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  Thanks for your time, and now it's time for some tuskers, the best grinding Karma beast in Asheron's Call!... although not always the best for loot.

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  The Mick had wisely come in at the northern end of Aphus Lassel’s two islands. The islands of the Tusker King were divided into zones by age and power, with the youngest and weakest tuskers to the north, and the mightiest and oldest in the south.

  Tuskers were an ape-like, barely sapient species, strong and brutal, pack-oriented, fast, and strong, if a bit of glass cannons in their toughness. Their oily sweat was prone to burning very, very hotly, among other things, making them very susceptible to flames, and their hides weren’t all that strong, given their size and mass.

  That said, the smallest of them weighed more than Briggs did, their arms were twice as long as those of humans, enabling them to run on all fours, and they were aggressive, territorial, and omnivorous, although they didn’t normally use Isparians as a food item.

  They were also all over the bloody place as Summons here.

  The Mick took the initiative to clear out and Seal a whole swathe of Spawn Points, as these younger Tuskers weren’t going to be used in any kind of army regardless, and opening up more land meant more places for the real tuskers and the chitticks they liked to snack on to grow up and run about on.

  Still, the density of the Summons here was on a par with that of the thickest areas of the Isle of Ruin. They weren’t anywhere near as dangerous, of course, the Summons having little idea what magical Arms, Armor, and spells meant to them, and they died very quickly under arrow fire or swipes of a Firephased Blade.

  We were here to meet Ketnan, and ascertain if we could use him for a short time.

  As the Mick had been here before, all he had to do was cross the waters and link up with his previous lived-line. Naturally he had visited the Tusker Emporium on the island before, even frittering away some pyreal on useless touristy stuff for the heck of it.

  Then he had left and never gone back, which was hardly a surprise. There was nothing useful to acquire from the fellow, only basic food and some useless overpriced tourist stuff.

  But basic food was something that might ease a lot of problems for the moment, even if it was quite overpriced. There weren’t that many places to spend MMD Notes and the like, after all.

  ---

  The dormant volcano was obvious above the trees, and making our way there with the Roaches wasn’t difficult, nothing on the landscape dangerous enough to be a threat.

  But, there were only the ape-like tuskers and the centipede-like chitticks around. The Mick’s face was ominous, and I had to ask why.

  “There should also be spawns o’ Isparians here what the tuskers enslaved, head-bashed by the Tusker King an’ serving the monkeys happily. I didnae realize they were Summons back then, but they were common on the northern islands and parts o’ the southern.

  “Lass, I’ve not seen one Summons o’ ‘em since I came back ta the island.”

  “Ah...”

  Summons reflected the creatures that lived in or occupied an area, at least out in the wilder portions. Thus the way Summons changed to reflect a large force living in an area, like all the Gotrok lugians that popped up around the Linvaks when the Tukora had control of the area, or the number of Hea spawns in areas the red Tumeroks controlled.

  Human Summons would have reflected the fact there were humans around here. The utter lack of human spawnpoints...

  “Hold a moment.” We weren’t far from the volcano, and the Mick glided to a halt before getting into range of another Tusker Summons, the Roaches lowering their Bows so as to not draw anything in.

  Locate Creature was a multi-Valence Divination, mostly due to the variable range. It was designed to track down and locate rare creatures, as opposed to traipsing all over tarnation trying to find one, and at higher Valences had ranges that started at miles and only grew longer.

  If Cast out of a VI+1 Valence, the range would easily cover the whole of Aphus Lassel’s two islands.

  I sent the spell out, specifically ignoring the pings our group earned from it.

  And I waited. And waited as it reached out, looking for other Isparians, Summons or natural or NPC’s, it wouldn’t matter, they’d still ping off it.

  The spell was fifteen miles away before it pinged off a concentration of Isparians underground in the distance off there… and they weren’t ‘real’.

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  I took a deep breath as I brought up the Holo of the map and interposed my results over it. “The only Isparians I’m seeing are Summons right there, underground, probably in a Dungeon.”

  The Mick’s eyes were flat and cold. “That be the Tusker King’s den. There were a couple levels to that Dungeon where head-knocked Isparians helped defend the place, with magic an’ the like that tuskers didnae have, probably made the magic traps an’ such there.” He paused significantly. “Were like a dozen NPC’s in the Tusker Town, Ooltanga or whatever it were called. Were only a few miles south o’ us.”

  I just shook my head. “I’ve got nothing there, Lord Mick. Unless they are Div-warded, there are no Isparians other than us and those in that Dungeon alive on Aphus Lassel… and that includes Ketnan, if he was supposed to be in the volcano ahead.”

  “Lord Mick? How many people are we talking? What happened?” Selena asked softly.

  “T’ tell the truth, I dinnae know. Dozens, at the very least. Maybe several hundred, although the Summons… the Summons numbered probably thousands, an’ where those came from, well…” He gave me a look.

  “Nothing says these islands weren’t alternate arrival sites for Isparians before the Tusker King came.” And if so, probably prey for Tim, if he liked to eat people, although there were likely enough tuskers to satisfy him, and they had more meat on them.

  The fact Tusker King Bobo could smack an Isparian on the head and effectively Charm them into obedience and worship was something else, and didn’t necessarily mean all the tuskers took such a conversion to heart.

