Chapter 16-420: Throat and Den (1/2)
The wind was bitingly cold, but none of us felt its force or its chill. Force Armor kept lower-level winds at bay, both Legion and Shvaughn had Storm Pacts, and we were all immune to cold.
“Hasn’t changed much,” Shvaughn said, looking out ahead of us, “except for the rot scampering around.”
There were things moving around down below, heading toward the walls of a fortified hilltop in the distance. We all knew that at the center of it was a long pit heading down into darkness.
Screaming magical fireballs were being launched by siege engines, swerving in mid-air to crash into tree-like, twisted things leaving trails of corruption behind as they moved behind the faster, mutated forms of Mazed werewolves, who despite their ferocious howls and demeanors, were letting the forms of the eel-headed scurves, corpulent forms of Enthemas, and other aspects of the Shattered take the brunt of the fighting ahead of them.
I Sent a cool Message out ahead to a certain puffed-up Borea, my eyes sliding over to the tendril-ridden forms of the prachas he was so puffed-up about having killed. It didn’t allow for a return Message, but I didn’t care about that.
Shvaughn flicked out her hand, and her Claymore Burn blossomed from flames into her hand. She used a MorphingMain-Gauche Weapon, Bound, in her other guises. Black angel’s wings and dark horns smoldered into existence, and her eyes went black and crimson. In contrast to that, icy winds began to swirl coldly about her, and a terrible fey beauty descended to accent unholy appeal and Amazon perfection.
“No fox stuff,” I said before either of them popped the tails and ears, and Shvaughn made a displeased face for a moment.
Legion’s draco-demon wings simply unfolded and expanded out of nowhere, their frill gained more color and grew larger as curling ram-like horns regained their proper place. Human eyes faded into the glowing paint of a Tatted Mask on an eyeless face, and human feet were replaced by hooves. The air about them grew heavy, as if straining to hold back some awesome power.
“We have this,” Legion stated, and the way the world reverberated confirmed it.
“Kiss-kiss!” I waved my hand as my Teleport took me off to the Den of Usarimak, and the wind filled in where I’d been.
“Shall we?” Shvaughn smiled, reaching out with one hand as Idiot’s holy fires lit up in contrast to the smoldering dark promise of Burn. Her voice promised a terrible ending for all concerned.
“We shall.” The two touched, different energies somehow mitigated and mixing through fey power and hellfire’s dancing doom. Wings beat, trailing fire that sent them into the air with far greater speed than any wingbeats possibly could.
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The Mazed were perfectly happy to let the corrupt minor Aspects of the Shattered take the brunt of the fighting ahead of them. I was perfectly happy to take them out first.
They didn’t seem to appreciate my generosity much, but hey, them’s the breaks.
Shards reached down and slaughtered the mutated Mazed werewolves, generating ki that I promptly blew on Call Lightning after Call Lightning. Rings of holy power rose from me and drove into the thickening Haze above us, currently replete with rumbling crimson hate lightning that was reacting to the corrupting power and the necrotic existences of the Aspects roving about below with flashes of yellow-green rotlight.
If the Shards were Chained out to harvest the weakest of the Aspects, it was just a bonus.
A blizzard of corrupt and twisted magical power rose to meet me in a myriad of forms and displays, ran into Spell Resistance at 49, and evaporated, while I dodged the stuff Spell Resistance couldn’t deal with.
The priggonus over there looked like a tree made out of meat and slime, a trail of steaming, fetid filth trailing behind it marking its path over the landscape.
It didn’t like it much when one of my Shards set the slimy trails all over the place on vivic fire, and unwhite flames dashed along them like trails of gunpowder. Soon scores of Aspects stupid enough to leave vivic fuel behind them and oozing on their skins were burning unwhite and screaming as they did so.
A couple flights of flame hit the main fighting at the entry to the Usarimak Den, and the dissolving corpses and acidic fumes there basically ignited into a nice whitestorm of vivus, eating into the Aspects wildly and devouring the fallen with massive speed. It raged into the tunnel, chasing after all the corrupting energy and dark powers, and the Aspects reeled back from the conflict, wailing and gnashing their mandibles as they burned.
Of course, they were running away backwards, right into me, and I wasn’t any more merciful. Aberrant Banefire worked on pretty much everything here, given the warped nature of the Shattered and its servants...
Rings of crackling holy elemental power flared around me repeatedly, and the crimson hate lightning hissing up there by default and the yellow-green responding to the corruption of the Shattered began to be replaced by silver-edged flashes that cut at the eyes of the things below that saw it.
They could feel power building up above, building, building... and they began to try to flee.
Whoops, failed that there morale check, they did...
The Mass Interdiction spread out over the entire battlefield didn’t help with matters. No phasing away along the Veil or simply quitting the mortal realm for these things. They were stuck until they got outside the sealed area... and on one side of the zone was the great fanged cave in the side of a mountain, and on the other side was me.
The Borea were pushing out of the cave now, maybe because of bloodthirsty savagery chasing after a routing foe, but more likely because I’d said I was coming in to pop the Seals, free the Bane, and then entirely blow the shit out of the place, and they didn’t want to be in there when I did that.