Chapter 17-460: The Final Phases

“Trying is part of the mortal condition,” Briggs replied, unconcerned. “What’s the goal now, Trav? We’re looking at two months tops before every other Shroudzone in the world is down.” Those Zones located in more isolated areas we were actually helping locals get to in order to accelerate the process.

There’d been a case of a drug lord in Brazil commandeering one of the Shroudzones there for personal use. Shvaughn had showed up, immolated him and his personal army of bravos and shooters, burned his personal compound to the ground, and given their weapons and money to a whole bunch of locals eager to make sure drug lords couldn’t do this to them again... especially after Shvaughn encouraged them not to take over the drug trade.

She already controlled a lot of the crime in the country as part of her Obsidian Web, although it was passive, basically looking for the real abusers and building up her information network for silly people with their crusading hearts on their sleeves to go deal with. The money went into some good causes... and some neutral ones, but she didn’t pocket it for herself. After all, she had tons of money already; it was just a tool for her to do stuff and play with the world now.

“You’re going to work on building up Warlords and just whittling down numbers. It won’t use the Greyfield trick until it thinks it will surprise us and catch everyone possible. Use that time to kill as much as you can, pushing the Shroudzone back. When it springs its Construct armies, you’ve got to be prepared, so you know which way to direct Naming Karma.” I took a deep breath. “We need a look at the very center of the Shroudzone.”

“Still too far. Even Briggs and I can’t risk going in that deep,” Sama said promptly. “And there’s gonna be active stuff at the heart of the Shroudzone like that. Will it even suffer the Curse?”

“Not if it doesn’t move from around its respawn point. That doesn’t mean its subordinates don’t burn and come back, but at least some of them probably stick around with it in the core area. And no, I wasn’t expecting you to do that. But I have to see that area, and for more reason than one.”

“You expect that Interloper is doing something,” the Angelos spoke up, frowning.

“I’m pretty damn sure the Shroudlord is already started constructing a Formation to Call in Guiogg the Devouring Moon to drain the planet of energy and kill us all off in one stroke. That won’t harm the undead, and the Shroudlord can just take the time to gather up all the random corpses around and take them over. The Curse of the Sun will fade with time, and the threat we represent will have been dealt with.”

Commander Haru’Ara frowned. “But you suspect this will not be the case?”

“Correct. I suspect the Formation has been or will be tampered with, and the Shroudlord doesn’t have the references to compare it to. In return, I have to adjust what I’m going to do to that Formation, and really, really mess up both the Shroudlord and the Interloper... and Guiogg, a certain person in the mirror being an equal-opportunity discriminating party against Worldenders.” I turned my head in a certain direction. “But first, I need to see what it’s managed to get done, hopefully without alerting it.”

“Lots of magic stealth ops,” Sama nodded. “Can you do it?”

“Yes. Wizard will hit Fifteen tomorrow evening, and some of the spells advanced to VIII should be enough. The main thing is getting there, but Navar Nevrend is only like twenty horizontal miles from Moscow, and sixteen or some from the initial Gate, if what few reports we have are right. So, I just need to punch a hole through to the correct location, then head up from below. The odds are very good that its defenses from below are not going to be enough to deal with me.”

“And you can just close it behind you,” Sama agreed. “And then?”

“Then,” I smiled, and cracked my knuckles, “I make a custom toy to mess ALL of them up!”

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The same day I reached Ten true, my Ring Lore started on Wizardry IV. The number of spells I had, both standard and pre-Meta’d, drifting in my Matrix was pretty confusing, and I was even leaving more open to fill on the fly, just in case I needed them.

Two days later, my Ring of Prime Elemental Command was finally completed, after more than a year of work on it. All creatures with Elemental Descriptors, fear me now!...

Sama and Briggs’ runs had basically confirmed the location of over a dozen sunken storehouses of something. They were now making plans to raid them and destroy them during the day when the undead couldn’t do much about it... although the explosives they’d found in some of the areas indicated self-destruction was also a weapon these things had in mind, in addition to the undead.

Just more things to deal with.

But before that happened, I had another stop to make in my down time.

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The Biological Warfare Headquarters in Atlanta was one of those black-operations the military didn’t like to talk about. They could try to fancify what it was there for as attempting to find biological solutions to the undead, but that wasn’t where the money went.

It was where they researched nerve gas and biological agents testing, and also looked over all the virus and diseases at the International Disease Control headquarters nearby. The fact such things were only useful against the living was lost on nobody, and at least one of the viruses plaguing the populations in Africa was believed to have been developed there and removed by cults of Skulos in a stealth op, along with who knew how many others.

I had naturally found out about it, and I had suborned the entire division to work on something else. That was getting rid of the potential Black Blood of the Earth, i.e., intensely necro-Energized oil.

Most of the oil in existence came from a time before bacteria existed to eat dead trees. In prehistory, forests upon forests fell, and would only erode, not rot. They ended up building up on themselves, pressing down on one another with their weight, even as the elements slowly ground them up... but they didn’t decay, and they didn’t rot. They only grew more compressed, water washed through them, and they were weighed down by the ages.

If they stayed solid, they became coal. If they liquified, they became oils. Ergo, they weren’t made of dead dinosaurs, but dead trees from a time before wood-eating bacteria.

We had that bacteria now. Evolving them to feed on Energized oil was the job. The lab had access to one of my thoughtstreams, and several Druids to wield the evolutionary control needed to do the job.

Oil didn’t Energize to anything but Death or Water well. If it did Earth, it turned to coal. If it did Fire, it blew up. If it did Water, it gradually dissipated as it lost its oily character. The darkseas and Deepseas might have partially formed from oil deposits going Water and draining away.

