The Wizard was there, glaring at me from behind Rova, another Nah’gh woman. I found myself glad to see that she’d survived our encounter. A Nah’gh woman was the first person I’d ever killed, and I felt a twinge of guilt at the prospect of killing them.

Molls was never far from my mind.

The last remaining board member of the Dearth Southern West Coast Board, a tall, male humanoid with blue, ridged horns extending from his forehead, stared back at me with wide open eyes, and one hand raised to his mouth. I’d clearly surprised him by smashing through his roof.

I nodded as they stared. “Smart,” was all I said, watching the word send chills through the lot of them.

Then the portal snapped shut, and I was alone in the penthouse with Doofus. Another victory, though the battle still raged below. Without MortBlock coverage, it would be more difficult for me to claim the area, but it wasn’t a huge inconvenience.

Just meant more tedium.

The way MortBlocks worked ensured that possession was still nine-tenths of what you needed. While I held the area militarily, the MortBlock owner would be unable to refresh it, as they were too far away physically. Soon enough, with the damage being caused by fighting, my MortBlock coverage would sweep in further and further. After that, coordinated tagging teams would fill in the gaps.

My hobbs had brought me two other MortBlocks before we even launched against LA, extending my official reach into parts of Mexico including the Baja peninsula. My target had been the southern Californian coast, a major trading port, and hub of Dearth’s activity in the area.

Even driving across turf with deep enough treads on a heavy enough vehicle was all it took to alter land enough to claim. The process of flipping the territory would be a hassle, but the military strikes and consistent damage inside the LA area were helping me fill in the blocks already.

MortBlocks were a little ridiculous in certain cases. Because I had broken through structural supports on the roof, the entire building we stood in was considered damaged enough to be a different structure and was therefore available for my MortBlock to claim.

So the fighting in the streets affected entire neighborhoods, and as my regimented hobb forces routed the rag-tag Dearth remnants, I was given more and more of the port city that I needed. Taking Los Angeles was the key to the entire west coast of the continent.

There were other ports, but none as easy to access for ships the size of what Dearth had been using.

I was happy to see several of the massive cargo vessels come into my grasp as my teams continued their assault throughout the morning. Each of the massive cargo vessels was owned by a captain, and each captain was forced to surrender their MortBlock, as my fleet grew and grew.

The other board members had been offered something similar, by my hobbs. They refused and were killed for their blocks. Only the alien with blue horns had survived. By the end of the morning, six monstrous cargo freighters were mine, all sitting peacefully in the bay.

My own hobbs had rappelled down from the hovercraft to my position, seen that I didn’t need their help, and went to go take the rest of the tower. These Dearth towers held nice treasure too, I was sure to make a small fortune from the confines of its vault, armory, and whatever personal effects were left behind by the ultra-wealthy former owner as he rushed to escape the mirror-helmed warlord of Arizona.

And I was going to enjoy digging through its more unique items, once everything was settled and sorted.

But for now I had to be content to stand in the tower and coordinate the battle from above.

Rayna and Tollya both were deployed, both wearing basic versions of the starfish suit relic. I’d managed to get a handful more of them, dealing with my Afflqwst app, which connected me to the Teslak Cooperative’s storefront.

Since taking over Arizona, Axle and I had visited it a small handful of times, trading in Afflqwst coupons for a growing collection of base-level starfish suits. I’d collected over forty since that first eventful week.

Rayna, Tollya, Ordo, and Jada all asked for one, and received them. After that, the relics were assigned to any trusted members of the affiliate, all within the original BlueCleave tribe.

The rest of my front line combat teams all got personal shields, which was an expensive investment but worth every mortie. Our teams had low mortality rates and ever increasing levels of combat experience. The shields also helped with morale, most hobbs were not used to being equipped with one.

As my extremely difficult-to-kill troops cleaned out Long Beach, the ports, and the bay, Rayna and I directed their movements from above. Our troops established a forward base at the tower, since I MortBlock-owned it, and we dominated the meager Dearth troops from the heart of their own operation all morning.

Axle explained that while the Southern West Coast Board had sent for reinforcements, their request had to be addressed by their greater Sol Board, since no other Nu-Earth governing boards were willing to spare their own troops.

