[Warpworld] Ch 38 – Along the Edge of the World
Added 2025-03-29 04:34:36 +0000 UTC« Chapter 37 | Index | Chapter 39 »
The elves and saurids contemplated that fact with slowly opening eyes, reaching out with magical senses to where Reality and Warp were at war… and immense pressure was being put upon the Warp.
Siffisstis, the senior remaining Shaman of the saurids, spoke up in his language, translated by my sphere of Tongues, “Any manner of spells to throw off the Warp, to Seal Gates, or to strengthen the Veil would magnify the effect of what the Unwhite Mist is doing here, ten, twenty, or a hundredfold...”
“All of which would crystallize come the dawn, and suddenly, we would advance further.” I lowered Mortus Dius, the new Dreadskull of the chosen avatar of a Warp God gleaming atop it, screaming Cursed defiance of all the Warp was out at it, a thing both saurids and elves looked at in respect and some fear.
My other hand flicked, and swirling rings and layers of Shards in twoscore patterns and colors rotated, counter-rotated, and encircled my arm and outspread fingers. My Rings glowed as energies coalesced about them, Kickers of a dozen different effects, all of them feeding into the one that was most important here, tolling like dozens of grand bells as they spun there.
Vivus!
Six spells coalesced down to six Orbs. Six Orbs spontaneously converted to six Rays. Six Rays hit six force prisms in the air, and became twelve.
Twelve sets of annihilation, their illumination subdued because they were so tightly wound as to not waste much energy on light, punched out, crossing the remaining area of the Domain and out into the Warp in a widely separated pattern with a mighty tolling across a score of Chords, all of them in complete harmony somehow.
Saurids, elves, dragons, and phoenixes were all squinting against the thaumic brightness of the spell, all of them able to perceive magic on some level, and then it hit the Warp.
The detonation was instantaneous, driving out into the Warp with a roar and lash of fury, Rays become massive Cones of all-consuming hungry as energies Elemental and non-mortal fueled the vivus and turned the whole spell into the equivalent of magical neutronium.
Magical neutronium guided by the Cursed magic of a Dreadskull to all the weakest points.
Reality fed, and for a second, everyone saw the Warp outside crystallize in massive hexagrams, anchored at the points the Rays had slammed into the Warp.
“Yes, Ethercutting and Dimensional Locking are working absolutely fine here,” I mused aloud, and my hand flicked again, another sixfold flight of Shards coming up in tolling, tonal ringing of Heavenly power. “This is what I am going to be doing to speed us up. I suggest both of your species get together and come up with a jointly separate but harmonious Planar Sealing Ritual, two different kinds of magic coming together in a common cause to do the same thing. It’s the kind of thing the Warp hates the most.
“Then Cast it, re-Cast it, and keep doing so, hammering it into the Warp.
“We’ll see just how many inches we get come the dawn.”
The saurids couldn’t smile, but their eyes had slitted with the intensity of predators on the hunt. The shamans turned away without another word as my second set of Rays reached out to maul the Warp… and then the Echoes of my first set remanifested right behind them, and the tolling clangor of them smashing into the Warp on the heels of my second shot was double the volume of the first!
The air was humming with Notes of magic, the Sublime Chord was ringing, all of magic rising up to do what needed to be done here. The wide-eyed elves once more felt magic coming to my call, and their touch, giving them an ability and power they could never wield on their own, and they realized that what they were going to be doing was indeed going to be hitting far, far harder than the Warp wanted to believe.
My Shards reached out, and the Warp exploded around them in rage and fury, which the Land drank in.
If you were looking over the edge of the pit, the crystals erupting out of the ground were now blossoming forth in dozens of hues and colors, and the area they were manifesting over was starting to increase very rapidly, with geometric precision… and the pinks-black of Banefire to the Warp just might have been lingering on the tips of each and every new stand bursting forth.
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There’s something to be said for grinding on multiple levels. While many people call it utterly boring, mind-numbing, tedious, and stressful, I had to admit I found it greatly relaxing.
Granted, repeating the same physical motions and staying in a heightened battle-state for hours on end can be immensely fatiguing. Channeling and controlling large amounts of magic for that extended period of time can also be tiresome, especially when doing it on the level I did.
But I had lots of thoughtstreams, and some of them could watch paint dry in fascination. Proper grinding by me occupied a lot of their time.
The physical motions were nothing. I was basically moving through meditative katas, letting my ki sing inside me as it flowed through my system, interacting with all the energies I could command. My Heartsinger sides were flexing the Sublime Chord with all the glory and grandeur they could, and the Heart of the World was Singing back to me at the incredible stimulation. Thoughtstreams devoted to every type of magic I could wield were acting on the Shards I was assembling, gathering those energies, harmonizing them, aligning them against the powers of the Warp, and sending them forth with joy and vengeance, every spell a hammerstrike, a thrusting sword, a rain of spears, and cannons going off in martial and magical mastery.
