Spore-laden atmosphere, deadly flora, odors to make you gag, hostile unnatural natives, and colors and hues to nauseate you.

What was not to love?

Had there been word conveyed across the Hag Empire? It didn’t look like it, or the three Mu Spores we could see would have been booking it away from the Wake.

It was time to go harvesting for Levels and Phat Lewt again... as well as do some other things.

Plans were made, means concocted, and the Vanguard team went out to hunt Mu Spores... after killing the first two nearest ones, and getting the company all set up on a safe zone where they could get some Important Work done.

For some reason, quite a few members of this lot of merry marauders had suddenly taken Alchemist Levels, and a lot of Ranks had been put into Alchemy and its Mastery. It might have had something to do with an incoming apotheosis of considerable degree. The alchemical tools were made out of the shell and tentacles of a Mu Spore, rotting on the ground and happy to contribute its remains to the furtherance of pscience and the glory of alchemy.

The girls even made Elder Arg a floppy hat and spectacles for this, since he was taking point. Even the dragons were tremendously interested in what was going to be happening, and their 14-16 Ranks were providing primary assistance to the great ape. A lot of humanoids with 8-10 Ranks were providing some very, very skilled labor.

If it was passing strange for hundreds of brute force axemen, stolid dwarven spears, and singsong elven magebows to suddenly be discussing boiling points, mixture patterns, diffusion ratios, condensation paradigms, trans-temporal effluvia, and radical non-symmetric assignation of proto-elemental fluxes, hey, I had some gifted subordinates.

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We went about our milking the Mu-cows/Spores, while the surviving Hags behind us organized a Mass Ritual to allow them to send giants across the Zone border. Thousands of them flooded into the Mushroom Zone... which didn’t treat them any more gently than it treated us. Alas, the lads were over a hundred miles away from the Wake, in the middle of a cluster of tightly-packed mushrooms with a central open area a kilometer wide, a Faerie Ring of great size, walking over a few hewed-down uber-stools, one unhappily dead Mu Spore, and no visible way in or out from the ground.

Errant led the girls, the North Wind and the berserkers, along with the Warlocks, on some raids out into the shroom forest. It was strictly hit and run stuff, trails erased by Barus and Riann. They stayed low, out of the way, and never fought within ten miles of the stuff Elder Arg was cooking up, and where the elves were chanting and bringing up all sorts of fun magic...

For all that the Hags had stolen into Exemplar status, they didn’t have someone with Epic Ranks in Alchemy among them, so their system couldn’t be near as efficient. It also helped to have a lot of monkey brawn available for the stirring, because the patterns they needed to be following were exacting. Under Elder Arg’s direction, the apes formed a very strong and disciplined work force.

Anyone not helping with the brewing was still Infusing or Investing. As hordes of giants surged into the Mushroom Zone and exchanged pointers with the giant mycoids, various kinds of fertilizer-seeking fungi, the native mushroom giants, beasts, and corpses animated by spores, and other sorts of fun surprises of the Gray, our team patiently completed our looping sweep of the zone.

With no Wake to let them know we were coming, all they could rely on were their alerts to one another, which didn’t take place when being swarmed by Void Brothers. We didn’t split up as thoroughly as before, keeping fairly close together with our two teams so we could converge and split as needed. We left at least two Brothers behind to collect the Goop and the Nexal, making that process quicker, and they always caught up soon after we took down the next one, and well before the fight after that.

So, while the giants, hags, and ogres were rushing all over the place and dying spore-adically, we were cleaning up the Mu Spores and giving Elder Arg time to do his stuff.

We also didn’t take down the Obelisk in the middle immediately, even if it meant having hordes of giants arrive there to camp around and protect it. The Pseudos there weren’t particularly appreciative of this protection, but after learning what became of the Greenhag Empress, at least tolerated them on the outskirts.

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-Elder Arg, we’re all set,- I /informed the big monkey, as I burned the last set of Runes into the shell of the last Mu Spore to die.

He /acknowledged that, and put the scores of other Alchemists into motion. The complex Rune Circles filled with silver looted and melted down from the empire behind us began to shimmer and burn with a new light. Excess Mu Goop was spilled upon them to burn with a most unwholesome stench and a variety of colors that was nauseating even in the thaumaspectrum. Goop froze, fried, was shocked, dissolved, and incinerated with a variety of magical means and energies, powering up the mixing process and interaction of energies for what was about to happen.

I watched the Rune I’d carved into the Mu Spore light up. The giants had doubtless come across some of the Mu we’d killed by now, but none of them should have messed with the Runes, up in awkward places where they weren’t easy to reach. Normally we’d just vivify such things, as we didn’t want them Animated as monstrously powerful undead, which I’m sure the Hags had ideas about. In any event, we weren’t going to give them time to do so.

The drawing of energy began.

An Epic-level Alchemy Ritual naturally required truly monstrous amounts of energy. Now, they could have just drawn it from the area they were at... which was right in the middle of thousands of searching giants and so not very wise. So, the Runes and Mu Goop sent that drain out to the dead Mu Spores, turning the floating abominations into living siphons tied intimately to the areas they harvested, and began to pull it all in.

