BECMI Chapter 265 – Looting and Lingering
Without Primus moderating the winds, it would have been a stomach-churning ride through wild winds roaring back and forth across the landscape, carrying the grief of the world through another unnatural wound upon it.
With my Ring of Primal Elemental Command helping his flying, Duum zipped about with energy and purpose, picking out the sites of the soul crystals I had a Detect up to find, and zooming down on them to pick them up.
There were thousands of tons of them, scattered over at least a hundred square miles of area, some of them the size of boulders, many just slivers and shards here and there. The vast majority, however, were still much bigger than the one I had stuck under Dread’s cap, and so I was reaping one Hell of a harvest.
I’d shared this spell with Cirru, as well, and both of us were armed with single-purpose Rods for this purpose.
The Rods were designed to Teleport Item things made of soul crystal, and only those things, to a safe location. All that had to be done was to touch the Rods to the item, and it would be whisked off to a collection of Seal Focuses in a location different from where I had stashed the cryopods, with a bunch of Phantasmal Servants there to move them off the Foci.
Funf’s Telekinesis ranged out, the powerful effect able to manhandle crystals weighing up to five tons total in weight, and a score of different objects at a time. I didn’t have to dismount or swoop down, when my Ring could reach right out, grab the crystals, draw them to me, and the Rod of Crystal-Snatching (trademark pending) sent them away to a dedicated location.
Forty-five days of devoted effort and the required goldweight to make each of these Rods, and this was literally the only time ever that they would be useful like this. Although I suppose I could use them to remove crystals directly from the walls, too...
I made all the money back within my first twenty minutes, relatively speaking, while Cirru concentrated on swooping down on larger pieces I pointed out, and I ported away agglomerations of smaller ones more frequently.
There was nothing else in the sky to run into, except radioactive falling ash that pricked at our anti-radiation Wards. Stuff close by had been totally incinerated, stuff that wasn’t had perished to the radiation and/or the shockwaves blasting past them. Forests were still on fire in the distance, those close by blown apart and into flinders and ash within the majority of the blast zone.
We ignored the view and the implications thereof for now, focusing on our harvest. Dread wasas always was watching for any hints of Immortal Power cutting through the lesser energies here around us.
Potions of Vitality would keep us going for the three days of cloud cover straight that we had. Wisps and stretches would start to break up after that point, as the mushroom cloud finished spreading out and really began to precipitate over a larger area. It was still going to cause an Ice Age, but even faint sunlight hitting the soul crystals was enough to start inevitable degradation.
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The soul crystals started about a mile from the crater from where the eruption had taken place, hit maximum saturation about five miles out, and then tailed off to almost none at ten miles.
A mile away through the dust and murk was sufficient to keep us out of casual view of the Immortals I was absolutely sure were inspecting their work already, and every sweeping circle we traveled took us further and further away from them. We gathered our rewards and kept on flying.
Cirru did have to rest after two days to regain her spells, by which point we’d flown around the blast site multiple times, harvesting more and more of the stuff, and hit the five-mile ‘sweet spot’ of the blast, where the largest and heaviest concentrations of the transformed Dura-topes of the Barhund had fallen. By the time we were done the first day, well over a thousand tons of soul crystals had been whisked away and safely secreted by me, any traces of Teleportation gone within minutes due to active beta and gammathaumic saturation in the manasphere wiping away any magical or dimensional traces they could follow.
Immortals looking through the area now weren’t going to find anything interesting until they went at least six miles out and were specifically looking for soul crystals no longer there. Any holes or impact sites were rapidly snowed in by falling ash, disguising the fact anything had been there at all, and they’d have to be looking for invisible creatures to spot us moving around… and we were only getting further and further away.
They might have spotted the Pyramids that had locked Thanatos in a death grip and obliterated his Avatar, but, their purpose done, the trio of Pyramids I’d set in place had rapidly changed their structure, perfectly placed to receive massive saturation from the Core going up, and in doing so absorbing at least half the magical contamination and beta-gamma burst that had come out of the Core entirely.
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My Pyramids were down there still, just buried a quarter-mile below ground, soaking up the Radiance and restricting its impact on the surrounding stone and landscape, charging themselves up and controlling how dangerous the emissions of the Core could be.
Completely unknown and invisible. Unless you knew how to resonate with one of them, you’d just pass them by without seeing or feeling them while looking. Even my own Communes didn’t acknowledge they were there… exactly as required to acknowledge the fact I’d not seen them in the future, either, nor had any Immortals discovered them.
