The Power of Ten

Chapter 10-306: A Dirge of Cultivation

“The fool did say she was courting death

Confirmed it true with his last breath.

Courtier, Hells, she’s a gods-damned minister

Doom rides dexter, Dread at sinister.

Tremble, she comes! Ohhh oh ohhh Tremble, Tremble...

Feel that crunch? That crump of bone?

That sinking feeling that you’re all alone?

That skip in your heart? That chill in your blood?

That pit of death, of writhing mud

Reaching, reaching, and drags you down

Endure, endure, and laugh, you clown!

Tremble, he comes! Ohhh oh ohhh Tremble, Tremble...

Born a maggot, riding a corpse long dead,

Bloodless skin, and a heart long cold.

Contempt of life, scorn for all,

Falsehood and untruth all you’re told.

Tremble, ohhhh tremble, tremble...

Born in murder, scorn all ties.

We know! We know! The truth lay bare!

Kinslayers, betrayers, souls of lies!

Vengeance, justice... in the end, we dare!

Tremble, ohhhh tremble, tremble...

Oh, raise that lion, and vent its roar,

You think its slavery will save your soul?

Release your phoenix, watch it soar,

You’ve not a prayer to reach your goal!

Tremble, ohhhh tremble, tremble...

Madness, mockeries, minions of death,

We see it all, it is clear at last.

We’ll see your end, your final breath,

And consign your filth to an unmarked past.

Tremble, ohhhh tremble, tremble...

You hear your names? Nor do we.

The final judge will be history.

Nameless curs and forgotten dogs,

Consigned to eternal obscurity.

Tremble, ohhhhh tremble, tremble...

Forever lost! Never to be sung!

Deeds forgotten, as are your dreams!

Defy Heaven, and live forever?

Oblivion to your lives and schemes!

Tremble, ohhhhh tremble, tremble...

HEAR US, WORMS, THIS IS OUR VOW!

YOUR FINAL DAY IS UPON YOU NOW!

AS YOU REAPED, NOW YOU SOW!

HELL IS WAITING, AND DOWN YOU GO!

ENDURE YOUR FATE, AND...

TREMBLE!

WE!

COME!”

“You fucktard,” Sama appended coolly, nose to nose with a superior-chinned idiot with the bulging forehead that heralded a brain mutation greatly valued among these paste-skinned fools. Of course, his eyes held total disbelief and dissatisfaction, what with his brain being impaled by a broad and heavy glowing soulsword, and he looked even less happy when his face fell off the rest of his head with a twist of her wrist.

The splattering front of his skull joined a whole lot of other body parts scattered around burning en vivus.

Naturally his soul wasn’t going to make it to Hell. Vivus already had it, and was burning it away. The Shroud and Hell wouldn’t get it, and the Land got back what the bastard leech had stolen from it.

This had been a decent push by the Daoists, committing over a thousand of them to the fight. Unfortunately for them, they really had no idea how their opposition wasn’t falling in numbers, but actually getting more plentiful, and stronger.

Gear, Karma, and hate. It was a pretty potent combination.

The profit motive was pretty good, too, and among other things, it was ensuring that they got all the supplies they needed to keep this moving along.

The Mick was already gesturing, and streams of blood were flowing from dead Cultivators in every direction, gathering into scarlet pools and being unceremoniously dumped into twenty-gallon jars on Disks about him. As such Disks were filled, Jujuns lifted them off in teams, gathering them into clusters for easy location and Itemization later, once the fighting was done.

The Mick’s own contributions went 100% towards the resupplying, and 80% of the blood from Cultivators slain by the Chinese did, too, the 20% being merely a tax to keep the whole process moving along.

The Mick was making plenty of goldweight just scavenging Qi-treated Weapons and Armor and Burning them, and truly didn’t need their blood to make money. Hells, he was filthy rich with a continuing income he had never dreamed was possible, just from his shares in the Energized Gem trade and the preliminary investments in the Firezone mines. Jujun, Withered, and Whites loved working in the mining trade, so even if they didn’t want to come here and make some real money, they were working away with the dwarves, gnomes, dhatun, and others out in the Firezone, getting good steady pay. Their ability to work long and hard hours was admired by the others there, and they were paid accordingly.

