Chapter 11-326: Taking Care of Business (1/2)

The bricks came to life, shuffling together with the lightness and ease of playing cards, and I directed them to stack themselves up on the cloth on the floor.

With speed and grace, they did so, stacking themselves up all across it with mathematical precision, while I joined up the next set of four. When it was done, I transferred the spell to the next set of cubes, and bid it do the same thing.

Rinse, repeat. I laid down more oversized Tapestry cloths as space was cleared, and as that mound stacked up as high as it could, I invoked the Tapestry, and shrunk it down to a gleaming and weightless golden image on the Tapestry.

Very satisfied, I rolled that back up, Itemized it to shrink it down to size, and proceeded to grab all the rest of the gold the same way, spending another Animate Objects to do so for each Tapestry.

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I was actually kind of surprised that nobody flew down to bug me down here, nor had I felt an Interdiction come up. Were they so bored that they didn’t even investigate intruders?

Ah, maybe they thought I was going to be physically coming up the shaft with a load of gold. That was extremely amusing. No, no, that wasn’t going to happen.

What was going to happen was that these vampires weren’t going to be able to pay their untrapped living kin outside for blood. I could imagine how the next meeting with the starving vampires was going to go for them.

I rolled up the last Tapestry, Itemized it down in size, and looked around at the misty clean floor, nodding to myself.

I Dimension Hopped two thousand feet straight up, completely skipping by any retaliatory action from below. There was no Interdiction or anything, and I stayed under the Teleport restriction, which further amused me.

I turned my eyes northeast, and Linejumped off that way, and like I had been doing all along, harvested the spell with ki to get it back smoothly.

I was looking for something out here, and the last news I had was that it tended to come out of the Bronx River right about there...

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Locate Object at IV was more than enough to find the rest of the creature.

It was like a moving white tree, a skeleton built thicker and heavier than a human, but still recognizable as humanoid. Where its left leg had been, a crude fake leg formed of multiple human skeletons fused together formed an odd pegleg of sorts.

It was closing in on thirty feet tall, big even for the biggest of giants. Crackling black and yellow-green lightning played about it as it moved towards me, having quickly felt me coming once I came in range of its senses.

In my hand, Clavus was responding to its presence, and the trapped and damned soul within it.

Being efficient, I had deployed flights of Shards to regain my full Pool of ki, obliterating a few dozen lurching walkers to get my reserves back. As the long-dead Storm Jotun - who knew where and when it came from? - lurched towards me, clawing for the bone of its femur, I calmly and thoroughly blew it apart.

Dozens of Shards impacted all over it, smashing ancient steel-hard bone to dust going vivic. Its fake leg exploded into nothing almost instantly. I blew apart all its joints even as it fell, and guided Shards up into every single bone of its spine. Ribs shattered and sprayed, and the last six of them detonated and blew apart the skull that had slammed haplessly to the ground as it was blasted apart.

The vivic mist began to swirl, and gather towards Clavus.

This wasn’t unexpected. I planted Clavus like the nail he was, the only remaining part of the dead Storm Jotun that had been cleansed of negative energies. Naturally the remaining vivified energies of it would gather to him.

I busied myself helping burn the disintegrating bones down faster and watching the energy flow into Clavus, while picking off any undead that got too close. I wasn’t worried about them seeing me. With borrowed horns out, burning scarlet skin, and demonic wings with holy silver Runes on them, they weren’t going to have any idea who I was.

By the time I showed the rest of the world this, the New York Shroudzone should be wiped.

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I reclaimed Clavus, feeling him brimming with new potential, new energy... and a burning new antipathy for the undead.

Without delay, I Linejumped back over to Long Island, and came plummeting down back into that parking lot, now festooned with a couple shadows and a dozen zombies investigating the bright white spots of vivus there and inside.

I snuffed them all while coming down, and set down upon my Lived-Line.

Vivus swirled into the space I vacated as I stepped across dimensions to dump my gains, and then headed back to the caldera, unmissed by anyone.

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Windgraf Mochtal strode down the corridor that Lady Traveler had excavated out of the deeper rock under Heavenbound Hall. He had gotten a message from her to go investigate the empty room at the end of the corridor, set aside for later use for something... storage, probably.

That door was now brimming with some subtle and powerful magical Wards... not entirely out of place here in the Hall, but the illusionary addition was something.