“Anything in the works with the Void Brothers?” I asked. I was a bit miffed that they didn’t want to work with me, but given how my Aura reeked of the Shroud, it was understandable. I probably tasted like a perfect vanilla ice cream cone wrapped in dead rotting flesh to their Helices.
“I’ve got their phone numbers, and Briggs and I got some Weapons made for them, as you requested. Whether they’ll take the negative Levels and rebuild is something else. They were a pretty twitchy pair, but they did seem to find the idea of having a lot more Voids around working with them a Good Thing. They also nommed to the fact Briggs and I were way more than we appeared fairly quickly, but their instincts said we weren’t a threat, so we got along fairly well. They actually spent around fifteen minutes just feeling out my Curse, fine-tuning their sensitivity. They had some stories about things some Hags had done that could curdle milk.”
“Adjusting their trackers. Well, hopefully they come around and can work with us. Whether they trust us to do what is ‘right’ is a hard thing from their perspective, but taking out the Shroud definitely can’t be low on the scales, right?”
“Damn right. If there are any of them in Asia, they have to know what is going on, too... but I imagine getting word out would be rather hard right now. The Daoists and Buddhists will hunt them with everything.”
“Sounds like they need someone to come in and relieve some pressure, and show them how to slaughter properly.”
“Topped Bursting Chained Shards on rinse and repeat?” she asked rhetorically.
“I was thinking Cleave Trains and Butterfly Runs, but eh.”
“Butterfly Runs?” she asked, after I let that hang, and she bit.
I whipped up a vid of that from the Crusades of Terra-Luna, and she actually bent closer to look and watch it. “Holy shit, who’s doing that?” she asked, eyes wide as seventy-foot ‘wings’ of Sharding strokes extended up and down into mounds on either side of a massive Cleave Run through literally a landscape of undead. The runner was killing hundreds of them a round, if not over a thousand...
“You did,” I replied.
She watched entranced as that line of death a hundred and fifty feet wide ran all over the place, and Buffed zombies and skeletons of many types exploded as she cleared a road all over the landscape.
“You can’t do that with Sharding...” she had to say, and I just shrugged.
“She did. Maybe the rules have changed on what has happened, but the Butterfly Runs of Sama Rantha are still embedded in history. Like you need Perpetual Shards to be a badass like her.”
She grinned toothily. “She managed to conflate ranged and missile Feats, penetration strikes and Cleave opportunities, all into the same attacks? That is just insane...”
“Yeah, well, she’s definitely a character.”
Sama grumbled to herself, wondering how to pull off the same thing. “Someday!” she finally said, and I could only grin.
In all honesty, just being able to run a Cleave Train like she could was pretty monstrous. A Butterfly Run was just hugely overboard.
But most people thought the same about unlimited Bursting Chained Shards and stuff, so I wasn’t one to judge.
“How far along are you on Rantha/7?” I had to ask.
“I grit my teeth and got Con done while I was in St. Paul. I worked out Strength while I was in Wakefield, and Dexterity in the army. I’m basically just stuck on Charisma now.”
I recalled what I knew of her Racial Class. “Wait, didn’t your Charisma hit +6 at Three?”
“Yes,” she said, “and it still let me advance Racials until I hit Six here, I don’t know why. I’m guessing I ‘can’ get +2 to Charisma a Level until Eight, but I ‘must’ take at least +1 per Level. I hope I don’t have to backpay +12...”
1.44 million was four years of just buying Charisma. Ouch! “Well, you’re going to need all of that to rule the world, so no better time...”
She rolled her eyes at me, I returned it to her, and we both laughed. “Okay, how’s the Karma for this Firezone doing for you?”
“It’s decent, keeping ahead of what I’m spending at any rate, and you know the huge amount I need. I’m definitely hoping for some bigger stuff...”
“And the boss is probably a magmawight...”
She smacked her lips as if I’d just talked about the world’s finest steak. “Yes, that would do!” she agreed happily. “And it should have quite the powerful cohort...”
“Karma on the stack,” I agreed with her. “We’ll be heading out tomorrow as a group again. There’s a lot of groups wanting to coordinate with us and try to clear ground.”
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“Nothing wrong with that. Briggs and I can handle any fast rescue requests if they pop up, or would you prefer to?”
“If they are close enough I can just Linejump over and back. If I need help, I’ll just scream for the rest of you, and Master Fred and Sleipner can tow you over quickly enough.”
“That unicorn has a lot more than eight legs under its hood,” she agreed affably. “But don’t think we’re gonna stop killing stuff just because you’re off helping feebs!”
“I wouldn’t dare even consider it!” I replied dryly.
----------------------
And thusly began our epic return to the Firezone.
We had already garnered a lot of notoriety, returning with salvaged creature loot, pyric crystals, and especially getting rid of the killer Oriental Fire Dragon. Helix was now at the center of our communication network, keeping tabs on everyone, and there were serious talks of making real progress here with us around.
The vivic fire was making sure everything we killed didn’t come back, after all. That was huge, although the enemy wouldn’t find out for some time...
