Chương 109: BECMI Chapter 108 – Fiends for Demons

Three of them. They hadn't bothered to disguise their Auras, so they blared violent fractured Jet in my Vista of Eternal Darkness when they Teleported in. T hey even had the grace to scream quite loudly in a terrifying shriek that reduced the limbs of most of the mortals around them to jelly. I had spent the last two days raging down the entire eastern border of the Khirifi lands, eradicating them wherever I found them, and I found them basically anywhere they were gathering.

The Land was pretty sensitive to their Priestesses, it turned out, and it knew humans who were born there versus those who came from more distant places, like species not in their natural territory. Communes thus let me know where random elements of them had gathered to be wiped away. The Land fed well, and no matter how many died, it was happy to take more of them.

A lot of them were pulling out, and naturally the mass movements were attracting the attentions of the Korshwa, who were quick to sweep in and plunder their settlements… settlements almost emptied of life when they pulled out, as I knew they would be. They certainly weren't going to leave enemies behind them, and dragging more slaves along was just using up supplies they needed for themselves. My promise to spare their innocents as they had spared others wasn't even close to being met.

Still, the Khirifi were not used to being in the position of refugees, and certainly didn't have the means to handle their own rush of returning people so quickly. Which was fine. People who couldn't take shelter were much easier to turn into Land-food. The Korshwa were following them, harrying them, and raiding them where they could, but military force was something the Khirifi were not weak against.

A Widened Pyroclasm a thousand feet across swallowing their entire camp and reducing ninety-nine percent of the Khirifi within to white ash in an eruption of bloody fire and screaming black Skulls, not so much. The few dozen Khirifi left were naturally panicking as they watched their friends and family reduced to smears of misting white on the ground, their spectral souls grasped by lashes of darkness and dragged screaming to their fates as ethereal black skeletons helped pull them down.

Still, one of them got off an alarm, and the demons came in to this nowhere fort in the middle of the plains, aiming to take me out. The Chained Thornrays laden with Immortal Power took them out explosively. Really, really explosively.

The demons were seven feet at the shoulder, with long sinewy taloned claws, vulture's heads on long skinny necks over two feet long, great vulture's wings with decaying feathers, digitigrade taloned legs, and they were dripping the Black energies of Entropy apparent on so many levels to me. In another time and place, they'd be called vrocks, Type I demons, embodiments of the Sin of Wrath, berserk and savage warriors always willing to the fight to the death for any reason.

They were lesser Immortal creatures in this realm, but they didn't have Avatars, only the draw of Entropy to whisk their souls home and reform their bodies. Bane to Legends and Bane to Fiends stacking were not gentle to them in the slightest, and vivus, vivus was violent to creatures of Entropy like them… and wasn't going to let them go home. They basically came in and announced themselves, while I was a hundred feet above them after sniping down most of the Khirifi survivors.

They looked around, Triadspell at VII got off the Interdiction and Roses blew out of the ground around them, red staining to black, Greater Thorns at V oriented on them, ignited, and the Chainrays went off on them with a very, very nasty -16 or so to the Saves against the Chains. The two taking the Rays didn't get any Saves at all. It was no contest once they weren't immune to mortal magic. Even minimum damage wouldn't have saved these twats.

There was a very bright light of Holy Force clad in black Skulls and Thorns aflutter with rose petals about them, and then the vrocks blew apart. The vivic explosion swallowed the entire fort and went even further than my Pyroclasm had, succeeding in leveling the entire place completely. Earthen fortifications and wooden walls were blasted completely apart, I was sent hurtling waaay into the sky, and terrified screaming shrieks echoed inside the blast as the Demons, supposedly immortal, instead died forever!

The Land took a long, deep draw and drink as the miniature nuke did the job of disposing of anything in the area that hadn't fled wildly from my earlier spell (which most of the livestock and horses and the like already had in a wild panic, because fire). As for me, I was very, very thankful that Evasion was the first of the effects I'd put into Haima before I'd started really upgrading its Regeneration (exploit Saves-for-no-damage whenever possible, people!).

With Dread's second Bonus all into Guardian, there was no way I was missing the Save, and even if it was a 20d6 blast of Immortal Power igniting, tripled, all the power did was push me away on the wings of a Featherweight spell, not allowing the energies to encompass me and grind me down. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Interdiction, not Stillflight.

I'd LET them arrive where I expected them to, in the center of the fort, if anything was going to come at all. Primus pulsed, my Wings taking care of my flight, and a Gust of Wind began to blow down below me as the dust billowed up after me in a burgeoning mushroom cloud.

The wind ramped up quickly, based on my Ringlord Level as it was, and blew the rapidly rising dust to all sides of me, driving down against the superheated air and forcing it out wider and flattening the cloud even faster than it had chased after me. This was definitely going to draw some Immortal attention. Duum had happily been outside the area of effect, and came winging in quickly to pick me up and get out of there.

