The landscape was burning white around and below us, and I was sniping stuff trying to climb up to us or fall down on us as we went up the caldera. There were many, many lava tubes coming in and out of this one, and from the way various serpentine forms of Elementals were coming through it, I had a good idea of the kinds of things that might be found within.

Were they a true threat? Not individually, no... but they weren’t coming individually, and their true importance was anchoring the influence of the Firelord, not in being a threat. I had just driven a spear of Land-food into this place, and was threatening that control and influence thereby.

The payoff would be the Glory award, not necessarily the slaughter of these creatures... which was still enough Karma to pay for a lot of Leveling going forward.

Snakes and serpents were a theme here. The Fire Asps and Cobras were dominant, but there were thoqua fire worms, the spiked bodies of massive charwinders, the wingsnake scorchfangs, and lots of Elementals in serpentine forms, their cruder versions of the scaled things not hurting their brutal power in the least.

There were a lot of long forms slithering back and forth inside the lava lake bubbling and overflowing at its core there, too.

The air temperature was well over two hundred degrees, and while we weren’t affected by it, I couldn’t get my cold bonus. I might have to improve it to a V Valence effect to do so, setting the area at a specific temperature regardless of the natural environment. I wanted those cold bonuses...

Whatever, I’d have to make do with the Power of the Land flowing so freely here, although the pyromana getting converted to cryomana wasn’t exactly part of its plan.

Arcanataoic Elemental Energy Mastery ftw!

There was a lot of snake chopping and hacking as we headed into the caldera, Masks on to help deal with fumes, our fire resistance doing lots of work, and we were preceded by waves and volleys of killing cold that sprayed ashen vivus (and little glittery souvenirs) all over the place.

When the car-sized head popped up in the lava pool and spit a Meteor Swarm out, I was watching.

A Meteor Swarm was theoretical in Valence prediction, a confluence of four Widened Fireballs with tremendous destructive power, rocking 10d6 of physical impact damage and 10d6 spread damage each. The blasts overlapped, and unlike normal spells, stacked, especially in the area directly between all four of them. Get caught there, and you were eating a LOT of fire damage, and saving against four different Bursts!

It was possible to approximate such a thing with a Widened Paired Admixtured Fireburst, if you could somehow fit all that into your Metacap, except such an attack would all be launched at the same area and target, not spread out for massive area coverage like a true Meteor Swarm. True higher Valence spells had advantages over Meta’d ones...

Seeing a Valence IX magical power come arcing up and over for us was definitely a moment, and I paused just to watch the extraordinary beauty of the magical weaving that it entailed. It wasn’t that I couldn’t comprehend and understand it, but if I tried something similar with a Spell, I’d blow my own skull apart.

That said, it might be one of the mightiest classical magical spells ever, but so what? It was still a magical spell, despite how devastating it was when it hit.

Silver magic came in and tore apart the primary components of its structure. Yeah, it took a lot of power to cast this, and the source was doing it at Twenty, but my Dispel Check was closing in on Thirty, so I didn’t much care.

The growing fireballs got about halfway to us when they blew up in midair, and I promptly Cryoclasmed the area about me in response.

I covered a lot of area, and the smaller slithering and squirming things nearby all went away. My big black ice feathers explosion covered a lot more ground than its big fire explosion would have, and definitely looked much more out of place, especially with the way it left jetsilver ice everywhere.

The smaller creatures froze, blackened, died, and burned to white dust and ash. The bigger creatures got blackened, but lived... but that didn’t help save them from the second, and possibly the third blasts they had to wade through to get to me, the second one hurting even more than the first as the 4d6 of Practical Penetrating Cold was Topped to a full 24 with Residual Magic paying for Widen. Generally speaking, 95%+ of the creatures had to save or die.

The big snake in the lava had risen up, and was urgently shooting Rays and Firebursts and the like at me, trying to interrupt my spellcasting and allow its minions to get close to me.

I had to do three things at once: Counter its magic, harvest ki, and keep attacking to slow down the wave assaults coming at me.

No problem, that’s what Arcane Fusion was for.

For the I slot, thirteen Weaponized Shards lashed out to reap the wounded mid-size, or living weaker creatures, feeding me back what I’d expended. For a III Slot, Dispel Magic glittered out there, empowered by Silver Magic, and slammed head on into whatever it was tossing, dissipating it, fracturing it into useless streams, or imploding it in on itself as its structure was torn apart and it exploded harmlessly.

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And I kept Casting Cryoclasm and thinning down the numbers further, swirling icefire feathers of jet and silver lashing out to cover the landscape in ice, so fast that it wasn’t melting quickly, if at all.

Anything coming towards me had to bull through at least two of those to reach me, probably eat a Shard or two, and Master Fred was happy enough to shoot them if they didn’t want to die. If they got any closer than that, The Mick’s Shardings ate into them with bloody frost, and none managed to reach us as we advanced down from the rim.

I had to admit the master snake was patient, and it wasn’t running out of lesser fire magic, continuing to spit out Rays and Bursts to keep me occupied, all its servants slithering towards me, trying to make it past my magic. It could see Cryoclasm wasn’t intrinsically all that powerful... but, oh, them kickers!

