It was another of those long, slow overland crawls. Ten miles of spawns of some of the most dangerous creatures in the Dereth islands, clearing a road through them to the end of the island.

  It might or might not have been easier to work the beaches instead, but that was kind of self-defeating. The beaches were the easy spawns, the ones the rare paramount teams were daring now and then in the slow and steady quest to gain The Deep’s approval and open up Luminance to new people. The spawns up on the Blighted stone of the island were the dangerous ones, but the ones that had to be cleared the most.

  Everyone took a week off just to prepare for this fight, heading home to visit the families they didn’t get to see often, blow off steam, relax, and get ready for more tough fighting to come. Lord Mick was regaling us with tales of all the different meals he and Bunita had been trying out, his wife consistently out-eating him at all stages, combining that with a trip to the Temple of Forgetfulness to free up some Karma so she could actually start gaining some Matrix Levels and begin her own rebuilding process.

  Kris and Briggs actually vacationed on Aerlinthe Island. With Aerefalle’s fall, the sapient undead stationed there had mostly abandoned the island, and the two of them had a great time rampaging against everything that remained, Sealing every Spawn Point they came across during the day and getting some vigorous exercise in at night, too.

  I’d kept busy mostly in the A’Nekshay area, hunting Burning Sands golums. There weren’t enough of the Hearts around, and very few people were bothering to hunt them with better options available. Master Ben Ten and a couple of his students had offered to accompany me, and we’d run circuits of the Spawn Points among the ancient sandstone cliffs of the area for hours. The only loot was jewels and the Hearts, but it was enough, and the swordsmen appreciated the fact that I could play close support mage without difficulty, and I was plenty able to Inflict-Heal them easily and keep them in the fights.

  I didn’t stop my daily Resurrections, either. Like my daily Investing, it was just something I did.

  Candeth Martine had sent a missive over, wondering if I might not want to raise one of my smaller Pyramids near to Candeth Keep for some security.

  So, another project to add to my downtime.

  The Dark Isle had one random element, and that was the Dark Falatacot undead followers of N’cthail who still wandered the place, occupied the temple at the far end, and actually controlled access to the Radiant Infusion.

  They didn’t appear to have much control over the Summons crawling all over the place, which was fortunate, because soon enough we were in running skirmishes with the black-clad monastic male followers and the scarlet-clad mistresses of the Sect and their Incantor magic bombarding us.

  That did indeed get irritating, especially since they could forcibly break any Sealed Spawn Points. As a result, all of the undead, Summons themselves or not, became primary targets on the Dark Isle, to be vivified if at all possible.

  Reaching them was something of an exercise in frustration, as they were centered inland and far up the coast, and to reach any of the Summons or real ones, we’d have to go through rings and layers of Spawn Points all too happy to try and kill us for them.

  When we retreated, they’d come in and break the Seals on the Spawn Points, and we’d have to reclaim the same ground all over again, as there just weren’t enough forces working the place to hold it against them.

  Four days we went back and forth over the same ground, getting better at killing the stuff that was there, but essentially making no progress whatsoever. The real undead retreated through the Spawns and impassively watched from the distance as we killed our way through them, not bothering to engage with us.

  There were infinite amounts of Summons, so what did they care?

  ---

  “Getting nowhere. Skirt the beach an’ go right fer the temple. If the lass can bring down their little place o’ worship, they’ll have t’ come running, right?” the Mick asked, annoyed as we retired to the Wagon after another day of tracing whiteness across the Blight of the Dark Isle.

  The undead naturally didn’t want any vivic fires Burning here and doing any real work, so anything we left behind in that vein was rapidly defiled. No real progress was made, deeper contamination welling up from inside the island to keep everything unclean and nasty.

  “Maybe,” Kris growled, stabbing her steak as if it were personally responsible for her level of frustration. She was primarily offense here, as Quaver’s Deepsong meant the enslaved remoran and sleech spawns here wouldn’t dare to attack her… or me, for that part. It was a nice benefit that allowed her to charge in on them and go apeshit all over them if I got some Imperils off on them for quick kills, but it didn’t do anything for the golum, shade, ruschk, or mukkir spawns. “It depends how fanatical they are about defending specific areas of rock. By that definition, this whole island could be considered holy ground.”

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  The Mick groaned as Briggs just nodded. “The temple is an Empyrean building. They are quick to be rebuilt by design. Anything we do to it can be undone with magic and a little patience. I think they’ve got both down pretty pat, and their tolerance of dust mites running around messing things up has been demonstrated for years. They are indeed wary of the rumors we can kill them forever, but it’s not a small hunk of rock, and we don’t have the forces able to run them down.”

  “Then we wall them off.” Everyone turned to look at me. “That’s how you capture ground against a mobile foe. You deny them the ground. We can either wall them off or pit them off, but the jumping ability here is pretty ludicrous, so we’re probably better off with the former.”

  Briggs, Kris, the Mick, and the Roaches and Skeeters, too, all turned to look at the Dark Isle behind us.

