It was a base 25 boosted Greater Shards, each dealing about 33 damage, added together in Ray form and the Kickers and Boosts stacked on top of the whole for another 100 per Ray or so.
Yep, it was about a base 5500 damage, and the Pierce All Defenses delivered it all to target. Then it was doubled via Disruption, and then it was increased by 50% because of the thing’s Vulnerability. Sacred Kryptonite, here we co!
Pairs of blindingly bright Primal/Divine Radiant/Force/Cold Rays blew through each set of its triple jaws and went down inside it. There was a pulse in the maddening waves coming out from the creature as the pure threat brought it out of its insane dreams to a very brief, very perfect mont of complete lucidity as those Rays carved down and through it… and then they dumped all that energy into what was basically a perfect fuel for vivus and positive energy to have a feast.
For a mont, one might well be wondering if the sun had ignited under the earth. The final scream of the dreaming Annelid faded away in an Aria of transcendent light and harmony, devoured by choral light and radiant sounds, and just as a secondary effect, it washed a Disruption effect across all the undead that received those final thoughts and were enslaved to this creature.
The undead detonations were like firework displays going off for literally miles around in pyrotechnics of psychically-conveyed Disruption blowing through them. Such didn’t harm the living, of course… but without the dreams in their head guiding them, the ignition of the Annelid blew Holy energies through them which basically did the sa job as it wiped the Evil from their minds and thoughts… and deposited Evil was all they had left there now.
I watched thousands of staring Beastials ignite like candles going off all over the place. Incorporeal ghosts, druj, shadows, wraiths, and spectres wailed and were devoured like a hand wiping steam off a window, while numberless moaning zombies, wights, and ghouls ignited and Burned away.
My sympathy quotient was pretty low, basically believing everything below was now much, much better off.
I kept the Raging Elents and Elental Sheathe as Duum glided down, daring to open his eyes, as he’d been flying blind. The spells would make easy to spot for the team.
Softly glowing white stone and countless corpses Burning down to vivus covered what had been sickly gleaming black rock painted with ages of Entropic energies. Indeed, the whole cavern was now pretty much glowing white, and a surface dweller could see without any difficulty as the stone bubbled and blistered, popping and peeling as vivus word into it and ate into the Entropic energies here.
“Belle,” I said calmly in Magevoice, “Mass Disk and get moving. I’ve a feeling this cavern isn’t going to last very long.”
Thirty seconds later Princess Brittabelle ca shooting around the corner in hasty flight, trailing the entire company packed onto Mass Disks or their own Disks behind her.
Duum tweaked an ear up at the ceiling above and promptly swooped off to one side. A breath later I heard the dangerous cracking from up above and understood.
Belle understood it, too. A Dinsion Door flicked up in front of her, and the entire line of Disks poured through it behind her for the few seconds it was open.
They appeared basically right next to , Belle reaching out to grab Dread, and Duum kicked on the afterburners.
His wings doubled in width, and were filled with stars and bloody suns. Crimson streaks in a wide and bloody swath followed him as his speed promptly doubled, and he shot across the sky as deafening creaks and cracks of protest started to echo all around us.
The degradation of the stone was naturally worst closest to the blasted glowing hole where the Annelid had died. With a sohow gentle roar that felt more like a sigh, that hole began to collapse into and form a crater all around it. I knew for a fact that the hole went down for probably twenty miles, and there was plenty of room for all that stone to go sowhere.
As the crater behind us passed two hundred ters wide and was expanding constantly as stone went white, crumbled, and joined the free-fall, the ceiling above it also decided it was ti to let go.
The dust that was being kicked up behind us was glowing white, but no friendlier to us as it billowed out and began to chase after us.
I held up Primus and blew a Gust of Wind at Twenty over and past us at an angle. Duum promptly cut across it and rode the oblique of wind pressure faster then the wind was blowing, holding wings and tail absolutely rigid in a trail of bloody light streaming behind us like soone had opened up the veins of a god to paint the undersky.
The destruction of the ceiling was expanding faster than the crater on the floor, due to the minor problem of literally having a mountain of rock above it. Stone was shattering and sloughing off, vibrations traveling at a couple miles of second to further make things difficult for us… but the infused entropic weakness was at least obeying the laws of physics and weakening with distance.
This book's true ho is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Everybody behind was screaming with fear and exultation at the speed we were moving at, and at the speed death was chasing us. Hanvol got a Ward Wall up in an inverted V above us to deflect anything dropping down from up above us. Duum’s shriek of echolocation was actually audible as a single quavering Note amplified by the Subli Chord into a vibrant sphere of colors around us. tiny adjustnts shifted his course as we vectored through at sothing like three hundred mph on the edge of the raging wind and disaster behind us, dodging the first small rocks that were being shaken loose from up above, or the glowing falls of vivic sand pouring down.
