Chapter 7-198: Into the Hot Pot (2/2)

When it ran out of flights of scorchfangs to send at us, I decided to show my appreciation for its efforts by using a Spellflare instead of a standard Dispel while it was in mid-Cast.

It wasn’t a high Valence effect, and I certainly could have done something more dangerous to it, but when the Fireburst it spat out blew into wild magic and fed back into it for a 3d6 jolt of its own power gone wrong, the King Serpent plainly wasn’t too happy.

It hesitated to Cast again, which was fine. I didn’t want it running away before I gave it my full attention, and so kept about massacring its minions, including the fresh Elementals squirming out of the lava to get to me.

Said lava was also blackening, freezing over as the Cryoclasms tore across it. That was affecting how rapidly its minions could get out of the lava pool and come streaming after me.

The Cryoclasms were also clearing away the chaff coming at me from behind. Given we were moving forward, those fun fellows tended to have to eat three of them before reaching me, and that didn’t end well for them.

I marked all the fumaroles and venting-holes that the natives were certain to come out from, and Master Fred was happy to drop Icefire Walls on top of them to further plug them and punish anything hot within them.

We weren’t in a hurry... this was all still about Rep Counts.

My Cold and Force Reserve Counts had easily hit Tier 5, not that it meant much at this point, as I didn’t need to use either.

The area around us was steaming and sparkling with warring heat and cold, and the fire creatures were plainly uncomfortable as they came crackling across ground that was basically supercooled at this point. Soon enough they contributed to it, vivic energy pouring into the ground going white as they died and their spirits didn’t return to the fire.

I had to wonder how much of this Fire had been here, and how much had congealed once the Shroud came. Regardless, the Elementals had not learned their place, and were warring to destroy the Green. We simply could not allow that.

Although most of humanity definitely did not want to believe it, the Elements had a LOT of power on the planet, with Earth being numero uno, Fire #2, Water #3, and Air last, but most precious to humanity. All of the Elements actually outpowered the Green and the Brown in influence, but their goals tended to be so long-term they mostly ignored humanity at the macro level.

At the micro level they were annoyances, and this whole Firezone thing was one of them, a tiny little speck of Fire that didn’t want to be caged up under the mantle and came boiling out to stake a claim in classic Elemental contention for supremacy of state of matter.

If Fire was meant to be stronger here, Terra would have been a sun. No. Smacking these things down was totally necessary, because plant and animal life could not survive Fire’s Domain. We survived between Elemental realms, not IN them. What force had the bright idea of allowing non-Elemental life to rise in the regions between the Elements had been Inspired, but that also placed us in a lot of danger in magical universes.

Elemental Dominance was not as immediately lethal as Necroic was, but such things all ended up the same way: worlds covered by water, worlds covered by charlands, worlds covered by wind-scoured deserts, or simply arid, airless rocks, the building blocks of life trapped within the stones of the world.

Nope. Fight ALL of that crap! Each Element considered themselves pure, and us just impurities. We considered them building blocks to TRUE lifeforms. There might have been just a little bit of instinctive doctrinal conflict there. They felt we were some weirdly Animated constructs made of mud, and we felt they were impossibly Animated states of matter. Tomato, tomahto...

It definitely didn’t stop me from shooting however, and paying attention to pretty much everything around me as I did. That’s why you acquire Permanent magical senses, after all!

Destroying them heartlessly and feeding them back into the Land was thus something that required very little justification. Terra hopefully loved her little green dressing gown of life and water and air, and wouldn’t begrudge us removing this Fire skin-sore messing it up...

Every time King Firecobra and his badass hood spat a long-range spell at me, I Countered it with a Spellflare and fed it back at him, much to his disgruntlement, then Arcane Fusioned for a Sanctified Cryoclasm and Shards to supplement it. Our advance had slowed to a crawl, everyone staying pretty busy with all the stuff coming from all directions, but that was fine. My Rep Counts were increasing nicely as I worked through Meta after Meta, having no end of those to work with and through, and if I didn’t have those and could interrupt my routine, I certainly had no end of spells to make Efficient, one by one...

Working like this, it was easy to see the advantages and disadvantages of Ki Reaping when compared to Perpetual. Perpetual didn’t need to have targets or kill anything to work, and with Residual Metamagic could fit any Meta under its cap to get reps. You could just stand there and repeat Shards all day for rep counts, targeting nothing at all.

On the flip side, you could only have one spell Perpetual at a time, and that +9 Meta modifier was a killer. Once you had it, you could rack up Rep Counts like nobody’s business, but getting there might be a bit tricky.

I didn’t have any tricks to break my VI Metacap yet, or Soul Magic to reduce the cost of a Meta down by four or five points. Perpetual Spell would be out of reach for a long time.

That was fine. My circumstances weren’t calling for a massive ramp-up of Metas at the speed Perpetual Spell could do so, and it was likely that I had lots of work ahead of me.

Ki Reaping would work as long as there were lots of things there to slaughter, and there would be things to slaughter in massive numbers as long as there were Shroudzones.

If I was projecting my Shroudborn Bloodline correctly, I was always going to be under Shroudzones. When my rep counts were done, so many hundreds of thousands of spells in the future, that just meant that it was time to go full slaughter mode.

Before then, lots of Practical and Efficient work to do...