We pushed aggressively into the west side of the Firezone, looking for trouble, and without much effort, finding it. It is convenient when your targets are generally moving spots of flame on a charred landscape, they really stand out.
Slaughter and Karma commenced. The amount of ground we had to cover and clear was immense, and spotting our next source of Karma was a thing.
When the day was up, I Mass Reduced everyone, made a convenient Seal on the underside of a rock to come back to, and Teleported us all back to Boulder to unload our day’s loot. We got a lot of envy for both our harvests and being able to get back here so easily to safety.
Having a Ten Caster around was indeed a Good Thing.
--------
“You all smelling that?” I asked calmly, as Sleipner glided to a halt.
Everyone sniffed, and their faces got strange. “What is that? It’s kind of sickening sweet...” asked Shooter Five, Sergeant Flanders.
“That’s the smell of Chi and Mana torn apart, and put back together poorly. That’s Fire Qi,” I informed them.
“We’re in the lands of the Spirit Beasts,” Sama smiled. Her canines gleamed as she continued, “A land of incredibly good eats...”
Everyone else started smiling, too. That Huo Lung Stew had been shared in Boulder among the Kill Teams, especially those that had lost people to it, and the raves about it had generated considerable interest in eating more of these Spirit Beasts.
It was a public service, after all.
The Mick had kindly arranged for lesser Casters with Gentle Repose spells to keep the carcasses fresh, some fresh and eager young Cooks ready to follow some exacting recipes, and they were now given the go-ahead to come to Boulder and get ready to both prepare and ship out some rare and amazingly tasty stuff. The Glutton Clans were particularly good at cooking up all sorts of odd stuff...
“Islanders, you’re up.” The three men I’d met on Long Island smiled slightly as they nodded. Exactly as I’d told Helix and later them, the two times we’d run into Spirit Beasts, one a lizard and the other a pack of buffalo-sized wolves, the beasts had oriented on the three of them first, looking at me and choosing to give me a wider berth.
They were walking bait, and wasn’t that just too useful...
-----
Helix, Sir Pellier, and Father Bower got into their new role with gusto. As before, the combination of thermal lenses, Eagle Eyes, and fire creatures just being so damn visible made searching around for the things fairly easy, and even if they had territories and were spread out, moving from one to the next was not a problem with Disks towing everyone around and ignoring the terrain.
There was a lot of Coldphasing and vivisizing oversized animal corpses. The Elementals didn’t seem to be too common around here, probably prey for the Spirit beasts we were butchering.
Gregorigori was trying to work out a timeline for how long these things had been here, sifting through released reports, and figured at least twenty years. The Daoists had been working for some time at this kind of thing. Perhaps expanding the Fire Zone was just a way to keep our Powered occupied and distracted.
Couldn’t do much about that, could only set things right for now.
---------
Helix came zipping back through the cut, a big grin on his face, followed by a pack of long-legged, too-slender dogs with burning tails and flaming eyes, howling as they chased after him while trying to dodge the remarkably accurate gunfire from the Paladin and Priest being towed behind him.
I waited until everyone else had opened up on the things massing as much as a rhino, streaks of Coldphasing white ammo turning into great black and white spots on their flaming hides before my Shardray blew through them all in arcs of freezing death. They crystallized from the inside out, whatever excuse for water in them went all solid, and their own convulsing muscle motion tore them apart.
They dropped like mannequins with their strings cut.
Shooter Six called out urgently, “We’ve got something big in the air!”
“Stay in cover. Helix, invisible,” Briggs said softly, but his Voice carried just fine. The Djinnblooded Sorcerer waved his hands urgently, and he and his buddies vanished from sight.
Everyone else, including me, withdrew to positions where we would not easily be seen by a flyby. However, the pack of dead firehounds out there was pretty obvious, but nothing we could do about that.
It was a bird, and a pretty damn big one.
It wasn’t a roc, which was always a raptor of one sort or another. No, this one was built more like a bird of paradise, with a feathered tail almost as long as its main body, a beautiful burning swirl of reds, yellows, whites, and oranges, like an artist had arranged it all just to be so gorgeous.
The flames trailing off it were like stylized feathers themselves, gathering into long swirls that spun lazily behind the creature as it swept by about a half mile overhead, well underneath the Haze.
I wasn’t particularly scared of it coming down, even as big as it was, as it was going to get a big, big surprise about how hard I could hit it.
It circled above us lazily once, and then took back off north, heading roughly in the direction of the volcano node. We all watched it go, and I had Helix keep an eye on it, making sure that it didn’t double back without us seeing it. Unafraid or not, getting caught by surprise by it could be lethal, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with that kind of surprise.
“That what I think it is?” Sama inquired of me. I definitely had the highest Lore rankings of monster ID of all of us, and was drawing from a much deeper knowledge base.
“Looks like a Fire Luan to me,” I murmured. “Second-highest tier of avians, just below Phoenixes. Peers of the Firehawks, Firebirds, and such-like.”
“A Twenty?”
“Indeed.”