Chương 516: BECMI Chapter 515 – From Castle to Meteor

They didn't have the coin and resources to waste on magically reinforcing the stone, and I could tell the stone itself had been molded and Shaped many times throughout the structure. They simply hadn't assumed their opponents could do likewise.

I had Shaped straight tunnels through the confusing architecture and maze-like tunnels and chambers of the place, rather upsetting some of the nastier cognition traps and illusions they'd set up, and incidentally made the place much easier to navigate and loot while doing so. Set off a lot of traps and released a lot of monsters, too, which nobody involved much minded as they killed them for me. But I'd also Shaped stuff right into the foundation of that Keep, right through the magicks keeping it unmoving…

not levitating, because that wasn't allowed, just unmoving. Had a lot of people watching behind me as I raised Dread and brought him down. Shatter the Longest Road. Very situational spell, capable of blowing apart a road a thousand miles long if need be, all dependent on Caster Level. A good way to obliterate a path in front of an army.

The path leading to the Unfallen Keep in front of me was one such road, and it blew apart in a rapidly advancing wave moving hundreds of miles an hour as it raced to the far end in tumbling shards of stone falling into the white clouds below, and vanished into the stone there. The spell was carrying the Shatter magic right into the heart of the Unfallen Keep's foundation, breaking apart the magic there in concentric layers and letting the magic of the plane have its effect.

Bereft of support, the Unfallen Keep fell away like a house of cards, eroding from the bottom up and back away from us. The great towers and statues and halls atop it roared and rumbled in the distance and toppled over as support spells blew away, and the massive thing fell into the clouds below. It was stone. It fell pretty damn fast, and the big chunks, not so constrained by the air, fell even faster.

We looked up, and in less than a minute, the largest pieces were up above us, falling at speed as they tore through the dark clouds and came raging down, winds howling and tearing at the masses of stone. They were only moving faster as they thundered by, some of the rubble starting to get pretty close to the platform.

"OUT!" I ordered, turning and pointing. Without any hesitation, the looting team hurried out the Portal and back to the Septahenge. I stepped through, and Sif sliced through the opening, severing the planar structure and popping it closed. As it collapsed, all of the Emblems buried into the Dolmen Gates flared with light at the same time and vanished, their job done.

"Can you get back there?" Thor asked neutrally.

"From here, yes. This is the only location with a planar link that can be opened… if you know where it is opening to." I waved my hand at the Dolmen Gates.

"Same for the rest of the places." What use that would be was very questionable for a prison realm and its warders, and I certainly didn't want to meet the Immortals irresponsible enough to use this set-up! The eternal falling would likely grind the stone to nothing but dust in time… but in the meantime it would be a deadly hailstorm, gradually spreading over time to all parts of the realm. Basically the prison realm should probably just be hurled into Elemental Air and forgotten about.

Thor turned around to look at the assortment of Eternals and Masters who followed him and the Bright Empire.

"Now," he said with a smile that was not friendly in the slightest, "we are going hunting."

The Far Shore… The Septahenge in the main timeline was located in the Bleaklands, less than fifty miles away from the Thisbean Inn. I was so bloody annoyed at the fact I almost trashed my lab in sheer annoyance, both at the chutzpah of putting it in the remains of Darkmoor's lands, and the fact I hadn't been able to sense it for all these years. I didn't go after it. I informed Sama and Briggs about it, the realms, the Lords of those Realms, and the nature of them and the Unfallen Keep where the Carnifex lived.

When the seven Emblems were assembled, there were threescore Forsaken Nulls, their bondmages, and support Clerics behind Sama and Briggs, every single one of them Master-class and deadly. King Antius was with him, and his wife and Fellows from Darkmoor. Elven teams, Rangers, Daisho pairs, and Vanguard operators filled out the forces. They all followed the two into the prison plane of the Carnifex. ============== Alas, no prison time for these ingrates. Novel Bind and other sites are scraping my stories (and others!) without permission again. If you're not reading (or hearing) this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief. Please read it in its original home, it's still free! You get the foreword and afterword, author comments, and answers to people with questions! I have not given permission for this story to be copied by a bot and posted ANYWHERE ELSE. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! ============= A week later, they followed them out.

With them were a LOT of Baneskulls and skulls harvested from the Carnifex. Most of the members had died at least twice, but the Clerics had returned them all to life unstintingly. A Spell Rune from me of Shatter the Longest Road went off, fed into the lines cut into the Unfallen Keep by Cryptomancers. The Unfallen Keep fell from the sky, and kept falling, forever. The Immortals would not be using the Carnifex at all.

Vivification and True Death was applied to each and every single one of them, Wishes were used to make sure they stayed dead, and basically every effort made to ensure they were gone forever. They had thousands of years of more research and knowledge in the city, and so the spoils and plunder were different, but the numbers of Carnifex still alive was significantly less.

Time, in-fighting (however small), and insanity getting to them after their long imprisonment, reducing their numbers to something manageable as the small army of Masters and Eternals had hunted them through their own city, unabashedly Shaping their way through it, blowing whole sections apart, and hunting them down like rats, unafraid of their skills or magic or power as they did so. Their own magic fed the Baneskulls and Dreadskulls made from them.

