Chapter 17-447: More Big Booms (+Poll) (1/2)
The cruise missile zipped around the hills and mountains with uncanny precision, faster than any Cultivator could fly. It was covered in E-plumbum, ignoring all magical and Qi energies on its course, and one protruding fin had an Interdiction on it, so attempts to intercept it with dimensional movement would be impossible. Its radar would avoid anything waiting in the air to stop it... but there was nothing doing so.
It plunged through the protective Barrier around the Hellfire Ice Note as if it wasn’t there, and if the guards on duty saw the dark shadow of it coming faster than sound, they weren’t in position to do anything to stop it as it flew directly above the central nexus of the Grand Formation, where the Sect’s Elders and Grandmaster were all engaged in directing power to the distant Black Dragon Claw Sect.
An atomic weapon by itself would have been lethal to almost everyone in the Sect, but that wasn’t the point of this. The Vivic Enchantment inscribed on the warhead and about the inner shell of the missile gave the explosion a hungry edge, and the concentrated Qi lines linking this Formation were like trails of gunpowder.
There was a flash of the sun, and then not only did whiteness bloom over the Sect, but it lunged out into the distance at the speed of lightning, growing at calamitous speed with every mile.
When they reached the sources of the Qi, those walls of flame were like sky-born tsunami stretching from heaven to earth, and the aghast Daoists could only gape as they came down on them.
The Grand Formation overloaded as the vivus devoured the Qi inside and out, and the Cultivators linked to it didn’t fare much better. Some exploded from within as the vivus got inside them, others managed to vent all their power before it could do so, and heavy white stars and striped cloaks devoured the landscape, throwing off waves of hungry vivus that devoured all the Qi, everywhere.
Atop the Black Dragon Sect, the incoming vivus collapsed onto that congealed dragon of Qi, and it blew apart with a devastating roar as it finished its cataclysmic breath. The Sect’s Formation only contained the explosion for the half-second necessary to intensify it even further, and then it all blew out in a blast of unwhite fire that reduced all the Qi-infused constructions, almost all the Cultivators, and everything they’d made upon this world into heavy white dust.
-------
Briggs and Sama led the vanguard team up to the Black Dragon Claw fortress while the world was still smothered in whiteness and dust.
There were only twenty of them, but they weren’t expecting much opposition at all. Tremblesense painted the ground for the whole group through the direct Fellowship link, and so they didn’t need to see too much as they ran or were Disk-dragged up to the fortress.
Detect Cultivators at V ranged out, painted those still surviving into the Heavens-Up Display for all of them, and five teams of four split up to make sure none of them survived the day.
-------
Nearly two million screaming Chinese assaulted all of the Sects at the same time. Their Formations erupting, their Qi sucked away by devouring vivus, their masters reeling, and the air thick with the horrible smell of the white dust of mortality, none of them were prepared to take on the assaults, even with the time gained by none of the attackers breaching the sensory edges of the Formation prematurely.
The searingly pure energies of vivus infused the air and devoured Qi everywhere, driving their spiritual animals crazy, to the point where some turned on the Cultivators with them to devour them and regain some Qi. It wasn’t enough and didn’t save them as the Purgers swept in.
The most decisive of the Sects gathered their survivors and immediately pulled out to the north, aiming to get over the mountains and into the desolate lands beyond, abandoned by mortals, where they could set up anew, gather their energies once more, and rebuild.
Unfortunately for them, they ran right into the North American Armed Forces waiting for them there, while those to the west ran into the European Forces assembled to make sure they didn’t spread anywhere else.
It wasn’t their first time seeing jets, helicopters, tanks, and assembled rotary cannons, but it was their first time seeing so many of them, of so high a quality, and all of them were directed at them!
Ammunition was spent very freely. There weren’t too many armed conflicts where it was going to be valuable anymore, so using it up on Cultivators was definitely the way to go here.
Most appropriately, the powerful Masters called in from other worlds did not have any experience with higher technology and gunpowder. Once they ran into Stillflight Fields and Interdictions and could not get away, artillery and rocket barrages focused on them did an excellent job of wiping them out, even if they raised whole hills of stone to protect themselves. A fuel-air warhead simply didn’t care, nor did radar-guided vivic-enhanced rocket loads eating away all their Qi and reducing them to merely enhanced physical combatants, which radar-tracking Gatling guns were happy to concentrate on.
There was no guarantee they got them all, of course. But there were Druids Communing with the Land, looking for sources of Qi in circles nine and ten miles in radius. There were Rangers tracking them down with impossible skill, be it on land or flying, and there were Wayfists and Fireswords grim on the hunt, following every last trace of Qi, every sleepy murmur of irritation from the Land, chasing after those trying to hide and stealth their way to safety.
No, they didn’t get all of them, but they got the vast majority of them... and as for the rest, they would be hunting them down forever.
-------
The only Sects left after the Changing of the Season, as the Chinese named the event, were those mid to low-tier Sects in the middle ground between the coast and the mountains. They were generally close to the two lines of the Great Wall of China, which was still in the process of being fully eradicated.
They didn’t know exactly what was going on, as there were far too many Purgers between them and the powerful Sects, but all the omens were bad, indeed, and when the dirty mortals turned out in such force that they completely surrounded each Sect one by one and began to reduce them, they knew their time was up.
Their end might have been more bloody and valiant were it not for the amount of artillery fire that pounded down on them and reduced their fortified bases to rubble, destroying their Formations, while missiles from aircraft blew apart towers and walls, softening them up for the final push.
------------
As the last of the Daoist Cultivator Sects was crushed, it turned October 15, and Sama and Briggs rolled that Glory Award into making Ten, an event that rippled across the Allegiance.
They were part of a Legendary Racial Class, so going right to Eleven was going to be nothing much for them, part of their inevitable progression to domination.