[Be Gone] Ch 10 – Lighting a Big Torch

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“It’s made of grass. Light it up,” I told Feature, who hissed a Word.

            His gleaming black and silver scales expanded, a crest rose down the length of his spine, two horns and a frill sprouted on his head, and four smaller legs emerged from the length of his serpentine body. His jaw changed form, and Runes filled themselves in across a great number of his scales as his defenses thickened.

            A greater fire was also igniting inside his belly now, everything courtesy of the Dracoform spell. I withdrew the Wall of Fire ringing us and prepared to send Wrath down into his head as he rose ten feet off the ground, still well below the threshold the agitated Air Spirits running away from the burning holocaust behind us would respond to.

            The colossus of grass ahead of us waved its hand, and the sky went Blacker as spears of twisted grass fell upon us like rain.

            The Hexar Shields lined up above us, denying the primary angle of attack of the things, and the grass spears came ringing down, bouncing off the Tempered Adamantine and glancing off Feature’s trailing tail, scoring black gouges on his gleaming scales.

            Mmm, magical spell, not a physical attack. The grass spears disintegrated and burst into flame all at once as they hit our backtrail.

            Big creature. Big target. It was going to take a big hit as we swooped in closer, came in range, and Feature inhaled.

            More to the point, I fed the full power of my Wrath into him, and stacked it on him... along with a Split Shardray from the Wand and Mortus Dius in the heart of the blazing golden dragonfire that he exhaled, riding all that incoming fire and driving it deep into the heart of the Grass Elemental.

            Feature had long been smart enough to take a few Feats related to breath weapons. Intense Breath Weapon, Lingering Breath Weapon, and Maximize Breath Weapon stacked to incredible effect. Very importantly, they recharged incredibly quickly if you happened to have a Warlock around to pump Wrath into you.

            Maximum damage, +8 to the save DC against the damage, and half the damage again as the flames stayed around. The +11 rounds before the next breath shrank at -1/round with Wrath infusions.

            This colossal thing didn’t have a very good Reflex Save.

            With a shining blast that lit up the entire area, glorious Gold slammed into the Black, raging up and down the length of the thing made of demonic grass, and a burning Shardray contributed by drilling a path deep into its core to help out.

            Primus blew a Gust of Wind to send us on and out of retaliation range completely as the sussurus wail of the Black Grass Elemental warred with the fires blazing over its hide. The fact it had survived a hit of that size indicated just how incredibly overpowered the thing was, but it wasn’t at the center of the plain, so it just a subordinate of the real boss.

            Was fine, I had no plan of fighting the boss without my magic at full power. But sending a Plant Elemental up against a fire-breathing dragon was just asking for free Karma... and a wall of burning annihilation was following us, regardless.

            Plus, you know, being on fire made it pretty hard for it to toss spells, which meant it was flailing after and trying to catch a very fast flying attacker.

            Amazingly enough, I didn’t have any problems tying off the Wrath to help Feature recharge, and flinging more Shardrays from Wand out infused into Windfire... attuned to Fire, of course.

            The detonations blew out huge chunks of the thing, including tearing away the first tendril-limb it tried to lash at us, tons of roots flying away on fire and setting the surrounding grass aflame over there. The blaze coming from behind was catching up to us as the Grass Elemental shed tons of burning mass, and then even more as I blasted it away, while we hid behind the Hexar Shields to overcome the physically-launched poisoned grass darts it began to launch at us constantly.

            Thirty seconds passed, and Feature’s breath came off cooldown.

            This time, the grass demon didn’t survive the furnace that opened up and swallowed its Black with Gold. White oblivion came Burning in, and there was a burst of vivus that scattered all over the place when the Shardray in the center of the entire effect went drilling into its core and detonated.

            Something big and burning white, red, and gold rose up out of the remnants of the thing, a Fire Elemental at least forty feet high. It looked at us with a gaze of acknowledgment. Feature curled around as the Wrath became a ring around us again, glided back down to the ground, and the Elemental Monolith that had manifested began to gesture imperiously, guiding the holocaust behind us as it began to rain down fire in every direction to purge this place.

            All in a day’s work. Sometimes, bringing the world to ash is all you can do. Let this Black Plain deal with the hungry monsters we were leaving behind...

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            Another hundred miles took us out of the plains. We passed a lot of exhausted Corrupted animals trying to run from the flames and failing, fated to be cooked and charred to vivic ash in our wake. I had some sympathy for what they could have been without the Taint in them, but it all had to be Burned; they were irrecoverable without Divinities coming in and extracting the Sin directly, and I didn’t see that happening.

            The area beyond the plains was broken badlands with little vegetation, scattered hills, and wasted copses of trees, paths between great standing wastes of rock that were weighed down by time and the ages, cut by streams of oily black water oozing through the landscape.

            The stuff went up like gasoline when vivus hit it, too, although the vivus died out fairly quick as the purified waters flowed on and it lost its fuel to its own effectiveness.

            The streams were small enough that we generally weren’t worried about whatever was going to live in them, as this area seemed to have a lot more of the minor demons and wandering beasts of smaller size than the inner areas did.

