[Be Gone] Ch 47 – Inexorable Advance
Added 2025-03-29 02:24:28 +0000 UTC« Chapter 46 | Index | Chapter 48 »
Virtually everyone on the Pyramid shouted out as we began to climb the first steep slope of the Hungry Hills.
They’d been wondering how we were going to find a way through, not really thinking the Pyramid could lift itself off the ground. It totally could, and in doing so, REALLY put some pressure on these hills.
So, the unnaturally steep cursed hills in front of us, arranged in some demonic Formation of unluck and terraforming that among other things REALLY annoyed the Earth Dragon, collapsed in front of us and to the sides, blazing with vivus as the slopes took the full weight of the geomagnetism of the Pyramid while Burning unwhite, and couldn’t hold on.
Even as we were climbing, the hills in front of us were collapsing in an avalanche, which rapidly spread away to both sides as their internal supports gave way. As the collapses built up in front of and below us, the ground blazed and compacted and we adjusted automatically. The sheer slope in front of us became a much gentler and more natural incline, which was compressed down to a long, wide valley and road moving straight through the unnatural landscape.
If rather a lot of oni thinking to jump down upon us from above were caught in the collapse of the hills and got themselves subsequently compressed and ignited, well, these things happen.
A bunch of flying oni thought they might hit the Stillflight Field and glide down on us from above. The winds circling above pushed them all over and down right in front of the Pyramid’s advance haplessly, and if the archers didn’t entertain themselves shooting them out of the sky, the oni hit the ground just in time for the Pyramid to glide right over them, and the burning ground to finish off any that survived that.
Those who actually survived coming through the Walls at the back of the Pyramid were shot down without fail, even if I had to do it myself. The archers prided themselves on me not having to do so, however, as did the engineers back there. They knew they were only finishers, but anything they had to finish had to be among the very toughest of the oni, so they took their jobs very seriously, indeed.
We ran into only two major armies on the way. The first one was of ogres driving goblins and trying to do the hill-diving thing, the other of gliders and fliers trying to exploit that angle of attack and ending up getting caught in the winds circling us. Neither army ended up well, and I got in a lot of fireworks practice while Feature zipped all around the Pyramid reinforcing locations every time there was anything resembling a breach that I didn’t address myself.
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Soon enough we were out of the Hungry Hills and into the seeming dry emptiness of the Seething Hills, where I’d sloughed off most of the Death Curse back then. Insectile and reptilian oni, some of monstrous size, came scuttling and slithering to the attack, and I politely blew and Burned the fuck out of them as we continued on ahead.
The Horse cavalry were much more circumspect out here after seeing the scuttling Swarms and monstrous sizes of the local oni, and so ended up contributing more to the arrow fire than anything else.
It was fine. I made more shiny crystalline arrows for them, and white rain burned across the sky as Chained Bursting Shards annihilated packed oni by the thousands, while Shardrays burned down their bosses by the dozens.
Korbald was Warlording it all, so I largely picked on the targets and positions he told me to, letting our juniors Level and reap the majority of the Karma. I was the Lord of the Pyramid, and getting a very steady flow even if all I did was sit there and pick out the power levels of attackers for the Heavens-Up Display, letting them know who to focus on and who to let the Walls burn down.
Walls of Fire with Swarmbane didn’t care how big your Swarm was. It was all just fuel to the Holy fires, and big heaping shovels of healthy vivus for the Land.
Healthy vivus also forged an adamant planar lock in the Veil, embodied by the Burning, seared, compressed, and line-straight crystalline road behind me, which refused to rotate under the pressure of the Shadowlands vortex.
The planar stress against the Veil was mounting, even as the oni forces we were killing were shrinking in reach and strength. The double-hit meant the edge of the Shadowlands was collapsing backwards even faster, as it had to condense to withstand the mounting planar rigidity even as there was less planar influence to throw around.
It meant the oni and the Tainted were being driven ever inwards and back, and the powerful beings in the core of the Shadowlands were naturally diverting them directly at us.
That was fine, it was why we were here. It was why we were advancing, all the time, letting them know what it felt like to face something unstoppable, something hungry.
Oni and Tainted creatures died by the millions, fed into the ringing Fires of the Pyramid, making the crystal road behind us all the brighter. Massive oni the size of hills and whales and maybe even bigger, some looming up to try to face off against me on my perch four hundred-plus feet up there, fell, and they burned with the rest in horror and disbelief as their eternity came to an end as munchies for the planet beneath us.
The Woods was on the horizon. The horizon was going to burn.
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The Demon Tree at the heart of the Woods was playing it safe, and really spending the juice. The area ahead of us was storming like mad, balefire lightning ripping through the sky and threatening to collapse on us, winds churning crazily and blowing in our direction. The trees were whipping back and forth, displaying lots of fruits and nuts and flowers and other Tainted and swollen organic stuff that was clearly meant to be massively dangerous to us.
The wind-swept pollen was entering the range of active vivus and igniting like burning snow. The winds and weather hit the area of effect of my own spells centered on the Pyramid, and a mile-wide gap through the clouds pushed the demonclouds aside, blue sky and sunlight shining down.
Balefire Thunderbolts came arcing in with great screaming blasts of Jigoku’s rage. A Sound Bubble covered and protected the lower layers of the Pyramid as a Lightning Rod around the 39th Tier diverted all the incoming lightning into it. Vivic explosions blew happily through the Pyramid as the Tainted power ignited inside it, feeding it more juice and strengthening its default defenses.