“Oi, stop that vivus! I need to harvest first!” he called out to her. Sama snorted and waved Tremble; the unwhite flames on the Cultivators burning away to white dust all around her snuffed out. Her arm snapped up, there was a twang, and a dying Daoist trying to crawl to cover inherited a Banefire bolt in the back of his skull from Fall, stopping that nonsense.

The wounded Daoists who had fallen were naturally begging for their lives, usually to give them time to detonate their dantians in a final fireball and take some of their slayers with them. The natural counter to that was to blow their heads off from a safe distance, which was now standard procedure.

After all, they were unnaturally tough, kind of like the Tomb Clans in how much punishment they could take before dying. If their head was intact, removing it safely was now SOP after some idiots had been caught in Dantian Suicide Bombs.

She flicked a Sharding out to open the corpse up and make the blood easier to get at. The Mick acknowledged it with a finger-flick, magic reaching out and drawing a serpentine flow of red-gold ichor from the dead Daoist, joining all the others being assembled in a viscous glittering sphere next to him.

“Where’s your girl?” Sama called out, grabbing Tremble with her hair so she could keep Singing a reassuring two-tones series riding on Endure and Stand’s bass and drum support, granting endless Heartsong benefits to everyone in Fellowship, Alliance, or Allegiance nearby, which was pretty much everyone.

Fall snapped up to full Autobow size, and Sama sighted and fired with her pump-action. A streak of fire that completely ignored gravity flashed out a hundred paces and drove in under the arm of a Spear-using Daoist all aswirl in some tiger-totem Chi style, really discomfiting him and knocking him off his stride.

Given one second of warning, the Glaive-using woman there struck perfectly, chopping off his right arm as he screamed, reversing and spinning in as he backed away desperately, and took off his head cleanly and smoothly when he couldn’t raise his Spear to block.

“Nice Ocean form,” The Mick observed, as Sama racked Fall and drew down on another target dancing around over yonder. The bolt flashed out, a leg was punched through, and the Cultivator’s scream ended his wild dodging as two Shotgun blasts blew open his chest, and then someone else double-tapped his face to stop any suicidal nonsense.

Them suicides cost them money, after all.

“They have real talent at this stuff. It’s just a shame most of their Powered were eaten as kids.” The Warlocks were doing their best to make up for it, but it wasn’t the same.

Blooded were scattered across the field, harvesting everyone’s pay. The Mick’s Blood Magic path had been embraced by pretty much all of the younger generations of the Blooded here, and even some of the Gluttons and Jujun were proving to be adept at it. The Mick had realized that spreading knowledge of it would only help his influence grow, and over the objections of some of the Blooded who wanted it to remain private and secret for just them, had taught it to any of the Tomb Clans who had an affinity for it.

“Aye.” He didn’t have much sympathy for them, other than on a superficial level, as he’d seen too much death of friends and family to be moved by even this scale of slaughter.

On the other hand, bringing an end to things who thought this was the way to live life? He was totally down with killing ‘em and making money and Karma off them. Could there be much sweeter in life?

“Why’s your girl not closer?” Sama asked, totally seeing the way The Mick pursed his lips and let his eyes wander over to where Amaretta Blakhamar, her erstwhile foster elder sister, was alternately shooting out eyeballs, cutting down the unwary, and gathering blood about a klik over thataway.

“She’s taken to specializing in similar Schools’ blood supplies. There’s a bunch of fire users over there getting shot down,” Sama glanced over just as a fireball all purple and blue detonated off thataway at his words, “and she just gathered up some jars from poison-users using controlled insects and the like. Doubles the value if you can keep the stuff separate like that.”

He was working over a broader area, and the Cultivators here used a mishmash of techniques, rendering that unviable. On the other hand, he harvested a whole lot more than she did from the random variations here.

“Oh, right, I heard the Brothers were doing that with the assassins getting sent out.” Such tending to have Shadow and Darkness-style attributes that could be mixed up together. “I hear the Wrapped really love that particular vintage.”

