A section of stone cliff peeled out of the side of the long-extinct caldera. Everyone rapidly got off, the Beasts who could fly taking to wing leisurely below the edge, out of line of sight. The Airship, a bit frazzled by the amount of magic it had been propelled by, broke into clouds and mist as it came apart.

“Congratulations on a good job all around,” Briggs began, holding out his massive fists for bumps, making it quickly through everyone as we all exchanged them with grim smiles. “Of course, this is barely the beginning of the start of the show, if Egypt is going to be any indication.”

A couple of the Dead Zones had put on tremendous displays not long before the whole Great Flood went into effect. To say there were a lot of Undead and Shades out there was by no means an exaggeration, and the least of them were far stronger physically than any Humans!

“Fae, any fine points?” Briggs asked me directly.

“We need Plant Mages to get every surviving Plant inside there pulled back to near or beyond the rim. They can’t all move, and there won’t be any pussyfooting around with restrained Domains now.” Everyone’s heads turned to where the teeth-gnashing edge of the Undead Domain had swelled up from the distraught Pyramid, filling most of the Elephant’s Graveyard entirely. “If they aren’t pulled out, they are going to die. I counted fifteen noble bloodlines, two royal ones, and there might or might not be an imperial one hiding in there. They’ve all got to either come out or fall back to the crater wall.”

“Imperial?” the normally-silent Tox blurted out. “Like, your Roses?”

“My Roses alerted me that they could feel its Presence. It’s at least a half-Emperor, the Graveyard is probably its domain. There aren’t many Imperial Plants in Africa, and given the location, I’m guessing it is the Imperial Protea of Repose.”

“They’ll saturate the area with Corpse Lilies just to find it if they have a hint it is there,” Sama murmured. “Sacrificing a Plant like that would be worth what we did to that Pyramid!”

“All the more reason to get it out of there,” I replied calmly.

Briggs nodded. “We can probably get Archmage Obai to send over some Summoners and Plant Mages who could help move the Plants out of danger. How do you want to handle the Undead?”

“If the Great Flood wasn’t ongoing, and the fighting on the waters not so intense, I would play overwatch and have all the Undead Hunters and new recruits to them start pressing this Pharaoh, far from watching eyes.

“Mick, you and the boys are needed everywhere and elsewhere. Sannina, you know you and the girls are going with them, so don’t even protest. Sama, Briggs, no, no, you’re not needed anywhere else, I’m sure.”

They all made twisted faces. It was too true, they all had other demands on their time. That left the Undead Hunters who’d been slumming from the littoral combats, fighting in the Death Zones instead, risking capture of their bodies and souls to get experience fighting the undead.

All of those men and women, led by Egil ‘Whitey’ Crookshank, his hair gone grey before twenty-five, looked back at me and clutched their Maces proudly.

“You are with me. I’ll be handling overwatch, and we’re going to start putting down the Undead here, not in Death Zones in other places.”

“Yes, Lady Fae!” they all shouted out together, the crystalline heads on their Maces flaring with readiness.

“King Koga,” I Said with Voice, carrying to the massive Ape looming atop the ridge above us, “is there a Beast around with the ability to find things that really are trying to stay hidden? I believe there’s a group of Humans somewhere in the area that managed to infiltrate the Graveyard and set up the ground for the Pyramid to get here. Just being able to do that should tell you how stealthy they can be...”

He called back down after a long and thoughtful pause, and I nodded. “Yes, there is a renegade Tribe among Humans who call themselves the Black Curia. They are open allies of the Netherworld, and strike at us and other Beasts alike in pursuit of their goals.”

He made some more grunts, and Sama and Briggs nodded with grim smiles.

“Obsidian Fang Mamba Duke will bring in every venomous Snake in the area, and blanket everything with Serpents. If there are any other Humans around, they’ll know within an hour,” I told the rest of them.

“Oh, that’s gonna be a bad way to go,” the Mick winced. Venom wasn’t necessarily associated with the Poison Element, after all. If they were smart, they would have already fled, and we’d only find a camp... but that should be enough.

“That’s your follow-up job before you head home,” I told him, and he nodded. “One of you will probably need to Contract with a tracking Snake. Tox, that probably means you.” The only Plant-user among them blinked, then nodded quickly. “Find the bastards and put them down. If that leads back to Sage Ojibwae, let a certain someone know and she’ll take care of it.”

Eyes turned to look at Sama, who gave them a smile with all eight canines that promised somebody was going to die.

“Seven Star Formation! We get all our Mana back, and then we go hunting!” I called out, and with the ease of practice, the mages arranged themselves into a Formation. Even Briggs and Sama joined in, as they’d expended a bunch of Mana through Tremble and Endure, smashing netherworlders and stone blocks alike.

----------

Hours later at night, Gabon’s capitol city of Libreville...

Tox floated through the city streets, the head of an Emerald Flying Tree Python poking up out of the backpack he was wearing over his shoulder. Its head was twice the size of his own, and certainly would have attracted a lot of attention if anyone could have seen them.

