250 Two Hundred and Fifty – Time to go Milking, Muuuu, Muuuu (1/2)

Spore-laden atmosphere, deadly flora, odors to make you gag, hostile unnatural natives, and colors and hues to nauseate you.

What was not to love?

Had there been word conveyed across the Hag Empire? It didn't look like it, or the three Mu Spores we could see would have been booking it away from the Wake.

It was time to go harvesting for Levels and Phat Lewt again... as well as do some other things.

Plans were made, means concocted, and the Vanguard team went out to hunt Mu Spores... after killing the first two nearest ones, and getting the company all set up on a safe zone where they could get some Important Work done.

For some reason, quite a few members of this lot of merry marauders had suddenly taken Alchemist Levels, and a lot of Ranks had been put into Alchemy and its Mastery. It might have had something to do with an incoming apotheosis of considerable degree. The alchemical tools were made out of the shell and tentacles of a Mu Spore, rotting on the ground and happy to contribute its remains to the furtherance of pscience and the glory of alchemy.

The girls even made Elder Arg a floppy hat and spectacles for this, since he was taking point. Even the dragons were tremendously interested in what was going to be happening, and their 14-16 Ranks were providing primary assistance to the great ape. A lot of humanoids with 8-10 Ranks were providing some very, very skilled labor.

If it was passing strange for hundreds of brute force axemen, stolid dwarven spears, and singsong elven magebows to suddenly be discussing boiling points, mixture patterns, diffusion ratios, condensation paradigms, trans-temporal effluvia, and radical non-symmetric assignation of proto-elemental fluxes, hey, I had some gifted subordinates.

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We went about our milking the Mu-cows/Spores, while the surviving Hags behind us organized a Mass Ritual to allow them to send giants across the zone border. Thousands of them flooded into the mushroom zone... which didn't treat them any more gently then it treated us. Alas, the lads were over a hundred miles away from the Wake, in the middle of a cluster of tightly-packed mushrooms with a central open area a kilometer wide, a Faerie Ring of great size, walking over a few hewed-down uber-stools, one unhappily dead Mu Spore, and no visible way in or out from the ground.

Errant led the girls, the North Wind and the berserkers, along with the Warlocks, on some raids out into the shroom forest. Strictly hit and run stuff, trails erased by Barus and Riann. They stayed low, out of the way, and never fought within ten miles of the stuff Elder Arg was cooking up, and where the elves were chanting and bringing up all sorts of fun magic...

For all that the Hags had stolen into Exemplar status, they didn't have someone with Epic Ranks in Alchemy among them, so their system couldn't be near as efficient. It also helped to have a lot of monkey brawn available for the stirring, because the patterns that needed to be followed were exacting. Under Elder Arg's direction, the apes formed a very strong and disciplined work force.

Anyone not helping with the brewing was still Infusing or Investing. As hordes of giants surged into the Mushroom Zone and exchanged pointers with the giant mycoids, various kinds of fertilizer-seeking fungi, the native mushroom giants, beasts and corpses animated by spores, and other sorts of fun surprises of the Gray, our team patiently completed our looping sweep of the zone.

With no Wake to let them know we were coming, all they could rely on were their alerts to one another, which didn't take place when being swarmed by Void Brothers. We didn't split up as thoroughly as before, keeping fairly close together in our two teams so we could converge and split as needed. We left at least two Brothers behind to collect the Goop and the Nexal, making that process quicker, and they always caught up soon after we took down the next one, and well before the fight after that.

So, while the giants, hags, and ogres were rushing all over the place and dying spore-adically, we were cleaning up the Mu Spores and giving Elder Arg time to do his stuff.

We also didn't take down the Obelisk in the middle immediately, even if it meant having hordes of giants arrive to camp around and protect it. The Pseudos there weren't particularly appreciative of this protection, but after learning what became of the Greenhag Empress, at least tolerated them on the outskirts.

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-Elder Arg, we're all set,- I /informed the big monkey, as I burned the last set of Runes into the shell of the last Mu Spore to die.

He /acknowledged that, and put the scores of other Alchemists into motion. The complex Rune Circles filled with silver looted from the Empire behind us and melted down began to shimmer and burn with a new light, and excess Mu Goop was spilled upon them to burn with a most unwholesome stench and a variety of colors that was nauseating even in the thaumaspectrum. Goop froze, fried, was shocked, dissolved, and incinerated with a variety of magical means and energies, powering up the mixing process and interaction of energies for what was about to happen.

I watched the Rune I'd carved into the Mu Spore light up. The giants had doubtless come across some of the Mu we'd killed by now, but none of them should have messed with the Runes, up in awkward places where they weren't easy to reach. Normally we'd just vivify such things, as we didn't want them Animated as monstrously powerful undead, which I'm sure the Hags had ideas about. In any event, we weren't going to give them time to do so.

The drawing of energy began.

An Epic-level Alchemy Ritual naturally required truly monstrous amounts of energy. Now, they could have just drawn it from the area they were at... which was right in the middle of thousands of searching giants and so not very wise. So, the Runes and Mu Goop sent that drain out to the dead Spores, turning the floating abominations into living siphons tied intimately to the areas they harvested, and began to pull it all in.

That included the Mu Spores from the LAST mushroom zone, too. Those Rituals around the fallen Obelisk were for a reason... and dead Mu Spores made for excellent foci when carved up appropriately. Tellingly, there was no resistance from the Land for taking down this mutated dark faerieland of fungi at all, especially with the mass vivic follow-up.

The endless fields of fungi around the Mu Spores began to wither and collapse. Even the haze of spores fell from the suddenly deathly still air. Giants shouted as towering mushrooms fell over on them, in many cases unleashing unpleasant surprises, and often filling the air with poisonous grit and dust as they decayed with shocking speed.