Chapter 9-263: Shrouds and Sects

Sama watched the few survivors from inside the whelming Shroudzone above them stumble past. Few carried much beyond a container of water and rough food. Money meant little under the Daoists, after all.

The elderly were generally riding bicycles or being towed in rickshaws with the smallest children, while the most fit people walked, trotted, or stumbled along, depended on how tired they were.

They were relieved and afraid to the point of tears when they saw Sama’s team there, but it was not time for them to stop. They were hurried on, for the faintly burning corpses ignited in the area assured them that they weren’t out of range of the undead.

Sama ran over her deployments again, mental view sweeping over Marked and Blessed spread out in positions over a distance of nearly two hundred kilometers.

Those with Vivic Weapons had been running around and aggressively burning all the dead, forming a buffer area from the areas with greater numbers of undead sure to rise beyond.

They didn’t have to spread evenly, of course. There were areas of greater and lesser concentration, and they were largely working the former, clearing away as many of the dead as possible before midnight came... and it was coming quickly, everyone could feel the moaning in the wind of the Damned circling, waiting to come back and take their revenge for being murdered upon the living.

Nothing to do but put them down again, and in doing so, let the people become more than anything they had ever believed possible.

Every corpse ignited with purpose was more Karma for these people, so Sama wasn’t going to interfere, although if something was out of easy reach and there wasn’t a shooter around, she shot the corpse and watched blood and gore ignite in purifying vivus.

The whole world was watching this, Marked back at Heavenbound Hall feeding illusions of multiple viewpoints through to cameras conveying this over the World Wide Weave.

Tens of thousands of dead were put to the vivic torch, pale white fires in the thickening night, defying the Shroud and the wails of the coming undead.

-Pull back!- Briggs’ orders /came on their mutual agreement, were repeated aloud, and everyone began to race back to the positions indicated where they’d be making a stand. They were very afraid, but very excited, too, for they’d seen what they could do when properly Buffed up.

There were very few Casters among those here, but those who were here had hastily added Holo 0 to their Cantrips, so they could broadcast what was happening to the south to those not Marked or Blessed.

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The Eagle’s Vantage spell showed them the sight from a couple hundred meters above the ground, and with great magnification, too.

The winding trails of the Shardrays zipping out constantly in paired lines of death were shadowy, obviously invisible to normal sight, crossing thousands of feet of space as the ghostly blur of the unicorn motorcycle, the image of the sacred steed’s soul around it growing more distinct as the Shroud gained power.

At the far end, Cultivators were exploding in multi-colored fires.

Flying, taking cover, hiding, or oblivious to what was happening, the deadly Rays came in and leapt back and forth in unseen, coiling streams of death homing in on them.

Some of the panicked Cultivators were raising alarm signals, but nobody could see the source of the death coming in at them, as the Caster was several hundred paces away, and the spells were only visible when they hit.

They began to panic, of course, as was only logical when you are getting blown apart by something you can neither see nor hear.

Those who fled very early were the only ones who got out of range in time as Sleipner rolled through the night, never getting closer than two hundred paces to them in the thick, cloying night, a darkness that did not impede the carnage erupting around them at all.

Occasionally the Shardrays would be alternated with a spread of twenty Shards arcing out to find targets and recharge my Pool, reaping the weakest and most hapless among the Cultivators who did not know what was going on.

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Sama’s attention flickered over to Master Fred.

There was a terrible, deep vein of rage on a deep-pressure boil inside the Silent Warlock. The level of anger seething there would likely have driven any normal person into a berserker rage of fury at what he had witnessed.

For now, he was just burning with anger, and it was going to take something exceptional to cool him down, she had no doubt.

There were still people arriving, making their way frantically towards the fires and the lights... the same lights and fires that would be drawing the undead to their deaths.

But the time between dusk and midnight was not short, and a unicorn motorcycle could cover a lot of ground during that time, as he had covered it before dusk. Unmoved by the slaughter, not viewing such things as civilized humans did, the dead forest king yet realized Evil when he saw it, and knew it had to go.

Also, the Qi in the air was putting him into a truly foul mood, and seeing Daoists explode into vivus was wonderfully cathartic.

The clock ticked that one second, and Sama felt Highmoon arrive, the sacred time for Rantha Hagchildren, the high time of the Silver Queen, and the start of her own magical day. Energy flowed through her in a welcome rush; it was nothing like a Powered would feel, but let her know that a new day had begun, and certain of her abilities had reset.

“It’s beginning!” she said and /said, and her words were repeated over hundreds of kliks of ground at the same time, even as the wind picked up in a foul, chilly manner, and began to sweep around and out and down as the Damned came to the flows of energy condensing into countless corpses, and raised them up.

It was midnight, and the dead began to Animate, in total counterpoint to the sacred revitalization she always received at this time.

Magic-treated eyes looked out into the night at the lines of Lights glowing ahead of them to draw the undead and create targets for them. The shooters with unlimited ammunition via spells were the first level of defense, picking out their targets at reach and dropping them with popping streaks of tracer-like fire that echoed in the night... and drew clear lines back to them.