The exit to the cavern was a few miles from the center of the cavern here, which was thankfully not as large as so of the larger settled caverns we’d had to clear. Duum raced through the whole ss, banking left and right with uncanny speed and agility, and a speed impossible for any natural creature. Sandfalls and falling stalactites, plumting boulders, frenzied air currents; none of it distracted him from the task of finding a way through the blindingly white fury being stirred up behind us as a ribbon of blood was chased across the undersky and swallowed by the whiteness behind us.
We all saw the crack race across the ceiling above us towards the tunnel out, shedding boulders like falling rice, and knew we’d been outrun.
But, hey, Wizard here.
The Dinsion Door rose in front of us as a black square. Duum tucked in his wings and we blew through it in less than a second, crossing nearly a mile of distance and well into the tunnel beyond as the entryway behind us collapsed with the roar of a falling mountain.
Duum promptly slowed down in the much smaller tunnel, losing the bloody lights and showy wings quickly as the Gust of Wind was directed into a gentle cyclonic field to keep the new cloud of dust from catching up to us and covering everything again.
A Sound Bubble rose up around us, and suddenly the noise of falling mountains beca gentle and thankful silence, so quick and rapid that the beating of our own hearts thudded like the caves were still falling upon us.
“I regret to inform you that the cavern ahead of us may have a bit of warning that sothing has happened behind us, and be coming to investigate odd events,” I noted in a dry voice to those behind . “Fear not that you’ll be getting your share of combat today.” Clouds of sparkling white dust were still swirling past and around us, even though the dust wasn’t getting through the gentle Gust wrapped about us.
“You just collapsed an entire city-cavern behind us!” Guy blurted out for everyone coming off the adrenaline high. “You didn’t leave anything for us!” he complained loudly.
“To be fair, Master Guy, I didn’t leave anything for anyone.”
Everyone craned their heads to look back, save those already sitting backwards and watching the show.
“Surely there had to be so loot back there,” he found reason to protest, and everyone chuckled imdiately. He still had quite the nose for sniffing out goldweight for everyone in one form or another, which down here mostly amounted to crudely enchanted magical items to Burn away, or raw nuggets of gemstones or precious tals that would need to be processed.
If I had casually pulled tons of ore out of the stone in so places, or loads of gem-bearing stones, it was what it was, and nobody was complaining when I handled out ingots of gold, silver, platinum, or whatnot from the later results after seeing to slting the whole down after so alchemical refining.
“Indeed. But now ahead of us will be the single biggest settlent of the Beastials… although we will be bypassing it to head east under the Ertobolle lands and those settlents. The last thing we need to be is surrounded with our enemies figuring out so way to stop Teleporting from working.”
The Beastials were the pet race of an Immortal, and there was dinsional locking in effect in places down below the mantle of the world, so they definitely knew how to alter magic to stop such things!
“That would be bad. A lot of retreating through stone while we ran away,” Buck comnted thoughtfully.
“Correct. And our mission is to wipe them, not to be encircled by them and give them a valiant last stand to overco, or to die foolishly while fighting them,” I agreed coolly. “Let them wonder about what happened here, while we take the adjoining passage and continue with our own mission.
“We should be seeing combat inside another hour, and this ti, I will leave most of the fighting to the rest of you.”
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Maybe they were taking enthusiasm from the Northn above, but these Beastials seed rather enthusiastic to get to close quarters and die valiantly in mortal combat, much moreso than most of the other tribes we’d run into. Sure, sure, the big ones always wanted to co to grips, while the dium ones tended to want to throw spears and javelins first, and the little ones wanted to gang up in clusters or slit throats and backstab and whatnot.
Here, everything liked to co screaming in berserk fury and try to brain or hack on us.
I was never going to be doing a proper Cleave Train, but I had Supre Cleave trained just so I could smoothly hack through these small hordes with appalling speed, and I was quite happy to teach all who wanted to learn them the sa things.
The Cleave Mastery proliferated rapidly thereby, as did the Hedged Thorn Stance that generated so many Attacks of Opportunity from the moving Beastials coming at us.
Of course I could kill more of them with just volleys of Chained Thorns ripping through up to 78 of them at a ti, every six seconds, but that didn’t help my companions Level Up and work on their mass slaughtering skills.
The Cleave Mastery line ant that the lee warriors actually were getting more kills in than the archers were, much to the astonishnt of the archers, and horde tactics from the Beastials just stacked up their dead impossibly fast. All we basically had to do was erect a Wall of Fire or so other similar impedint across their charge path, making it impossible for them to encircle and thus overrun us, and the lee fighters could handle the incoming horde of the smaller Beastials without issue, while the archers easily feathered down the big lumbering ones that were the main threat.
I knocked a lot of heads. Belle swirled through the hordes of them, a silver and golden blur in her Armor, followed by over two dozen elves eager to follow her and reap their own terrible toll in the face of so many Beastials… and that was after they set up a gut-slamming field of Fire Reserves blowing apart many of the charging hordes before even having to resort to their Weapons.
The Beastials fought, they charged, they died in savage valor, and we fed their misting bodies to the Land.
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