  If all those Isparians woke up suddenly, AND took control of the Isparian Summons…

  “Let’s find Ketnan or his remains, if we can. Then investigate this tusker town of yours. Feel free to kill all the tuskers in the way, I doubt they are going to be friends at this point.”

  It was rough treatment, but no different than walking into hostile Hea territory in the Direlands. There certainly had been no hesitation on the side of the tuskers from charging to the attack…

  -------

  “Well, that’s pretty telling,” the Mick pointed out for everyone.

  Tuskers didn’t use fire, didn’t go near fire. They could catch on fire as easily as a torch.

  The entryway to the Emporium was a mounded tunnel down into the stone of the semi-extinct volcano, and now said stone was cracked, split, and blackened by repeated flames.

  More to the point, there were a LOT of charred tusker bones scattered about that entryway. They’d been picked mostly clean by scavengers, dusted and eroded by the time and the wind, but there were a LOT of them, heaped and mounded up here and there.

  “Yer take, lass?” the Mick asked softly, as we took in the entryway, the clearing around it, and the trees.

  A dozen Summons points were also Burning vivic up around the rim we’d jumped down from. The Mick hadn’t remembered any such Summons being up around the volcano at all.

  “There’s scores of burn scars on the volcano walls, you can see the craters from the strikes.” Fire Bolts made the bigger and deeper ones, Volleys shallower ones in a row, and slow-moving, grid-like Isparian Walls rigid patterns of them, all where they would have missed their primary targets.

  There were a LOT of them.

  “That means spells going OUT from the entryway,” the Mick said ominously. He walked over, and kicked at the mounded bones there. A couple of kicks, and the tumbled remnants of a stacked stone wall was visible, black rocks heaped atop one another, scattered by time and force. “There were a rough wall here. Not a very good one, set up in haste, likely blasted out o’ the crater. It were torn down an’ scattered.”

  “Ripped apart by the tuskers, no doubt.” I sighed, and cast another Detect variant.

  Detect Bones. Dead ones, that is, not the living ones inside flesh. Very different paradigm, that.

  Even out of only a III Valence, the area around me fairly screamed of the presence of bones, both tuskers and Isparians, which were easily told apart in the spell. Tuskers outnumbered Isparian at least five to one out here, but the mounds of weathered, burned stones corroded by time, wind, and ash were remarkably well-preserved for the time that had passed, having been out here for more than a decade.

  And that was without the remains of Summons, which would simply discorporate.

  “I see about fourscore dead Isparians among everything,” I murmured, my eyes closed while I was basically counting skulls, although most of the Isparian ones were crushed by heavy bludgeoning blows. “I see over four hundred dead tuskers, from sizes equal to the basically children and young adults we’ve seen, all the way up to some old brutes the size of anything in the Direlands.”

  I turned around once slowly. “Tusker skeletons are randomly all over the place out there, and then concentrate intensely as they get closer to here. All the Isparian remains I can sense start here, around the half-circle of the entrance down.”

  I flicked up a Holo to better illustrate my findings, all of them looking at the many dots of green versus red remains. Tellingly, odd white robes, moldering and fraying in the wind, coated many of the human remains, with the occasional remnants of a bright blue beach towel or a cotton shirt in bright green among them.

  The tuskers had left behind odd bits of metal armor, mostly broken breastplates, greaves, bracers, and helms, among their remains. There were collections of swords and knives in the hands of the Isparians as well, but next to no armor at all.

  “This be a final hold-out,” the Mick breathed softly, looking around at the desolate place, a boneyard highly suitable for a necromancer. “They were defending it against the tuskers, as they had no way off the island, an’ it were the only defensible point. The tuskers came in an’ overwhelmed them with pure numbers. Given the amount o’ dead, I imagine the Isparian Summons were lettin’ off massive volleys o’ flame spells, an’ the dead tuskers must have been piled high…”

  I flicked up a flight of Bursting Chained Shards. Normally the spell didn’t target objects, but the Bursting allowed it to do so as part of an area of effect.

  The Shards took off, arching up into the air and plummeting down all around us. They plunged into the mounds of bones and blew off in eruptions of fire, force, and vivus everywhere around us, blasting bone in all directions and sending shooting chains of eruptions bursting forth as they jumped from one mound of old disintegrating bones to another.

  In an eyeblink, fountains of fire exploded all around us, doing nothing but going after the unburied, undissolved bones, their persistence probably a result of all the fire magic that had been at work here.

  Scores of mounds all around us winked out in my Detect immediately, the ground flashing white even after being burned by the secondary damage of the Shards. Vivic mist gushed out of the ground and began to spread, naturally flowing towards the residual elemental and death energies inside the remains scattered around.

  “Let’s see what became of the rest o’ them,” the Mick said, and we all turned our eyes on the tunnel leading into the extinct volcano, and what had once been the Tusker Emporium.

  My Detect Bones was slaved to my Holo, and everyone saw the long line of many red and a few green dots extending out ahead of us.

  I brought up my Darts. As Lord Mick led the way down the tunnel of carved magma slowly. I detonated volley after volley silently underneath us, the bones crunching against the stone vivifying and falling to restful white powder and mist as we followed the trail of the dead down and in.

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