That included the Mu Spores from the LAST Mushroom Zone, too. Those Rituals around the fallen Obelisk were for a reason... and dead Mu Spores made for excellent foci when carved up appropriately. Tellingly, there was no resistance from the Land for taking down this mutated dark faerieland of fungi at all, especially with the mass vivic follow-up.

The endless fields of fungi around the Mu Spores began to wither and collapse. Even the haze of spores fell from the suddenly deathly still air. Giants shouted as towering mushrooms fell over on them, in many cases unleashing unpleasant surprises, and often filling the air with poisonous grit and dust as they decayed with shocking speed.

The areas of death expanded outwards from the rotting ‘shrooms rapidly, harvesting the life force of these mutant fungi, tearing them down, and pulling it away as they collapsed into dust and goo.

The dead Mu Spores withered up even as they pulled the life out of the heart of the fields they had harvested, using those links to power the Ritual. There were some powerful druidic elements supplementing the alchemical in aspects of what was going on, and the repercussions were going to reverberate throughout the Zone. Namely, what was being created here was an absolute vacuum of life, which Nature naturally abhorred. The life that did exist here was unnatural and bloated, and evening it out was a subset of what was going on.

A ten-mile radius around each Spore was initially stripped of life, but the circles kept going out, ripping out the excess life energy of what was there, feeding it down into the Land, spreading it out, and totally tearing apart the entire zone’s forest of fungi as it did so.

Watching 270,000 square miles of massive mushrooms falling away in grand slow motion (and knowing that another like area was doing the same) is truly an impressive sight. We were already in motion, heading for the Zone nearby where the mushrooms would be the last to survive all this, protected by the buffer of the Ritual itself. That, of course, would give the giants a perfect target to swarm towards. But travel times were a thing, and they had to hack their way through the surviving shrooms... which they most certainly would energetically do, heading for the center where whatever was responsible for this would be at.

That was okay. They weren’t going to enjoy what they were going to find when they got there.

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The Alchemy was there to distill the Elixirs for gaining Lesser Exemplar status, True Werebeast Status... and the elves.

The former was going to anyone who was a Ten, and had taken the /4 in their Racial Level; Evolved, what was called Atlantean Humans for us. The latter was going to anyone who wanted it, and was willing to acknowledge service to the Exemplar who would be their bloodline progenitor. What the elves were doing was for themselves.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Wolf was far more popular among the soldiers than the Lion, given his pack focus and teamwork mentality. The champion sorts took the Lion, including all of the berserkers (since it would change their Totem), some of the North Wind, and some of the officers of the Ironblood. Most of the others went with the Wolf, although the girls abstained, as the Hag Levels they were taking basically equaled or overrode the benefits, anyways.

The fact the Wolf Elixir took less than half the Mu Goop and Exemplar Blood to make that the Lion Elixir did was also a factor. The latter was basically going to be reserved for champions who earned it.

Afterwards, everyone who made Ten and had the Racial/4 partook of the Lesser Exemplar blood. Oddly enough, over the last two days, every single member of the Company had struck those three levers, knowing what was coming, and were willing to put up with the higher Karma of gaining more Levels and Masteries for the chance to get the Template. The Karma had been set aside long ago, a lot of mental levers were pushed, and the air was filled with power.

The monkeys probably would have had the least effect, as they couldn’t take the Exemplar bloodlines. Ape not Wolf or Lion, and Humans were strange as far as bloodlines went, after all. Where else had all those Anthro Races come from?

However, there was a Primordial Ape right there, who, enlightened to the potential of the Mu Goop, had been sharing his bloodline with his lesser kin, and those kin had been driving it straight to Ten Racial Dice in anticipation of this moment.

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The giants were certainly energetic enough, hacking their way through literally a half-mile of wall-to-wall mushrooms with stems as hard as ironwood. It ended up being more a tunnel than a cleared road, given the press, and a few hundred of them died to acid showers, exploding puffballs, dripping green slime, and viscous clouds of spores.

None of that really deterred them, driven on as they were by the Hags, and not about to let such minor things stop them. They were Jotuns, after all.

They hacked their way in, and the Company came out to greet them.

The apes had all doubled in size. The chakon were twelve feet tall, the champa-ka merely eight feet. All of the human, gnome, hyn, and dwarven soldiers had golden eyes and new grey or golden fur showing, and were moving with incredible speed and power.

The endurance of a melee combatant is their pool of Hit Points, i.e. their Health and their Soak. On average, that pool had doubled for the recipients. Their physical Stats had increased by an average of +10, making them four times stronger than before. They moved faster, and most importantly, they healed.

Not only could they take immense amounts of punishment, their injuries now healed themselves, exactly as if a Healer was attending to them. No longer did they have to rely on magic to cure their wounds... their Health (bodies) healed even as they were fighting, and if it fell too low, they only needed retreat from combat for a minute or three, leaving their eager fellows to leap into the fight to take their place.

They only needed Soak to defend against massive blows. They could easily survive on the continual influx of Fast Healing/5 coming into them from their Lesser Exemplar Templates, and their newly inflated Health.

The giants had worked their way through the mushroom forest in great time, looking to do battle with whatever was inside. They were packed into the entry tunnel, three giants or four ogres across, and now... what was inside, was coming out.