And then, since the raiders had no use for the Skulls of the extinct Carnifex themselves, they gave them all to me and I took them back to the Other Shore. I naturally had another use for them there. Every single Skull I had was of a Carnifex who was still alive on the Other Shore, and provided a nigh-unbreakable bond for tracking them down, one that even the Mind Blanks every single one of them bore found hard to prevent. And with that, the Eternal War on the Other Shore began.

The fighting began small, with raids on civilized areas all over the continent, along with select Carnifex trying to infiltrate and take over areas, particularly trying to slay and replace rulers and nobles to destabilize the situation. Powerful monsters conjured or created by magic attacked settlements. Strong characters perished to sudden attacks, ambushes, or assassinations. Churches burned.

Foes would pop up in whizbang attacks in cities and towns, unleashing powerful destructive magicks before fleeing by Teleportation or Invisible Flight, the normal people unable to do anything about them. They stayed away from the Bright Empire and Heaven's Reach simply because of the existence of mass Stillflight and Interdiction zones that prevented many such tactics, and slay-and-replace didn't work with Marked individuals, nor did Shapechanging escape Pyramid Domain powers.

There were many, many other targets, and we couldn't guard the world, only save who we could. Dragons began to vanish, killed and eaten or enslaved. Demons and powerful undead, along with creatures of Mythos, began to appear more and more widely, brought in from other places to serve or simply to unleash chaos. Whole villages in certain lands would simply vanish, overcome and carted off to become sacrifices and feasts, sometimes even in that order.

If a Carnifex infiltrator was revealed and killed, unless it was slain with vivus and True Death in one form or another, its master simply Wished it back to life or resurrected it, returning it to the game with knowledge of its enemies and a great wish for revenge. Quietly, outlying villages and farms were evacuated, and sent to either the Nested Realms or across to The Far Shore. Food production from the Nested Realms sustained those being left behind as the hunts continued.

The Carnifex were clever, fiendish, arrogant, and driven to dominate all, unstinting in their ambitions, could be subtle, sly, clever, and even whimsical if needed to be, and deception was just part of their mindset. We hunted them, and they knew they were being hunted. They made hidden lairs, but dragons were searching for them and noticed their quick effects on the local ecologies, their gluttony meaning they rapidly depleted local food and so signaled something there to local predators.

Word spread, investigations came, and the Carnifex were rooted out and had to flee their bases again, and again, and again. Our teams always had True Death on hand to make sure they didn't come back. The forces brought in from other planes ravaged the land, especially the demons, particularly hard to deal with given their ability to Teleport in and flee if desired, plus how hard they were for normal troops to kill.

Creatures of Mythos invaded, took over and sometimes replaced whole towns and villages, and had to be rooted out like parasitic infestations. Others transformed whole landscapes into alien flora and fauna, and had to be burned away completely to eradicate them. Plagues spread with supernatural rapidity, bred by magic and alien beings. They combined with Weather Control magicks wrestling in the sky, causing droughts, floods, and famines. Starvation spread. More civilians died.

Lycanthropic Curses spread like wildfire among desperate survivors, turning them on those not so 'blessed', converting loyal folk to predators of their own kind. Survivors Leveled. The number of 'safe' areas shrank quickly. Pop-and-go whizbang attacks for terror increased… until Teleport Traces and Teleport Delays began to nab the terrorists, following them to their retreat areas or allowing our own Portaled or Teleporting forces to arrive into an area in time.

Clerical magic from the gods helped bring back those who had died. Vivic fire consumed the dead, feeding them to the Land and denied necromantic magic corpses to work with, preventing some of the dead from returning.

Here and there, profane magical Rituals generated earthquakes, coaxed volcanoes to erupt, smashed tsunami into shorelines, started forest fires, inundated areas in killing blizzards, and Animated massive numbers of undead, widening the death toll, getting rid of the opposition at the mortal level, sapping their will to fight by making it impossible to defend what they were fighting for.

We knew it was all coming, and since they could operate in secrecy and our civilians could not, the slaughter was going to continue. Of the Immortals a whole lotta people were beseeching for succor, the only sign was the continued granting of Clerical spells to the faithful. Otherwise, there was silence. In the Astral Sea, there were storms. Fifth-dimensional storms. Immortal Storms!

Titanic forces were rippling through the Astral Plane, hurling planar connections about, laws of reality bent and twisting upon one another as opposing forces exerted their wills upon reality. Blackballs swept through the silvery void in swarms, hunting for victims, while spectral hounds and other creatures of the Fifth Dimension swept up the unwary and those who did not belong there. In return, pulses of The Light, Gold, Silver, and Rainbow, arced and washed through the endless expanse.

Where it passed, the Storms were swept away, the Blackballs popped like newborn stars, and the spectral beings ignited and Burned away to less than ash. Immortals converged upon the source of The Light, trying to enter. Immortal Power warped the endless reaches as they attacked, trying to tear their way through to what was beyond, exerting all their might to do so.