Chương 322: AF Chapter 321 – Floating Wealth

"I agree with you. So, be on the lookout for another Signat to pop. In the meantime, they'll just have to be content with the +2 War, +1 Life limits of the Fulguris we have extras of," I shrugged extravagantly to Lord Mick.

"An' the Shocking Stones," he smiled back, just as an ornate dealybop rose from the dust of the Signat's crumbling armor robe. He snatched up the Virindi Key and walked over to the white and purple flower-like spatial vault floating in the corner. With the ease of long experience, he inserted the key into the center of the floating safe and the petals unfolded outwards, revealing a space inside bigger than the flower was. Neatly arranged within were over a score more gleaming Shocking Stones.

They were resting on beds made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of glittering minor gemstones. He whistled at the display, prompting me to drift up and look inside with him.

"They were harvesting Lightning Elementals, too!" he deduced with glee at our windfall. I made a swirling motion with my hand, and a glittering stream of the contents began to move from the Signat Vault to my Disk there.

"For what?" I asked him grimly, and he pursed his lips in thought as he glanced at me, and all kinds of bad things came to mind…

"Ye're raining on me happy moment again, lass!" he warned me with a wagging finger.

"You're such an ebullient, happy person, somebody has to be the black lining in the white cloud for you."

"Aye, that be truth. Terribly joyful an' effervescent sot that I be, bubbly an' happy-skippy-dancy I am," he agreed shamelessly.

"Now break out that Healing Reserve, get rid o' me little knee-bumps an' elbow-scrapes, an' lets get out o' here."

"I'm going to leave a little something here while we do that…"

"Heads up." I broke out of mana-Renewing Meditation, and we both watched as the virindi came for the Amperehelion Vault. The virindi hit squad came streaming in over the shallow waters from the south, lighting the way up with a whole lot of violent magic that cleared out every single damn spawn in their way with absolute dismissive impunity.

"They be using proper Elemental damage types on 'em. Living vir," he noted professionally, dark eyes measuring everything. Summons would use random energy types which might not hurt shades at all, for instance, and that wasn't happening here.

"Hundred of them, with another hundred tuskers and Minions." I nodded in agreement.

"The tuskers and Minions are mostly Summons picked up on the way. Center of the pack. Two Minions with crimson hides." He noted them.

"And right between 'em, another Signat." The wind blew stiffly as the sky boiled, building towards a storm for the last hour from the direction of the Obsidian Plains. Distant booms and claps of thunder rolled by after weird colors danced inside the clouds there. Nothing special to see there, and the virindi ignored it. Isparians didn't have weather control magic, after all. The horde steamrolled every hostile Summons in the way, and instantly took control of the two sets of Summoned virindi packs we could see.

The whole mob of them rumbled up to the ancient stone windmill that was the cap of the Amperehelion Vault, and quickly established a security perimeter around the place, while a straight stream of virindi and the most powerful Minions there plunged inside and down the steps inside in hyper-coordinated fashion, no hesitation and no gaps. The clouds overhead rumbled, and the Minions, tuskers, and lesser virindi left outside ignored them.

The Mick sat there, waiting patiently as minutes crawled by, waiting patiently as the virindi raced through the complex maze of the inside of the Vault, waiting patiently as they flowed towards the machine at the bottom, waiting patiently as they looked for signs of who and what had cut off all the virindi there. His Alarm spell went off and vanished before they could register the magical signature, alerting him that something had entered the edge of its sensory radius.

Such a nice little minor spell, he mused, fucking patience done with.

"Bring it down," he told me, flipping up Bunita's Sound Bubble. I reached out into the roiling elemental hellstorm waiting up above, seething with all sorts of raw magical fury from the unstable magic on the Obsidian Plains, and brought down five Topped Call Lightnings at one time, each accented with a separate energy type that joined them into something bigger, greater… and more disruptive.

Lightning accented with Fire, Acid, Cold, Holy, and Force Magic, fed with Silver Magic and both Primal and Divine Fury, fell down upon the steadily pumping windmill that was the Amperehelion Vault. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. This was no Thunderbolt being delivered. This was me drawing a conduit between all the potential energy of a thunderstorm down to a major nexus of lightning energy to ground it.

Even with Devasight, the Mick and I had to look away as the storm above discharged down into the Vault. The night became day, and the slamming impact of the thunder sent rocks tumbling down from the sides of the hills all around us, spontaneously bringing down a couple cliff-faces as the stone broke from the slamming impact. The Bubble from Bunita wobbled from the volume of that much sound, but held.

The air was full of debris kicked up by the force of the displaced air shattering everything, and we waited patiently as it began to drop and clear. The shadow of the windmill was visible first. It looked a bit different at the moment, because each of its four Vanes was limned in a different Elemental flame. Purple, crimson, cerulean, and verdant green flames burned serenely as they turned slowly through the air.

Scattered around the windmill were the corpses of the slaughtered virindi horde, all of them slowly burning vivic as they were destroyed.

