Chapter 8-225: And Right into the Fire (1/2)

Inukchuk tried a couple more aborted attempts to get up close and engage me in melee. First, he tried bringing up a blizzard. That was fine, I Spellflared it, and He got to eat the feedback as it collapsed atop Him.

He repeated the process six times, and I collapsed it right on top of Him six more times. It did slow me down, having to break my pattern to let loose a Spellflare, but I didn’t let it stop me from killing Congregants and the tougher undead. His minions could always enjoy a few more seconds of unlife, it didn’t mean anything to me.

Stealth didn’t work. I had See the Invisible at V, Arcane Sight at V, and Master Fred had Detect Evil V, Behold the Heart of Darkness.

Oh, and the +52 Perception modifier didn’t hurt, either.

His influence on the manasphere was readily apparent even if He was cloaking Himself with Divination Wards, and His tie to the Shroud was perfectly visible to me simply by tracking His influence on the surrounding undead, and triangulating.

He was really surprised the first time He was first disguised as just another white wraith and I shot Him, and incidentally all the wraiths and snow shades around Him... and then I repeated the trick when He disguised Himself as an invisible stalker, trying to do the same.

He was the Shroudlord. He carried around His power and influence like a huge dark cloak, if you knew what to look for.

Arcane Sight, Detect Evil, and See the Invisible at V all formed a trifecta that made His Mantle of Power bloody obvious no matter what He looked like or changed Himself into.

Sometimes it sucks to be the king, after all.

He tossed icy spears at me, I dodged them. He tried to get within two thousand feet of me, and I shot Him and sent Him flying, mostly dead, each time.

I belatedly asked The Old Steed if he recognized the old fellow, and he affirmed that this was a brother deity of his former master.

I wonder if He recognized the skull on my Stave. The double-duty Baneskull was burning black and red, seemingly laughing in irony at the devastation I was bringing out in so many radiant hues.

My progress around the void continued, occasionally slowed but never abated. The undead could not possibly move fast enough to escape me, and if they wanted to abandon the area, all I had to do was sever the control links to their boss, and they’d turn right back around and charge into obedience range, walking right into obliteration to do so.

The cold frustration coming off the old god was perhaps being accentuated with a little dread now. Perhaps He was wondering how a non-divine being was throwing out such an endless cavalcade of obliteration, but the only ones who knew the precise method were myself and the Shroud above, and neither of us were talking to this ancient frozen thing.

Its Shroud was shrinking rapidly, and as I turned the far side and was burning away the undead there, it was receding literally as fast as I was coming.

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His flying servants were all gone.

His Congregants, or minions with some intelligence, had become vivic candles. His brutes and beasts were burning on fields of vivus with the countless animated and frozen corpses and bones He had assembled over the time-lost years of His vigil.

His throne of carven stone, where it had doubtless sat for millennia uncounted, had been randomly blown apart in passing.

His elite crew of boulder-throwing frozen Jotuns had perished in one fusillade, before they could chuck a single boulder in my direction.

The drake-riding undead Sepulcher Knights and their bony wings had been blasted burning from the sky.

Four winter wights were assembled at His sides as Shards exploded through the ranks of His minions, and the last members of His Dead March, His mighty undead horde of close to twenty million frozen, icy corpses and carcasses, and over fifty thousand incorporeals and Elemental spirits, was pretty much gone.

The white-on-dark of the Frostshroud above Him was basically just a tiny little patch on the Haze, basically nothing at all now.

Seven hundred meters away from Him and in midair, I hove to, while Master Fred calmly exploded a couple more Walls of Fire here and there, even though there were no viable targets in the sea of vivus burning so cheerfully below us.

Master Fred then cast the last one he needed to.

Come now. I was a Spellcaster with a 46 Intellect (50, in this cold). This could get done with brute power, but where was the elegance in that?

No, Master Fred had been drawing a pattern, Walls of Fire searing the lines and curves of it into the landscape, disguised among the greater vivus; whorls and arcs and drawings were executed precisely as I guided him, the pattern hidden among the greater slaughter.

And now they linked up!

The Runes on the ground lit up with the speed of det cord igniting. They were hot and heavy, pulling in all that expended fiery mana in the air, all the vivus from the disintegrating corpses.

I saw Inunkchuk look down as the lines of fire flared below and past Him, streaking into the distance, and He looked up just in time to meet my eyes.

The detonation blew one hundred feet into the air everywhere, ringing that empty void in divine fire. His mighty winterwights, among the strongest of all non-Eternal undead, went away under the starfire reaching up towards the heavens, and their dread chillflames turned them into vivic explosions hitting the old god from all four directions.