Chương 550: BECMI Chapter 549 – An Eternal Advance

Aelryinth… Two miles had been my chosen range cutoff, which was well up onto the surface of the Plateau ahead of us. Behind us, the towering mass of Edge's Castle Doomrose, a good two thousand feet high, pulsed with the ides of day sweeping past and into it from behind, the Elder Signs on it flaring as if filled with sunfire and a morning breeze, before wavering and fading back away, only to fill and flare once again. Liquid sunlight seemed to drip from the Flowers bending over in homage to the light.

Weapons hissed out at an unknown signal. Runes on Armor flared and shifted to Defiance of what was coming. Bane and Dreadfire of cerulean blue and oily black ignited over hundreds of Weapons. Various personal Buffs and Wards ignited over everyone. Edge was holding down the right flank as our Wings snapped out together. My Arakne Arms unfolded, already gripping my Pleiades Autobows, and my Manticore Tail snapped into position like a tracking turret.

Above me, the Celestial Cerulean Seal still blazed, never having gone out. My Hexar Shields snapped out and settled in around Feature, their Elemental Absorption capabilities currently off so as not to affect neighboring spells, but their Invulnerable defensive capabilities working just nicely, thank you. Holding the center was actually one of the youngest Eternals, a grim and ready Cryptomancer named Kaanlin, who was actually a distant descendant of Emperor Thor…

not that such a thing was uncommon after three thousand years of so many great-grandkids. The Imperial Family was likewise dispersed to the flanks, as were most of the senior Eternals, with Laurentine anchoring the left flank. That was because I was in the middle, of course.

"Advance," the rumbling order of Emperor Thor washed past us, and the combat line strode forward. Ahead of us, the seething dark sea of inhuman forms finally broke. A cacophony of sounds meant to terrify mortals raged out for us, but I had a Widened Greater Cloak of Bravery up, and fear meant nothing to every ally within two miles of me, only eagerness to get to the fight. Madness and unsettling presences were something else, but there were a LOT of Buffs to the minds of those around me.

We weren't moving too fast, because we didn't have to. We had a slender silver thread of a guide in the sky above us. When we reached a hundred yards ahead of the Casters on their grav-sleds, the sleds all started into motion together behind us, matching pace with us. When they were two hundred paces from the Castle, the slow, crushing grind of its advance, an inch of stone and earth shattering underneath the Darkstone of its construction so as to satisfy the Stillflight that was up, began rumbling behind us.

The horde reached my default range soon, and so I began to open fire to start my Residual and Repeated Metamagic cycles. One of the Metas on my Greater Shards became free when Repeated from cycle to cycle. That Meta was the +9 of Perpetual Spell and Paired, the Metas trading off, meaning I could fit in any additional Metamagic below them that I wanted to.

That was always Admixture, which duplicated any Spell attack having an Elemental affinity with an identical spell, only with any Elemental Affinity, the same or different as desired. I was just going with Fire here, as that was actually the damage type the least number of things here were resistant or immune to, unlike, say, Fiends… and they couldn't be immune to my Divine/Arcane/Primal Flames, regardless.

Greater Shards flashed like radiant javelins out to my range, Chained through two dozen more targets after the first, and also Exploded to inflict more Kickers on everything around the things they damaged. Silver Fires Burned on everything, and the countless creatures of Leng were devoured by the Kickers rapidly over the course of the next twenty-four seconds, since less than half of the targets actually died to my initial barrage.

That was still very impressive, but that was mostly because Disruption was forcing a save or explosive death upon the undead, Fiends, and aberrants there alike, and that Disruption was heavily sauced by the Lost Light. Whether they recognized the slicing whorls of Incarnate Light wasn't my worry, although I was sure they'd encountered them before. ============== I do have another worry. Novel Bind and other sites are scraping my stories (and others!) without permission again.

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In the last two months, certain of the Eternals and Master Aspirants had urgently and happily ranged all over the world, seeking volcanoes of Nown that could bring forth Infusions of various forms of Earthfire to feed the Lost Light. They'd found them, brought them back, fed my Fount, and grown it enough to split one off on their own. The radiant whorls of the Lost Light had blessed the Weapons of every worthy soul here, yet one more edge in the upcoming slaughter.

I was carving out the middle of the incoming horde at the rate of nine to eleven thousand kills a spell, their Burning bodies falling a-Fire and trampled heartlessly under-foot/paw/claw/hoof/tentacle by those behind them. Not all of those I was reaving were at the level of toughness I'd come to expect of Leng natives, meaning they were throwing younger or lesser creatures in to soak up the damage of the guns and provide screening targets for those who were truly dangerous.

There were a whole lot of hulking things in the mass ahead of me, but they were also collapsing and dying as Shards from multiple spells hit them and layered Elemental Kickers on them, dying in twelve seconds or so on average as I managed the countless targets I had ahead of me. As a result of my barrage, the surviving things scrambling towards me were much, much more scattered than those to the sides.

There were rolling hisses as Cyclonic railgun cannons let go, pushing lances trailing cerulean flames across the sky with pinpoint precision and no sonic booms. Recipients a mile or more in the distance shuddered and lurched wildly at the impacts, the biggest creatures naturally getting the most attention, and the Artificers in the tanks made sure Blooding was on their shots so said creatures couldn't heal from the hits easily.