The delay had meant the fall of their territory.

It was a lot of open land, desert, and ruined cities to cover, with nothing but a handful of ports down the coast to justify the expenditure, but I was more than happy with it. And just knowing about Dearth’s tremendous bureaucratic weakness put a big ole smile right over my face.

It was something I’d be able to exploit again and again so long as my actions here never got bigger than their profit concerns elsewhere.

I wanted the land for the population, primarily. In any clustered formerly-civilized area, there were always survivors. A lot of them had already come to me in Prescott, for safe haven, but I knew there were more out there. Trapped, or living hand to mouth on what morties they could scrounge, just barely staying ahead of death, or Storage.

The stories my survivors had when they reached my gates, or my squads picked them up, were never nice, or uplifting. But I never stopped trying to find them. It didn’t seem like anyone else was looking.

We had launched our attack at dawn, following the spy’s flight. By noon, everything but a few pockets of hardened resistance on the docks of Long Beach was mine, and fleets of hobbs and human volunteers were already driving vehicles across the open land to the north and east of Los Angeles.

Vehicles were one thing we had plenty of, thanks to Rova. The Nah’gh vice chair had run a sizable security force out of Prescott for Dearth, with the goal of securing and protecting the space elevator and surrounding port that I had stolen.

Now the large fleet of admittedly cheap vehicles was mine too, under the care and custody of tribe BlueCleave. Dearth’s ground based rollers had their strong suits, but they were more fragile than I cared for.

BlueCleave engineers, at Tollya’s suggestion, stripped most of the fleet for city-runners, making them as light as possible by removing sections of plating and weapon emplacements.

The vehicles were modular, which was an amazing benefit. Axle told me to think of it in terms of sleds and parts. We had taken nine-hundred and ninety-four quad wheel roller sleds, down six from encounters with me prior to our takeover.

By removing the primary armor plating from six hundred, we were able to lighten those considerably for general transport of people and goods throughout the city and star port.

That armor plating then went onto the remaining four hundred, in varying amounts, to create armored personnel carriers for my military. We had triple plated vehicles for dangerous missions and quick, lightly armored scout craft.

Also worthy of note, Tollya kept adding new stuff to the fleet that she liked, usually for specialty roles. It all came out of their ten percent, so I wasn’t complaining, but there were some oddball vehicles in BlueCleave’s hangars.

The fliers were more limited, we only had one hundred of them. I had a handful of employees that needed them for transport, like Lee. He commuted to Prescott every day.

The star port spread out around the elevator, in a broad U-shape, so we needed aerial police to control that. Plus I needed a fleet of rapid response troopers and engineers for the elevator itself, and with several docking stations built into the massive structure, our hovercraft were a natural fit for them too

Beyond that, I had known Dearth would need another ass-kicking soon, so every flier we could spare went into my ever-expanding military.

The entire fleet was electric, so range was a massive limiter outside of Prescott. We’d carried Cube with us on the invasion, he seemed to enjoy going on trips, often shouting for pilots to fly faster, or make sharper turns.

Since he’d grown a step in his development, he’d become a lot more involved in day to day life.

Prescott had a big old honkin’ nuclear reactor courtesy of the Dearth Conglomerate, so it wasn’t difficult to run power from that to Silken Sands, and free up Cube to do things he wanted to do.

And, it turned out, he primarily wanted to eat new and interesting people. So he joined our military.

Seemed like the best place to keep both entities happy.

Cube was often used to power the entire military fleet on long engagements, via remote transmitters installed in his heavily armored flier. Tollya regularly flew command from that vessel and communed with the sentient metal box.

She even fed him his desired victims.

All dead, of course. She shuddered to think of feeding him a live one, or so she said, anyway. I had my worries, though. She was an indulgent hobb.

Our fleet was something we were quite fond of, quite protective over. We’d only lost a single vessel in the battle for Los Angeles. So when my heads up display showed the entirety of my ground fleet as disabled, spread out across multiple states and areas, I gaped at the readout.

Then the tower began to shake. The penthouse waved and swayed, as the building's earthquake protections rolled to absorb the motion and energy.

A massive earthquake was rattling the coast.