Chapter 9-262: Scorched Terra (1/2)
Everything ahead of us was dead for sixty kilometers.
A huge chunk of it was on fire, too. Every single human and animal larger than a dog was sitting and rotting out there in the sun, and death was gathering.
The killzone extended off inland and around, representing the territory of the Daoist Warlords around Hong Kong.
We didn’t stop as the kill totals mounted, only swinging inland.
The bodies were fresher in that direction, so the Daoists carrying out the scorched-earth policy were in that direction. After all, our goal was to save the people, right? So, killing the people would deny us our victory, even if they all died. If we pulled back, they could just go find some humans elsewhere. After all, there were still at least a hundred million Chinese left...
Still, we had to cover a hundred kliks of ground before the first slaughtering teams flying and racing around showed up on the awareness of the land, crawling over the land like locusts. Wherever they went, everything was dying...
Naturally, everything we were seeing was going out on streams to basically the whole planet. Villages filled with dead, humans and animals slaughtered, the ground and buildings covered in blood and gore, corpses exploded and ravaged, everyone from children to grandparents butchered without mercy.
When midnight came, all these corpses would be rising, bearing horrific resentment for their slaughter... but unable to do much about it, constrained by the Curse of the Sun. They would head north and south, killing everything as they did, expanding their numbers, growing a huge new Shroudzone.
A buffer zone against invasion? That wouldn’t work...
Sure, they’d point at us and claim we forced them to this point, which was total bullshit. You were never forced to take out your impotency on civilians and innocents. This was simply the callous hearts of creatures who didn’t care about humanity taking pitiful revenge for the annihilation they could feel was coming.
The Chinese on Taiwan and to the south weren’t getting frightened off by this, but it did mean that the normal people here needed to be warned.
That’s what Mass Message is good for.
The Daoists have slaughtered the living in a broad swathe to the south of you. You need to flee, or when they rise and come walking, you will join them. Look at the sky, it already turns dark.
I sent that Mass Message off repeatedly to the little presences at the edge of the Commune’s awareness, enough to get the warning out. By the way people started to move, they were going to at least make the attempt.
It didn’t mean we couldn’t do something about it, either. After all, I could Teleport back to Shanghai, and quickly pick up a whole lot of help.
But before then, I had to slaughter as many thousands of the Daoists as I could.
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The first teams were ground teams, racing over the streets and fields as fast as deer, chasing down the people and butchering them without emotion. They crashed through doors and walls seeking everything that was living, ignoring the screams, the begging and pleading, as they cut everything down as rapidly as possible.
Then they began to die.
They could feel the attacks incoming, but they couldn’t dodge the death that was coming for them. Clusters close to one another would explode without any visible source, giving them no idea where the attacks were coming from, or what it was. All they knew is that their fellows started getting blown apart and crashing down to the ground, burning in multi-colored flames very hotly indeed.
“Try to get as far north as you can,” I told the civilians via Voice. “The dead will be rising at midnight.Help is coming from the north.”
That simple reminder was enough to get even the most distraught of them moving as fast as they could. There was no time to mourn or to recover.
In the far distance I could see the Daoist flying squads swooping around, bombarding the ground below with fire and lightning, shooting arrows like they were at a gallery. Unseen Shards flicked up around my arms, and we closed in on them grimly.
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An hour before dusk...
I stepped out a moonbeam from atop the Energized Seal in the newly renamed Court of Dead Dragons back in Shanghai.
Over a thousand people were waiting for me there. All of them had hand Weapons now, while those who had working firearms were clustered together.
I could not Buff them all straight off, that was impossible. Briggs and Sama had already marked out who I should Buff, and with what.
Ultravision to give decent sight under the Shroud was passed out to a couple hundred people. The guns were all made +V via Greater Magic Weapon, with ExtendedEndless AmmoIII added on, as were a couple hundred Weapons to be split among the squads, and all of those were made Vivic as well.
The Taiwanese were allocated among the various squads that had been assembled, and then I Mass Reduced them in teams of a hundred, held their hands as foot-tall men and women gathered around me, and Teleported us all into the distance along the frontal area at the edge of the killzone, and into the areas I’d purged of Daoists.
I could refill my Pool damn fast if I had enough targets, but once the Daoists realized that they were being eradicated, they fled hastily back south towards Hong Kong in urgent waves. For a short time, that made my job very easy, and Chains of unseen Shards reaved through their packed numbers and groups, filling the air and dotting the landscape with burning Daoists in all their finery.