Chapter 10-320: Marching to Death

Update: The First Day ebook SHOULD be out on the 15th, but now Amazon has been nice enough to inform us that they need 3 days to clear the EIN for it with the IRS. Yes. Mmm. So timely. Here's hoping for no delay.

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My a-Mastery-Tier-a-Day-Keeps-the-Levels-Away advances continued, moving from Perception to Stealth +1’s per day, topping out at Five like normal, moving onto the next in an order I could vaguely influence. For instance, my Diplomacy, Sense Motive, and Intimidate Tiers had all been maxed out before the much more combat-applicable Perception and Stealth. Why? Because at this stage of the game, growing my Allegiance and influence was actually of primary importance, and even if I didn’t need to be immediately available to do such a thing, those modifiers made working and leading my Allegiance ever easier.

The only reason to up my Stealth and Perception modifiers was if I was going to be going up against stuff with equally monstrous modifiers. That the Shroud was making sure I had them was definitely a warning for some of the stuff I still had to fight... which probably wasn’t inside the lesser Shroudzones, but only the big one in Russia.

Something to think about.

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In the meantime, we were blowing the shit out of tons of undead who, trapped inside their Dome to serve as power supply to their masters, who were themselves chained and churning out the Death Qi, couldn’t do anything about it but be served up as sacrifices to power-leveling Chinese feeding their Weapons, and one silly Magos getting her rep counts in.

There was one abortive attempt by the Daoists to come out and stop us. Abortive, because the first twenty-five of them to breach the Inner Dome blew apart into vivic fireballs, raging eagerly in midair there for a full five seconds as they were completely consumed, rich in Death Qi and all that.

The ones following behind naturally decided that discretion was the better part of not committing suicide, and retreated back inside their little Dome.

Perhaps the most clever among them realized their Dome was actually a convenient corral, a self-made fence for a ranch delivering great Karma to the hungry?

Were they watching the numbers of vengeful Chinese and hungry Tomb Clans growing every day, while their own numbers remained stagnant? Were they hearing the insipid excuses from their fellow Cultivators about gathering together to break the siege, now that we were here? Alas, they didn’t know that every Cultivator incursion within thirty leagues was an immediate alarm to me, and the Chinese moved out to get ready for them... or I wandered over that way after rep counts.

Commander Haru’Ara could tow a bunch of people on Disks very quickly, and had taken to fighting Cultivators with a will. Capable of wielding some excessively powerful spells for emergencies, and having copious amounts of Warlording experience, he watched over the Purgers as they ambushed infiltrators and scouts time and again, and vivus reclaimed the Land from the odious pervasiveness of Qi.

These Daoists had literally painted themselves into a corner, thinking themselves invulnerable and that they’d ride the super-abundant Death Qi to great power... only to find their great power and wonderful environment didn’t actually mean all that much to me.

It was interesting how none of their Tens and post-Tens came out to mess with me, either. I guess watching their minions taking a Chained Split Shardray to their faces and blowing apart with such hungry enthusiasm was fine-tuning their sense of invincibility, and with such powerful protection at work for them, they naturally couldn’t breach it very readily with ranged attacks from inside.

I really did want them to try protective Shields and other stuff to protect them, and watch what the combination of a Spellflare and Shardray did to their sense of superiority.

But, no. Instead, they did what encircled and desperate people who are all going to die do, and started looking for help. Hey, the Buddhists could do it, so why couldn’t they, being far superior Daoists, do the same thing?

So we looked on from the outside as they began some massive Summoning Ritual, meant to bring in help of some sort or another from elsewhere.

I was actually REALLY amused by this. These Daoists didn’t have a church-like organization, unlike the Nirvanic Mantra, which was based in its own separate sphere. Sure, there were higher Realms of Cultivators, who’d walled off the rest of Creation from their private realms so they could rule over everything and butcher one another as they wished, but the direct ties and chains of control and information just weren’t there, especially with the Sects in the way.

Did they think that the truly powerful beings among them were immune to the effects of the Shroud? I found that pretty damn arrogant... and totally believable with the level of self-conceit and lack of information these bastards had.

Of course, they thought their Qi arts were totally superior to ours, until it was proven to them that, being an inferior blend of mana and chi, their Qi was totally susceptible to the effects of both powers, so things like Spell Resistance and Dispel Magic worked perfectly well against them.

Well, I didn’t know how much that knowledge had actually spread, given how surprised the Cultivators were to find out that our measly inferior arts could directly counteract their own, right before they tended to die to them.

Idiots.

Okay, they were pulling in something from outside, using Death Qi. I had to smile, especially as I saw the Shroudzone above them thickening. It had been shrinking rapidly as we offed hundreds of thousands of undead every day, but now was thickening and churning as power was pumped into the sky, bending the Shroud, looking for something beyond to bring in and succor them.

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“Those total retards,” Briggs murmured, watching the long pillar of black energy extending up into the churning mass of the Shroud above Beijing. “Do they not realize how the Shroud actually works?”

“Mmmm, no, probably not. In their very limited experience, the Shroud works on undead, specifically Dark Clergy who have evolved out of undead,” I informed him. “Maybe they have word of Fiends being enslaved under them, but nothing like, oh, Sama’s revelation that an incoming balor ended up a Shroudlord,” I mused for him.

The Shroud was not that picky. It would take for a Shroudlord ANYTHING that satisfied the requirements of Death, Negative Energy, Evil, Power, and Not Mortal.

In fact, if the most powerful Death Cultivator in there had actually figured out how, he could have directly replaced the Shroudlord he had enslaved there, started drawing power right off the Shroud... and forever enslaved himself to it, and possibly to the Curse of the Sun.

Had he figured that out? Maybe. Daoists hated having limits on themselves, and even if he could ride the Shroud all the way up to an inevitable Twenty, what good was it if he was trapped here underneath it?

