Chapter 2-62: Gotta Start Somewhere (1/2)
Two notes rang out, and to their astonishment, the wose and its redcap servants found themselves starting to... tremble...
“This occasion calls for a song...
“Wose of the wood, that thought it could
Find cheap power for easy gain.
Bloody hats, booted twats,
Sacrifices to the Tane.
A gift of glee, happy to see,
Delivered to Sama now.
A Rantha born, their fate is shorn,
Dead without knowing how.
Tremble, She comes!”
A golden blade fully three feet long that was perfectly sized for her new reach and strength hissed to life, and she was coming, the blue of her eyes like lamps in the glow of her soulsword.
The war cries the Fey gave out as they surged to defeat her didn’t sound anywhere near as full of savagery and bloodlust as they should have. There was something in her Song that was pounding at memories in their dreams, hammering at their thoughts.
”TREMBLE, SHE COMES!
Blood my sword, feed my soul
Nurse the Land with your cries.
Your cycle done, your race is run,
Your spirit forever dies.
An axe, a sword, a peasant lord,
A tree, a man, all Nature’s Plan,
Not even carrion for the flies.
Tremble! Oh ooooh oh...
Tremble, She comes...”
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The shrieks and screams, the buzzing roar of Summoned insects, the howling of flames and crackling of lightning, the chopping of butchered flesh and bone, the crack of shattering wood, and the shrill screech of rending metal were done.
Various pieces of redcaps were scattered about the clearing, and the hacked, rent, and ruined remains of the woodwose were disassembled among them, soaking in their pale red blood.
Sama kicked the hats of the redcaps into their owner’s blood. Those were some very useful power comps there, worth exactly one goldweight each towards a magic Weapon.
Mmm, how fast would there be a run on slaughtered redcaps if humans learned that their bloodsoaked caps were worth a goldweight? They’d be seen like walking piggy banks. They’d go from being berserker fey butchers to hounded fey dogs fleeing humans everywhere who wanted to earn themselves a couple years income with a couple shots of cold iron rounds.
The wose had tried its spells, but those hadn’t mattered all that much. They had run into her Null and done nothing to her whatsoever. She had shattered its defenses with her first blow, and taken it apart with two more, pretty much ignoring its counterblows and the explosions of thorns coming off it.
She’d actually taken most of the damage from the oversized axes on her Health... because she had a fuckload of it, and Fast Healing/1 was mending the injuries speedily, not that they’d amounted to much after DR 16/Holy Silver softened them up a lot.
Melee Five. Sage of Swords had kicked in, and the new Rantha Levels had given her the skill points to get thirteen Skills to five Ranks.
Her Sword damage had basically doubled, outside of the fact that she was four times stronger than she had been yesterday.
She picked up the Masspack sitting on the ground, where it wouldn’t be ripped apart by the Curse, and pulled out another set of clothes as her Vajra expelled redcap gore and woodwose splinters from her. The thorns sticking in her were getting forced out by the healing, too, so there was no danger from those, regardless of how much the barbed things wanted to stay stuck in her.
She put the bloody hats in a bag made from the grimy tunic of one of the redcaps, definitely the best place to store them, and then proceeded to vivic the lot of the killer gnomes, making sure they weren’t going to re-enter the auto-incarnation cycle and come back to bug someone else.
Death should not be something her enemies laughed off, even if she could, at some point.
Now she basically had to start over somewhere, new name, new face, new job, new life, and hope nobody was savvy enough to track her back to her family in the future. Have to do something about her electronic footprint so that wasn’t possible, maybe...
Anyways, she had some hiking ahead of her. Maybe something nasty would try to attack her on the way, maybe not.
Time to grow a lived-line a bit...
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Making it to St. Paul didn’t actually take all that long. After all, she could run fifty to a hundred miles a day without too much problem, and once she got out of the hill country and onto the plains, that was just easy cruising along on the Waveskating Steps.
Of course, she didn’t just run. She had bloody red hats to burn off on her Floating Forge, boosting Fall, and she was also working on carving Implements or making Swords every day, too. She didn’t have a lot of raw material, but since she wasn’t working at eye-blurring speed, it was fine.
There were definitely things that wanted to accost her along the way. Wandering spirits who thought a lone girl out in the middle of nowhere would make fine prey were a thing. There was a wolfwere pack that didn’t like humans at all, and probably thought they’d surprise her with their cold iron vulnerability, instead of silver. Alas for them, Ki Strike Mastery/3 filled in that weakness for her... and she wasn’t the twelve-year old pure Human girl she had been a few days ago.
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Sama Rantha, NG Rantha/4, Sustained
Classes: Melee/5 (P), Archer/3, Monk/3, Scout/3, Expert/3, Vizard/3, (Null Druid (4), Null Sorcerer (4)), Runesmith/3, Rune Chemist/3, Minstrel/1
Strength: 20 +5
Dexterity: 22 +6
Constitution: 30 +10 (+5 Inherent)
Intellect: 22 +6
Wisdom: 17 +3
Charisma: 20 +5
Health: 100 (75 (4x (d10+10 Con) + 5 (Toughness) +20 (Spirit-Reinforced Body)
Soak: 145 (105 (5x (d10+1FC+10 Con)) + 20 (Toughness/2) + 20 (Tough Spirit))
Ki: 32 (30 Invested)
Valences: 46
Null: 25
Talent: Natural Swordsman
Racial Benefits: Rantha Hag
Traits:Rantha Hag
Karma: Current Eight (63%)
Base Abilities...
Feats/Class Abilities...
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Twelve hundred miles was quite a bit overland, especially fording rivers and with some minor mountains in Wyoming in the way and stuff.
She loved it all, trotting along for eight hours at a stretch, seeing the new landscape changing, and not really caring if she followed the roads or not. She had stuff to keep her busy, and if a bunch of birch dryads looking for some easy fertilizer ignored the head of the woodwose she was holding onto and its implications, well, it wasn’t her problem if they wanted to commit suicide.
If the dryads' satyr and other Fey amours thought she was running away from their vengeance, they also learned different, much to their sorrow. If an angry Black Ent thought she was ignoring the trees moving as she sat there working, well, that was unfortunate for it when it tried to surprise her in concert with a shambling mound...