Chapter 5-142: Letting Some Light In (1/2)

I spent a ki point and gathered in the expending energy through Spirit Captures Mana to regain one of the expended Slots. It meant not firing for six seconds, but also meant a point of Ki suddenly became something that could wipe three hundred undead.

I figured it was worth it.

Focused on their shooting, half the team hadn’t noticed anything, but the other half couldn’t help seeing the utterly massive web spun by all those arcing Shards flying in all directions, seeking victims to Feed to the Land.

“Tiirith!” blurted out Helix, gaping at the show.

“Keep shooting!” I told him calmly, and he shook his head, raised his Windbow, and with many, many dreams coming to mind, kept up with his harvesting.

The Fellowship Ritual meant everything I was killing he was getting a piece of. Maybe someday he’d be able to do the same thing... or close to it, or something. Who knew?

The incoming mob of incorps had been drastically thinned down, and was running straight into a whole lot of big, powerful, and Mighty Ghost Touch bullets laden with +11d6 of Wrath and other kickers. They weren’t enjoying it all that much.

I popped three volleys of Dartrays before they could close in on us. None of them actually managed to reach us, burned by dancing arcs of jetsilver Force or popped by serpents of burning light with extreme accuracy.

Not wanting to waste the More Ammo, Master Fred swung the Disk behind him, everyone got out of his way, and he proceeded to start punching rounds into the horde behind us.

That was an impressive sight. The undead basically had no resistance to the passage of the bullets, and one shot could punch through dozens before it stopped, laden with so much force and flames of Wrath that whole rows of undead detonated as he scythed through them. Before whatever intelligent commanders they had could get them off the road, an additional quarter-mile of the road behind us was burning brightly, and Master Fred basically ran out of targets.

That was no reason to stop firing, of course, and he simply started shooting out in an arc out of line of sight, fully able to visualize the position of the road behind us and where the salvos would be useful.

Magical guns don’t jam, and are very hard to overheat when you have good fire discipline.

He let off with a minute to go on the spell, finishing a sustained barrage that consumed most of the magazine and wreaked havoc behind us as the undead tried to press forward on alternate courses, and merely became more targets for him.

The magazine would fill back up, there was no reason to press the issue.

“Damn impressive!” Number One admitted, seconded by the other shooters as they kept their own shots going. The undead weren’t getting less numerous, just spreading out... and they were indeed slightly harder to kill now.

There was a crash and a boom that seemed to suck at the soul. A bolt of red-black lightning bounced off the shield that Topaz had thrown up alertly, just waiting for someone to toss a Negalance at us, and I spun around, energy seething around Clavus.

A Congregant. Looked like a Wight...

I had been casting Darts once again, so I had Repetition and Residuals in use. The two Shardrays flared jetsilver and blazed Consecrated gold as they smashed into the hapless undead thing that had cast a spell at us and blew it apart. Its escorts of Hardbones and Parched got caught in the spiraling fury of the Chain that followed, and blew apart as neatly as if caught in a fireball, showering the lesser undead about with burning vivus.

“Nice block!” I called out, shifting my efforts back to the side approaches once more. With the R&R working, my Darts were punching out ridiculously accurately, and were devastating when they hit.

“They telegraph it,” Topaz sniffed disparagingly.

“Sleipner, we need an open field so we can draw line of sight on this Dark Minister and take him out. I think we passed a couple farms on the way...” I called out to our driver.

The front wheel of the bike looked this way and that, and began to trundle off to the east, taking us with him. The undead, some of them moving appreciably faster than normal zombies, dutifully followed, and everyone obligingly kept firing.

The number of our kills was quite staggering from a real standpoint, if not relatively. The Aruans were averaging a kill every second or two, let’s say thirty a minute. One hundred and fifty a minute between the five of them, and we’d been at this nearly two hours. That was eighteen thousand kills.

I had been casting Darts for the same period of time, being conservative and killing forty per Chain of two Darts. Eighty every six seconds, eight hundred a minute, two hours, ninety-six thousand kills.

Sir Pelier, Father Bower, and Helix were putting up numbers similar to the shooters, having the same kind of Gear and skills to do so. Topaz would soften up formations with Spike Walls, and the weakened undead soon fell to burning shots or even the mistfire on the ground. Master Fred was alternating between booming Grit shots shooting out spirals of Wrathfire, or raising Walls of Fire to explode out of the dead ground like volcanoes erupting to consume whole lines of the undead. That endemic double damage to undead of the Walls was hugely useful here.

We had probably passed a hundred and fifty thousand kills somewhere along the way. Based on the size of the Shroudzone, there were probably between three to four million undead under the Shroudlord’s command.

I had marked the edge of the hate lightning in the true Shroudcloud, and noticed it had receded visibly as we slaughtered and vivus-infused the world, pressing back against it.

The Karma was flowing freely, of course, and everyone here had made enough Karma to Level multiple times, without a doubt. But part of the reason I was doing this wasn’t just for the open-ended Karma.

It was to drive home the fact that there were a lot of undead to kill, and with just us, even slaughtering like some massacre-happy fool’s wet dream, killing all these undead was going to take a long, long time.

We needed numbers of people, numbers of guns. Unlimited ammo was nice, but we needed more people.