The Power of Ten

Chapter 7-181 - The Luan Luau

The sky exploded with cold lightning in hues beyond the visible spectrum. Writhing beads, swirls, dancing columns, streaking arcs, raging infernos, liquid swirls, crystalline shockwaves, and shimmering reflections of energies, among a thousand other manifestations of unleashed wild magic, tore apart the sky as my spell ripped apart all those Qi weavings and fed them into those who were supposed to be benefiting from them.

The two Cultivators up on the back of the thing suddenly became visible, as they were in range of the AoE, too, and by the snakes, worms, and beetles of mana crawling all over them, weren’t taking the division and cancellation of their buffs too well.

The forward momentum of the luan didn’t change, and the partial paralysis, feedback, and general discomfort of eating its own Qi Weaving meant it didn’t alter course.

That all meant it dove in at near 200 mph into Sama’s Null Stillflight Field, and welp, it was a gigantic bird that was relying on fire and Qi to stay airborne, not physics. There was no way it could stay in the air.

Its scream as suddenly it couldn’t fly was heartening to hear. It started into a death spiral, flapping its wings as hard as it could, but it wasn’t that it wasn’t plenty strong, it was that it was simply too heavy for the air to carry.

As a bonus, the Cultivators were thrown off its back by the burning bird’s crazy gyrations and flapping, and were shrieking in equal fear as they fell, unable to fly.

Sama and The Mick were already blurring into motion. Oh, no dimensional shenanigans allowed, either. The Mick had been putting a lot of Karma into upping his lightfoot, and while there was no way he was going to catch Sama, he was still moving waaay faster than any normal human could.

Briggs kept his position between the falling idiots and the boys, face impassive, holding onto Endure and perfectly willing to do nothing.

I spun up two series of Shards, and simply waited as the ground loomed upon the big bird and it snapped out its wings as wide as it could, breaking its momentum... and not incidentally making a great big honking target of itself.

The alchemical acid I was holding in my hand, which I had supercharged with my Alchemist power, was consumed as the first Twinned Volley of Shards went out. They were cast from Valence II, Improved Shards, and so with Delimit, there were a base fifteen of them, plus three for Weaponized and Shardcaster. They were fully Weaponized, and they hissed out like crackling, frozen balls of liquid jetsilver, trailing crackling corrosive mist. The Royal Avian, a great noble creature of the skies, could only watch them coming in like arrows and bursting against the steel-hard feathers over its throat.

Not cold, no, although they were powered by the frozen, pure magic of cold.

Like detonating bombs, they hit its upper chest and throat and blew away the protective layers there, dissolving the metallic feathers and sending electrical charges along them to tear them from its skin. Primed to counter cold with fire, the heat only turned solid-state force-acid to liquid, and helped it do its job better.

The luan started to shriek in alarm and pain, and then the Fastcast set shot out, Spellwarped down and merged into a single Ray in front of Clavus. It hit the force prism of the Split Ray, and dual lines of jetsilver light shot out into the hole in its feathers and Qi defense, dumping a whole lot of damage into the thing.

36 x (d6+8) + kickers is a rather large amount of damage to eat, and when it is Sudden Topped, well, 36 x 14 + kickers was close to 550 points of goodness to the throat. Heck, even Sneak Attack damage applied, as there was no way it could dodge in the middle of not trying to break some legs on impact.

Even that wasn’t enough to kill it, although it was enough to light up its head and chest from the inside as ravening force, lightning, cold, and acidic energies burned through its system, and turned that spot on its throat into a sizzling hole.

As a free action, I could also shoot a Shard from the glowing crown of them around my head. I did that, except I Spellwarped the whole Crown down into a Ray centered on that one Shard, and shot all 38 of them at once.

The whole set of them grandly left their scintillating formation and flowed into one blindingly bright point of jet-cored starsilver, and then inverted, a solid line of jet, wound about with silver coils of power and supercharging energy.

Take that, only three a round restriction, you!

The coruscating jetsilver Ray punched into that hole, and there was flaring explosion of silver light and black force shards crackling with various energies out the other side of its body. The luan hit the ground with a rumbling smash at that moment, and went down hard, not moving as a great cloud of dust blew up, and glowing lights played around the three-foot hole punched out through its back.

The Cultivators had to vent a bunch of Qi to take the hit as they crashed into the ground, raising cracks and their own impact craters. Naturally, there was no thought from our side of allowing them to recover from the impact.

Sama got to hers first, and he was just sitting up when she swept on by, his eyes widened, and stayed wide as his head went flying into the air.

The other one managed to sort of get up just as a wall of liquid crimson blew over him, melted his ornate robes right off him, and as he staggered, a milk-white sword buried itself into his belly, and the spell inside lit off his blood like fire.

He screamed and shook and writhed as his insides boiled, cooking from within, and crimson steam jetted out of all his orifices.

The Mick watched the Cultivator’s eyeballs melt, and then the corpse sagged and fell around Smior, insides par-broiled and quite dead.

He withdrew Smior, and lifted the Blade up to his lips, drawing the backside along it and tasting the blood of these bastards.

His eyes lit up with crimson.

“Save their blood! I can sell it for a fortune!” he shouted in delight. Sama shook her head, put an Exsanguinating Tube into the main artery on her target’s neck stump, seared the other two closed, and set down a two-gallon jug to collect it all.

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I had to Stone Shape up a big barrel for all the meat off the luan, and a broad, level slab to lay all its feathers on. There was literally tons of the stuff, and we all got pretty energetic harvesting it all.

