Weeks had passed. Recruiting had continued, viable candidates for Undead Hunter arriving here from all over the world after careful vetting and referrals from Coralost nominators.

Still, most of them were from Mexico, as there was no end of eager volunteers from the country as the people saw the ancient Death Zone being leveled, cleared, and the undead not rebuilding... because they were not allowed to rebuild, they were given no time to do so, and destruction of their vaunted City of the Dead continued apace.

Despite the high morale and enthusiasm, the process continued with iron discipline. It didn’t matter how excited or confident everyone became: there was a process, and it was adhered to with steely determination by Briggs and all the senior Hunters. The process worked, it grew more Undead Hunters, and it minimized losses and kept the mages alive.

These men were alive, and their commanders wanted them to stay that way, as well as wanted them to grow stronger.

The Synod would have dearly loved to disband the entire thing, but after the hits to their reputation, their political capital in Mexico seemed to have largely dried up. Our observers across the country reported Church of Heaven attendance rising and Church of Light plummeting, probably because some more damning reports of incidents that had happened across the country had surfaced...

I watched the teams below finishing their circling sweep of the city. We now had enough people that we could camp the tunnels coming out from the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon during the day, meaning the undead were unable to dig them out again at ALL during the day, which basically locked the bastards up to the immediate vicinity of the Pyramids.

It meant that we deployed a quarter-mile from the Pyramids, completely encircling them now, and moved in as dusk came over the white sands that had replaced the yellow of ancient bone dust.

The fighting there was terrific yet contained, violent displays of magic pummeling the undead all night, often vaporizing dozens, scores, or hundreds of them at a time, chasing them back towards the doors they were racing out of as fast as they could come nightfall, trying to gather enough bodies to actually slow down the forces closing in on them.

And yet, we still didn’t close in on them completely, blooding the new Undead Hunters, gathering Soul Crystals, gathering Karma as more and more Scepters of Disruption ignited slowly among the more hardened troops who had stuck out the fighting.

But we had done the unthinkable. We had completely contained the undead within their Pyramids now, and the Ahaws could only seethe and stew and continue to send out countless new minions from the Netherworld, testing our conviction, seeing if we had the endurance to wait them out.

We were only the living. Eventually we’d get tired, lose our focus, our will, our alertness. Our forces would be sapped, and then they’d be able to push us back, push us out once again, rebuild their Death Zone, and see about gaining vengeance upon us.

But for now... even the Ward that encircled the Death Zone was down, the consumption of Elemental Crystals and the Archmages needed to power it an unnecessary expense that forced more reliance on the Synod to supply such things. The money formerly used to do so was instead used to rebuild that Ward in much closer on the weakened Death Zone, forced back by so much vivus eating away at it.

The Ward they used was redesigned and improved upon not to need Elemental Diamonds, only devoted mages in the meditative Formations that were made available to the soldiers of the military, and with its size reduced so far, there was much less effort needed to sustain it. Even if we stopped tomorrow, we could totally contain the undead with much less effort, and the more powerful Adepts and Mages could bombard the entire area of the Pyramid-Temples from the Wardwalls with virtual impunity.

The undead only had enough influence left in the zone to rebuild the surface to a smoothly tiled plaza, instead of the chewed-up battlefield of craters, cracks, and fissures that resulted every evening. When combat started, the undead came bolting up out of their Doors and quickly-burrowed tunnels, and the spells started blowing them into ash and dust.

“Any issues from the men?” I asked Briggs. I wasn’t expecting any, as a good chunk of them were Marked, and I’d heard no rumblings from that area.

Briggs was overseeing the Demolition Teams, who were practicing erecting a very familiar diagram and empowering it. It was a powerful Ritual meant to Seal a Conduit, especially the minor ones split off to make the extra Doors on the Temples of the Sun and Moon.

It combined Interdiction with a whole lot of explosive Mana to blast the Conduit into instability, then reality would reassert itself with the vivic reinforcement to clamp shut and Seal the openings. Not incidentally, a nice chunk of the Pyramid would also be ruined by the blast.

“None. All of them understand it takes time and effort to improve their Scepters, and they’ve got to Temper ALL their Stars. There’s more Mages in the Hunters now than in any similar force in the entire world, and they are already starting to have to field offers from a lot of interested parties trying to lure them away,” Briggs replied cheerfully.

“Pity they’ve all got that Geas to contend with,” I mused. The sheer inability of the many, many factions to lure away, bribe, or tempt the Undead Hunters was dumbfounding the powers trying to do so. Even more outrageous was the way they weren’t responding to blackmail, extortion, threats against their families, and the like. So far over three thousand different men had seen action against forces trying to blackmail other Hunters, who had kidnapped their families, threatened loved ones, and the like.

We didn’t handle this for them, as they handled it for one another, although we’d lead the way, Divination Magic being so crazy good at the process.

In doing so, they also learned a whole lot about the factions behind those attempts, many of whom were attempting to recruit them openly at the same time. Word spread, it made the news, it traveled through the communities, and the factions responsible suffered outright murderous retaliations.

There were loud and fervent complaints from said afflicted parties, desperately claiming complete innocence and a power-grab by foreigners looking to take over Mexico, sovereignty, accumulation of power, and so forth and so on. Of course, they tried their own retaliations, too, but ran right into the teeth of even more soldiers happy to kill the people threatening their brothers and sisters-in-arms.

