[Warpworld] Ch 31 – Goodbye, Child of Klaw

« Chapter 30 | Index | Chapter 32 »

            I hit the Child of Klaw with one hundred and twenty of the Greater Shards, but not before the second Arcane Fusion delivered its second spell.

            Dispel Item Magic, thoughtfully delivered straight to his new set of sexy spiked black Armor, shutting down its magic... and the Life Ward he doubtless loved so much. Without getting rid of his Divine Shield first, I wouldn’t have been able to target it at all.

            He weighed a hundred tons at the least. He was moving at close to the speed of sound.

            His Divine Shield blew up in his face, actually lifting him off the ground as massive volumes of wild magic going violently bad in three spectra exploded over him from the equivalent of a 10th level spell going off. He was actually blasted airborne before he could reach me, moving in an arc... and then Greater Shards made out of Divine, Primal, Eldritch, and Force energies, with a lot of transcendent and Heavenly Kickers and full Silver Smites on them slammed right into his newly null-Armored chest and head, not giving a fig about his now-absent Life Warding Armor effect.

            In more real terms, the thing took one hundred and twenty howitzer shots to the chin in the same instant in terms of kinetic impact and striking power, and none of it was mere mortal energies.

            His forward momentum went up and became backwards momentum as the Shards drove into him and detonated. His scream as his invulnerability from his god failed was something to hear, fear and savagery and disbelief intermixed, unable to believe it was possible, that the power of his god could fail to protect him.

            He didn’t make it to the ground before my next volley hit him, burning crater holes all over him, half his Armor blasted away in midair and seething with vivic fire now expressly playing over it with its Life Ward down and exposing its own corrupt energies. My Fastcast volley was twelve Rays in tandem, eight to his chest, four to his head, and they pumped him full of the Wrath of Heaven, not a single energy there mortal in nature, hitting him about fifty feet above the ground.

            Oh, and he was indeed subject to the Vivic Kickers on them.

            The huge scarlet corpse smashed to the ground, its arms and legs bouncing away, no head left to scream or follow along with them, its torso now an inferno with misting unwhite flames shooting like geysers out of five holes in it. Whatever horrid scream he was going to make died as the remnants of his spirit were up and devoured by the Land in a section of the Warpzone where the Veil was solid and the Land was now supreme. It ate him up like the gnat he was.

            I stood there on Feature and watched the fucker Burning with an intensity to the vivus I had never seen before, the unwhite light proclaiming to everything and sundry that something that had more than a hint of true Divine power in it had just met a properly violent end.

            Fuck him. The death tolls of mortal worlds had hovered about him in a massive psychic cloak of annihilation. The vestiges of countless deaths were likewise being devoured by the vivus, any hint of his existence feasted upon and wiped away as the Land treated it all like dust, in the end.

            Fucking invulnerable champion? Don’t strike the champion, strike the invulnerability. The bastard had relied on his invulnerability to mete out carnage and doom with total impunity, which had nothing to do with war and fighting. It was simply mindless repetition and destruction, demonic exultation in hapless slaughter.

            Fucker got what he deserved.

            The Warped forces in the distance were looking on in disbelief and horror. They’d probably expected me to throw Feature against him, and had been looking forward to my Eidolon being ripped apart and devoured in front of me as all of my magic did nothing.

            But there were Weavers staring in shock and awe at what I had done, completely demonstrating the superiority of magic to the servants of Klaw. It was only... they couldn’t understand how I’d done what I’d done. It was beyond them and all their understandings of magic, unless everything they’d been told was utterly wrong...

            I watched a dozen of their heads explode as the Sublime Chord echoing in the air conveyed the vivus to them with a Song of magic powered by Words of Creation, and hundreds of other spellcasters understanding the glory and Truth of Heaven and magic for just a moment blew apart as well, unable to withstand their enlightenment.

            The rest began to withdraw... quickly. Because the Shards began to race out in all directions, flights of thirty at a pop, ranging out over a mile, and where they passed and Chained, the followers of the Warp exploded and died en vivus...

------

            The Warpeater Pyramid’s Domain rolled up and over me, and Feature finally turned from his casual harrying of fleeing Warped to head back to the Pyramid.

            The expression of the elven Archmages basically said it all as I came down, while the dino-guys merely looked impressed at the display, not really understanding the immensity of it. I imagine if one of their muudrs had been here, the thing might have had some conniption fits at the mere fact it could NOT explain to them what I’d done.

            It was fine. I just sat down in a Disk-chair, Feature took up his place on the block above me, and I continued my vigil as if nothing special had happened.

            “Master Aelryinth...” the soft voice of the younger archmage spoke up carefully from beyond me.

            “Yes, Elder?” I asked calmly.

            “What... what kind of magic was that? How... did you wield such power?” he asked cautiously, afraid of giving offense.

            “That was human magic, Elder,” I replied calmly. “And I did it with a lot of rep counts.”

            That sort of answered it without answering it. “Is this... something we could learn?” he asked hesitantly.

            “Well, it’s not elven magic, Elder. The way you Cast spells now... no. Trying to Cast a spell like that would burn you out right away, like a torch trying to be a bonfire. You don’t channel energies like that through yourself using the elven methodology without drawing up some damn complex formations that take a lot of time and effort. I imagine me doing that like I did was about as jarring as someone ringing loud bells in your ears, from a magical perspective.”

