Chương 494: AF Chapter 493 – On Your Bax!

"Tremble." Oh, feel the subsonics of that growl, the Sublime Chord was thrumming with it, mana was drawing back from a Null that hard. Aerbax was freaking, even as it tried to Dispel the Debuffs I'd put on it frantically… and then she was up in its face, right between its arms, and Quaver was plunging down behind the mask and into its hidden insides once again, twisting and making Aerbax spin against the pressure of the Lost Light.

Endure crashed into that broad wound on its backside and stayed there, drumming like a slamming bell that had Aerbax arching its back and spasming its tentacles in agony.

"Today, you Feed the Land." The Mick and Briggs grabbed its arms this time, preventing it from hooking its sickles onto her and tearing her apart with main strength, and now all the Skeeters came charging in to Aerbax, crashing into it as they each tackled one of the razored tentacles before they could writhe free and evade them.

Swords wrapped and twisted and spun with frantic speed, rolling up and over to bind the tentacles, keeping them taut with pressure and skill, even as Aerbax tried to heave everyone off the ground. Around it, the Roachs' Wolfpack went on a mad tear of cutting and hacking beneath the heels of the Skeeters and around the Mick and Briggs, chopping into the meeting points of those arms and tentacles and making Aerbax's control spasm wildly beneath the cutting blows.

"This hour, you feel Heaven's Hand." Eight Shardrays hammered into the back of the renegade virindi, while the nonstop arrows from the Archers turned the area around Endure's hammering beat molten red with their impacts. I was drawing off Kris now, and I began to pound the Shardrays in as fast and hard as I could, Burning all the Valences that needed to be Burned. Polychromatic flares of Elemental Vulns went off as Lenses inside Swords being used as levers and binds cut into crackling, twisting tentacles.

Fire primary, cold. Fire, cold. Fire, cold. Starfire plunged in to annihilate everything. Voidchill shattered all defenses and coherence, opening wide the wounds the flames made. Fires shattered the weakened defenses. The Void Phoenix screamed in the manafield. Plumes of fire and frost were erupting back from me as Repeated and Residual Metamagic piled on top of one another, and the damage kept going up, and up, and up!

"This minute, you die where you stand." A feral knowing purr, as the Nulled length of Quaver, even the Motes of Lost Light silent and still, found something important inside, and Kris began to press down against it.

"No! No! Mercy! Spare me and I will serve-" it actually shrieked in Human, a wildly a-vocal disruptive sound melange that assaulted the ears.

"Your doom on the loom of Fate uncaring, inexorable Axiom is all about sharing,"This second, you truly die, because YOU CAN." Aerbax stiffened in realization that severing itself from the Quiddity had indeed meant it would now die forever. What enlightenment of the irony of the mortal condition came at that point was probably pretty sublime, in my estimation.

Quaver punched down as twelve Shardrays detonated around something inside the massive torso, and the weakened spot where Master Oswald had cut it completely gave way. It all went white in front of me.

I was further away than even the Archers, so I was the least affected by Aerbax going vivic. What that mostly meant is that I got to everyone and got them into conjured clothing before the dust really settled and a bunch of mostly naked fighters didn't have to parade themselves before those watching worriedly from over there. Briggs was the first one up, and mostly intact, as he'd been the only one not in Olthoi Armor for this fight.

When his massive plate-armored ass rose from the ground, the soldiers over there cheered to see it, which continued as the rest of the fighting crew got back to their feet, one after another, and Weapons spiraling with Lost Light were raised high in triumph. Pretty much anything that had once been alive on them was dust and flinders, and that included the chitin which formed the Olthoi Armors everyone had been wearing.

It was the finest Hollow Armor we had, but that much vivus to the face meant that even alchemical treatments couldn't prevent it from breaking down. A lot of boots, underpadding, shirts, trousers, underwear, and socks went with them, as did pretty much all the body hair. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. Well, except for Briggs and Kris, who were the only ones with full heads of hair left.

That technically included me, but I had the Favor of Sylune, which effectively meant my hair was blown away, and then regrew in seconds right back to the fashionable length it liked to be at. The Roaches and the Skeeters were a bit dismayed, but all their Jewelry was intact, and now everyone had a reason not to wear leather Armor and see it blasted to dust fighting highly energy-intensive otherplanar Aberrant Hiveminds finally being freed of Axiom forever.

"Don't bring yer Masspacks to the fight against Aerbax, ye said," the Mick said accusingly, looking around at everyone's bald pates, except for Kris, Briggs, and me.

"They are still sitting on my Disk, right over there," I said, waving my hand and bringing up Mass Disks for everyone to fall over onto, which they pretty much did. The ground an inch beneath my feet was blasted purest crumbling white, and reduced to the consistency of fine powder. Even with lightfoot, those who'd been standing were happy to get off a surface which felt like it was going to slough away beneath us.

