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

I had just completed killing the Old God Hastsezini, spending time getting the ley line and the caldera under control. Naturally, that meant I was alone.

It also meant I could pull something off without observation.

Teleporting back along my Lived-Line to a certain garage there was somewhat surreal. I even came in at the same chamber where I’d first appeared on this world.

The decaying zombies all around me, three of them, were a bit surprised to find someone with scarlet skin and burning hair pop up in the middle of them. The next second, they were sprayed white over the dark concrete of the room.

I looked down, and was not surprised to find that any indications of me once being there before had been moved or vanished... or gnawed.

There were a couple other random walkers around, which I dusted instantly as I made my way out the back.

The van was still there, doors yawning open. I looked around calmly, Bitchood up and scanning the area. Nothing particularly alarming around, and the two walkers in the parking lot there were dusted without anything noticing.

I Cast Invisibility to Undead, and rose up into the air as I popped my borrowed wings, succubus wings flaring with silver Runes and burning slightly as they did so.

I had studied the maps of the city from before, and knew right where the Federal Reserve was. There was just getting enough height to Linejump over there above it, evading the shadows and other incorps milling around in the sky, dropping down from the sky, and entering the shattered front door of the building.

I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw the starving vampire spawn waiting nearby. Heavenbound Hall had indicated that at least one of the Vampire Clans had an Elder trapped inside the New York Shroudzone, and some of their living descendants still supplied them with blood on a regular basis.

Bitchood could encompass the whole building, but the walls and floors naturally restricted it. Still, I had sensed dozens of vampires and their ghoul servants as I’d descended from the sky, so this was anything but surprising.

There was no power, so the elevator shafts were all pried and left open, to be either climbed up or used as movement routes for vampires in bat form.

I calmly dusted the sentries, not at all concerned that an alarm would be raised. Layout said that the elevator down to the vault would be over there, but an alarm might be going off if the master vampire(s) noticed their minions were dying off.

I wasn’t worried about any amount of undead at this point. I could also track anybody on this level precisely, and Seeking Shards didn’t care about corners.

I paced through the building for the heavy-duty elevator heading down to the vaults. With the power off, there was no way they could bring it up or down, so they’d likely just collapsed it and left it down there. Bringing up the gold would have been a slow, gradual process, the metal probably exchanged for blood for thirsting vampires mad to assuage their hunger.

There were a few other undead scattered about, some slouched on chairs or desks from seventy years ago, stone bored and just going blank with the uselessness of their trapped lives. If they left, they just burned up in the sun. If they didn’t, they just stared at the same walls in timeless boredom, waiting for a random magos to wander by and vivify them on the fly.

I found the elevators, and dropped down, trailing my hand against the wall.

The cables were still hanging, surprisingly, possibly to help ghouls move up and down? When I looked down, the top of the cabin of the elevator had been torn open, peeled back to allow man-size beings to drop on through.

I took advantage of their opening to drop through, and my Bitchood lit up with the presence of undead. I walked out into the area here, feeling a touch of surrealism. The architecture was older, but the layout of the place was identical to Terra-Luna’s copy of this place.

Not as many raging angry claw marks along the walls, or fallen insulation and things shoved in the corners, though.

There were plenty of gaunt undead standing around, their skin slick and black, obviously reinforced for strength.

I had to lift an eyebrow, because all the gold was out of the various cells for the different countries, the vampires obviously not caring about the balance of exchange between countries once carried out here. The forklifts which had once moved stuff around here were shoved off to the side in the corner, now decaying, clawed up, and useless.

They had stacked all those bars up into giant cubes of gold, from which they seemed to be removing bars on a regular basis, by the display of symmetry there.

Well, that was bloody convenient for me.

Shardrays flashed through the place, with a follow-up set of Shards to pick off a couple stragglers flopped into corners here and there. Piles of vivus fell to the ground, heavy white mist crawled over the tiles and fed on necroic residue, and I had a big pile of gold all to myself.

I pulled out the first Itemized cloth for the Tapestry spell, spread it out perfectly on the ground next to the first of the neatly stacked cubes of gold in the center of the room, easily a ten-foot cube of the stuff. The weight of this gold was colossal, but Tapestry didn’t care. All it was worried about was volume.

A Widened Tapestry was twenty feet cubed. Eyeballing the rows of stacked gold, it looked like about thirty thousand cubic feet of the stuff. Meaning I’d have to move the stuff, and I’d need four Tapestries.

Moving it telekinetically would be far too slow given the volume of stuff here, but building links of bricks between stacks? That was perfectly doable.

I started flipping off weighty bricks of buttery golden metal, making links between sets of four stacks on the ground, officially connecting it all together as ‘one big set of gold’.

Then I Animated the whole bunch, which, when cast at VI and 30+, meant I Animated the whole damn set of golden bricks, a mass weighing hundreds of tons.