I managed to look down at a fistful of stone clutched in my right hand with a death grip. I hadn’t let go of it, and indeed had completely forgotten it was there.

  Princess Kristie put her hand on mine, clenched so tight. Her fingers interwove, Golden light flickered hard, and the stone in my hand crumbled, freeing the fingers I had embedded into it.

  She turned my palm over as she peeled open my totally unresponsive fingers, and the eight uncut Blackfire Obsidian jewels glittered with shimmering, yet fractured inner fires.

  “Nice..” she said, eight canines gleaming in appreciation. Despite having my mind basically blown back into my spinal cortex, I’d still managed to latch onto the stones and somehow pull them up to my hand in the scant seconds I’d had to act!

  ----------

  Briggs was soon on site with a whole team of people, and others were streaming across the open land between the Withered Beach and here along the pathway cleared of Summons and marked with posts indicating the way.

  Heck, he almost beat the Mick here, who had prudently swung a wee bit wider from the kaiju, and even at that range had barely kept his feet working when the Sound blew past him.

  Briggs had his Floating Forge with him, and all the adamantine bars I’d made for him. He started making blades and carving tools promptly, because there was a metric arseload of very big and impressive scales to peel off that corpse, and everyone with adamantine Weapons got to work on that job pretty quickly.

  It would have been really tough if the Aetheric Tide Ravager wasn’t already ripped into multiple pieces and gave us softer fleshy places to start from… places that were also quickly on vivic fire and eating away the dimensionally unstable flesh and bone and helping us carve the scales off the thing.

  The average scale of the beast was as tall or taller than a person, ranged from four to six inches thick, and was less heavy or light than somehow resistant to movement, simply not wanting to be shifted from place to place without actually resting on something else.

  Drop it from the corpse, and it fell to the ground in slow motion. Leave it on a Disk, however, and it could be shuffled around fairly quickly.

  Vivic Weapons were planted in trails of gore and unmentionable fluids leaking out of the thing, Burning them off before they could contaminate anything. Vivic Weapons carved into the meat, setting the slowly liquefying stuff on mistfire, and kept the process going of turning it to white powder and Land-food instead.

  I mostly contributed by occasionally blasting Darts into the sides of meat chunks, but mostly just sat there in Aurora Stance getting a lot of mana back and gazing out to sea.

  Those Elder Leviathans hadn’t gone too far. I could tell they were mightily curious about how we were going to dispose of the corpse, and were likely watching us from out in the waters, probably impressed at how quickly we were stripping, disassembling, and Burning down the corpse of the unnatural creature.

  We’d also found Aerbax still alive, when all the evidence was that he was either dead or reduced to a slave of the System, and had been reduced to that status before the Fall, out on his floating citadel in the heart of the Obsidian Plains.

  A horn blew up on top of the plateau, and everyone turned to look up at the sentry position up there.

  “Now what?” Kris promptly complained, kicking off yet another massive scale from the four-story central corpse of the thing to slide down its armored hide.

  I Jaunted up to the top of the plateau next to the spotter, who was pointing to the west.

  “Ah, Hells,” I said in Magevoice to everyone, staring at the incoming forces. “We’ve got a force of undead on the way here. Coming to investigate or coming to take the corpse, I’m kinda thinking?”

  I could see Kris smile from up here. “Dear Lady Magos who loves the undead so, would you care to handle this problem for us?” she asked sweetly. “Rest of you, keep working.”

  Even the guard up top laughed softly at that, as I turned my eyes towards the incoming undead.

  They’d swept up all the random undead spawns on the way, so it was a few thousand of them, at the very least. Looked like another major noble in charge of them, not that I was worried about that, either.

  Volleys of magic were clearing off hostile spawns in their path relentlessly. I noted that as I started walking their way, putting up some Buffs for myself on the way. I was down on higher Slots, sure, but I had some Mana to spare for the moment, and my Shards, well, that was what I had a Wand in Crown for.

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  ----

  “Go home,” I said in Necrus. They were Falatacot Undead, probably expected me to use that language. Maybe it unsettled them that I spoke in Necrus, because their loping progress slowly came to a halt about two hundred paces away from me.

  That was way too close for them to me, considering the flights of Shards I had up and hovering around me with lots of different undead-killing flames on them, oh so many lethal Colors to them.

  Looked pretty bloody impressive, they did, especially to the undead, and I’d been informed by our own undead as to the truth of that.

  It looked like I had the spears of Heaven at my side ready to fly at them. Very intimidating to the undead, because they could feel the threat such Shards presented right down to their souls.

  “I have had a very bad day, and I am in no mood to slaughter a bunch of undead right now. Just turn around and go home, and I’ll pretend you haven’t offered yourselves up on a platter to Feed the Land.”

