[Warpworld] Ch 7 – The Hills have Teeth
Added 2025-03-29 04:00:47 +0000 UTC« Chapter 6 | Index | Chapter 8 »
“All twelve of you! Listen up!”
All of the Ice Hydra’s heads swung around to look at me from where it was dozing. I motioned them down, and they craned themselves in closer to stare at me, listening attentively.
“I noticed you all enjoy breathing in the vivic fire. Is that true for all of you? Hiss if so.” I pointed at them each, one by one, and all the heads hissed one after another dutifully. “Well, fine then. I’m going to set your fangs on vivic fire, so all you have to do is open your mouths to enjoy breathing it all in. Is that okay with you all? Hiss again if so.”
The hisses were more eager this time, with Ice-1 adding something extra with a glance at Feature, who was laying down nearby.
“Yes, this is exactly what he has on his main fangs. You all can smell the crap in the air, right?” I waved my hand around and made a stinky face, and all twelve heads hissed and nodded again. “Well, that stuff is bad for you. It makes you mean and violent and causes your scales to grow wrong and heads to come in funny and other really foul stuff. I’m sure you’ve seen stuff running around that was just plain wrong, Ice-1?” The senior head hissed and wobbled in the affirmative. “Yeah, all that stuff is contaminated and Tainted. Eating it, or even biting it, is a bad idea... unless you’ve got those Burning fangs to purify the stuff.
“Okay, Ice-1, open your mouth here.” I waved the head down, and it hesitantly opened up a mouthful of curving crystalline fangs for me to look at.
Without any hesitation, I reached out, grabbed its left top fang, and tugged it in closer, using some subtle TK-enhanced strength and really surprising it that I could do so. “Watch closely, everyone. This won’t hurt at all. The big thing is that when you want to be sneaky, you’ll have to keep your mouths closed.”
The other eleven mouths all crowded in from all directions for a better look as I cast the first Vivic Eternal Iceflame on the fang I was grasping.
Excited hissings burst out all around as the Electrum glow, misting unwhite around the edges, started Burning on its fang. Ice-1 preened despite itself, until I tugged its head back down by grasping the other fang. “Stop that, we’re making these matching,” I told it, just a little pressure on its eyeballs indicating I meant business. Squinting, it obligingly stopped moving as I Cast the spell again, and gave it a matching set.
I let its fang go, chucked it up, and Ice-1 rose up, the other heads crowding around to watch as it opened up and inhaled loudly. The single front foot thumped happily at the feel of ignited Weird Shit Burning and streaming down its throat and tingling into its lungs.
“That should help deal with a LOT of your hunger,” I told it. “Any pain?” Long hisses answered as it shook emphatically. “The rest of you ready for yours?” Eleven heads zipped down to present themselves to me eagerly. “Ice-2, you’re up next! No need to shove, everyone gets theirs in turn!” I made a pushing motion, TK shoved back all the other heads, and I yanked Ice-2 ahead by its nose spike. “Open up, let me see those fangs!” I ordered, and it obligingly did so.
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By and large, it went pretty well, although 4 and 9 sneezed and covered me in hydrafrost. I totally ignored the mishap as if it hadn’t happened, further impressing the creature’s heads as the ultracold ice fell off me harmlessly.
When all was done, the heads showed all their Burning fangs off to one another, and even Feature chimed in to say they looked impressive, which earned a lot of eager tail-wagging from the thing. Eventually it flumphed its way over next to Feature, sprawled all of its heads across him and his spinal crests, and lay there dozing, jaws open to the north and inhaling the Weird Shit in the wind in deep satisfaction as Feature extended a wing over it kindly.
Well, they are getting on well, I mused, regarding the Ice Hydra, white with black chasings, and Feature, all polished jet with silver edging, the silver-outlined black sword symbol of The Steel prominent on his neck, even without him flaring his hood.
Well, odd couples and everything. A true Dragon likely would not have tolerated the Ice Hydra’s presence, but Feature could not have cared less. He’d hobnobbed with all sorts of Eidolons, Familiars, Animal Companions, and Called Outsiders, and had no reservations about the origins of such things.
I turned to this fairly flat area of the mountainside, covered in snow that was not quite the right color or texture, and just nodded to myself.
One thing I wasn’t going to be lacking in was stone...
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My speed in making this Pyramid was somewhat affected by the fact I did have to purify the rock first. It had Chaos Magic running through it in unwholesome veins, and was ready to crack, fracture, crystallize, melt, vaporize, and just become something else with sufficient magical pressure, none of it predictable or under my control.
Thus, I actually had use Vivic Rock to Mud on vast amounts of the mountain’s stone, shooting it through with vivic energy and making the dark granite even harder, turning it snowy white as the infecting Chaos was burned out and vivus infused the stone. It required expending magic to do that, and while I had prodigious amounts of magic now, I could still Shape and mold stuff at a massive speed. I could convert massive amounts of it using Rock to Mud, and then I could revert it all with one Chained Dispel with ease.
I could have tried using the local spirits to help out, but just starting that nonsense was a bad idea. The local spirits were a gibbering, insane mess from this much Chaos magic streaming out into the world. They weren’t going to give me the time of day, let alone transform a couple cubic acres of stone for me.
Well, whatever.
The play was Widen with my +3 Valence advances, and then pay out of my Pool for a true Meta Widen and Echo, using Residual Metamagic to bounce them back and Repeated Spell to boost Caster Level slightly while going through my Pool and Valences.