"Ye think it's safe t' go in?" the Mick asked warily.

"Only one way to find out!" I said cheerfully, dropping Resist Lightning, Gold Lightning Protection +1, and Protection from Lightning on both of us, just to be on the safe side. Grinning as widely as I did, he vaulted the edge of the elevated ledge we'd been waiting behind a couple hundred yards away, masked by a Circle of Non-Detection.

There were no living virindi left inside. The disruptive nature of the lightning coming down had been both absorbed and ejected by the Amperehelion Vault, venting into the interior of the place in a violent dance of Elemental energies that had vented all the impure powers riding the lightning, bouncing the energy of the Called lightning back and forth until all such elements were completely expended. Anything inside was naturally slagged as they acted as leaping conduits for the energies writhing through them.

The walls were alive and crackling with constant flickers and flashes of lightning, things the Mick made sure to disrupt with a touch of Bunita's point, Grounding them out before they could cross and catch us between them. Sparks danced from the floor we were gliding just above as we skated back down through the place once more. A few more Virindi Amulets. A few more Virindi Masks. Lots of dead virindi set on vivic fire and feeding into the Vault.

Lightning crawled over them eagerly and devoured their alien energies in rapture. The Signat was down right underneath the arcane machine they'd built, which was now showing an intact Shocking Stone inside it. The Mick yoinked it as I pulled the second +4 Virindi Amulet of the day out of the Signat's sparking, crumbling remains, and dropped its Enruned Mask on top of its compatriot's."' Tis been a fine day today!"

the Mick grinned happily, as we started quickly back up, this time doing it parkour style as he bounced between the railed levels of the central shaft, much faster than taking the ramps down.

"So it has, so it has!"

With a Mask of Clarity, night and day had little meaning to us. There was a single pause at midnight for Sylune's Salute, as Aethra had heralded the dusk, and then the Mick was skating along while I Meditated, regaining Mana once again as the Mana Boosts I'd used were soothed and washed away by my Silver Renewal at midnight.

We left the four blazing vanes of the Vault behind, both of us wondering how long it would be before the virindi investigated again after the loss of at least forty of them, including some extremely strong ones, fed forever to the appetite of the Land. The Black Hills on the way weren't too populated by Summons, but the more natural hills past it certainly were. Invisibility helped a lot, except against the virindi Summons dotted among the extremely varied and powerful Spawn points.

I saw my first Diamond Golum Sovereign, towering to twice the height of a normal such Golum and surrounded by a cohort of powerful Astyrrian Lightning Elementals.

Powerful senior Tukora lugians, noble-ranked Hea Tumeroks, clusters of Swarm Olthoi exploration teams, Wisps twice as strong as those vented off vivic points in the east, at least a dozen each advanced Drudges and Banderlings along different paths, groups of powerful Undead and shades, blood-red horse-sized reedsharks vying with elephant-sized shreth for attention… There was a mighty Crystal Lord, too, surrounded by a swarm of zefir-like Crystal Minions.

The Mick's face as he looked at the horde of them was of incredible loathing. Nothing had less than five hundred Health, and the vast majority were a thousand and higher. I could see the Mick was itching to test himself against the creatures, especially any solo spawns that we saw, but he held off. The job first.

"Too many virindi," I judged from the edge of the hill near Harraag's former den, staying very low. There were a lot of powerful virindi Summons up, particularly Quiddox and Paradox… and all of them were Shadow-touched, which might indicate something about splits in the Quiddity, or just how susceptible the things were to infection by outside forces.

"It might mean Aerbax be still alive," the Mick agreed, pushing back and sliding below the lip. I followed suit.

"I have no idea if that is good or bad for us, but it's certainly not good for the virindi," I agreed, hopping on my Invisible Disk as he turned west yet again.

"Well, it means he's out o' his den, an' that means among the other banderlings. Likely there's nothing good for us in this matter."

"Can't argue that," I answered as he turned west.

"You think Harraag set his sights on Ayan?"

"Isparians and others out o' Ayan probably killed the bastard a thousand times or more. If he didn't have a vengeful streak as big as Bonecrusher, I'm a mosswart." He started on his way, and my Detects ranged out ahead, complementing eyes that ignored the darkness warily looking for signs of intruders. Amusingly enough, the Elemental-phasing Weapons wielded by a lot of the creatures here were enough to give many of them away at some distance, as was the casual use of magic or venting of power.

The number of native real life forms wasn't that high, however. I literally didn't sense anything real bigger than a mouse or lizard. Possibly the Summons were used to cull any species which might break the paradigm, and the subtle control of the Primal magic here held the environment to a certain level of development and no higher. Certainly the forest should have been a lot more overgrown than it was at the ground level, and while the trees seemed old, they weren't BIG…

which was pretty strange and put hackles on my neck at the creepiness of the restrained growth. It was also possible the natural vitality was being drained away for some other purpose… I sighed and shook my head, banishing such thoughts for now. It was a problem for the future.