Chapter 2-57: Burning Chains (1/2)

She met up with the excited Chomps and withdrew two miles from the conflagration, back to a location where she could see the main road leading up to it, and the traffic going back and forth.

Less than an hour after she started her vigil, three pickups with lots of brawny, hairy men riding in the back rumbled past.

About a half hour after that, she watched two helicopters come in from the southeast, and smiled. Let’s see that cover-up squad deal with a bunch of angry werewolves..., she thought, eyes glinting hard.

Not long after that, some unmarked sedans hurtled past, fairly exuding government vehicles. That should be the FBI, here to get their feet involved in a murder investigation.

They were raced to their destination by an ivory-and-black helicopter that came thwop-thwopping in, fairly exuding a severe air of no-nonsense business.

That symbol of Harse on the underside, modified to a sword balancing the scales instead of a hammer, would make any reasonable person wary.

The Inquisition of Harse technically had no secular authority. Realistically, nobody really dared to get in their way, as interfering with god-backed criminal investigators who were always happy to cooperate and share their findings with the authorities, and who also were divinely good at the practice of law and wielding it like a terrifyingly brutal hammer on those who deserved it or who impeded their pursuit of Justice, was often a career-ending move.

There were a LOT of faithful of Harse in law enforcement... except maybe in the SWAT teams. Mithar pretty much held everyone there.

It basically didn’t matter how badly Hexar wanted to make this matter go away. Once the Inquisition was onto them, they were in for a bad, triple indemnity, time.

She pictured the amount of the fine: all profits from this pumping, costs to clean up industrial waste being pumped into the ground, which would take Rituals by Sevens of Flora or Druids, at the least, with the requisite material components; cost to replant the area and clean it up, doubtless also taking spellcasters and paying them through the nose...

Then, triple that.

She smiled widely. Yes, that wasn’t going to be a small hit...

But, oh, the worst part of it was that the Inquisition knew... and Inquisitors were not dumb people. Oh, no, not in the slightest. Now that they knew Hexar was involved in shady stuff, they’d be looking into it... and into its parent companies.

Inquisitors were very much not stupid, and Justice was Blind as far as who it went after, not in what it was doing. There were a lot of clever people who had found out that the Inquisitors were anything but dumb, and tended to know a whole lot of people everywhere.

In front of her, a cursed, unclean Weapon made from the vertebra of something, maybe fully advanced werewolves, was writhing slowly in the vivic flame of her Floating Forge, while her Autobow was sucking in the power burning off of it, and it was being reduced to dirt.

Her Autobow had been Named Fall in the game she remembered, and she saw no reason to change it now.

She still had to work on a proper Shield, but everything in time. She didn’t have the Battlesmith ability to apply Naming Karma to both a Weapon and Armor piece every day yet, anyways...

As for whatever was watching her from over there, probably thinking it was a sneaky predator and not having the slightest idea that under her mask were Whiskers that let her hear all the forest animals chatting about the big intimidating supernaturally powerful thing crouching over yonder, well, if it wasn’t bugging her as she broke this stuff down and finally made her starter Autobow magical, that was fine by her.

She could feel Karma accumulating as the feeling of a Quest being fulfilled percolated. Not just eliminating the perpetrators, but starting a rolling series of events that would punish the powers behind them.

The internet was fairly informative place to tool around, even if she couldn’t do it herself. Still, people wrote lots of books, and she read them.

The Good Churches were here, and most of the Neutral ones. That naturally meant the Evil ones had something here as well.

In addition, vampires and werewolves and secretive mages had always been here. Even now, seventy years after magic came to the world, they were secretive and hadn’t stepped into the light. There were old Evils here, from before the undead came, and just because there were a lot more magical people around didn’t mean they wanted to reveal themselves, either. Indeed, having a lot more magical beings who protected their prior victims could hardly be a good thing for most of the existing powers on the world... especially those newly empowered humans who clove to the Good powers that were so nastily effective against them.

Old Evils, new Evils... native assholes who were slow to adapt and with centuries of confrontation and mutual distrust between them. Mmm, a fine cocktail.

The vampires and werewolves had been forced out into the open because there was no way they could hide from the Powered, especially all the new Clerics who just seemed to get empowered out of nowhere, complete with all sorts of spells and magic without even having to labor for centuries to decipher the changing paradigm and build up a library.

Sama smirked. Most Casters had to work out their spells and build up a personal library. Clerics and Druids, nope, had access to the whole list. Bah-roken! They might not know everything that was on the basic list, and custom spells still had to be learned individually... but it was a big list, nonetheless!

Being able to sniff out shapechangers and undead had been a pretty big thing. Trying to fight back against the effect was useless... there were far too many Powered being born, and all killing a few of them did was make the rest even more determined to ace you. The utterly fearless Paladins, Champions, and Heavenbound were particularly annoying at all facets of that.

But their existences being forced into the open certainly didn’t mean abandoning their beliefs, sharing their histories, or viewing humanity with any kind of equality.

The Vampire Wars had been remarkably short and brutal. Fast-Leveling Powered had hunted them down wherever they were, piercing through their Masquerade with appalling speed and sureness, and were equipped with the magic and power to destroy them.