The vampire pharaoh’s first punch saw his fist go flying away, completely severed from his hand, Burning black and white as he watched it fall into darkness with a look of disbelief. Then the poml of Laird crashed into his face, crushing his nose and snapping his head back with the pure brute force of the blow, stopping his advance as the kick he threw sent him off-balance.
The Mick took a steady step back, cutting down and across in a blur of motion. Another long slash across the paled chest of the undead monarch erupted into wrathflas, and as the vampire jerked forward and down as his foot landed, Laird spiraled and the Mick stepped past him, taking off his head smoothly and precisely.
“NO!” the Mother Spider scread, the human head glaring at him as her oldest vampire minion dissolved into mists… mists that were instantly and completely devoured wholesale by black Banefire and unwhite vivus.
“I will rend your soul apart for a thousand years for that, puny mortal!” the Mother Spider scread at him, flicking up a Resist Lightning to minimize the power of the Lightning Bolt that ca in from Laur just then, basically ignoring it.
The Mick reached down into the purse at his side, and drew out a skull of black bone, horns filed down, tusks and fangs obvious, very inhuman. It lit up with an oily black hue in his grip, and without replying, keeping the gaze of this Immortal, he fit the Dreadskull to Entropics on over the poml of Laird.
The nearly solid oily black flas, seething with anathema for Immortal things of the Sphere of Entropy, poured up along the glowing Blade, while Laird comfortably shifted to Healing Edge and added so hostile positive energy sparkles to the edge of the Dreadflas for contrast.
“Arakne Progenos,” he purred, and saw her flinch back again, the power of her Na removing so of her protections against mortal magic, although he was certain the Dreadskull alone was enough for him, and he wasn’t worried about her Anti-Magic Aura with his Null. Vivus still wound through the Dreadflas, and he saw her multiple eyes lingering on it in new fear.
He had already Null-Interdicted and Stillflighted the area. Nobody was going anywhere.
She scrambled to retreat her bulbous body on her lethally slender spider-legs, but the Mick wasn’t anywhere near as slow as he should have been, especially in his Armor, and he didn’t have any problems loping after her with strides twice as long as they should have been as he ca for her.
He didn’t really notice her Aura flare. He didn’t notice the blast of Immortal Power that was effectively a death ray, because it never reached him. He did notice her legs start driving in at him, and the fangs in her mouth grow longer, but neither earned more than amusent from him.
Sword Beats Fist also applied to jaws and spindly legs without reach, and he’d trust in his Armor and Crystal Shield Disciplines to soak up almost all of what she was trying to do to him.
The first leg lunged at him like a spear, and the first foot of it went sailing past him as it was severed, vivus and Dreadfla hissing together on the chitin and gore of the limb.
The Mother Spider shrieked and reared back, legs upraised, and dropped down on him, ready to crush her teeth right through his armor and pump a lot of lethal poison into him.
Which was kind of hard to do when your jaws were impaled on the Archer Stands Thrust for triple damage.
Her legs rang and crashed against his Armor, trying to drive him off his feet, but his Heavyfoot held him just fine despite the battering, locked into the statue-like pose that now had her head twitching two feet down Laird’s blade, writhing wildly as Healing Edge, Vivic, and Dreadfla all ate away at her.
There was a hissing swirl, and a dozen radiant Shards that looked like throwing quoits flashed past him, biting into the Mother Spider’s steel-hard shell.
She reared back, he crouched down, and Laird was free of her extrely tough skull. Then he was underneath her with a spin, four of her legs were hacked through instantly. When she ca down on top of him, instinctively trying to flatten him, he was already on his back and Laird braced against the ground in a now-prone Archer Stands Thrust, waiting for her.
She smashed down, and drove her thorax fully upon his braced Claymore.
He could feel the flas go off on her innards, the sudden freezing and shock as the Immortal realized that was exactly the wrong thing to do. Immortal Power tried to surge, to expel Laird and raise her off of it, but the Dreadflas were having none of that, driving vivus out to et them and start to feast.
The vivic flas on her energies spurted and doubled in size abruptly, while he just rose with her, twisting and leveraging Laird to find sothing sensitive inside a body that wasn’t mortal and didn’t really have organs like one.
But Entropic Immortal Power, vivus loved that.
There was a surge along every crack, joint, and seam of her carapace, the holes punched in by the Shards blazing abruptly, and the Mick grinned as he continued lifting the Mother Spider higher than her legs… and then surged and ripped sideways.
Stolen novel; please report.
Light exploded, filling the darkness of the pit with blinding whiteness as vivic energy howled in glee at the feast.
At the sa ti, there seed to be a wind picking up, its howling eclipsing the last murderous scream of the Mother Spider, Arakne Progenos, as she was devoured and her Immortality ca to an end. Immortal Power was snatched up and away instead of being blindly released into their surroundings… and into the mortals killing her, too, which could end up being a mite painful.
