Chương 472: BECMI Chapter 471 – Eternals to the Feast

Laird came down and across, back, and back again, a full Z-cut trailing black and white Wrathflames. The Lich-King's body was chopped apart, then blown apart as vivus raged through it, feasting on essence of shadow and a split soul.

It devoured the screaming thing as in the far distance, hidden in a deep well, a carved jar of deepest obsidian pulsed with white cracks, then exploded as the soul within it was blasted by black Baneflame and unwhite vivus combined, coming apart and forever ending the threat of the Lich-king to the living. The revenant surged to its feet just in time for Laird to sweep back and up and take its head from its shoulders with a One Strike, felling the last of the Lich-King's personal guard as it did so.

The Mick took two steps to slam his booted foot down on the Proud Staff of Monarchs Mourning, which was starting to roll away under its own power. With a nasty smile, he kicked it into the flaming robes and ruin of its previous owner and then chopped down with Laird once. The Staff could only be destroyed in the burning soul of its former owner, who had to be both a wizard and a king. Vivus devouring the dolt was definitely Burning a soul.

As the Staff writhed in both delight and horror at the inevitable death of its wielder, the Mick lifted Laird and brought it down on the necromantic Artifact that had given rise to so many horrid undead creatures. The hardened bone shaft split in two, the Artifact's normal nigh-invulnerability suspended as the conditions for its destruction were met.

Laird nailed it to the stone floor in Breaking format, Sundering and Breaking swapped in to it now, and his Eternal bonded Blade began to feast on the powerful Artifact Staff. There was a crunch and a crack, and the Mick looked over to see Eshauna's Spear Armz nail the true body of the Skull druj to the wall, promptly igniting the thing in Wrathflame and dropping the remaining two of its spectral clones as it perished abruptly.

She had been the first of them to get an Eternal Weapon, destroying the Spear of the Bone Hunter's wielder and feeding the Artifact Spear to Armz to do so.

"Jace," the Mick said, kicking something into the air. The hyn deftly snatched the seared and white-lashed skull of Lich-King Vagavrong, still wearing its Tainted golden crown, out of the air. A second later it was wrapped in a leaden bag, awaiting the gold that would empower it into a Dreadskull (likely to be from that very crown!) like the crystalline skull gleaming fell and deadly on the pommel of Laird, all sparkly and with bits of light glittering upon it.

Prince MacKlannister, former Radiant Lich, was now helping make the world a better place one riven undead creature at a time, bless the vivisized soul long since Fed to the Land. There were distant crumping sounds of Fireballs going off, but they were of no relevance to here, inside the cold and fallen palace where once noble kings had dispensed their words and wills… or, if the stories that survived were right, rather arrogant and vicious kings dispensed tyrannical edicts upon their people.

They hoped they'd be getting something better with Vagravrong, and had found out that it was so much worse. Going from the rack to the iron maiden was not any better at all, it was not. The Undead Hunters of Transyvia had certainly been bored after clearing their shadowed and haunted homeland of the undead, bringing the Principality back into the light after centuries of vampiric overlordship. Igniting their interest in destroying the undead leaders of Buraval and their unliving minions hadn't been hard at all.

The Mick's goal was the lich's Artifact Staff, needing to destroy it and harvest the Immortal Power within it to empower his own Eternal Weapon. How Laird evolved to use that Immortal Power was something he had to consider strongly, as well as applying the Naming Karma every day from what they earned together. The Karmic Hole they had to clear was huge. Utterly huge! The road ahead of him was so long and aching with Karma to gain the Mick couldn't rightly see the end of it…

but he had all the time he needed to make it there now, true enough. The Wishcasting had been an utter godsend, raising all their Stats to perfection and meaning they didn't need to spend Karma to do likewise as Eternals. They basically now needed to max out their new Eternal Hit Dice, boosting their Health or Soak to incredible Levels, and once they did so, they could step into Eternity and reach 37.

Eshauna and Kavva had the longest roads there, of course, especially if they wanted to follow in Lady Edge's footsteps and be truly broad. The road of the Dwarf-Priest Korgi, currently outside and presenting his Hammer to the undead to Turn them into oblivion, was nearly as long, but Clerics were a cheaper Class to advance with than wizards were. His own path was relatively straightforward. His Scout Levels were secondary and would only advance at 1/3 of his Fighter levels, which was still fine over time.

Focusing his skills would keep him as adept as he needed to be in his key areas of advancement. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. The immense amounts of Karma needed to advance also meant they would now have to go off-world most of the time to gain their routine Karma, or they'd be sucking it away from the people below them also eager to earn their chance at Eternity.

Doing so without running into Immortals likely quite curious as to what they were doing off the Prime would be an accomplishment, but it helped that they could simply be disguised as followers of Tek going out and exploring the multiverse for the new Immortal… and Eternals just looked like mortals to Immortals outside the Astral Plane regardless, the vast majority of whom would ignore them if they weren't in the way. Entropics, well, that just meant excitement was about to come!

