[Be Gone] Ch 4 – The Trees are Watching

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I allowed the Wall of Flames to jump up to its default ten-foot height from below eye-level. That would burn everything up to twenty feet above and away from it, and Blessed Banefire would only be adding to the mess.

            I was basically running ‘blind’, with the Eyes of Heaven painting the trees in front of me (and the ground, and the Wind spirits, and... well, everything, ugh) in all sorts of Black hues, while a Golden circle of flames around me burned everything that wanted to strike at me and set the forest on fire. Trees full of Sin seemed to shriek as steam blew out of them, roots and branches exploding as they were superheated, and their hard bark ignited in supernatural rage as anathemic forces feasted on them in a way that natural flames would never be able to.

            Was I easy to follow? Yes. If something wanted to track me, well, I was a big burning Light on the ground, leaving a big blazing trail basically as straight as an arrow. I couldn’t see any trails, but most of the ground clutter was exploding away in front of me, roots were being scoured away, and any minor beasts that might prove to be an issue were being incinerated if they didn’t get out of the way of me and the steam-screams of the writhing trees fast enough.

            Burning branches writhed and lashed all over on my backtrail, but they were having a hard time hitting me as they pinged off my Hexar Shield cover. I was skating a couple inches above the ground with Footsteps of a Mage, mostly to save my ankles from the rough terrain. Animated roots were burning away as I swept past, or scattering as I slammed through them; some branches were coming down to swing blindly at me, and Mortus was shattering them with a resonating, glowing halo about it... and the Fiend Baneskull was working on those things just fine, thank you.

            Yeah, I had made Mortus quite the Weapon for combat, too. Implement bonuses were cheap to stack with Weapon Buffs...

            With a hiss, Feature came off my head, staying partially in Tattoo form.

My Familiar had been quiet during all of this, unable to help or do anything. He would have been too vulnerable in the fight against the Death Titan Demilich, and naturally was useless against the Curse. Now that he could suddenly do something as I was running away, he decided it was his time to act.

His cobra head loomed over me like an umbrella, and he hissed as he joined the defense, slamming against the branches and shattering them just as readily as Mortus, while I just focused on reading the ground and kept moving. The Hexar Shields flicked out razored edges and began to spin like saw blades, taking up positions at Magnus’ behest to start slicing a path through the undergrowth so Mortus only had to worry about stuff from above.

            “Sorry to impose on you all. If we try to fly, we die, and I can’t do anything clever like Jaunt my way around. We’re going to have to slog this the whole way. Right now, the vast portion of my mind is working very, very hard not to be erased by the Curse of that demilich we killed, and so I don’t have access to all the truly useful stuff that would make this not an issue.

            “If you all have any ideas, I’m game.”

            -Ride me,- Feature /replied instantly. He was sharing my Eyes of Heaven, so he could navigate just as well as I could... and lower to the ground, and more easily, being a snake and all.

            Oh, and he could actually see visibly. Since he was touching me, I just overlaid his vision onto aspects of my own.

            Glugh. Not any friendlier than the Eyes.

            There were lots of blacks, and lots of puke yellow, yellow-green, yellow-brown, brown-green, gore red, and flesh-rotted pink... basically, it seemed that a mad demonic artist had swept the world with a palette of colors guaranteed to make the eye revolt at the pure insult to what was natural and beautiful with something randomized and replete with Sin.

            I sighed and didn’t really look at it except to verify that the trees really did look like Autumn in Psychedelic Hell. I hated to say it, but the shades and textures of Black were easier to deal with, even simmering with all sorts of malice as they were.

            I shared my lightfoot, Angel Walk, and the Cloudstepping Sandals still empowered on my feet with Feature as sixty-some feet of thigh-thick ubersnake boiled off of me, around me, undulated into a ring for me to sit down on, and began to weave his way forwards through the trees even faster than I had been running. Our guiding Divination arrow was Right There, telling us what direction to move in, and if Feature had to stay partially coiled up and cramped inside the ring of Golden fire all around us, it was keeping the trees from beating on us, so that was all that was important.

            A minute later, I noticed a phenomenon happening. A path was opening for us, but subtly trying to steer us away from the direction we wanted to go. The trees had shifted, the path was very apparent, and was growing wider as I watched it extending out well in front of us, stabilizing just wide enough so that we didn’t damage the trees.

            But it was trying to bend us more ‘south’, and we weren’t having any of it. Feature slithered through the gaps and kept to the proper course, and if that meant the forest burned, so be it.

            But then the trees started to move really close together down here, forming almost a solid wall of trunks we couldn’t possibly slip through. The forest had effectively unlimited numbers, and raising a barrier like that was certainly possible, showing an uncomfortable awareness and solidarity of purpose. No wonder I hadn’t run into anything powerful here; the combined trees probably tore them apart and ate them.

            “Take it up to treetop level.”

            Feature immediately drove for height, a flaming Wall raging its way through the canopy that abruptly tried to close in atop us, and burning branches charred and Burned away all around. Feature broke out into the ugly gray and brown Black sky, just beyond the reach of the writhing trees below us, and I circled the Wall of Fire down below us so we could see what was going on.

            The path through the trees curved away from us in a slow and gradual arc, leading to something dark miles ahead I saw through Feature’s eyes, Eagle Eyes working to cross the distance and...

I jerked back as the massive tree there snapped open hundreds of balefire eyes. I knocked Feature’s head aside instantly, breaking the visual link and veering us left.

There were murky clouds over in that direction, and purple lightning was crackling in them. One of those bolts blew from the tree into the sky, crossed the clouds in our direction, and came down in soul-hungry Balefire devastation about twenty feet to our left. An unfortunate murder-tree below was instantly obliterated, its Black vanishing and replaced by traces of Utterblack residues from condensed Elemental energy and Sin.

