The Power of Ten

Chapter 9-283: Buddhas and Devils

Four Rays hit two of the devic guards with their hawk helms and metallic wings. Devic guards were made from the souls of enslaved Powered, installed in powerful bodies and made to serve eternally as warriors, as they couldn’t ascend up the steps of Buddha-hood to being an Arhat, or beyond that to one of the True Sattivas. They had silver skin, golden armor, and unflinching, complete obedience to their Buddhist masters.

They did not, however, have the ability to just dodge Rays, so I was pretty sure the Split Paired Admixtured Shardrays were not going to have much problem.

There were four Anaganis accompanying the Arhat in charge; not quite so fat, not staying in faux meditative poses, only one of them chubby. All of them had golden skin and bald heads and were clad in orange robes, while their porker of a boss was in a combination of black, orange, and gold that no doubt indicated its preferred path of ascension, which I had had an academic’s interest in that I quashed in the name of Feeding it to the Land.

The Chains tore through all fifty of its escorts. I could have accommodated a hundred, but a little overkill was fine.

Fred’s Grit cracked at the same time the circle in the sky was lighting up with acidic green light. They didn’t have any particular resistance to acidic energies, so why not abuse them? Especially when I could top it off with a concentrated Ravage to bring out the sins of their empty philosophy and its enforced slavery and sear their minds and souls with it.

Because I’m nice that way, ripping your false faith apart as you die forever, Arsehats...

The flying fatarsehat whipped about, looking not too different from a robed beach ball with a macabre-grinning head atop it, and the E-plumbum shot carrying a Greysphere buried itself inside it.

Master Fred was already in motion as it started to fall. They leapt off from Sleipner, going up as all the Buddhists came down in Baneflaming sludge, Idiot singing into their hand, Grit resolving into its Revolver form. Dark wings and darker horns sprouted from them, and a very impressive movement rate suddenly doubled as the second pair of wings blossomed. They were diving on the Arsehat as it hit the ground and rebounded with some difficulty to its short, stout legs.

It didn’t have any of the Qi-abilities it should have had, and there was a rather malevolent look deep in its eyes, the big smile more a grimace than anything as it tried to sway aside from the incoming charge.

Four wings banked and gripped the air like it was a chute. Hotfoot had no problems altering its path on a charge, and so Master Fred hit the thing at something like 200 mph.

Idiot was up, Idiot was abruptly down, a solid wall of Banefire was bisecting the golden body and its non-fancy, nope, nope, robes, the Sword completely slipping through the clapping hands that ‘should’ have caught and held the blow, and simply couldn’t deal with that level of strength. Then Master Fred crashed right into it, and despite the eight-foot bloated sucker having to weigh a good ton, they tore it right off its feet.

The reddening eyes looked down at the gun inside its mouth, and then eight rounds blew out of the magazine in less than a second.

You’d think that having eight rounds of heavy reality blowing out the back of your head would kill you, but nope, the Arsehat kept right on moving, a heavy palm knocking Master Fred to the side, trying to create some distance.

Master Fred was already performing a mid-air somersault, wings grabbing and playing with the wind as if it was solid at will. The palm hit their back as their leg extended, hooking its arm. The force of the palm basically just snapped their back up and over it, Idiot up again above it as it looked up in disbelief. Now their entire body was between it and any defense it could raise, their other foot pressing down against its other hand, wings stroking the air to keep them in absolute relative position as it tried to dodge.

This time, Idiot split its reinforced shining golden pate, Golden Armor, Divine Bones, and Sacred Flesh right in two. Take that, Body-Tempering 401!

Golden Body meets adamantine, has problems with Pierce Damage Reduction and Might 70, and, well, it wasn’t Idiot-proof, oddly.

Idiot powered right down through its skull, throat, breastbone, and ended up down somewhere in its guts, mostly because they left it there.

“The Land thanks you for your charity, O Man Ipad Me Hu Mmmm...”