The beautiful, sparkling green Snake was much bigger than it appeared, but it fit easily into the open Void Pocket anchored to his Backpack, so it could taste the wind and lead them unerringly after their targets.

The Snakes had indeed found the camp, but it had been abandoned hours before, probably right after all the King and Noble Beasts showed up outside the Graveyard. Still, the Snakes had easily identified that at least six Humans had been there, along with the unique stench of the Black Curia’s Dark Mutates, and they had also identified the spot the group had Teleported away from using some sort of pre-set Formation.

Glenn’s singular Divination Element had no problem tracking them to their destination whatsoever, and Driver Sam’s Earth/Void Magic wrenched open the path again for them all to take quite smoothly. The Python, under temporary Contract, had come with them to track the Humans who had made this entire mess possible.

They’d found themselves outside of Libreville in a small clearing of the ever-present jungle. Tracking the Black Curia agents had followed forthwith, helped along by Invisibility, Flight, and Disks.

A long tongue flicked out, tasting the air, and they followed the Snake’s pointing head through the outskirts of the city to the city’s docks, now built up with haphazard Earth Element fortifications broken and smashed from repeated littoral raids by Aquatics. The warehouses there were mostly abandoned and half-collapsed, which made them convenient places to take shelter.

-Shadow-user on the south side. Mutate under the rubble to the side,- Glenn /called out softly, eyes glowing softly with the pale clarity of his Divination Element.

-Mutate,- Sama /murmured her claim, and was not among them a moment later.

-Burt, on three, brainlock the sentry,- the Mick /ordered, his Staff Forked sliding out half a yard of blue-black adamantine Spearhead. -One, two, three!-

Void Magic grabbed him and displaced him fifty yards. A shadow jerked five feet to his left as the Id Insinuation smashed into the spotter and trapped him inside an illusion for a few seconds.

That was more than enough time for a Spear to drive into his neck, up into his brain, and a Shocking Touch that could light up a small city to discharge into his grey matter.

The rubble surged up behind him as the Midnight Horror nearby, the ‘greater’ form of the Black Curia’s Cursed creations, surged to its feet.

A second later, its head kept going into the air, propelled by the hard-pumping blood from its neck. Sama was right next to him, past him, and her Null was up hard as steel, locking the magic down around her as the Shadow-user materialized, a swarthy olive-skinned fellow who could have come from anywhere of a hundred nations.

Then she was moving into the doorway of the building, and the KIA team flitted into position around it, making sure nothing got away.

There were only a couple shouts of alarm, a few impacts lost in the rumble of the heavy seas beyond the lackluster breakwalls, and then cold, chilling silence.

Sama came walking back out the door with four heads in her hand, which she tossed towards the Mick. He shifted them into his Pocket without blinking an eye. “Missing one. Which way?” she asked the Snake who was watching all this with great interest... and shying back from the incredibly hard, yet totally ethereal edge of Sama’s Null.

The Snake hissed, tasting the air, then turned around and pointed. Without another word, the KIA team headed in that direction.

The bodies inside were vivisizing, and there would be no trace of anything having been there by morning.

---

-Leaf here says the sixth one is female, and is there, with a Human Sage,- Tox pointed for everyone. Schematics of Sage Ojibwae’s manor house floated past each of their mind’s eyes.

-Oh, is that not just typical!- /laughed Sama as the location was verified as his bedchambers. -Glenn, are they still going at it?-

The rawboned, slender Diviner lifted an eyebrow at her request, but obligingly pulled up a nearly-invisible Eyeball of magic and sent it zipping towards the building two hundred paces away with a flicker of his finger. Everyone waited patiently as his left eye glowed softly, the Wizard’s Eye popping from point to point as he shifted it along lines of sight, bypassing the Wards designed to detect magic crossing them.

He shifted the Eye through a pair of closed glass doors, and looked down at the intertwined couple on the bed for a moment, making sure they weren’t moving.

“Looks like they are all spent for the moment, Sama,” he said with half a smile.

“Make sure you keep that Eye up so you can record his expression when he wakes up with his headless lover in his arms,” she said mirthlessly, and everyone swallowed as she seemed to shift sideways into nothingness, and was abruptly gone.

Leaf was the most disturbed of all, looking around quickly for any sign of her. Tox just patted the Python consolingly when it could find no trace that Sama had ever been there at all, and the Snake hissed in distressed alarm...

---

No Void Brothers around, gotta do all the work myself, Sama thought, with a cheerfully fatalistic mindset that she always found reassuring.

She’d known she was a Template since she’d been born, just like all the Ranthas. She and Briggs had even done their Incarnation Dives a long time ago, and found out where the two of them had died, and who was responsible.

The Shadow Waters Sage, Publio Colignistroni, his Great Family one of the most feared criminal Families in the world, a man with his fingers in ALL the pies, feted and feared by mages and great powers all over the world, had been the first human to die by a nihilor bullet, fired from two thousand paces away.