[Be Gone] Ch 51 – Desperate Demonic Defense

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            There were a bunch of demons here.

            There were more assaulting the main keep of the Bear, where what elven Clan troops who could be spared from killing one another had managed to gather to oppose them. The demons had flowed down from the north, paralleling the now-hostile flow of the River Corpus down to the one place with intact bridges still crossing it, and were assaulting it with everything.

            The Bear had mostly moved into their two new Keeps made by yours truly, and were fighting on their own. The elves were getting their asses kicked, not having a whole lot of experience dealing with Shadowland sieges, and were going to lose the main battle fairly soon, get pushed out of the mountains, and then have to engage the demons on open ground as their Clans panicked and called for reinforcements after their failure.

            All in all, a trying time for the Empire.

            Also, they had earned it all, so not my problem.

            Directly ahead of me was also a lot of fighting.

            I scanned the bunches and bunches of giant demons who might actually make it aboard the Pyramid, albeit not without some painful burns. They’d learned not to fly in the area, but nothing said they couldn’t be thrown up to the higher levels.

            I’d already made a lot of ammunition for everyone and everything, passed out a lot of Mass Shadowlands Bane Buffs to Weapons, and now we were going to have a scrum of it.

            The Shugenja present were tasked with dealing with pure Death Effects. Elemental energies, however Corrupted, the Pyramid could suck in, vivify, and absorb for its own use. It was something already happening with the occasional necrobolt hurled this way, hate lightning writhing and twisting and voop, it was sucked away before it could harm anyone.

            I sat up there on the top of the altar, Mithar’s Sword Symbols burning Holy Light into the face of the demons, driving them wild with hostility and angst over their Sinful existences. Nothing gets the Sinful rowdy better than Virtue shoved in their faces, after all.

            We had the winds on our side. The Air Spirits were totally happy to completely mess up incoming missile fire from the oni, as well as help guide our own to its target. When the first burning volleys went up and came down, the fraction that hit was significantly higher than was statistically probable, and a lot of lesser oni were mowed right down.

            The master Archers were targeting the bigger oni, who had to guard their eyes and throats against some murderously accurate arrow fire, while the ballista crews were chortling with glee at all the big and easy targets they had for their Taoflame loads, missiles Burning black as oni blood and unwhite with vivus. Tokens dangled from every such engine, adding another +1d6 for that extra edge of fun and joy, jade glowed with Holy lights, and the slaughter was totally on.

            The Tiger Casters made a good showing this time around. The Shugenja were on defense and support, leaving the Tigers to pour down the Reserves, which they did unstintingly. Small fireballs and precise lightning bolts were zipping down in endless volleys, harvesting the oni and generating more vivus out there for advancing oni to get Burned by as they swarmed towards the floating Pyramid and the Walls of Fire that guarded it.

            I was limited by neither range nor targets. Individual targets I could slam with up to twelve Shardrays at a time, which was enough to really mess up anything below a Primary Oni Spawn. Large clusters of powerful monsters would get Chained through their numbers, wiping out up to 26 per Ray.

            If it was a mixed group of large and small, Bursts would explode from the Chained targets, and slaughter the weak teeming about the strong.

            If it was just lesser oni, individual Shards would Chain and Burst, and thousands would explode as Holy flames, Banefire, vivic fire, and anathemic earthfire from jade Tokens blew through them.

            I had scores of concentrated holy water vials ready to go, enhancing and altering Acid-type Shards to Holy Water, really adding some punch to them for any slightly tougher mobs and making sure of the kill. If it was a huge mob of them, then burning an Alchemical Bomb as a material component for an additional +8d6 of Kicker damage would also suffice, and look damn aquatechnic as it did.

            Stronger demons hurled weaker ones up the slopes of the Pyramid, getting them over the twenty-foot Wall which by itself was wreaking as much havoc as any of my spells. Anything trying to get through it was running into a thorn-hedge of long spears and lances determined to keep them demons in the Holy Primal flames and burning, and Clan Tiger magic would light up anything truly dangerous.

            Magic was warring around us, a lot of demons were trying to unload, and a lot of Corrupted Spirits were trying to manifest something to bedevil us.

            The air was saturated with vivus and incoming spells were streaked with vivic energy as they came in, Burning away before being absorbed by the Pyramid or Countered by waiting Shugenja. The outgoing fire rarely faltered, and as for the demons who survived being tossed up, those they wounded were attended to quickly by Tiger Healers with endless Healing Reserves to use to mend their flesh and bones.

            I satisfied myself with wiping out an acre or two of lesser oni at a time, or somewhat smaller areas of more elite oni, repeatedly. They were in every direction now, which was nice, as it gave me constant targets for mass slaughter, more oni running into range as I cleared out denser clusters of them.

            Thirteen Shards became twenty-five Chains, which became 325 Bursts taking out anywhere from one to ten or more packed targets among the lesser demons, slaughtered by layers of stacked Kicker damage, of which the Holy Metas provided the most punch.

            Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of lesser oni were driven into the fight, supplemented with demonically-powered bakemono and other Tainted mortal creatures. I cycled my spells constantly, Mortus Dius shining electrum in my hand as the Staff of the Last Day lived up to its name.

            Soon enough I was handling almost all the lesser oni, while the Archers concentrated on the big targets and covered them in Taoflaming arrows, Clan Tiger spells pounding any that got too close. Most of the demons died before they could reach the burning Walls. The clever ones tossing up their lessers were the main targets being picked off.