The mispronunciation of the Mantra in Sattivan was exquisite, especially when fourteen different voices did it in a chaotic mess all at the same time. The entire body of the Arsehat seemed to convulse in shock and revulsion at the horror and blasphemy of what it had just heard, and that crack in composure was all that was required.

There was a huge explosion that a mere Greysphere couldn’t suppress... but could turn most of it into a pretty light show of vivus consuming a lot of Nirvanic energy that didn’t want to die, as it was supposed to reincarnate and exist forever.josei

Too bad, so sad.

Master Fred drifted down from above right down in front of where I was still sitting on Sleipner, four wings delivering them precisely and gently to the seat. Colorful vivus fell down all around us for a good thirty seconds, joining the burning sludge scattered all over the place. Valuables like, oh, enhanced Weapons and Armor given to the devic guards, and Prayer Beads and ear hoops of gold and rings and no, no, they were above material things, no sir... I gathered all the pious contributions from their faithful to Burn away.

“Well done,” I congratulated them. I hadn’t minded spending time each day so the Amazons, Warlocks, and Priestesses could get their time in. Sama had been chiming in from the distance to give advice to all the hackers and shooters, and they’d definitely been eager to put all the lessons to practice.

It was their first time uniting all the Pacts and hitting something with Seven Dragons swordplay and footwork. Wingwork? Worked out pretty well...

“Why don’t you ride Sleipner to keep your Lived-line intact, and chart us out a course to clean some of these Shrines to speed things up?” Master Fred asked in their layered voice, conveying all sorts of their eagerness to enjoy being a true Hunting Angel of the Heavens.

“You got it.” They could fly at least 200 mph, and wouldn’t have to hug roads, so they should be perfectly capable of keeping up with me and Sleipner. With a Land Pact, they should also be able to quickly alter the Formation’s key parts to reverse its effect.

“Thank you.” They lifted off again, flitting as easily as a moth, a hundred feet in the air in a second, swooping and shooting off to the south to the next target I had painted into the Map for all of them.

I turned my eyes back to that looming Dome as I slid forward into the lower seat I never requested, and very seldom sat in. Where would I get my nice set of shoulders to lean on if that happened?

“Hi yo, Sleipner, and away!” I called, and whooped as the unicorn zipped into motion towards the next target.

The Buddhists didn’t much care about those left at the Shrines; even after the ambush was unsuccessful, they didn’t call them back into the Dome. I didn’t mind, and neither did the Land or the City of Bombay.

--------

There was another Arsehat down below, actually sporting around a golden halo of sacred inviobility as it led the Chants powering up the Dome, surrounded by the Anagami and Lamas helping focus and buttress the effect.

They had raised the effective Caster Level of this Dome to 50. They probably thought their defense was unshakeable, and with the square miles of acolytes and disciples kneeling, chanting, and praying down there, they still had plenty of juice to use to set up another Summoning.

Could they bring in enough stuff to make a difference before they ran out of Qi? Who knew. The countryside was emptying out, years of Conversion being consumed and not replaced by any external sources.

Naturally, I wasn’t going to be waiting that long.

With the ambush cleared, I could use the external Shrine forces to recharge as I bent the weather to my will, and it began to howl and gather above that Dome. I didn’t bother going for lightning, as that totally would not do what I wanted to happen, and I didn’t need it.

The clouds over that Dome began to get REALLY thick, and when they started spinning, even the fanatically devoted souls below couldn’t resist taking a look up top and shuddering.

A tempest was building in the air above them, whirlwinds howling up along the edges of the Dome, making it ripple from the hurricane-force winds. The winds entered the vortex above, hot air being drawn into the sky, as coldcoldCOLD air from Way Up There, probably laden with a whole lot of negative energy juice, was now extending down towards that Dome in return.

Seeing a vortex extending fifteen kliks up into the sky, seething with cloudy streams of black energy, should give just about anybody the heebie-jeebies.

