Chapter 264, 1/2

Chapter 264, 1/2

Erick remained on his perch atop the center structure of House Benevolence, gazing out across the land for a while longer. The people of House Benevolence lived their lives down below. Dramas unfolded and crashed and began and then came to closure as people picked up the pieces of their previous existences and tried to make something of them. Not many people had gotten anything close to closure at all, but some had, and that was wonderful. Most people got pretty far in that endeavor, though, considering they had been enslaved little more than a week ago—

A drone floated high in the air above the geodesic node network surrounding the lands of House Benevolence.

Erick reached down with his [Physical Domain], through the command center of the House below, to say to the people there, “I see a drone above us. Right here.” And then he conjured a coordinate map of the drone amid the command center.

Ruby was in the command center right now. She was Second to Querkooda, and she was a ruby-colored dragon currently shaped like an Elemental Plasma-derived elf, her body glowing a little internally. She was well put-together, like all the other people around here. The command center itself was still a wreck.

There were five people on a bunch of tech-based imagery-stations and four on magical scry-based stations, and those stations were only halfway completed. Wires stuck out in the backs of places and people were working in small holes in the machines here and there and tech guys were everywhere. Four people were learning the targeting software for the weapons systems right now, and a bunch were in other rooms, still trying to work on Erick’s [Cascade Imaging] to integrate it into the normal sensor systems that people had bought from this place or that place.

At least all the bugged tech was easily discovered with some Benevolence and scanning magics and scanning software from the various technologically-inclined people of the House. Erick wasn’t sure when the bugged tech started to appear, but they only really noticed it four days ago, and now the whole place —which wasn’t even together yet— needed to be ripped apart and redone in a whole bunch of ways.

So it was kinda fair that they didn’t notice and shoot down the drone yet.

Ruby turned, and her hair flowed as she moved, her eyes focusing on the video feeds and scanner equipment. She flicked her aura at a control center that some other guy was at, taking the controls from him for a moment. “... Looks like a standard spybot. Hmm. That’s at the limit of our capability to scan. No wonder it was missed.”

The guy at the control center looked utterly ashamed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Erick responded. “We’re still building the place.” And then he shot a javelin of light at the bot, erasing it from existence. He turned his attention back down to the control room, and to the [Cascade Imaging] he had set up in a special room, anchored to some metals and the node network. Some guys were currently trying to install some tech onto that working of magic, but they weren’t getting very far with it. “It appears my own Imaging didn’t pick it up, either.”

Down in the control room, Ruby frowned at the monitors. More than a few of the guys working the monitors cringed. They were embarrassed. Ruby said, “Your powers are... quite a lot better than the software we’ve been able to find and buy.”

And needing to rebuild the place didn’t help.

“Keep at it. Most of the spying is being done from far across the shell of Margleknot, anyway.”

Erick looked at the sky, which was a little dark because this was ‘night time’, though night time here in the spatially-expanded lands of Margleknot mostly meant ‘half-light’. This wasn’t the Mortal Lands where the sun actually disappeared behind a black sunblock; this was Slaver’s Den, in the ‘ascended’ side of Margleknot. And over there, in the worlds beyond this one, on those layers of lands out there, far above the atmosphere of this flat place, they were watching this flat place.

... Welp! Let them watch. It was time to see if they did anything truly desperate when he wasn’t out here, surveying everything and everyone.

Erick said, “I’m taking a break now. I’ll be back by morning or in case of emergency.”

Ruby and the entire command room went on high alert, though no actual alarms or such went off at all. People simply looked harder at the scanners, and started running them more. They were onduty.

Everything would be fine.

And if it wasn’t, then Erick could reverse time and save whoever he needed to save. He hadn’t needed to resort to that yet, thankfully. Hopefully he never would.

... There was probably going to be an attack in under an hour, though. The forces of Slaver’s Den were watching him a lot.

Erick got on with his life, anyway.

It was time to make some truly horrific magic to appease Lord Dakka, and he knew just where to go to get some proper ideas for that sort of shit.

A lot of people had been hurt a lot by Slaver’s Den.

They would want revenge.