            Sure, I knew the lesser oni were the least threats, as they couldn’t pass the Walls. In a normal fight, they might try to swamp and quench the flames, but that couldn’t happen here. They would normally stack up their bodies and just flood the lower levels, but their corpses were being Burned away underneath the Pyramid, not piling up as they should have.

            By killing the weak, I encouraged the archers and arbalesters, even some slingers, to focus on the tougher stuff and earn themselves more Karma. If things turned serious, I could clear the tough oni out easily enough, totally able to sweep hundreds away in seconds if things grew tense... and especially so if the arrow fire had already wounded them.

            Heck, if the arrow fire got to them, they might die to being surrounded by lesser Oni Bursting and get taken out as tertiary targets!

            The advance of the Pyramid did not stop, although it slowed in consideration of just how many heaped-up oni had to be Burned away and ground beneath its advance. The land behind it was a shining and sparkling white, misting like a lake with a fog about to arise from it. Despite themselves, the demons couldn’t spread around us onto our backtrail, as they’d Burn their own feet off trying to do so.

            The Oni Lords finally showed themselves, rising out of the muck, fading into sight, pulling themselves up from among their Spawn, or materializing from smoke and ash. They were about fifteen hundred yards away, not wanting to test the range on my Shards. They loomed over massive numbers of their Spawn, forcing them forward in concert to try and overwhelm our advance.

            Naturally that meant I had to shift targets. “Let the weak die on the Wall of Fire. Concentrate on the larger ones as you have been,” I Told everyone with Magevoice. “I am on the big ones.”

            Catering to their belief on my range, I let them hit four thousand feet before unloading on the army of Spawn advancing this way with great speed.

            Their size determined what I hit them with. Lower-Tier Spawn of the Oni Lords received two Shardrays, and as they got bigger, I gave them more. If they tried to do something fancy, like Counter my Shardrays, I instead targeted the oni in front of them, and had them eat multiple Chains like good fellows.

            There were literally thousands of the Oni Spawn, ranging from twenty to sixty feet tall, and they were moving fast enough to make it to us in under a minute.

            I dropped an Infusion on Mortus Dius to add Echo to the Split/Paired/Admixtured + Fastcast/Split/Paired sets going out, and burned charges from the Shardwand in his Wand Chamber to add Admixture to the Fastcast volley.

            Then I charged it all up with Acid Alchemy Bombs and Infused Holy Water for another +14d6 in Kicker damage, too... with back-up concentrated Acid for when I ran out of Bombs.

            It was really something to see as I burned through my comps that fast. Thirty-two Rays that looked like sparkling pure and crystalline water, swirls of gold and silver and rainbow shining inside them, were wound about with gentle unwhite mistfire, seething jade earthfire, and howling red-black Banefire as they swirled out, Seeking meaning they didn’t need to be linear to hit what I aimed at.

            Eight Rays a volley, doubling to sixteen as they Echoed.

There was no Resistance to Holy Water damage.

            Each set of Kickers went off per impact, be it the main Ray or the Chains that arced off from them. The Rays were layered with Holy Metas, doing multiples of damage that was Topped off and stacked with +9 or more damage per die.

            Demonspawn of all types blew apart into Burning, liquefying sludge. The humanoid giants with the burning triple tongues. The spideresque gatherers of souls. The massive tauroids, charging destroyers of buildings. The sluglike endless gluttons. The serpentine dancers of slaughter. The winged moth-like devourers of magic. The cloudlike swarms of demonic flies and locusts. The all-consuming hordes of endless ant-centipede things. The spectral reavers of spirits.

            Two hits from a Ray took down any of the lesser Spawn. Three hits took down any of the major Spawn. Four hits took down any of the primary Spawn.

            Chains were half-strength, but their Kickers were full strength. I didn’t have to double up on the Chains, more like +50%. That was cool.

            The Void-moth-magic-eating things were trying to turn, Counter, or eat my Shardrays. Resonance made sure they couldn’t twist and turn them, they had no viable means to Counter streams of holy water, and eating Sacred energy was only going to get them killed. They could wreak a lot of havoc among the Shugenja, however, so they were my first targets.

            The moth-Spawn were liquefied into crystalline rain, vivus feasting on them with searing brilliance as they splattered onto their neighboring oni in a crazed, crisscrossing web of natural Elements and Divine Primal Holy energies. It was quite impressive to see all these things with hundred-foot and more wingspans just coming apart as rivers of liquid light ran through so many of them.

            The Swarms of various kinds of oni were the least dangerous, as the individual bodies couldn’t bypass the Wall, so I ignored them. Triple-tongues and dragon-rhino tauroid things got the Repeats to the face, screaming as the glowing streams of magic flowed right through them and cut them down like ice melting before lava.

            The slug-shitpiles with endless appetites were huge, massive, and slow, moving generally by teleportation instead of physical locomotion. Interdiction made that impossible, so I went over to the spider-scorpions, who could likely step right over the burning Walls and make their way up the Pyramid, and who were coming in leaps and bounds to do just that.

            Thirty-two Shardrays slammed into them once, and the entire advance wave of the spider-scorps literally came apart, their nine limbs flying in all directions as they were sliced to shreds. The bigger ones behind writhed and twisted and slowed down as corrosive Holy Water magic ate through them. The next salvo slammed into and through them, and blew apart into huge droplets of mist and rain as it tore through the incoming Swarms with Swarmbane and Swarmkiller Clasps doing their thing. The countless bodies of the Swarms were splashed by the Burning rain, and the Kickers Burned right through them, annihilating them in no time at all.

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