The gangly slick-skinned salamander-men were quite eager to come after me, considering I was a mortal female in no armor. They had light to medium armor, shields, and either spears or scimitars to accentuate their fire-spitting jaws and flaming blood. Some of them were riding fire striders, too. Burning salamander-men atop fire-dinos, I guess.
None of it bothered me in the slightest. They were racial Three to Fives, and I was a Deep Ten. I cut into them, through them, around them, whirling and dancing, perfectly visualizing everything in my Domain, eyes looking in every direction at once, and tracking it all without effort... or perhaps with great effort that was just wasn’t that great as a Ten. I could cut through myself, cut in blind directions, see attacks coming from anywhere and respond. I could dodge their hurled javelins and spears easily, even pluck them out of the air and hurl them back effectively. If they came within reach of me, they died, and didn’t really believe it when they did.
I was also fast. Incredibly fast. Base human movement is 30'. Annis hagchildren get to 40' as a bonus from their mothers, skinny fast killers. I got another +10' fast movement from my Melee Levels, bringing my base to 50'…and then 3 Monk Advances with lightfoot, giving me +1/3 my base each time, rounding down. So, +45, bringing me to 95' movement, and I'd stuffed 4 Soul Essence into Speedy Soul, a Soul Feat that added +5' of movement per Soul Invested.
115' movement. For comparison, a thoroughbred horse runs at 90'. I was that fast all the time, not just when running in a straight line. In a straight line, movement is normally about x4. I had the Run Feat, so when sprinting I moved at x5. That was almost 200 yards in six seconds.
With the Waveskating Step, I didn't have to move in a straight line when sprinting, so I could move incredibly fast and still be evasive.
They couldn't avoid me, they couldn't keep me at distance, they had almost no time to attack me as I closed, they couldn't keep up with me in combat, and they couldn't run away from me.
Tremble sang, and I moved through their formations, Cleaving and Supreme Cleaving from one to the next, opening up chains of kills in blurs of swordwork. The Cleave Train had left the station.
“TREMBLE, SHE COMES!”
I had never said that outside the game. It was stupid, pure cheese, and yet there were a LOT of people from the Power of Ten who knew what it meant when I sang that out, because it was how I bailed out their asses.
It was time to kill.
My reach when attacking was 10', instead of 5', a combination of lunging, sliding movement with my lightfoot, and ki extending the killing edge of my Sword. That meant I outreached an average spear. Supreme Cleave let me take a single step between Cleaves, up a to a number totaling my normal movement per round, i.e. five-foot steps adding up to 115, or 23 of them.
An Acrobatics check at 35 let me extend that to ten feet, although the total distance stayed the same. Cleave let me continue a blow to the next target if I killed one of them.
What it meant in a tight formation is that I could turn one attack into two dozen kills, a smoothly flowing stream of death, blood fountaining with every step I took and two of them to every beat of Tremble's death song.
I got two to four strikes a cycle, a combat round.
I slaughtered a unit of firenewts numbering over a hundred in less then thirty seconds. They never had a chance. Most of them didn't even realize that I was in range of them before they died. They just saw their egg-mates coming apart in front of them and fiery blood exploding, a dark flash and golden hair going on by, and they died.
They also liked crude gold jewelry and fiery gemstones, so I did have to pause to loot them, once they were dead. Their officers even had simple magical Weapons.
They also had hides. I was no kinder to them than they were to me. When I slaughtered the unit of 100, the sorcerer in the back that didn't have time to run away seemed to be wearing his spellbook on his skin. I decided to make use of that, skinned the bastard, turned the tendons of a score of them into thread, and made myself a Masspack out of his hide.
D&D had made Bags of Holding and all their derivations famous. Loony Tunes had made Hammerspace a thing.
Power of Ten had been very, very explicit that you don't go around stressing dimensional integrity that way. Nobody had spatial rings, holding bags, handy haversacks, dimensional closets, or anything similar. Archmagos who got the Dimensional Mastery were the only ones who received the ability to open an extradimensional space, and even then, it was only accessible once or twice a day.
There were some people in Power of Ten who did decide to make dimensional Toys despite the warnings. Exactly three, as a matter of fact. One did the spatial Amulet thing; he got sucked into it, and unleashed an invasion of Astral Ravagers. Was never seen again... which meant character wipe, and he would have had to start over from nothing.
The guy with the Bag had a very large tentacle-thing come out of it, grab him, and suck him inside. Then something really big started to come out of it, and someone smart blew the Bag apart before it could manifest.
He also vanished for good. Character wipe, and didn’t restart.
The last one had tried to make a bigger, badder Sanctum. The explosion made a new lake on the server. Gone forever, too.
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All three of them, character wipe. Nobody tried to make dimensional holding things after that. The lake even got some monuments to all three idiots. Both Weird's and Mulcaster's sites had Dimensional Magic theoretical sites for the magic to do it, but they were only unlocked for trusted sorts who would never implement them, just to see the theory behind them.
They weren’t hard to make. Obviously there were other things out there looking for little moving distortions in the Veil, and preying on them. Who needed Bags of Devouring?
Now Compression magic, that was a thing. You could shrink stuff down easily enough, and even make it long term. But if you wanted a container to do it for you, you couldn't offset the weight easily. So, a Masspack could effectively turn a 4 cubic foot backpack into an 8, 16 or 32 cubic foot backpack by shrinking the things that were put inside it… but you had to be able to carry the weight of the whole thing, and it had to be built strong enough to carry all that weight, as well.
You could use magic to buy off the extra weight, but that was no different than building up a Disk, cost-wise.
