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Speak softly, carry Ruyi Jingu Bang
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"We're good to take a few thousand ghouls on a temporary basis, but only a few dozen vampires since they require more secure facilities; fewer of the stronger ones, since we'll have to force them to fail their flesh to stone save if we want to securely hold them long term. The more other undead you get, though, the better we'll be able to deal with anyone still in Ustulav."

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Great! In that case, she can get an extended death ward from a 6th circle cleric of Iomedae and see about locating the undead.

It's surprisingly annoying to do it via the sight, but once she senses her first one doing it via energy sensing is triviality itself. They feel... wrong, inverted, like the exact opposite of what a person should be in her senses, but that doesn't make them stand out less. and her ki sensing has always been one of the best in all of recorded history. She can start with a cluster of weak signatures-

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and find herself in the middle of a group of skeletons, all so slow as to be unmoving from her perspective. A thorough look with the Sight confirms that the souls are indeed within the bodies in question and also not in control, which is a horrific way to do things and she immensely hates that some fact of magic she doesn't know made some person decide this was how they wanted to make disposable minions. She'll annihilate the bodies and any possible structure for the spells trapping them to hold on to, and watch the souls depart with some satisfaction. The next group is-

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right here, and it's mostly zombies from the looks of it, who have the same deal. Another blast will destroy them, making sure not to damage the surrounding infrastructure-

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Actually, considering the distances involved and the need to search and reorient between strikes, it's just plain faster to fly. Which is a weird thing to say about a method of instantaneous movement, and it's somehow kind of sad that within a day she's already had this be true twice, but that's just how it is sometimes. Pushing her power as high as she can without acting as an enormous glowing beacon to anyone in the postal code, Kakara will bounce from undead concentration to undead concentration, starting with the ones that feel like the skeletons and zombies and going from there.

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The undead are, not, unfortunately, uniformly that accommodating. Sometimes the "groups" are actually spread out across hundreds of yards, or interspersed with other kinds of undead. Like these spectres here!

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It's not actually an issue to change directions over distances that short, especially when she doesn't even have to and can mostly just make do with beams. As for the spectres, she can close to melee range and-

-not grab them, apparently, though she manages to cut herself off before her magic-and-ki enhanced hand just carves its way through them. Okay, what if she channels the Sight this time like she does to grab souls, and also slows down enough to make sure she doesn't do that again?

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That'll work, though if she slows down that much and then stops to transmit it it'll have enough time to notice her and start to react.

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Only start to, thanks, she's not moving that slowly. Does it come with her to the moon?

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Yep, although once it notices it's probably not going to be happy about it.

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Believe it or not, that is not in fact actually her primary concern here. The rest of the spectres will take the same trip whether they want to or not, and more quickly this time once she knows what she's doing.

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In that case, they will thoroughly fail to offer any meaningful resistance.

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Great, then she can add power levels (power antilevels?) that feel like the Spectres to her search too. Kakara was a bit worried about pulling this off in practice, but this seems surprisingly relaxing; she's pretty sure she could do this all day.

Those look like ghouls. Not what she was looking for, but if they're en route to the next batch she's not going to ignore them. She'll grab them, remembering to be careful not to injure them by exerting too much force, and instant transmission inside one of the cells at a prison Lastwall said they had extra room at. It takes a few transmissions to get exactly the right location, so it's not as easy as transporting the spectres to the moon was, but it's not really an issue just yet and future dropoffs at this prison should be faster until she needs to start using the next location.

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Given the ease of this task so far, one might be forgiven for wondering why nobody has ever done this before. Certainly neither Lastwall nor Ustulav nor any of their other neighbors have ever had a saiyan before, but it's not like ordinary adventurers can't go through skeletons and zombies like a scythe through wheat, and they certainly have a lot of those. What gives?

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There's a lot of answers you could give there, frankly. A cynical man might guess that the answer is as always money; by and large, the wealthy and powerful in Ustulav are safe from the dead, and even those merely nearby or with collective wealth like cities are well fortified against the low-level dead. It's mostly those without that feel the privation. A more economically minded sort might point to logistics; even if a team of 5th level adventurers could cut through one of these groups like a hot knife through butter, they couldn't go through all of them. A pessimist might ask you what the point even would be, if you could; in Ustulav, it's not like whatever filled the new power vacuum would be likely to be any better. 

All of these are, to some extent, true. The city of Absalom has, at varying points, had an undead problem of it's own, but dealing with this issue has always been well funded and benefited in no small part from the glut of adventurers in the area who figure they might as well see if they can afford that new item or go up a circle. Likewise neighboring Lastwall, with its functional institutions and ability to distribute high level good adventurers at rock bottom prices, has done a far better job of keeping its own issues under control despite occupying Gallowspire itself. And it is undeniable that Ustulav has no shortage of horrors that would happily claim any new real estate that opened up. Despite their truth, however, these answers fail to grasp at the main point. The restless dead in Ustulav are primarily one of the symptoms of its problems and not the cause; simply destroying them, as has been attempted a few times in the intervening years since the Shining Crusade's own go at the issue, will typically result in them being replaces and typically filling their own power vacuum without doing more than mildly alleviating the country's woes in the process.