- - - -

Erick walked into a classroom of his Arcanaeum, interrupting a lesson between Ta’Kamoil and some talented ex-slaves who were all bent on killing slavers in the most painful ways possible. Ta’Kamoil had been trying to get them to calm-it-the-fuck-down with their bloodlust, but at Erick’s entrance Ta’Kamoil merely smiled and promptly shirked his duties.

“And here’s the Wizard himself!” Ta’Kamoil said, “Please ask him how to kill people more painfully. I am sure he will have lots of information about all that!”

Erick was fine with that introduction.

The crowd of 27 ex-slaves were all very quiet. Some looked ashamed.

Surprising them all, Erick said, “I’m actually here to get ideas for that very thing. I need to appease Lord Dakka, after all. Anyone got any good Blood, Carnage, or Death-based ideas? Who wants to see their work on the battlefield?” Erick pointed at a woman who he was pretty sure was named Vanya, and a light appeared over her head. “Yes?”

Vanya looked as though she had been handed the keys to a kingdom. She launched to her feet, saying, “Bloodfire! It was what they did to us through some sort of light. It burned us from the inside out and paralyzed us as we tried to escape their capture drones.”

“Good one.” Erick pointed to another person, whom he did not actually know. “You.”

Vanya sat down, looking faintly happy... and yet somehow sad.

The next person was a man with deep red eyes and skin. He was suddenly unsure, because Erick could tell the red guy wanted to use the magic he was thinking about himself. Vanya was just realizing the same thing. The rest of the people in the class were also pulling back from the hate that they were feeling, if only for their own personal desires of revenge.

Only a few people were rethinking everything about this whole scenario.

Erick pulled the light off of the red guy and stoked the fires of hate, saying, “Come on! Let’s go kill people as viciously as we can! Surely nothing bad will come of perpetuating cycles of violence and hate! These are slavers, after all. They don’t deserve to be treated like people! We can treat them as you were treated, right? ... Right?”

Silence.

Erick stopped pretending, and said, “It was incredibly rude of me to say that to all of you, of course. Who am I to judge how you feel as wrong or in any way unjustified? And anyway, war still has to happen. Proofs still need to be made. In this particular case, Slaver’s Den needs to be eradicated through a pure showing of power, to thus dissuade others from attempting to fight back and to keep this House Benevolence of Margleknot protected for many, many years to come. There’s nothing wrong with you all desiring revenge, but instead of trying to hurt people for the sake of hurting them, how about we try hurting people effectively. So. Once again.” He gestured to the red guy. A light reappeared. “Got an idea?”

With an even gaze, the red guy said, “Use Carnage as a damage multiplier. Add it to the bloodfire. Make people explode in gore shrapnel when they die in the light.”

Erick was not expecting something so... Simple, actually. And yet so far beyond how Erick would have done it. Yeah; Erick was not nearly as vicious as he could have been. Erick said, “Easily doable. One final suggestion for Death. Yes, you.”

The light went off of the red guy, and then appeared over a bookish woman with three books open up in front of her.

The bookish woman said, “Have the blood and flesh explode, but leave behind the skeletons as minions of undeath, empowered by the Carnage bloodfire...” She paused. She said, “But that seems hard. Alternatively, make the Bloodfire burn away life and then, in death, twist everything into a Carnage minion.”

... So that was vicious.

This had been a productive detour.

Erick said, “I have no doubt in my mind that this suggestion is probably exactly what Lord Dakka is looking for. Thank you all for your contributions.” Erick said, “I suppose I will be working on some war crime magic now. And make no mistake. These are all going to be war crimes. They have no place in a functioning society, or in the worlds I want to build.”

Erick left it at that, and then he left the room. Ta’Kamoil bowed a little as Erick left, and then he went back to the much more somber classroom. Before Erick had walked in and done all that, they had been talking in hypotheticals and overly-eager wishes. But now, knowing that whatever Erick was going to make was going to be horrific and used on the battlefield? That had done a lot to temper their desires for bloodshed.

It had taken them a minute to get there, though.

When he exited the arcanaeum out the front door, amid students and refugees and returners all, he simply took to the sky, transforming into a great black dragon that was already in the air, his tail the last little bit of his body to leave the ground.

He decided to check on the perimeter before he went to make magic, and it was a good thing he did.

