Chương 408: BECMI Chapter 407 – Are You Kidding Me?

Fireballs that had been Spellwarped down to Rays were first Split, then the whole mess Paired, then Admixed to Lightning, came scything in. It wasn't Laur's best Element, of course, but it stepped nicely around the Beetle's Fire Resistance, likely derived from an Earth-type Elemental nature. Rays also meant no saves for half damage, which a creature this size was bound to make. Laird had no problem being the target of all that Lightning and passing it on.

The Mick had long made his Blade Indestructible, and no mortal power could inflict the slightest damage upon it. Laird was the focus of 80d6 of Lightning, which he happily conducted right into the center of the over-sized Bug's nervous system, promptly frying the ever-loving crap out of it. The Mick watched the skull of the gigantic bug light up from the inside, its other crystalline eye popped from excess voltage, and sparks and the smell of cooking… granite?, filled the air.

"Saving this skull." -We are getting reports of earthquakes happening in multiple locations, - Briggs /reported crisply, as always having his thumb on the general information flow. -All of them near settlements, but not IN those settlements... - -As if some twat didn't want to be sensed putting forces into place, - Sama /noted with a /smile that was all hungry teeth. -See where that tunnel goes, Mick. We'll get the other Dispatch Teams to the affected areas.

- The Mick nodded to nobody in particular, drawing Laird out as if the meat and steel hard chitin of the creature wasn't fused around it… and then promptly raising his Blade up and chopping it down to cut off the thing's head.

"Butcher team gonna have a fun time breaking this thing down. I imagine the fancy boys gonna want to turn this into some kind of all-terrain transport device, aye, luv?" Laurentine looked over the hulking body, larger than most dragons, and much more solid.

"That seems viable. I'll note it as a working project once the material studies and anatomy is gone over. The claw tips and pincers look to be at least as hard as adamantine…"

"Agreed." The first gleam on his Oathring indicated Jace and Eshauna were ready to come in, and the others were going to be quick on their heels…

-You are not serious? - Sama /repeated at the Mick's words. His team had headed down the tunnel with speed, an Extended Wizard Eye zipping out ahead of them and making sure there were no dire surprises coming. The first thing they'd come across was an otherwise empty room with a steel cage in the middle of it, and an Elemental Phasm of Earth, a horned, winged, gray-skinned elemental shape-shifter, sitting inside it.

The fact that room was twenty miles and a ten-minute trot from their previous location indicated something highly screwball was going on. -He says these beetles are being made by devices hidden in the connected caverns here, and he'll shut them off if we can solve some riddles, - the Mick /said, eyeing the tall, and skinny shape-changer dourly. It shuffled uncertainly under his stare, and the overwhelming feeling of power radiating from all eight of the adventurers here, even the dog!

Said dog being the size of a horse with Eshauna riding him didn't help matters. -Immortal games, - Lady Edge's always-dry /voice judged narrowly from the side. -Someone is using an Immortal Tool. That has to come with restrictions. This is the restriction. Using wits to defeat a creature of pure brawn by stopping them before they come into being. - There was a pregnant pause. -And we don't want to do that until the moment is right to do so, right?

- Sama's /smile had all the bloodthirst, and there were dozens of /voices piping up in support of that notion. -Stick the creature on a Disk, drag it around and find out where those dimensionally-connected tunnels go to. I want to see these 'devices', - Briggs /rumbled threateningly.

"Bestie, pick the tunnel and we go," the Mick stated to the Hound, who immediately loped off to the East. Flying or riding Disks, the party plus one nervous Earth Phasm headed after him, Laur's Wizard Eye zipping on ahead to scout the way.

It was a pillar jutting up from a rough circular plate on the floor, carved up with pictoglyphs of dozens of these Earthquake Beetles. Just as they were entering the place, they happened to see a carving of the Beetle drop off the obelisk there and fall to the plate below with a heavy clunk. Immediately the crude carving began to grow, gaining more details and lines as it swelled with Immortal Power, visibly drawing in earth and mass to grow and grow and grow…

The phasm looked at them, then at the beetle, its vestigial wings twitching nervously as the adventurers just waited and watched. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Uh, you know, the other pillars are dropping these things off, too, adventurers?" it added uneasily.

"I see you aren't immune to the Beetles," Laurentine noted slyly, making the creature twitch and glare at her for revealing that.

"Do not worry, we shall not let it get close to you."

"Putting on the pounds fast," Kormac noted dryly, the party's second Forsaken intent on the creature. It was already the size of a cow and growing like mad.

"Why don't ye give us this riddle for turning off the machine like a good lad?" the Mick remarked, clearly not at all discomfited by the rapid growth of the creature with his full team here.

"Oh! Oh, of course!" Now the center of attention, the blue-skinned phasm flapped his small wings and straightened up proudly.

"What we have here are several lengths of chain." He stretched out his skinny arms, and half a score of chains of silvery metal appeared draped over his arms and clawed hands, with anywhere from three to eight links.

"Your test is to find the cheapest way to join all these links together into one long chain! It would take a smith one copper coin to break a link, and ten coppers to weld it back together! What is the best way to join all these chains together?

