219 Chapter Two Hundred and Nineteen – Sure, Let’s Call it a Training Montage... (1/2)
Zone 2...
”So, I count two hundred visible super-worm tunnels through this pass...”
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Zone 3...
”Um!” Verd pointed at a castle-sized toadstool in the distance. ”Is that mushroom moving?”
”Yes.”
”Oh.” Everyone stared at the landscape covered in a thousand types of fungi, seeming to undulate as if alive, despite the fact there was no wind, only a lot of spores in the air... and some of those winged things in the sky had no heads...
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Zone 4...
It was cold, and the wind was howling through the pass ahead of them. Snow blanketed the ground, and the trees were heavy with white snow.
Shirley and Fido sniffed and growled. The dragons nodded agreement.
”Thousands of them,” old Corgun murmured, his wings wrapped tight against the nearly gale-force wind.
Everyone looked up at the long, narrow Wake of the Land riding above us. Yeah, no way they didn't know something was coming.
”Should be fun!” Veis chimed, enjoying the climate, and everyone laughed softly...
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Zone 5...
”Well, don't these look familiar,” murmured Feist, shrugging off his new yeti-hide cloak. There were a lot of them, stacked on Disks as loot, they'd fetch a good price back home. Hazé, busybusybusy with her evacuation duties, would be popping in with an Item Tapestry to take them all off their hands, and distribute them to Sama's goods-hungry burgeoning mercantile empire. There were, after all, far more of them then they needed to make everyone here cold-resistance items, no reason not to send them back to make more of the same... or make a whole lot of money, as long as they could be distributed around the continent.
And, well, Hazé was definitely bouncing around the continent, coming into the 400x zone, getting Renewed, and Gemjumping out to punch through the spatio-temporal hijinks. She'd already done a dozen Teleport Runs, bringing in hundreds of people and colossal amounts of goods through coordination and Marked in key places helping communicate. Popping up and dumping off a few/dozen/scores of prime yeti hides wasn't even an imposition, although most of them simply got dropped in The Camp and were snatched up to make Cold Resistance items for the Ironblood there.
The company parted with them because the plain in front of them was dotted with large mounds. They were all at least a mile apart, but they stretched straight to the horizon. And there were already dark blurs wriggling out from each of them...
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”That's a lot of formians,” Briggs observed, side-eying me.
”Is it? Prep for poison, everyone...” I half-grinned.
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Zone 6...
Hazé looked behind us, at all the insect mounds littering the plains, the ones underneath that blue line in the sky kind of half-crumpled, with a clear line of white on the ground matching the skies above. She glanced at the stacked-up square Stone Shaped containers, lifting up the plug on one and sniffing.
”Ant honey.” Her eyes fell on the containers made from white stone. ”Royal?” she asked, pointing.
”Well, their nests didn't need them anymore,” Briggs said with a straight face. ”We kept a bunch for Healing Potions, and Wand charging...” As a power comp, the magical royal honey meant you didn't have to cast the spells to charge up a Wand, like normal; you just sacked the Honey to it. Given how much we'd recovered, charging up a couple Wands of Cure Serious Wounds made for a nice emergency reserve... and now everyone in the army had at least two doses to drink in event of emergency, too!
”Right.” She looked ahead, where the sparse grass of the ant-ridden plains gave way to desert, the sands turned remarkably dark remarkably quickly, but did not venture past this hill line, as if held at bay. ”And what's out there?”
”Temple to Apep,” Errant replied, silver eyes shining expectantly.
”Sooooo... lots of snakes.”
”Especially Fire Snakes!” he agreed enthusiastically.
”Well.” There was clear longing in her voice, but she was doing Good Work, and earning no less Karma then him in so doing. ”Be about your snake-hunting, I suppose.” She sat down on her own Disk, shaking her head, and watched our troops gliding past on Disks, alert and ready to fight. She could rest from the spellcasting she was doing, go through an accelerated Renewal, and be off to another evacuation.
There had been deaths, of course, but with the White Staff, we'd managed to recover most combat deaths, and there were several Clerics among the elves and dwarves who could bring the dead back, as long as we recovered a body. Given how damn tough this troop was, and how much Healing we had available, it was actually really, really hard to kill anyone as long as formations were kept and teamwork was adhered to.
And of course, Hazé could Gemjump in to the rogue stone Errant held, and provide even more help on the revivification side of things. With Tremble able to bring back anyone who died within the last minute, as long as she could reach them, we still hadn't lost anyone permanently, despite some very energetic attempts to make it so...
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Zone 7...
”That would be a real bad idea to go in there,” Errant mused, accepting the new boots of Fire Snake hide I handed him. He sat down on his own glowing Ward Wall and swapped out his tooled leather ones calmly. The flames that poofed up from them when he put them on were certainly eye-catching enough, although they wouldn't set fire to anything unless he wanted them to.
The desert had rather abruptly given way to a dark and brooding old forest, rising out of the sands over the course of a mere mile, splayed around a winding river that gave some wet to the dry sands.
Apep had one less temple and was pissed at us, no doubt. Those had been some big Fire Snakes, but the Valor dragons had had an absolute heavenly time, freezing the burning neo-cobras and stuffing themselves silly on them. Fido and Shirley had just gone off on them, as such things were fairly common in certain areas of Hell, and rather bemused, the rest of us had just followed their lead as they rampaged around.
”Agreed!” Barus and Verd spoke up together, and Silent Jhon nodded, as did every single damn elf and halvyr there. Nobody wanted to go into that place. Broody and hungry, everyone could feel it.
”Barus, Commune with the Land, not the forest! Find out if this place can be purified. If so, where the heart of the forest is, what we need to do, and we'll alpha-strike it with a strike team, and run everyone through while it's recovering...”
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