High above the dome of House Benevolence Erick found a drop ship filled with horrors of various kinds, from flesh abominations to living poisons to killers in invisibility cloaks. His normal sort of attack would have pierced the place and killed most everything, but left behind the tech that he could then hand over to the engineers to add to their growing collection of tools. That tech would have been poisoned irreparably, and probably in multiple ways.

Erick was pretty sure that some previous salvage had led to their current tech problems in the House.

The problem was, though, that if he simply evaporated the thing...

Eh.

Less thinking.

More complete annihilation.

He did check on the radiation dome and found it fully functional.

And then Erick blasted the transport with a few lines of light, piercing holes through shields and then through hulls. Next came some [Grand Reincarnation] that managed to erase every living thing in there and send it off to another land, and since there were holes in the defenses of the transport there was no impediment to Erick’s lightning. The only targets he missed were the cloaked people; the other main threat of the attack. They were all falling out of the air and spreading wide, trying to escape the blasts.

Erick lit up the entire sky with a [Luminous Beam].

One thin thread of light sent out a river of atomic blasts into the transport, proving to be complete overkill as the entire sky turned to brightest day. Erick’s attack ended somewhere in the impossible distances overhead, way before it actually threatened anything in the Margleknot’s sky. The city shields, both magical and mundane, soaked the damage. Nothing got through to the city except for bright lights. The invisibly cloaked people were incinerated by light and heat long before they got anywhere near the dome below.

When the light faded, the transport was gone.

On the plus side of showing off that magic for the fifth time, so far, it also showed that the city below was completely protected from incidental damage. The dome below held very well; Erick certainly had enough power going to that thing, after all.

- - - -

Ruby shuddered in the command center. “Brightest stars, that is insane. That he can both do that and survive that.”

Querkooda smiled at her side. “It is a wondrous thing.”

- - - -

Vanya stared out the window of the classroom, watching the sky come back from beyond the blinding light of the Apparent King. She was not the only one. The entire classroom had rushed to the windows to see the light when it appeared.

Vanya wanted that kind of power.

... But even if she was somehow granted that power, right there, she knew she could not handle it, and for many reasons. She would dive into death to avenge her everything and fall both to her own demons and the real demons out there... And, she supposed, it wasn’t right to... just kill everyone.

She still recalled the painful bloodfire light out there on the shores of seaside, so many ‘layers of infinity’ away. She recalled the slavers picking her up and laughing at her as her skin burned in her mind, but not in reality. How they teased her for her invisible pain. How they inflicted even more invisible pain...

Erick had been right about many things.

The slavers deserved to die in horrible agony, but...

Erick kinda wanted to discard the idea of using Elemental Vile to pain people... But Elemental Vile was very good at targeting. Benevolence was good at targeting, too, so did he need to use Vile? Yeah, probably, because people were under Contracts and some Vile might be able to act as a layer of anti-reaction against those Contracts activating if Erick did it right...

Hmm.

An idea.

Elemental Vile and Exalted were rather unable to be used together, but not really. The problem was that there was a whole lot of overlap between the two, so outside of very rare circumstances there was no need to use them both. Vile wanted to primarily harm enemies and secondarily help allies. Exalted wanted to primarily help allies and secondarily to harm enemies. Added to this, there were often mana concerns; one could only cast a spell so often before one’s mana ran out —for those who had such issues, anyway— and there was no such thing as Propagation Magic on Veird due to the Foundation Ban against that sort of power.

Erick had neither of those concerns right now; he had mana, and there was no Propagation Ban.

Added to that, Vile and Exalted had different focus auto-targets... When it came to buffing and debuffing magic, anyway. That’s what Erick was focusing on now, so that’s what he kept in mind at the moment. Actual Vile and Exalted damaging spellwork was a different ball game altogether...

But Vile was kinda Ooze-like and Exalted was definitely more Force-like—

Ah.

It was all slotting into place.

Erick envisioned a drop of Blood, which was the best Propagative baseline, that infected a person’s soul and locked them into that body. That was the baseline magic. When the person died, for whatever reason, their body would hold onto their soul and put it into a state of suspended animation. If there were enough sources of the animate-version of the lifecycle of this magic nearby, then the Vile and Exalted auras of those nearby animated minions would empower the dead body to animate with them. If there were no nearby sources of Vile or Exalted power, then the body would simply release the soul when the magic therein degraded.

