[Be Gone] Ch 6 – Holing Up in the Fire

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I was more about staff-slinging balls of whirling compressed air razors, rather than actually shooting something at the creatures about, but it all worked out happily. I got to swing Mortus around, magic swirled and added a few more energies to the attacks as I donned my Twilight Crown, an impressively showy piece of Shoot-At-Him-He’s-The-Mage attention-getting headwear I normally eschewed, but I was making enough of a show I decided to bring it out now.

            My range wasn’t the greatest, but it was enough for me to do what needed to be done. As things came in, drawn by the light and my hateful Good presence, the Light went out and blew them apart.

            I still had Wands for backup, and stacking Chained damage on idiot fliers coming in was a nice way to dissuade them permanently from life, as it were.

            Also, they were creatures, not plants, and even with all that Sin in them, they still had appetites... even if, strictly speaking, they didn’t need to eat so much.

            So, when I took stuff down, I was effectively leaving meals for all the demons and demonic beasts, which served as a huge distraction for those things following me.

            There was one demonic bat-winged thing with no neck the size of a roc that came down to snatch us up and dispose of us.

            Instead of waiting for its claws, Feature lunged right up into it, I went along for the ride, and he buried fangs over a foot long into the joint of its left wing.

            Gold under its crawling hide flared at the point of his bite. Feature’s bite was not merely some horrifically potent venom; it was also a Ravage, and worked perfectly well on Evil things that were otherwise immune to poison.

            The neckless winged thing screeched in pain, but it couldn’t reach Feature’s coils with its claws, him sticking to its body like he was, and I just kept the Wall of Fire up and let it cook, the Light of my Crown helping do some additional burning with the Glow it was putting out and the Banefire working off that.

            No-neck Bat managed to make it about another two kliks as golden veins spread out through its body, glowing and bursting as black blood and hide ignited, and all that Con damage and Wrath cooking at it had its way.

            Two hundred feet and more of wingspan came crashing heavily to the ground, blazing and Burning, and vivic fire began to really feast. The demonic things hurrying this way were going to have to hurry if they wanted a bite...

            Feature and I glided down from the sky, him still not having taken a draconic form, and we continued on our way.

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            The stuff on the ground soon stopped chasing us, and the stuff in the sky stayed at a safe distance, occasionally spitting spells that ran into my Hexar Shields and either scattered in useless sprays of Dark Magic or were absorbed by the array of Elemental Lightning Rod variants centered in five of the Shields, charged up by my Wrath and sucking in all Elemental energies launched my way, Corrupted or not.

            Matters with Aelryinth in the back of my head were coming to a boil, so I started looking around for somewhere to hole up for a while.

            A rocky outcropping with a hole in it seemed like just the thing. Of course, the three-headed snake-squid thing inside had to be dealt with, but after a minute of concentrated cooking from a Wall of Fire on top of it while we stood there and glared at it, its corpse began falling apart into vivic ash, and the cave was mine to take.

            I went into the back of the cave, now glaring white as the vivic energy ate at the Sin in the surface of the stones. I sat down against the stone there, watching the sacred fires finish burning off its waste and the detritus from its kills...

            Huh. Is that a human skull?

            Magnus flicked it to my hand, while Feature wrapped around me in a circle and laid down on the ground, eyes on the short length of the cave leading this way, a circle of white that was slowly, almost imperceptibly going back to Black leading out into darkness.

            Definitely not a human skull. I touched it with the blood-red fire from my Human Baneskull, and yeah, no reaction. Different number of teeth, different cranial bones, a bit lower and broader than human...

            Telekinetic fingers sifted through the bones and scraps being reduced to vivic dust among the ash of the snake-squid.

            Broken, half-dissolved remnants of armor. The squidsnake had been an acid-spitter, so that was no surprise. I noted the design was pretty ornate, and it had been magical at one point.

            The skull had been cracked open to allow the squidsnake to get at the brains, and the rest of the bones were missing entirely, likely swallowed whole and reduced to the sludge being disposed of. The blue and gray helm was a bit... garish, especially with the dragon ‘horns’ coming off the temple, but also probably identifiable.

            I wasn’t too surprised when a pair of Weapons gleamed in the vivic dust, reflecting the light as the fires cleansed the stuff off them and revealed them to me, the magic glowing and obvious to me.

            Anything organic was gone, but the metal of the hilts was still there, and the designs definitely used a Runecraft Pattern.

            A heavy Battleaxe, made for punching armor and thick hides, no prissy Weapon it, inlaid with glowing Holy jade. It was also at least the equal of +V...

            The short Blade was of a matching style, for all that it was unlikely to be wielded together with the Axe. The wrapping of the hilt was also gone, and the guard was of a similar design to a wakizashi, also wrought of glowing Holy jade.

            What armor was there was gathered together, and my Load Disk was pulled out to stack them atop.

