The Power of Ten

Chapter 8-232: Chamber of Frozen Souls

The Shroudlord was in a great underground canyon, the whistling of the wind proclaiming that it had been drawn here from outside, and that far above was some flue drinking it in before sending it out through the numerous tunnels and caves all around.josei

Lots of necroic energy in the air, rubbing off the death idolized here.

Both sides of the entire canyon had been worked over into endless tombs, graves, creches, bas-reliefs, and sculptures... many of the latter with currently empty stands, and their occupants scattered over white floors behind me. Master Fred and I craned our heads back, and yes, they ascended a good long way, the necroic haze in the air eventually obscuring even Eagle Eyes.

There was a last flood of incorporeal attacks here, ramming full into scores of Shards and Shardrays, Bursts filling their air with shrieking immaterial forms burning away forever. Who knew if they were mad or happy that their end had come...

I was down to merely two Alchemical Bombs left after that particular rush, not that it worried me. It simply meant that I had a lot of empirical evidence over multiple Elements that the trick worked. Creation Theurgy and the Shroud continually prodding me FTW!

“<WHO ARE YOU?!>”

If that Voice shaking the stone walls of this place meant to scare us, it naturally failed utterly.

I had been listening to these undead cursing, swearing, chanting, singing, screaming, shouting orders, pleading, and uttering battle cries for some time now. They’d been doing so in multiple languages, but only one of those matched the carvings and art style that had filled up all the available stone everywhere in homage to those who had come before.

The language was a crazy mix of Necrus, Aklo, and Human that didn’t speak well for the sanity of any culture that had developed it. The fact it had a Human base meant they’d reached a unified height as a culture somehow, somewhere. That Aklo and Necrus had thoroughly corrupted it meant they had fallen a very long way.

They lived in a necropolis with the ghosts and spirits of the ancients moaning at them all the time. They probably gave the undead the same rights as the living, like some idiot cultures did, and this is what became of them.

Their name for their culture literally translated as Hyperboreans, the first people of this land. As might be expected of a culture that had fallen so far, they were advanced in the sciences and the arts, valuing magic and developing a great and grand history I’d read as I passed by.

Unfortunately, they were living in a land with lots of Old Gods, and their elders were Bent. Their paths of power took them beyond the grave, and their lessers, tempted by the secrets of the dead and ‘immortality’, followed, and so their culture came crashing down in undeath and mad whispers in the dark.

Happily, this problem seemed to have largely solved itself, as the remaining living elements of the culture here had now joined their elders in eternal stasis and slow decay, and so it would vanish into the long night and never be seen again.

That night, of course, was going to be very bright and unwhite with vivus.

-Cold,- Master Fred /noted, thumbing a falling flake of carbon dioxide out of the air. The gale-force wind got within ten feet of him and vanished, picking up on the other side smoothly.

-It’s the single largest Cold Node of both worlds. Makes sense.-

He had asked me about undergoing the actual Ritual and Ceremony combination. I’d pointed out that he had a Heaven and Hell Pact, so he didn’t need to undergo the full things, just the penultimate ones, reinforcing the benefits of his Pacts.

It was, however, the smarter play to do the Ceremony of the Frozen Soul first.

Oh, yes, the voice...

“<LIFE!>” I replied in a chipper Voice, my answer swimming through the gale and lighting up the manafield with the Sublime thrum to the word. Lots of dark energies ahead writhed at the intrusion, and I sensed that they were burning.

I wasn’t bringing the power with me; I was burning what was here to make the power I was using. They could have all the necroic power they wanted; I was going to set it on fire and turn it into what I needed regardless!

“<THIS IS A PLACE HALLOWED TO DEATH!>” came the immediate retort. “<YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE!>”

“<THIS IS THE MORTAL REALM. THE DEAD HAVE NO PLACE HERE>,” I replied calmly, promptly winning the metascale fight of justifications as we made our way forwards. Fresh scrapings seemed to indicate that all of these tombs had already been emptied, although which direction they’d gone was up in the air.

We were being followed, but well in the distance. They thought they were out of range of my spells, but they were only at the edge of my Detect Undead V. I could still reach out and touch them without any problem whatsoever.

A great black darkness whelmed up ahead of us, but neither of us slowed down. Solid tendrils of necroic energy, glinting faint purple in the lack of light, seemed to coalesce and lunge for us, and Master Fred waved Sleipner’s Alicorn.

The Wall of Fire exploded into place just ahead of us, held in place by Master Fred, and flared very brightly indeed when the necroic energy hit Holy Wrath. The air seemed to howl and buckle in pain as the darkness ignited all around us, none of the stuff able to touch us. I leisurely waved my hand, formed the Spellflare, and sent it into the tight clusters of woven spell energy ahead of us.

