Chapter 5-148: The Shriners (1/2)

“It is the word of Shoul that if you can’t hold onto something, then it is not yours.”

The voice rang through the Shrine of the True End. It was not loud, but it was pervasive, interrupting everything, and making the quiet somehow fuller, brighter, and deadlier.

There was very little light in the Shrine, as those living there didn’t need it, gifted with darkvision or devilsight and able to function perfectly well in darkness. It was a wonderful defense against intruders, too, and helped subdue both prisoners and the normal people working there, who knew that venturing out of the lighted areas meant they would not be coming back.

“You have taken something I call mine... my son, my child. Whatever claim you make on him can never change that fact... but you were going to try.

“Alas, you don’t have enough time. The equinox is not going to be here in time. You are going to die, and I am going to take back what is mine.

“When you are screaming in the throes of your Pacts, when you are wailing in the torment of the Shroud, slaves to the undead forever, you will know a simple and final truth: There are some lines that you should not cross, some things that you should not desire, and some treasures you should not touch.

“You crossed a line when you stole my son. You should not have desired his Bloodline, and you touched the child of someone willing and able to kill you all to get him back.

“Come, with your tamed shadows. Come, with your vampire slaves. Come, with the ghouls you’ve locked in darkness. Come, with the mummified guards of the ancients. Come, with your whining Warlocks and their wheedling Pacts for power. Come, with your false-tongued Clerics and their empty lies and promises. Come, with your skulkers and assassins and cutthroats.

“I am Traveler, and I Bring your Last Day!”

I was sure that they sneered in the dark for a moment.

“TRUTH!”

And there were screams throughout the Shrine.

It wasn’t close enough to actually do damage, but adherents of Shoul being confronted with the purest truth, instead of the lies and delusions they dealt in, was one of those things that are very distracting.

It gets worse when the strike team members come out of your maze of secret passageways and start shooting you.

Their Ward collapsed when I Dispelled it, and if they gawked at the fact someone was able to bring down something Cast at Fifteen by a Greater Daemon, it didn’t stop it from happening. They lost their ability to track their foes, to sense enemy Faith and Pacts... and so, the masters of darkness were blind.

I was tracking everyone through Status and Fellowship links, plotting out the courses, rapidly defining the Shrine even more closely, indexing traps and magic and ambush points as Topaz called them out, and directing people here, there, and everywhere.

The Eyes of Heaven were no longer blinded within here, and not too many of these people had any way to avoid them, especially Master Fred’s at /4.

The undead ran into buzzsaws. The living ran into Topaz and Master Fred.

There weren’t many of the daemons. They glowed like dark suns in the Eyes, even against the undead. Those bastards ran into me.

Perhaps they were supposed to be frightening, fast-moving skulkers in shadows, trying to hit and run, in and out of view.

Ah, before I left Detroit, I had the Angelos make up a bunch of Eternal Lights, Raised to IV.

All their Endless Darkness effects were at III. The Eternal Lights snuffed them out in passing, and Devilsight didn’t make these people immune to sudden very bright lights in their faces.

Master Fred was flitting between shadows into these people, Topaz was coming out of the stone with a nasty smile, and Sir Pellier was quietly ID’ing shooters they weren’t handling.

SeekingDarts and Shards were hunting down my targets behind cover and shadows, homing in on them ruthlessly. Lurking assassins, skulking daemons, waiting undead... it didn’t matter. Them being around corners just meant they had no chance to get a final shot off at me as they died.

They did get a lot of shots off at me, but that didn’t help them much, either. We were moving fast, layer on layer, triggering traps ahead of us or jamming them, the biggest ambushes broken up by the two very senior Warlocks with great spikes of stone exploding up, or roaring flames spitting out screaming, burning disciples who were shot down mercilessly.

The Locate Blood Relative I had up was working very cleanly now that their Wards were down, and we were already inside any residual spell defenses that might interfere.

I hoped they would run. That would just make things easier at this point.

Bodies burning white littered the halls and tunnels, staining the dark rock white.

The primary fane was ahead, and it seemed my inherited son was being brought there ahead of me. Guns roared, arrows thundered, Walls of flame exploded with Wrath, and men screamed and died as they were impaled on living spikes of stone from below.

Both Master Fred and Sir Pellier were pretty clear that the main Evil of this place was waiting for us ahead there. How nice.