“The Earthhouse of Michigan will begin accepting applicants in three minutes.” The Holo of Clients One to Ten popped up above the six doors, and those eager applicants hurried up to the Phantasmal Servants taking their Hunter ID’s.

---

From hundreds of miles away, I watched the opening going off without a hitch.

The introduction of the Earthhouse went over with at least the same amount of celebration as the Lighthouse had. The extremely moderate fighting capabilities of Earth-users at the Novice level had always been apparent, and while their defensive abilities later on were top-notch, not having any true fighting power at the beginning was always humiliating.

Really, Earth Ripple? Being able to make things on the ground move faster or slower?

The introduction of Crystal Shards, Rockfangs, Sand Serpents, Sandstorm, and Rock Armor completely upended the possibilities for Earth-users, as suddenly they were mobile and powerful on both offense and defense at the mere Novice level. Sand Serpents even gave them a control aspect, and Sandstorm a form of concealment and evasion technique.

Like the Lighthouse, the process was mostly automated, although the Staffers were Redshore Vassals this time, not just Hunters.

The announcement had gone out a week ago, the Hunter Guild and military given three days advance notice, the former mostly to get the staffing and computer systems in place to handle the surge in applications going to be coming at the local branches, and the latter so they could start sending soldiers to Michigan to go through the process.

Michigan was one of the more secure regions held by Humanity, having mostly been purged of truly hostile Beasts by the tenacious natives. The Great Lakes did have a few dangerous species in them, and even a couple Rulers, but the Michiganders didn’t bother them, and were mostly ignored in return. The Empress Turtle, Lady Gichigumi, tended to stay up in her own Great Lake and was not intruded upon save by the idiotic. The occasional attacks were mostly spillovers from further north, as the peninsula was also the northern and western edge of Humanity’s midwestern territory around the Great Lakes, with the area around Chicago and the northern parts of the Mississippi being constantly-threatened battle grounds. The far side of the Great Lakes were in Canada, realms held by many Rulers and even Emperors.

The Pike Lands were what the Upper Peninsula was called, a contested zone Humans were exploring and mining, but not truly settling. There were plenty of iron mines and other substances of Earth in the Pike Lands, and a lot of effort was put into bringing them out and back down into Human lands. Various species of Wolves, Weasels, Bears, Badgers, Stags, Raccoons, Foxes, and Pumas were constant threats, with the latter three being especially cunning.

The men of Michigan gave as good as they got, however, working the mines and then filling them back in after mining them down before moving on to the next. The mines actually made decent lairs, and it had been noticed that the Michigan people cleaned up their messes and tried to contain the spills and tailings until such was done.

As a result, mines run by Michigan folk were less ‘assaulted’ by Beasts than ‘frequently tested’, teased, and taunted by the territorial creatures they were intruding upon who wanted their land back... and would eventually get it back, as the miners didn’t make a habit of killing interloping Beasts if they hadn’t killed anyone. Mines run by others who were more ruthless and uncaring of the side-effects of mining? They were faster and cheaper to run, and paid for it in Human lives, entire mining crews and their guards sometimes wiped out by hordes of hungry and irritated Beasts swarming over them.

The Michigan Union of Miners had sprung up out of such blatant disregard for the miners. They’d originally expanded slowly, facing a lot of harassment and outright suppression by powerful and greedy mages and the Families behind them, but in the end, they had won the battle by their unity, tens of thousands of miners walking off the job until their terms were met, shutting down whole swathes of America’s industry and bringing incredible pressure to bear on the Families trying to break them.

Nobody could force the powerful Families to employ Union workers, of course, but given how much of a risk of death working for them was, the wages and costs of employing scab labor simply began to rise past the point where it was cheaper to employ the MUM. The Families had hated it as their costs escalated, but they had folded in the end.

The consideration of the local Beasts had one exception, and that was Wolverines.

Mutual antipathy between the savage creatures and Humanity ruled the day. They were a nasty species at the best of times, and Humanity had killed their Emperor, so their enmity was now bone-deep and untiring. While the Wolverine Tribe wouldn’t seek out Humans to kill and eat constantly, any encounter or infringement on Wolverine territory was met with straight-up conflict, often to the death, and young wandering Wolverines would slaughter any Humans they encountered without exception.

Michigan’s Wolverine Hunters were known across the country, and even overseas, tapped frequently to take on powerful Badger-kin of all types. They’d been hired in both Europe and Africa, among other places, just to deal with other Wolverines and Honey Badgers.

They didn’t bother to keep their skills a ‘secret’, either, as many specialized Monster Hunters did. It was just the tenaciousness required to finish the job was more important than all the magic used, and too many people were not up to it. Being a Wolverine Hunter was the most respected job in Michigan, and set the standard for the whole state.

The militancy of MUM, the other unions, and the reputation of the Wolverine Hunters meant there was a strong fighting spirit in this area, for all that the danger within the State itself wasn’t that high. As a result, there were garrisons in Detroit, Fort Mackinaw, and Chicago, a LOT of people with military experience, and the Families didn’t have quite as much power in Michigan as they did elsewhere.

There had been efforts to break MUM in the past, trying to turn it into an extension of one of the Families as a mere instrument to enrich them and give them an easy source of minions. That particular Sage and his people had ended up buried alive at the hands of some of the most skilled Earth-movers in the world, as well as all his Family’s business holdings and residences, a simultaneous one-night operation that had required over a thousand mages to pull off, none of whom had been caught or found, oddly enough.

Briggs came from three generations of those MUM workers, and was extremely widely respected within the union. The fact he’d quietly crushed at least three criminal networks taking over parts of the union certainly hadn’t hurt the fact. I doubted he’d offed the two Dons in New York City masterminding the whole affair, but that was what Sama was best at. The gory bloodfest she’d left behind was still talked about in the shadows, I’d been told.

