[Be Gone] Ch 3 – Limited Options still have Power

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“Mortus, I need a Sanctified Spell Infusion up on you!” I called out, and my Item Familiar Staff hummed alertly in my grip. I couldn’t Infuse him right now, but he could use his charges to Infuse himself, via Metamagic Staff... and I could recharge him almost instantly with Wrath, using Servant’s Theurgy and a UMD check.

            No surprise, I had plenty of UMD Ranks, and three complementary Feats and the Mastery to it. It was vital for True Artificing Mastery and transdisciplinary magical understanding...

            Power swirled as I brought up the Wrath of Heaven, stacked it onto the Shards I was calling out of the Wand, and the Windfire arrow of a Windfire Archer centered on one Shard. I let fly down at the closest group of things swimming to my destination point, now just a hundred feet below.

            The shot was quite bright in my Eyes of Heaven, as was appropriate for Aligned Magic. Shards and Wrath rode together, one razored teardrop holding the Wrath, one the Windfire, the others splitting off into their own targets close by, going three Shards to two more, leaving two untouched. As I did so, I Consecrated the Shards for 0 Cost with my Shardcaster passives, maximizing the damage they dealt to Evil with a flare of Holy Power that pulsed right through my Wrath and giving Sanctified Spell a full +3d6 Kicker to the +5d6 or so on the spell already.

            Every Shard and target was another place for the passive Boosts of Forcecaster, Augmented Healing, Holy Scourge, and others to stack, as knowledge of how to use Shards wasn’t the same as not being able to Cast them right now. Soul Essence I didn’t dare move right now, lest I totally lose control of it, hummed in my Arcane Soul, Arcane Focus, and Marksman’s Gauntlets, adding to the damage stack with Extra Edge and everything.

            I had eight total Shards, so all four targets had Shards burning with Holy power and Banefire crashing down atop them. Arcane Fist ensured that those Shards hit like plunging spears, too.

            Damn, I didn’t dare spend ki, either...

            Four horned and spined reptilian heads that might once have been crocodiles or something similar blew apart together, and the water below instantly cleared up for sixty feet around the center of impact as the vivus took the corpses and flashed them into dust instantly.

            The last two horned and spiked crocs thrashed wildly and exploded as the Wrath in the central Shard Forked out into them, and 10d6+30, /2, +8d6, tore through and killed them, too.

            The other crocs further in the distance had seen the magic, and probably seen the Holy power in it, but not felt it. I switched targets as I dropped down further, and let the next pack racing this way have a taste, too.

            Targeting six different things simultaneously gave me a headache, but the shots still smashed true, and the targets were blown apart into purifying vivus that continued to Burn atop and lick at the waters, whatever essence was infusing this place obviously not natural. Blots of empty whiteness replaced the Black Sin infusing everything, and vivus was visible eating at the edges of the Dark Aura around everywhere.

            The third group noticed the deaths of the other two, and dove about thirty feet down from where I was going to hit the surface of the water, thinking to avoid any spells from above, and come up at me from below.

            I was perfectly capable of closing my eyes and sighting a target with my Eyes of Heaven before this, and Force attacks were perfectly capable of traveling through water with practice. Crackling with Holy power, another charge of Shards was spent as I plunged Mortus Dius’ head into the water, and the water heaved with an eruption of white purity. When it faded, the Black silhouettes of the crocs were nowhere to be seen in the whiteness below me.

            I reflected that Spellwarping to a Ray and Chaining might have been more efficient, but oh well. It had worked well enough.

            My feet hit the surface of the water, just as a hill rippling with living oily Black darkness over yonder suddenly shuffled, and opened five lambent rotting-green eyes the size of dinner plates to look at me.

            Well, that wasn’t welcome news. Yay for Heavenbound fearless, or I would have just lost the lunch I never ate, because, you know, Sustained.

            “Time to go! Magnus, I need to know the way out of here, and get your Shields up!”

            My Ringlord Ring hummed and fetched the Divination spell off the Eidetic Wall, its once-a-day special power. Quite abruptly I had a direction marker firmly Right There in the middle of my vision, without actually occluding anything, letting me know that the closest way to get out of this planar-infested Zone was in That Direction.

            My intelligent Arcane-Bonded Ring also reached into my Masspack and drew out its Hexar Shields via Telekinesis at 15.

            I didn’t use the hexagonal things all that often, as 1) they occupied my Ring’s TK, which was a useful tool and 2) generally speaking, they were total and complete overkill and unneeded, given my other defenses.

            With no magic, suddenly I was goddamn glad I had made the damn things up and even put basic Enchantments on them. Normally I would drop a Greater Magic Weapon/Armor on them if I needed to use them, but that was not an option at the moment.

            Seven hexagonal Shields about two feet across individually spun out of the nested stack they were in, and took up positions at every two o’clocks and above my head, while I did the ‘Run James, Run!’ thing.

            I booked in the pointer’s direction. Tiny little golden lights came up under my feet as I ran across the waters, Angel Walk at work repelling the oily black Sinwater, while waves began to surge towards me from behind as whatever that thing was behind me began to move...

            And about another hundred yards ahead of me, an even bigger hill with a living Aura of Black darkness, right in my path, blinked its many balefire eyes and also began to move.

            Righto...

            This time the Shards from Mortus were Spellwarped together into a Ray and Split. This automatically extended their Range to Long with Spell Secret, and I could reach a hundred yards without effort... and I certainly wasn’t going to miss something the size of a hill. The Light of Wrath and Windfire burned around the drilling, scintillating Shardrays pulsing out from the head of Mortus Dius, and drove into the whale-sized Black bulk of whatever this warped mutant-demonic thing was.