Thwip. A Cultivator in the distance sending out waves of serpents to attack pitched over in shock, a burning Bolt having sprouted in his ear.

“It turns out some of their Elders have ties to Skulos, and that particular blood works verra well in Dark Magic. We had to make the supplies sort of disappear, and are working out what to do with them.”

Sama mind-flitted a list over to him, and he took a glance at it in his Visual File. “Oh, nice. This Mask of the Night sounds perfect for a certain someones or three... they’ll be pleased to hear of it.”

This Clarity of Night, a simple version of a Tat-Mask, granting perfect Devilsight in all darkness... looks pretty nice, too, he mused, going down the list of darkness-style magic items that had nothing to do with Evil. “Radiant Darkness!” he blurted out, seeing that.

Magic Weapons often had the ability to shed light, an unsurprising and useful talent, if for no other reason than to tell someone that you had a magic Weapon, and see how they responded.

Radiant Darkness was a Weapon ability that instead emanated a sphere of darkness. It didn’t give the wielder any particular ability to see through it, which was hardly a detraction, as if you had such a weapon and didn’t have a way to see through the darkness, you were going to find a way to get one so you could use it.

It was something you added to a Weapon with some planning, not something you picked up as random loot off a monster in a dropped video game or something, after all.

“Done!” he judged, Detect Blood up and running, telling him where all the bodies were. Sama promptly exploded into a whirlwind flurry of blows, and Shardings of low strength and lots of kickers flashed out in every direction. Something like fifty corpses in the area lit up with wooshes of vivic fire, burning the desiccated corpses like they were dried tinder now.

Took less than six seconds to ignite them all, too. The Jujun stacking up jars were all very impressed.

Sama pointed to an area that seemed to be displaying some excitement, Fall up and looking for targets already. The Mick flowed after her with strong strides, bringing Smior out in his off hand, in case of-josei

The Cultivator seemed to fold out of the wall, howling as he raised his shimmering Saber and leapt at Sama, face exulting at getting the drop on her.

The Mick pushed off with a slam of his foot, his white form suddenly a blur of crimson that swept past the bladesman in mid-charge, coming together on the other side as the man gawked in shock.

The four sections of his body and Saber bounced off her as she didn’t bother to change stride, reaching out to grab the Weapon as his ichor-spewing corpse bounced in all directions. The sanguine cash swirled up and not a drop of it touched the ground before assembling into a nice globe that went drifting towards the Jujun patiently pushing Disks after them.

She tossed the curved Blade onto her own Disk, which was pretty much stacked up right now with powered-up minor Qi Weapons, Armor, and other knick-knacks to be Burned down. She made the mental note to him that it was his, and just kept moving. Fall thwipped with almost 100% energy dump, and a burning line extended out a hundred yards, perfectly straight and defying gravity. The woman in the fancy blue court dress playing at being a swordswoman over there didn’t much appreciate it when it drove into her side.

The milk-skinned, jet-haired woman enjoyed it less when old Chen Chou, seventy years old and looking thirty, hacked off her swordarm with one blow and her head with the follow-up.

Sama skipped in place, her Disk coming up under her, and The Mick reached out to grab it, Detect Blood giving him a perfect view of anything with that precious substance close by, making it impossible to surprise him.

Lines of fire began to pump out, steady and hellishly accurate and picking on Daoists in combat with others, who did not see the incoming shots and so were unable to dodge them. It naturally attracted a lot of attention, and Cultivators moving to reinforce one another diverted in the direction of the pair.

She ignored them, shooting at those occupied as both sides hurtled towards one another, and then Tremble slapped into her hand, the Song in Markspace blared out to audible volume, and all the Cultivators blanched as one.

“ENDURE!”

With a roar like a chained hurricane, a very hefty Hammer exploded in from the side, and Daoists went smashed and flying, bones breaking loudly. They looked over to see a mountain in metal charging over way too fast.

“WE COME!”

There were a dozen of the bastards suddenly breaking to a halt there. A Sword, a Katana-not-a-Warsaber, and the returning Hammer all ensured there weren’t any of them in very short order.