The people with treated Weapons were between the shooters and the undead, near the poles with suspended Eternal Lights creating something for the undead to converge on as they came out of the neighborhoods further on towards the regional capital, burning so nicely with all the pillars of smoke rising in twisting clouds towards the Haze... and now conducting damned spirits down from those self-same clouds.

The first of hundreds of thousands of undead were coming this way. It was going to be a long night.

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The Daoists abandoned their defensive line after I completely butchered half of it, fleeing for Hong Kong and points south desperately. We watched them zipping away in the distance, the ones on the ground not getting far enough fast enough to outrun us for a few more miles, giving the ones flying all that much more incentive to keep going when those burning explosions of death kept following them...

I flew up to three thousand feet, and Linejumped back east to the water, using the water to then Waterjump accurately to the port city of Chaozhu and its slaughtered millions of inhabitants all risen and ready to kill them any sort of living they could. From there, it was simple to Linejump to the easternmost position of Sama’s defensive line.

The difference between this run and the previous one was that there were plenty of undead scattered around to recharge my Pool, so I could layer on a lot more Buffs on the people... and I proceeded to do so.

Obliterate twoscore undead, layer on some Extended and/or Duskstopped Buffs. Weapons once again burning with Greater Magic Weapon, Vivic, and Bane to Undead; Force Armor for some protection, and things like Heroism, Bless, and so forth.

Sama and Briggs didn’t really have a lot of healers, but they did have Healing Wands, which could get anyone injured out of danger. Heavenbound Hall had been making a lot of them lately once more Warlocks figured out how to use their Wrath to charge them up, always the slowest thing about making one of them.

It took me an hour to shoot from each team to the next, all of them gathering up eagerly to get the Buffs, 25 or so people at a time. The undead coming out of the cities and towns began to run into blenders, flaming centers of purification that were taking the opportunity to once again advance Named Weapons and Level up.

Their Buffs would last all the way to the dawn at least, and Shvaughn, Sama, and Briggs were monitoring the whole situation, making sure there was no thought of making a living wall. No, this was nothing more than a slaughter and a delaying action, making sure the undead couldn’t reach the people evacuating the area.

Soon enough, massive areas were burning vivic as the defenders allowed themselves to be pushed ever backwards, but left tens of thousands more corpses at each location burning behind them as they did so.

Fresh zombies weren’t fast, and so it would be harder for them to generate a Dark Minister if they couldn’t catch any living and kill them personally. If the Cultivators were smarter, they would have left some wounded in the middle areas for the undead to feast on so the undead could regain sapience more easily, but hey, I wasn’t complaining.

Assured by all parties that they could handle it, chests out proudly and everything, I headed back to Master Fred.

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I flew up out of the waters of the South China Sea southeast of the corpse that was the city of Shanwei... a corpse that was now moving and fighting within itself as the first Dark Ministers were born from the corpses of the strongest of the living, and began to clash, establishing a true Shroudzone that was rapidly blooming inky black Hellclouds and spreading west.

Master Fred was on the road there, a once-paved highway that had been strategically destroyed in several locations, none of which would impede Sleipner in the slightest, especially since Master Fred had his Angel Walk Mastery at /5 now.

We didn’t say anything, as this next part was likely going to be just as bad as what had just transpired.

Sleipner rolled off the road, down the beach, and atop the water. I waved him into Invisibility, and we headed down the coast towards Hong Kong.

The Void Brothers were fairly up-to-date on what was going on here, as the local Wave and the Spear was active here in his own way, and more than a few Wavebound were operating in the area. Standard navies were naturally mostly useless against Daoists, but operating underwater continued to be one of their weaknesses, and Hong Kong had been putting up a very spirited defense, indeed.

The arrival of the Buddhists from the south and west had turned an ongoing constant skirmish into a tense three-way conflict where nobody trusted anybody, but couldn’t commit major forces against anyone without the other party pouncing on them. Any alliances were fragile and broken very easily, and the Kongers were superb at using Divination magic to make sure such things never happened between the two Cultivation powers successfully.

The most successful thing that the Kongers had done was erect a massive Wardfield that covered all the islands of the province in a sensory web that reacted instantly to any Qi-bearing creature or entity passing it, and also afflicted it with a debilitating Curse while it was inside the Wardfield. Neither the Daoists nor the Buddhists had found a way to neutralize it, leaving them at a considerable disadvantage if they tried to launch an assault on the very annoying Powered over there.

Naturally they had their own Formations around their Sects and Temples, doing similar things, and so the standoff was a test of stealth techniques, sudden ambushes, and equally quick withdrawals. Generally speaking, the Kong forces controlled the waters of the Bay, and took great pains to slaughter any Cultivators who thought raiding out after their fishing fleet was a good use of their time.

Constant low-scale conflicts were the order of the day... conflicts now getting upset by a surge of Daoists fleeing with news from the north of a great power that had slaughtered its way through all the forces of Shanghai... and was coming south.