The Power of Ten

Chapter 9-257: The Storm Comes to Shanghai, Part I

I fought down the urge to vomit at the feeling of contamination surging through my awareness.

It didn’t spread that far out into the sea, probably because the Daoists didn’t linger out here much, but it was spreading far, far inland, with thick welling knots of the shit here and there where either converting Formations were in place, or various Sects or Schools had set up shop and were doing the conversion with bodies instead of tools.

“Ahk!” I wanted to rinse out my mind. This was horrible!

Master Fred just glanced at me, and I fed him a taste. He blinked, and carefully spat something black off to the side. -We can’t just ride off,- he /said calmly, and I sighed, knowing he was absolutely right.

If I had to burn the entire damn city off the map to get rid of this, that was exactly what I was going to do!

I sent it back along the Fellowship links to those behind, overlaying it on the map of the city. I couldn’t sense any individuals with Qi, given the overall thickness of it, but the neighborhood areas alone were going to tell them something.

Oh, and a lot of them puked, too. The area I could just sense was nearly as big as all of Taiwan, and this extended off into the distance...josei

Yeah, not fun.

“Sweep the perimeter, and hope they aren’t using Death Candles or Blood Markers or something to alert them if someone dies. Even if they are, great! I hope they come looking!” I grit my teeth, glaring at the filth in my head, the disgusting feel of it in the manafield around me making me want to bury the world in vivus to get rid of it.

Ugh. Void Brothers would hate this so much. Were there any even active hereabouts?

Well, I suppose if I just burned the damn place down they might feel it...

“Let’s find as many as we can for now. If we attract a sortie party, we’ll butcher them, too.”

-With pleasure.- Sleipner neigh-tooted his approval, too, and we continued the arc along the edges of the patrol routes over the water, looking for more of these bastards to pop and kill.

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They could run, but not fast enough, and they couldn’t hide. They could deflect one Ray or Shard, but not two or more. That cut into my killing potential significantly, but note that they couldn’t deflect a Chain, which required a Save... and that Save was basically out of their reach.

Which was totally by design.

Screaming Daoists plunged over a couple hundred feet to the water, all of them burning in at least three colors, and found that hitting the water from that height was almost like slamming into cement, especially when you are flailing around like an idiot and not trying to configure yourself in a dive pattern.

Not that most of them were even flailing, but those that were still alive were trying to put out burning Banefires, panicking at not being able to fly, and generally acting like they weren’t lords and masters of creation, but people who’d never really met a challenging foe who wasn’t just like them.

Yeah, those were some impressive belly-flops and head-plunges. Gotta work on your Body Techniques, guys.

There was one guy who survived. He looked up through the water, saw a bright light, and Master Fred blew his addled head apart.

I harvested heads and goldweight coolly, the freshness of vivus burning in the water and helping cleanse the slime in the air.

Would they send out more? I doubted anyone wanted to add to their snuffing Death Candle tally, and besides, who would dare to attack them?

Once again covered in invisibility, we headed for the shore, right into that gag-worthy miasma of Qi the average human couldn’t even tell existed.

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Teleportating everyone was a case of Mass Reduce enough times to shrink everybody down to 1/5^th normal proportions in all dimensions, their weight dropping with them, and then Widening my Teleport to increase its weight allowance by a factor of eight.

There was no problem fitting all of them. We faded out, and zipped down my most recent Lived-Line, back to where Master Fred was waiting atop a dead patrol of burning Daoists.

We shimmered into view on an abandoned plaza in the south end of a city neighborhood, about a block away from a minor Sect headquarters.

I snapped up Detect Qi at VII, and ignoring the filth in the air, went plumbing for every single damn thing in the area radiating it.

At this point, there was no way we could spare anyone who had a Dantian developed; it was going to be a death sentence. I painted them all into the Heavens-Up Display, and Sama and Briggs began allocating and coordinating, a dire two-tone note beginning to reverberate through it all with some really nasty Heartsong Buffs.

+6 universal to hit and damage was a game-breaking mass Buff, after all, and the Daoists wouldn’t even be able to hear it unless Tremble and Endure were right on top of them... in which case they wouldn’t be hearing it for long.

I was in the air with a Wind Wall at V raging around me, protecting me from physical ranged attacks, including gunfire; the magic didn’t care. With Seeking Shards, I didn’t need line of sight, I just needed approximate location and verification of a target, and an open path to them... doors, windows, hallways, stairs, it all worked.

Selected people were giving me, Sama, and Briggs visual access so we could all paint The Map into the overlay, and poof, just like that, everyone was carrying real-time updated tactical maps and displays in their heads, pointing out targets, warning of threats in the area, giving travel paths, and the whole bit.

It was nothing like they had ever used before, or imagined was really possible outside of fiction.

