Chapter 5-143: The Moon Shining Down

-Don’t phase out, or you’ll lose your skin. Dig your way up, and stay above the ground,- I Messaged Topaz, smiling as I looked up at the incredible clarity of the night filled with the stars and a partial moon gazing benignly down upon us. -Grab the shining skull of the bastard, if you will.-

Offering Dark Clergy up to the gods was a thing, but I didn’t have enough people to go over there, lock the sucker down in the prescribed pattern, and perform the Ritual.

I DID have an Obelisk with all the required stuff carved into it, just waiting to be triggered by a Dark Clergy getting wasted next to it.

Dark Clergy were massive conduits of energy, standing between whatever unholy Patrons empowered them and the enslaved souls of their congregations. All that energy igniting at once was a Nice Thing.

“Holy fuck!” Number Three, a rather taciturn individual, blurted out, shocked at the sight.

We could see for quite a ways in front of us now, because the ground was all sparkling white and misting, glowing and lighting up everything as it sparkled under the moonlight and burning clouds.

“I’ve only ever seen the stars on TV, when they Open the Sky in Detroit,” Number Four swore softly, gazing in awe at the moon and stars.

“Sleipner, Obelisk,” I said, and the unicorn started forward after only a moment, the spirit still looking at the sky above.

A mound of earth, startlingly dark amid the white of the landscape, burrowed out from underground, and Topaz emerged from it. She looked all around in shock, and did a double-take when she looked up at the sky, saw the clouds burning white, and the stars gazing down at her.

She was probably the only one here old enough to remember looking up at the night sky, and the burning expression on her face, the hate and the longing, wasn’t something that could be concealed easily.

She gestured, and the glassy blast center of the Dark Minister going off churned, lifted, and something glittering emerged from the crystalline sands.

She astutely did not touch it as the rest of us trundled up, greeting us with, “So, you think they know we are coming now?”

“Dunno, horrible visual acuity on them, and there’s a Dark Bishop only a klik or three away, feeling it as thirty to forty thousand of its minions and one of its lieutenants kicked off in style.” I reached out with Minor TK and hauled the crystalline skull over to me, the bone glittery and pure, overlaid with living, twisting runes of shadows over the brilliance inside the marrow. “Helix, want a Greater Undead Baneskull with some glitter?”

His eyes lit up, then looked a little wary. “Uh, are there any risks with it?” he asked carefully.

“No. Intense vivification. It’s just a fully powered-up Greater Undead Baneskull.”

“Sure!” he grinned widely, popping the fairly normal enruned Skull currently attached to the front of his Windbow off, slipping the Token off it, and tossing it to me as I tossed his shiny new toy to him. I lobbed the Baneskull over to Topaz automatically, and she accepted it for the hilt of her Sword without comment.

I couldn’t give the shiny skull to her, although I was perfectly willing to. She could disguise the appearance of a normal Baneskull between identities, but a shining crystal Baneskull? Clergyskulls were pretty singular. She wouldn’t be able to use it in any other identity.

Her eyes flickered at the consideration. She stepped off the mound of earth to her empty Disk, while Master Fred reached over to the Obelisk, now streaked with glittery white, lifted it up, and set it back into Sleipner’s sidecar.

“Forty thousand, huh?” Number Five, a slender fellow with large hands and a weak chin, repeated.

“Up to. It depends on how densely packed they were behind him.” I smiled widely at a virtual wall of undead drawn up at the edge of the glittering white sands ahead of us, slowly spreading out along the perimeter. “Two more hours of this, gentlemen!”

There were more groans as my first SplitDartrays went off, girt in holiness, and reached out all the way to the surrounding horde of undead, blowing an explosive path through them.

Sleipner obligingly started rolling forwards as all the men looked up again at the stars glowing overhead. Hate lightning had started gathering at the edge of the burning whiteness, warring with it, particularly concentrated on the west side.

“It’ll stay open longer if we feed it more whiteness,” I informed them, and saw grim smiles rise on their faces.

Master Fred whistled and pointed to the GAR. I tossed a Snowcast Extended More Ammo on it, fires lit up on his hands, and he started shooting, good for at least fifteen minutes of endless ammunition.

They couldn’t run from us, as we totally had the mobility advantage. What we had here was a shooting gallery, and there was only to open them up and let The Light in. With all that light from above relative to before, that meant we were going to be pretty busy.

The many deaths didn’t stop them, as in the end they thought they were unkillable, but that was fine with us, as we were here to kill as many as possible, not caring whether or not they could reach us. Some tried to come at us as we stopped a hundred yards away, but the glittering sands burned them up, and lines of flaming corpses extended the vivic saturation period nicely, in addition to everything else we were doing.

It was plain the undead didn’t know what to do. There we were, a hundred yards out, and they couldn’t do anything to us except Cast spells... and Topaz was just waiting for that.

We even had our Obelisk back. None of these undead had any idea how we had done what we had done, and their bosses had even less idea right now that their minions wouldn’t be coming back.

Weren’t they going to get something of a shock tomorrow evening!...

“Everyone has taken their advances, right?” I asked them all, and got confirmations all around. Unfortunately, the Aruans were mixed Archer/Melees, which would hamper the easy way of doing things... but that just meant taking the longer, harder road, which would be more profitable in the end.

