The Power of Ten

Chapter 8-225: And Right into the Fire

Inukchuk tried a couple more aborted attempts to get up close and engage me in melee. First, he tried bringing up a blizzard. That was fine, I Spellflared it, and He got to eat the feedback as it collapsed atop Him.

He repeated the process six times, and I collapsed it right on top of Him six more times. It did slow me down, having to break my pattern to let loose a Spellflare, but I didn’t let it stop me from killing Congregants and the tougher undead. His minions could always enjoy a few more seconds of unlife, it didn’t mean anything to me.

Stealth didn’t work. I had See the Invisible at V, Arcane Sight at V, and Master Fred had Detect Evil V, Behold the Heart of Darkness.

Oh, and the +52 Perception modifier didn’t hurt, either.

His influence on the manasphere was readily apparent even if He was cloaking Himself with Divination Wards, and His tie to the Shroud was perfectly visible to me simply by tracking His influence on the surrounding undead, and triangulating.

He was really surprised the first time He was first disguised as just another white wraith and I shot Him, and incidentally all the wraiths and snow shades around Him... and then I repeated the trick when He disguised Himself as an invisible stalker, trying to do the same.

He was the Shroudlord. He carried around His power and influence like a huge dark cloak, if you knew what to look for.

Arcane Sight, Detect Evil, and See the Invisible at V all formed a trifecta that made His Mantle of Power bloody obvious no matter what He looked like or changed Himself into.

Sometimes it sucks to be the king, after all.

He tossed icy spears at me, I dodged them. He tried to get within two thousand feet of me, and I shot Him and sent Him flying, mostly dead, each time.

I belatedly asked The Old Steed if he recognized the old fellow, and he affirmed that this was a brother deity of his former master.

I wonder if He recognized the skull on my Stave. The double-duty Baneskull was burning black and red, seemingly laughing in irony at the devastation I was bringing out in so many radiant hues.

My progress around the void continued, occasionally slowed but never abated. The undead could not possibly move fast enough to escape me, and if they wanted to abandon the area, all I had to do was sever the control links to their boss, and they’d turn right back around and charge into obedience range, walking right into obliteration to do so.

The cold frustration coming off the old god was perhaps being accentuated with a little dread now. Perhaps He was wondering how a non-divine being was throwing out such an endless cavalcade of obliteration, but the only ones who knew the precise method were myself and the Shroud above, and neither of us were talking to this ancient frozen thing.

Its Shroud was shrinking rapidly, and as I turned the far side and was burning away the undead there, it was receding literally as fast as I was coming.

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His flying servants were all gone.

His Congregants, or minions with some intelligence, had become vivic candles. His brutes and beasts were burning on fields of vivus with the countless animated and frozen corpses and bones He had assembled over the time-lost years of His vigil.

His throne of carven stone, where it had doubtless sat for millennia uncounted, had been randomly blown apart in passing.

His elite crew of boulder-throwing frozen Jotuns had perished in one fusillade, before they could chuck a single boulder in my direction.

The drake-riding undead Sepulcher Knights and their bony wings had been blasted burning from the sky.

Four winter wights were assembled at His sides as Shards exploded through the ranks of His minions, and the last members of His Dead March, His mighty undead horde of close to twenty million frozen, icy corpses and carcasses, and over fifty thousand incorporeals and Elemental spirits, was pretty much gone.

The white-on-dark of the Frostshroud above Him was basically just a tiny little patch on the Haze, basically nothing at all now.

Seven hundred meters away from Him and in midair, I hove to, while Master Fred calmly exploded a couple more Walls of Fire here and there, even though there were no viable targets in the sea of vivus burning so cheerfully below us.

Master Fred then cast the last one he needed to.

Come now. I was a Spellcaster with a 46 Intellect (50, in this cold). This could get done with brute power, but where was the elegance in that?

No, Master Fred had been drawing a pattern, Walls of Fire searing the lines and curves of it into the landscape, disguised among the greater vivus; whorls and arcs and drawings were executed precisely as I guided him, the pattern hidden among the greater slaughter.

And now they linked up!

The Runes on the ground lit up with the speed of det cord igniting. They were hot and heavy, pulling in all that expended fiery mana in the air, all the vivus from the disintegrating corpses.

I saw Inunkchuk look down as the lines of fire flared below and past Him, streaking into the distance, and He looked up just in time to meet my eyes.

The detonation blew one hundred feet into the air everywhere, ringing that empty void in divine fire. His mighty winterwights, among the strongest of all non-Eternal undead, went away under the starfire reaching up towards the heavens, and their dread chillflames turned them into vivic explosions hitting the old god from all four directions.

He was still in midair, blown to the very top of the hungry flames, when nearly three hundred burning Shards slammed into Him to complete the process.