The spell started at about 1056 twenty-foot cubes, doubled with Echo, increasing by thirty-two blocks each series as the Repeated Caster Level went up. Twenty-five more spells meant enough mudrock for 1856 blocks at the final casting, of which I could Shape about a block a minute effectively, making a double-sized Pyramid this time.
When you start with a 40x40 base for 1600 blocks, 23k blocks-worth of stones still doesn’t take that many days to go through.
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Ices’ heads were poking under the massive floating cubes of stone cautiously, probing gingerly and expecting the stones to fall down at any second. Feature just casually hopped up on one of them and looked out over the landscape, the Ices looking up at him jealously at his being able to fly and bounce around so easily.
“There’s not going to be a lot of room up there when this is built, so it’ll be slow for you to get around,” I told the Ice Hydra. It could stretch up enough to get its heads atop the block without an issue, but its slow and bulky body with the awkward leg arrangement couldn’t possibly get up high enough. I was Shaping another block inside and out, right down to crystalline levels with Shape Stone acting at functionally V+4, forming twenty-foot cubes those makers of the Waystones would have considered excellent for not being pre-fabricated printed matter.
Still, the Ice Hydra looked discontent, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Hydras had a really weird physiology and were very slow, making them devoted ambush predators or slow stalkers digging things out of their dens. Their short, stumpy trio of legs weren’t made for anything like speed or agility, and their body itself was rather swollen and broad, having to support twelve heads like it did, with an incredibly complex and strong rib cage.
“Hey, Feature, why don’t you take the Ices flying.” I flicked up three Disks for the Hydra, all its heads perking up in interest. “Ices, get on the Disks. Feature can tow you around if you just stand on these and let him do it.”
Remarkably eager for the chance to fly, the Hydra galumphed over and settled its big stumpy feet onto the three Disks, which took its weight easily. Feature glided down and past, taking control of the Disks with a touch of his tail. A moment later, to the delighted hisses of the cryohydra, they were airborne and zooming away into the sky.
-Give me a good circuit of the area, ask the Ices if it remembers any points of interest around, just in case. You know how long it takes me to make one of these things.- I’d put up some Hallucinatory Terrain illusions over the area so we wouldn’t be spotted from above or in the distance, but you never knew.
A cryohydra being towed around by a dragon. Well, not the craziest thing I’d seen in this life...
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Feature glided around effortlessly in his Dracoform. He was natively a serpent, so he understood the Hydra’s pleasure in being able to face into the wind, feeling the cutting edges over his scales, breathing in the air that was Burning with the shit that was in the wind, turned into purified and invigorating raw unbiased magical energy.
At one time he hadn’t been able to fly, only slither and swim. Flying was wonderful, and doing so with wings to grant more power even better! Feature looked down at the ground below them with powerful eyes, borrowing his Master’s Eagle Eyes for the distance boost, and was able to see everything as if he was only a couple dozen yards above the ground.
There was life down there, but none of it was normal, and all of it seemed aggressive. Even the rabbits had tusks or fangs, and leapt to do battle with the wolves and foxes that were hunting them, the latter equipped with steely hides and razored claws on their feet and the like.
Some of the lemmings got together and spit fireballs at a pack of wolves, which both burned the lupines and pointed out the whole swarm of lemmings for them. Seconds later, the wolves were on the spell-tossing rodents and scattering them to stop the conjoined Casting, swallowing them whole, and tearing them apart with their claws.
There were birds with talons dripping poison, caribou with great racks like razored steel, and mammoths with claws on their feet, barbed joints, and scaled hides accentuating jagged tusks and serrated trunks, often in very unnatural colors.
Feature saw great lurching trolls of a new species, their skin pale blue, holding onto clubs that looked to be formed of ever-frozen ice with steel barbs embedded into them. They were ten feet and more tall, probably as hungry as all trolls were.
The giant, miles away in the distance, was twisted and deformed, once of humanoid shape, its head distorted with unequal growths and warped by mutations, including a vestigial face on its shoulder, at the same time.
The giants of Jotun he knew would certainly have been horrified to see the thing.
Runes of some kind seemed to have formed over its thick hide, seething with latent magic aligned to some dark power inside the Vortex over there. At more than twenty feet tall, it was truly a monstrosity, and Feature knew it should die.
However, not today. His job was to look for things of interest, and if the giant wandered over to the mountain, it would die at that time.
Or if his master told him to kill it, he would. The creature was moving with long strides, but not quickly, more lumbering clumsily along, and there was precious little cover around for something so large.
The Ices hissed, the heads looking towards the Breach, and Feature glanced over that way. A blob in the distance leapt forward into his sight and resolved into some sort of demonic army.
The baseline members seemed to be corrupted humans. Feature didn’t like fighting humans, if only because he was very aware of how powerful humans could become, given the strength of his master Aelryinth and his friends. On the other hand, corrupt humans who fell to malevolence had to be put down, and with extreme prejudice, as they could be extremely dangerous to everyone nearby.
He’d had that lesson drilled into him early with the ‘PK’s’ of his very early days, and his discussions with his master over the Alignments and what happened to those who chose their paths and gained power in them.
Those up ahead had fallen to Chaos and Evil. He could see it in the unnatural Fiends moving through the camp, ready to fight and gnawing for purpose, yet subdued in the absence of battle. He could also see it in the ramshackle, disorganized camp they had erected, where individual places were done with skill and competence, but the arrangement of the whole was slipshod and amateurish. It was very unlike the disciplined camps of his master’s armed forces, which could be picture-perfect lined up in safe or open territory, or so obscure so as to be hard to see only dozens of feet away.
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