I smirked. There was also that one little effect that the Shroud had, and that was its absolute insistence on killing anything living under the Shroud. Even the likes of Fiends were regarded neutrally, since they were, in the end, collectors of souls after death, and the Shroud was all about never giving them the chance to do their thing. Only the Old Gods, with a hint of divine energy, could defy it, and even then not with mortals.

So, what these idiots were doing was Summoning something that was going to be Aligned with Death Qi. If they succeeded, that powerful entity was going to come in, the Shroud was going to look at it, at the enslaved Shroudlord battery, and rub its Cursed hands in glee at the superior choice.

“They think they are bringing in their salvation, and whatever foul thing it is, it is going to Kill Them All,” Commander Haru’Ara added, his voice underscored with faint celestial choruses. Even if they found him hard to be around, the nastier elements present here still treated the transformed and scarred planetar with great respect, just like Briggs. Shvaughn’s ruthless followers were slowly increasing in their pragmatic numbers, finding her leash better than the random death that tended to come with not having it there, doing something stupid, and getting summarily offed for it.

With her there, doing something stupid very predictably resulted in getting summarily offed. Incentives!

“Okay, lads, no time to waste today. We need to kill all the undead there!” I announced to everyone and sundry. “When whatever they bring down manifests, I want there to be a solid ring of vivus where these remaining millions are!”

The Purgers of China shouted back enthusiastically, while I watched the massive flow of Death Qi being expended to do this. Nice, nice, pulling it back from the Land, using it up, easing the infection while trying to bring in new poison.

Whatever, it was now time to work.

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Aelryinth had naturally raised horde-slaughtering to an artform. So much shit had come to Terra-Luna over the years, and he’d fed so much of it to the Land, alongside the other Casters there slaughtering just like him. It got to the point where any invading races had damn well better have Greyfields up, or they just got butchered en masse.

Naturally, said massive Greyfields had proliferated obnoxiously. Combat had become much more restricted, and the Melees and Archers had to carry the fights. It was also why you just didn’t find a Caster there who didn’t have Levels in something that could help them in a no-Casting fight.

The gods did like their shows of primitive combat, after all.

But these Qi-using bastards couldn’t do that... or rather, they probably could do that, but since it would cripple them, there was no way they’d even consider it. Among other things, guns would rip them apart without the Qi to withstand them, an alternative we hadn’t really had back home.

Aelryinth didn’t have the infinite spell loop that I did, but he did have Perpetual Shards, and had Meta’d that into all kinds of effects. I was supplementing my Loop with other spells of Mass Slaughter.

The most key of those was naturally Pyroclasm. Or rather, Widened Pyroclasm.

Land-feeding explosions of fire five hundred feet across are terrifying. When they are a thousand feet across, it’s much worse.

Shards had an unfortunate limitation, in that the spell’s initial targets had to all be within thirty feet of one another, so I couldn’t spread them all over the place when fighting. Chaining them had the same limitation, in that the next target had to be within thirty feet.

The Vast Meta doubled those numbers to sixty. So, what I had to do with my Shards is find eighteen to twenty-three targets inside a sixty-foot circle, find Chain targets for all of those within sixty feet in different directions, and then allocate them at least twenty feet apart so that the Bursts didn’t overlap when they went off. The Chains would go racing out in explosive lines, detonating in ten-foot radius miniature Bursts, and the Kickers would do what needed to be done.

If you don’t pay attention to this, what you get is a lot of Chains crossing over each other and wasting damage and targets. So, I literally had an entire thoughtsteam or two operating like a computer on the input feed from my Detect Evil VII+Eyes of Heaven V, lining up the targets and scatter patterns so as to reap the maximum amount of undead within the 840’ range of the spell. Within that area, I could precisely identify what type of sub-Alignment bias (none, they were all black; anything that could think and reason was a Congregant and being drained of Death juice), how strong they were, and positions so precisely I could do it all without actually needing to see them.

Detonate a Pyroclasm about myself. A raging sphere of fire blew out in a five-hundred-foot radius, sweeping up the undead in something like 9d6+70ish fun, which was enough to bring down all but the toughest of them, converting the whole area into a vivic burn field.

That was a bare minimum of thirty thousand undead, and if they were tightly packed, could easily be four times that.

At the edges of the blast zone, my Shards came down. They detonated in the tight masses pressing towards the lines of Purgers, eliminating the first targets and getting me back the ki I’d spent on the spell. The Bursts swallowed anywhere from four to twenty other undead, while the Chains of force energy, carrying them wonderful Kickers, arced out in a rapidly diverging fan, twenty-five jumps each, and every time they landed another Burst went out, with more Kickers.

The initial hit was like 3-18+38ish, halving with a Chain or Burst. The additional 6d6+36 of Kickers didn’t go down at all.

Optimally, the targets were twenty feet apart, maximizing the lines of devastation, creating lines of explosions four hundred feet long, eighteen or twenty-three at a time.

18 shards x 26 targets Chained/Shard x an average of twelve in the Chained Bursts was 5600 kills per Shards spell.

I wanted to Pair and Admixture the mess, which could potentially double and quadruple my kill rate, but I couldn’t find that many separate original targets most of the time, and the Bursts in the original killzone really overlapped a lot, which was amusing but wasteful. Still, if they were packed densely enough, I could Pair and/or Admixture in additional volleys.

Mostly, I just used Repeat Spell, since it allowed me to target a new area.

My Shards were used to break up the numbers in front of the Purged, who then proceeded to shoot and hack the vivus out of the survivors. There was an additional scattered line of them trotting behind me as fast as they could, eliminating any of the charred survivors of my Pyroclasms. Shooting from the hip contests of accuracy were proliferating in my wake...