            Huh, I could have been taking trophies or something as we went along. Had my gaming instincts completely eroded, or transferred over to Ael? Just because I was busy running for my life was no reason not to loot! Ah, well...

            I reserved the full force of the Wrath for internal work now, letting Aelryinth really start in on the Curse with the stuff, cutting into it and throwing it off into the environment around me.

            Feature told me there were things settling down outside the entrance to the cave, but none of them were daring to enter, probably because they could see his eyes glowing silver in the depths, waiting unblinkingly for them to try anything, seeing everything and just waiting for them to do so. He hadn’t shown off at all, and was plenty ready to take on these things in tight quarters if they wanted to get personal.

            I could fill the whole area with a Wall of Fire that wouldn’t harm either of us in the slightest. The whiteness of the stone here was a warning to the Black outside.

            Renewal was coming up, and I was looking forwards to popping Purity/2, too!

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            The jolt as the Sending hit me out of nowhere made me pop my eyes open from where I was waiting patiently. Slivers of hideously potent Curse magic had been spinning off from the back of my head, tossed out beyond the cave to fester as they lost their target and would gradually expunge themselves over time.

            Having the spell come crashing down on me was a total surprise. Raised to VII, no less! Mystified how it could possibly reach me despite that, given the metaphysical distance I’d traversed, including at least one Pantheonic boundary, I recorded it dutifully.

            Incoming Compressed Message from the first of the Soulshards you cut off, doofus! Decode and read, chop-chop!

            I blinked. From wha-?

            Oh. Oh, shit...

            Those pieces of my soul had separate cognizance? And I’d just left them drifting in the Weft between Worlds?

            What a fucking idiot I am at times...

            I looked at the algorithm, and sighed. I had the Math Ranks to do that, but it had to be unwound to numbers, then reconfigured into words. I didn’t have the layered smarts to do that right now.

            Aelryinth spared one thoughtstream from the copy/pasting, able to afford it with the wriggle room success had given him, and the algorithm executed in my Visual File, then was cycled through a compiling equation.

            I smirked as I looked at it, able to see at least ten languages represented there. Whatever was being conveyed, the sender was being VERY specific about all of it.

            I read through it once, then again, and whistled.

            Well, Number One, now calling herself Traveler, had definitely gone to far worlds and dug out new and exciting things for us to learn.

            Fourteen points!

            One, informing me that my soul shards were alive and fully sapient, and what had happened to her. She posited that being Marked by Sylune might bias them to getting stuck into women Casters...

            There were seven of them. Mithar...! Mithar...

            My eyes narrowed. Mithar, indeed. I touched the Symbol about my throat. Mithar knew...

            And how could He not take horrible and awful advantage of this to do some Good in the multiverse?

            My smile was mirthless under my empty eye sockets. I had the feeling those soulshards were going to end up in some pretty tough spots where they could do a lot of Good...

            Point Two: The Thing was likely behind what had been done to her, to Pentara, and had probably tried to get the Shroud onto Terra-Luna. All evidence indicated it had been watching and waiting as we tore apart the Shroud on Pentara...

            My smile this time was all teeth.

            The Thing! Even now, the memory of it made my guts churn and head spin; the memory was too vivid, too real, never to go away. That horrible moment when I felt the souls getting torn out of billions of people who were stupid enough to Look at the Sky, and Terra itself was hauled out of its own reality to be a snack to a World-Eater from Outside Creation...

            The Pact whispered angelic music behind my ear, and my guts settled. Horror, Terror, Madness, too much Awareness for me at the time... I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to confront it without flinching.

            It was the moment when I became Aelryinth, and could deal with the Reality suddenly forced upon us all.

            I took a deep breath. This news meant that the Thing wanted the power that had been stolen from it back. The Mazakeem had torn it apart in an unexpected attack in a moment of weakness, just as so much of its power was drained into Terra instead of feeding upon us. It had survived, but the attack had clearly cost it, and it wanted to reclaim some of its power.

            Terra-Luna naturally had the biggest surviving chunk of its power. The Mazakeem certainly weren’t going to give any back...

            So, we would have to be on alert for a dimension-hopping Aberrant Entity that could throw planar invaders at us. Just, just wonderful...

            Point Three: Leveling advice. My eyes narrowed as I read it, and passed it on to that semi-free thoughtstream to take into account for its Level-assigning activities when he started rebuilding our Matrix.

            Faux Levels, stacking Advanced Classes on top of Primary Class, the Double Helix method... and her being a halvyri now, she had five Faux Levels from Racial Classes to assign...

            Yay, halvyri, I guess? Another not-coincidence... maybe...

            The gods couldn’t see under a Shroud, as we’d proved. The Shroud was a problem made precisely so that the gods couldn’t solve it with a wave of their almighty hands...

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