The first flaming arrows shot out, Flaming Bows and arrows with Bane to Tainted on them just for effect, and naturally vivus was riding them.
The demon storm was blowing at us and raining down, but it had been shoved aside, and now the winds were hot and handy and blowing away from us... and neither Banefire nor vivus cared about wet.
The trees in front of us ignited like tinder, their organic bombs and loads only adding to the carnage as they went off. The winds blew the flames back and away from us... and the first Fire Elementals began to emerge in burning anticipation of what was about to happen.
Precise arrows went out, set demonic trees on Taofire+, and the forest around us began to burn. There were no trees in range at all that were not on fire and writhing by the time the Pyramid hit the treeline... and then the forward Walls of Fire exploded hotly over them, candles of annihilation blazing up a couple hundred feet in the air as they ignited and were mowed down, smashed flat by the sheer bulk of the Pyramid into the other trees ahead of us in a moving wall of destruction.
Hordes of Fire Elementals were being Called forth, and the swirling winds around us turned the flames into an inferno that didn’t touch the men watching in awe from the tiers of the Pyramid. Those who could advance to the higher tiers sat down and watched in wonder as a firestorm built up around us, growing stronger and stronger with every Tainted tree going up in flames.
Lightning was pounding down every breath or two, trying mightily to get to the soldiers below me, but all they saw was a lightshow. They couldn’t even hear the forest dying around them, save for the trees directly in front of us crackling and falling as the Pyramid outweighing them by several orders of magnitude crushed them flat and flaming.
There were creatures hiding in the trees, of course, intending to use them to get onto the Pyramid. That became somewhat problematic when the firestorm was howling madly to get at them, flames and vivus and the dark tongues of Banefire were raging through everything, and a feast of feasts was being set for the Land this day!
Soon enough, the first tornadoes and firecells were rising to the clouds, spinning out and away to carry the punishment beyond the range of my weather control. They rarely worked together this well, but the Air and Fire Spirits promptly started making more of one another in these ideal conditions. Soon blazing fireswirls were rising again and again, sweeping out to feed on the forest and grow even larger as they did so.
I watched whole blazing demon trees, branches whipping back and forth in agony, get torn up into the sky, their branches ripped away and flung flaming in all directions to add to the burning carnage.
It was a gorgeous display of Elemental savagery and vengeance, impossible not to watch and to admire, and something the humans, elves, and korobokru below would remember for the rest of their lives.
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Well, the orcs and the gnomes, too, but there weren’t that many of them.
“Brother Aelryinth!” a deep and cheerful voice called out.
I glanced back at the looming, yellow-skinned figure there. It was a bit surreal seeing one of them without a bloodthirsty expression on their face, but Heaven didn’t care about appearances.
“Brother Kosh. Come up for the view again?” I asked the orc monk calmly.
The serpentine Fire Dragon emblazoned around his big arms and chest dominated his other Tats, and seemed to writhe and move as if alive in the light of the flames.
Reassured by my reply, he took the narrow steps up to the Altar Tier two at a time, coming up beside me as I sat on the altar here, and without asking, he sat down on it next to me.
There actually weren’t a lot of natives who could make it up here to me, as Good wasn’t exactly something they bothered themselves about here. That an orcish Tattooed Monk was the first of them had to really annoy some of them, but they probably attributed it to some mystical technique of his Order, rather than the fact that Master Kosh was actually just a really nice guy.
“It seems to me you would be lonely here, and a little company for a time never hurts,” the big orc replied easily, his reddish eyes like furnaces in the light of the elemental apocalypse taking place around us.
“This is true,” I acknowledged. “Also, it has the best view.”
“That is also true,” he admitted, little spurts of fire manifesting on his Dragon Tat. He sighed as he looked around, but while there was wonder and appreciation in his eyes, there was nothing like joy or satisfaction. “This is a grim thing you do here, brother Aelryinth.”
I watched a new fire twister spinning out to the south, roaring unheard into the masses of writhing living trees that could not run away, setting them on fire and hurling blazing tree limbs and trunks in all directions to increase the firestorm building remorselessly all about it, totally defying the weather magic struggling to remain intact above.
“One thing a warrior culture glorifies is the vicious fighting, and they often completely ignore the far more essential clean-up that has to follow. This is clean-up, not a fight, but some might see it as outright slaughter. This is executing the Duty of Fire.”
“Oh.” He was a bit surprised at my viewpoint, but then realized that was indeed the case here. This simply wasn’t a fight. “I notice you are not heading directly for the darkness there.” He pointed at the blackest area of the storm to the west.
“This forest has to be burned down entirely and properly. I’m exhausting the Demon Tree’s weather control, Burning massive amounts of Taint away, and driving nail after nail into the planar instability here. We are not in a hurry here, brother Kosh. We are here to destroy the Shadowlands, and what is around us is a sea of Taint that must be Burned clean.”
The Balefire Thunderbolts from above had faded to about once every five minutes, completely ineffectual as they were, and one flared and crashed into the next Tier down in silence outside our Sound Bubble, bursting into vivic fire in a reaction that didn’t quite make it back up to the clouds along its blur of a backtrail.
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