            “Bells. Mmm, yes, that is as good an analogy as ever. Very LOUD bells,” Archmage Artlis admitted, trying to smile and it coming out more like a grimace. “You were drawing power from outside the Colors of Magic as we know them...”

            “Which should probably tell you that the magic given and allowed to you by the Warp Gods in this closed world is but a mere subset of what is truly possible with it.”

            They both pursed their lips, as the entirety of what they’d devoted centuries, if not millennia of their lives to, was revealed to have been the mere parceling out of dribs and drabs of what was truly there.

            Hidden, infected, and corrupted by the gods of the Warp, never to advance beyond them, because the limits on mortal magic were what the Warp Gods decided they were...

            They shuddered at the revelation, that their utter mastery of magic was, in the end, the mastery of nothing more than what had allowed them by those they’d been fighting against!

            I, I was from Outside this world, and what I knew of magic and what was possible with it was very, very different. I was not bound by the Laws or Rules of Magic that was in this place, as those I drew power from were likewise not bound by the dictates of the Warp Gods!

            “There are people that will tell you that magic is all one thing, that the magic of mortals and gods and demons is still just magic. And they are correct, to a point. But, just like how your own system uses an encompassing grasp of all the Colors of Magic to make a unified system greater than any one of the Colors, the style of magic as you wield it is just another level or strata of what it possible out there. Arcane magic, Divine magic, Natural magic, Eldritch magic, Pact magic, the Heartsong, Primal magic, Spirit magic... they are all bands and substrata within the greater overarching field of what magic is. What you call the Colors of Magic is a mishmash of Natural and Arcane magicks, mostly the latter, jammed into working together by how Chaos has bent the Rules of Magic here.

            “I am sure you can feel the disharmony within the Colors of Magic, as well as between them? You should be far more sensitive to it than I.”

            It was a backhanded compliment and challenge. If they couldn’t sense it, despite supposed to being able to do so, why were they even bothering to talk to me?

            “Yes, the influence of the Warp is very prevalent within magic. Extreme care has to be taken to minimize the effects on magic. Blending the various hues and Colors together is an art, but it does minimize any effects of corruption within a specific Color,” Master Artlis was quick and confident to assure me.

            “Opening you up to corruption that magnifies across the Colors, no doubt.” Both elven archmages tried to hide grimaces by looking away immediately. “Aye, no free ride that way, just a different layer you have to fight. The Warp Gods play all the angles, one way or another.”

            Messing with the Divine wasn’t fun. It was a lot of angles to have to consider and play, with the clever and trickster types pulling off all the stunts of maddening complexity, the brutal gods of war and domination going for overwhelming power that standing against was suicide.

            But there were now Rules at play they had no power to influence, Laws that affected them because they were cross-multiversal existences that no native had any idea existed or could be used against them.

            If they dared to move against me directly, well, that could cause some very, very interesting consequences for them. The Ranthas coming in had already built a connecting road to somewhere else they existed... and where they existed, there was precious little doubt the Aruan Pantheon did, too.

            So, the Warp Gods had dispatched a very powerful proxy, gambling that immunity to magic and unstoppable fighting power would be enough to overcome me.

            Unfortunately for them, I was plenty aware that ‘immunity to magic’ was highly conditional. It didn’t mean ‘immunity to magic’, it meant ‘bearing X levels of anti/null magic’, and if you could overcome those levels, their ideal ‘immunity to magic’ didn’t exist.

            “How did you overcome that creature’s immunity to magic?” Master Sethanon finally dared to speak up, as if realizing that his secretive bias against me earlier meant I had the excuse to off him if I pleased... and that I could do so. “It... in the manafield, it was a black hole of negativity...”

            “Precisely,” I concurred with the archmage, confusing him. “Negativity. It was saturated with energies to counter any magic that was thrown at it, backed by enough raw Divine capacity that you’d have needed a hundred archmages to overcome its defenses with volume of magic. However,” I raised a hand, “it was Countering the power being thrown at it with the might of a god. There are two simple ways to overcome such defensive power, and multiple complex ones. What are the simple ones?”

            Master Artlis leaned forward, clearly eager. “Multiple complex ones would allude to finding weaknesses of various sorts in the defenses and opening them up, exploiting them. I presume with enough skill that could even be done to the magic of gods. But simple ones...” the elf frowned in deep though, and then shrugged. “The first would be enough power to overwhelm it in some manner. The second would be to attack with a type of power it could not counter.”

            “Well spoken, Master Artlis! There is a corollary to the second method, the girding method. That is, a power that stays intact effectively enough to deny your method of taking it apart. I employed all three, and furthermore, there was another subtle effect going on. I wasn’t targeting the being the power was defending, I was targeting the power itself. It is akin to shooting the bow from the archer’s hands, or cutting the armor off your target. Once the key power is removed, what do they have remaining?”

            “Screams of protest and denial?” Master Sethanon blurted out before he caught himself, looking almost shocked at the irreverent words that had come from his own mouth.

            I had to smile in approval. “Ah, so you’ve done this before, Master Sethanon.” He didn’t quite agree, but he didn’t disagree, so I continued. “One, its master is Klaw, who is no Caster. He relied on pure Divine power and energy to do what He did, with an effective Caster Level of 50 in broad terms.

            “I didn’t throw fire at the water. I tore apart the water first and converted it to boiling steam. Its proud and mighty defense became its enemy.”

« Chapter 30 | Index | Chapter 32 »