A Disk was based entirely on the arcane spell Disk, which formed a meter-wide circle of force that could carry 50 kilos/Caster Level, hovered at waist height off the ground, and could either follow its controller in a locked position, or slowly move at the pace of a slow walk a short distance from the controller over the ground. It couldn't fly over a space unless the controller could, and it had no pushing force to speak of. All it could do was carry stuff.
But being able to carry big, heavy stuff that wouldn't fit in a Pack was a great thing all on its own. You could also throw party members on it, and have a flier or speedster as the controller, and move a group of people as fast as the fastest member. Disks were awesome and universal. In a fight, you just let them sit in one place, or shoved them somewhere out of the way, or used them as firing platforms. They could even be used as floating movement impediments for an enemy.
I effectively needed both of these things, but the Masspack right now would be better for my valuables. I'd need to carve or cast a Disk, and I didn't have the materials to do either at the moment.
Well, there was a lot of metal here...
Of course, I was Sama Rantha. I couldn't just make a QL20 backpack and weave Runes into it made from thread from my hair and call it done. Oh, no. I started to do that, and my face just sort of contorted and I had to start over. There was simply no way I was going to be satisfied with something that low a QL.
I was a Null Ten. Naturally I was a Quality Level snob.
Quality Level was the big thing for magic items… the lowest level of quality inherent in the item defined the Quality Level. So making something awesomely and then skimping on the last part would nosedive the QL. It ALL had to be good. 90% QL 50 and 10% QL 20 was QL20 to the magic. So, crafting stuff was a thing that definitely had to be done right.
Firenewt brains treated the hide, I used my Vajra to accelerate the alchemical tanning processes as I bloodwashed it, microlacerations helped permeate the hide with the oils from their bodies and rendered it supple. I had to make it with multiple pockets and straps and tie-downs and straps and false compartments and sealable folding areas. I carved fire strider bones to make the teeth and slide for zippers with my nails, I used their third eyes for studs and buttons, and I Burned the remaining skulls, brains, spines, and fundamentallums that generated their breath-flames as Power Comps to power the thing up.
So, there went like, eight hours just like that. The Pattern I carved out with my nails did the job just fine for the Investing. Some flying nuisances came in, died, and I tossed their fundamenta in with the rest. I worked with inhuman speed and precision, able to slice and grab at the tiniest levels, and had the Ranks to design and execute this all in my head.
When I was done, I had a Masspack that could unfold up to six cubic feet of capacity, both shoulder and hip straps for taking the weight, and all those third eyes were glowing with the mana from burning the fundamenta of every single one of the bastards, pumping it slowly into the Pack.
QL35. Currently half size compression, fifty-kilo weight let-off. More than enough for my current loot, and it would increase every day, as long as I fed it more fundamenta.
In went my loot and tools. I sat there and Meditated for two hours to calm my new OCD down with the satisfaction of a job well-done, ignoring my inner itch about clothing quality which I would have to address soon or I was going to tear off this QL 12 mass-produced stuff and just run around nude...
Oh, there were undead, too.
Gave the Fireborn critters a bit of surprise when some of the things they'd killed, and pretty much everything sizable and dead that they had not, got up around midnight. They were burning with necropyre flames, black and green, and fully capable of contesting with Fireborn. Their bodies were burning away, but never getting smaller, trailing ash and smoke and really not liking the situation they were in.
I killed them, too. Sometimes I even had to swing twice, if it was a grizzly. That whole herd of beef cattle, now with burning horns and flaming hooves and tails, I could have lived without, but I killed them, too, staying in motion so their stampeding bulks didn't bury me, taking their heads and sending them Down once more.
Midnight was also my Renewal. I'd accumulated more than enough Karma during the day to Infuse my Sword before and just after, and I did so.
Naming Karma is restricted to 2 goldweight equivs of Karma a day, i.e. 1000 gpv. That's a significant amount for a low-Level character, but barely registers for someone at Ten.
Of course, it takes a lot of days of Naming Karma to power up a magic Weapon to any degree.
Rule One of Naming Karma: The Weapon has to be magical, even if only in the smallest way.
This is annoying to Artificers, as there are definitely things which are more important early than base Enhancement. Happily, there is a single workaround. You can Soulbound the Weapon, if you've got Soul Essence you can use, and know Soulcrafting.
Which I did. Tons of the former, since it was half of my Diamond Vajra. Since Soulbound operates off of Bloodbinding, there was no issues with Tremble. I Infused before Renewal, waited until the wave of refreshment rotated over my soul with my personal tides of magic turning, and Infused again.
Two days of Naming Karma, before and after Renewal, was enough to open the first Slot, Einz.
Then I pushed some of my soul into this Weapon that was an extension of me.
A sharp golden light gleamed around the edge of Tremble, winked at the edge of the Runes carved into it, the Light of my soul. Without me laying hand to it, this Blade wasn't even magical. But with two Soul Essence inside it leveraging the magic within, it was +II, not +I, and now qualified to be Magical and could be built up even further.
It would take six days of Naming Karma to open the next Slot advance on it, from Einz to Zvei. I had taken the first step on the long road of Gear upgrades.
Unfortunately for that road, I wasn't going to just sit around and wander down it like a grinning hopeful fool. There were plenty of shortcuts on that road, and I was going to take those, too.
But I was going to need my Smithing Tools to do them. Tools, Forge, and Anvil, respectively. To do it right, I'd need the raw materials for them. Once I had them, my Gear growth would be a whole lot more than a piddly 1k of Naming Karma per day...