Leaving Laird to feast for the next eight hours, he palmed the +V Plasma Sword that was his backup weapon, but didn't bother to turn it on. He could also draw his Bow, but seriously, if he needed to take direct action, something had gone horribly wrong at this point.

Kormac poked his head around the door, the new Baron keeping his hand in the big fights, because warriors had to war to keep their edge, and just becoming a Zanzyran noble wasn't going to stop him from planning further and higher, just like the rest of the Forsaken.

"Any problems, Mick?" he asked, not expecting any, especially once he saw Laird shoved a foot deep into the stone and Staff and feeding away.

"No. Your end?" he asked, walking towards his fellow Caer and Forsaken to stand in the doorway, from which he could see some of the fighting taking place in the streets. Well, vicious slaughter of undead and hasty surrendering of the living, mostly.

"Got the juniors testing out the places below in Dungeon mindset. Eager and careful at the same time, but they know they got backing if they get in trouble, so they're pressing in. Lots of undead," Kormac said unnecessarily. The Mick glanced that way in Markspace, knots of souls in their Teens pressing down into the depths of this place.

"You realize this sot of a Lich-King was a High Archmage, right?" he asked leadingly. Kormac glanced at him, pursed his lips, and got the hint.

"Fellow up!" he shouted, Cruath springing to hand.

"We're going in for close support of the juniors! The King probably has some very unpleasant surprises down there they aren't ready to deal with, not just hapless prisoners and lab experiments!" That proved to be very true, but that was a different story. Suffice it to say the subjugation of the place took a few days longer with the immensity of the catacombs they found below the castle and city of the Lich-King of Buraval…

"So what were we looking at there?" Briggs asked Sama neutrally, Tremble and Endure currently buried in the wreckage of what in another place and time might have looked like a command console, and was in reality a fairly advanced magical device that looked to be emulating a holographic display console.

"Well, before we smashed it to bits, I think it was displaying a map of where all the annelids were supposed to be," his wife said cheerfully, her Bracer lighting up a Holo of her own where the thing had unfolded in display, after the blood of what had presumably been an important priest of Thanatos had splattered all over it. Briggs studied the snapshot, and nodded agreement.

"They don't know half of them are gone…" There was a lurching rumble of the whole tower, and the pair of them laughed together as they promptly sprinted towards the nearest exit at speed.

"Now including the one here!" Sama laughed, out-racing him without trouble. She slid around corners, he ricocheted around them with aplomb. She made her way to one of the apartment rooms for the superiors of this cult, said cult having actually built a whole goddamn tower up around the dreaming bulk of the comatose annelid here, as if its mad dreams were desirable things for living humans to experience here in the Hollow World!

Edge's Communes had long charted out the location of every single damn annelid chained in sleep in the Hollow World, and they were being snuffed, one by one, feeding Eternal Aspirants with Immortal Power as they did so… and leaving no signs for anything local, other than the mind-fuckery extending from the Entropic worms suddenly vanishing and going quiet.

Indeed, the 'bad vibes' of the things meant nothing living was ever in the area to witness the vivus eating the things down and away, and such evidence was gone within twenty-four hours tops. Natural Renewal passed, even in a land with no night and an eternal sun hovering in the sky. Idiot Immortals couldn't even arrange for a revolving dark or light side to the illumination. Total screwballs. Sama dove through the window, Briggs smashed through the whole window-frame.

It was a hundred-foot fall, neither of them caring as their Rings caught them a foot above the ground and lowered them down nicely to the ground. The tower was crumbling behind them, the vivus from the dead annelid eating away at a foundation long corrupted by the Entropic energies it had tapped to remain hidden.

The powerful Illusion that had long disguised it as a rock formation on a random hill in the middle of nowhere naturally faded as it collapsed loudly, but spurting dark energies were devoured before they went anywhere, vivic dust fell heavily back to the ground, and if you didn't know the area, there was no evidence that anything had ever been there besides a hole in the ground within minutes.

Their Weapons were still in the mess, still feasting on the remnants of that Artifact that had bound the entire thing together. Sama just dusted off her hands as she eyed the tumbled wreckage, most of it falling apart rather quickly and erasing any evidence.

"Think it'll empty out the hill?" she asked her man. Briggs nodded.

"It's what happened at the other places." Vivus eating away the Entropic energies around the wormholes naturally collapsed them, turning a hole into a crater as it collapsed down and widened, until enough non-corrupted stuff collapsed to block the hole it had dug to get where it was sleeping. Some that were close to magma chambers had ended up slowly becoming volcanoes. Actually, the Land hadn't minded getting those holes in itself filled up at all.

Edge had taken care to fill all the ones she'd cleared to a mile in depth, making the craters left behind little more than scattered lakes afterwards, no signs of Immortal Worms here, nosiree…