In reply, President Cortega put on a master’s-class of stern words and a lot of hand-wringing, while absolutely nothing got done about it. He took one look at those newly powerful Mexican mages who weren’t beholden to any factions, and knew they could keep him in power for years if he only proved to be a truly great President.

The Synod made one set of threats against him, and the messenger fell dead of a heart attack on the way out of the National Palace. Then the Sun-Hurling Sage was found dead of a heart attack in his home, at a spry seventy-two and in perfect health. Ricardio Gomez, a half-Sage of great repute in Mexico City, was also found dead of a heart attack... and his Light of Souls was also not found when the Synod retrievers urgently went looking for it.

We’d also had to fire half the President’s Guard straight-off, as it was riddled with Synod agents and those in the pay or service of other factions. When some of them resisted, it also got a little messy, and the political fallout, arrests, flight by powerful mages, and similar things made for a very interesting and exciting evening news.

“Yeah, I’ve had a great many soldiers thank me for the Geas keeping them on track. We’ve had a few failures here and there, mostly from soldiers who were approached on leave and couldn’t warn us fast enough to prevent a tragedy, but you know what happened to those behind it.”

“Yes.” Four times the extortion, threats, bribery, and kidnappings graduated to murder. Four times a Family and three Cartels and their holdings had disappeared in an inferno of Undead Hunters volunteering to avenge them all. It turned out that threatening loved ones was also a great excuse to play superhero and go after crime Families from top to bottom.

The Mick and Driver Sam had notches for five Cartel heads between them, and the Undead Hunters had something like twenty thousand dead Cartel members between them, further adding to their heroic reputation. Drug production across half of Mexico was completely disrupted, the enforcers with the stranglehold on the communities forcing it were dead, and many new places had petitioned to become Coralost Communities.

Many of those places also had soldiers in the Undead Hunters eager to return there and see to a better life for their people.

“Haven’t had any attempts in nearly two weeks. It’s like somebody got the message. I expect there to be more idiocy in the near future, however,” Briggs replied grimly, knowing this world for what it was.

The Mick and Driver Sam regularly toured the city and the countryside during their time off, Lived-Lining off the entire place, and could get to within a mile of anywhere within fifty miles of Tezcatlipoca now in literally a fingersnap.

If they got proper directions from a Diviner, they could literally be right next to a kidnapped person in two snaps.

With a whole lot of friends. They’d done exactly that more than once, leaving behind a whole lot of flaming ruin, and not many survivors.

“Any more problems with assassins?” I had to ask. I usually got briefed on the hit teams offed once a week, as Sama and Briggs handled almost all of that stuff. I was dealing with Imperial Beasts and stuff, I didn’t need to be wasting my time on the stuff they could handle.

“The heads of the Cartels and their fixers were pretty informative on some new groups of mercenaries and hired guns who do that kind of work, and their agents and arrangers. Sama and the White Necromancers have been having a field day pulling out a lot of sordid details. Nothing of particular relevance to you.” He sent over the files with a blip of willpower, and one of my few uninvolved thoughtstreams started going through them.

Gah, more Family filth, anything acceptable as long as the powers in the Family benefited...

Eh!?

“CRIMSON ALERT! FULL RETREAT FOR THE WARDWALL NOW! NOW! NOW!”

Every man on station jerked and found themselves hurtling for the Wardwall with maximum speed. Wind Trails exploded all over the place as well-rehearsed evacuations became blurring streams of movement as all the soldiers booked for it with maximum speed.

I was weaving fast and furious as the rumblings in the Conduit grew harder. Briggs was booking it with everyone else as a plume of inky darkness fountained out of the center of the plaza and blew for the sky.

“MAXIMUM POWER TO THE WARDWALL! TROOPS START BUFFERING IT AS SOON AS YOU GET THERE! LEAVE THE TOP OPEN FOR IT TO VENT TO THE SKY!” I continued, flying backward and reaching out to the massive amounts of vivus in the ground from the Burning deaths of what were now tens of millions of undead.

The Wardwall snapped up, higher and harder since it didn’t have to make a dome. The fountain of ink hit where the dome was expected to be, and paused, as if expecting resistance that wasn’t there. Then it began to expand out sideways rapidly, the shadow of it below immediately curdling the vivified ground and trying to catch the soldiers who were fleeing beneath it.

To that, I fed it a whole bunch of Vivic Shards, while the Sublime Chord shook the manasphere and instantly trebled the resistance of the Veil to this sort of intervention. The incoming energy flow stuttered and faltered, and the expansion of the shadow above slowed tremendously as I blew apart the apex of its fountain, saturating it with vivic energy that devoured it with great speed and happiness.

The Undead Hunters were damn happy for the extra time to retreat, nobody wanting to test what was happening to the ground, especially when all the additional bulges started rising from it in a nearly solid mat of incoming Undead of at least Commander-tier.

That fountain?

That was the work of a Low Emperor! I smiled savagely as my bombardment of the energy source only grew more powerful with repetition. One thing I did not have at this time was any chance of running out of Mana with normal Sage spells!