage of the bullets, and one shot could punch through dozens before it stopped, laden with so much force and flames of Wrath that whole rows of undead detonated as he scythed through them. Before whatever intelligent commanders they had could get them off the road, an additional quarter-mile of the road behind us was burning brightly, and Master Fred basically ran out of targets.
That was no reason to stop firing, of course, and he simply started shooting out in an arc out of line of sight, fully able to visualize the position of the road behind us and where the salvos would be useful.
Magical guns don’t jam, and are very hard to overheat when you have good fire discipline.
He let off with a minute to go on the spell, finishing a sustained barrage that consumed most of the magazine and wreaked havoc behind us as the undead tried to press forward on alternate courses, and merely became more targets for him.
The magazine would fill back up, there was no reason to press the issue.
“Damn impressive!” Number One admitted, seconded by the other shooters as they kept their own shots going. The undead weren’t getting less numerous, just spreading out... and they were indeed slightly harder to kill now.
There was a crash and a boom that seemed to suck at the soul. A bolt of red-black lightning bounced off the shield that Topaz had thrown up alertly, just waiting for someone to toss a Negalance at us, and I spun around, energy seething around Clavus.
A Congregant. Looked like a Wight...
I had been casting Darts once again, so I had Repetition and Residuals in use. The two Shardrays flared jetsilver and blazed Consecrated gold as they smashed into the hapless undead thing that had cast a spell at us and blew it apart. Its escorts of Hardbones and Parched got caught in the spiraling fury of the Chain that followed, and blew apart as neatly as if caught in a fireball, showering the lesser undead about with burning vivus.
“Nice block!” I called out, shifting my efforts back to the side approaches once more. With the R&R working, my Darts were punching out ridiculously accurately, and were devastating when they hit.
“They telegraph it,” Topaz sniffed disparagingly.
“Sleipner, we need an open field so we can draw line of sight on this Dark Minister and take him out. I think we passed a couple farms on the way...” I called out to our driver.
The front wheel of the bike looked this way and that, and began to trundle off to the east, taking us with him. The undead, some of them moving appreciably faster than normal zombies, dutifully followed, and everyone obligingly kept firing.
The number of our kills was quite staggering from a real standpoint, if not relatively. The Aruans were averaging a kill every second or two, let’s say thirty a minute. One hundred and fifty a minute between the five of them, and we’d been at this nearly two hours. That was eighteen thousand kills.
I had been casting Darts for the same period of time, being conservative and killing forty per Chain of two Darts. Eighty every six seconds, eight hundred a minute, two hours, ninety-six thousand kills.
Sir Pelier, Father Bower, and Helix were putting up numbers similar to the shooters, having the same kind of Gear and skills to do so. Topaz would soften up formations with Spike Walls, and the weakened undead soon fell to burning shots or even the mistfire on the ground. Master Fred was alternating between booming Grit shots shooting out spirals of Wrathfire, or raising Walls of Fire to explode out of the dead ground like volcanoes erupting to consume whole lines of the undead. That endemic double damage to undead of the Walls was hugely useful here.
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We had probably passed a hundred and fifty thousand kills somewhere along the way. Based on the size of the Shroudzone, there were probably between three to four million undead under the Shroudlord’s command.
I had marked the edge of the hate lightning in the true Shroudcloud, and noticed it had receded visibly as we slaughtered and vivus-infused the world, pressing back against it.
The Karma was flowing freely, of course, and everyone here had made enough Karma to Level multiple times, without a doubt. But part of the reason I was doing this wasn’t just for the open-ended Karma.
It was to drive home the fact that there were a lot of undead to kill, and with just us, even slaughtering like some massacre-happy fool’s wet dream, killing all these undead was going to take a long, long time.
We needed numbers of people, numbers of guns. Unlimited ammo was nice, but we needed more people.
These people would go back, make their reports to their superiors. They would report how they’d killed thousands and thousands of undead, and how the Shroudzone had barely moved even after perma-wiping so many undead.
If they wanted to do this seriously, they’d need more... but the key fact was, they’d done it! They’d gone in, killed ungodly amounts of undead, never to return; actually forced the Shroudcloud back; and with good teamwork, healers getting rid of muscle cramp and fatigue, and the right Weapons, they’d shot and killed undead for hours straight in their home ground, at night!
