[Be Gone] Ch 5 – Out of the Frying Pan

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The fly-demons that still lived decided they’d had more than enough and scattered in all directions. I had limited ammunition, so I wasn’t in the mood to snipe them as they ran off. Well, I was in the mood, but I was also smart enough to rein it in and practice ammunition conservation.

            Feature wove his way between the treetops, staying below the irate Air Elementals above us. I thumbed Primus thoughtfully, and ticked on its Aura, something I normally avoided.

            The pressure from above suddenly evaporated, and the Evil Presences in the air above withdrew hastily. I could sense both ire and fear at the Aura of Elemental Command emanating from Primus; even if they were demonically influenced, the dominating power of my Ring was still there.

            I could reach out, grab one, and enslave it if I so desired, and they knew it. Any attacks I made against them were going to hit hard and bite in deep, while they were going to have problems hitting me in return. In fact, Primus had been helping smack the crocs and water-dwellers earlier right in their Elemental bias.     

            The Holy power in my Shards wasn’t helping them feel any more secure, either.

            Gratified that nothing was attacking me immediately, I kept turning my head and watching in every direction, ignoring the very cautious Elemental Spirits spying from a distance above us.

            Oh, there was a bunch of nasty vulturoid sorts swooping in ‘invisibly’, thinking they were being clever or something. Feature was using my Detect Invisibility at VIII; I couldn’t even tell they were invisible since I was just tracking them by their Blackness.

There were five of them, and they looked bloody full of themselves.

            My primary target blew apart under the initial impact, and the Shardray arced through the other four in a bright swirl of Silver, Gold, and Rainbow. None of the four died, but they were heavily impacted by the Chain, and faltered when they should have been instantly separating for distance.

            The next Shardray and Chain blew them all apart without fail. The trees parted to allow the flaming corpses to fall untouched right through them, hit the ground, and Burn away, closing like jaws snapping shut behind us as we swept past.

            East beckoned, and we obliged, Feature spiral-slithering unerringly on the right course, while the Hexar Shields tinged constantly from branches, thorns, pinecones, rigid needles, and razored leaf-shuriken spraying for us, making sure we didn’t get bored on our way. The flames of Wrath around us dealt with all the light stuff, and the Shields generally bounced the rest of it...

            The Killing Tree that reined over this demonic forest could only glower in our direction as we refused to look at it and give it a target lock for its retribution all these kliks away from it. The blazing trail we were leaving through the forest in a slowly-curving line arced away behind us, feeding on demonic trees that couldn’t get away fast enough and leaving them as white oblivion. It was doubtless really pissing off their boss, given the numbers of things that were coming from all directions all around us...

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            I watched the second Wand’s powder blow off into the draft of our passage as we hurtled along, our course still right at treetop level, and consequently still leaving a Burning path arcing behind us as we continued forward steadily.

            Two hundred charges had generated over eight thousand kills of various kinds, mostly from things getting their wings blasted off and plummeting to the ground, letting King Gravity and Queen KE do their things together. The Throne of Physics was still important, even in a magical world, and their Kingdom was not to be impinged upon lightly.

            There was stuff chasing after us, no doubt prodded on by the Killing Tree, but we were making good and steady time, and actually moving faster than most of the fliers. The turbulent spatial mechanics ongoing from the center of the dimensional lock behind us meant that they couldn’t Teleport out ahead of us and really form a wall of bodies to bury us, although the incoming flocks of things prodded to come after us didn’t let up.

            Perhaps it thought we’d get tired. I had already swigged down a mouthful of an Elixir of Vitality, one of those emergency things you make up just for situations like this, and shared it with Feature. We could go-go-go without sleep or rest for several days if we needed to. Sustained actually took most of the load, so splitting a day’s share with my Snake Familiar/Animal Companion/Eidolon was no issue, as the magic didn’t have to supply energy, just get rid of stress and fatigue, which was much easier to deal with.

            Among other things, it allowed Feature to basically do an aerial sprint for hours, and not even demons could keep that up for so long. We made really good time; he and my Gear looked around visually for threats, while I considered this world of shades of Black beating on my foreskull and that blot like a dark sun radiating at the heart of this demonic forest behind me, sifting through what I was seeing with ever more detail while I armored my thoughts against the revelations more and more.

            Ugh. Kind of like getting used to a sewer by inhaling deeply.

            No, nothing actually managed to surprise us, even when they started waiting in ambush down below instead of converging from the sky.

            Starting an attack on ambushers who are concealed and are sure they can’t be seen while still three hundred yards away from them is one of those demoralizing things that happen in the world.

            Behold the Wonders of the Soul of Reality had a far greater range than a mere three hundred paces, of course. It was Cast as a VIII, after all. However, the precise, immediate, accurate, and pervasive awareness area of effect extended to that distance. General Auras were perceptible from much further away, naturally enough, and I could tell that we were moving with the spreading flow of Sin, away from the area central to it and toward somewhere it was weaker.

            Nothing truly big except for that Tree woke up and tried to mess with us. I was pretty sure there were more such things around, but the Tree didn’t want them nearby, and might have just grown the whole forest to reinforce that desire. It had smashed a 20d8 Doombolt down at us from fifteen kliks away. It had some serious power, and I didn’t believe it was alone, it was just in our way... and we were fleeing, so it couldn’t be totally unhappy with us, even if we were scarring its kids.

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            It still took a couple hours of butchering demons and demonic beasts before the forest finally wised up and started getting out of our way. It seemed to realize what the path we were taking was, and the trees shook and wavered as they slithered out of the way.

            The hurled thorns, pollen, leaves, branches, roots, nuts, sap, and fruit didn’t stop, of course, but the Wall of Wrathfire I was keeping up dealt with most of that explosive and poisonous stuff, the Hexar Shields took most of the rest, and casual evasive maneuvers handled the remainder.

