"Don't you say it."
"We've got giant mushroom people."
"Don't! It's too obvious!"
"And now we have Mushroom Giant people," Briggs went on, as if I hadn't said anything. I threw up my hands as everyone tried not to laugh knowingly.
And yet it be true. There were mushroom ogres and giants here, instead of, you know, normal ogres and hill giants.
Their skin looked like mushroom hides, and they had toadstool caps on their heads. Their body hair was like cilia, moving weirdly, and they released clouds of spores when hit and when they breathed, which would have been annoying if everyone wasn't Vajra'd or Masked by now. Their blood was also this creepy whitish hue...
Like the straggler dark elves, they were following around the Mu Spores, harvesting the stuff they dropped in big longboats and containers on their back, as well as intermittently harvesting some of the more exotic and memorable fungi around... which actually turned out to be pretty valuable, when we started sifting through them very carefully. After all, having an invading fungus infiltrate your body and start converting you was not something we wanted to happen.
So, the next Empire was the Greenhag Empire, Verd's Grandhagmother Dearest. Amber was already toting her Gramma's skull, Veis was pouting that her Grandmother seemed to be on the opposite side of the Hole and we wouldn't be going there anytime soon... but we might be meeting her sometime soon regardless, who knows?
Estemar and Errant once again took charge of the company, proceeding forwards as Briggs and I fanned out with our teams of Void Brothers to harvest ALL the Mu Spores. Wayfair stayed with Errant, to his somewhat consternation, as they wouldn't be dealing with anything Epic hopefully... and for that, they had Elder Arg and Elder Wolf along, the latter eager to gain more of these Level things and feel his power increase very rapidly, indeed.
So, the Company's valiant hacking down of everything in their way around the Obelisk we'd toppled and buried under no less than six Mu Spores and the Pseudonatural mycoids (wow, making unnatural mushroom men even more unnatural was quite the gross achievement, I have to give Outside Creation some credit where it was due) that had been guarding it. The lads and ladies took it as an opportunity to get a little rest and some more Investing and Infusing done, while Elder Arg worked on a certain special project he and I had talked about, with the Girls helping him out.
The Investing and Infusing was concentrated on improving the Giant Baneskulls we'd picked up earlier, especially since the apes needed some. Thankfully, we had extras that Hazé hadn't spirited away yet, so they had stuff to work on in down time. The stronger gorillas particularly wanted to beat down the ogres. Maybe there was some racial rivalry going on there, or ancestral really bad blood?
Elder Arg didn't mind ripping apart giants limb from limb, of course, and there wasn't a Jotun his size who could rival his strength, especially with Philosopher's Might up.
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Brother Wayfirst preferred to use his handfangs, but he wasn't an idiot. He could use a bigger Weapon as readily as anyone, and we applauded politely as he downed his first solo Mu, previously working with Mindring to take down two others. Of course, I had to drop it from the sky, but eh, he did the job of carving it open with a Cleave-Train and AoO's.
Mu Goo Jars were inserted into the gunk, it was sucked inside; the psionic nexal was carved out, so very nice, and the other Brothers had all caught up by the time we were done. Disks followed them, full of many, many gallons of Mu Goop.
They'd all been clued in on what it might mean to get Lesser Exemplar status. We all agreed the Bloodline compulsion probably wouldn't affect a Forsaken Human/4, but you never knew. In any event, there'd still be recognition, and politeness meant we wouldn't do it without Wolf's permission.
Naturally, it takes time to track down giant floating fungi-balls across a 900 x 300 mile zone covered in building-sized mushrooms, many of which liked to do exciting things when potential fertilizer was in the vicinity. Equally wonderful, Void Brothers can veilwalk very quickly to close in on their targets, and if I wasn't THAT fast... I was still damn fast, and getting faster as I bought up some Hag and Succubi Levels for that extra +10 to movement speed, and could really kick it into high gear.
We'd left the company at the Obelisk in the middle of the zone because we still had to extend the Wake. The company wasn't staying AT the Obelisk, of course... something nasty and powerful might arrive there to investigate. A couple dozen miles away in the huge mushroom forest was fine, under some giant mushrooms that didn't drop acid flowers or have animate roots or launch spore bullets or pop tendrils or... whatever, they were just big mushrooms that could make sure we weren't seen from overhead. The fliers kept watch from above, waiting for us to come back with Jars full of Phat Lewt.
Which is pretty much what we did. The speed we killed the Mu Spores at was only limited by the speed Briggs and I could get them to drop them out of the sky. So, basically every two hours we moved from one's territory to the next, leaving a Brother behind to loot and then went to find another one. Rinse, repeat, find them all, kill them all.
No, we weren't particularly interested in keeping them around to harvest from for perpetuity, which the Hags obviously were. If this reality shard collapsed and they survived, there would be a whole lot of Mu Spores packed into a very small area, all of them pissed at us... or they'd all be swept off into Leng and vanish, and with them their sweet Mu Goop, Nexals, and Karma. Too bad, very sad. In order for them and their drive to cover the world in the Grey not to be wasted, best to kill them all now. Be confident, everyone, we will collapse this Reality Shard, so extermination of the elder abominations before they vanish is a mercy and useful thing to do!
No, no, it's not greedy harvesting of precious, precious resources without caring about species extinction. There were a whole lot more Reality Shards with Mu Spores in them, according to the wistful Brothers.
Ah, if Briggs and I had just gone around massacring stuff with them for those three years, what joys and wonders we might have accomplished...
Aaaargh. Doing the right thing, doing the right thing, I sobbed silently to myself, vision of so much Karma I could not eat it all running down my throat with all sorts of Levels attached.
