“Ugh, dammit.”

“Again? Don’t they learn?”

“Firk ding blast...”

I held out my hand, Briggs forked over a gold coin, others were exchanged around me.

-Light’em up.- Far over by the savage tribes, Tremble relayed the order.

Yeah, last night’s Investing had all been aimed at making these.

Poofpoofpoofpoofpoof...

One by one, large braziers lit up. They were made of melted, purified Warp metal, breastplates mostly, lots of enchanted arms and armor Burned to power them up.

Vivic flames, of course.

The unwhite fires blazed up ten feet high, sucking in the energy leaking out of the Rift swirling slowly, unstoppably before us. Certain of the nauseating colors within it were becoming more prominent – the yellow of puke, bile, and corpse fat; the rust of decaying metal; the green of dying bronze and rotting meat; the fuzzy black of mold growing on carcasses.

Riggibuhl’s people were on the way.

Ahead of them was coming the disease-carrying swarms that would truly render this place into a pit of suffering. The Forsaken and certain of the Powered didn’t have anything to worry about, and the Casters could heal themselves, but everyone else was bound to get infected.

Whether they could endure it long enough to not die was a crapshoot most didn’t want to take. Enter the vivic flames.

The coming plague was driven by Warp energy, being supernaturally infectious, virulent, and pervasive. Warp energy was a fine meal for the Land, once vivified. The swarms of bugs that delivered the manifold plagues of Little Grandfather the Pox Bringer were going to fly into this area and go up like popcorn fireworks, Land munchie-munchie.

There were tensions between the various Warp Powers, to be expected of such Chaotic and self-interested entities. Klaw was ostensibly the most powerful of them, but vied with scheming jRaztl and despised the decadent Amourae. That basically meant Riggibuhl would have to be next.

After him would be Amourae’s legion of deranged fanatic sensualists, as Riggibuhl’s slothful gluttony and enduring acceptance of survival despite all resistance clashed heavily with jRaztl’s obsession with ambition, changing the world, self-reliance, scheming, and energy. Too, jRaztl’s forces would want to be last, to have the greatest chance to study their enemies and devise a battleplan to address all our weaknesses.

It was all cool. Knowing who was coming was half the battle, right?

Riggibuhl’s strength was centered on inevitability, endurance, and strength. His forces could take more punishment than any of the others, being able to shrug off pain and ignore seemingly mortal wounds. Plagues, poisons, and disease ran through their bodies like symbiotes, giving them secondary nervous systems, circulations, and endurance, even as it made them rather slow and stiff. They were very tough, and this had been verified repeatedly during the Warp band combats.

They were also infused with negative energy, as Riggibuhl was even more closely related to necromancy then jRaztl, who preferred more energetic and active forms of magic. This was known as being Tomb-Tainted among the knowledgeable, able to subsist on the negative energy of death, instead of the positive energy of life and the soul. This was extremely useful for necromantic types, as negative energy attacks healed them and their undead minions, while harming the living.

On the flip side, healing magic and positive energy would hurt them even as it healed the living. It’s just that there weren’t a lot of positive energy attack spells, as it were, while there were tons of necromantic ones.

But if you were forewarned, well...

You know that Healing Reserve, which allowed endless amounts of Health Healing? Well, Amana absolutely loathed Riggibuhl. There was a discipline called the White Fist, wherein you used the Healing Reserve to supplement your unarmed attacks against undead and other creatures of anti-life. Heck, you could grapple with one and burn a grinning Riggibuhl fanatic to death from the inside out. Those viruses and rot running through him weren’t anything but tinder to a White Hand.

And, well, there was this Sword with a Special Purpose out there and unlimited use of Mass Cure Light Wounds. Sure, it was only twenty points at a time per target, but it all added up... and she could mix it with Healing whoever the Riggors were fighting, a win-win.

The savages had vivic braziers burning, too, and had turned them into impromptu roasters for light snacks, such as it were. Ogres and their bigger cousins had big stomachs to fill, after all, and this promised to be a true grinding fight.

On a final note, the newcomers were going to be very, very disappointed.

One thing the swarms coming out of the Rift were supposed to be doing is looking for corpses to infect and animate with their necroic Plagues. Unfortunately, our dead were either gone to vivus or returned to life by now, with precious little in between, and the same went for the whole battlefield. Vivic torches had set all the dead to light, and the fires had burned for most of the night, actually. Those rage-monsters had fed the Land pretty good out there.

All those dead Klaw guys should have contributed a lot of corpses to animate and head to the fighting again. Alas, they were white dust on the wind, and all gone. Too bad, so sad, we didn’t have to fight two armies at a time.

It was like someone thought about things that might happen like that.

-------

Riggibuhl’s people preferred discordant drums and bone rattles, ceaseless waves of sound meant to lull and wear away at the resolve of their opponents. It wasn’t very effective against the Elevator Music from Heaven, soon to be replaced by the Power Ballads from Heaven, but can’t do much but give ’em props for trying.

Wayfair and the fashion-conscious were motivated to pick through all the sins against Style, marked out all the commanders, captains, bosses, and champions, urging everyone to remove them with great enthusiasm. No, dragging entrails is not a fashion statement...

