Chapter 361 - Far Future Ch.71 ??? With a Word She can get What She Came For (1/2)

Weeks and Levels later...

”Hold!” Shiera sang out, and everybody instantly froze in place.

Everybody was on foot now. Riding in a hoverwagon, on a Disk, or flying didn't expand your lived-line. As a result, all teams had to have some form of lightfoot for moving overland at a good pace. It was perfectly fine to fly a hoverwagon along your lived-line, but you better be on foot after you reached your last advance point.

Extending lived-lines got painted into the Map with absolute spatial coordinates. That meant people could unerringly Teleport along them, or even Linejump with precision, despite the interference of the Haze shrouding the world in crackling whiteness and removing landmarks.

As a result, their teams had the potential of instant bail-outs available, from Sama sitting on top, or the psions arduously clawing their way up the ladder of power. Those people who could improve their Soulbound Item Familiars to that point could also access teleportation, potentially multiple times a day.

Teleporting along someone else's lived-line didn't give you the range boost, but it was still perfectly accurate, which was the whole idea. Every team held a Teleport Focus to grant a range boost, and of course, if the teleporter had lived-lines close by, the range bonus might kick in anyways.

They'd been doing this for weeks, flying in and out of the Wastes, slowly extending their lived-lines out, and wiping out the extremely dangerous native life-forms as they did. Generally, they moved from ant nest to nest, stirring up trouble. Newbies came out to get power-leveled by fighting ants, while everyone else took on the bigger stuff. Fighting swarms that weren't going to spare you if you panicked and tried to run was a good way to harden just about anyone.

But Sama was up there, and Chalice was Singing to them, telling them to drink deep of battle, and the sweet, sweet Karma that would pass their lips and send them on the road to greatness.

The seismic teams that recorded activity of the beasts outside the walls back in Janus Prime had remarked that there was a whole lot less sand wurm activity than there had been in hundreds of years...

And so, the Karma Hunting Teams expanded out, girt in corrosion-resistance by Vajra or psi, their battlewagons likewise reinforced, harvesting beasts and occasionally running into the great Crystal Rocs stopping in for snacks on patrol over their territories. Their little caravans of battlewagons generally scared up all sorts of buffet leavings for the big birds...

Now they had finally made it to the crumbling hills at the edge of the desert territory.

It meant they had all grown up. Nobody in the team was less than a Six at this point, and the leaders were all at least Eights... which was very, very impressive when those were Rantha Hags and Briggs Brothers.

Shiera reached out ahead of herself, flicking up her soulclaw. An edge sharper than a razor reached out, and tinked on something.

Golden light flickered along something transparent and incredibly thin. Sharp eyes watching narrowed, and a few people swore.

”Monofilament?” Piotr Briggs asked, his Hammer at rest, watching his girl's soulclaw trace it.

Shiera nodded. ”Someone give me a dispersed las, play it over the canyon.”

One of the G&G Nulls quickly adjusted his las, lifted the rifle, and sent out a dim fan of not-so-hard light, washing it over the empty, shadowed space in front of them.

Everyone sucked in their breath when they saw the light get refracted in complex whorls and patterns, filling the canyon to a great distance above them with webs of unmoving, bright strands of ruby light.

”Glass Spider.” These things didn't wrap things up into a web to kill them. Running into a glass spider's web generally meant you were sliced apart by invisible monofilament lines, not wrapped up. They wouldn't cut through Energized Armor, but anything less hard than diamond was basically going to fall apart from a high-tensile line only an atom or three thick.

”Where's the spider?” Piotr asked, hefting his Hammer, which began to rumble with Thunder. He swatted it forwards, and the monofilaments in front of him broke with a tinkling chime, shredded and falling into stray atoms as the sonic energy reverberated through them, found their harmonic frequency, and shattered them.

”Ten o'clock high, fifty yards,” Shiera said after a moment. Everyone focused, but most of them couldn't see anything. ”It's light-bending, perfectly transparent at this point. Hard rounds only. Kloser! Energy Blast, right down the middle, use Thunder.”

The Beacon Psi, proudly displaying his Hexagon, stepped up, his Null girl Jilla right with him. He took her hand in his own, focused, and psionic power moved from her to him, followed the Line of directed energy outputs from his tailbone, up his spine and over his head to his third eye, and erupted out.

The attack was a Lance effect, ten feet across, sounding like a great bell ringing as it blew through the center of the web. The monofilament strands blew apart instantly, shaken apart by even a minimal application of power.

They were watching, and saw the motion up above as the spider shifted ever so slightly. Great spiked legs that could hang on the cutting lines read the vibrations in the webs as countless strands were instantly shattered, and naturally the sound of the sonic blast carried for a great distance.

The riflemen all had their guns charged up. All of them had long customized their guns to include both slugthrowers and beam capability. Some used disruptors or plasma charges, some lasers or particle beams, a few used Verje Chambers and could throw alternate energies like frost, pure force, and thunder at specific foes. Corrosion damage was available, just in case, but given the alkaline environment, basically useless unless something very strange happened.

Mostly, they just shot things.

Archer was the most common Primary Class among the G&G people, as this was the future, and ranged attack power ruled the roost. Having a built-in melee weapon meant they didn't have to carry knives or clubs or what have you, and they weren't allowed to ignore their infighting skills.

Generally, melee combat was best left to those in power armor or with insane stats. The Briggs Brothers generally worked enthusiastically at the former, and the Ranthas had the latter. Both were very happy to come to melee, and generally left most of the ranged combat to the others out of fairness. Watching a Briggs rip a claw off a Shredder Scorp was a nice way to get respect for the fighting prowess of the Ancients, and nobody underestimated the golden swords of the Ranthas.