He swooped past, I swung into his saddle, and he winged away with a Gusty tailwind out there just above the top edge of the roiling clouds until we reached the edge of my Interdiction, at which point I Linejumped politely out towards the horizon. Dread hummed happily in my hand, having siphoned off some of that Immortal Power for itself, exactly as it was meant to. It was the only way to expand its supply of Immortal Power, looked like ten points from each Screaming Demon.

130 IP in its reserves now, currently down seven spent for the Triadspell and its derived spells, neutralizing the Demons' anti-magical Aura, that expenditure completely hidden by the delightful coincidence of exploding vrock. There was nothing living left there to question, and I had an Astral Ward at IX+1 going. They weren't going to learn anything there. Deduce I had something to do with it, maybe. But a mortal killing three vrocks forever was going to be hard to believe. Let's see what they did with it.

There was a swirl of winds, and suddenly an old man was standing where a dust devil had been a moment before. He was tall and broad and had the features of a Northman, gray-bearded and weather-beaten by waves and winters uncounted, but unbowed. He studied the pit before him, where once had existed a mortal fortification.

It was completely gone now, a crater formed by a giant scoop taken out of the earth, two hundred meters across and fifty meters deep, the material both glassed and shattered and seething with slowly dissipating energies as the forces that made it drained away with unseemly speed. The whiteness of it was staining visibly and would be gone by morning, only the unnaturally perfect circle of it betraying its Immortal origins.

The sudden explosive release of Immortal power was against every compact and agreement of the Immortals on this world called Nown by its oldest inhabitants. His lip curled in distaste as he looked up.

"Are you responsible for this?" he demanded of the sky coldly, the wind swirling and plucking at the light shining down. To a mortal, it looked like the sun came down out of the sky and coalesced into a form of flame and scorn. Grimr read the outrage and anger on the face of the other, who couldn't even keep an idealized human form stable in his fiery-skinned Gul Avatar state for the moment.

"Please, you old fart. I have far better weapons to use than Immortal power to obliterate hapless ants," the Eternal calling himself Gulguz sniffed.

"This was a very thorough obliteration, which serves no purpose except to hide who was responsible, and it was MY worshipers who were targeted!" he sniffed petulantly.

"Ah, yes. Your indigent Khirifi, who seem to have kicked over a beehive somewhere, and stirred up someone they should have left alone." Grimr's smile looked much like his frown as he glared at the younger and very disrespectful Immortal of Energy.

"What say you, Clangyr?" The ground next to him surged up, assembling itself in chunks and pieces that somehow fit together into the form of a deeply browned thick-browed human in fine leathers and working apron of a style worn by a people no mortal on this continent had likely ever heard of, so long ago and far away had they passed on. Clangyr the Craftsman, hammer in one hand and pick in the other, scowling at Gulguz and none-too-friendly to Grimr, huffed deeply.

"Anything the stone could tell me was lost and purged away by the explosion, static spread through the surrounding matter. Nown itself remembers nothing of what happened here, although it seems to have enjoyed the dispersed Immortal Power."

"Sophilisa, what has Time to say of this?" Grimr grunted. Rain fell out of the sky where the mushroom cloud had dissipated with mysterious speed, pouring down into yet another form, this one of a woman surrounded by droplets of water moving in different orbits at different speeds, counting down times and cycles of who knew what Immortal Projects were taking place where. The brown-haired, faintly amused olive-skinned woman of attractive but not exceptional appearance considered the three of them without fear.

"As is typical for Immortal power, it is not bound by mortal restrictions, and the effects of the explosion extended into the future and the past, obscuring what comes before and only dissipating as the cloud of imbued matter was brought down by Lord Grimr here. The megalith's appetite has drawn the energy away, but what happened before or after is buried in obfuscation. It does appear that there was a direct conflict of Immortal powers here, and at the very least an avatar or its equivalent was destroyed."

High Eternal Sophilisa waved her hand at the hole in the ground, looking at Clangyr, who grunted and tapped his foot down. Time began to rebuild the hole blasted into the world, Matter going along with the return to a prior state instead of resisting it. Stone and soil and vegetation rebuilt themselves out of nothing, although naturally the artificial contributions of mortals were gone on the wind as Thought had been eliminated here, and the Energy spent to form their little town expended uselessly.

"There has been a mortal chastising your little assortment of fanatics, has there not?" Grimr asked Gulguz, having the satisfaction of seeing the impulsive fool's eye twitch. He cast about on the winds, but there was no whisper or mention of her.

"Lady Edge, a few of my Priests have called her. An elfin w orking with the new human king who has taken up residence near the Castle Darkmoor."

"She used a powerful spell to see through time and identified those who attacked one of your coalition's temples as Priests of Gulguz, and they Summoned a Soul Eater there," Sophilisa smiled at Clangyr, who nodded slowly as he glared at Gulguz, whose only response was an uncaring shrug.