Zone 2...

“So, I count two hundred visible super-worm tunnels through this pass...”

-------------

Zone 3...

“Um!” Verd pointed at a castle-sized toadstool in the distance. “Is that mushroom moving?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Everyone stared at the landscape covered in a thousand types of fungi, seeming to undulate as if alive, despite the fact there was no wind, only a lot of spores in the air... and some of those winged things in the sky had no heads...

------------

Zone 4...

It was cold, and the wind was howling through the pass ahead of them. Snow blanketed the ground, and the trees were heavy with white snow.

Shirley and Fido sniffed and growled. The dragons nodded agreement.

“Thousands of them,” old Corgun murmured, his wings wrapped tight against the nearly gale-force wind.

Everyone looked up at the long, narrow Wake of the Land riding above us. Yeah, no way they didn’t know something was coming.

“Should be fun!” Veis chimed, enjoying the climate, and everyone laughed softly...

--------------

Zone 5...

“Well, don’t these look familiar,” murmured Feist, shrugging off his new yeti-hide cloak. There were a lot of them, stacked on Disks as loot, they’d fetch a good price back home. Hazé, busybusybusy with her evacuation duties, would be popping in with an Item Tapestry to take them all off their hands, and distribute them to Sama’s goods-hungry burgeoning mercantile empire. There were, after all, far more of them than they needed to make everyone here cold-resistance items, no reason not to send them back to make more of the same... or make a whole lot of money, as long as they could be distributed around the continent.

And, well, Hazé was definitely bouncing around the continent, coming into the 400x zone, getting Renewed, and Gemjumping out to punch through the spatio-temporal hijinks. She’d already done a dozen Teleport Runs, bringing in hundreds of people and colossal amounts of goods through coordination and Marked in key places helping communicate. Popping up and dumping off a few/dozen/scores of prime yeti hides wasn’t even an imposition, although most of them simply got dropped in The Camp and were snatched up to make Cold Resistance items for the Ironblood there.

The company was parting with them because the plain in front of them was dotted with large mounds. They were all at least a mile apart, but they stretched straight to the horizon. And there were already dark blurs wriggling out from each of them...

---

“That’s a lot of formians,” Briggs observed, side-eying me.

“Is it? Prep for poison, everyone...” I half-grinned.

-----------

Zone 6...

Hazé looked behind us, at all the insect mounds littering the plains, the ones underneath that blue line in the sky kind of half-crumpled, with a clear line of white on the ground matching the skies above. She glanced at the stacked-up square Stone Shaped containers, lifting up the plug on one and sniffing.

“Ant honey.” Her eyes fell on the containers made from white stone. “Royal?” she asked, pointing.

“Well, their nests didn’t need them anymore,” Briggs said with a straight face. “We kept a bunch for Healing Potions, and Wand charging...” As a power comp, the magical royal honey meant you didn’t have to cast the spells to charge up a Wand, like normal; you just sacked the Honey to it. Given how much we’d recovered, charging up a couple Wands of Cure Serious Wounds made for a nice emergency reserve... and now everyone in the army had at least two doses to drink in event of emergency, too!

“Right.” She looked ahead, where the sparse grass of the ant-ridden plains gave way to desert, the sands turned remarkably dark remarkably quickly, but did not venture past this hill line, as if held at bay. “And what’s out there?”

“Temple to Apep,” Errant replied, silver eyes shining expectantly.

“Sooooo... lots of snakes.”

“Especially Fire Snakes!” he agreed enthusiastically.

“Well.” There was clear longing in her voice, but she was doing Good Work, and earning no less Karma than him in so doing. “Be about your snake-hunting, I suppose.” She sat down on her own Disk, shaking her head, and watched our troops gliding past on Disks, alert and ready to fight. She could rest from the spellcasting she was doing, go through an accelerated Renewal, and be off to another evacuation.

