Chapter 9-257: The Storm Comes to Shanghai, Part I (1/2)
I fought down the urge to vomit at the feeling of contamination surging through my awareness.
It didn’t spread that far out into the sea, probably because the Daoists didn’t linger out here much, but it was spreading far, far inland, with thick welling knots of the shit here and there where either converting Formations were in place, or various Sects or Schools had set up shop and were doing the conversion with bodies instead of tools.
“Ahk!” I wanted to rinse out my mind. This was horrible!
Master Fred just glanced at me, and I fed him a taste. He blinked, and carefully spat something black off to the side. -We can’t just ride off,- he /said calmly, and I sighed, knowing he was absolutely right.
If I had to burn the entire damn city off the map to get rid of this, that was exactly what I was going to do!
I sent it back along the Fellowship links to those behind, overlaying it on the map of the city. I couldn’t sense any individuals with Qi, given the overall thickness of it, but the neighborhood areas alone were going to tell them something.
Oh, and a lot of them puked, too. The area I could just sense was nearly as big as all of Taiwan, and this extended off into the distance...
Yeah, not fun.
“Sweep the perimeter, and hope they aren’t using Death Candles or Blood Markers or something to alert them if someone dies. Even if they are, great! I hope they come looking!” I grit my teeth, glaring at the filth in my head, the disgusting feel of it in the manafield around me making me want to bury the world in vivus to get rid of it.
Ugh. Void Brothers would hate this so much. Were there any even active hereabouts?
Well, I suppose if I just burned the damn place down they might feel it...
“Let’s find as many as we can for now. If we attract a sortie party, we’ll butcher them, too.”
-With pleasure.- Sleipner neigh-tooted his approval, too, and we continued the arc along the edges of the patrol routes over the water, looking for more of these bastards to pop and kill.
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They could run, but not fast enough, and they couldn’t hide. They could deflect one Ray or Shard, but not two or more. That cut into my killing potential significantly, but note that they couldn’t deflect a Chain, which required a Save... and that Save was basically out of their reach.
Which was totally by design.
Screaming Daoists plunged over a couple hundred feet to the water, all of them burning in at least three colors, and found that hitting the water from that height was almost like slamming into cement, especially when you are flailing around like an idiot and not trying to configure yourself in a dive pattern.
Not that most of them were even flailing, but those that were still alive were trying to put out burning Banefires, panicking at not being able to fly, and generally acting like they weren’t lords and masters of creation, but people who’d never really met a challenging foe who wasn’t just like them.
Yeah, those were some impressive belly-flops and head-plunges. Gotta work on your Body Techniques, guys.
There was one guy who survived. He looked up through the water, saw a bright light, and Master Fred blew his addled head apart.
I harvested heads and goldweight coolly, the freshness of vivus burning in the water and helping cleanse the slime in the air.
Would they send out more? I doubted anyone wanted to add to their snuffing Death Candle tally, and besides, who would dare to attack them?
Once again covered in invisibility, we headed for the shore, right into that gag-worthy miasma of Qi the average human couldn’t even tell existed.
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Teleportating everyone was a case of Mass Reduce enough times to shrink everybody down to 1/5th normal proportions in all dimensions, their weight dropping with them, and then Widening my Teleport to increase its weight allowance by a factor of eight.
There was no problem fitting all of them. We faded out, and zipped down my most recent Lived-Line, back to where Master Fred was waiting atop a dead patrol of burning Daoists.
We shimmered into view on an abandoned plaza in the south end of a city neighborhood, about a block away from a minor Sect headquarters.
I snapped up Detect Qi at VII, and ignoring the filth in the air, went plumbing for every single damn thing in the area radiating it.
At this point, there was no way we could spare anyone who had a Dantian developed; it was going to be a death sentence. I painted them all into the Heavens-Up Display, and Sama and Briggs began allocating and coordinating, a dire two-tone note beginning to reverberate through it all with some really nasty Heartsong Buffs.
+6 universal to hit and damage was a game-breaking mass Buff, after all, and the Daoists wouldn’t even be able to hear it unless Tremble and Endure were right on top of them... in which case they wouldn’t be hearing it for long.
I was in the air with a Wind Wall at V raging around me, protecting me from physical ranged attacks, including gunfire; the magic didn’t care. With Seeking Shards, I didn’t need line of sight, I just needed approximate location and verification of a target, and an open path to them... doors, windows, hallways, stairs, it all worked.
Selected people were giving me, Sama, and Briggs visual access so we could all paint The Map into the overlay, and poof, just like that, everyone was carrying real-time updated tactical maps and displays in their heads, pointing out targets, warning of threats in the area, giving travel paths, and the whole bit.