            Most interestingly, many of them seemed to be moving in a direction a little off from where we were going, but still toward the fading Black.

            I let the Wrathfire ring around us fade so as to draw less attention, and Feature turned his scales black, gray, and brown to blend in with the hues of the landscape and not draw so much attention. My normal garb was dark enough, and if my hair was white, I was a white-haired guy in a black outfit riding on a flying black supersnake.

            If they couldn’t sense our Auras and we didn’t make a show of using Sacred magic, we actually blended in pretty well with what was going on.

            Magnus assured me that with my eyes like they were, I actually looked like a necromancer, especially with a burning Fiend’s skull on Mortus like I had right now.

            I just sighed and we kept going until we found a place to hole up for the night.

            I debated moving on top of one of the rocks, but there were large numbers of demons moving through the sky, and certainly enough were still fleeing from the flames and smoke that dominated the whole horizon, which meant we’d be harried all night if I did that.

            No, we just settled down in the lee of a stone away from the stream we were following, silent and still and watching from the shadows as other things moved past and below us, and flames danced across the entire horizon.

            We could have kept going, but I wasn’t going to push a Vitality Potion unless I had to, and Sustaining only took two hours to get us back to prime shape.

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            Oni.

            The type of armor on the ogres and what demons were wearing it was Oriental. Demons were reflections of the mortal societies that spawned them. There was an aesthetic to them particular to those cultures and their beliefs.

            Bakemono, the hordes of green-skinned scuttling creatures were called. Lesser demons in crude apelike or monkeyish forms, only more bestial and half-finished, followed the commands of greater creatures of more defined types... who bore the marks of being lesser copies of some greater demonic being, with links to their progenitor my Binder sensibilities could sense.

            There were a couple things traveling by shadows that ran across us, were a bit surprised, and died in the next second, Feature spreading jaws misting white and swallowing them down rather quickly as they burned into oblivion.

            There were Ogres, a larger breed fat with Sin, as big as Jotuns, and with eyes flashing with more intelligence than the ones I’d met in the past. They often had two or three horns, and the purple ones were a head taller than their brethren and led them.

            Trolls, long-jawed and swollen-bellied, actually smaller than the ogres but wider, like orangutans to humans, shambling and complaining about meals, occasionally nabbing a goblin walking close by and popping them in for a snack.

            Only thing I hadn’t seen were undead.

            The creatures came through all night, in loose companies and clans and small hordes and packs, but they were all moving in the same direction, converging from the west and moving to the east and a little south. I had little doubt that other paths to the north and south were seeing the same kind of groups coming through.

            A set of tauroids with serrated tentacles for arms and faces like masks of jelly galloped by on six legs, their overlong limbs whipping out at luckless boulders and stones to score them and send chips flying. Feature and I looked up to see some form of pteranademon flying overhead, beak replaced by fanged jaws, and heated markings on their bellies and wings.

            I wondered how much news of us had reached all the way here, and smiled despite myself. It wasn’t like the source of the fires wasn’t obvious if they came close enough to get a good look at us, but how many had done that?

            We’d just have to see, and it didn’t make much difference, in the end. We still had to go east.

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            -The horizon moved two degrees.-

            I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, then. I patted Feature as he took up his form, and we slid out of the shadows and into motion in the demonic night.

            “It’s been doing that since we arrived here, rotating clockwise at different speeds as we move away from the center. It’s a side-effect of the dimensional interface between the two realms, and the instability here. It’s why our trail here kept arcing to the left.”

            Feature hissed agreement as he undulated along above the stones, not quite tracking the creatures in front of us. After all, we didn’t want to run into an army or something, especially a demonic one. I was fairly certain we could outrun one, but that all depended on the size, and where we were running to.

            Likewise, getting into combat with us was going to be painful for basically anything, and the Wrath could heal us both back up very quickly, indeed, meaning we only had to be wary of spells and status-effect debilitations, like various forms of poison, which had little to no chance of actually affecting us with Mind over Body Sun Saves in play.

            Since we weren’t affected by terrain, we could move over rougher ground than the forces gathering were doing, which meant moving by them or in through the gaps between them. None of them were particularly motivated to catch up to us for questioning, what with the eyeless Caster in black with dark skin and skull-staff burning black Banefire riding atop the huge black snake slithering so silent and ghost-like over the landscape. When one group of bug-eyed monkey-wasps came swooping down for a closer look, I coolly and impersonally Chain-Shardrayed them out of the sky when they got too close, encouraging the other flying demons to keep a respectful distance.

            Naturally that wasn’t going to be the case for the full trip, because as dawn broke and I quietly ticked over Purity Mastery/3 in great contentment, Feature also saw a flash of gold-green Light with definite signs of pure Elemental power in it ahead and off to the left. It came from atop a low hill that now looked as if it was being surrounded by demonic forces, and encircled by demons in the sky.

            I would have rolled my eyes if I’d had any left. Feature politely did it for me. “There’s always something to make us do it the hard way, isn’t there, old buddy?”

            -Karma for the Super Eidolon!- he /hissed fatalistically, and I laughed.

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