It would set off an explosion of investment into Amulets of Death Ward and the like. Not everyone could have me here getting rid of incorp swarms, after all...
----
We moved into an open field that gave us a good idea of the tens of thousands of undead coming to encircle us. Sir Pellier spent the More Ammo to fire up the GAR, and Fred proceeded to mow them down and create a nice firebreak of vivus, scything down swathes of them explosively as multi-flame serpents of fire drilled through multiple bodies.
Some of the undead were directed to march through their burning dead. They caught on fire, became walking pillars, and generally crumpled down within thirty seconds, adding to the mess and extending the carpet.
They weren’t going to run out of undead, of course, but that was fine, we weren’t going to run out of ammo. The black flames buffering them gave them that little extra shot of Health that was making it harder to one-shot them, which meant the kill rate for the shooters was slowing down... except for me, which they noticed, and spurred them to get better at shooting things!
“Topaz, do you have eyes on the Dark Minister?” I asked her, sending out more Dartrays into the uncaring masses of undead. Webs of Chains exploded out from the impacts, reaching deep back into the coming mass to make more lines of vivus. The guns were making the vivic carpet in the front; I was creating channels they had to walk through, slowing their advance further, like squeezing four lanes into two.
“I do. He’s a big guy on a bone mare there, surrounded by a bunch of other corpses on dead horses!” Looming over his minions like he did, he was hard to miss... and there was a remarkable amount of light on the dark field now, too.
I took a glance around. The incorps in the area had been thinned out precipitously, but more were certainly on the way from the west, if nothing else. But if we had to run, we could run.
“Can you take the Obelisk and pop it up right next to him? You’ll need to get back into the ground fast... when I see it pop up, I’m going to waste him.”
She glanced at me appraisingly. “I thought those guys could just bodyhop away?”
“You do know Circles of Protection stop Possession and similar stuff, right?”
She pursed her lips in consideration, and her crystalline eyes glittered. “I have the feeling this is going to be big...”
“Well, you won’t get to see it, but the rest of us will,” I smiled slightly.
Without any more delay, she stepped over past Fred on Sleipner, grabbed the half-ton Obelisk as if it was a sack of potatoes, and hopped off the bike. She went straight into the ground as if it was made of water.
Our target was five hundred yards out, close enough for its command aura to reach us, but no undead were getting within forty yards of us yet, so it was moot.
Earthjump once, Earthjump twice...
I distinctly saw the heads of the riders all turn at the same moment as all the Blacklight Buffing went out, and the advancing undead suddenly halted. The Shards I had waiting exploded out.
Some bounced through the air like they were reflecting off mirrors. Some shot straight as lasers, others came arcing in at angles, some had writhing paths like snakes or waves, and some corkscrewed and spiraled artistically.
They all converged on that one target.
Weaponized Shards with full Consecration and Energized smashed into him, each Shard almost as powerful as Fred’s Grit shots, all of them laden with Metamagic and all sorts of stuff very hostile to this bastard. A few crits landed on its eyes and neck.
The Wrath that Master Fred had helpfully sent along for the ride punched in deep, too.
The blast of 400+ damage was pretty bright. As the nexus of a small horde, the Dark Minister had a lot of negative energy cycling through it. But cut off from them for a moment, the extra Health Qi gained from leeching off/distributing damage to its minions temporarily wasn’t available, and my attack simply overloaded what it could handle.
That energy fed into the Obelisk, which pulsed once, and a completely different set of Offering Runes lit up... and instead of fading away, that vivic explosion got brighter, brighter, and brighter...
With a woosh, it blew past us, a rushing gust of semi-solid vivic fire extending right out to the ranges of the Dark Minister’s influence.
Tens of thousands of undead were swept away instantly, like dust before a great unwhite wind. Its personal Graveguards were pretty tough, but they were right on top of the center of effect... and they were reeling from the Chains I’d ladled onto the Shards I’d cast out of a III Valence for the extra juice.
The explosion went up further than it went out, feeding on the negative energy in the air, and driving up for the Haze above hungrily. It plunged into the dark and grey of trapped souls above us, and blazed through them, hungry and devouring.
Everyone around me gaped as the clouds were eaten away, pulled back from the light, and in the middle of a Deadzone, a burning circle limned an open view of the stars above us.
Ohhh, did that feel good...