            The Rays drilled right into it, and a building glow shone through cracks in what were probably scales on really thick hide, light inside a sack of slimy Darkness. Then the far side of the thing blew out in a spray of golden glory and white oblivion, hundreds of pounds of flesh flying through the air and burning away as they did so. Auspicious mists began to rise from the flesh of the thing letting out a pained final groan as it slumped into death. Whiteness shot through it, hunting Sin, making it look like it was going to shatter into bits.

            Well, that’s what something looks like when it eats a 300+ point hit, I reckoned, impressed. Aelryinth had certainly hit things much harder, but this was just using a charge of a Wand, Wrath, and Windfire. It was most impressive...

            Oh. Oh! There was Curse magic being attached to the magic I was letting off. Even a sliver of the Death Curse was either forcing a crit on the targets or tanking their Constitution or something...

            Clever, Ael, clever, making it chase after the magic I wasn’t even using properly, dragged along by the Wrath. The Wrath was grinding off the Curse and delivering it unto mine enemies...

            The creature behind me let out a bellow that sounded like a jet engine being farted through a sphincter the size of my fist. Thank Heaven for Thunder Resistance, or I might have been deafened as it swept over me, shredding some of the tough, scraggly plant life around me as it did.

            It knocked me forwards, but I took the flesh-shredding hit on my Health, fought off the pain, and before it could do it again, I sent Healing Wrath through myself to supplement the guided auto-healing from Warshaper Levels, fixing the bone-shaking and cell-rupturing effects almost instantly. I kept right on running over the water as the force helpfully shoved me further ahead, little golden dots of light following me across the Sin-infused Black water.

            I felt a twinge on my Teleport Sense as it tried to use some sort of dimension-hopping, but the very recently vivic-reinforced Veil got in the way, fortunately. It was trying to surge after me, but I was actually moving at a decent clip. Base 30, fast movement +10, Fleet +10, that was 50, two lightfoot advances from Arcane Fist/4 and 7 gave a third each, so +30 from them. A total of 80’ speed was damn fast in mundane terms afoot, a hundred meters in six seconds.

            I put two Soul into Fleet Soul, and knocked that up to 90’, meaning I was motoring as fast as a thoroughbred horse going all out as my pace picked up.

            I would have liked to fly, but the presence of the enraged Air spirits above me was pervasive and constant. They weren’t watching me after I landed, but if I went into the air, I would be facing Elemental attacks within a few breaths that wouldn’t let up until I was out of the air or dead.

            So unfair...

            I knew the direction I needed to go, so I was going full Eyes of Heaven in that direction, making sure I knew if there was anything in my way, the general infestation of Evil like watching a world painted in Sin. Just, ugh... but for now, it meant that not being able to see visually didn’t actually mean that much.

            Mortus alerted me that a massive wall of water was hurtling towards me from behind as the creature there shoved it at me. I definitely didn’t want to take a bath in the stuff, and the wave was overtaking me quickly... but that was fine.

            When Mortus called it, I jumped into the air, easily clearing fifteen feet; I turned around in midair and unloaded on the creature.

            The thing had seen the other one just ahead of me die, so I don’t know why it kept pissing me off. For this attack, the Shards stayed separate, I doubled the range with Spell Secret so they’d reach back to the thing, and they detonated into the thing’s big, round, needle-toothed lamprey void of a maw.

            Multiple Shards so multiple chances to crit, just because I was annoyed and wanted overkill.

            Indeed, of eight Shards detonating, two or three actually went right down its throat in the middle, and massive amounts of divine energy were infused into its unclean flesh violently.

            The gray spurts of Curse magic letting it know that Doom was here didn’t hurt me, either. I think it auto-crit the Wrath hit...

            The thing started to squeal/roar as I cleared the wave and came back down, sliding on the surface of the murky and mixed, partially purified water. Then its head blew apart into white oblivion, and flashes of Golden Light split it open for about another ten feet. At least a ton of tainted meat went flying in all directions, and it slumped into the waters, vivus blazing over it like a bonfire fed by gasoline.

            I didn’t stop, and continued after the wave as it hit the corpse of the first creature I’d killed, also blazing merrily now. The impact rolled the bulk of the creature over, and I jumped atop it, over it, and kept moving as the diverted wave, the power backing it all gone, rapidly receded.

            Christ and Mithar, the plants ahead were radiating living Black Evil. They were Animated...

            They looked like twisted reeds, but they had an ominous tar-Black gleam to them. Before I reached them, I pulled up Wrath and surrounded myself in a Wall of Fire with a quick Invocation to the Runes of my Pact.

            Golden flames surrounded me, kept by my will within five feet of me and just below my eye level. I tied them off to Primus to maintain, my Second Ring taking the job over with aplomb, anchoring the spell easily as it was very similar to something it could do. I wouldn’t be able to use more than minor Wrath effects while the Wall was up, but that was fine. The last thing I wanted to do was run through a stand of poisonous demonic sword reeds!

            The reeds in my path and around me charred and died before they could whip at me, as 17d6+20 of Purified Wrath and Kickers is pretty good at chewing on plants infested by Sin. I burned a path thirty feet wide through the patch of reeds, then swore as I saw the trees ahead moving in ways that were not part of the wind.

            Joy. I just needed a living Sin-infested forest to brighten my day. Hell on Earth, indeed...

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