244 Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Four – Linking Back Up (1/2)

It was hard to miss the several-hundred-yards-high wall of magic, earth, and bits of drow and their cities tearing across the landscape, even at a distance. Being forewarned of it happening, everyone broke off the fighting, slaughtering, and run-by looting to get a good view of things going utterly bad for the drow and the Hags.

Any sense of organization among the drow rapidly petered out. That also meant impediments to travel, especially along the Walls. Guards abandoned their posts with haste, hurrying back to join up with clans and families and figure out what to do next with the massive power vacuum at the top... and doubtless the intervention of other Hag Empresses at some point.

In the meantime, there was opportunity to grab for power, extract some revenge, advance agendas, and manipulate rivals to be taken advantage of. Oh, and they had to deal with all the Blessed of the Hags (i.e. wolf-blooded Exemplars and werewolves), who had gone batshit crazy and were killing everything, certainly endearing them to their mistresses.

The drow no longer had the desire to sit themselves in front of an army of butchering outlanders and bloodthirsty monkeys and be killed. The number of drow the company had to worry about naturally plummeted.

That still meant they had to hook up with Sage Sama's team, but happily, that meant just crossing the zone straight through, which they needed to do regardless. Naturally enough, Brother Wayfist took the lead dragging the Disk Train, Elder Arg flying in his wake and dealing with any obstructions with some very big fists.

Their killing and burning and stuff was almost incidental to what was now going on. The drow had turned on one another with incredible energy, and simply ignored any thought of taking orders from powers beyond clan matriarchs and their own witches. The great zone-wide city was rapidly burning, and a whole lot of drow were being killed by one another with energy and enthusiasm.

Ah, the pleasures of a Chaotic Evil society.

Brother Wayfirst brought them as directly across the zone as he could, the fighting getting nastier as the buildings got more frequent. There were murmurs about how a lot of these drow were probably going to end up as undead, which wasn't a comforting thought, but they couldn't do much more than shoot corpses as they went by, and given the scale of the fighting, it was truly a minor thing to do.

And besides, they'd killed a zone full of undead already. It wasn't like they couldn't do it again.

Of course, it was easy to track where Sama's team was, as the Wake extended across the sky, and the trail of carnage they'd left pretty much paralleled one of the smoking, hissing canyons that had blown through cities and great walls on its way out of the zone. A solid line of blue, bringing down light from sun and moon that the drow had not seen for millennia now stretched across the zone like an error, and began to bend and grow as it head Inwards.

Ah, penalties in bright light, to add to those wild shroom dreams...

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Given that we were in the center of power, and the rest of the company had to catch up with us, there was no reason just to sit around with our thumbs up our bums. After a couple hours of drow and demons energetically avoiding anything to do with the plaza and the fallen Obelisk's many cracked and shattered parts, which Briggs and Mountainhammer had some interesting contests in breaking down yet further, the lads got bored, and Wayfair wanted to go play, now that she could come out and gloat.

Well, that meant it was time to loot an empire. Hazé renewed the Gemjump on the rogue stone with us, and Jumped away to another stone, taking a large amount of purloined wealth with her as she did so. There was no way it could not be put to use.

The Brothers were extremely good at tracking down concentrations of magic. As often as not, this led us to some pit of horror where things we didn't want to know existed lurked, were caged, or were Sealed. These cages often became rather weak when their primary source of power was gone, so the things inside broke out, and hilarity ensued.

...mostly because the Brothers laughed at the idea of extraplanars going up against so many Brothers at once...

So, in addition to all the fractional strife going on, the Brothers let some stuff go to add to the greater havoc, and yeah, those imprisoned creatures were indeed happy to contribute to the slaughter.

Wayfair was kind enough to shrink all kinds of massive volumes of loot down to be dispensed later. After all, our company could eat hundreds of thousands of gold value a day in precious metal, we wouldn't actually be hauling it all around all that long.

We're talking actual rooms filled with gold, too. Whether it was real or dream wasn't an issue as long as it was here. The lads would be all too happy to dispose of it.

But, we only had so much time to work on fun before the lads got here.

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We met them outside the walls of the capital area, deciding that moving a large armed force into an area crawling with pissed-off avatars, elder abominations, and even a minor demon lord or two wasn't a good idea. The inhabitants might have thought the same, but some irked godling had collapsed all the primary walls out, made the entire area a no-fly zone, and brought in a bunch of creepy-crawly stuff to take over the walls and prevent anyone from escaping.

The noble houses weren't too happy about it, especially since they were experiencing an Eldritch Extinction Event, but they were certainly giving a good go of it. One of the Abominations was already dead, so the drow certainly weren't no slouches.

We were resting in an out of the way park, where everyone was burning lots of gold down into magic items, doled out by Wayfair with great amusement as she watched it all go. The accumulations of an empire were vanishing by something like a thousand gold every minute, which was absolutely hilarious to her... and didn't stop her from working on her own stuff, of course!

Being Sustained and Revitalized, we weren't really tired mentally or physically, but I still called for two hours of meditation for everyone. Any drow passing by took one look at the armored ape looming over some 'shrooms and decided to go elsewhere.

”It's a good thing we looted all this,” I said to Briggs, as I watched a heap of gold coins with imprinted Hag faces burning away before me, powering up a Hag Baneskull that I'd already etched with more molten gold in the appropriate Runes.

”Yeah?” Briggs was doing the same, although that skull of his didn't exactly look like a proper skull. Too many eyeholes, and I don't think the mouth was supposed to be over there...

”I chatted with Wolf and Elder Arg. You know I used the Int bonus from the Mark to give the big guy Alchemy Ranks, right?”