  “Gor, that’s going to be a lot of walls, lass,” the Mick sighed. “Good thing ye’ve so much practice at it, aye?”

  I threw a fry at him, but he wasn’t wrong. Putting up walls was slow but relatively relaxing work, and if plans called for some, I was happy to put them in place.

  “You referring to my work with the Viamontians, or something else?” I asked him. I’d been back to Sanamar twice in the last two months, the Viamontians eager to expand their reclaimed territory. They’d lured in the Eaters, slaughtered them at the hardpoint I’d put up for them, and reclaimed some additional territory of the ravaged island.

  If Sir Bellas and some of the most skilled Bellenesse under him had quietly gone along to help out, that was their choice. The Bellenesse were using the same tactic on the northern island around the Hold of Karlun more frequently, as the hordes of Eaters spilling out of the north built up with remarkable speed because of the dense spawns there, based on what had originally been a green and thriving land. I was going out there about once a week to claim about a square mile back, slow but steady work.

  They were also pulling more souls trapped in System slavery out of there, slowly but surely, but that was also something being kept on the down low. The people in Sanamar were still former servants of the Corcosi, and would certainly be all for rebuilding their conquering armies if they could do so, something we simply weren’t going to let happen.

  “Lass, ye’ve put up probably a thousand miles o’ walls an’ roads an’ bridges an’ whatnot combined, an’ ye even bother t’ ask that?” the Mick just laughed at me, wagging that fry at me and then downing it flagrantly.

  Well, he wasn’t wrong.

  “They’ll have to be at least twenty feet tall to be any kind of a barrier, and thirty would be better,” Kris mused aloud, going right from annoyance at having to do it to execution. “They’ll have to start right at the Shoreward and keep looping out and over.”

  Briggs just glanced at me, and I flicked up a Holo of the island, starting here, on the shoal island just off the shore of the Dark Island proper, with The Deep’s shrine setting at the far end from us. “Spawn Points,” he said, and I blew up the local area before filling in the bright white dots of Spawn Points, limning in red those we’d repeatedly Sealed heading up into the middle of the island, all of which had been power-surged free by the undead working patiently once we’d quit the area.

  “You can walk up about a mile of wall per hour, right?” Briggs asked, everyone moving over Disks to take a look at the Holo with professional interest.

  “Yes.” A higher Valence opening would increase that, but that was my limit for now.

  “Safe zone, skirmish zone, danger zone,” Selena spoke up, pointing out the zones that started at the area nearest the Deathstone Pit and moved parallel along the shore until they were across from The Deep’s shrine.

  I flicked up rough walls in that area. The Dark Isle basically sloped up from south to north, the north side being mostly sheer cliffs. For that reason, the southern beach was generally considered the easiest area to work, with the zone right across from us having the most area to retreat to without a Shoreward and thus the ‘safest’, even if the Summons in the area were no safer than anywhere else on the beaches. No Spawn would get anywhere near the Deep’s Shrine.

  “Fortifications on the beach. I feel like a Marine again or something,” Briggs smiled happily, and I belatedly remembered that the Commander of Redshore had been very, very good about his shore defenses.

  “Question! Does raising walls affect the Spawn Points at all?” Kris’ student Sonya spoke up, her eyes, like everyone else’s, roving over the hundreds of Spawn Points visible on the map, just in this small area.

  “Good question?” Briggs looked at me.

  “No, unless a wall gets raised on top of one. Then it is displaced to someplace else nearby…” I pursed my lips at the observation.

  “We haven’t been doing many combat fortifications in hot zones,” Kris added to that, seeing the same point. “So, how far do you think we can push these Spawn Points apart?” she asked me.

  “Take it to the next stage,” I murmured back to her, steepling my fingers thoughtfully.

  Tsu Nippo, one of the two regular Support Mages, spoke up, “If the walls can displace them, we should be able to track exactly what has been displaced and see if we can move them via other means, right?” the Sho exclaimed eagerly.

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be so damn useful,” Briggs murmured, pale green eyes wide and intense. “Shifting Spawn Points from one point to another less convenient point to them nearby…”

  “Temporary, I be thinkin’,” the Mick grunted into the hopeful atmosphere, earning sour looks from everyone. “If ye be using magic to shift the things around with a spell or ritual or something, I be thinking that it’ll reset soon enough, same’s as the surges un-Sealing them.”

  I threw up my hands. “He’s not wrong. It can be done, but it’ll probably reset after so many respawns, or Natural Renewal, like a slowly tightening rubber band snapping back into proper position. A wall works because it’s more like terrain shifting, and Spawn Points don’t happen on ground a Summons can’t stand on easily.”

  “So they could pop to the top of a wall instead of to the side if it was closer?” Briggs reasoned, sighing as everyone basically nodded at the simple sense of it.

  “I never tried to build a short way to test it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a Spawn Point could move to the top of one of my walls if that was the easiest way,” I agreed reluctantly.

  We, the Shapers of rock and stones,

  shall ward away those pesky bones!

  You go rabble round and fight

  and we shall show you the true might

  of the Walls of the combat engineer!

  ============================

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