It was hard to miss the several-hundred-yards-high exploding wall of magic, earth, and bits of drow and their cities tearing across the landscape, even at a distance. Being forewarned of it happening, everyone broke off the fighting, slaughtering, and run-by looting to get a good view of things going utterly bad for the drow and the Hags.

Any sense of organization among the drow rapidly petered out. That also meant impediments to travel, especially along the Walls. Guards abandoned their posts with haste, hurrying back to join up with clans and families and figure out what to do next with the massive power vacuum at the top... and doubtless the intervention of other Hag Empresses at some point.

In the meantime, there was an opportunity to grab for power, extract some revenge, advance agendas, and manipulate rivals to be taken advantage of. Oh, and they had to deal with all the Blessed of the Hags (i.e. wolf-blooded Exemplars and werewolves), who had gone batshit crazy and were killing everything, certainly endearing them to their mistresses.

The drow no longer had the desire to sit themselves in front of an army of butchering outlanders and bloodthirsty monkeys and get killed. The number of drow the company had to worry about naturally plummeted.

That still meant they had to hook up with Sage Sama’s team, but happily, that meant just crossing the Zone straight through, which they needed to do regardless. Naturally enough, Brother Wayfist took the lead dragging the Disk Train, Elder Arg flying in his wake and dealing with any obstructions with some very big fists.

Their killing and burning and stuff was almost incidental to what was now going on. The drow had turned on one another with incredible energy, and simply ignored any thought of taking orders from powers beyond clan matriarchs and their own witches for now. The great Zone-wide city was rapidly burning, and a whole lot of drow were being killed by one another with energy and enthusiasm.

Ah, the pleasures of a Chaotic Evil society.

Brother Wayfist brought them as directly across the Zone as he could, the fighting getting nastier as the buildings got more frequent. There were murmurs about how a lot of these drow were probably going to end up as undead, which wasn’t a comforting thought, but they couldn’t do much more than shoot corpses as they went by, and given the scale of the fighting, it was truly a minor thing to do.

And besides, they’d killed a Zone full of undead already. It wasn’t like they couldn’t do it again...

Of course, it was easy to track where Sama’s team was, as the Wake extended across the sky, and the trail of carnage they’d left pretty much paralleled one of the smoking, hissing canyons that had blown through cities and great walls on its way out of the Zone. A solid line of blue, bringing down light from sun and moon that the drow had not seen for millennia, now stretched across the zone like an arrow, and began to bend and grow as it headed Inwards.

Ah, penalties in bright light, to add to those wild shroom dreams...

--------

Given that we were in the center of power, and the rest of the company had to catch up with us, there was no reason to just sit around with our thumbs up our bums. After a couple hours of drow and demons energetically avoiding anything to do with the plaza and the fallen Obelisk’s many cracked and shattered parts, which Briggs and Mountainhammer had some interesting contests in breaking down yet further, the lads got bored, and Wayfair wanted to go play, now that she could come out and gloat.

Well, that meant it was time to loot an empire. Hazé renewed the Gemjump on the Rogue Stone with us, and Jumped away to another stone, taking a large amount of purloined wealth with her as she did so. There was no way it could not be put to use.

The Brothers were extremely good at tracking down concentrations of magic. As often as not, this led us to some pit of horror where things we didn’t want to know existed lurked, were caged, or were Sealed. These cages often became rather weak when their primary source of power was gone, so the things inside broke out, and hilarity ensued.

...mostly because the Brothers laughed at the idea of extraplanars going up against so many Brothers at once...

So, in addition to all the fractional strife going on, the Brothers let some stuff go to add to the greater havoc, and yeah, those imprisoned creatures were indeed happy to contribute to the slaughter.

Wayfair was kind enough to shrink all kinds of massive volumes of loot down to be dispensed later. After all, our company could burn hundreds of thousands of gold value a day in precious metal, we wouldn’t actually be hauling it all around all that long.

We’re talking actual rooms filled with gold, too. Whether it was real or dream wasn’t an issue, as long as it was here. The lads would be all too happy to dispose of it.

But, we only had so much time to work on fun before the lads got here.

-----------

We met them outside the walls of the capital area, deciding that moving a large armed force into an area crawling with pissed-off avatars, elder abominations, and even a minor demon lord or two wasn’t a good idea. The inhabitants might have thought the same, but some irked godling had collapsed all the primary walls out, made the entire area a no-fly zone, and brought in a bunch of creepy-crawly stuff to take over the walls and prevent anyone from escaping.

The noble houses weren’t too happy about it, especially since they were experiencing an Eldritch Extinction Event, but they were certainly giving a good go of it. One of the Abominations was already dead, so the drow certainly weren’t no slouches.

We were resting in an out of the way park, where everyone was burning lots of gold down into magic items, doled out by Wayfair with great amusement as she watched it all go. The accumulations of an empire were vanishing by something like a thousand gold every minute, which was absolutely hilarious to her... and didn’t stop her from working on her own stuff, of course!

Being Sustained and Revitalized, we weren’t really tired mentally or physically, but I still called for two hours of meditation for everyone. Any drow passing by took one look at the armored ape looming over some ‘shrooms and decided to go elsewhere.

“It’s a good thing we looted all this,” I said to Briggs, as I watched a heap of gold coins with imprinted Hag faces burning away before me, powering up a Hag Baneskull that I’d already etched with more molten gold in the appropriate Runes.

