Chapter 7-200: Being Practical and Efficient (1/2)

Author's Note: HO! It's Chapter 200 of The Human Race. Hopefully the people sticking with me have come to enjoy the story, so it's time for my 100-chapter harrangue. Has it been three months already?...

If you put in a good Review for the first two books, remember that it doesn't apply here... so, I'm asking for that Review for this story, too!

If you haven't submitted a Rating or Review yet (hopefully a good one, the story is VERY reliant on 5-star Reviews due to the lower number of followers), I'm hoping you can take a minute or five to do it now. I know it's a bother, but if you aren't on Patreon, it's the best way to support an author!

As I write this, I've finished Ch. 314, so there's a lot more story coming yet. Yes, I could stop writing and you'd have chapters for three months. I take the job seriously.

And of course, talking the story up and directing other people here as readers always helps!

Thanks for your help, everyone! The story got to Page One, and is currently at Page Two, because of your support! Thanks for reading!

=== RE Druin

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The Mick left off any fake attempt at contributing, withdrawing smoothly to fetch a ride on a Disk, and to watch the show.

This was no longer anything resembling a contest. This was a slaughter and massacre, and the denizens of Fire had been corralled, gathered themselves to the task of confronting her, and now only wanted to flee the terrible web of cold stretching out in every direction.

He knew the math quite well on these spells: the Chains were at half power, and the Bursts at half that. But the shining silver of the Kickers tearing at these things affected by Evil magic didn’t dim at all, and now every spell wasn’t just a dozen or a score dying, it could be hundreds.

If she could Chain pure Shards instead of Shardrays, how many more would she kill?...

They cannot stop me...

She had made that claim about the Shroudlords. The steel in her eyes, the utter confidence in her voice when she said that... Despite all that, he had thought her somewhat crazy, as who could be so confident about such a task?

Now, watching stabbing lines of black and silver dropping shattering icicles of frozen gases as they wove terrible webs of death among the Fireborn, he finally believed.

He had nearly lost his bowels when that dragon had reared up. It was easily two hundred feet long, old and massive, and its fiery presence had seemed to be burning his very soul.

She had one-shot it, and then reduced it to spell components, its entire body salvaged in seconds. That meant that she had known she would, and had everything smoothly on line to save it.

Just... damn!

This was a spellcaster like he had never imagined could exist, something from a crazy cartoon or dreamy novel, a pipe dream of someone stuck on giddy desires for power and more power... and he was watching it all right here.

Utterly surreal.

Back in Ohio, after he’d first met her, he’d been chatting up a couple of the Sylunar nuns there, who had asked him in hushed terms if he knew what her hair signified. They weren’t sure, but it was Lit by the Moon even in the brightest light, and they had been fairly certain it was a sign of being Chosen by Sylune...

He wasn’t even sure how that was possible, as Traveler had declared herself that the gods couldn’t see them here at all, so how could she possibly be Chosen?

But here he was, slowly floating forwards over an island of lava frozen into a caldera at the heart of a volcano, frozen by icy magic so cold it made him terribly, terribly glad that he wasn’t harmed, by dint of being Excluded by her concentration when it all went off. He was watching her wreak the kind of harm on enemies that Wizards would wet themselves to pull off even once... and she was doing it in unending, savage, relentless volleys, giving the Fireborn neither time nor mercy.

His face lit up suddenly as his dark eyes fell on the Magical Beasts and things whose carcasses were left behind... and tellingly, weren’t burning vivic.

There were Phantom Servants all over the place, picking up vivic Cores from the ice, filling up Disks, dumping them into Sleipner’s sidecar, making them even more goldweight, and right ahead there were bunches more, waiting to be gathered up by a discreet hand.

Ach, such a dear girl. Never forgetting about the money, even in the heart of total massacre. If only his mum had been able to find such a wee lass for him to marry himself...

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I spun slowly to survey the whole area.

Darkvision, infravision, and Eagle Eyes combined nicely, and one thing Fire creatures didn’t have was the ability to hide easily with all the heat they gave off. Given how much ice was covering everything, anything Fireborn stood out like a candle in a dark room... but I didn’t see anything around right now.

The lava lake behind us had mostly swallowed the cap I’d frozen atop of it, but the jarring, wrenching disruption of the Blight was still a huge plug on the ley line below. The Firelord’s power and dominion over this section of the Charlands was completely fading, and with it the unnatural pyromana sustaining its nature.

In other words, everything was cooling down as the pyromana faded, was subsumed into the Land, or was outright devoured by the vivic fire spread out everywhere, hastening the process of a return to ‘normal’.

Even the Haze up above was visibly thinner, given this much Land-feeding was going on.

There had been reinforcements coming in through the lava tunnels for a short time, but those had dried up, as if they had better things to do with their time than to wander into a landscape somehow below freezing despite the lava right over there... but that lava was cooling too, although it wasn’t visible quite yet. Still, the edges of it had withdrawn a good five feet, especially after it had to eat so much Cryoclasm-chilled rock. It was just that there was literally mountains of lava below fighting back.

The harvesting was going on behind me, and I’d already had to Itemize several loads of stuff given the quantity of what we were gathering. The Mick and Master Fred had lined up the carcasses of most of the snakes and stuff that weren’t Elementals when I slowed down my sniping, just so I could keep Casting, and I’d shrunken the hauls down to Scrolls ready to send out soon.