Weeks and Levels later...

“Hold!” Shiera sang out, and everybody instantly froze in place.

Everybody was on foot now. Riding in a hoverwagon, on a Disk, or flying didn’t expand your lived-line. As a result, all teams had to have some form of lightfoot for moving overland at a good pace. It was perfectly fine to fly a hoverwagon along your lived-line, but you better be on foot after you reached your last advance point.

Extending lived-lines got painted into the Map with absolute spatial coordinates. That meant people could unerringly Teleport along them, or even Linejump with precision, despite the interference of the Haze shrouding the world in crackling whiteness and removing landmarks.

As a result, their teams had the potential of instant bail-outs available, from Sama sitting on top, or the psions arduously clawing their way up the ladder of power. Those people who could improve their Soulbound Item Familiars to that point could also access teleportation, potentially multiple times a day.

Teleporting along someone else’s lived-line didn’t give you the range boost, but it was still perfectly accurate, which was the whole idea. Every team held a Teleport Focus to grant a range boost, and of course, if the teleporter had lived-lines close by, the range bonus might kick in anyways.

They’d been doing this for weeks, flying in and out of the Wastes, slowly extending their lived-lines out, and wiping out the extremely dangerous native life-forms as they did. Generally, they moved from ant nest to nest, stirring up trouble. Newbies came out to get power-leveled by fighting ants, while everyone else took on the bigger stuff. Fighting swarms that weren’t going to spare you if you panicked and tried to run was a good way to harden just about anyone.

But Sama was up there, and Chalice was Singing to them, telling them to drink deep of battle, and the sweet, sweet Karma that would pass their lips and send them on the road to greatness.

The seismic teams that recorded activity of the beasts outside the walls back in Janus Prime had remarked that there was a whole lot less sand wurm activity than there had been in hundreds of years...

And so, the Karma Hunting Teams expanded out, girt in corrosion-resistance by Vajra or psi, their battlewagons likewise reinforced, harvesting beasts and occasionally running into the great Crystal Rocs stopping in for snacks on patrol over their territories. Their little caravans of battlewagons generally scared up all sorts of buffet leavings for the big birds...

Now they had finally made it to the crumbling hills at the edge of the desert territory.

It meant they had all grown up. Nobody in the team was less than a Six at this point, and the leaders were all at least Eights... which was very, very impressive when those were Rantha Hags and Briggs Brothers.

Shiera reached out ahead of herself, flicking up her soulclaw. An edge sharper than a razor reached out, and tinked on something.

Golden light flickered along something transparent and incredibly thin. Sharp eyes watching narrowed, and a few people swore.

“Monofilament?” Piotr Briggs asked, his Hammer at rest, watching his girl’s soulclaw trace it.

Shiera nodded. “Someone give me a dispersed las, play it over the canyon.”

One of the G&G Nulls quickly adjusted his las, lifted the rifle, and sent out a dim fan of not-so-hard light, washing it over the empty, shadowed space in front of them.

Everyone sucked in their breath when they saw the light get refracted in complex whorls and patterns, filling the canyon to a great distance above them with webs of unmoving, bright strands of ruby light.

“Glass Spider.” These things didn’t wrap things up into a web to kill them. Running into a glass spider’s web generally meant you were sliced apart by invisible monofilament lines, not wrapped up. They wouldn’t cut through Energized Armor, but anything less hard than diamond was basically going to fall apart from a high-tensile line only an atom or three thick.

“Where’s the spider?” Piotr asked, hefting his Hammer, which began to rumble with Thunder. He swatted it forwards, and the monofilaments in front of him broke with a tinkling chime, shredded and falling into stray atoms as the sonic energy reverberated through them, found their harmonic frequency, and shattered them.

“Ten o’clock high, fifty yards,” Shiera said after a moment. Everyone focused, but most of them couldn’t see anything. “It’s light-bending, perfectly transparent at this point. Hard rounds only. Kloser! Energy Blast, right down the middle, use Thunder.”

The Beacon Psi, proudly displaying his Hexagon, stepped up, his Null girl Jilla right with him. He took her hand in his own, focused, and psionic power moved from her to him, followed the Line of directed energy outputs from his tailbone, up his spine and over his head to his third eye, and erupted out.

The attack was a Lance effect, ten feet across, sounding like a great bell ringing as it blew through the center of the web. The monofilament strands blew apart instantly, shaken apart by even a minimal application of power.

They were watching, and saw the motion up above as the spider shifted ever so slightly. Great spiked legs that could hang on the cutting lines read the vibrations in the webs as countless strands were instantly shattered, and naturally the sound of the sonic blast carried for a great distance.

The riflemen all had their guns charged up. All of them had long customized their guns to include both slugthrowers and beam capability. Some used disruptors or plasma charges, some lasers or particle beams, a few used Verje Chambers and could throw alternate energies like frost, pure force, and thunder at specific foes. Corrosion damage was available, just in case, but given the alkaline environment, basically useless unless something very strange happened.