When it ran out of flights of scorchfangs to send at us, I decided to show my appreciation for its efforts by using a Spellflare instead of a standard Dispel while it was in mid-Cast.

It wasn’t a high Valence effect, and I certainly could have done something more dangerous to it, but when the Fireburst it spat out blew into wild magic and fed back into it for a 3d6 jolt of its own power gone wrong, the King Serpent plainly wasn’t too happy.

It hesitated to Cast again, which was fine. I didn’t want it running away before I gave it my full attention, and so kept about massacring its minions, including the fresh Elementals squirming out of the lava to get to me.

Said lava was also blackening, freezing over as the Cryoclasms tore across it. That was affecting how rapidly its minions could get out of the lava pool and come streaming after me.

The Cryoclasms were also clearing away the chaff coming at me from behind. Given we were moving forward, those fun fellows tended to have to eat three of them before reaching me, and that didn’t end well for them.

I marked all the fumaroles and venting-holes that the natives were certain to come out from, and Master Fred was happy to drop Icefire Walls on top of them to further plug them and punish anything hot within them.

We weren’t in a hurry... this was all still about Rep Counts.

My Cold and Force Reserve Counts had easily hit Tier 5, not that it meant much at this point, as I didn’t need to use either.

The area around us was steaming and sparkling with warring heat and cold, and the fire creatures were plainly uncomfortable as they came crackling across ground that was basically supercooled at this point. Soon enough they contributed to it, vivic energy pouring into the ground going white as they died and their spirits didn’t return to the fire.

I had to wonder how much of this Fire had been here, and how much had congealed once the Shroud came. Regardless, the Elementals had not learned their place, and were warring to destroy the Green. We simply could not allow that.

Although most of humanity definitely did not want to believe it, the Elements had a LOT of power on the planet, with Earth being numero uno, Fire #2, Water #3, and Air last, but most precious to humanity. All of the Elements actually outpowered the Green and the Brown in influence, but their goals tended to be so long-term they mostly ignored humanity at the macro level.

At the micro level they were annoyances, and this whole Firezone thing was one of them, a tiny little speck of Fire that didn’t want to be caged up under the mantle and came boiling out to stake a claim in classic Elemental contention for supremacy of state of matter.

If Fire was meant to be stronger here, Terra would have been a sun. No. Smacking these things down was totally necessary, because plant and animal life could not survive Fire’s Domain. We survived between Elemental realms, not IN them. What force had the bright idea of allowing non-Elemental life to rise in the regions between the Elements had been Inspired, but that also placed us in a lot of danger in magical universes.

Elemental Dominance was not as immediately lethal as Necroic was, but such things all ended up the same way: worlds covered by water, worlds covered by charlands, worlds covered by wind-scoured deserts, or simply arid, airless rocks, the building blocks of life trapped within the stones of the world.

Nope. Fight ALL of that crap! Each Element considered themselves pure, and us just impurities. We considered them building blocks to TRUE lifeforms. There might have been just a little bit of instinctive doctrinal conflict there. They felt we were some weirdly Animated constructs made of mud, and we felt they were impossibly Animated states of matter. Tomato, tomahto...

It definitely didn’t stop me from shooting however, and paying attention to pretty much everything around me as I did. That’s why you acquire Permanent magical senses, after all!

Destroying them heartlessly and feeding them back into the Land was thus something that required very little justification. Terra hopefully loved her little green dressing gown of life and water and air, and wouldn’t begrudge us removing this Fire skin-sore messing it up...

Every time King Firecobra and his badass hood spat a long-range spell at me, I Countered it with a Spellflare and fed it back at him, much to his disgruntlement, then Arcane Fusioned for a Sanctified Cryoclasm and Shards to supplement it. Our advance had slowed to a crawl, everyone staying pretty busy with all the stuff coming from all directions, but that was fine. My Rep Counts were increasing nicely as I worked through Meta after Meta, having no end of those to work with and through, and if I didn’t have those and could interrupt my routine, I certainly had no end of spells to make Efficient, one by one...

Working like this, it was easy to see the advantages and disadvantages of Ki Reaping when compared to Perpetual. Perpetual didn’t need to have targets or kill anything to work, and with Residual Metamagic could fit any Meta under its cap to get reps. You could just stand there and repeat Shards all day for rep counts, targeting nothing at all.

On the flip side, you could only have one spell Perpetual at a time, and that +9 Meta modifier was a killer. Once you had it, you could rack up Rep Counts like nobody’s business, but getting there might be a bit tricky.

I didn’t have any tricks to break my VI Metacap yet, or Soul Magic to reduce the cost of a Meta down by four or five points. Perpetual Spell would be out of reach for a long time.

That was fine. My circumstances weren’t calling for a massive ramp-up of Metas at the speed Perpetual Spell could do so, and it was likely that I had lots of work ahead of me.

Ki Reaping would work as long as there were lots of things there to slaughter, and there would be things to slaughter in massive numbers as long as there were Shroudzones.

If I was projecting my Shroudborn Bloodline correctly, I was always going to be under Shroudzones. When my rep counts were done, so many hundreds of thousands of spells in the future, that just meant that it was time to go full slaughter mode.

Before then, lots of Practical and Efficient work to do...