[Be Gone] Ch 52 – The Oni Lords

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            The ghostly harvesters of souls screamed as they entered the Interdiction Field around the Pyramid. They were forcibly pulled into materiality, and were forced to remain close to the ground by the Stillflight effect, as well!

            They had no material anchors, and the vivus saturating the air meant they burst into vivic flame instantly, even before they hit the Walls of Fire.

            Pure negative energy beings got to eat all the positive energy Kickers as I converted all the harmless Cold Kickers to Healing energy, and let loose with some anti-negative energy Goodness riding on top.

            The Shardrays looked like glowing streams, expanding into massive waves as they spread to encompass the incoming ghostly Onispawn. The Rays burned right through them in no time at all, the entire flight of hundreds of the incorporeals disposed of in one salvo of Shardrays.

            Only a few of the largest Spawn remained now, as well as the serpentine dancers, marilith-like killers with female upper bodies and snakish lower ones, their weeping swords in hand. They were smaller than most of the Spawn, but fast and compact, deadlier in their own ways, agile and hard to kill.

            The way to get around agility was either to force a lot of Reflex saves and let the Kickers stack up and do their things, or force them to use other Saves, like, oh, Fortitude against a pervasive area effect, instead of splash or burst damage.

            I didn’t hit them with just streams, but teardrops. Lots and lots of teardrops.

            They juked and evaded some, but not most. There was considerable overlap in targets, and layers on layers of Kickers slammed into and through the hundreds of them to devastating effect. Burning from dozens of holes melted through them and their scales, their arms often flying free as whipping Chained Shards ate them away, those Spawn died as well. The residuals basically smashed into the eldest, toughest Spawn, fed them layered Kickers, and melted them down.

            The Glutton-slugs left behind were basically the only Spawn left, looking out over their predecessors dissolving into glowing puddles of sparkling waters in total dismay. Then the purifying streams came rushing for them as they were unable to Teleport away.

            I looked down at the massive, kaiju-sized Oni Lords from atop my Pyramid, which had never stopped its slow, relentless advance. Thousands of lesser oni were stacked up in hills and mounds, which exploded into Sacred fire and Burned away before they could cross the flames. They were ground beneath the Pyramid as the greater oni tried to endure the flames long enough to grab the stone and leap aboard the lowest tiers, right into Flaming Weapons raised and waiting for them. That kept them in the Wall for another few precious seconds, which was often all that was required to annihilate them after the arrows and spell injuries they had suffered on the approach.

            The millions of lesser oni were now mostly gone. Their vaunted main battle force had been reduced to slime in under a minute. All that was left were waves of trash oni, some stragglers commanding them, and the Oni Lords.

            Who... it was time to reach out and touch.

            A mile away? Did they really think it was out of my reach? I hadn’t layered Reach any further onto my Shards, but the final increase of x2 was still there. I could have reached them before, with my enhanced Caster Level giving me easily a mile of range with the Long-range spells.

            On top of that, each jump of a Chain could reach sixty feet. Twenty-five jumps meant another 1500 feet... but I was gonna need that right about now, as the Oni Lords were scattered over most of a mile in an arc.

            I didn’t think I’d kill most of them with this. But honestly, I didn’t care, and weakening them with the first salvo, as well as picking on the weakest of them, was perfectly fine by me!

            Without any let-up, as I didn’t want to lose the efficiency of Residual Metamagic and Repeated Magic, I pulsed out my normal and Fastcast volley, and slaved the Repeated ones to them.

            Winding, spiraling, snaking, and flowing streams of quicksilver Shardrays reached to the right and to the left.

            The winding and ghostly form of the incorporeal Oni Lord Yuskochu was absolutely stunned when my spells reached out well over six thousand feet and drove into it. A virtual ocean of quicksilver force grew inside it, and then exploded forth as the spectral oni screamed from eating sixteen anti-negative energy Shardflows right in the chest.

            In an eyeblink, faster than any water could flow, the Shardrays continued on via Chain.

            On the right-hand side, the glutton Tsuburu tried to swallow the incoming spell, but all it did was Burn the heck out of itself as the Shardflows arced into its corpulent flesh and through it, Burning all in their path, and kept right on going.

            There were plenty of minor minions between the various Oni Lords. The flowing streams of Burning quicksilver, alive with so many hues and colors and energies, reached down to find some victims in between the various Lords, jumped a dozen times, and then plowed into the next Oni Lord.

            Not as deadly, no, as the Chains were only at half-strength and could be evaded. But it still hurt them, the Kickers still damaged them at full strength, and it all still surprised the heck out of them as they tried to dodge the lightning-flash flickers of Divine Primal Holy Water.

            On the left side, the ghost Yuskochu, the spider-scorp Eikichu, and the fly-locust Swarmlord Yosuki. On the right, the glutton Tsuburu, the multi-armed Marilith-wanna-be snake dancer Kyoso, and the ant-centipede Swarmlord Musaboru.

            Triple-tongue Akuma there in the middle was thinking he got lucky there, as the jumping range of my Chains only had the range to get to two other Oni Lords and couldn’t reach him. That was right about when the Crown of Stars around my head collapsed into a Ray, Split, and two arrow-straight lines of pulsing force entwined with a dozen different Kickers to the tune of 120 d24, each Topped, slammed into the middle of his mountainside of a chest.

Then Korbald’s squad hit him.

            The Smiting Descent of Diamond Thunder clove the head of the loftiest of the Oni Princes in twain. One of his legs was chopped off at a bulbous knee. Infinitely thin arcs of wind and water swept forth to complete the emptying out of his torso, and the One True Akuma no Oni, self-styled ruler of the Oni of the Shadowlands, began to topple.

