Chapter 11-325: Minor Matters (1/2)

“Letting the stone take all the abuse was a fine idea,” Briggs said. “I’m glad I thought of it.”

“You should share such genius with us earlier. I might have been able to work that into my Warlordship,” I shot right back at him.

He gave me a look, I gave him a stink-eye, and everyone else burst out laughing. Briggs just laughed from his belly and hugged Sama closer, who purred and raked her nails over his hide, Vajras sparking at one another.

“That were a Good fight, and truth to that,” The Mick said, hoisting his own bottle, his arm around Amaretta Blakhamar. “A double Glory award, was that? Quite a rush!”

He didn’t say anything about the twenty-nine Life Diamonds we’d burned bringing people back. Healers and defenders could only do so much, and really, they’d kept alive hundreds of people who would have died in a normal fight.

Perma-deaths were seventy-six, and over half of them had been from the Outsider’s single area bombardment. She had burned a lot of Death Qi on that, and not everyone had been able to dodge in time.

There was a damn reason people were supposed to take the Sun Saves, and it was exactly for occasions like that.

They’d learned their lessons the hard way, and the Sun Saves were the first thing everyone who didn’t have them was grabbing now, along with anything and everything to boost Concentration. The magic number was 30, which wasn’t high enough in the end, but it was high enough for almost everything else now.

After Aelryinth got smacked with that Death Curse, I considered anything under 70 low myself, which was why I was very, very eager to get my Concentration modifier up so high.

More to the point, every single damn person was going to be able to fight tomorrow. Healing magic was just something you couldn’t look down on... and that included the people I’d had to Chain Regenerate to reattach or regrow limbs that had been hacked off, pulled off, burned away, poisoned away, eaten, or some such thing.

Qi wielders had some powerful self-regeneration abilities, which made Blooding quite useful against them, but their ability to heal others tended to suck, given the corrupted nature of their power. Sharing Qi with others was actually incredibly difficult.

Healing, the anvil upon which you Level. While the nadir of Evil was killing one another ruthlessly so that only the best rose to the top, for the Good it was healing, doing it again, healing, doing it again, relentlessly trying over and over, hammering the lessons in with success or failure... and everybody living.

Living to learn! Living to Level!

Evil ate its own to gain power. Good treasured its own, and wanted them all to get stronger. Access to the most powerful healing magic was one of the foundations of the magic of Good, where access to the most ruthless offensive magic was the hallmark of Evil.

I had no problem playing the Healer and Buffer, and Amanans who rarely raised their hand against anything were still able to play support Caster and healer, getting those who fought back on their feet quickly to fight where they did not, ensuring that they lived to enjoy the lessons battle gave them.

I got a mental notice. “Be right back. The Brothers found their hoard.”

Eyes gleamed, glasses saluted. The way there was visualized completely, transferred over, and I Teleported away.

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There were three Wayfists among the Brothers here. There were three others working in India with Sama’s forces there, drawn from every continent to deal with the corrupting Qi. Their Brothers had other concerns than Qi, of course, although there were four Lightscepters here among the Purging forces, here to act directly against things which denied the gods.

I came in on a set of stairs, Brother Eurofist there to see me arrive. I held up a fist, he bopped it in amusement, and I wandered down into the vault they’d opened, the outsides carved up in some precious sealing formation that was scarred and chopped in key places, and then streaked with the whites of vivus as the leaking Qi was eaten away.

The keys themselves had been on the scattered undead vivused away in Tiananmen Square. They hadn’t even had to pick the thing.

It was a large hall, and it was stuffed with... stuff.

Einz began TK’ing a spot open for me to put a Tapestry down, and I pulled out the Item Scroll with the box for it absently as I surveyed everything.

“Anything stand out that needs to be destroyed, needs to be read and then destroyed, or is just plain confusing and probably a nasty surprise?” I asked, the dozen Brothers slowly running their Helices through everything. They were moving throughout the entire complex, Weapons burning white with them, tracking down Qi-infused treasures for destruction. They’d been successful, because the Disks I’d given them were loaded down with stuff to Burn.

Eurofist, who looked like a whipcord of a Slavic boxer, blond with pale brown eyes, pointed. “There’s some scrolls and books of Qi Cultivation and Refinement techniques.” He scowled despite himself. “We’re going to be going over them with some advanced Masters to find out their weaknesses and how to exploit them. Likewise their Forms and Spells.” He indicated a separate sense of books tellingly.

“I’ll review and translate them for you,” I agreed calmly. “I’ll do it during downtime.”

Einz was quickly assembling the boxlike structure of panels and frames atop the tapestry, raising the eyebrows of many of the Brothers.

“You came equipped to loot,” he noted, as I considered the absolute mess of gold and silver items scattered in heaps before us. Bastards didn’t even bother to melt it all down.

“I’m very prepared to loot,” I smiled, tinking a floating Disk nearby heaped up with Potions and Pills made by Daoist alchemists, which I’d Cast for their use hours earlier.

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Some months ago...