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Speaking of blowing things away... Novel Bind and other sites are scraping my stories (and others!) without permission again.
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The plaza stones about the Obelisk I’d erected blew up and away, little more than ornantation by this point over the gaping hole below. A roaring geyser of vivifying Immortal Power blew up out of the opening below, drawn by the Obelisk I’d made here. It surged past, heading for the sky, perhaps intending to spread out and away… but no.
It collapsed inwards upon itself, drawn back down and into the waiting Obelisk here, whose black stone was rapidly stained white by the incoming power, and whose Runes all began to shine sharply and powerfully as they drank in the Immortal Power.
She wasn’t that powerful an Immortal, but still, her potential by default was over the 500 IP minimum limit, so at least equal to a decent-sized Artifact. Harvesting it and spending it was only going to prove beneficial.
Eh?
There was sothing fluttering down from above. Vivus washed over it as it fell like a heavy leaf in the updraft of power, but it was not hard.
Funf reached out and grabbed it, dragging it to through the updraft outside and the downdraft inside the geyser of vivus. It spun through the air into my hands.
Immortal Power tingled under my fingers. I looked at the symbol of the dove and laurel wreaths embroidered into the heavy cloth here, and sighed once.
This was the Banner of the Pax Mundia, the Artifact the Mick had originally been dispatched to hunt down. It hadn’t been present in the Pharoah’s ho or tomb, according to his report, aning it had been removed by an Immortal hand and sequestered here to keep it out of the hands of mortals, where its ability to remove emotional bias and encourage reason would result in mutually beneficial negotiations instead of war.
It had stopped a lot of wars in the past. Removing it from the mortal world was a useful move.
The power within it belonged to Oroyosam, unsurprisingly. The Immortal’s monomania for peace was well known, to the extent that he had actively split his soul and banished those elents of himself to form another Immortal existence… the trickster and temptress Mizanotha, long considered the most charming and seductive of the Immortals of Entropy.
Going back in ti allowed one to witness many things, and my Sims had discovered the resonance between the two, and the difference in Oroyosam’s Aura after he had made his self-purge. Naturally it had cost him a great deal of power, all of which had gathered itself to beco the new Immortal dedicated to thwarting him at every occasion, neither of them aware of the true origins of the other and the clone-like reason for the hatred.
It also offered him an even deeper kind of Immortality. Neither aspect of him could die unless the other died as well, making them both nigh impossible to kill for long. They would just be regenerated by their other half’s own power, probably not even realizing it was happening as they were restored.
It probably wasn’t deliberate, but if it was, it was a genius move on his part. An Immortal of Peace who was nigh impossible to kill or counter long term would be absolutely a cockroach, and if he had to tolerate his opposite being there, it was likely worth it.
I folded the magnificent hanging banner, the craftsmanship and magic involved in its making tingling as if alive under my fingers. Into my Masspack it went, maybe to be used in the future.
I also pulled out the preserved flesh of the two Imperials there, glancing around at the world. There was no way I was starting a Clone spell in a world with a Death bias to it, but that was going to change shortly, and I could then work on bringing the two of them back, ‘rescued’ from their dire fate.
Normally an Immortal couldn’t invest energy into anything beside the Ho Plane they were bound to… but I wasn’t an Immortal, and I believed this was indeed Mother Spider’s ‘ho plane’, such as it was, secured behind doors of ti and very hard to infiltrate.
But not impossible, as the baka, an Immortal Creature of Matter that the Mick’s team had witnessed transporting so fortunate souls away from here, had demonstrated. So this place was known by opposing Immortals, and it could be entered and exited by them, it was just considered really bad form to take on fellow Immortals.
We had no such scruples, and now the Mother Spider was gone, good riddance to her.
I should be able to use her Immortal Power to change things around with an Upcast Wish out of XIII or higher Valences.
Change the affinity to Death in stages to closer to Elental Harmony or maybe slightly Positive. That should get rid of Tomb-Tainted on the newborns, at least. There was a lot of work that needed to be done to get them out of here in a tily manner, but moving a hundred thousand people anywhere was going to be a logistics challenge of the highest order.
Happily, we had the ability to do the logistics on this end, and BRING what was needed along with those we were sending out. It wasn’t a massive amount of area to work, but it should be enough to take care of the people that were here… especially after the Mick and the others took out the rest of the undead and the Fiends, all of whom were now likely going a bit crazy as the ultimate Master at the top of their hierarchy was dead, with her descendants likely doing likewise.
They’d be whizzing around like mad trying to get rid of the creatures now engaged in dominance struggles against one another, while I started work on the Pyramid. It would be a pretty large one to cover the whole demi-plane, but one thing this place didn’t lack was enough ti to get things done…
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