“Yeah?” Briggs was doing the same, although that skull of his didn’t exactly look like a proper skull. Too many eyeholes, and I don’t think the mouth was supposed to be over there...

“I chatted with Wolf and Elder Arg. You know I used the Int bonus from the Mark to give the big guy Alchemy Ranks, right?”

Briggs pursed his lips, looked over at the looming mass of the great ape... who was also standing by a Rune Pattern, his Bonemelded Goristro horn now looking like a particularly frightening polemace.

Elder Arg had 21 Hit Die as a Primordial Ape. That meant 21 Ranks in Alchemy. That was Epic Knowledge of Alchemy.

That oversized, tusked gorilla was now the most knowledgeable mortal alchemist on the planet! Gotta love Akashic learning...

“Spellcraft next?” he asked softly, considering the implications of that.

“And he wants the Smithing skills. He wants to start making his own stuff, and teaching his people how to do so. He’s been taking Expert Levels on the sly...”

With 21 Ranks to build up, it would take almost three full Levels of Expert just to max out one Skill like that.

“What’s up with the money?” he asked shortly, knowing I’d brought it up for a reason.

“The process of Templating for Lesser Exemplar and True Werewolf involves using Mu Goop.”

Briggs blinked, his concentration almost breaking. “Gkkk!” he managed brightly. “Is this True Shifting? Not a Curse?”

“As long as the Wolf is willing, yes.”

“What did you do, Charm the bastard?” Briggs sucked in a breath despite himself.

“Well, I freed him from literally centuries of imprisonment, gave him a Mark... and I let him eat the brains of the Hag who imprisoned him. He’s also finding the Marktell hugely enlightening, and we’ve been talking about the Exemplars and their place in the world.

“And you know, nobody works together as well as monkeys and canines. We’ve been together a long, long time.”

“Truth,” Briggs grunted, still shaking his head. “Still... Mithar and Valus, Sama, do you know what those Templates can do?!”

“Yes,” I replied immediately. “I knew there were Exemplar Animals in here ever since we pulled up those bones at the entrance to the city. There’s at the very minimum a Lion here, and I can’t see only two out of the three Hag Empresses having one. So, I’m pretty sure there’s three, and the last one is stronger than a Lion. Don’t know what, but stronger.

“What I didn’t know is that Mu Goop is required as part of the process. So, we’re not going to be selling all that much of it.” Enough to at least see how good Wayfair was at the process, however...

“Ah. Ahhhhhh.” He looked around at the warriors here, especially the Ironblood. “Not just us...” he breathed. Obviously, if I needed lots of it, it was to do something on a scale similar to the Hags... without having harvest teams trailing Mu Spores around and accumulating the Goop over years and centuries.

“Lesser Exemplar isn’t Epic, and it will tie the recipient to the Wolf, as would Were’ing someone... but it’s still monstrously powerful.” I glanced over at the Wolf, who was sitting there with the Hellpoodles, who were treating him VERY respectfully. The Wolf was getting combed down by Veis, while Fido and Shirley were getting combed down by Verd and Amber respectively. Elder Arg was with them, too, and if he was more powerful than the Wolf, the lupine still had the automatic respect given to something with an almighty bloodline.

The dragons were giving the Wolf careful space. They had already learned what Pseudonaturals could do to them, and Exemplars were the ultimate step beyond that. The Wolf had taken two Racial Levels over the past two days, and was now the size of a pony. One more, and he’d be the size of a large pony or small horse, the size of a Dire Wolf.

He’d also expressed learning more about magic. He, I, Barus, and a couple of the Elves who were Druidic Casters were having discussions about it. The only thing holding the Wolf back from being a legendary talent at it was the fact that wolves didn’t think much about the future, even ones smarter and wiser than humans were.

What we had agreed on was that he was the protector of wolves, and to a lesser extent, all canines. That meant he was also a protector of the world his people lived on. Precisely the thing I was doing was protecting this world against the things that would despoil it, and harm the harmony of nature, of predator and prey, that wolves were intrinsically a part of.

Fido’s and Shirley’s stories about Hell and how the canines and lupines were treated there pissed him off to no end, as did the stories about how some of the goblin gods had corrupted wolves to make the barghests. The corruption was what bothered him, rather than wolves fighting for goblins. Canines would fight for their pack, whoever that pack was. Making them into something other then what they were was far too much like what the Hags had been using him for.

Becoming part of a greater Pack was an interesting idea to him, especially after digesting the fact that humans and dogs had been together for so long that dogs had actually evolved away from wolves in order to work better with humans. We were natural allies, almost made to work together... and there was a chance to work even more closely with them. Having willing members of his Pack among the humans was not a totally unallowable idea... as long as he judged who was and was not worthy.

Naturally, he regarded all of us Beyond Law and Chaos very carefully, indeed. He had seen us fight, knew how absolutely lethal we could be, and we were definitely no less superhumanly powerful than he was. The fact that so much of the natural power that made him dangerous meant absolutely nothing against us meant he knew that we could be a threat to him, and that he wasn’t anywhere near as much a threat to us. Mutual respect was the foundation of a good relationship... and as a Wolf, he respected strength deeply.

So, yeah, there was now an Exemplar Wolf and Primordial Ape tagging along with us, and we were negotiating using the former’s blood as a component in a Ritual to make Lesser Exemplars and True Werewolves, which Elder Arg was going to be mixing up with Mu Goop and our assistance.

I smiled to myself. This was the kind of reward that would make the Ironblood truly unique.

More to the point, there were other Exemplar Animals ahead of us...