But if there were animated undead nearby to power the raising of the corpse...

Yes.

Erick needed to add in some [Renew] spellwork for that.

But then... Yeah. This was an idea.

An animated corpse —the main active form of this magic— would then start oozing out Vile aura and wielding Force-like Exalted weapons that carried the Blood magic, and then they would keep killing others and infecting them with the blood. Carnage would activate if the undead spotted enemies against Benevolence...

Erick examined his thoughts and found them all distasteful.

... And then he considered power requirements, and control. From there came thoughts of how to end this spellwork once it was done.

Maybe he could do both at the same time? Have a few trips through Infinity using resonwork to connect animate-corpse to animate-corpse in a mana-sharing node-network so that they didn’t run out of power and constantly healed each other...

Erick paused.

“This is probably more horrific than that [Cascade Imaging – Luminous Beam] magic... Hmm.”

Now there was a thought.

Erick could probably tie this magic to a [Cascade Imaging] and use this magic both to survey the battlefield from that spellwork and also make a specific kill-switch for the spell through the Imaging. The only downside to that was that the people around here knew about radio waves. That was one of the reasons the [Cascade Imaging] back at base didn’t work so well. The smart forces of Slaver’s Den were using canceling tech to erase their presences from Erick’s Imaging.

... So don’t go off of radio waves, then?

He needed to update [Cascade Imaging] to resonwork and Benevolence and all of that to utilize the curve-through-infinity resonwork that Cascadio had shown him.

... Yeah?

Yeah.

That would be the first task of this magic making today. A new [Cascade Imaging] for a new era.

Erick looked out across the various little ideas he had cast into the air, all of them misleading and ill-formed, from fireballs that pained people through light to bullet storms to world breaking spellwork, and then he erased it all from the air. They were just the doodles one did when they were busy thinking. They didn’t mean anything.

He wondered what the people looking would make of them.

... Anyway!

Time to get back to work. Some people were trying shit.

Erick leapt up into the air and flew upspireward, to where his Lightning Path was guiding him right now. He found a giant abomination of rock and crabs scuttling toward the city. It was very well hidden. Erick landed right on top of it and crushed it dead under one foot. When the remains tried to cloy into his scales and flesh, he frowned at it, trying to understand what it was doing.

Ah.

This was tricky shit.

A lot of soul work in that little shit of a crab— Well. ‘Little’. It had been 20 meters wide, and that was a lot of space in which to put a whole bunch of replicating machines and undead slugs and shit. They didn’t get anywhere. They tried. They failed.

They would have been murder against anyone other than Erick, with them trying to burrow into Erick’s scales like they were. That would have turned a normal person into paste in a matter of seconds.

Erick fried them with copious amounts of fire—

Which they absorbed, and then the whole metal slug swarm grew. Erick’s foreleg was now crowded up to his elbow in black machine-slugs.

He tried Ice and the infection got bigger.

Hmm.

This was a pretty interesting attack. It gave Erick some good ideas for the spellwork he was working on. Of course, putting Mana Siphon into a bunch of replicating minions was probably a very, very bad idea. The creators of these metal slugs certainly didn’t care that they had done exactly that and made a grey-goo scenario, though.

Erick wondered if they had an off-switch?

Whatever the case, the slugs were trying to turn immaterial and slip into his soul, but his soul was a raging river and they could not swim upstream that fast at all.

Erick did not let the infection continue.

[Physical Aura] pulsed out like an explosion, physically ripping the slugs away. A more attuned aura vibrated the slugs into the air, to suspend them away from the ground. Erick continued to flow power away from his arm and the rest of his body, to push the slugs away, and it worked rather well. Within moments the slugs all floated in a vibrating sphere of power. He even grabbed up the slugs hiding in the ground and in the sand, and another, secondary crab hiding ten kilometers away from the first.

The black slugs roiled in Erick’s suspension like black cables all twisted into each other.

