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(Back to the Story)
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“Anything special we should know?” Sama asked me, her Vajra dealing with the wind as my Force Armor did; we didn’t need helms or to tie our hair up as Sleipner zipped smoothly along.
I flicked up a Holo, courtesy of The Mick, courtesy of Tamalgand’s Toughs, who had limped back into town earlier that day, down two men who wouldn’t be coming home. They were a skilled, experienced crew, with decent Gear, all Sixes, and they’d been mauled rather badly.
She looked at the picture of the crimson and golden burning snake coming up out of the ground, melting its way through it with a burning aura, breathing a terribly powerful blast of flame, tossing fiery spells this way and that, and tanking their bullets and cold spells without too much trouble.
Her eyes narrowed when she saw the two claws, and the small horn on its forehead. She looked very sharply for the ones further back, catching a glimpse of them as it arced up and dove down into the flaming soil to disrupt the shooting formation of the Toughs.
“What,” she scowled, “is a Hou Lung doing here?”
I held out my hand. Helix made a face and flicked me a gold coin. Sama smiled slightly, then scowled again. “What, you thought it was a fire linnorm?” she teased the young Sorcerer, who blushed in embarrassment. “Linnorms don’t have rear claws, Helix!”
He turned away, muttering to himself at missing the obvious tell. Fire linnorms had a frill of horns, not just one, too...
“Sama, I really hate to say this, but you’re going to have to go to China as soon as we can send you there.”
She looked at me, then nodded slowly. “You disrupt magic like a star, no way to hide it close to you. Is that a fake Ten Aura around you?”
“Yes. Human/2, got me to Faux Wizard/10. I’m still a Five Sorceress base.”
“They’ll be able to pick you out of a crowd, even if you morph.” She turned an eye on Briggs. “And Fuzzy here is like a light bulb. He can’t blend in either, even if he morphed.”
“Yes, yes, the price of being unique and irreplaceable,” he pontificated, also watching the Holo. “They dropped off a dragon here? How the hell?”
“They evolved it from a snake, of course.” Both of their faces twitched. “If they can get a Daoist Immortal from a human, how hard is it to get a dragon from a snake? Just need the fire Qi.”
Both their heads looked up sharply at the dim crimson lights on the horizon. “They’re converting the fire mana here?” Briggs rumbled dangerously.
“If they’re doing it here, imagine what they’ve done back home.”
Both of them looked very unsightly. Sama even rolled her eyes. “All the shit the Imprusar, the Wolves, and that lot have put me through, and they aren’t even players in what is going on...”
“No.” I let the Holo shift to a map of the area. “It was seen here, and this is the closest volcano, which would be at least a Minor Fire Node.”
Both of them nodded. “So that’s our eventual destination?” Sama asked.
“Yes, but no hurry. We’re going to wipe out the landscape as fast as possible.” I flicked up three Darts, and they both blinked, then smiled.
“Nice,” Briggs said approvingly, eying the dagger-long teardrops of hardened jet and silver frost, quietly seething with all sorts of dangerous energies. “What’s the base?”
“3-18, but Penetrating Cold, so double damage to Fire; 6-36 on different targets.”
“Ouch!” Briggs flinched. “What kind of fixed bonuses?”
“+20 or so?”
They both sucked in a breath, and then Briggs chuckled softly. “Goddamn have I missed having an experienced Magos around. Quick, get us into the Fellowship. We are going to be riding the Karma Train as much as possible!”
“I’ll be relying on the two of you to lure stuff in and bait stuff out. You’re definitely the best equipped here to do it.”
Sama nodded. “Tip of the Spear, got it.” They both waited as I invoked the Ritual of Fellowship, which would conjoin and coordinate everyone’s efforts, sharing Karma gained according to honest contributions. A spotter calling out enemy attackers and warning everyone earned as much Karma as those fighting below if his warnings were timely.
They’d naturally heard about the mass slaughter I’d been able to unleash on the undead, and now I had even more Darts available to wipe out the enemy. Granted, Fireborn weren’t undead, but with this level of killing cold against fire creatures, it was going to be even better for me.
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And we were going to be driving back the Firezone as we killed. We were in no hurry.
“Do you have the Commune memorized?” Sama asked in a low voice.
The Commune she was talking about was Commune with Nature, the Druidic spell that allowed you to talk with the Land and learn all sorts of interesting things about the make-up of it, the landscape, and the creatures and plants that dwelled upon it. Pointedly, you could also get a pretty good idea of the minerals present in a location, if you were the sort to exploit that... and I certainly was at this time, not that I intended to harm the Land while I was doing it.
“Not yet. I need Elemental Theurge at Five for that, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be forced through all my Theurgies now that I can take them. So, it’s coming, but it’s not right in front of me.”
Sama nodded understanding, grinning slightly. “Sucks to not be able to optimize properly, right?”
I threw up my hands as I scanned forwards. “You have NO IDEA. I don’t have proper Rep Counts on ANYTHING, even Shards! I’ve been totally distracted Casting other spells and keeping reserves...”
“Rep Counts is an accumulation of time,” Sama agreed somberly. “There’s not many ways to get around it.”
I knuckled my head. “Aelryinth had access to a +9 Meta he Weirded down to +3, Perpetual Spell. He tied it to Shards and just added the basic Metas as he needed them, got them all Efficient within a day or two, then used Residual Magic to chase up the rest of them, swapping Perpetual Spell in and out for the other.” I was sooooo annoyed I didn’t have access to Soul Magic Weirding abuse to do the same!
