Chương 115: BECMI Chapter 114 – The End of the Khirifi Empire

It had to be horrible for the Khirifi. I knew it, realized it, could even empathize with it, but it wasn't stopping me. They could see me coming from miles away in the dusk and night. The mountain valleys the vast majority of their people had left on a campaign of conquest nearly two decades earlier had been lightly populated, ancestral holdings that they hadn't let go, but which had lost all importance in the face of far more fertile lands to the east and south.

The population of the Khirifi had surged with access to better lands and resources… and the removal of those peoples who had lived there before the Khirifi had come. The valley-dwellers who had kept them in the high hills for so many years were only a tithe of their original numbers, reduced to little more than slaves and vassals toiling to raise food and mine ores for their masters, not allowed to bear arms or speak up against the Khirifi.

The vale-folks' eyes as they saw the Khirifi return in their numbers, frantic and fearful, were full of schadenfreude that their conquerors were receiving what they had doled out so mercilessly, and the Khirifi did not appreciate the irony of it at all.

So great was their fear they did not even bother to slaughter the vale-folk as they passed through, although they did take every ounce of food and supplies they could rip from the populace during their hasty retreat, doubtless certain that if salvation came, they could reconquer this defeated population at least as easily as they had the first time… if the vale-folk could survive the coming winter with no supplies of their own. But I was no following army.

Stripping the land just slowed the Khirifi down and meant I could catch them that much more easily. The screaming of the black skulls. The flash of flames in four, five, or six colors as streaks of force scythed through the air like hungry demons, trailing red rose petals. Punching through armor, skin, flesh, and bone, erupting forth with vine- Chains that linked webs of fleeing tribesmen in a final flowering pyre of doom. From white soil, roses bloomed.

White, red, and black of blossom, wickedly thorned, markers of death and the doomed. White blossoms, indicating the level and power of the dead as they died and were given unto the Land. Black and Red indicating the balance of darkness in their souls, acknowledgments to Hell and the Abyss or whatever their equivalents were that they had done a great and bloody deed here, and their Immortal Patron simply did not give a damn about the immorality of His choices and theirs.

I was very, very much not concerned about fighting fair at all. They couldn't Dispel any of my protective magicks. They had no way to get past my Mystic Sphere or Reverse Missiles, so anything that could by extension wasn't Khirifi. They didn't have the magicks to shut down my flying as an AoE, and they couldn't target me with the needed spells. They couldn't reach me unless I let them do so, and I wasn't letting them do so.

This wasn't a fight, it was an execution, sentence being passed, and the Khirifi being removed from the world… and they could hear and see me coming for miles. Naturally, it was all just a great big show. I was simply not that stupid, thinking I could just bull my way forward into what was once their ancestral ground and not take any risk as I did so. I watched them abandon the young and the old who could not keep up.

The beaten vale-folk took up the weapons dropped by those I slew, and if I deigned to pass the Khirifi's weakest by, it wasn't because they were going to survive. The vale-folk had years of abuse to vent, and they weren't going to let the Khirifi off, either.

If watching Khirifi explode in erupting rose vines and shrivel around blossoming flowers was the most horrific sight they'd probably ever seen, not a single Barb or howling skull found a single one of the vale-folk as my magic leapt from one victim to the next. The Khirifi ran to ancient fortifications and holdings wrought from crude earth and stone, calling out to their god and master to save them, and He did not.

I peeled open the stone and earth and turned them into examples of horticulture, great clusters of rosebushes billowing out of their last stands to mark where the Khirifi had perished. Ahead and up the valleys rose the ancient cave-temple to Gulguz, the final heart of their people. It was an old and mighty holding that had defied all their enemies throughout their history, and now sheltered the last thousands of them in grim fatalism and fear.

Fires were blazing high on the walls of the temple complex as I came up on it. Powerful Wards long laying idle had been brought desperately back to life by the remaining priestesses, the whole thing visible as a phantasmal corona of fire overlaying the whole place. Dread hummed in my hand at the presence of Immortal Power. Either Gulguz was taking a direct hand here, or there was a true Artifact supporting those Wards now, giving them the power to lock out hostile magic.

What they had to sacrifice to get it up and going, and to keep it active, was probably bitter, but they were doubtless expecting that I was here to reap, not to besiege. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. In truth, I had nothing better to do with my time, and certainly could have laid siege to them, or just waited them out.

They did have enough priests to feed their remaining population, more than likely, and enough hoarded stolen food and supplies to last a very long time. Would it be enough to stop me from breaking their final redoubt? Of course it would not. My pursuit had always had breaks, presumably where I had retired to rest and regain my magic.