Given how crazy wild and exuberant the magic was here, this was not a process to undertake lightly, and so I was getting a big mental workout while doing this, even while I was dancing through the spell motions again, and again, and again.
Repeated Magic was thus giving me a further +5 to my Caster Level, and DAMN was I hammering at the Warp!
Profound tonals associated with Celestial Thunder were ringing out with the blessings and condemnations of Heaven, the very air shuddering in either ecstasy or agony at the sounds, depending on what side of the Pyramid’s Domain it was on. The Light was radiating everywhere, balms on the soul, utter annihilation to Warped spirits trying to move closer to us.
Vivus was swirling and igniting, and the Land was feasting. Oh, how it was feasting…
And underneath it all, I was plotting and acting.
After all, just showering Shards on this thing was monotonous and didn’t require any slyness, just an obdurate will and lots of patience, both of which I had multitudes of in multiple forms. But I was Smart, not just Focused, and having only one avenue of attack was dumb, dumb, dumb.
The elves and the saurids took about an hour to get their own assault going, with Feature actually cajoling the Dragons and the Phoenixes into contributing and striking back at the unnaturalness beyond the roiling unwhiteness, too. Ancient Primal magic and energetic Arcane might rose together, and this time they did not compete in the slightest. One was used to enhance and empower the other, weaknesses of the one fed the strengths of the other and vice versa, and their Ritual rolled out, thrumming in the Sublime Chord that swept it all up and slammed it into the Warp, just like my endless salvos were doing.
Phoenix cries and draconic roars rippled out and tore through the Warp, the truths of the ancient past, the weight of mortal reality, and the thirsting power of mortal fate dying to break free smashed and tore into the Warp again and again and again. The waves raged into the cracks and flaws I was constantly blasting into the edge of the Rift, further eroding the Warp at its moments and places of greatest weakness, more lava than water as it eroded and blazed into the energies of another dimension, set them on fire, and drew them back to empower itself even more.
It wasn’t Law, as that would have been straight cancellation of powers. This was Hunger. This was Feeding the Land, and the endless appetite of the mortal realm for those energies, now that it had a way to rapidly harvest them.
Instead of devouring a way forward, the area reclaimed was being deflected out into the entire sphere of area claimed by the Warp. As a result, the amount of progress seemed to be miniscule… but it was certainly there, it was certainly progress, and it wasn’t getting slower.
It was also more than an inch!
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I had a Sculptor thoughtstream.
That might seem particularly focused and niche to devote a fragment of your mind to, but when you Shape Stone at the level of, the frequency, quality level, and amounts that I did, well, it becomes more a necessity than a luxury to have such a thing handling the events, while, oh, the Focus thoughtstream of mine which would have had to handle the level of detail work could instead concentrate on broader Spellcrafting stuff with the Sublime Chord and Theurgies at work.
I had a Caster Level of 90ish with Shaping Stone, given everything that was working together. That was a base area of about a hundred cubic feet.
It was also Sudden Widened, Widened^7. So, doubled ten times over, for x1024 the normal area worked on, with Dawnstopped Spell changing the duration from instantaneous to until Natural Renewal… where I had the whole thing tied off to basically auto-Renew unless I somehow didn’t have the reserves ready to do so.
Ninety thousand cubic feet of stone is a LOT of stone to be able to work with. Auto-Reach from the Hierophant Advanced Class extended the default touch range to thirty feet, and the Reach Spell Metamagic tacked it up to Short Range for no additional cost. That was important, as it meant I didn’t actually have to touch what I was working on, and, well, I had a monstrously distracting amount of Casting going on around me as I worked.
The big limitation on Shaping Stone was that the mass of stone, earth, sand, or rock being worked on had to be contiguous. I couldn’t work on multiple separate Pyramid Blocks, for instance. I could work on a BIG Pyramid Block, sure. But I couldn’t work on, say, ten at a time, which was within my volume limits.
They all had to be one big thing.
As an interesting side note, the Range of a Spell has no effect on the Area of a Spell. It is totally possible to have a spell with a short casting Range, and the Area of it could actually include you in the area effect if you weren’t good with spell placement. Range of a spell referred to the point where the spell began, that is all. The Area extended out from that point in the desired direction.
Thus, the most common use of it is something like a Wall of Fire, which has a short Caster Range of 25, +5 Feet/two CL, and an area/length of 10 feet high, plus 10 feet long per Caster Level. It meant that you can make a Wall that extends far beyond your Range very quickly.
As a point of fact, a cubic feet of stone, when broken up into one-inch cubes arranged in long strips, is 144 feet long.
Multiply that by 90 such cubic feet, and then Widened by x1024, and you suddenly have a one-inch square line that is 13,271,040 feet long… or about 2500 miles, or 4000 kliks.
The circumference of a circle or sphere with a radius of 16.2 miles is only 102 miles.
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