It might likely be filthy, squirmy, creepy, unclean, profane, Evil, and otherwise devotedly Ick, but it was still magic, still a spell, and so it could be Dispelled.

But why merely Dispel when you can light things up at the same time too, right?

Dispelling didn’t require you to find the heart of a formation or spell, it required you to find the spell. Finding the heart of it was like making a perfect Dispel roll.

Making spells was like weaving, pulling lines of magic into different configurations and sending them out there to do something. Some of those things were very fast and energetic, some were long-term and very steady.

A Dispel was about either straightening out all those things that had been woven together and popping them back to their original status as threads of mana, or simply shutting out the mana flow and making them wink out of existence.

That’s it. The hard work was making the spell. Unmaking the spell just required brute force, and one of the two tactics. It was deucedly simple. To put it other terms, Creation was on your side when it came to unmaking spells.

The energy of a Dispel hit a spell, and naturally expanded along it, trying to take it apart or cancel out the incoming energy so that it would dissipate harmlessly. A high Dispel roll was the spell finding the key parts of the spell and ripping into them. A low roll was spending energy uselessly on the most secure and stable parts of the spell, and accomplishing nothing.

Arcane Mastery took the randomness out of the equation, turning contested checks like that into mere skill rolls you could Take 10 on, make an average effort, and know the outcome.

At that point, it merely became a contest of having enough spell power to do what you wanted to!

The incoming magic was coming in at Eternal Levels, which was impressive if it was a single Caster... but it wasn’t, as there were too many different shades of energy there. The base Level looked like, nnn, 20 or so? That was about right for a Shroudlord using negative energy spells. Cooperative Casting, backing one another, even spending Valences to boost this to what looked like 30...

Having the ability to manipulate my own Caster Level thoroughly, in addition to inherited experience, judging the Caster Level of a spell precisely wasn’t that hard.

It ran into a Spellflare sitting at +43, take 10. I needed to hit a 40. I couldn’t lose even a random result, because success chance went up 5% per CL higher, and only down by 2% per CL low (Dispelling having an advantage over Casting, as it were). +13 Levels was +65% to a 50/50 result... even without Arcane Mastery, I could not fail.

I applauded their choice of using Dark Magic I had bonuses against as the Spellflare tore their conjoined spell apart, ignited the magic, and fed it back into all of them.

The darkness lit up with the batshit craziest display of wild magic surging back to those hapless undead Casters. Shrieking whorls, arcs, spheres, rays, clouds, twisting fluidic currents, floating polka-dots, hard-driving guitar music, spontaneous floral perfumes, exploding parti-colored hummingbirds, and other weird shit manifested as this Umbral Wind ignited and all that energy had to go somewhere.

Even the incoming wind was disrupted by the wild magic, momentarily swirling into a pollen-filled updraft of honeyed light sparkling everywhere.

The screams of a lot of undead who had contributed to the spell to make it big and long range rang out with the songs of moths and a chorus of growing grass.

“”

Into their existential crisis of what seemed like at least +9d6 of feedback damage across the board came a whole lotta Shards, coming in like a starfield rising in the night around four hot and heavy Shardrays, and a Sublime Aria Chanting all the Salutes to Aru and Sylune.

I could only see the undead blocking the entry to what seemed like some sort of colossal audience or assembly chamber beyond them. The first ranks of Shards swept through the things blocking my sight, and then Chained Bursts blew out crazily in all directions, and The Light truly came to this accursed place.

It wasn’t maximally efficient, but I was advancing fast, and did indeed sense hundreds, if not thousands, of eruptions of vivus on negative energy, and those sources of negative energy suddenly snuffing out.

What they didn’t snuff out got to burn for a bit longer, which was often enough to finish the job... not that many of those undead could even survive a single Shard’s Kickers after the feedback.

The Repeated Spells layered on top of my next volley as I came very quickly into range of my Detects, and my last Alc Bomb for the day disintegrated as it gratefully added itself to my primary Spell.

I could see the Casters at the heart of the Formation now, desperately trying to get up a defensive Ward as my spells came in... and the Dispel from the Arcane Fusion at the heart of it shattered the spells they were trying to weave, Areas of Effect being like that. The threads of magic sprang free from their skeletal fingers as they stared at the incoming radiant spells clad in all the powers of magic they’d ever seen, and several they had not, and it came down with a sad, piercing Requiem Sublime.

The Shroudlord’s most powerful servants were caught in crazy crisscrosses of multiple explosions and Chains before the arcs went out to wreak havoc amongst the remaining inhabitants of the chamber indiscriminately.

Bursts exploded next to the Shroudlord, and the Toppling effect sent its bony arse tumbling haplessly about like a ping-pong ball, bouncing from blast to blast helplessly, before it went sliding across a floor carved with some impressive Summoning Circles and the supporting runic sigla, now all getting stained rapidly white.