Chapter 7-181 - The Luan Luau (1/2)
The sky exploded with cold lightning in hues beyond the visible spectrum. Writhing beads, swirls, dancing columns, streaking arcs, raging infernos, liquid swirls, crystalline shockwaves, and shimmering reflections of energies, among a thousand other manifestations of unleashed wild magic, tore apart the sky as my spell ripped apart all those Qi weavings and fed them into those who were supposed to be benefiting from them.
The two Cultivators up on the back of the thing suddenly became visible, as they were in range of the AoE, too, and by the snakes, worms, and beetles of mana crawling all over them, weren’t taking the division and cancellation of their buffs too well.
The forward momentum of the luan didn’t change, and the partial paralysis, feedback, and general discomfort of eating its own Qi Weaving meant it didn’t alter course.
That all meant it dove in at near 200 mph into Sama’s Null Stillflight Field, and welp, it was a gigantic bird that was relying on fire and Qi to stay airborne, not physics. There was no way it could stay in the air.
Its scream as suddenly it couldn’t fly was heartening to hear. It started into a death spiral, flapping its wings as hard as it could, but it wasn’t that it wasn’t plenty strong, it was that it was simply too heavy for the air to carry.
As a bonus, the Cultivators were thrown off its back by the burning bird’s crazy gyrations and flapping, and were shrieking in equal fear as they fell, unable to fly.
Sama and The Mick were already blurring into motion. Oh, no dimensional shenanigans allowed, either. The Mick had been putting a lot of Karma into upping his lightfoot, and while there was no way he was going to catch Sama, he was still moving waaay faster than any normal human could.
Briggs kept his position between the falling idiots and the boys, face impassive, holding onto Endure and perfectly willing to do nothing.
I spun up two series of Shards, and simply waited as the ground loomed upon the big bird and it snapped out its wings as wide as it could, breaking its momentum... and not incidentally making a great big honking target of itself.
The alchemical acid I was holding in my hand, which I had supercharged with my Alchemist power, was consumed as the first Twinned Volley of Shards went out. They were cast from Valence II, Improved Shards, and so with Delimit, there were a base fifteen of them, plus three for Weaponized and Shardcaster. They were fully Weaponized, and they hissed out like crackling, frozen balls of liquid jetsilver, trailing crackling corrosive mist. The Royal Avian, a great noble creature of the skies, could only watch them coming in like arrows and bursting against the steel-hard feathers over its throat.
Not cold, no, although they were powered by the frozen, pure magic of cold.
Like detonating bombs, they hit its upper chest and throat and blew away the protective layers there, dissolving the metallic feathers and sending electrical charges along them to tear them from its skin. Primed to counter cold with fire, the heat only turned solid-state force-acid to liquid, and helped it do its job better.
The luan started to shriek in alarm and pain, and then the Fastcast set shot out, Spellwarped down and merged into a single Ray in front of Clavus. It hit the force prism of the Split Ray, and dual lines of jetsilver light shot out into the hole in its feathers and Qi defense, dumping a whole lot of damage into the thing.
36 x (d6+8) + kickers is a rather large amount of damage to eat, and when it is Sudden Topped, well, 36 x 14 + kickers was close to 550 points of goodness to the throat. Heck, even Sneak Attack damage applied, as there was no way it could dodge in the middle of not trying to break some legs on impact.
Even that wasn’t enough to kill it, although it was enough to light up its head and chest from the inside as ravening force, lightning, cold, and acidic energies burned through its system, and turned that spot on its throat into a sizzling hole.
As a free action, I could also shoot a Shard from the glowing crown of them around my head. I did that, except I Spellwarped the whole Crown down into a Ray centered on that one Shard, and shot all 38 of them at once.
The whole set of them grandly left their scintillating formation and flowed into one blindingly bright point of jet-cored starsilver, and then inverted, a solid line of jet, wound about with silver coils of power and supercharging energy.
Take that, only three a round restriction, you!
The coruscating jetsilver Ray punched into that hole, and there was flaring explosion of silver light and black force shards crackling with various energies out the other side of its body. The luan hit the ground with a rumbling smash at that moment, and went down hard, not moving as a great cloud of dust blew up, and glowing lights played around the three-foot hole punched out through its back.
The Cultivators had to vent a bunch of Qi to take the hit as they crashed into the ground, raising cracks and their own impact craters. Naturally, there was no thought from our side of allowing them to recover from the impact.
Sama got to hers first, and he was just sitting up when she swept on by, his eyes widened, and stayed wide as his head went flying into the air.
The other one managed to sort of get up just as a wall of liquid crimson blew over him, melted his ornate robes right off him, and as he staggered, a milk-white sword buried itself into his belly, and the spell inside lit off his blood like fire.
He screamed and shook and writhed as his insides boiled, cooking from within, and crimson steam jetted out of all his orifices.
The Mick watched the Cultivator’s eyeballs melt, and then the corpse sagged and fell around Smior, insides par-broiled and quite dead.
He withdrew Smior, and lifted the Blade up to his lips, drawing the backside along it and tasting the blood of these bastards.
His eyes lit up with crimson.
“Save their blood! I can sell it for a fortune!” he shouted in delight. Sama shook her head, put an Exsanguinating Tube into the main artery on her target’s neck stump, seared the other two closed, and set down a two-gallon jug to collect it all.
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I had to Stone Shape up a big barrel for all the meat off the luan, and a broad, level slab to lay all its feathers on. There was literally tons of the stuff, and we all got pretty energetic harvesting it all.
The heads of the Cultivators were my special project, while we let their bodies burn away after the Mick drained them dry. He informed me that their blood was brimming with energy, and could probably even restore expended Spell Slots if treated properly. I could imagine how much he could sell them for, and how it might be productive to let that fact leak out...