Could the Arsehat below sense the Weather Magic that was going off at +54? That the ice that was starting to fall was seething as it slammed into the Dome like cannonfire, instantly melting and dumping the power of the Shroud right into the Dome in countless spots of blackness?

Nope, all that still couldn’t breach the Dome.

But when I used Delay Spell to set five sets of Paired Twinned Spellflares off, the Caster Level going up by +1 each time, blowing twelve hexagons apart at a starting Dispel Check of 63, they really got to see something. It all cost me 50 ki straight off to set up, and the Spellflares didn’t actually kill anything below, as the toughest creatures stoutly took the feedback and promptly began to heal themselves.

But that was A-OK, because that miles-high vortex came straight down from above and inside their pretty little Dome in the most lethal twister you ever saw.

It didn’t kill them outright, but it still severely mucked up their concentration, and they didn’t get it together in time to fix the nice big hole blasted into the top of their Dome. The sky literally came howling down through that opening, and delivered all the cold and negative energy you could shake a stick at down into their tight little balmy pressure cooker.

Their Dome didn’t stop warm air from coming in, which exchanged with the cold air coming down and sent that funnel really spinning. By the time the funnel hit the ground, it was a Class 5 tornado all the way, locked right onto the center of that Dome. The Dome was generously heating up the incoming air to drive the whole process, feeding the inside more warm air as the inside volume was sucked outside, and in essence helping hold the tornado in place as the funnel expanded down low and swallowed everything.

Caught at the top of the Dome like a pinned snake, the massive vortex of the tornado writhed and bucked and ripped across the area inside. The Buddhists were packed in there like sardines, now being subjected to base air temperatures in the -60 F degree range, with wind chill in the Noooooot Possssssssible! area as 200+ mph winds were turning the grand buildings and temples into flying shrapnel and scooping up Buddhists by the hundreds or thousands every second.

Any Buddhist at Six or higher might be able to ignore the cold, but the ones lower than that? Not so much. And the ones at Six-plus didn’t have any resistance to being plucked off their feet like chickens and sent spinning around inside the vortex as it went up, and up, and...

No, they didn’t go that far up. They went into the Haze, and that was as far as they got.

The incorporeal spirits trapped in the Haze didn’t give a Damn about Class 5 tornadoes, and, oh, were there a bunch that had some grievances from life they wanted to inquire about...

The tornado was much too loud, but if it hadn’t been, you might have been able to hear the screaming of the senior Buddhists as knots of the Damned souls of the Haze converged on them and tore their lives and spirits apart.

They wouldn’t be reincarnating, either. The Shroud was useful that way.

It took five minutes for the Dome to utterly collapse. By that time, millions of those inside had been sucked into the tornado and smashed to death by the ice and rubble caught in the funnel with them, frozen solid down there on the ground, or somehow managed to survive their hapless trip up the vortex into the Haze, and then died screaming there.

They really weren’t prepared for Master Fred to come in and start laying down Walls of Fire to disrupt any protective fields being brought up. The idea that something was strong enough to fly in those winds was bad enough, and when they went streaking down a kilometer-long street, Idiot a solid butterfly pattern of burning adamantine that bisected a swathe of Buddhists almost ten paces across, I could hear Sama giving them a thumbs-up from way over in China in approval.

It really helps your Cleave Run to have a howling wind at your backside racing you forwards, and being able to use your Wings like butcher’s blades...

I went in there, too, a Control Winds around me that reduced the windspeed and velocity of natural airborne particles by 250 mph. Anything that wasn’t dead and was trying to protect themselves against the cold and the wind ate a Spellflare if they had defenses up, and Shards if they did not.

More cries rose as the vortex came across a personal Dome of protection. I Spellflared it, and the Buddhists’ screams as they merged into the howl of the funnel when it passed over them and pulled their burning bodies into the sky were quite heartwarming.