            If it didn’t like the way oblivion was eating away everything that got in our way, that was just one more reason to let me get out of there at top speed, right?

            I didn’t look back for the big tree again, although its general Aura was radiating back there, Black and mighty, but I definitely wanted to come back here when my power was fully restored and see about carving out the Heart of this Forest.

            It would be a great and Good thing to do, as would Burning this forest off the Land. The Land would thank me, as this much Sin converted to vivus would be a nice shot in the arm, and a decent rental payment complete with penalty reparations for invading the planet like this.

            Mmm. Less Evil ahead, but still Black, only not as much of it.

            Run from the Tree, Jimmy, run from the Tree...

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            The transition from forest to badlands took place over less than a half-klik of distance. Geographically, that was almost a knife’s edge, and suddenly the agitated trees weren’t there any more, flinging up a last load of exploding fruit and nuts, trying to rattle me. We were sweeping out and past them over a line of brush that rapidly fell into scrub and less, giving way to more rock and sand than dirt, and the accompanying lack of anything resembling true vegetation... although there was definitely a supply of fake carnivorous vegetation.

            More importantly, Feature swirled to a stop just beyond the range of their thrown crap, and I turned around to look back at them, watching as the trail through the trees oozed shut, trunk by trunk, and the forest glared back at me in hate.

            There were a lot of things ahead of me, in the sky and on the ground; waiting, drawn here by my burning advance and the bright lights in the sky from all my combat on the way. The bird and bug bias of the Forest demons was replaced by scales and chimeric designs of the various types I could see, and different, bigger, land-bound bugs.

            Ignoring them, I wrapped Windfire around a bolt of Wrath, and shot the last tree to throw something at me.

            The forest definitely wasn’t expecting me to just stop and start shooting back at it. Now it was the one without the range who couldn’t respond to an attack. Coldly, methodically, and mercilessly, wielding my infinitely useable Wrath and Windfire in conjunction, I proceeded to Burn down every tree within my range that had shot at me.

            The forest could do nothing but Burn. I blazed new Walls of Fire back through its mass, setting dozens of trees on fire, and repeated that action for the exact width of the trees that had been raining crap on me for hundreds of miles.

            Was it small in relative size? Yes. Was it petty? Not really.

            If you were aware, you knew that every single tree that had attacked me and I could reach without risk had just died. As a matter of fact, I could now turn around and start Burning a path back the way I’d come, and it would have to get more demons and beasts here to try and stop me, as the trees were too slow to be a threat against Heavenly flames feasting on unnatural fleshy wood so merrily.

            And while those flames were eating the trunks of the dead trees into unwhite oblivion, the trembling Black of the rest of the trees didn’t dare move forward and fill in the hole I’d just Burned into the edge of the forest!

            When I was done with my little lesson, I turned around, looking at all those monsters and beasts Corrupted by Sin waiting there. They were staring at the Golden flames of Wrath eating away all those trees, and the misty unwhiteness coating the ground and staining it white.

            They hated the sight of it, hated the Color, hated the Light... and that mist. That mist made the Sin inside them crawl, feeling the power of the Mortal Plane stirring. It had preyed on mortality, and now, mortality was rising up to prey on it! The ghostly unwhite of vivus was hungering for the Black something fierce...

            It was a show of power, of fearlessness, of determination and resolve. I didn’t back down, I paid back what I could when I was capable of doing so, and I stopped when it was useless to do more.

            I had also killed those damn trees VERY quickly, if these creatures hadn’t had a good enough view of me going through mutant birds and wasps a half-mile before reaching the edge, chewing through most of my third Wand as I did so.

            Now the Baneskull from a Malebranche glared at them from the top of Mortus Dius, glowering as black Banefire that would eat at them all blazed atop it. It was mixed with the silver-gold of Holy fire, and the unwhite of vivic fire in a swirling stark torus of hungry flames that stacked on the Golden flames of Wrath that ignited around us once again.

            The meaning was very clear. Anything that offended me was going to Burn.

            The weaker creatures were the first to flee as Feature moved down towards the ground, getting away from the looming presence of the Wind Spirits, who also didn’t like what was Burning around us. I didn’t want to put up with their winds, various forms of precipitation, or lightning, so down we went, into the reach of some of the bigger things sitting there, watching and waiting for us.

            Feature didn’t move as quickly, mainly because I wanted time to bombard stuff if it didn’t get out of the way. I was plainly willing to stop and do just that when a Wrathwind Shot spiraled into the many-eyed head of a fiendish giant wolf spider, spikes and writhing cilia and all, which probably thought its massive car-sized body was camouflaged by illusion, eliciting a squeal of great pain and a sudden retreat in the face of 17d6+20 of damage or so.

            Oh, and leaving its face on four shades of fire. It was a painful lesson delivered as it scampered around on unnatural fires that didn’t go out, then convulsed as its internal pressure gave way, its legs curled up, and it shriveled up and died.

            Yes. I was going to See them, and I was going to shoot them if they got close or didn’t get out of my way.

            Feature undulated along, just above the ground. He wasn’t small at all, either. As a matter of fact, he looked pretty damn impressive, his scales black and gold, rearing up behind me with his hood splayed out, the black sword on gray of the Steel prominent there.

            He was radiating the kind of challenge to power that beasts and things understood intimately, because he was an effective Caster Level 27 triple-decked Theurgic Companion via Arcane, Druid, and Binder Levels. They would be very unhappy to find he could turn into a Lung-style Orientalish Dracoform at will and really, really start Bringing It.

            My Snake, a Class Feature better than your whole Class...

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