Chương 382: BECMI Chapter 381 – Eyes on the Prizes

My base Caster Level off Ur-Priest Levels was base 26 Clerical/Ur-Priest, +31 (36 Wizard +26 Sorcerer, /2) = 57, +9 for Spell Power was 66. Before any other modifiers. For Shard -type spells, that limit was more like Caster Level 100, outclassing just about anything alive as far as what I could make those magicks do. Twenty-three Shards at 2-7+5, Topped, was 12 each, meaning 276 damage before any Kickers applied, out of a I Valence. Paired, that was 552 damage, coming out of a I Slot.

That was also before any Boosts or Kickers. Seeking meant I could shoot around corners if I knew where something was, which meant Duum in his small Bat form could just poke out his head and spot for me. All of which meant, yep, sniping kills were really easy for me against almost anything now, if I could use Eternal-grade magic. Being restricted to 15 Shards would have been 180 damage base, 360 Paired, and Kickers would have come into play. They would have taken me over the edge, but I preferred overkill.

There was no way it could spin around in time to stop a Shard volley, so it was find the thing, get behind it, launch from behind cover, and watch the volley of nearly fifty Shards in a lot of hues and patterns punch into and through the rocky-hued hide, turning its oversized brains into fried puree, and profit. I could technically have gone as high as seventy Shards, but did I need that much overkill? I did not. I had plenty of kill just sticking to twenty, add three, Pair, thank you.

The Land was happy to tell me where the unnatural things were, the same way a person would want to get rid of a leech sucking on their skin. Apparently they had fairly set patterns they moved in, places prey might wander into or intruders might come along, and we'd gotten lucky in that the part of the river the fleet was in was later in the rotation and so hadn't been seen yet. The giant sheep had to go, too. They had no predators and would explode in population without them.

I was actually going to have to create some predators with magic to leave whatever we didn't harvest for the fleet under control.

The sniping was anti-climactic, because it was supposed to be. The twenty-foot rocky sphere herded the compliant giant sheep into the cave, then rolled the great slab of stone over the entry to protect/trap them inside until the morning. And that's when a whole bunch of colorful Shards punched it in its backside and ended its life, driving through its stony hide in splashes of radiance and force. Banefire led the energy to all the nasty places, and it was removed from existence.

"Let's go, gentlemen." Captain Sigmal, with a Flight spell on him, led the men on Disks over a steep adjoining hill from out of sight of the creature and straight down an unscalable cliff there. As they came, Funf reached out and rolled the stone back, causing a medley of confused baaaa's and lowing from the sheep. My Shards stacked up, this time with Chain Spell, and lanced out again.

The interior of the cave lit up with flashes of Bane to Animals and streaks of force flashing between horse-sized bodies, and then there was no noise at all. I waved the men inside, torches with Eternal Lights were brought out for illumination, and with the Disks there to take all the weight, they moved in for the butchering to be done. Four thousand sailors needed a lot of meat, but there was a lot here to be harvested.

With Funf's Telekinesis and adamantine butchering tools, I handled the beholder alone, Shaping containers for blood, brains, stomach, the massive hide, and eyes out of the stone to store them in. As for where I put them all, in my Sanctum was the obvious place, as it had the room, and I could task the Permanent Greater Phantasmal Servants to prepping everything properly. Beholder hide that thick took some special techniques to treat properly, and I went over several options of what I could make with them...

By morning, three of the massive beholders were dead, harvested, and Burning en vivus. The local Land was quite happy to be rid of them, and even more happy when I started Summoning in natural creatures to help the ecology, leaving its own awareness to guide the magic on what should be brought in. I burned through a LOT of Valences doing this, the vivus from burning Beholders making the Summoned creatures real and natural, replacing some of what the things had annihilated.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. It left a lot more beholders behind, and a lot more sheep to dispose of. Which was totally cool. The men were more than happy to shear a lot of sheep and store up a lot of mutton, and eating lots of meat was a decent enough way to spend the time. The beholders themselves were terrifying, but if I was able to pick them off one by one with no risk, that was totally cool.

At anywhere from three to five hundred thousand gold in spell components each, it was also totally worth my time and theirs if I shared the fruits of our mutual labor. Of course, if the beholders found out I was killing them, the sailors had better be able to get on their ships and get out of sight right quickly. The sailors who saw the corpses knew it, they spread the tales, and the ships were drawn up to head down the short river and out into the open ocean with some speed.