Endless Ammunition and the Freezing dripping ice from the barrels also meant that they would not need to stop firing for lack of ammo or overheating. As the charging horde hit about a mile, the gun mounts on the vehicles began to add repeated plasma rounds to the mix in incandescent flashes of energy accentuated with azure Dreadfire. They weren't the most accurate, but given the press of numbers out there, it was enough just to get them set at the right height, and something would run into the shots.

At a half-mile out, the pulse rifles began to kick in, the first few shots sniping, building rapidly into a veritable wall of creulean-enhanced killing energy that didn't stop the rush, but certainly took a broad toll. In the formation's center, it was enough to kill off virtually all the stragglers that I missed and deliberately ignored as I focused on the greater numbers of survivors. At five hundred feet, the Pyroclasms went off.

Every Eternal who was doing this had a Valence at XII, and Spell Power at 50 functional. The flames of the spell, shot through with Sacred Spell's golden glory, rolled grandly outwards like small atomic shockwaves. The Casters were only two hundred and fifty feet apart, down the entire frontage of two miles, ensuring multiple coverage of the spells.

The Pyroclasms rose up in a panoply of colors, those of the Pyromancers notably more vivid than the others, and all of them were wound through with a fine set of at least +8d6 of Kickers from their Staves… and Burning Spell, of course, from Infusion if nothing else. The advance waves of the incoming horde crashed into those expanding walls of flame, and they Burned.

Only the very weakest, or those already wounded by pulse-fire, blew away in the first shockwave, and the survivors raged for the Casters even as the Divine power in the Kickers latched onto them, and then they Burned again… as another salvo of Pyroclasms blazed out, sweeping over all of us without hurting a single Good soul or our equipment here in the slightest.

Now the tougher Leng creatures began to drop, just as they reached the Melee lines for the most part, and waiting Weapons sliced through them without mercy. Pulse-fire dripping cerulean flames stood them up, but they couldn't even touch the Master and Eternal Melees, only sprint between them as the Elder Signs ablaze on their Breastplates and Shields glowed with the anathema of the Elder Gods. The creatures of Leng thundered past, still Burning, still trying to get to the spellcasters…

The third volley blew off in their faces, and they Burned away. I wasn't leaving much for those behind and around me to do, which they didn't appreciate, Karma-hungry as they were. I began to spread out the Chains of my Greater Shards through the greater mass of the horde, a broad and feather-shaped pattern that tended to cross every single one of the larger beings there at least once. If I didn't kill them, they were still massively weakened by the time they hit Pyroclasm range.

The result was that some did manage to hit Kaanlin's Pryoclasm, the shooters behind me got to do some work, and the amount of damage I sent out actually didn't change at all, dispersed across the entire frontage instead of just in front of me. I didn't have to worry about anything reaching me, considering the blazing brightness of the Seal above me. Anything Aberrant entering its range basically fell crashing to the ground in front of me, unable to move, and the riflemen or my Autobows finished them off.

Above us, the gray and murky sky of Leng kept peeling back, splitting open like a ripe wound around that narrow slice in the sky and letting in the starry heavens through the gray murk of its clouds. We made it to the top of the Leng Plateau fairly quickly. The landscape was misty and fog-filled, changing whenever the eye wandered from it. It smelled of old things that should have rotted away and refused to, death and blood and gore…

and fresh breezes of spring, where vivus was feasting on the edges and very nature of Leng. Despite all that, from my Eagle's Vantage two thousand feet in the sky, I could see flashes of gold on the horizon in three directions. Sunlight, where the sun was not permitted in a realm of Nightmare. The Great Arktos Seal, ranging up the Maws and letting Leng know the Prime Plane was out there and ready to eat them.

It wasn't succor, or release, or absolution, or escape, and most especially not a promise of soft flesh and souls to feed the natives of Leng. No, that light was HUNGRY. Around us was a horde of impossibly tough, supernaturally vital, and driven to almost mindless violence beings drawn from the nightmares of creatures across Creation, siphoned off and incarnated here and turned into servants of the King in Yellow. This wasn't a place we could beat, but that wasn't the goal.

The goal was to send it back where it came from, and keep it away from us. A pulse of sunlight flashed past us, into the distance, riding on the Domain of Castle Doomrose.

Grinding along and fully visible above the hemispheres of the endless repetitions of Pyroclasms illuminating it, the Castle hadn't had to start spewing firefalls on anything yet, as Pyroclasms from more Eternal Casters behind it were also going off and slaughtering the things rushing up from behind the advance wings in an attempt to flank and encircle us. They couldn't touch the tower if alive, and if undead, they didn't last long enough to do so, either!

Ahead of us, the mist and fog faltered and dispersed under true sunlight, as if waking from a daydream, and revealed the first ring of Black Pyramids there. They were sleek and almost polished, as if made from jet, ominous and dark, with Obelisks rising at the corners of them to help contain and coordinate their power. Flashes of golden mist dispersed against them and went no further, the cloud and fogs behind them immune to the intrusion of daylight. There, the influence of Leng was condensed and absolute!