They both looked scandalized. “He had that? Damn!” Briggs muttered. “He should have been famous for it!”
“Int 30 to understand it.” Their faces got a little comical. In the game, there’d been maybe three people who reached that level of brains. “Then you need Soul Magic at effective 15.”
Aaaand those other two people probably hadn’t had 25 Con scores. Flechette had used her The Shardcaster Title to only need Soul Magic at Eleven and pick it up after things went ‘live’...
If you couldn’t get the modifier to +4, it was scarcely worth it to use the Meta. Once you did, and could start getting rep counts and stacking up to +2 Metas ‘for free’, Shards became a gloriously powerful spell to use endlessly... as both Aelryinth and Flechette had been very happy to demonstrate. Sure, it made you a One-Spell Wonder... but if slaughtering endless amounts of undead was the goal, did it matter?
And people kept forgetting The Ringlord and The Shardcaster also had ALL their other Spell Slots available for combos...
“Firebat cloud ahead!” Helix called out.
Eagle Eyes was Helix’s Extra Spell Known III. He had wondered why he should take it instead of Fireball or Detect III or something. I had just told him to do it, and pick up Sudden Extend.
So, for a period of ten hours a day right now, his forward visual acuity was x25. He could see things from a LONG ways away... and when you are an Archer, or a Ray-user, that was extraordinarily useful.
Also, he could girl-watch from, like, a thousand yards. No, no, I was sure he wasn’t doing that...
It made him THE spotter if he had line of sight and visibility. The funny thing about Fireborn is that they tend to be very easy to see at a distance, at least when moving... and Helix was also wearing one thermal vision lens for those, as even cool and black they were still hotter than the landscape.
This put him in the nice position of seeing all our enemies first.
We all saw the moving flames a good mile off, but didn’t know what they were, or even if they were off the ground. Helix answered both questions with his call-out.
Briggs spoke up before everyone else. “I’m sure you all figured it out, but we’re all riding Traveler’s train here. What we do is to supplement what she can do, to contain, corral, and line the bastards up so they can be mowed down more quickly by her.
“They have NO IDEA what is coming,” he went on calmly. “They aren’t ready for us, really, and so they have absolutely no idea what they are dealing with in her.
“We are not here to be stealthy. Just like your show down south, we are here to be loud and to make a mess. Sama and I and Master Fred are here to deal with any ‘surprise’ magic, and Lady Traveler is going to get any Casters dead in the soonest way.
“If the burning bastards aren’t nice enough to converge on us, Sama and I will be wandering out to slap them in the head and pull them back to everyone.
“If we run into something truly powerful, we will of course run. And then the powerful thing is going to run into someone Casting Shards at-?” he glanced at me.
“XXVII.”
The Casters all dropped their jaws. The rest did so a moment later.
Except Briggs and Sama. They just grinned more widely.
“Cantrips at 27.” Briggs’ grin threatened to break his face. “You all know how she promised she would be bringing down the Shroud. Do you believe her now?”
Helix swallowed audibly yet again. Everyone else looked rather wide-eyed.
“Okay, let’s get ready for some skeet.” He unlimbered his portable cannon Boomer and looked towards the incoming firebats expectantly.
------
They were a Swarm, so the Swarmkiller Clasps did their thing, and radiated the extra damage out to neighbors struck by the arcs of cold that had replaced the lightning, looking like a great spiderweb of feathery ice had appeared in the air, catching and snuffing out the firebats like moths.
It tore the heart out of the burning cloud the colony had formed, and before the survivors hungry for some nice cool blood to boil in their little tummies could arrive, the second salvo came out and finished butchering ninety percent of them.
Skeet-shooting commenced on the suddenly and sadly wiser survivors as they tried to scatter. As they were out of Chaining range of one another, I could only pick them off one at a time myself, so the shooters were actually more useful then I was once they broke apart.
Briggs was quick to point that out, too. “Everyone registered that, right? Her power is when the enemy is close to one another! As soon as they break, they are ours! Pick off the stragglers!”
“Sleipner, pause for a moment!” I called out, and the unicorn bike coasted to a stop.
“Something is glittering!” Sama noticed, before Helix spotted them.
I reached out and pulled the nearest one to me close. A sparkling deep red crystal about as big as my little nail zipped over to my hand, and I held it up for everyone.
“Killing a Fireborn with cold and vivus has a chance of condensing their lifecore into a jewel. This one is worth about twenty gold.”
Everyone’s eyes lit up. Profit to be burned away was always a good thing.
“For Fire-based enhancements, that value is doubled... like, say, your Fire Resistance devices. Helix, grab them,” I waved at him, and he promptly flew off, gesturing with Minor TK to pull them in as he spotted them. There were several dozen of them, and Sir Pellier and I helped by grabbing the ones closest to us.
Helix came back with a big heaping double handful of them, and I pointed to Sleipner’s sidecar, still holding our Ward Obelisk. The base area had plenty of area to shove the things.
Somewhat innured to high value gemstones after riding with me, he dumped them into the sidecar, then shot up for some altitude.
“There’s some wandering Elementals coming in from that way!” he called out. Sleipner obligingly diverted off the road, riding over the landscape as smoothly as a zephyr, leading us towards our next targets.
Morale was good, everybody knew what they had to do. It was time to do some real Good, and make a proper fortune while we were at it!