What three Pyramids force-fed an unholy amount of energy by a magical fusion Core could turn into was something that was going to take a lot of time to develop, and be an unwelcome surprise when it took place.
In the meantime, they’d also be registering the exact vibes of the Immortals who came to check on things here, so they could be recognized in the future, and we’d know exactly who designed this mess and was responsible for this fiasco.
They weren’t just Immortals of Energy, Dread informed me coolly. At least one Immortal each of Time and Thought were also involved, although Matter seemed to be abstaining from this particular project of theirs.
What the addition of an Entropic Immortal’s IP had on everything I had no idea of, since I hadn’t been able to vivisize it without starting a temporal event that would have sent me spinning lost into another timeline. I could fantasize about being able to do things properly, directly nullifying most of the effects of the eruption straight off, but simply unleashed by death and obliteration? Anything could have happened!
Jorg Turmalez had been a hero right to the end here. I grit my teeth, wondering if I could reward his sacrifice with another shot at life… and the Rune of Time quivered dangerously at the thought.
Fuck! Same vibes as it got whenever I considered waking up the rest of the crew in the current time period.
They were supposed to be dead. As long as they had absolutely no effect on the time stream, they could endure. If I moved to let them out, it was time to create an alternity, which would last exactly as long as they did and then vanish back into improbability, their lives having no more meaning in it than they did in this one.
In this one…
Leaning back against Cirru, who I was helping draw energy to restore her Valences while Duum stood silent and unmoving watch, my left eye popped open.
Huh. Just… huh…
I couldn’t bring the crew to the future, or wait for them there, either. I was bringing as many of the Greens as I could from Darkmoor to my future, resettling them in Eismoor before the Doom could take them. They’d run into their alternates and cause a temporal paradox here, where the laws of Time were pretty damn strict.
Buuuuut… nothing said I couldn’t take these men and women THERE, across the pond now, did it?
The Rune of Time was absolutely silent. All I had to do… was bring them in past the Doom and avoid the Crimson Cataclysm with them. My only risk was… the Immortals coming in and wiping them anyway?
I’d have to think on the problem, but it looked like my way out of this dilemma for them…
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Just a dash of sunlight, crossing the morning under the yawning cloud cover.
I watched half an acre of soul crystals vanish from my Detect as the light danced across them just once. The crumbling process had begun.
I directed Cirru and Dread to concentrate on the lee of the items here as I Cast my Detect wider, and watched blip after blip vanish under passing dashes of sunlight.
I pulled out a series of coins, which promptly swallowed me in a small ball of absolute darkness, a mere five-foot radius.
Still large enough to shield a soul crystal from sunlight. Funf dragged them from my fingers, sending them out to cover their targets as we flew low over the landscape. Speeding black spheres of darkness zipped out, covered their targets, and Funf yanked them into its protection and then back to me or over to the next target, depending on what was closer.
Cirru dove down to touch larger stones still covered by shadows and not sunlit yet.
I wasn’t worried about missing any and what the Immortals might find. There were no soul crystals on the surface in the future. Sunlight, direct or reflected, got to them all and reduced them to uselessness. Our time had been limited, and now we were eking out the last of it.
It was all good. There would never be any more of the stuff… until and unless the Crimson Cataclysm erupted on the other side of the pond, which I was quite determined to never see happen.
But we’d have to see.
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I was glad I’d made thestorage cavern about twice the size I’d thought I’d need, as I’d filled the whole damn thing up. Phantasmal Servants had been crazy busy pushing Disks of Soul Crystals to the far side of the cavern and racing back to pick up more as we Teleported them all in.
A roughly glittering, somber sight of stacked mounds and heaps and scattered boulders of glittering soul crystals, greater than any vein or supply underground, waited somberly before us, ready to be Shaped, molded, cut, and turned into the perfect physical conduits of gammathauma radiation, i.e. the Radiance.
I didn’t know what I’d be working on with it quite yet, but it was going to be something impressive.
In the meantime, all my urgent work was done, and it was going to be another forty years before the Time Portal was open for me to use, and my earlier self exited the Inn.
I already had Sims at work, parceled off during the long haul back to the Doom. They were already scattered around the world, most of them already with their own souls by now and monitoring the world, contributing to the Twilight Library.
I sent a quiet Mass Message off to them, letting them know I was here.
-Have arrived at CC. Success! First Truename gained, harvest completed. Any place you think I should go for now?-
And with nothing that I could do for now, I waited for the replies and the reports of my agents in this time period, knowing that they’d certainly have things they could have me doing as time rolled unstoppably forward toward the future…