Getting into position for the Vissidal Run wasn’t too hard, as we already had lived-lines along the shoreline. Basically it was a section of the beach off the northern end of the Espers Mountain Range; just line up with the island five miles away on the other side of the Shoreward and head on out.

  Both of the islands had great reputations among the paramounts as places to get a lot of loot before the Fall, and the trophies offered by The Deep had meant great Karma to be harvested from everything, too.

  They were also full of high level crap shooting Pyreal, Platinum, and Mana-level spells around, with far too much Health and annoying numbers and varieties of them, like the South Dires, only worse.

  Worse meant more Karma. Variety meant great for the Matrix side of things, too.

  The Dungeons on the islands had historically been limited, torn between undead of the Falatacot who had once buried both islands to Bind and Seal the Ruschk champion Grael below them, and who had come out of hiding or returned once those bindings were undone; and some minions of Grael who had taken over places devoted to their champion.

  Given Grael had a huge connection to the Shadow in the Void that was responsible for making the Shadow creatures, my sympathies for his rebellion against his Haebran enslavers was limited. He did manage to bring down their empire, in the end, ending a full Empyrean Age with the power and fury of his uprising.

  And somehow Dereth had been the key to doing so, imagine that.

  The trip across the waters was fairly short and sweet, barely five miles to come in on the side that historically had very few spawns, a fact which Master Oswald had assured us had not changed.

  ------

  We swept ashore, the Skeeters and the Roaches on the Wagon, more for the experience than any expected fighting. This was a contact mission, not a treasure dive… although they’d also be testing the local spawns for the new generation of warriors coming up, and maybe even paramounts wanting to come back here to play.

  “Well, seems to have lost a lot of the rotten fish smell an’ the jutting coral an’ shells an’ stuff,” the Mick remarked, striding up the pink-sanded beach. “There actually be green things growing here now,” he pointed out, where tough low shrubs, grasses, and weeds had managed to embed themselves into the island and were eking out a living here.

  “There’s a layer of dead coral under us, which has started crumbling with time and the elements now that it is out of water,” Kris agreed, tromping forward and up the dune. “Crushed shells and coral for the beach sand. Pretty enough.” She looked east, to where the dangerous elements of the island were, and the growth of greenery was also widespread, many coral formations collapsed or worn away by time and weather. “Where are Ulgrim’s lads? They were NPC’s, so they should be just fine…”

  “The merwarts? They be just up here, aye. Good merchants, nobody used them…” he trailed off, shooting her a knowing glance. “They sell a whole lot o’ crap, too,” he added in a softer voice.

  “That couldn’t be important, could it?” she returned in a level voice, looking back at all of us following on the Wagon.

  None of us said a peep.

  ---

  The Merwart Village wasn’t far, up off the beach on the highest part of the island, so as not to be washed away by any storm waves that came up.

  Also, the only place the gargantuan shells and coral constructions had survived, obviously mana-reinforced.

  I sat back with Selena up front on the Wagon as Kris and the Mick made the rounds of the merwarts, a paler-skinned tribe of the scaly fish/lizard anthros from the same world as the banderlings, tumeroks, and drudges, which hadn’t increased in number and for some reason had been sitting around for going on eighteen years waiting for humans to come back to sell stuff to them.

  “They’ve just been sitting there since I was a little girl, waiting for us to come back?” Selena asked me, just to be sure.

  “Yes, selling basic supplies in quantity, despite there being no trade Portals here at all.”

  She pointed off to the left, where the absolutely biggest nefane shell we’d ever seen was embedded into the ground and clearly used as a home by what looked to be the local merwart wizard or shaman. “That… looks at least as big as the one off the shore of the Vesayans was back then.”

  I measured it by eyeball. “Yes, it’s about three feet taller,” I confirmed after a moment. There were two of them visible. “Supposedly there are others scattered across the island, but they’ve probably crumbled down now if they are out of the water and exposed to the sun.”

  “That means there’s even bigger nefanes down in the ocean, right?” she asked uneasily.

  “Perhaps even too big to be floating around,” I agreed, eyeing the pale purple shell with fading crimson bands to it. “I can’t see them being killed just by the island coming up, unless they were marooned on it and literally died under their own weight and exposure to the sun on the surface when it rose. That shell is much too heavy to wash ashore.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “But there are other nefane shells, some of great size, scattered around the beaches,” Selena frowned. “I’ve seen them!”

  “Tim loves nefane tentacles. He’d break the Shoreward, draw one in for a fight, kill it, drag it to shore, and eat it, leaving the shell behind.”

  “Oh. Ohhhhhh…” Selena nodded. “That really does make sense. He really couldn’t use them for anything, could he?”

  “Tim’s not dumb at all, but there’s no ancestral knowledge there, and no society for him to learn from. He could potentially have crafted armor or shields from the shells, but he has no idea how to treat them to endure, imbue magic into them, or the like. You know monugas. They can make clubs and barely leather and hides. There are no real craftsmen among them.”

  “But Tim can learn all the stuff?” she asked warily. “Do we want him to know it?”

