262 Chapter Two Hundred and Sixty-Two – The Days Blur Together (1/2)
I also had to speak with the little sisters, and my hellpoodles. This was replete with many protests, woofs of denial, and other disagreements that I just ramrodded right through. After all, they knew me, I wasn't going to take the low road, and I knew them, and I believed in them.
Having someone with a working 50 Charisma believing in you is nigh-irresistible. They all succumbed under Sama's Steamroller, surprise, surprise.
I had to speak with Errant and Hazé as well, and to my lack of surprise there wasn't much resistance to what I was proposing. After all, Heavenbound and Mystic Theurge... they were tied right in to the powers Upstairs, and big picture thinkers for big reasons. They reviewed everything, agreed with me on what was likely, who had to do what, and knew what they had to be working for.
Then, it was back to work.
---------
We cut a very wide swathe across the zones, back to the capital city. We weren't hasty, they knew we were coming by those who ran away from us, and yeah, they took some steps to defend themselves.
The Void Brothers descended on the place and took down the Hags and their magical defenses in a night of slaughter, which rather thoroughly gutted their spellpower.
The next day we began hitting them, making sure nobody got to run with the loot and wealth of the city. We were going to reduce the place, and cart off the wealth of an empire for Elder Arg, his monkey boys, and the dragons, and there wasn't going to be any stopping us.
Find authorized novels in Webnovel，faster updates, better experience，Please click visiting.
The self-healing aspect of the Exemplar Lites truly shone here, because it meant we could undertake continuous, grinding warfare. Five minutes was generally enough for even the most badly wounded of our people to return to full strength, barring missing a limb or something important, and as always, the clerics and the White Staff were standing by, ready to bring someone back who got too cocksure, much to the mockery of the others.
A lot of Karma went into Racial Levels to get Health up, accordingly. The Kings maxed out their Racial Levels, King Gold getting up to nearly the size of a Dire Lion, while King Ivory grew larger than a mammoth.
With more Hit Dice came higher limits on Skills, especially for Ivory. What he would choose to do with them was his business, but his discussions with me and Elder Arg were remarkably nuanced, even as he commenced taking his Class Levels, too.
The capital city was immense, stone blocks hauled from neighboring zones, built up over this wet and marshy land, forming a grim, damp city that just begged for murderers in the shadows and things stalking the streets in the night. There was a mile-wide crater where the Obelisk used to be, deep-deep canyons dividing the city which couldn't be crossed by magical flight, and many buildings fallen and collapsed.
We didn't kill all the giants, of course; that would have been inefficient. They were strong, tended to the dumb side, and were used to being ordered around by female spellcasters. Accordingly, Wayfair soon took control of them, supplemented by massive amounts of charm spells on key bosses, and in no time at all, we had a labor force for clearing the rubble and getting at the treasures within.
Briggs' and mine advanced tremblesense came in very useful for locating buried hoards and vaults, and we dug them out with amazing speed, with Rockborn directing everything and vohr supplementing with magic where needed. Tons and tons of gold were Itemized or Tapestried, and Wayfair teleported away, following the Wake all the way back to the Plateau of the Monkeys, depositing ever growing piles of the shiny metal for the apes waiting there.
After all, I had tons of Marked monkeys back there, who were all very current on what we were doing and all the things that had been done. They knew about the Shardzone collapse coming, and were starting to gather all the tribes in the jungle in preparation. Their only weakness was supplies, and that wasn't that hard to solve. Some of the chakon and champa-ka Exemplars headed home through a double Portal via Tremble, Wayfair providing the target focus on the far end, and with their muscle, starting to harvest the neighboring dinos and lushest greenery and fruits and preserve them according to the new methods they now had knowledge of.
And if they happened to bring along multiple tons of giant's weapons and stuff bundled up along with them, that was only a little opportunistic and pragmatic...
--------
You wouldn't think that a major city that had housed over a hundred thousand giant-sized occupants could be looted thoroughly in under a month, but that's what having a superstrong labor force who knows right where to dig gets you. We were literally hauling out wagonloads of precious metals, and buffing up Disks to take all the weight as we hauled them through Tremble's Portals to Monkey High.
The monkey-boys were delighted to learn that yeah, all that salvage and this digging up gold accumulated Karma, too. Given the amounts being pulled out, they were doing just as well as being in roaring combat all the time. Which naturally set thoughts turning to downtime, and Crafting, and casual Karma made that way...
----------
”We take down all the Obelisks in this Shardzone. I want a full conduit in and out for dumping stuff in Reality. The faster we can do it, the better.”
We were all watching The Map of the Shardzone, looking at our winding path in and out. The positions of the Obelisks we'd passed were clearly marked, as were all those in zones that we'd bypassed or not entered on the way in. There were quite a few of them.