            If I had full access to my kit, Hell yeah, I’d go over there, fight some Evil demon tree-king, and make me some Karma.

Right now? I prudently wanted away from this place.

            There were flying creatures in all directions now, above and beyond the Air Spirits still roiling in the air not twenty yards above us, all spurred on by the Killing Tree over there. If we went any higher, there were going to be Elementals coming at us from all directions. They seemed to be giving the trees some respect, however...

            “Stay to the course! If they come in to attack us from the air, I’ll have to handle it!”

            I stepped the full Wrath infusion into our warding circle of flames down one notch, giving me access to one Slot of Wrath as needed. The trees were waving wildly around us, their limbs looking more like claws and spears and clubs, their rot-hued Black leaves like shuriken ready to throw, and I could feel the malice and hate rising off the forest all around us, while above the clouds were rumbling in anger.

            Astral Ward VIII from Magnus. Too bad, so sad, no Div Locks on me, arsehat. Without the visual lock, the Kingtree could only get a delayed sense of our trail and predict our path, it couldn’t actually rain Doombolts down upon us...

            Feature flowed into motion, the normal side-to-side motion of a snake more like a spiral motion as he flew along, expertly using the Waveskating Step technique to push off the air and double the distance of every motion smoothly and effortlessly, even while the coils I was sitting on remained motionless.

            He wove his way between the taller trees, and their vulnerable tops ignited behind us as they writhed and flailed in our direction. The Hexar Shields dinged and donged as they were struck incessantly. I considered the ‘ammo clips’ of the Wands in my Masspack, noted that it was a miracle I had any in there at all given I knew Perpetual Spell, and resolved that I was going to build up an emergency supply of them just like an archer would arrows in the future. What was another bundle of ‘arrows’ in my Masspack?

------

            The flaming arrow of our travel path continued to bend more easterly as we moved on, which meant either the destination was moving, or the land below us was. I wasn’t sure which was worse. More and more flying creatures were winging their way after us to track or intercept. As Feature managed our travel, I watched the skies grimly.

            The first group to come at us looked like some kind of demonic winged monkey. They were using spears, and a few swooped in close enough to try throwing them at us. Feature dodged them easily, the Shields blocked the rest indifferently or knocked them away, and a shot of boosted Wrath+Windfire was enough to burn their wings and send them plummeting from the skies.

            They vanished into the trees, and didn’t scream for long, never hitting the ground before being torn apart to feed on.

            The second type was insectile, with a humanish face mixed with a fly in all the worst ways, hooked and barbed stingers, and multiple legs with grasping claws. They filled the sky with their droning as they arrived, multiple groups stacking together into a truly massive swarm around and above us, paralleling our course in a blot of Blackness around the Gold of the Wrathflames they didn’t want to test. I eyed another group of flying serpents about to arrive, and just shook my head.

            Ideally, the bastards would cluster up into a nice sphere, and I could blow them out of the sky with a Chained Shardray. Flyers generally weren’t that tough, except for the really big critters, like dragons, rocs, greater demons, angels... never mind, squib fliers weren’t that tough. One Boosted Shard would kill any of them, but Shards had a limited target area they could affect, I couldn’t just shoot them off like a machine gun in every direction... although, you know, I’d really love to...

            So, Chain Spell it was. I could guarantee kills, or cause maximum harm and then hope for more kills. Looking at how vulnerable the gossamer wings they had were, I went for harm.

            Eight Shards went out at the thickest cluster of the things, four demons within a sphere sixty feet across. They were the biggest of the bunch, the leaders of the independent swarms, so while I acknowledged the waste, shooting them with two Shards each was perfectly suitable. The two biggest ones got the Wrath and Windfire-laden ones, respectively.

            The leaders literally blew up at the impacts of the Shards dumping all that Holy demon-slaying love into them. Then the pairs of Shards merged and shot out at the nearest demons to them in every direction.

            Four lines of Holy force shimmered and shot through the air in zigzagging unerring aim, finding their targets, and punching right through for the next of them. They spiraled all over the place, looking for their victims, Spell Secret doubling the seeking range, and the whole spell moving faster than they could break formation and dodge, filling the sky with a tracework Chained Lightshow.

            There wasn’t anything left of the leaders. The Chained targets took only half base damage, but the Kickers hit at full effect. The hits didn’t kill them outright, but fourscore shrieking bug demons went falling from the sky as their wings burned away into white oblivion.

            The trees reached up to meet them with clawed branches and spear-like limbs... and the demons blew apart into unwhite flames as they crashed into the hungry lignites, promptly setting the demonic trees on multi-colored fires heading for vivic oblivion, too.

            I smirked at the remaining bug demons, who still numbered in the hundreds, but now there were eighty less, and I shot again.

            This time, Residual Metamagic paid for Chain, so I used the balance to pay for a maxed-out Reach Meta that also included the targeting area for the initial shot, giving me a huge target area... even while wishing I could have Paired Spell active, too.

            Eight Shards whipped out, with a much longer range than before. They hit some very separated targets, who basically blew apart into raining fiery vivus, and then continued every which-way through the swarm.

            Droning demons shrieked as they fell and died, and vivic flames were now anointing the Blackness of the forest all around us as we air-slithered along. Basically, one whole side of the swarm died, and the other side realized a bit slowly that they were next.

            Residual Metamagic kicked in again. Reach was paid out of the residue of the previous spell, and Chain Spell went out again.

            Eight Shards flew out, crisscrossed the shrieking sky, and bug demons fell screaming as they burned. The hungry trees didn’t know better, catching them eagerly as they fell, and started Burning too, adding more white oblivion to the Blacks that were everywhere.

            Looked Good at this point, it did.

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