It had been three months since the first subsea Death Zone had been Sealed away.

Nine Aquatic Emperors had died, including two True Emperor Sharks and a Sea Dragon. Pride, gluttony, or ferocity made them overextend, and get swarmed and killed faster than the Kill Team could come in to rescue them, always a huge danger when dealing with Undead and Shades.

We could kill the powerful Undead and Shades far more easily than the living, but they in turn had much more offensive power than their living peers, and they were unafraid to die, thinking they could resurrect and their shells were just shells they could abandon and reform.

It didn’t work that way, but they found that out when they perished, their souls that had embraced necroic energies Burning like tinder and being fed to the Land.

Now I was looking at the last of the Death Zones. All the Tainted and Corrupted survivors who’d fled the open seas and managed to evacuate the smaller Zones before we could surround them had come here. Although the waters of the world were still full of Dark Mana, the Sealed Conduits were now grinding away at the problem, instead of contributing to it. The tendency of the Dark Mana to diffuse towards areas of low concentration helped as the Domains of the Pyramids pulled in the Dark Mana from all directions and set it en vivus.

There’d been a couple abortive attempts to go after Pyramids already in place. Only four hundred feet high, the piles of linked stones were in no way able to resist the power and strength of an Aquatic Emperor, or even most of the Rulers.

However, we were monitoring all of them, and both Flowing Silver and The Ice Emperor were watching them. Nothing strong enough to threaten either Pyramid that had been moved on had survived long enough to do so, mind crushed or frozen solid across the miles. The Rulers left on security were happy to start the devouring and Burning process, naturally enough.

The Sea Emperor’s forces had been filled out with Ice vassals comfortable in the water, their ability to restrict movements coming in very handy for encirclements and slowly confining the enemy to areas, which could then be inundated with vivisized Water to kill them more quickly.

I stared at the dome-like barrier of necroic energy in front of me, replacing a warped and tainted Death Zone with an open expanse of untouched sea in the central Pacific, out in the literal middle of nowhere.

“HEALER FAE?” The Sea Emperor asked calmly, as I stared at the barrier in front of us.

“Bring in the wings and the flanks. Stop the encirclement and get everyone back here in formation,” I said calmly, but it was Psychic as much as words.

There was only the tiniest hesitation before the tactics and strategy that had been applied to the previous Sealings was completely abandoned, and the Rulers and Emperors swarm urgently back to join the main thrust of the attack.

I felt ripples in space, carried along with the waters, amplified them for the Emperors and Rulers around me.

Large numbers of large bodies, moving in tandem with our own.

“I have dire suspicions that there are at least two High Emperor Netherworlders behind that dome. Possibly three.” The Sea Emperor’s eyes flared open in realization that a charge would have likely gotten them all killed. “We are going to change how we attack them as a result.

“Emperors form an outer shell and concentrate on protection against your Wills and Souls. Rulers, a Formation on the inside.”

I began to weave a Seven Stars Elemental Formation around the Obelisk toted around by Ship of the Oceans Nautiloid Emperor. Although many of the other Elements were rare among the Emperors, that wasn’t totally true among the Rulers, as the seas held a diversity of life. There were Aquatic Rulers with the Elements of Earth, Light, Fire, Air, and even Lightning, they just weren’t very powerful.

But I didn’t want powerful, I wanted effective, and Ruler-level was plenty enough to be effective and really juice the power of the Obelisk we’d brought along.

Assembling a minor Pyramid foundation for the Obelisk took only minutes, and spacing Rulers with all Seven Elements around it to feed the Obelisk’s Dark Mana ignition and the power of its Jade Ring was simplicity itself.

I sent the plan out to every Aquatic there once everything was in place. “Alright now, what we’re going to be doing is bending an entire ocean current to the absolute limit of the Obelisk’s Domain in the form of a Maelstrom. I want waters heavy with Dark Mana pulled out of the area ahead of us, fed into the Obelisk’s Domain, and then I want them poured right back inside that place. I want them swimming in acid and poison, I want all their Tainted crap shut down, and I want you all to use your greatest strength, your collective power over Water, to kill them all.

“Your Majesty, you lead.”

A single Chord resounded in the deep, spreading through the waters and making the Water Mana here dance. One Chord, one Harmony, one resonance between all these ultimate Masters of Water.

The Sea Emperor reached out and rumbled harmony into that Chord. Whorls, clicks, calls, murmurs, and faint songs whirled, adjusted, and high and low, slowly synched into harmony with that one Chord, which consequently began to grow and grow, shaking the Waters with the sheer amount of power it represented.

“Pull it out, turn it around, Burn it, send it at them.”

The Psychic vision was spot on, The Sea Emperor leading the effort. Miles away, a huge section of water just outside the dome was pulled away from the natural course, disrupting the deflection and transport effect of the dome in front of them. There was even a ripple as the confinement effect of the Dome failed, the Interdiction against transporting equally massive amounts of water from elsewhere around the Dome shuddering the water and the whole weight of the Ocean around basically bearing down at once, demanding there be pressure, demanding there be balance!

Thick, turgid and blackened water, heavy with necroic energies, surged out of the illusion wrought by the concealing Dome, and set up a massive current under the sea.

