Chapter 16-421: Two Ways to Bring a Hammer Down (1/2)

The Demon Bear Usarimak exploded out of the stone, repelled by the earth as much as forcing its way out, sort of like undead rising from their graves. Bellowing loudly, its huge mass was ejected onto the surface of the rock, which had gone all black and moldly, looking something like rotted cheese.

The big sucker naturally spotted me hovering there overhead, my spread wings with the jet and silver butterfly patterns shining there particularly easy to see... and then it looked past me.

It looked up a long, long ways, and its bellow of outrage slowly trailed off as it finally kenned to the way magic was humming really, really loud, in a way and to a degree it had never seen before. It could feel the dreadful power of the Haze reaching down to it, ready to entrap it, enslave it, but all that didn’t matter right now.

Fifty Thunderbolts from On High erupted at once, and came down on it.

50 *(25(D10+6, Topped to 16) +6d6)) came down onto it with a Thunderclap like the biggest, grandest church bell ringing in the Hereafter.

Layered itself into an instant Symphony, too, if you had the ear for it. Scribbles hasty musical notations...

20,000 +300d6 of damage (eh, another 1050~) came dropping down out of the sky all at once. They heard the Thunderstroke hundreds of miles away, and saw the flash far over the horizon as the Holy illumination shot through the Haze for a hundred miles in all directions.

The Den couldn’t hold the force of all those 30’ radius eruptions at the same time dumping all that energy, and blew in every direction as Usarimak was atomized and devoured by vivus, all in one go.

My Commune with Nature said the Mother Land here actually popped open an eye at the shot in the arm. Still, it was just a little bear, and Russia was a big Mother Land. She fell back asleep almost instantly, but definitely appreciated the snack.

There wasn’t much actual debris and dust and stuff, mostly because the area affected by the Thunderstroke was also infused with a lot of Corruption which the vivus blew through in a wave of purification, and it was kind of reduced to very white dust. No doubt there would be veins of Energized minerals extending from this location for miles and miles soon.

I made a mental note for someone, maybe me, to come back and check on that in a few months.

The big cloud of vivus-enriched mist and dust settled slowly to the ground, the prevailing winds still too shell-shocked to try blowing stuff away. It took a few minutes for it all to settle onto and into the ground, and suddenly there weren’t any signs of Aspect corpses or Mazed or even dead werewolves around. It was just clean and white and pure, sparkling, and would be that way for at least a day or so.

Good enough. I waved my hand, and the vortex above in the Haze dissolved, holy lightning crackled out in all directions, and a ten-mile radius of the Haze was open to the night sky, making the Borea gape upward in disbelief.

I descended to the ground, hooking into the Lived-Line of a certain lilithi, and zipped back to the Throat.

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I got there in time to see a section of the Throat about thirty feet square crack, and then lift itself a hundred feet right up out of the ground, a rough pillar extending down out of sight into the darkness below.

The Mazed and Aspects seeing this all went crazy with glee, especially with the chittering cry from below that frazzled all the nerves and jolted on the teeth. The Borea looking at it all despaired, and probably wanted to blame someone for their failings.

Shvaughn and I knew better, and she didn’t stop cutting a Burning swathe through the creatures, letting them taste hellfire and vivus combined. Mmm-mmm, a double feast of unnatural energies, and Sin sure did make those fires pop nicely.

Then that pillar of stone descended much faster than gravity.

The crunch was pretty hard, and the Aspects and werewolves too near that Pit were all knocked off their feet, even sent flying. A plume of dust blasted to the sky as the air below was forced out of the way.

Very importantly, that chittering cry from below also stopped rather abruptly.

The pillar rose again, much faster than before, and then it drove down again.

The attacking Mazed and Shattered Aspects all kind of faltered in place as theWHUMP of it traveled through the ground and threatened to knock them off their feet again.

Rise, fall. Rise, fall. Rise, fall. WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP...

The scream was soundless but still hair-raising as something important down below us gave way entirely, and then a column of rich unwhite vivus blew up right out of the Throat into the sky, chased away the Haze, and revealed more night sky.

Legion came shooting up out of the white-stained Throat as the blast faded away, up and arcing down REALLY fast, trailing holy fire from huge demo-dragon wings as they swooped down towards Shvaughn, Idiot out and trailing holy Wrath, and the two promptly raged across the battlefield.

Yeah, that monstrous milli-centipede-hentai horror Aberrant down there hadn’t much liked getting hammered to a pulp by a column of hundreds of thousands of tons of stone wrenched out of the side of that hole and wielded by a thirty-foot-tall six-armed Grandmaster Warlock.

I stayed at the back, playing Shards over everything that tried to run, which was actually a lot of the stuff now. The two Warlocks, Hellfire and Wrathfire swirling about and between them, moved with an absolute coordination and trust in one another that was poetry to the eye, setting up hapless Aspects and Mazed and thoroughly covering for one another as fire blew in all directions.

I watched Legion’s Dragonwrath swallowing massive areas, larger than either dragonflame or Wrath would normally cover on its own, and doing far more damage. Legion had definitely been practicing combining aspects of the two energies and Pacts, and wielding the might of the Demon Dragon they had Consumed.

Given how fast they moved, and how their flames pretty much swallowed anything that grouped up, finishing up the last of the Mazed who weren’t being chased down by Borea werewolves didn’t take too long. They were actually using my view of things as reference points on which way to go and to help them coordinate.