MUM was also where Briggs drew a lot of his people from. Not everybody could mine, and miners all had brothers and sisters who didn’t follow the trade. Briggs had long put out the feelers for non-Casters with brains and drive, and employed a bunch of them in Coralost. That number was basically growing every day now; I vetted new hires for them, looking for those elusive Good Auras, and accepted the occasional Blue or Green with strong enough family ties.

Teaching Artifice to his people was natural in this place. Michigan was the auto-manufacturing titan of the world, making more cars for the working man than any other company, even if it had much less prestige in the fancy luxury market. It had attracted more Earth mages here per capita as a result of it all than any similar population in the world. It meant the state had exceptional numbers of engineers to draw on, a lesser occupation often made up of mages with Elements that didn’t cater to Intelligence, and so were prime recruits for Artificing, Alchemy, and now, Wizardry.

Setting up the Earthhouse here wasn’t so much calculation as inevitable, and making it a part of Coralost the same. Briggs could directly manage the income, and allocate his people and/or allies as he desired... and I just dumped the income on him and let him do what he wanted to with it.

I’d also added the sixth Podium, with the superior Earth Ripple Scroll on it. Dubious people had tried it, and been shocked to find that their Earth Ripple suddenly became ten to fifteen percent larger in area, tested out repeatedly by numerous parties from all over the world with plenty of video evidence to support them.

I’d thus also put up a Sixth Scroll at the Lighthouse, along with the news that the default, inferior spells would be released to the public one year after each Spellhouse was opened.

That silenced a lot of complaints, except the petty ones that wanted me not to delay, but I’d just ignored them and said that it gave the early users a full year to test out everything about the spells and make sure they were completely valid for everyone else.

If they wanted the best version of the spells, they’d still go to the Houses. If they wanted the normal ones, just wait for them and they’d be fifty bucks a pop plus handling fee from the Hunter’s Guild on a consumable Scroll.

The new wizards looked at the spells in their spellbooks and snickered, quietly teaching them on the side to their friends and families ahead of time. They weren’t the Impressed versions, but that was fine. They’d do until they could get the better versions, which were basically going to combat Casters, anyway.

---

“Swampy, take it!”

The big man crossed his arms and took the jet of corrosive water on his personal Water Shield, his Water Magic the best to defy the attack of the Deep Goggler spitting at them, especially when backed by his Rock Armor. Normally a creature of the sea would have superior power and skill with Water Magic, but Tier-5 Stars said no, that wasn’t quite the case here.

The Mick’s Lightning Whip lashed out, spinning and whirling as he let go of it, and the Ball Lightning Bolas snapped and whirled tight about the startled Goggler, who wasn’t expecting such a fast response. They came spinning in tight, blew in a crackling explosion, and the fishoid’s skeleton was briefly visible inside its scales as it was fried.

I was holding a Wizardry lesson in Markspace; a separate Artificer lesson as well; directing a new and superior line of Healing Potions being put into place; and running the coordination of the fight here with Detect Aquatic Creatures V: Behold the Heart of the Deeps in place, piggybacking it on my Eyes of Heaven V, which was Zealotry-empowered to detect Non-Good.

I could Detect every Aquatic creature within a 240-yard radius, or 480 yards in a sixty-degree arc. I was also aware of everyone in the Fellowships, with Healing Frostfire Darts on standby to deliver some much-desired Healing love if they needed it.

There was nobody who desired power so much as the meek, and when you had nobody in front of you keeping you down, only raising you up to become more, more! MORE!, well, what was a little murderous combat in a Littoral Zone to gain the Karma to claim those Class Levels?

Driver Sam had driven me out here to Boston to establish the Lived-Line path to the Littoral Zone, and now daily Teleport trips back and forth from Coralost were the norm, amusingly doing exactly the same kind of thing Sama and Briggs had once done in-game, albeit this ‘island’ was a ten-mile-wide stretch of shore on Boston Harbor, stretching all the way to Salem, now turned into a killing ground for the daily tidal assaults of all sorts of creatures from the depths of the Atlantic.

Some of the raiders were humanoid, some were tauroid, some were just creatures of the deeps coming up here to kill people at behest of their masters, leaving behind more room for the young of their species to grow.

Unlike the often-mountainous Irish coasts and its highly-fortified rivers, Boston was an open bay right on the ocean, and there was no denying it was a massive frontal zone on the ocean worthy of invading. Apparently, some Emperor or six down in the Atlantic had decided that they didn’t like the pollution, didn’t like the fishing industry, or didn’t like how many Humans there were, and had decided some population control on both sides of the equation was appropriate.

So, here was a constant battle line, fought at every incoming tide in the harbor. Manipulated by the creatures of the ocean, the incoming tide was always at least ten feet higher than it should have been, and if the incoming force was particularly large, could be thirty, forty, or fifty feet higher than the actual waterline.

The first such invasion back in the late 1800’s had been catastrophic, wiping half the city off the map and killing tens of thousands of unprepared Bostonians. Armies from the entire New England area had to pour into the place to hold back the literal tide of Aquatic reinforcements, only the Wards of the city giving them enough of an edge to push the invaders back after a full year of bloody combat, the deaths of four Aquatic Nobles and a half-Emperor, and over a hundred thousand dead Human soldiers.

The United States had felt the loss for years, but it had only set them up as one of the most combative nations in the world since!

The cost from the sea was at least ten times the Human losses, but the Beasts of the Atlantic didn’t care, continually sending forces to batter at the harbor, and so turning it into one of the world’s deadliest combat areas: a Littoral Zone!