            My next volley went off as the staggered Oni Lords were all turning to run.

            It didn’t matter, as long as they didn’t separate. They had first tried to Teleport away, and found themselves unable to, Interdicted by the Jumplock on my magic for several minutes, even though they were beyond the Pyramid’s Field. They didn’t separate, because they were all fleeing in the same direction: back to the Vortex!

            Well, the Swarms started to separate, not that it would save them. That’s what Swarmbane and Swarmkiller Clasps were made for. Musaboru and Yosuki died with screams of chitters and squeals as their own linked-minds guided the magic to help destroy every single one of their countless bodies, and their spirits with them.

            Double damage to Swarms with AoE’s. Add up all the spell damage and Kickers, double it all. As long as they were part of the Swarm, they all got to share!

            Liquid fires in a dozen hues blew off in the sky, spreading across a large area as the Swarmlords perished utterly. The spectral lord Yuskochu tried to dive underground, and was denied, forced to remain corporeal as doom came reaching for him. He was washed away in the sparkling waters that exploded through him like a hundred geysers of purity and cleanliness.

---

            The void-moth magic eater Oni no Kukanchi was one of the two who were still untouched by all this, being the one farthest in back and centered behind Akuma. He also paused to measure what he should do, the incredibly complex and interwoven Shardflows that were eating away his rivals and peers distracting him, even as his head turned to see Akuma fall.

            The ever-destructive hungry form of the tauran Oni no Tsuno was turning around reluctantly as its fellow Lords fled, watching in alarm as the Swarmlords were dissolved into silver pools on either side of it and perished.

            Then Kukanchi looked ahead as Lightning Across the Hill carried Korbald’s team across half a mile, and they hit Kukanchi with Thunder and death.

            The Oni Lord was a terror to Shugenja, not to chi-wielding Dragon Warriors. It had just enough time to squeal in rage and pain as its layered, writhing moth-wings were hewed through by Fire and Water and Thunder. Then my Shardflows slammed into the back of the Oni Lord Tsuno directly in front of it, and all the Chains leapt right for Kukanchi in its moment of weakness.

            The rumbling bulk of Oni no Tsuno had nearly collapsed under the assault of thirty-two Shardrays, yet it lived long enough to see Kukanchi blasted apart and dissolved by countless swirling flows of magic, vivic fire flaring up with unwhiteness that seemed hotter than any star born to the now-terrified Oni Lord.

            Then it realized it was charging right into the teeth of those who had weakened Kukanchi, and it tried to stop, only it was far, far too late for that.

            The Oni Lords were fast, but they were not fast enough to get out of my two-mile range in time. They’d chosen big, but not powerful, and they were lumbering at their size, instead of being swift and smooth. They were fast because of their size, but relative to humans, their movements seemed slow and stiff.

            If they would have come at the Pyramid all at once with their Spawn, there would have been some trouble. But now hungrily blazing corpses were all that was left of several of their lesser copies of themselves, and it was only left to reap the last of them now.

            Oni no Kyoso tried to dance and avoid the incoming Rays, and managed to bat aside four of them, at the cost of obliterating the great black Sabers in her four hands as she did so, darkened blood-iron slaked on countless souls corroding away in glittering tears and shards instantly from the impact of the magic.

            The other twenty-eight Rays buried themselves in Kyoso’s serpentine body directly, then leapt out in all directions to liquefy the oni nearby fleeing with her.

            Oni no Tsuno was hewn apart by Korbald’s team, its horned head chopped free as its legs were hacked down with breathtaking speed by boosted Techniques and chi spent freely.

            Oni Lord Tsuburu was the last of them to die. Too fat to get up and run, and unable to Teleport, it watched its companions fall Burning in unwhite, quicksilver, and polyflames from mortal Blades powerful enough to cut off an Oni Lord’s head. It could only turn its squinty eyes to the distant Pyramid, the figure standing on the altar there, the Silver Swords raised all about on the stones, and the shadows of a distant, alien, and totally inimical Presence upon them.

            Then quicksilver flows were spiraling out for it one last time, the holes in its sagging, grotesquely swollen body still dripping with energies it had never experienced before as they came. It could only watch as thirty-two sinuous, sparkling heralds of death fell upon it.

---

            I watched the corpse of Oni Lord Tsuburu implode as it was devoured and dissolved from within, deflating and falling apart much like a slowly-popped water balloon. A massive wave of sludge and innards blazing with vivus washed out from it, over too many oni trying to run past it, and took them down with it.

            I didn’t stop the killing, although I was completely out of holy water and acid at this point, and had reverted to plain Shards and Rays.

            It was basically all weak oni at this point, nothing but numbers. They were being channeled between the places where the Oni Lords had died and forced to bunch up densely there... which was exactly what I wanted as I began to harvest those lanes of death and those to the flanks with twelve different Chained Bursting Shardray sets, reaping the oni as fast and thoroughly as I could.

            There were fighters on the Pyramid who wanted to go chasing the oni, now that they were in retreat, but the only ones allowed to disembark and race after the oni were those faster than the fleeing oni, and for the soldiers that basically only included the cavalry... and none of them had any plans to get off in a swamp.

            The ground ahead was swamp, slime, and muck, and even with the vivus acting on it, it was still going to be mud. If you didn’t have lightfoot, it was a potential deathtrap, and only the oni’s vestigial corruption was allowing them to move across it easily. That ability was suffering now that the Land was being purified, and they were being forced to wade.

            It was a bad time to have your ability to move hindered...

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