Erick broadcast his intentions though the nearest 50 kilometers, “I’m going to take these slugs to all four of the major cities of Slaver’s Den.”

And then Erick took to the sky and dragged along the slugs with him, headed toward Centrics, the nearest major city of—

The ball of slugs exploded like ten million firecrackers going off all at once. Within seconds, nothing was left except for broken flesh and charred machinery.

“... Hmm!”

Erick flicked some physical power at the broken grey goo, crushing it down to a molten ball of various metals, and then he did some Particle Magic separation, pulling out tens of different metals in various combinations; mostly iron. With a bit more flashes of power, Erick turned those different metals into ingots, and then into tiny slug sculptures. Then he made them all into a tiny sphere of slugs with some words written in slugs upon them.

With a bit of power, Erick zapped over to the edge of Centrics, about 190 kilometers away.

The wall of Underling Chains’ major city lay ahead; a solid black wall a hundred meters tall and crowned in turrets. Towering buildings rose into the sky beyond the wall, and everything there was as orderly as Erick had seen back in Wraithborne’s ring city, around the Evil Death Sun, but also a whole lot worse. In some ways, what Erick saw was just people going about their lives, going from market to market, or high-end shop to high-end shop, or eating good food, or doing whatever they wanted, except there were slaves everywhere.

10 slaves for every 1 slaver—

The turrets started firing what had to be depleted uranium, or something. Each ‘bullet’ was a meter across, too. They kinda stung. Didn’t do much actual damage. Erick turned on some defensive spellwork, and then there was no sting or damage at all.

He just hovered there, wondering if the turrets would get bored, or not.

Erick easily survived the turret fire, so he let that happen for a little while; 20 seconds, just to let them know they were ineffective. They did not seem to want to stop firing at him, though, so he turned on some reflective spellwork and returned their fire to them. In a flashing instant, bullets bounced in a way only magic could manage and bullets impacted the shields of the five nearest turrets. Bullets crashed up and away, headed back into the sky. The turrets kept firing for 2 more seconds but Erick tuned his reflections and made some precise return fire that broke through the turrets’ shields. Bullets the size of people ripped through the offensive structures.

People were already screaming about dragons in the city beyond.

Erick turned to lightning, went into the center of the city, to a garden square surrounded by dark trees and with a sculpture of Captain Shackle in the center. With a whip of his tail, Erick decapitated the winged elf statue and put the metal-slug sculpture onto the head’s place.

And then he got out of there, being sure to decapitate another two Captain Shackle sculptures on the way out and place copies of his slug sculptures atop each one’s neck. He scattered a few more slug balls here and there, just to be sure the message couldn’t be hidden.

He wondered what their response would be, for written in slugs, Erick had declared, ‘We’re showing off Propagation Magic now? Okay.’

Erick got back to House Benevolence well before some atomic bombs dropped. He stopped those easily enough. Honestly. Did they think his absence would take any more than 10 seconds? That he wouldn’t be back in time to stop the destruction?

Slavers were fucking stupid.

The only real defense they had was all their intrinsic hostages.

This was almost like that time all those years with the slave cities of Mainland Nergal, back on Veird. Erick had been involved in all of that shit, too, but the main contributors to ending the largest lands of slavery on Veird had been Destiny and Messalina. They cleaned up those lands and turned them into the Freelands, and Erick mostly supported them. He didn’t do much of that himself.

Since then, he mostly tried to forget those evils he had seen.

But now those memories were surging back to the forefront, because this place was so much worse than how Continental Nergal had been.

And to think, he was actually feeling bad about the spellwork he was going to make.

... Eh. Self-replicating angel-demon carnage-blood-radiation zombies seemed about as ethical as one could get with propagation-war magic... Probably. Erick’s version had the souls trapped in their own bodies, quietly riding along for the journey and completely insensate. If he wanted, he could make the souls and minds fully realize what was happening to them. That seemed a whole lot more evil and traumatic, though.

And allowing people to see what was happening to their world after they were soul-captured would probably disrupt the magic. Best not to allow for that sort of vulnerability; just make the souls silent and secured.

But first thing’s first!

An update to [Cascade Imaging] to remove a lot of the current limitations on the magic as well as add a whole lot more functionality and protection.