"Answer me correctly, and I'll shut off the pillar for you, and give you a small reward," the phasm beamed at his central role in all of this. Du-du du-du, the famous tune of Jeopardy! from Darkmoor started playing, utterly confusing the waiting phasm. That had been one of the best shows broadcast on the holonet there. The Mick had loved it and all the trivia it covered, although the lack of broad education did hamper things a bit for contestants.

Still, Engel Bobber had become a famous and well-known hyn for MC'ing the show for years. There was almost an instant ding! Clearly the Lady Edge could solve this and had hit the buzzer in no time at all. Not that any of them were going to do the same thing. Another Disk was flicked up, the chains were appropriated and laid down on it, and quick questions and some math followed, everyone chipping in with an appropriate comment or two.

Obviously the simple act of using one link per chain to attach to the next link wasn't the best way to go. Three with six links, three with five links, one each three, four, seven, and eight links, for ten total chains. The Mick didn't bother to think too hard.

"Revered Korgi?" he asked the fiery-bearded, stout and muscular dwarf-priest and smith after everyone chimed in. It was plain the stony-faced dwarf had solved the problem at a glance.

"Breaking a link to connect it to another involves breaking nine links and rewelding them, nine tasks," the dwarf summed up, pointing firmly to the last link on nine of the chains, in order.

"As Kavva noted just now, getting rid of one of the chains would reduce the number that would need be connected. Unlinking the eight-link section results in nine segments remaining, and links enough for the eight-fold task." His gauntleted hand shifted to the last of the chain segments, however.

"However, these shorter chains each count as a segment and a task. It be easier to link long chains than many short ones. Get rid of the three and four link segments, and we're left with eight sections, which can be linked with the seven total links from these segments, a seven-fold task and the fastest way to be done with this," he declared with professional finality. The phasm looked impressed at the rapid solution.

"Very good!" he said, stretching out his hands. The chain links leapt into his grip, his large taloned fingers wrapped them all up expertly, then let most of the mass drop, revealing that all of the links were now connected into a single long silvery ornamental chain.

"Your reward, noble dwarf!" the blue-scaled reptilian face of the phasm proclaimed, handing it over formally. Revered Korgi took it with a snort, the thing obviously a fancy thing designed to be a display item, not functional. He glanced at Kavva, having noted the elfin eyeing the glittering thing, and with little more than a simple and experienced flick of his hand, wound the entire length of it around his fist, then handed it off to the elf without a care.

She took it and stowed it away in her Masspack without missing a beat, smiling slightly as she did so.

"And now I'll turn off this obelisk for you-p!" the phasm was interrupted by the Mick dragging him backwards by one under-sized wing, and Kormac's Claymore Cruath hovering dangerously under his throat.

"That you will not do," the Mick purred grimly, as a Mirror Portal opened behind them, and delivered into their midst the personal Dispatch Team of King Antius and his guards, students… and two of his children, along with his elegant and poised wife, Ranger and former Empress of Siricil Mauria de Darkmoor. The phasm looked at the new arrivals delivered so precisely to their location, and swallowed as the towering Marius the Bronze gestured at the circle in the air that had let them out.

It vanished before the phasm's eyes.

"We're going to watch and see how long that little bug there takes to get to full size," the Mick went on.

"Then you're going to show us to the next one of these things, and the next, and the next. We'll solve your little riddles as we go, so think of this guide service of yours as being paying us back, aye?"

"Of-Of course, sir! I will, I will just hang back and not get in your way at all!" the phasm said, waving his hands quickly in abject surrender.

"That's the spirit, lad. Yer Majesty, welcome to the first Bug-Maker Cavern." King Antius eyed the beetle-esque creature over there that was still growing with visible speed, definition and detail filling in as it did so.

He didn't look much older than he had when the Mick first met him decades ago on the Other Shore, but he was a man at peace with himself and what he'd done, and having a half-dozen children and even more grandchildren had made even the abrupt move to the future a thing he could overcome and deal with. He was a warrior-king in the old and great mold, everything Delpha looked down on and Siricil wanted to conquer and best. And now he was going to have some fun.

Like every other warrior of any worth in Eismoor, he'd done his grinding time at the Bug Farms, as they were called, and he had no real fear of this growing Elemental insect.

"The other teams are tracking down the earthquake-makers as we speak, Lord Mick," the King said to him firmly.

"This will give us an idea how quickly they are generated, we merely need to find the obelisks themselves."

"We've got a guide," the Mick grinned, tossing a thumb at the nervous blue-scaled phasm lingering there.

"After this one, we'll make each trip as rapidly as we can." They wanted more information on these things, and the Dispatch Teams, well, they wanted to kill as many of the things as possible! The two teams settled in to watch and observe, timing everything off as the Earthquake Beetle grew, and grew, and grew…. Soon enough it would be time to kill it, show everyone how it moved and used its many limbs, and then spells and hacking blades would do the work that needed to be done.

The Obelisks were promising a whole bunch of them for fun, enough to keep everyone happy and on their toes… and the first preliminary analyses of the carcasses of the things were very promising, with worthwhile salvage to be had from them…