Mostly, they just shot things.

Archer was the most common Primary Class among the G&G people, as this was the future, and ranged attack power ruled the roost. Having a built-in melee weapon meant they didn’t have to carry knives or clubs or what have you, and they weren’t allowed to ignore their infighting skills.

Generally, melee combat was best left to those in power armor or with insane stats. The Briggs Brothers generally worked enthusiastically at the former, and the Ranthas had the latter. Both were very happy to come to melee, and generally left most of the ranged combat to the others out of fairness. Watching a Briggs rip a claw off a Shredder Scorp was a nice way to get respect for the fighting prowess of the Ancients, and nobody underestimated the golden swords of the Ranthas.

That being said, Sun Shots converged on the motion, blew apart the stones around the spider, and the veil of light deflection around itself.

The spider materialized, ten-legged like most spideroids were on this world, and with a legspan forty feet across. Three of its legs were on its web, the others anchored into the stone about it, easily supporting its weight on dangerous glassy legs. It was nearly transparent even now, the glass-like hairs of its body naturally refracting the light around it and making it hard to focus on.

It was just starting to turn and scuttle away when the other twenty rifles opened up with Sun Shots of their own now that its concealment was down.

Each shot hit like a grenade, psychic force exploding through its mass, punching through the deadly and razor-sharp hairs that could slide along on monofilament webbing. Several legs blew off it before it could scuttle away in time, and it lost its hold on the cliff. With a tinkling cry, it fell off the cliff, and fell right into the grip of its web.

There was a wave of darkness through the glass of its hide, odd colors and patterns starting to rise, even as the crystals seemed to shrivel and die. As they did, they lost their resistance, and the spider slowly began to fall again. As it did, it was sliced apart repeatedly from multiple angles and vectors, silently, smoothly, and what reached the ground was many, many bloody sections that didn’t look like a spider at all.

“Paint it again,” Shiera said, watching alertly, unmoved.

There seemed to be a hum in the air as Timoth swept his laser out slowly.

There were twings and twitches, quiet but distinct. In the light of his laser, the web was disintegrating, lines vanishing as they lost their tensile strength, and tore apart in the psychic backwash of their maker’s death.

It only took two minutes, and there were no webs within the light of his laser.

“See if that thing has an intact nexal, and let’s go. Our goal is the other side of this plateau. We want to get up on the high desert, and see what the fuck is under the haze there.”

Everyone nodded. They were one of the elite teams now. The Wastes behind them were for the newbs to exploit. They were the vanguard and spearhead, out to find better hunting grounds.

---------

The foothills and canyons of the edge of the plateau were spideroid territory, including Glass, Shadow, Obsidian (ten attacking legs), Radiant (web focused sunlight into laser beams), Longlegs (twice normal length, able to scamper about with ridiculous speed), and several small scuttling hordes of younger spideroids thinking their group looked like mass meals.

There was no magic to raise the dead here... but there was psionic power that could snatch back a recently dead person, much like Cure Deadly Wounds. Shiera was working on that as opposed to Teleporting quickly, as she could call in outside aid via Teleports if needed, but if someone went down, they had to be healed NOW, or that was it. No White Staves to raise the dead, so if someone was poisoned, dissolved, torn apart, burned, impaled, crushed, or otherwise killed, they had sixty seconds, no more, to get the body parts together and bring them back, or it was too late.

They’d lost two members of the team; one to an avalanche, the other to a Longlegs who fled far enough fast enough that they couldn’t catch up to it in time.

But past beetle swarms, one dune-sized sand ooze, various varieties of scorpioids and more beetleoids, they had woven their way up along the game trails coming down off the plateau, avoiding the dead ends, and finally setting foot on the highland.

The air crackled with electromagnetic distortion that was really unsettling the fusion plants of their vehicles and tougher weaponry, and they had to leave such below the lip of plateau. Indeed, the whole area seemed to be pretty hostile to techno weapons, draining energy from their clips precipitously.

No surprise, looking ahead. Shiera made sure everyone was sending what was ahead back via Marktells.

The Haze was running with a sickening panoply of colors, veins and swirls along the Veil that were unmistakable if seen before... and those sights had been seen many times by them or those close to them, sometimes close, sometimes at a distance.

Shiera looked left, panned all the way to the right.

“That looks like a fucking continent-wide Warp Zone, Piotr,” she noted to the looming Ancient at her side, and everybody else.

“I’m guessing it’ll grind down any tech above Four or Five, or that’s not psi-backed,” he agreed slowly, “but there’ll have to be tests to confirm.”

“So, slugthrowers, no energy weapons, no gyros.” There were quiet groans all around, even from the Verje users. Ammunition was going to be a problem...

“And why would they do that?” Shiera smiled dangerously.

“To make an environment more amenable to personal combat,” Piotr said without blinking an eye. “The place is probably full of Warped, Mutants, and Demons.”

“And what else?” Shiera inquired of everyone, and Piotr shook his head once.

“KARMA...”