The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

She listened to the birds going quiet at the presence of a hunter, circling back to watch the driver they’d left behind, obviously bait in one form or another.

They probably weren’t actually expecting anyone to be left behind, and were just doing it in hopes... whatever, they were still going with proper partners.

So was she. They should have stayed a foursome, and they might have had a chance.

They were walking, not jogging, wary of an ambush, and certainly hadn’t wolf-shifted. Catching up to and getting ahead of them really wasn’t all that hard.

---

She stayed around the back of the camper as they arrived, instantly saw the bloodstain, deduced what it was, and saw the pack of food and stuff laying around. Naturally one of them had to enter the camper to see what was in there, while the other grabbed some meat on the ground, and unwrapped it for a snack.

The Waveskating Steps were the Joe Average of Lightfoot styles. Their greatest strength was basically being able to ignore rough or uneven terrain, sort of flowing around obstacles easily. That flowing stuff was because you were sliding on your ki field over the ground, alternately gripping or slipping as you liked, which meant some odd movement styles were possible.

Like, oh, sliding under a camper as if the ground was greased, and coming up to bury your glowing sword in the groin of a very astonished werewolf with his mouth full of bloody human flesh.

Then extending it a foot further into his heart.

He stared at her, eyes starting to go yellow, then fading away. She grabbed the front of his shirt, lowered him down, even crinkling the plastic wrap as she lowered him, and turned toward the door, flattening against the side of the trailer and letting her Tremblesense place the other Were within the camper.

The smell of death and blood permeated fast. The startled Were inside the camper growled and lunged for the door-

And as his throat cleared it, he ran right into the starsilver edge of the soulsword waiting for him.

3-15+6, +10 Anathema, x2, +4d6 Sneak Attack damage. These weren’t elites, just average werewolves in human form, Health-centered twats who relied on people not knowing they had DR 10/Silver to get the time to wolf up and then tear them apart.

Their blood bubbled and hissed as it swept over Tremble, flesh curling away from it. Anathema was a Forsaken Feat, and a terribly dangerous one to lycanthropes. Satisfy their Damage Reduction to silver twice over, and it became Damage Vulnerability, the difference between smacking Superman with red sunlight and smacking him with kryptonite.

Ki Strike Mastery/2 was choice of silver or cold iron. Sama had taken silver, naturally. /1 was magic, of course.

They didn’t get a chance to fight back before they were dead, and she removed their heads to stop them from animating come midnight.

Vivic would come in so useful at times like this...

Just to push the point home, she got out two vials of fleshfire, and poured them over the corpses, which promptly ignited.

It was an expensive way to make sure the corpses were useless even if they became undead, but now it was time for her to head back the way she’d come...

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Both werewolves smelled the death before they saw anything. The guy by the car had his pistol in hand, doubtless loaded with silver. The one in hiding was moving stealthily through the greenery, closing in on the source of the scent.

The one in the open shifted to hybrid form, kicking out of his shoes as his feet elongated and he put on at least another hundred pounds of furry mass. His nails were gleaming like knives, and his lupine features were distorted and mutated – uneven eyes, a turned-up nose, and serrated ears.

Clearly a sign of corruption that wasn’t visible in human form.

He turned the corner, and looked at the two severed heads of the Weres who’d gone to investigate the girl. Both of the skulls looked mightily surprised, and the one even had a cut of human flesh still clutched in his teeth.

He looked at the ground for a sign of the being that had dropped them, inhaling deeply, looking for a scent. There was no swirl of supernatural presence... an assassin or skilled stalker, certainly, that –

A great growl and yelp sounded in the woods not thirty yards away. Instantly the guard was bounding for it, as there was a great thrashing, and then sudden silence.

He came upon the stalker, laying in wait there if anyone was hanging around to attack him... and now he, the bait, was the only one alive! It looked like his packmate had walked right into a long blade that had opened up his throat and underjaw completely, nearly splitting his head in two. The edges of the wound were still sizzling from whatever had done it.

He smelled nothing, saw nothing as he spun around, heard nothing.

There was a flutter of wings as a startled bird took wing above him. He jerked his head up automatically at the sound... and three feet of plunging, glowing sword went right down his throat.

------

She didn’t have to haul their three-hundred-pound-plus bodies, just their heads, happily. She brought them down to the jeep, lined up all four heads on the hood of the Jeep there, and brought out the Compass.