There had been deaths, of course, but with the White Staff, we’d managed to recover most combat deaths, and there were several Clerics among the elves and dwarves who could bring the dead back, as long as we recovered a body. Given how damn tough this troop was, and how much Healing we had available, it was actually really, really hard to perma-kill anyone as long as formations were kept and teamwork was adhered to.

And of course, Hazé could Gemjump in to the rogue stone Errant held, and provide even more help on the revivification side of things. With Tremble able to bring back anyone who died within the last minute, as long as she could reach them, we still hadn’t lost anyone permanently, despite some very energetic attempts to make it so...

----------------

Zone 7...

“That would be a real bad idea to go in there,” Errant mused, accepting the new boots of Fire Snake hide I handed him. He sat down on his own glowing Ward Wall and swapped out his tooled leather ones calmly. The flames that poofed up from them when he put them on were certainly eye-catching enough, although they wouldn’t set fire to anything unless he wanted them to.

The desert had rather abruptly given way to a dark and brooding old forest, rising out of the sands over the course of a mere mile, splayed around a winding river that gave some wet to the dry sands.

Apep had one less temple and was pissed at us, no doubt. Those had been some big Fire Snakes, but the Valor dragons had had an absolute heavenly time, freezing the burning neo-cobras and stuffing themselves silly on them. Fido and Shirley had just gone off on them, as such things were fairly common in certain areas of Hell, and rather bemused, the rest of us had just followed their lead as they rampaged around.

“Agreed!” Barus and Verd spoke up together, and Silent Jhon nodded, as did every single damn elf and halvyr there. Nobody wanted to go into that place. Broody and hungry, everyone could feel it.

“Barus, Commune with the Land, not the forest! Find out if this place can be purified. If so, where the heart of the forest is, what we need to do, and we’ll alpha-strike it with a strike team, and run everyone through while it’s recovering...”

----------------

Zone 8...

Horns blew, shrill and high, haunting and soul-chilling. I cocked an ear at them, noted how the eyes of the elf-bloods went wide.

-Hey, old crow, that horn what I think it is?- I /replayed the sound for Noir Rabe, still Way Back There, veeeeeeery slow.

-The Lost Hunt!- he /identified the horn immediately. -Be wa... Ah. Let them entertain you...- he /caught himself in time.

If they were caught in this zone, then pretty much anything dangerous had probably been hunted away. As long as the zone could be crossed during the day, it was probably perfectly safe.

Alas, we had come out in the evening.

“So, who wants to come with me to kill a Fey Hunt?” I asked freely, and the elves all looked very uncertain, while Brother Ancientaxe just looked disdainful, and Briggs and Errant totally expectant. Everyone else just kind of pursed their lips, looked at the stats in Markspace, and wished us well. The dragons were already scouting ahead, no need to turn back and engage with this... unless the Hunt was dumb enough to pick them as prey.

Not that I’d give them the chance...

----------------

Zone 9...

Mutated and malformed bodies, parodies of natural animals and bipeds, warped with aspects of other creatures, swollen muscles, gaping jaws and extended claws, and the occasional extra mouth or limb, were everywhere, now burning vivic.

The demigod was sitting atop a mound of burning corpses, His eyes glowing as he regarded Briggs and me.

He looked like an Ancient, with more teeth and claws, dressed in leathers from some beast I’d never seen, His famous Spear, and of course His stag-horned head.

A dozen warped versions of Him were burning away under our feet, and many of the creatures we’d had to kill were mutated versions of His green-fire-eyed Hounds. Of course, there were literally thousands more of the creatures dying throughout this barren place, where even the lichen and moss had been scraped off the stones to feed the hunger of the Gargovian Mother ensconced here.

She had to be limited to this zone, or she would have eaten the world by now.

I kicked the skull of one of the replicants, probably made from eating His corpse after He died. As a demigod, He naturally was Renewed to Hunt again, but if the Mother had been able to make multiple versions of Him, that meant He’d died here multiple times, and had been brought back to hunt again.

