Chapter 18-473: The World is Turning (1/2)

I watched and I worked, and the days rolled by. It was only six days to Map all of Australia, giving the Aussies some unwelcome news about what was down below them,

Legion was out of it for twenty days, and it would have been a month if Binding Theurgy hadn’t come through, my Warlock Magic reaching Wrath Mastery/5 and Warlock Caster Level/5, qualifying as a Ten Warlock and so enabling a slew of new Theurgic Classes. The extra Wrath built up to +10d6 once I gained my Chasuble of the Heavenshrouded, and could really help with the Burning during our rides together.

It was difficult. Using the Wrath of Heaven in an Atonement process like this required me to really, really hurt someone I loved, for protracted periods of time, and given the close contact, there was no way I couldn’t feel the pain.

I could also feel the Sin burning off them, which was a huge incentive to keep doing it. Being able to hug the most huggable person on the planet for hours and hours certainly wasn’t part of it, nuh-uh.

Even Shvaughn didn’t dare jump in and make an appearance while this was going on, or she likely would have been severely cooked in mid-Pactjump.

Undead were dying by the millions per day, mostly in gulagzones and now Japan, which was hosting a lot of Juniors eager for Levels as they worked to clear the islands.

While Africa had a bloody history in some areas, it didn’t have nearly the Shroudzones of the other continents, and those were also falling fast as the tribes and clans there found common ground in extinguishing the undead, and not falling behind in the power race. The strongest of them headed urgently for Russia to get in on the final fight.

South and Central America’s Shroudzones were also eroding fast, after the parties trying to reserve them for themselves were removed by one means or another, or at the very least demoted to just another force doing the job. They often weren’t happy at the new situation, but it turned out Shvaughn spoke the language of how to deal with them pretty well, and the examples she made of them, drawing liberally from their own conduct, heartily encouraged them to play nicer, at least if they survived.

As an aside, there were lots of Cartels involved in such things, who often had Shoul ties. Morningsuns and friends (and they had a LOT of friends) would happily cross the Atlantic to visit those people and discuss religious matters with them.

With golden plasma. They got rather good at taking out key elements of the leadership and factions there, with Shvaughn’s informed help after she Consumed a bunch of them. They shattered the cartel structures, spurring fights for domination and control that only helped the Good Work along.

The local governments didn’t much like it, and the people certainly had to keep ducking, but the Churches of a magic world had a lot more martial strength to them than in a normal world, and they were plenty happy to ignore secular authorities often bought off by the cartels and pursue extralegal means against them, just like the Dark Churches were doing.

It was also a lot harder to hide with Divination magic around to track killers down, too.

Pawlie Blakhamar located the first cephalid base under North America, and Sir Pellier, the Traveling Knights, and a bunch of other grim people went down and took it out. The MountainHamar of the Void Brothers promptly went looking for the one or two deeper in the Strata, even as his peers were doing the same on the other continents.

The cephalid base deep in the Strata in Europe was also part of the controlling intelligence directing the Templars there, and that organization’s European branch fell apart once the Elder Brain was cooking in its Purified Spawning Pool. Granted, the Templars had already been largely gutted by the teams hunting them down after some of the disasters they triggered, but once no longer receiving instructions they couldn’t disobey beamed into their heads, they went hiding, hoping nobody would find them, including their inhuman masters.

We believed that there were cephalid colonies under China, India, and the Middle East, but they seemed not as eager to come into Africa. Maybe it was because the dark elves were concentrated there.

So much work to do, and the ancient and elder evils that had been lurking in the shadows for all this time were rudely awoken to the fact that a great number of very powerful humans had suddenly evolved out of literally nothing in basically no time at all and were really bringing the hammer down on their opinions about these things.

It was a total shock to them. They were aware that dire things were happening on the surface, and they were trying to burrow deep and stay beyond the evils even more dangerous than themselves... not that such a thing would have worked. When the Shroud killed a world, it killed it all, and it didn’t matter how deep you wanted to hide, it would find you eventually, hunting remorselessly and inexorably until every spirit of the world, on the world, or in the world, was dead.

We couldn’t afford to be much more merciful to these things, as they could literally plague the planet for millennia. Humanity was in a position to do something about this while the EE’s were weak... there were too many ways for them to exert extinction-level events after Shroudfall on humanity if they deemed humanity too strong, which it now was. They certainly had the means and power to tear apart human society with mind control, plagues, mutation, and the like, so we had to get them NOW.

Teams were regularly being pulled off the Russian border just to deal with these special circumstances that were popping up, but nobody complained. When they were pulled, there were things to fight, and those things had to die.

They were also a major break from the undead, and REALLY good Karma.

My Staff Clavus finished up his Staff of Battle upgrades, and started on Slot Dreizehn, which would make him solidly +V and basically end what I wanted to do with him for now. That would be fifty more days of Naming Karma, meaning I stopped by a Shroudzone and pretended I was a Melee shattering skulls wildly for a few minutes every day. Einz would harvest a few with his Shells via TK, and directed the Naming Karma into Lore.

The champions and powers of the mortal races were moving with more energy and drive than they’d ever had. Armies of basically superhuman men and women were getting stronger yet, and while the pessimists watched with flat eyes at what their power meant for the rest of the world, particularly with the great advances of science and the great equalizer of gunpowder and easy firearms access going away in favor of much more individual-favored magic, for now, there were enemies of all the mortal races here to fight and pay attention to, helping keep everyone roughly together instead of competing with one another.

How long it would endure after the Shroud came down was a different story, as the gods didn’t like boring Good societies grabbing an early win...

Ah, well, I could only watch the progress going on, and hope for the best afterwards.

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