But, I could cover nearly two thousand miles a day. That was more than half the Mu farms, and a bunch of dead Mu Spores. Revitalizing strikes, chasing off the edge of that fatigue from running 75 mph for hours and hours.
Damn, all those wasted lived-line miles, when this space was just going to go away. Sob, sob. So unfair on my poor feets...
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I met up with Briggs in area 15, he not having quite the legs I did (in more ways than one, hah!) and we proceeded back to the area of the Obelisk, where the lads were energetically searching down dangerous things to make sure they got their Naming Karma, but not straying too far from the Wake so they could rendezvous with us. We could turn around, and go booking as everyone got on the Disk Train and headed for the border to the Greenhag Empire.
And if the Elves had been up to some rather impressively awesome conspiratorial Rituals with Wayfair while we were gone, that was totally fine...
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Unsurprisingly, it was wet.
Long term terrain adjustments had resulted in a lot of floodlands here. Rivers sprawled over miles, marshes and swamps went on and on. There was a lot of game around, of a size suitable to feed a lot of giants... and there were a lot of giants.
River giants, hill giants, swamp giants, and some rare fog giants formed the upper range of the intelligent threats here, with hordes of ogres, bands of trolls, and giant animals of the marsh and river-dwelling kind dominating the rest. Giant crocodiles and crayfish seemed rather common, with the occasional giant pike, giant snakes, and vecme in the deeper waters. We saw catoblepas, with their killing stares, at a careful distance, as well as different kinds of great sauropods munching away on the reeds and goop.
We weren't pleased to find out some of the ogres were were-crocs, BUT... they weren't True werecrocs, so they had no Exemplar bloodline, as the Wolf confirmed.
There were just a whole lot of Jotuns. And once the alarm horns carved from the thighs of massive sauropods sounded, they did keep coming.
This was a problem. Normal ogres were one-hit kills for the vanguard team, but werecroc ogres were two-hits, which meant much harder to mass slaughter. Any True Jotun was at least two hits, with the elites reaching three and four. You start pouring hundreds, then thousands of such drawn over many leagues by the sounds of those horns, and yeah, the company was going to have a problem. Several hundred head-sized rocks coming in at two hundred mph was a good way to spoil everyone's day.
Happily, they didn't seem to have much in the way of air power, not needing it when they had so much anti-air defense walking around everywhere. Shields and armor didn't really stop the rocks, you had to Soak the hit or you'd get smashed off your feet like a straw dummy.
The best way to deal with them was to get in and out and do our business quickly, not allowing them to truly encircle us and gang up to stop us. We could definitely move faster, but avoiding notice was extremely difficult, as they had naturally high vantage points, and Jotun eyes are bigger than an eagle's and can see things a long distance away. Avoiding notice was very difficult, and as soon as the first alarm horns blew, things were going to get very difficult.
So, we had to move at night, which, dim as this place was, wasn't so much of an issue, along with the wide prevalence of night vision and devilsight in the company by now. Some illusions to ward us in shadows, and were just a patch of shadow moving across the ground, with brothers scouting ahead, and invisible dragons and griffons overhead, laying out the ground and potential encounters up there, steering us away from knots of ogres and giants who could set up a really bad encirclement of us.
It didn't mean they didn't notice the Wake above us, as the thing was bloody obvious. But word hadn't spread that we were coming, so they didn't know it was us doing it, and although it was interesting, it didn't mean they were going to drop everything and move after it. Also, because we were minimizing kills, it was very slim and more erratic than the areas behind us wedged open grandiosely by the slaughter of legendary flying fungi and stuff.
Oh, we did have to kill things, but Sound Bubbles of size made sure that all the horns being blown didn't go anywhere, and nobody heard whoever we had to slaughter. We also got up on any horn blowers VERY quickly; much, much more quickly they expected, and they didn't get the chance to run away and be seen by others. If some of the ornerier animals or predators messed with us, well, they became Wake fuel, and a lot of the folks made comments about giant crocs making some excellent and stylish footwear... who were promptly put in their place by their counterparts dreaming of dragon-skin cavalry boots and thigh-highs.
Still, we managed to keep our profile low enough that no huge alarm rang out during the night.
Naturally enough, the dim daylight of the occluded sky did eventually come, and we could see the Obelisk on the horizon... and the massive banyan tree city that spread about it for miles, Olympian-sized and populated by tens of thousands of Jotuns.
Yeah, this was going to be interesting...
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Strangely enough, it wasn't as hard as expected. I knew there was a reason we kept Void Brothers along.
Jotuns as a rule aren't too clever, and definitely aren't up on the military handbook. If we had problems moving the Company to a safe area, and risked them ganging up on us, well, then the thing to do was draw them away.
The Hags had to know something was wrong and we were coming, and the giants and ogres closer to that mangrove/banyan city did indeed seem to be on the alert, especially seeing that rift in the sky coming for them. However, what exactly was coming they weren't sure about, because the Hags didn't know, and so couldn't tell them.
So, when a bunch of Void Brothers came out of nowhere and started kicking up a fuss, that got attention, and a whole bunch of giants, ogres, and the hags giving them orders converged on that area very quickly.
Who knew a bunch of feared assassins did diversions so well?
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Glossary: Olympian-sized means that everything mundane is approximately twice normal size. Trees, mice, bunnies, the grass, etc. In other words, it's a world where Giants look like humans, and humans look like halflings. It also means mundane animals and magical beasts are twice as strong/tough/etc... you know, challenges for legendary heroes and demigods.