"Please, please tell me there's LOOT!" the Mick complained loudly as he sat down with the force of someone whose wobbly legs had just given way. Kris touched her plain white cotton blouse and trousers, and Skated back for the central area where Aerbax had died. The ground looked like a blasted crater, but even her Waveskating Step crunched it down like compressing foam as she Skated over it, making it plain the rock there was basically ready to fall apart with a good breath.

"Hah!" She reached the center, looked down, and squatted, plunging her arms six inches into what looked like solid stone that fell apart around her hands. She pulled up the standard drops from a Virindi: Aerbax's scowling Mask, and an Amulet made from a Blackfire Diamond, definitely the most advanced Virindi Amulet we'd ever seen not fused into a virindi.

"Sickles didn't make it?" Briggs asked, not stepping forward. He'd probably sink to his knees or more, depending just how deep the zone was. Kris looked back and forth, swaying on her feet as the delicate silt-like stone crumbled beneath her slowly.

"Don't see them, Fuzzy. Probably Shadow-infused and were eaten." Briggs nodded after a moment.

"That makes sense." He looked back at the soldiers on the other side of the lava pit.

"No virindi, Markspace up. Let's hear the reports, soldiers!" he called out, pointing for everyone to get on the Disks and striding for the Chain still bridging the lava moat. I ignored the mounds of icy crystals surrounded by blazing lumps of fused stone behind where I'd been standing, rounding everyone up, even Briggs and Kris, and leading them back across the Chain in a long line of Disks.

There was a lot of hooting and good-natured ribbing, along with wincing faces as all the fighting men there realized the two squads had not only lost their hair, but the extremely valuable Olthoi Armor. Still, they'd not lost anything inherently magical, and I'd provided for their modesty.

"You ready to scan this place for loot and strip it good?" Kris asked from behind me as I skimmed across.

"As Her Highness wishes. I seem to remember we barely managed to cover a corner of the Cauldera, and that was before it erupted and covered everything in nice hot bubbling mana…" Briggs was definitely listening in.

"Oh, ho! We can expect some good stuff, then?" he deduced.

"I am very curious about what we might manage to find down there, if Aerbax managed to dig out a Blackfire Diamond of its own…"

The rest of the day was spent Detecting the Isotopes inside the Cauldera, then pulling out a bunch of them. A similar survey was done while I was going over the rest of the island, and the bonanza revealed had the royals with us giddy with joy over the potential here. Plans for new mines were in the offing quickly, and naturally that meant a Long Jump was going to be needed to put in place… Well, it was just more work, and I always had things to do. Aerbax and his cohort of virindi were probably out of the picture.

King Bobo and Harraag had reported great success in cleaning out the Direlands completely, while the Aun and the Hea had taken it upon themselves to crisscross the North and eliminate all the virindi from surface spawns there that they possibly could. No virindi were respawning, so that had worked out well for everyone concerned.

They'd be at it at least a couple more weeks, and scout teams were dispatched into any known Dungeon that had possessed a virindi presence before the Fall, to Seal and clear the devoted spawns there. The virindi were gone, and trying very hard to stay away from here.

MacNaill turned to Master Ben Ten, offering a skeletal hand to the swordmaster. It was taken and shaken firmly, and the former master of the Sun Legion, last of the Cursed Dead of Hebian-to, stepped down to the temporary altar Hallowed and Consecrated here in Holtburg to finish up the job I'd begun over a year before.

Waiting quietly around were the last fifty of the Cursed Dead, all of them officers and commanders who had quietly waited until the last and least of their soldiers who could be returned to life was finally Resurrected. They had all elected to return together, worked out the order, alerted any relatives who still lived, and put the clothing and coverings necessary in place around the Altar I'd erected there.

A carved and Energized Diamond Golum Heart was handed to me by the former bandit, and his bare bones laid down on the Altar there, as had his subordinates before him. It perhaps said something that I had now Cast Resurrection enough times to reduce Meta Costs on it for +I and +II Metas by 1. I was a very long way from making Rapid Ritual Practical for VII's, as that would take literally 64k Castings of long VII spells to do so.

Which didn't mean I couldn't do it, it just meant it would take years, and hopefully I'd be doing it with things like weather controlling spells or Divinations or Summonings or other things, instead of bringing back people long dead. I broke his neck to kill him to start the spell. Magic gathered with great speed. It condensed into a new heart inside his ribcage with swirls of Silver and Gold, bringing down his Green-Yellow soul and binding it to his bones once more.

Bones crinkled and crackled as flesh and blood began to grow over him, cloaking everything in skin and then inflating underneath as muscle, organs, and ever more blood regrew. He'd been in his fifties when he died, but I'd restored all the skeletal undead to bony perfection over the last nearly two years, so he was in fine shape with no arthritis as the spell ended, his heart beat, and he drew in a sharp gasping breath as his dark eyes flew open.