I kept dragging groups of butchers around the countryside, laying down herds of the giant sheep after I killed their shepherds, and Flying officers dragged the men and their haul of meat and wool back to their ships with urgent speed… for all that everyone enjoyed zooming over the landscape at speed. To make matters quicker, elements of the fleet actually broke off at night and circumnavigated the island, stopping near indicated places so that they could disembark more men closer to the locations of the kills.

Zip up the side of the cliff, do the butchering, descend at speed worked out pretty well. All twelve of the outer beholders were killed in only two more days with this method, and thousands of giant sheep were cut up and fleeced. The quality of the wool alone was going to make all of the men fairly rich if they could get it to civilization and sold, and they knew it. Some even floated ideas of taking over from the beholders and managing the herds for themselves and future profit…

which, honestly, wasn't a bad idea, if I managed to kill off the beholders, which nobody in their right mind wanted to face. But then, as expected, things went a little off-course. Even with vivus helping clean things up, slaughtering that many sheep generated a heck of a smell, and since we were coming in from all sides, playing with the wind only went so far.

One of the beholders picked up the smell of blood, went to investigate, and found absolutely nothing but a few scattered sheep that had escaped their master wandering around. Of its brother or whatever, there was no sign. Morning had come, vivus had long finished its work, and nothing remained of the dead to be found, except unusual thick and vital growth, while the area where I was Summoning and releasing animals was on the opposite side of the island from them.

I tracked its progress via the Commune, but I didn't get to it in time to stop it from raising the alarm with ungodly loud bellows punctuated with crashing a multi-ton boulder into the side of a cliff repeatedly, letting the sound carry over the craggy hills and echo off the scarps, mounts, and mesas.

It was crude, it was effective, and when it abruptly stopped because I punched over three dozen Shards into the thing, well, that only served to spread the alarm further, as the reciprocating replies of crashing stone were considerably fewer in number than they should have been. That was when things got a bit exciting, as the beholders began to move out, first moving out to investigate the territories of the outer ring of beholders who were so silent… and lose another one of their number while doing so.

Proper paranoia sent the remaining five of them zipping back to the center, where the beholder king there was actually trying to use some form of Artifact-class Orb to find me, and any others with me. The fleet was already twenty miles off the shore, just some white scrap in the distance, even to a giant's eyes not really much to see… and certainly not responsible for what was going on here.

I was fully aware I was pissing off someone and something by doing this, but there was no way I could let things like this endure… mainly because as I was Communing with the island there were a dozen obvious places that had been built and tunneled out, inhabited by humanoids of some sort, but all of them were cold, empty, and passages had been drilled into them by the pure and artificial power of Disintegration beams, digging them out of homes and caves and doubtless right into the maw of these beholders.

I didn't know if these things were the inspiration for the massive version that Grimbol's team had met and brought me in to deal with, but I didn't put it past the Immortals to see if they could get a mortal mage to make something similarly stupidly overpowered and out of their control for the fun of it. It sounded just like something an Entropic would do… and, huh. It was involved with the Saber River and a Curse leveled by Delphan Immortals… Yeah, there was definitely a tie here, and I was betting it was Delphax.

He might have even made the first of these things, and was spreading knowledge of them to other worlds as one of His great success stories, overweeningly proud of His accomplishment. Meandral was his skyworld, after all, and Delpha the world and empire that He had ruled here. Of course He was still going to have power and influence here, the overweening and arrogant idiot unable to give up on the fact his own pride and foolishness had cost Him His mortal empire.

Showing everyone He wasn't wrong had to be one of His great driving motivations, even after so long. At least, if the things He'd been doing across the multiverse were any indication they were. So, the Artifact was likely Entropic. Good to know. Good to destroy, good to Feed to this floating chunk of rock with a biosphere that could use the injection of IP to return itself to fecundity and a more natural ecology. Huh.

It occurred to me that popping the Artifact and Feeding it to this Rock might turn it into a baby Megalith. Wouldn't that be all kinds of funny? Definitely worth taking out all of these floating eyeballs with prejudice.

========= If just taking out gigantic Aberrant creatures likely sourced from Outside Creation wasn't a strong enough incentive for me to wipe them all, the peak at the center of this broken hunk of rock had been artfully shaped into a temple and monument to the creator of these eyeballs, complete with a fantastically-overdone statue looming over it.

It looked like a big, one-eyed Roaring Demon with particular facial features, tentacled hair with eyes instead of horns, and a few extra eyeballs at inappropriate places on its anatomy. Still couldn't fail to recognize that face, given how I'd had to let the fucker live even while a couple of my Sims were part of His entourage tracking Him across the planes. Gave Him the finger, and then I went to go kill His toys.