It also took a metric boatload more Karma, but that suddenly wasn’t an issue.

They were relying on an Artificer or Alchemist Level for the hard carry here, whichever Briggs had had them NOT take before. Their job was to take Battlemad and Arcane Archer Theurgic Levels, get those four Theurgic Levels in place, and then take three more Class Levels, if they could. As I understood it, they’d all been Intellect-Marked JUST so they could do this.

Unfortunately, they’d taken their Human/2 advance and the Caster Level increase there already, but once they advanced to Seven in Archer, they could still apply their Human/3.

They would also become Forsaken at that time.

The racial boost would raise them to Faux Nines, regrettably shy of Tens, but that was just another delay until they could hit /5 in their Carry Class, Eight in their Primary. Certainly the Karma to make Ten wasn’t going to be an issue, and with Briggs backing them, there’d be no issues getting there.

More importantly, more craftsmen who could make high QL shit with nine+ Ranks in a Crafting skill was awesome stuff!

They just needed a huge dose of Karma to do all that, and they had already gotten it. This night had certainly satisfied all the Karma they’d be needing to do what needed to be done.

Now it was about Investing in their Named stuff, steady upgrades of Gear, and becoming even more holy terrors in the night.

I was aware that Sama had Marked them, and they were Investing her Marks. Their 16 Dex scores were not going to have any problems getting to 20 one day, but for now they were filling that Intellect Mark up, getting smarter and able to take those neo-Caster Levels...

-------------

One day ago...

“You know what my Marks are?” Sama asked me. We were leaning on Bone Marrow, taking a few minutes to chat before taking off. Briggs was giving heartfelt and moving interviews over in the remnants of Hermitage, and the rest of us were moving along nicely.

“They are copies of Succubi Blessings.” The look on her face as I told her that was impressive. “What, you didn’t know that?”

“It might not surprise you that I didn’t have such things in the game,” she replied, annoyed, giving me the hairy eyeball. “It is so irritating that you remember meeting the original. Does she have the Rantha Curse, too?”

It was my turn to be surprised. “Not at all. She was just a baseline Hagchild... although she started taking Lilitu Levels to shovel in all the Karma she was harvesting. What’s this about a Rantha Curse?”

She was delighted to know something I didn’t. “Ranthas are born as Rantha Hags. We get empowered at puberty, just like other Hags. It’s basically a very advanced Human Evolution template powered up by the Hag Curse.”

“Specs?” I had to ask. A Holo-crystal on her collar glowed, and projected a Level-by-Level advance schema next to her.

I had to blink a few times. “Seriously, that’s as bad as Briggs!” I looked at her, and she just smiled. “Well, someone hit the superpowers lottery!... I noted the Karmic Load is not mentioned, however...”

Her expression fell. “It’s monstrous. The benefits are priced almost exactly like magic items.”

I lifted an eyebrow, and began to run calculations on some of those Stat benefits. Those Very Large Stat bonuses and abilities and whatnot...

“Damn, Sama! If that’s true, you Rantha Hags and Briggs Hagspawn are Karmic black holes...”

She nodded in the direction of the town, now starting to swarm with disaster-aid people and cops who couldn’t do anything for the dead but help manage the media circus going on. “I’m guessing there’s a relationship between our templates and the Hag Curse, naturally enough.”

I found myself rubbing my temples. “Just what the fuck has been going on with you two out here in the multiverse?”

“There’s a progenitor of the Rantha Hag Curse out here, so there’s way more than one of us, if it wasn’t obvious. She left me a message for me when I was incarnated.” She suddenly leaned forwards. “Hey, question. Is the original big on Briggs, too?”

“The Golden Hag and her Fuzzy are the envy of so many Amazons. They can’t believe she took him away from them.” I couldn’t keep it from her. “Yeah, you’re pretty much an item. No kids of your own, though... I’m not sure Sama can have kids, being a Annis-blood, at least not in any traditional sense.”

“Mmm,” Sama agreed, thinking. “The Rantha Curse might manifest on her. Do you think you can get a message to her?”

“To her? A Null? At this range? I can probably get a Sending to someone close to her...” If the Shroud could actually be breached.

“Hags have to steal the souls of a child, they can’t just manifest kids. So she can only have children who have the souls of someone who died to great Evil, if I’ve figured it out correctly by what happened to me.”

I blinked again, going over that. It made sense. “And they’ll be born Rantha Hags... and Briggs Hagspawn?” I glanced back in the direction of the town myself.

Sama nodded. “I’m thinking...”

“I’m not gonna say anything more about how weird it would be to have a child who’s a psychic mirror of you.” The multiverse was strange. “So, you’ve got at least one active Mark, right?”

“Yes. For telepathic contact, once it is powered up.” She watched as I rolled up my sleeve, and gave the Tat on my tricep there a weird look. “Damn. You even know what my Hagmarks look like?”

“Sama gives them out back there, too. The Forsaken and Primos can hold a Mark without any problem, but this is just a Slotless magic item to the Powered. If you could kindly attune it to the operating energy, I’ll start the process of Infusing it.”