Modifying E. coli to eat natural oil was actually not a big step, especially in a magical universe where it could mutate, potentially forming oozes, slimes, and jellies of various types.

But those things were going to form anyway, echoes of Shoggoth genes drifting around and stuff. The Black Blood was a disaster waiting to happen, and getting rid of it far more important than keeping it around. There were races out there that would clean off the planet just to get access to large quantities of Black Blood, so making sure they didn’t, by the simple factor of not having any to take, was much more valuable than using it as a resource of our own.

Bacteria live and die fast, and with Alchemists and Druids cooperating to hasten and direct the evolutionary cycle, and my 12 Ranks in both to draw on, they’d rampaged through the science and alchemy of the whole thing to make cultures of bacteria keyed to both the core design of hydrocarbonic oil, and specific varieties thereof. West Texas Crude and Aramco Standard had very different characteristics, after all.

The bacteria couldn’t produce vivus, but they could attract it if it was close by, and use it to energetically attack and digest the Black Blood, rapidly breaking down it and the surrounding oil into component elements and organic compounds, the latter of which would doubtless have a tendency to turn into oozes or puddings or something if they could. But if the hydrogen and oxygen lit off down there, it would help keep them under control. We’d just have to be ready for them... but it was a load better than getting the planet glassed.

We didn’t ask permission from the wealthy or powerful to do this, as this might harm their interests. If they knew ahead of time, they’d try to push the costs off on someone else by whatever methods they could, if the sheer reluctance to stop oil production was any clue.

I had touched the coasts of the entire world by now, crisscrossed North America, and was doing Asia. I had definitely crossed over all the underwater oil sites, and knew where they all were.

So, added to my daily duties was visiting all those places and unleashing some hungry E. coli on the black goo, letting the power of multiplying life and time do the job we were unable to do ourselves. Establishing vivic lamps near some of the sites to conduct vivus through the mass, forming a chain of life to those Black Blood accumulations, was also part of the plan, but that was quietly set up and executed by other Brotherly parties.

Eating away the death in the air was never a bad thing, after all. We just had to scoop out a room below ground, place the braziers, and seal them back up so some enterprising soul didn’t walk off with them for their own enrichment, which was considered pretty much a given if we didn’t.

And so, every day I put down a dozen or more of these things in different places, and the hungry little fellows started eating, making more of themselves, dying, and eating more... and the oil began to go away.

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The two high-end concealment magicks are Illusion and Transmutation. All the schools can play at the job, but those were the big two, covering functional invisibility and perfect camouflage between them.

A simple See the Invisible, a II Valence Divination, worked totally well against invisibility effects up through V, which showed how difficult making invisibility work was. The lack of need for anything above IV meant nobody ever Raised the effect, unless they were invoking True Sight or something... which had a very short range compared to See the Invisible’s full visual range.

Casting Invisibility at effectively VIII was Seeming, a powerful combination of illusion and invisibility effects that wiped you from sight and overlaid you with whatever was supposed to be there. So, not only were you effectively perfectly transparent, it overlaid you with an illusion of a clear space that transmitted the appropriate visual image to whoever was looking at you, like a camouflage cloak.

Evading other senses via Astral Ward flummoxing routine Detects was another factor, and the Darkstalker Feat extending the ability of Stealth to mask you against non-standard, non-magical senses, like tremblesense, lateral lines, infravision, and the like, was all part of the kit, too.

Then, you just shrink yourself down to make yourself harder to see. Sure, powerful senses can detect grains of sand if they focus... but if all you are doing is scanning passively, finding something suspicious is much harder if what you are looking for is small.

Accordingly, I was a foot tall, about the size of a pixie, as I Stone Shaped a tunnel to the surface. I first moved horizontally to almost directly under the reported location of the fallen Deathgate from all those years ago, and then straight up.

I could Shape over 3000 cubic feet every six seconds once the VIII Valence opened for duty. I had gonzo Spell Pool to pay for Widen VI to add to the base spell, and that meant I could make a tunnel a foot across and three thousand feet long in but seconds, making traveling through the ground a speedy and easy thing to do.

The biggest things I would have to avoid were active Divinations, active Telepathy, and any actual spellcasting while I was in range of the Shroudlord. He’d sense me looking around, he’d sense the play of living thoughts crossing his own, and he’d sense the pull on magic, none of which I could mask. From there it was a Stealth vs. Perception check, and I wasn’t doing too bad at that angle, sitting at +61 against undead, and a nice +20 circumstance bonus for being invisible on top of that.

Unless I was really close to him, or rammed into something to draw his attention, I should be fine.

I felt the edge of the Shroudzone at twenty miles down, just deep enough to include Navar Nevrend about fifteen miles away. I was flying upwards quickly, enough tremblesense active through my Primal Ring to make sure I didn’t run into anything, and I was definitely scanning the ether to make sure some incorps weren’t sitting down here playing sentry, which was totally possible.

I was also sure he had buried sentries with tremblesense to detect diggers, but I wasn’t striking any surfaces to transmit vibrations, just opening and closing the earth and stone behind me. Unless I was dumb enough to wander into range of their tactical tremblesense, their passive seismic listening wasn’t going to register me.

Magic is so cheaty. I gave my Matrix a fond pat in appreciation for its brokenness.

I watched the depth indicators zip by as I ascended, watching through the ether and feeling through the earth to make sure some sentries weren’t posted here. I didn’t put it past him to have Grave Elementals or something to make use of, too... or rather, I was almost certain of it, but they shouldn’t be buried this deeply. As long as I didn’t get too close, and didn’t leave my tube of travel open, I should be fine...