They'd certainly tried to Scry me and use scouts to determine where I went on such things, but my Astral Ward could defy Immortals, mortals weren't going to be able to track me and where I'd gone. They seemed to be pretty confident in their Wards. Their expressions when I approached their walls on Duum's barely-flapping back and we drew up right outside the Wards without touching them made some of them almost sag in relief that something had finally stopped me.

The high priestess, resplendent in a gold headdress and jewelry over an ornate crimson robe, all done up in flame motifs, drew herself up in a picture of dominance and faith returned, relief warring with confidence restored as she glared at me in momentary triumph.

My expression didn't change an iota as Duum flapped gently and slid sideways through the air, jaws agape and long bright red tongue visible in the flickers of light from the Ward, his monocle gleaming and an almost comically-inappropriate top-hat with a white band and red feather stuck into it firmly in place on his head.

"You cannot pierce the temple's Wards!" she proclaimed with near-manic fervor.

"Harry us as long as you wish, witch! We can hold out here until your patience wanes and our god will send such curses upon you that you will be forced to withdraw! Flee before His power, for He will hunt you across the lands as you have dared to hunt His favored people!" I ignored her. Duum wafted left along the full length of the temple wall, while I silently met the eyes of each and every warrior and priestess who dared stand there.

"Blood and souls," I Whispered in their own language, and watched them grimace as each and every one of them heard me.

"The debt you owe the Land comes due. You've wrought a cage of flame for yourselves, a pyre to offer your lives to the world you've wronged." Duum tilted sideways, coasting back to the right easily, as if his wings were irrelevant.

"On behalf of the Land, I thank you for gathering yourselves in one place for the sacrifice to come." And their burning Ward flared with hot blue-white arcane fires. Their composure broke instantly, staring up blankly as the invincible Wards they had spent such efforts to raise began to, well, ignite. But not with fire, which they might have been able to resist, or call upon Gulguz to remaster. Nor to cold, to counter and invert it, because Gulguz fancied himself a master of cold magicks, too.

No, no, that was all much too rote and too predictable. Setting the magic on fire, now, that wasn't Fire-fire. That was Arcane Fire, pretty much purest magic going off, a variant of Spellfire working off Silver Fire. Where had I been going during my off hours? Why, I'd been coming here, of course. It wasn't like this temple wasn't the biggest damn thing around for miles and miles, that the Land didn't know right where the Khirifi used to live, and this place was just blazing for attention.

I had arrived here, built a Pyramid down and underneath the damn temple, inside their own mountain, using Rune Magic for a one-off and a very specific purpose. Immortal Power was suddenly hard and heavy in the air, Dread crackling in my grasp. I just turned around, looked at a certain spot in the sky where the stars were a bit redder than they should have been, and just dared the fellow to do anything.

Skulls writhed into being, formed of arcane fires Burning, attuned to the echoes of all the victims sacrificed in this temple, all their own power blazing and bringing those echoes to life. Flaming spirits pulled out of the Wards that were beginning to collapse inwards, while neo-arcane Fire Elementals leapt forth upon the nearest of the screaming Khirifi and began burning them alive with flames that weren't fire and with no heat in the slightest.

Two, three more sources of Immortal Power wafted gently along and through the manasphere. The building energy over there in the sky paused, and then abruptly cut itself off as the Ward touched the stones of the temple… and the stones themselves began to Burn unstoppably. The Khirifi inside screamed and fled, but I couldn't hear anything through the noise of stones cracking, exploding, melting, liquefying. The whole temple, inside and outside, began to melt and Burn away.

Anything human and living inside Burned away with it as the magic collapsed back towards its source. Yeah, I'd completely suborned their Wards, turning them into their own tools of destruction, which, you know, totally fit what should have happened to them long ago. What was going to be left intact in there was an Artifact of some kind or another that had been given to them to power this Ward.

I was going to take that Artifact, and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with it, but obviously it wasn't going to be in the hands of Gulguz's faithful anymore. If it was a Cauldron I was probably going to destroy the thing out of pure spite. But, you know, there were some other Immortals here not too happy with the bastard, who just might be willing to take a toy like that off my hands. It would be interesting to see what I could get for it… or if they'd rather I just destroyed the thing.

If it was an Entropic Artifact, I most certainly was going to destroy it, no questions asked.

There was nothing magical to salvage. The arcane fires ate up anything magical and it fueled the collapsing Ward that had consumed anyone and everyone within this place, the vivus added to the mix turning them all into white spots on the inert stone. The Arcane Elementals had made sure none of the magic items were missed, but it still left a lot of spoils of the more mundane kind around.

I Shaped up some stone in a Tapestry -capable container and dumped all of the valuables and plunder from a generation of looting and raiding their neighbors, offerings to Gulguz, and bribes to stay away from them, inside it. The vale-folk in particular were going to need some supplies, and most of those were largely untouched…