There was no way the Emperors and Rulers inside the Dome could possibly stop the flow of what was going on here. They couldn’t match the raw amount of power over Water on our side, and once it was all synched up with resonance effects AND the Sublime Chord was giving them all a Caster Level boost, their attempts to claw back control, break the Interdiction effect and keep their happy, heavy wonderland of Dark Waters intact simply couldn’t happen.

Those Dark Waters arced around in a mighty circuit miles-long and wide, a darkness at the dark bottom of the ocean, and slammed into the Obelisk’s Dark Mana draw.

Condensed rivers of Dark Mana were pulled ahead of the main mass, but even as they streaked past and over the Rulers and Emperors doing this, they were igniting from countless Vivic Eternal Flames Burning over each and every member of the Sea Emperor’s undersea flotilla of mighty Beasts, possibly the most powerful force of Beasts that had ever been gathered in one place in planetary history.

The Obelisk went up like a blazing torch, fed by the Seven Stars Formation and absolutely blazing with vivic energy that sucked in the Dark Mana, ignited, and erupted into a great flowing flower as that condensed and intense vivic energy was swept away as fast as it Burned, and slammed full on into that invisible Dome.

The massive expanse of it rippled at the contact of so much intensely vivisized water, but it couldn’t deflect or deport the Water, this entire expanse of the ocean was completely locked down, and moreover their Tainted Mana couldn’t maintain control of anything Burning so intensely in opposition to them.

The whitened water, like rolling clouds glowing in the deep, poured into the unseen Dome in front of us and past, plunging into whatever was waiting on the far side.

Behind me, the Rulers and Emperors of the Seas were blazing with vivus, points of hungry Light as the main flow of the Dark Waters swept over and past them. The initial Formation of them, designed to maximize the ignition effect between them, was subtly and continually updated in response to changes in the patterns of the Waters. It began to Burn brighter and brighter, while the writhing cords of Dark Mana plunged in one side of the Obelisk’s Domain and exploding whitely out the other side continued their job.

Responding to so much movement of the waters on the ocean floor, the shallower waters up above us began to spin.

Relief pressure on the far side of the Dome opened, and whatever cyclic effect was going to happen in the Dome broke suddenly. More Dark Waters were vomited out into the seas, but these weren’t en vivus... yet. There was a tremendous amount of water pressure in that direction, and their control over the waters meant the Dome could still stop the Dark Waters from venting... but not the vivic ones.

It took only a minute for the constrained flow of Dark Waters under high pressure to suddenly explode in size, and the cloudy waters of the cycle blew out from inside the Dome under high pressure, not incidentally catching up to and consuming the Dark Waters ahead of them as they did so.

Inflow and outflow of the vivic waters meant all the Waters inside the Dome were being drawn out naturally, while the vivus played havoc with the denizens’ control. They could try to send the incoming, untainted Waters around the circuit, but now the vivisized Waters were starting to bend towards that inflow, which would once again disrupt their control, and set up a rotating circuit of vivic waters cutting right through the Dome.

All The Sea Emperor had to do was guide the input and output points, and He could wash the entire damn thing down eventually. Anything inside was going to take a howling vivic bath as the amount of vivus feeding on Dark Mana naturally spread and sought out more centers of Dark Mana.

The current was in place. It had taken the power of Emperors to get this started, moving this much water and Mana into motion, but once it was there, the Rulers could actually keep it going as long as they were in harmony.

Above us, there was a massive maelstrom, tens of miles wide, starting to spin and form on the surface of the sea. There were no ships in the area, and the weather was rapidly becoming a howling cyclone, but that was fine.

There were a score of Avian Emperors up there in those clouds now, led by both Thunderbird and the Phoenixes, making sure no stupid Synod or Curia forces got ideas of interfering with this. Thunder and Lightning alternated with Fire and Ice suffusing the clouds, temperature differentials fueled a greater display and concentration of powers... and actually helped the Seven Elements flow as Ice and Earth Rulers and users, consisting of Crabs, Clams, and Lobsters, were able to draw upon more of their strength in counterpart with the higher concentration of off-Elements coming in from above.

The Land Emperors might not like the Aquatics, but this was about the Netherworld, and there were no grudges about this matter.

Fire Luan Emperor reported to me that four separate satellites in orbit were paying very close attention to this matter, and I was sure that something was thinking about intervening and trying to get everything involved killed.

“Emperors start sliding forwards,” I told them all softly, and all around me massive forms began to glide into position, arrayed about the still and waiting figure of The Sea Emperor, Dark Waters igniting around Him as they did all the others, thick bands of whiteness coiling through the passing Waters and pouring into the invisible Dome in front of them. “Start letting the Rulers take the load and maintain the currents, get ready to use defensive magic. They will attempt a massive strike out against us, led by their strongest. I will deal with the six strongest attacks.

“Your Majesty, prepare something dire.”

The Sea Emperor’s eyes actually glowed, and cubic miles of waters streaming past us at over sixty mph, an underwater flash flood, impossibly fast, nothing without absolute control of Water would have been able to stand in the midst of it, THRUMMED as a very powerful, very ancient Will, reached out and began to do something with at least a million Mana.