Chapter 8-231: The Central Spire (1/2)
The last two mountains had been entertaining. Liches, wights, and mummies had started joining the throngs of undead trying to stand in our way, and all of them were spellcasters.
They all belonged to a human or humanoid race, it was hard to tell which (what with them being dead and all), of great and slender height, ghostly pale skin, and rather enlarged heads that bore the signs of being molded from birth. Such things were done by magically and psychically advanced societies with no care for their young, possibly as a way to force Powered status into their children by forcibly attuning them to the background energies of the universe... and inevitably such children weren’t sane by human standards. You listen to the insane sounds of Mythos all your life, and sanity is just a byword for unenlightened, right?
They were all still undead, and they didn’t have range on me. Indeed, they didn’t really have range on my Detect Undead, although some tried to conceal themselves with Aural Wards of various kinds.
I was sure the locals had all kinds of names for this central mountain, with appropriate fear and dread attached to it, but all it was for me was the location of a Shroudlord, who, if the condition of the decent clothing on these Caster undead was any indication, had killed an entire living population of their kind and made them into its servants.
Shroudlords couldn’t tolerate the living under the influence of a Shroud, and I was sure it would have swept out to conquer the world... if sunrise hadn’t sent them all right back here, and they couldn’t Teleport around while Suncursed to just return back to wherever they’d already advanced to, either.
An army of unkillable undead spellslingers could indeed wipe clean this world... and gone marching across the void to ours, too. The Leng ghouls had probably dispersed themselves enough so the Haze couldn’t pick one to form a Shroud, and were trying to kill off the random undead so as to avoid a critical mass scenario. Ghoul Sage Woodward had actually been working with the living, although exactly what kind of living things I wasn’t sure of. Beastfolk of some kind, or fey spirits, more likely, who could tolerate him and wouldn’t have real food issues, either.
Invisibility couldn’t hide the undead, Eagle Eyes could pick them out from quite some distance away, and if they didn’t have an Aural Ward, I didn’t even have to be able to see them to kill them. Shards burned out, Chained if they came in clusters, and undead died.
There were no living creatures here to worry about, save for a few Fiends of various unwholesome derivations that had been enslaved and were driven forth like dogs to attack us.
Holy Magic loved Fiends like it did undead. White stains along our backtrail continued as we continued towards the mountain.
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From a distance it hadn’t looked like much, but up close this passageway into the mountain was tall enough to admit a Titan. The shape of the doors and hinges had an inhuman aesthetic, so I was sure no humanoid of any size had actually made them. The images on the door were of a great apish beast with fur like icicles, and a many-legged insectile thing with a burning crest that resembled a much-too-large remorhaz.
They hadn’t managed to close the doors in time, although they’d tried. I’d flown ahead, and simply Shaped up a massive wedge in front of the one as it closed. It had ground to a halt, unable to shut regardless of how many slaves were pulling on the chains to make it so.
A lot of undead came stumbling out of that door, trying to stop us. The vast majority were skeletal remains of the over-tall humanoids, flesh fallen from their bones, their misshapen skulls even more obvious in death.
A necromantic society would doubtless have extensive catacombs, and when the Haze came, they had doubtless all risen up at the same time and invited any living people to join them.
The numbers that were being disgorged into my face were extensive, likely representing millennia of ossified residents of their catacombs.
I got a lot of testing in using Alchemical Bombs as material components, more than enough to satisfy my curiosity and provide some statistical backing, while I patiently accumulated more rep counts of Metas and blew my way through the flood of undead coming out of that door.
A mortal host of warriors could not have endured the constant rush of reinforced undead, especially with the Congregants, Fiends, and Constructs attached to it. It was the first time I’d seen such large numbers of Constructs, mostly made up of stone and bone, the latter obviously using the remains of the dead that weren’t intact enough to form undead themselves. Given Constructs were even more durable than most undead, that wasn’t a waste at all.
But, I had a Golembane Scarab for a reason, and I knew how to Cast Orbs.
Orbs were one of the four initial basic Spell Templates. They were medium-ranged, decent damage touch-attack spells; they often had secondary effects attached to them, and might Burst in a small area at higher Valences.
But, from a Caster’s perspective, that wasn’t their main job. Their main job was to kill things that were mostly immune to magic, like, oh, Golems.
Most spells gathered together mana of a specific source and type, actualized it, and hurled it forth. So, a Fireball spell was actually composed of magical fire.
Orbs didn’t do that. Orbs gathered together REAL energies. Fire Orbs, for instance, gathered heat from their surroundings. Cold Orbs actually pushed heat away and formed balls of liquid or even frozen gasses. Lightning Orbs gathered static electricity and compressed it.
Force Orbs gathered the pressure of wind, the weight of falling footsteps, the grinding friction of stone layered on stone, the energy of motion and effort and weight and molecular vibration, and condensed it down into an Orb of shimmery force waves, which I let fly.
Delimited, and with all the bells and whistles, of course.
Reaving the undead around them, the lines of simpler, basically just Animated Constructs were actually easy to reap with Shardrays, exploding as the Golembane effect shredded them and they blew apart.
The true Golems stood out by being completely unaffected by normal magic at all. But when I condensed the force of ten thousand footsteps into an Orb and slammed it into their insectile, reptilian, humanoid, bestial, and amphibious-carved forms, well, that wasn’t much different than hitting them with a really big hammer, and they blew apart rather emphatically.
I was only getting +3 per die, but that was still 130 damage an Orb, on average, and the biggest one that came lumbering out, a massive dragon’s skeleton animated as a Golem (a drolem? Hah!) still only took two shots before its head blew apart, its spine conducted the remaining force down the length of it, and it disassembled violently enough to embed some steel-hard bones in the stonework.