It pointed due north; a chip of metal in the bottom of one of those coolers, taken from the current needle, providing her exactly the direction to go.

She plotted out the topography in her mind, wondering how far it was, drawing out a line...

Huh. Aren’t the Hexar Company’s grounds in that direction? Those guys weren’t wearing uniforms...

She popped open the glove compartment of the Jeep, and pulled out the contents.

Those are two Hexar ID badges...

Welp, that makes the tracking easy. What it portends is something else...

Wrecking their firearms had been a thing, and making off with the ammo was another. Cash in the wallets, sure. She memorized the names and addresses of their licenses for looking into later, noting they were fairly close to one another.

Now she had to find where that human flesh had gone, and kill a lot of things while doing it...

Chomps was right with her as she put her pack back on, set herself for the run, and headed out.

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Her father would likely have been rather startled by how far she had sometimes run at night, practicing her lightfoot along the winding roads and trails of the local farms, hills, and copses. She’d gotten to know the local area pretty well after crawling all over the landscape and building her endurance, charting her lived-line and matching it up with maps to always know her location.

Finding the fracking compound wasn’t hard, as the road literally led right to it. A girl and her dog heading to it weren’t going to raise too much interest, but as she still didn’t want to be seen, she had to rely on game trails anyways, and not having run out this far before, she was adding to her lived-line.

The first thing she noted was that there was a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire around the entire area, a rather unusual amount of security for what should simply be a pumping station for getting shale oil out of the ground here.

The second thing upset her Alchemy Ranks. Just what the fuck were they pumping down into the shale?

She was totally aware that fracking involved pumping in stuff to free up the shale oil tied up in those formations. It was supposedly rather expensive to do, but Hexar was working on a way to minimize the cost using alchemical solutions instead of normal chemistry.

That shit drooping around on the ground did not look like anything that should be pumped into the ground, or coming out of it in the oil.

There were people who were walking around who weren’t people; they were those slimy eely Aberrants, but what looked like the normal joes walking around didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with them whatsoever.

The oil wells were burning off the fumes badly, the black smoke was staining the area, there was lots of spilled petroleum on the ground... Having run these forests for literally years, the contamination and pollution was a huge affront to her, and the strip-cutting without replanting only made it worse. The forests had more than enough problems staying healthy with the Haze up there leeching so much sunlight away. Not replanting a forest or greenery or something would vastly increase the amount of time that the area would need to recover, strip the land of topsoil, increase run-off...

“I am sensing a theme here,” Sama murmured to herself, eyes narrowed as she considered the whole thing.

The whole camp sprawled over at least a quarter-mile square, with multiple wells and holding tanks, areas for container wagons, dormitories and working areas, and the like.

AND Aberrants who had some kind of Veil running she could see right through, who were working with an unannounced clan of werewolves, and who might be joining them for dinners of human flesh.

She considered the whole problem as she waited for nightfall. She was bound to a Highmoon Renewal as a Hagchild, one way or another, so there would be no advances until then. Still, she’d gained enough to Advance Tremble a notch today; it was just she had multiple days she needed just to get to the next Slot.

Many, many days to fill all them Slots, and grow her Sword. Or, alternately, millions of dollars of goldweight laying around somewhere.

Perhaps they would be wearing something magical she could burn and use to build up her Gear. After all, she wasn’t Smithing and making goldweight out of raw materials right now. She definitely needed some compensation for fighting the Good fight and improving stuff.

“I want Bane so bad...” she muttered, shaking her head and knowing it was impossible. She needed Vivic too much, seeing what was going on here, and the need to get rid of bodies, feed them to the Land. She also definitely needed Flaming and Shocking, and Sundering and Breaking for properly dealing with material objects.

“Ten years,” she sighed, and because gold was so damn expensive, and combat encounters so hard to come by, her Gear was still low, and she couldn’t lean on it or use it like she wanted.

But, technically, she didn’t need to do this every day, but every other day. As long as she did it before and after Renewal, she could flip levers and Invest stuff without any problem.

It basically came down to how much Karma she wanted to earn, how much she could kill, and so forth.

Every night of combat was two goldweight equivalent in Karma Growing her Sword. That was far, far more money than she could make Smithing right now, bar none.

Night was coming. It was time to make some cash-equivs doing some Good work...