Chapter 17-460: The Final Phases (1/2)
“Trying is part of the mortal condition,” Briggs replied, unconcerned. “What’s the goal now, Trav? We’re looking at two months tops before every other Shroudzone in the world is down.” Those Zones located in more isolated areas we were actually helping locals get to in order to accelerate the process.
There’d been a case of a drug lord in Brazil commandeering one of the Shroudzones there for personal use. Shvaughn had showed up, immolated him and his personal army of bravos and shooters, burned his personal compound to the ground, and given their weapons and money to a whole bunch of locals eager to make sure drug lords couldn’t do this to them again... especially after Shvaughn encouraged them not to take over the drug trade.
She already controlled a lot of the crime in the country as part of her Obsidian Web, although it was passive, basically looking for the real abusers and building up her information network for silly people with their crusading hearts on their sleeves to go deal with. The money went into some good causes... and some neutral ones, but she didn’t pocket it for herself. After all, she had tons of money already; it was just a tool for her to do stuff and play with the world now.
“You’re going to work on building up Warlords and just whittling down numbers. It won’t use the Greyfield trick until it thinks it will surprise us and catch everyone possible. Use that time to kill as much as you can, pushing the Shroudzone back. When it springs its Construct armies, you’ve got to be prepared, so you know which way to direct Naming Karma.” I took a deep breath. “We need a look at the very center of the Shroudzone.”
“Still too far. Even Briggs and I can’t risk going in that deep,” Sama said promptly. “And there’s gonna be active stuff at the heart of the Shroudzone like that. Will it even suffer the Curse?”
“Not if it doesn’t move from around its respawn point. That doesn’t mean its subordinates don’t burn and come back, but at least some of them probably stick around with it in the core area. And no, I wasn’t expecting you to do that. But I have to see that area, and for more reason than one.”
“You expect that Interloper is doing something,” the Angelos spoke up, frowning.
“I’m pretty damn sure the Shroudlord is already started constructing a Formation to Call in Guiogg the Devouring Moon to drain the planet of energy and kill us all off in one stroke. That won’t harm the undead, and the Shroudlord can just take the time to gather up all the random corpses around and take them over. The Curse of the Sun will fade with time, and the threat we represent will have been dealt with.”
Commander Haru’Ara frowned. “But you suspect this will not be the case?”
“Correct. I suspect the Formation has been or will be tampered with, and the Shroudlord doesn’t have the references to compare it to. In return, I have to adjust what I’m going to do to that Formation, and really, really mess up both the Shroudlord and the Interloper... and Guiogg, a certain person in the mirror being an equal-opportunity discriminating party against Worldenders.” I turned my head in a certain direction. “But first, I need to see what it’s managed to get done, hopefully without alerting it.”
“Lots of magic stealth ops,” Sama nodded. “Can you do it?”
“Yes. Wizard will hit Fifteen tomorrow evening, and some of the spells advanced to VIII should be enough. The main thing is getting there, but Navar Nevrend is only like twenty horizontal miles from Moscow, and sixteen or some from the initial Gate, if what few reports we have are right. So, I just need to punch a hole through to the correct location, then head up from below. The odds are very good that its defenses from below are not going to be enough to deal with me.”
“And you can just close it behind you,” Sama agreed. “And then?”
“Then,” I smiled, and cracked my knuckles, “I make a custom toy to mess ALL of them up!”
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The same day I reached Ten true, my Ring Lore started on Wizardry IV. The number of spells I had, both standard and pre-Meta’d, drifting in my Matrix was pretty confusing, and I was even leaving more open to fill on the fly, just in case I needed them.
Two days later, my Ring of Prime Elemental Command was finally completed, after more than a year of work on it. All creatures with Elemental Descriptors, fear me now!...
Sama and Briggs’ runs had basically confirmed the location of over a dozen sunken storehouses of something. They were now making plans to raid them and destroy them during the day when the undead couldn’t do much about it... although the explosives they’d found in some of the areas indicated self-destruction was also a weapon these things had in mind, in addition to the undead.
Just more things to deal with.
But before that happened, I had another stop to make in my down time.
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The Biological Warfare Headquarters in Atlanta was one of those black-operations the military didn’t like to talk about. They could try to fancify what it was there for as attempting to find biological solutions to the undead, but that wasn’t where the money went.
It was where they researched nerve gas and biological agents testing, and also looked over all the virus and diseases at the International Disease Control headquarters nearby. The fact such things were only useful against the living was lost on nobody, and at least one of the viruses plaguing the populations in Africa was believed to have been developed there and removed by cults of Skulos in a stealth op, along with who knew how many others.
I had naturally found out about it, and I had suborned the entire division to work on something else. That was getting rid of the potential Black Blood of the Earth, i.e., intensely necro-Energized oil.
Most of the oil in existence came from a time before bacteria existed to eat dead trees. In prehistory, forests upon forests fell, and would only erode, not rot. They ended up building up on themselves, pressing down on one another with their weight, even as the elements slowly ground them up... but they didn’t decay, and they didn’t rot. They only grew more compressed, water washed through them, and they were weighed down by the ages.
If they stayed solid, they became coal. If they liquified, they became oils. Ergo, they weren’t made of dead dinosaurs, but dead trees from a time before wood-eating bacteria.