  The silence that wafted back to me at my rather exquisite scorn regarding the level of threat they represented was actually rather telling. I just sat there and stared at them, daring them to come any closer and get what was coming to them.

  The ranks parted and the commander of the core legion there came striding out to see me. He was in a rich red robe, eyes burning brightly, standing at least seven feet tall. I didn’t recognize his accoutrements or appearance, but that wasn’t a surprise, not exactly being widely-informed of undead Empyrean society.

  “You! You are the Lady Magos of the Isparians!” he called out across the distance, rather hollow and raspy, yet deep voice carrying to me easily. “You dare to impede our way?” he demanded of me, pointing his finger. “Such effrontery! Such arrogance!”

  “I can kill you all right now if you want me to,” I replied tiredly. “If that’s easier to you than dying is, that’s fine. Just keep coming, and I’ll get started on the Land-Feeding, Elder.”

  My casual confidence had to be unnerving him, and for certain by now their spies had related how very, very good I was at killing undead of all kinds. The last major action they’d taken against us had been at the Hall of Lost Light, and an elite legion with its supporting companies had simply ceased to exist, vanishing into nothing and nowhere as if it never was, none of those souls returning back to them.

  Spirals of the Lost Light were seething around my Staff Crown and the Shards waiting to be released around me, and no, the undead were not happy at all. It meant I had been there, and the undead which had killed the last of the Knights of the Lost Light long ago had utterly failed this time.

  “We have been sent to take possession of the remains of the great beast slain by the Leviathans!” he called out to me. “We will not be permitted to leave empty-handed!”

  “Does that mean I should kill you all now, Elder?” I asked with a tired sigh. “Just get to the point, please. It has been a VERY long day.”

  He was gnashing his teeth that I wasn’t rising to his bait and negotiating for one reason or another. I knew it was what he wanted, but he was in the lesser position here. I clearly felt no need to negotiate, so he was going to have to make the first offer.

  “A Scale!” he called out finally, grasping onto a possibility that wouldn’t get him killed. “And one of the teeth!”

  Huh. “Fine. Stay there. I’ll get one delivered.”

  -Kris, pop one of the scales and teeth on a Disk and run it out here, will you? I’m bribing the undead to go away so I don’t have to butcher them all today.-

  -Huh. You must not be feeling very energetic,- she /said. -Sure, I think we have a few to spare!- she /laughed. -I’ll get one sent out to you.-

  “It’s on the way. Why don’t you send the Summons back where they came from, and it’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  He actually looked around at his army, and sort of blanched when he realized I could tell how many were Summoned, just by their generic and matching appearances, which did not match the proud armor of his revenant forces.

  Regardless, there was no reason to keep them around, and I even let the Shards dissipate as I leaned there on Crown. I kept an eye on the undead legion as he waved his hand imperiously, and all the Summoned undead stiffened, then abruptly turned around and started loping back the direction in which they’d come mindlessly.

  One of Briggs’ soldiers came running up with one of the big silvery-gray scales sitting on a Mass Disk I’d evoked earlier, the almost spear-like tooth sitting on top of it.

  I sent the Disk floating across the space between us with its load, which the undead commander received eagerly. He also found the Disk spell interesting, but I basically willed it out of existence as it reached him, dropping the scale and tooth at his feet, and so forcing him to command his undead to pick the thing up between them, then turn around and start marching away as we watched them go.

  “I must say, I wasn’t expecting such a simple solution, Magos,” the tall and formal Gharu’n sergeant there admitted, watching them go.

  “I’d down almost half my Slots and don’t feel like wasting Mana in a slugfest right now. They’ll all get what is coming to them, and now I’ve got ten different unique undead I can potentially track back to who knows what bases in the near future.”

  His dark eyes glittered with appreciation. “It has been a long day, has it not? Certainly too long to engage in anything approaching subterfuge…”

  “There you have it.” I turned around, and he did the same. “Let’s get back hard to work on reducing an invading Aetheric life form to food for the Land. The Withered who have to keep respawning around the corpse must be getting annoyed with us.” Devoted teams had been assigned to handle the respawns, although the vivus on top of some of the spawn points was Sealing them tight for perpetuity.

  Ah, well. We could pop them open if we wanted to, but it wasn’t like the entire stretch of shoreline was being worked, or we were short of combat zones. Teams usually alternated over a small area, parceling out the Healing and endeavoring to make the fights as short and vicious as possible to reduce the chance of catastrophic injury. The nature of the Summons to always gang up on the first person who aggro’d them meant the tank was truly a perilous position to be in.

  Three or so Platinum spells going off would reduce even a paramount to the brink of death if Healing weren’t fast and hard. Getting physically beaten on was actually much safer than being chain-spelled to death.

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