“Briggs greets the Elder!” mah Fuzzy said, bowing to the ancient god of the hunt. Lord Herne studied him, His bloody wounds healing quickly, and nodded slowly to this junior, His eyes flicking to the Hammer beating softly in Briggs’ hands. His eyes turned to me, and Tremble zipping around in the distance, dispensing rays of gentle white light... the same rays of light that had kept Him alive during this very long and bloody fight with a dozen of His doppelgangers.

By transferring his injuries to me.

He gestured us both closer, and, totally unafraid, we stepped up within arm’s reach. His hand reached out, and dark claws bit into Briggs’ shoulder (he let it). The bloody scar flashed with harsh red light, healing up even as He carved it. Briggs didn’t even grunt, as he had half-a-dozen deeper wounds on him right now.

He did the same to me, and when the scar flashed and closed, so did twenty-two different faded claw and bite wounds all over me, which He didn’t fail to notice. I’m afraid I quirked a smile at him, and He exhaled long and slow as he looked over the two of us, and nodded.

“Girls, clean Him up and make sure He takes the rest of the night off.” I snapped my fingers and pointed.

There was a fire in the eyes of all three of my little sisters as they came forwards, and there was no way the demigod was going to miss that light. The three of them pulled Him to His feet, and there was a thick set of cover not so far away...

Briggs watched them go, not knowing whether to laugh or not. “So... her first time will be with a demigod?”

“They are so envious of her,” I chortled, leaning over against him as if he were a tree.

“And you aren’t indulging because-?” he asked.

“Mah Fuzzy is way more dangerous than some ancient demigod who can’t even kill a bunch of Gargovian dupes of Himself. Exactly why would I prefer Him over you?” I gave the rock of his ribs an elbow, and he politely grunted... and lengthened it into a groan.

“I so need puberty to start and get done with like yesterday!” he growled, reaching a big hand out to drape around my shoulders and drag me in. He smelled my hair, all nice and sweet with vivisizing gargovian guts. “Aren’t you as old as Veis?”

“I’ll turn mine on when yours turns on,” I patted his hand. “It keeps them happy thinking they are all bigger than me because they went first.”

He sniffed the air, thick with primal vitality and ancient energies, stirred up by the presence of the Hunter. “We’re going to have to declare a night off after this, and break out the beer. The elves are getting restless...”

I laughed deep in my throat, and he shivered. “Come on, let’s give that Mother the final treatment. You ever kill her in game?”

“Yeah, made a couple runs. She probably won’t look anything like that, though...” He hefted Endure, I drew Quaver back out, and we started in the direction that Fido and Shirley were indicating.

The rest of the troops fell in behind, and didn’t look back to where the girls and the demigod had vanished to...

===========

Author’s Notes: Small zones range in size from 50 x 150 miles to 100 x 300 miles. Major zones are 300 x 900 miles.

Zone 2 – I was channeling Dune, but not so big. There are spots in the Felldeep where lots and lots of purple worms gather...

Zone 3 – The killer fungi zones in Vault of the Drow, only worse.

Zone 4 – Last module of Rise of the Runelords, there’s a yeti camp. Yeti can be verrrry tough in Pathfinder...

Zone 5 – I was thinking the bugs from Starship Troopers as I wrote this...

Zone 6 – Big Fire Snakes are the Cobras from Gods of Egypt. You can’t ride the little ones. Totally overpowered breath weapons from the little ones.

Zone 7 – This is based on an old Dungeon Magazine adventure where if you don’t purify the heart of the forest in time, it animates the WHOLE FOREST to kill you.

Zone 8 – I saw the stats for the members of the Wild Hunt from Paizo and went, aww, I just got to do this...

Zone 9 – And if you run into a Poser Hunt, you should run into the real thing. 15 HD demigod, kill him or die if you’re the target of his hunt. It’s okay, He just rises anew to hunt the next day, and holds no grudges.