265 Chapter Two Hundred and Sixty-Five – A Land of Fuego (1/2)
The inhabitants of this volcanic area were firenewts.
These were the devolved, mortalish descendants of elemental salamanders, the flaming half-men, half-serpents of legend from Elemental Fire. They had black skin, whose cracks showed the heated flesh beneath, could breathe fire to a short range, and had the same kind of salamander proficiency in working metal, loving lava, and conquering anything colder than themselves.
Their preferred mounts were fire striders, which were vicious elemental versions of either flightless birds or raptor-dinos, depending on how you looked at them; mean fire-spitting bastards whose favorite pastime was standing around in burning forests.
This area was a slipshod territory where no obelisk zone was raised, and so no constraints put on safeguarding the natives, nor stopping attackers. As a result, the surrounding zones of animated undead, grey dwarves, hill and mountain giants, and vampires had considered them fine hunting sport and a good way to let off steam for their more aggressive underlings.
The firenewts had reciprocated the fact, and their attackers never seemed to properly learn the lesson that when attacking creatures who lived in and were descended from fire elementals, mass fire resistance is really a thing, since the firenewts seemed to be thriving pretty well despite their neighbors.
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Us, we weren't so ill-equipped. Freezing, Coldphasing, Bane, Enmity/Fire, and other such custom preparations were all over the place. There were cold spells, and acid ones for firenewts who happened to be prepared for them, and yeah, they had native hellhounds and hellcats here and there, and large numbers of firedrakes, a couple lava wurms, and of course, some actual real salamanders on long-term visits/vacations, along with bringing in some fiery devils, mostly burning abishai, for funsies and some fiendish bloodlines to spice up the magical gene pool.
Everybody but the apes and dragons were here, as those were busy dealing with invading hordes trying to escape the ruination coming down on them in a few days. Ravaging the neighboring zones made it easier to divert the hordes around them, but inevitably such forces were also hungry, and rampaging through the forest chowing down on monkeys and greenery seemed like a good idea to most of them.
The dragons and their riders, along with a few angelic vohr, had been engaged in a great deal of airborne combat, keeping the skies clear with the help of the winged monkeys. A unit of Ironblood Nulls had been tasked to reinforce them to help deal with the numbers of flying enemies, and massed Interdictions at unfortunate times for invaders could send literally thousands of them hurtling to the ground, where the chakon, champa-ka, and mandrilla dealt with them savagely, drumming them beat-sticks hard.
Elder Arg was far from averse to making more Exemplar Lite Elixirs, and had, with the help of Wayfair, salvaged the apparatus they'd made from a Mu Spore in that reduced mushroom zone, and made up Elixirs en masse for all the participants. The matter of him being the only one who could make the Elixirs was not something he exploited, as I was the one who had possession of the spilled Exemplar Blood, and the ultimate trust from the Three Kings... and none of them could really defy me. A working 50 Charisma combined with my Warlord bonuses was just frightening to deal with.
Even King Ivory had gotten into the show... and there had been other mushroom zones found in this Shardzone, which had been brutally cleared of Mu Spores by my trio. There were even more in the other Shardzones, but they had mostly been left alone unless the path of the Void Brothers doing the full circuit crossed them. They could be harvested later... and would be.
As a result, a lot of Mu Goop got processed by Exemplar Lite apes into Elixirs, and was shared with the mandrilla and the flying monkeys, as well as the uranga and the bandob, along with Elder Arg's Bloodline.
The defense of the monkeys took a great leap forwards. Naturally they also wanted to know more about the great Markspace the mighty champion spoke of so reverently, and a couple of the champa-ka had taken the necessary Ranks in Tattoo Artist and Spellcraft to make Marks that could, with my approval, link to a powerful Marked being's own Mark... that entity naturally ending up being Elder Arg.
The ubiquitous Mark was naturally Intellect, and so the average intelligence level of the monkey kingdoms was skyrocketing. It was heartening to hear, and he got them to work on a great localized formation that would help them to defy the incoming temporal synchronization. Skulls of invaders were a primary component, and were contributed enthusiastically.
Meanwhile, pretty much all the rest of us were now in this fiery landscape, running down all these firenewts.
There were thousands of them, they were very aggressive, fighting bitterly to the end, and they had a lot of fire magic to send at us. Of course, when everyone is buffed against fire, they should have been more inventive, but that was their fault.
They did have a copious amount of loot from raw metals and minerals spilled out by the lava, and eagerly mined while they were also digging for the metals for their armor and weapons. We impolitely took hold of all of it, sending most of it outside to spill into the warehouses from all the bricks and blocks we were also sending out via Tapestry.
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”Soooooo... what's the play, Sama?” Briggs asked, as we stood on the rim of the volcano that formed the heart of this hot zone.
The Priests of the firenewts had been undergoing a ceremony here when the vohr swooped in and flash-froze the entire congregation, stopping them from doing any funny stuff with the burning caldera yonder.
”Come along and see,” I said mischievously. I started down the crater wall, sliding down the jagged yet soft edges of the side here as if it were a slick slide, and he followed without hesitation.
His Exemplar status plus some very high-end Vajra fire resistance meant he had no trouble moving across the bubbling surface of the lava with me, and we made a trip around the roughly hundred-yard surface, looking at what was below.
We did move on tiptoes metaphorically speaking. After all, this was an active volcano, and if it let go, that would be bad.
”Right here look good to you?” I asked, and he looked down.
”Probably best,” he agreed, and I /whistled mentally.
Three vohr prepared for this, and immune like me to temperature extremes, swooped in overhead and began Casting. The lava in the area was pushed back by a combination of Control Fire, Part Water, and Rock to Mud in Ritual, slowly and grandly pushing the thick soup of two-thousand-degree stone back to the dark black surface below in this area.
Sticking up out of that rough black surface was a blue-black spike about twenty feet high, almost the hue of adamant. We'd salvaged a lot of fire metals off the 'newts, and even now the vohr were working at Shaping and Transmuting free the vein of adamant the newts had found, aiming to get as much of it out of here as we could before it went away. The Rockborn, heck, everyone was lending muscle to that effort towards the base of the mountain, tons of ore being hauled away by superhumanly strong workers eager to claim all that they could before it vanished.
Adamant make more QL 40+ Gear, yo!