The explosion of this Frostlord detonating poured down into the rising flames that hadn’t quite died off, and they instantly doubled in height and luminosity, nearly reaching the altitude at which I was floating on The Old Steed.

It took several minutes for the gargantuan Wall of Fire to fade and dissipate. The golden starfire and heavenly flames slowly receded into the great Formation Master Fred had carved out for me, and behind them leaving nothing intact.

Except one thing.

The skull was icy blue, and definitely not human or made of bone, in contrast to the black one on my Stave, but there was no doubt of some similarity between them. The Spear looked like an overlarge icicle, but it was a godly Weapon, so I wasn’t going to ignore it.

It joined the Bow, Spear, and Tomahawk in the Quiver I had in my Masspack. I would do something useful with them eventually.

My eyes turned to the great carven pillars that represented the ice nodes of the South Pole. The seventh one was actually located at the center of that floating continent out there, annoyingly enough. It looked like we’d be doing some traveling again...

-------------josei

I Blighted all the Nodes to drain them of power, then Hallowed them, making a fundamental change in the nature of the energies they presented. There were some old, dangerous, and inhuman signatures present in the great columns and carvings that represented those Nodes, and now they were sitting on Sanctified land that was innately hostile to them. Their influence over this isolated realm would suffer thereby.

I didn’t know what the ramifications were if this pocket dimension was actually eliminated, and had no desire to truly test it out. It was enough that I had completed six of the seven Cold infusions into my blood, offsetting them against my blazing hot heart. It took the scarlet off my skin, leaving me with just edges and highlights of crimson, which would be completely balanced off with the last Node.

Master Fred took command of a horde of Phantom Servants and went around cleaning up the battlefield of what little needed to be scavenged, salvaged, or arranged, while I froze my blood solid repeatedly, my heart melted it, and steam came out my nose as ice dripped out my pores. Melted weapons and metal armor were the biggest things sitting around, but occasionally precious metals that had been worked into grave goods or trophies had been left behind, and Master Fred salvaged those, either stacking them up or moving them out of the way.

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“She wiped out millions of undead, then took out something that was probably a god, made a Wall of fire half a mile wide ringing a circle ten miles across as part of doing all that, and she showed it to all of us.

“And you don’t find that even a bit intimidating?” Shvaughn asked Sama.

Sama took a drink of something local, looked at it crossly for having no kick, and pulled something out of a pocket to toss into the bottle. There was a poot, blue flame shot a foot out of it, and she took a drink while it was still burning.

Her boots were propped up on the corpse of a finely-uniformed general who had thought himself an important person or something. The center of his chest held a charred hole a foot across, seared so cleanly through it didn’t even bleed.

“Nah, that’s about right. Senior Powered who knows how to build, and she’s got something going on with her connection to the Shroud, giving her tips or something. Not surprised.”

“Let me try that.” Sama tossed her the bottle, snagging another beverage off the wine rack kept by the man, eyeing the label before preemptively tossing in another tablet of something.

The flames were green this time, but still an improvement over the stuff they served here.

Blue flames started coming out of the Warlock Grandmaster’s nose and ears after she took a long drink, but she managed to keep her eyes closed, and ignored the smoke coming out her eye ducts while all the veins stood up on her neck.

It took fifteen seconds before the flames went out. She swallowed, cleaned out her mouth, and looked at Sama crossly. “Damn Hag. This shit is lethal!” She took another swig, leaning on the bodyguard of the general slumped on the couch next to her, a two-inch hole burned between his eyes.

“Nah. Just need ten points of fire resistance, it’s like bath water,” Sama replied casually, waving her hand dismissively, then shook the one in her hand. “Now this one requires acid resistance, so, yeah, it might be lethal.”

Shvaughn rolled her eyes. “You are so annoying.”

The doors to the general’s office slammed open, and an elite squad of soldiers ran in, weapons hot, freezing as they saw the two women drinking flaming bottles of wine turn to regard them with eerie synchronicity.

Both of their eyes were burning.

“Get. Out.” Said perfectly simultaneously.

The elite personal soldiers of General Huaverz blanched, and found their feet moving backwards before they could say anything. It was just the slightest flicker of those eyes, but they had the distinct impression that if they didn’t courteously reach out and pull the doors shut behind them, they wouldn’t make it out to the hall.

The doors closed quietly, shattered or not, and their footsteps retreated down the hall.

“Such loyalty to a dead man,” Shvaughn murmured, tossing her currently-black hair back as she took another swig. This time she exhaled twelve rings of fire, ascending lazily towards the brocaded tile of the ceiling, which they promptly set on fire when they burst against it.

Sama pursed her lips and spat a thin stream of glowing green stuff ten feet up to the impact points, extinguishing the flames and eating right through the plaster there, precipitating a general collapse in that section of the ceiling.

Shvaughn considered just how much gut power that took, and smirked despite herself. Projectile vomiting just took on a whole new meaning...