The heads of the Cultivators were my special project, while we let their bodies burn away after the Mick drained them dry. He informed me that their blood was brimming with energy, and could probably even restore expended Spell Slots if treated properly. I could imagine how much he could sell them for, and how it might be productive to let that fact leak out...

They were murdering Powered to refine them for power; there was no reason we shouldn’t be doing the same. Reducing them to walking spell components was great motivation for a lot of people who were only interested in profit to act against them...

As for the luan, Sama set up a coal pit with my help, and started cooking it first in a sealed pit with holy water, then smoked it over magical flames fed with a mixture of Energized herbs, incense, and stranger things.

Yeah, we drooled over all of it while we worked on chopping up that multi-ton bird. We’d definitely have to go back to dump all of this... and I informed them all that we were going back to Detroit with all this, as there was just too much stuff to dump in Boulder.

Nobody argued. I sent off notices to my Allegiance about what they were going to need to do to prep for our arrival.

That I could send us all off all the way across the country was something they didn’t bother to comment on. Obviously I could do it, and I had already proved I could pop us a hundred miles back to Boulder, why worry about it now being a thousand miles?

Which didn’t mean I wasn’t going to leave some surprises behind, because those cultivators coming out with their pet meant there were more of them back there. What might they be thinking when their pals and birdie didn’t come back?

Sama served up the meat in beautifully arranged cutlets, shavings of half a dozen nuts, and accents of a wine I wasn’t familiar with.

To put it bluntly, they were heavenly. A couple of the Aruans almost swooned on taking their first bites, and the watching Briggs had to clap them on the shoulder and keep them awake.

I nibbled at each cut, savoring the incredible smoothness and subtlety of the meat. Truly, Cultivating creatures weren’t real, getting rid of lesser elements and basically turning themselves into pure Energized delicacies.

Something embarrassing like this was fueling the Aruans’ desires to break Seven and advance to Null Forsakens. They’d been earning great Karma, which had been allowing them to spread their builds properly, take the secondary Levels and the Theurgic combo-Classes. I’d seen them making special ammo, tossing buffed alchemical grenades, and working on their Gear, with both Sama and Briggs advising them directly on how to go about things and their choices of abilities.

It took everyone an hour to eat their fill, and everybody wished it wasn’t. Heavenbound Hall was already setting up the stuff to cook up a feast like they had never experienced, the alchemists were racing to get the accompanying raw materials ready for Sama, and when I spun up the Teleport to take us away from there, I knew they were ready on the far end.

This should not have been possible beneath the Haze, as the dimension-trapping aspect of the Shroud didn’t allow Teleport to normally move beyond line of sight. It was quite a restriction on certain Pact Patrons who could normally teleport freely, as they couldn’t move more than a couple miles overland unless they were doing from an elevated location, which meant not flying.

Teleport was surface to surface, after all, and if you got it wrong, well, you could end up inside a wall, or sunken in the ground.

All this was why Lived-Line Teleporting was so damn important, as using your own temporal presence as a guideline, and simply shifting your physical location to someplace you’d occupied earlier temporally, was pretty much the definition of a location lock.

It also explicitly had to follow the landscape, or the Lived-Line broke, and you lost the connection. That was why I rode everywhere, and in a Named Vehicle, with Detect Location up constantly so I could draw a mental map and know where my Lived-Line allowed me to go.

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From the charlands of Yellowstone, we materialized in a storage hall in Heavenbound Hall, which had been quickly cleared out to give us room.

The Tapestries I’d shrunken down of the goods, basically an improved Itemize spell, exploded back up to full size, and amazed teams of Heavenbound and temple acolytes and aspirants found themselves looking at the loot of a Firezone killteam.josei

Most of the team had never been here, and Helix was almost jumping in excitement at the thought of being able to meet an actual elder of his Bloodline. The Shrines and Temples here were all famous, and they all wanted to see the sights... but not before disposing of our earnings.

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“Thanks, Stand.” I sat there in midair, Master Fred watching with interest from behind me.

Sama’s shield had grown to its full round size, a good two feet across, and altered the runic irregularity of its surface to a bright, mirror-smooth finish. It hummed, watching along with me as the Scrying on its surface showed clearly what was happening at the area we’d left behind.

The Alarm spell I’d left behind had gone off about an hour after we left, and I had retired from all the eager storytelling to see what was happening.

Divination wasn’t a thing that Cultivators were particularly well-known for, and I’d prepped ahead of time, actually molding in a cul-de-sac at the top of a boulder that would keep the sensory source of the spell concealed, so they’d have precious little chance of seeing it.

Looked like four of them, dressed in those overly complex robes and tunics they were so fond of, lots of embroidery and gold thread and layers of silk. They didn’t seem uncomfortable in the 75 Celsius temperature there, but as that was pretty much a pre-req for staying there, it wasn’t a surprise.

By their colors and patterns, looked like three Fire stylists and an Earth stylist, the latter actually in something that could vaguely be called armor... costume armor. I smirked, imagining what Sama and Briggs would say...

I was a little surprised as precise typing played across the top of the image. Is that really armor?!?!?, Stand asked, following with a crazy-face emoji.

“Not without lots of reinforcing Qi, no, but you know how crazyass armor can look like once magic gets involved,” I informed the Shield. Pattering notes that sounded very much like a grumbling truck engine answered me. “No comment!” I laughed, watching the Cultivators inspecting the campsite gingerly.

Not much of the luan was left, and nothing of their companions but white ash politely fed to the Land. That area drew their fascination, as the Qi in that area had also been purged clean by the burning vivus. The woman among the three of them bent down to touch the area of white soil...

“Pull it,” I ordered solemnly.