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So it's the necromancers that are the real problem here? Well, them and the various greater undead like Vampires that don't need the aid of magic to reproduce, plus all the overlap between the two categories?

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Colloquially, the individuals thereof are typically referred to as the whispering way, although it would be a mistake to ascribe too much of an organization to them. They aren't all out to free Tar-Baphon either, allegedly or otherwise; most of the older members have fought each other at least once and only loosely cooperate insofar as they have shared goals. But the one thing that has managed to mostly unite them is putting a stop to anyone dealing with Ustulav's undead problem, and towards these ends they can devote a dizzying array of resources, minions, magical firepower, and so forth, while being hidden enough that tracking them down to deal with them is an ordeal in itself. Also complicating matters is that if it was easy to make killing them stick, they wouldn't still be around anymore.

None of this would be enough to defeat another shining crusade, or even the lesser efforts the forces of Good and Law have deployed to issues like the worldwound. But despite Her best efforts and those of Good in general, Golarion has yet to produce another Iomedae, and even if it did they'd be unlikely to aim their efforts at Ustulav. The fact is, there are bigger, more active problems out there than a localized necromancy problem, so as the centuries passed it has slowly entered a similar spot to Nidal, Geb, and the varying other minor hellholes that dot Golarion, where as long as everything stays at a low simmer there are perpetually bigger fish to fry,

(Iomedae had never intended this to last, and Lastwall had mustered its armies in unheard of numbers to act as the tip of Aroden's sword during the Age of Glory. When instead he died without warning, victory once more had to take a backseat to triage.)

 

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Which all adds up to whole cabal of liches, vampires, necromancers, and so forth all ready to come down like a ton of bricks to stop someone from doing just this!

...in theory, anyway.

In reality, both being undead and being centuries old have a tendency to make people set in their ways and slow to react to events outside their expectations, and Mind Blank is categorically sufficient against divination from anything short of a demigod. Between this and the lack of coordination and information sharing, in reality the first hostile encounter between Kakara and a member of a the whispering way will come from 6th circle sorcerer and would-be lich Oana Rusu, who, pissed off at what she assumes is one of her rivals taking a swing at her by targeting one of the mustering points for her current army buildup, dons her ring of invisibility, hides herself from divinations, and stakes out her main staging area to either fend off the critical blow or make whoever dares pay a dear price for crossing her.

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Taking out the lesser undead is surprisingly relaxing, when you get down to it. Kakara might not love fighting like most of her people, but that doesn't mean that this kind of exercise doesn't have the same physiological effects on her, and there's something really nice about seeing the positive effect of all these people freed from torment in real time. The relocation business for the smarter ones offers a break to help keep it from being monotonous, too.

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Funny story about both of those spells; they require attack rolls! Since they target touch AC, that's usually not too much of an issue, but exceptions exist to varying extents.

Right now, that takes the form of the would-be target leaning slightly to the side to let them pass as they light up with a Solar Flare.

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Aaauugh!

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This about the undead - though most prefer to operate under the cover of darkness in one way or another, only a handful of them are actually weak to sunlight. Unless you overcharge a solar flare to a ludicrous degree the most you will accomplish is blinding or dazzling them, and many of them will avoid that too. Since there's no actual positive energy behind this sudden luminescence, even most of those rendered unable to see will not be noticeably harmed, and are not actually all that less threatening for it.

Oana Rusu, on the other hand, is a perfectly ordinary human who spends the overwhelming majority of her time in darkness and shadows, for reasons of aesthetics as much as practicality, and happened to be staring directly at Kakara Goku when she lit up like a fusion reaction. She is the one who dropped like a puppet with her strings cut and started screaming.

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Oops, that's a bit more force then she was aiming for. She can, er, take them off to the prison Lastwall made for her? And then get back to work.

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It would be a stretch to say Oana is cooperating in this endeavor, but claiming she resisted it would be giving her entirely too much credit. When she finishes blinking the spots out of her eyes enough to see, it's to find herself within an antimagic prison cell, at which point she passes from this story.

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Intellectually, Kakara knew that Ustulav had a lot of undead in it. Lastwall told her as much very thoroughly. And experiential, the same goes; she can sense them all, their energy signatures undeniably weird but legible even from hundreds of miles off. There's no way in which this could reasonably be considered a surprise to her.

But Supreme Kais Almighty, there are a lot of undead in Ustulav. That's too many undead; put some back.

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So, do you now see the futility in attempting this? The sheer, crushing horror of the scale of the task you have taken upon yourself, that simply by magnitude my overwhelm you without even seriously using its own force? The intractable problem that has bedeviled any who attempted it since before even the Whispering Tyrant?

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Yeah, no kidding; this is going to take hours to get them all, at least if she wants to be sure there aren't any stragglers. Kakara sure hopes Lastwall has enough castings of Death Ward prepared for the whole stretch.

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