  “That is a question a lot of people are putting forward, equal parts fearful as impressed by him. I say we leave the choice on being friend or foe to him, and if we have to kill him, we have to kill him. He has no magical ability to speak of that we can discern, although that also might change if he discovers a way. There’s no other free Tremendous Monugas for him to learn from, after all.”

  “True. Is it also true that any monuga might grow to the same size?” she asked urgently.

  “Yes. It is very, very unlikely, however. A combination of eating the right things, advancing through combat and sucking in enough magic that their strength grows faster than their size. It’s very hard to do. Most monugas just get too big to move themselves and just die of starvation.”

  “Why is that?” Selena was startled. “Don’t you get stronger as you get bigger?”

  “Double your height increases your strength fourfold, but your weight eightfold.” She frowned as she followed the math. “Truly large creatures are either mostly hollow, collapse under their own weight, or are magical, like the Aurochs on the Hlaetians. Humanoids who can grow to height have to tap into Jotun magic, the effects of Stature, or our bones would break and organs tear away inside us as we get bigger. We wouldn’t be able to breathe enough oxygen, our hearts couldn’t pump our blood, and the like. We find it hard to move our arms and legs as they get bigger, and so forth.

  “We’d be okay weight-wise in the water, but the blood and breathing problems would persist.

  “Becoming something like Tim means tapping Stature Magic, which he’s done. He might live a long, long time, and his brain is big enough he’s outgrown the pure savagery of his upbringing.

  “If TM’s are the final form of the species, a normal Monuga is nothing more then a belligerent and angry child. It might be why they are so savage and dumb, in the end.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she told me. “What about this island itself? Know anything I haven’t heard?”

  “Probably not? I’ve seen as much as you. I doubt the Summons here drop golden trophies any more, they’d just be ectoplasm and vanish with them. No loot, of course. Just things to fight and slaughter. They might have Luminance energy attached to them now, however, they are powerful enough. It’s one of the things we are here to test.”

  “Ugh, no free power-ups from The Deep? So unfair!” she protested without heart.

  “You’re at least twice as dangerous as an Isparian of your level was back then, and that’s even accounting for the Gear difference,” I reminded her. “All they did was One Shot archery and One Strike combat. Wolfpack combat and multiple attacks simply weren’t possible by them,” I reminded her.

  “The Wintermas collection of Weapons they had to haul around is famous, too. Lord Mick still rails on about it!” She was plainly amused at the idea.

  “Aye, the older mages all love talking about their collections of lethal Wands and Orbs and whatnot, how they babied them and modified them and ruled the world with them.” Ad nauseam, even if it could be interesting. You wanted the best Weapon to fight something, so you carried an Xmas tree of stuff!

  “Until the world blew up on them.” Her voice said she remembered the moment of the Fall well, even after all these years, despite her age when it happened.

  “The sick joke is that it probably wasn’t even intended as it was. Something was, and it was likely intended to be disastrous, but not like it happened. We believe the leader of the undead was behind it, but there’s no absolute proof, only the fact he’s missing, like many of the other great magical beings.”

  “But we’re going to find out, right?”

  “Right!” I confirmed for her. “Now, get ready to move out and test out the Summons here. It looks like Her Highness and Lord Mick are done.”

  ---

  Selena scrambled up to get her team ready as Lord Mick and Kris wandered back to us. Their faces were carefully neutral, more thoughtful than planning.

  “Anything useful?” I asked her, and was shown an egg-sized yellow Gem, looked like a topaz variant, glittering with magic inside it. “Still selling the Vissidal Portal Gems? Does it even work?” I had to ask.

  “No idea. But I bought a dozen to be sure.” She poured them into my hands, and I deposited them into my Masspack. If nothing else, they were a reference to one-shot consumables. “Nothing of great value at the vendors. We can buy up a lot of cheap steel if we need it, although it’s not THAT cheap.”

  “I’m surprised they haven’t been shut down,” I admitted, while the Mick called out orders for making ready for some skirmishes to come. No new creatures had been seen here, and they’d even fought more powerful subspecies of the local monsters before, but it was all about the Karma and spawn density, and Vissidal had been famous for its proliferation of Spawn Points.

  “I’m guessing lazy managers and video game logic. As long as there are MMD’s, there has to be some place to use them, so they just can’t blanket remove that aspect of the System, but it’s so archaic they don’t pay attention to it, either,” Kris guessed knowingly.

  “And there being fewer and fewer NPC vendors around isn’t helping,” I agreed with her. “Speaking of… when are you planning on freeing Lady Vundanewall?”

  “We ask her every week, and she keeps refusing for the time, given how much olthoi armor we are managing to harvest off of her. Briggs is getting close to perfecting the method, but the instant conversion is extremely convenient right now. Being able to hand her pieces and get back armor is the equivalent of like fifty high-level smiths and alchemists working every day to accomplish the same thing.” She leaned into me. “We gave her one of the Blackfire Stones for her Crossbow,” she whispered.

  “Heard you been having the lads take turns Investing Gear for her, too.” I nodded. It was only right.

  “If we ever go after the Queens, she’s being released, period. Lots of the boys who can invest in the skills if need be,” Kris sniffed, and that was that.

  ============================

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