Their second auction in Southmarch had gone nearly as well as the one in Zynozure, as those parties who hadn’t been able to get any Mu Goop in the capital had hurried on wings of teleportation to Southmarch to secure some there. Much gold had left tight fists in the forms of trade goods, whole warehouses or ships’-worth sometimes, and such had been removed with disconcerting quickness by the lovely haror accepting payment.

At the same time, a factory for six new lines of lady-friendly clothing, footwear, accessories, dresses, skin care, and lingerie was going up in style, and the Fairway House of Fashion was off and running. It was going to change clothing styles like everywhere, especially with the advanced mechanical looms already being designed and set up. Perhaps the women would be a bit confused if they learned Marked mandrilla had made the looms for their clothing, but whatever.

The Riggors had stepped out in all their rotting array for us to admire. They were basically grossly swollen or starving things, with not much in the middle. Skin and flesh were sloughing off, discolored, rotting, and didn’t seem to have any effect on them at all. New organs outside the body, guts, and innards hanging out, bulging muscles bare to the air, swollen blisters and dripping sores... yeah, it was all on display. They were into severed, rotting heads more than bony skulls as trophies, too, and scattered limbs on banners were always a treat.

There were a lot of Bannerbound. Community thinkers, the Riggibuhl were. None died until they all did, or so the plan was.

Yeah, this was going to be a long, grindy fight. However, there was the addition of soooo many Priests coming up, their ability to channel the power from the hearts of their gods providing us with some additional damage and healing capacity combined. No need to worry about healing the enemy this time, just let it all go and let them burn.

Shutting off my sense of smell, as the odor of rotting everything was so bad it was making it through the vivus, I picked up Quaver and Chalice, and with the Brothers and Briggs, headed off to work.

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

They had a lot of demons, and they had a lot of undead. The demons were there for our attention, they didn’t really get all that far, and the Land fed on them well. I think it was developing a Sluggor fetish or something, and certainly when one was opened up like an overripe tomato, the vivus wooshed into existence strongly enough to devour any Pusboys nearby, too.

The undead were just damage sponges: strong, mindless, slow, tough. They were mostly humanoid, a few oversized bugs, beetles ,and cockroaches the size of bulls also prominent. Riggibuhl liked his bugs.

They wore a lot of armor, since they weren’t going to be racing around, and had pretty good unit cooperation. Their auras of pestilence, decay, rot, and what-have-you ignited like gasoline vapors in vivus, which they didn’t seem to like, and all that ill-fitting armor made lots of holes to insert arrows burning white and anti-Warp Banefire pastel-blacks. Non-symmetric bodies were a pain to armor properly...

Today was a day for Called Lightning. It was one of the best long-term damage spells, especially in its long duration form. Once every ten minutes, call down a lightning bolt dealing a ten-foot radius of damage equal to your Caster Level in d6’s, d8’s if you were a Divine Caster with Air or Weather Domains, or a Druid. Since these guys were wearing a lot of armor and couldn’t dodge, this was basically an ideal spell for sniping out their bigger guys or tight-packed units. A good Caster would wring a dozen bolts out of it... and if they cast it multiple times, well, that was a lot of lightning and thunder coming down for the Valence Three it was Cast from.

There was a lesser version of it, faster-cast, doing a fixed 3d6 in damage, but getting a bolt every few seconds. Accented with banefire and other damage mods, it was still capable of frying lesser targets, but was nowhere near as effective as the big ones chopping down from above.

They advanced slowly and inexorably, taking hits that had downed Klawites without flinching, the Bannerbound taking a lot of concentrated fire to kill. Still, enough magic could kill them, and certainly Banefire was doing unpleasant things to them. Undead Tokens were far from uncommon things for us, and their Tomb-Tainted damage sponges actually died with remarkable speed to arrow fire that should have been virtually useless against them.

That was fine by them. They soldiered on into the screening areas with the rounded columns that forced them to split up. Some even stopped to whack on them, and even though it took them a while, reduced them to rubble to clear up a path.

I didn’t bother to tell them that it took literally six seconds to make one for a Stone Shaper, and the effect it had on traffic was minimal. There were too many chokepoints, and even though they were going to get through them with their numbers and toughness, they were still going to get bottlenecked.

Still-living soldiers started laying down, building up a false ground of armored bodies for those behind to tromp over. I was impressed by their fortitude and mindless dedication, and then multiple Spike Stones punched up through the ground over the vast area, impaling two and three of them at a time, and setting them all on vivic fire to burn those walking over them, too.

They had spellcasters with them, but those fellows had a problem, beyond the Brothers orienting in on them. When you have fifty or so Ritual-cast Call Lightnings going off, that’s a thunderbolt coming down every long breath to blow you apart. There was a regular chorus line of massive bolts coming down on the great and powerful to send them on their way, and the spotters were all over looking for them.

It really sucked for them that they couldn’t Summon in all the fun stuff that they wanted to in the Interdiction, and all their trying to Animate the Dead just made targets out of them. In general, they were next to useless, because the few direct attack spells they used ran right into our side with tons of Dispels ready to make that stuff useless, and then we promptly nuked the Casters. Plague clouds and similar nasty stuff never really made it into play.

Then there was Wayfair again.