We could do it; we had done it. It was time for them to vent, and Make Some Karma.

And they did.

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Shanghai was burning around me. Burning, because cultivators naturally didn’t give a shit about property damage or innocent lives, and the Dragon Hand Adepts and Warriors couldn’t afford to be all that much better as they took them on.

While staying around me, because I was in the middle of the entire sphere of fighting, literally.

Detect Qi at VII was lighting up the area for a thousand meters around me, picking out the targets with searing precision. Nobody strayed from within that range, because that was also the range of the Rays that could save their lives.

Spellwarp/5 meant I could change basically any spell with a range into a Ray, and that included just about everything when I also had Reach Spell, and could change Touch range to Short, to a Ray with Medium Range, and increase that to Long Range.

I could also Chain it to hit a bunch of people in the area, and then ladle on additional benefits with Imbued Healing if it just happened to be a Healing spell.

Or Cure Mortal Wounds, bringing someone who had just gotten themselves killed back from the dead.

The Cultivators were nice enough to give me all the ki I needed to keep Casting. Sure, I needed to use two Shards on them, but that was still plenty of excess ki from my Pool when I was throwing out over forty Shards, and popping a couple dozen of the weak ones per Casting.

The tougher ones didn’t much like taking the hit right before the High on Elevator to Heaven Music chi-wielders slammed into them.

Dropping +6 Force Armor onto the mostly unarmored DW’s and DHA’s, Enchanting their Weapons to +V, adding Bane to Cultivators, Protection from Evil effects, Blessings, Prayers, Aid,Energy Resistance...

I doled out monstrous amounts of Buffs, and dying Daoists paid for all of it. It was no exaggeration to say that the longer our people were fighting, the stronger they were getting, somewhat to their disbelief.

It got really sick when the Duskstopped Haste spells were dropped on a couple squads, and suddenly they were moving 50% faster than physics said was possible, and the killing speed REALLY picked up.

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The increased speed didn’t faze Briggs or Sama at all. They kept allocating forces here and there, choosing who fought what for the best picks.

These Cultivators had a crazy Elemental dominance schema that included Wood as an Element, and broke out Metal as an Element separate from Earth.

Wood. Right. So, Flesh would be an Element too, then? No?

Whatever, Fire users against Wind/Lightning users; Storm stylists against Water users; Ocean Dragons against rigid brute force or armored stylists; and Crystal Dragons wading through the attacks of fire users. Sun Dragons against Mentalists; Fire Users against Poison and Wood users (they were basically the same thing most of the time); Moon Dragons to lock someone down so random Beast-totem users could beat them down; and Shadow Dragons contesting with the Daoist’s own oh-so-clever sneak attackers and any twits using Cold, only ours knew exactly where their opposites were.

Sama and Briggs were performing all those roles, of course. There’s sneaking up on somebody, and then Briggs coming through the brick wall you’re hiding in the shadow of and Endure coming down to really ruin your day.

The two of them tanked so many palm strikes, wind blades, ray fingers, claw storms, and whatnot without a scratch on them, and of course none of the Daoists could fly or dim-shift away with whatever the Movement Technique of the moment happened to be.

No, it was pure speed and brute force when dealing with the two of them, and just how good you were.

Strangely enough, the Daoists weren’t anywhere near that good.

My attention was going in every direction, tracking the whole Raid via Status effects, four whole thoughtstreams on that task, and my spellcasting was nonestop.

Buildings exploded, fires spread swiftly as winds swirled madly, called in every direction by desperate Qi wielders. An inferno was chasing behind us through the city, and while I had Called in a storm to put it out, it was going to take time to get to us, because we didn’t want to be fighting in the rain, either.

On the other hand, I could also dole out Chained Protection from Rain, so the storm arrived sooner rather than later.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, the whole city began to erupt as we slaughtered our way through it. Guns came out of wherever they had been concealed for this moment, and junior Cultivators were being riddled with holes, much to their disbelief.

The Warlocks along conscripted any shooters or hidden Powered suddenly showing up to vent their anger on the Daoists, making sure they acted in teams... and they suddenly started getting Buffs dropped on them by Chained Rays coursing through them. A grandfather who’d lost his daughter to the whims of a Cultivator suddenly holding onto a fifty-year old Colt pistol that was now +V and bearing Endless Ammo good for an hour abruptly became a very dangerous threat.

Double-tap, double-tap. At least two shots at any one of them, no exceptions!

Screaming their hatred, the citizens of Shanghai who could fight back began to mob the Cultivators, slowing them down, distracting them... and dying if I couldn’t get to them in time. Sama and Briggs were always moving between the mobs, and it was utterly remarkable how deadly a simple mob of people became when they were suddenly +6 to hit and damage...