[Be Gone] Ch 2 – Meeting Something Not to Remember

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  Oh, that didn’t look good.

            No, that looked downright Evil. Horribly much so. Revolving darkness, something inside it, trying to drag my attention to it, and with it, hook my soul and drag it down and away. My Heaven Pact was blazing in reaction to its very presence.

            My eyes were wriggling in their sockets as I clamped them shut, trying to drive away the sight and even the memory of what I had looked on, knowing only that I shouldn’t visualize it, it wasn’t made for mortal minds... and I was tumbling into it or by it, I couldn’t tell...

            My eyes ripped free of their nerves, and turned around in their sockets, writhing and biting and burning, trying to dig themselves in further, following the memory, the sight, the madness...

            Wrath flared as darkness bloomed in my eye sockets, and my Pact reacted with Light. I could only scream as the Animated eyes Went Away, and with them my sight.

            Be Gone, gawddammit...

And then something tugged me hard sideways. It was like gravity, but not, and reality was changing around me as all my other senses went into complete overdrive to compensate for what I had just lost.

Yeah, fucktards, I still had ALL the Permanent Spells and stuff in force, thoughtfully upgraded every time Ael gained a couple of Caster Levels...

Detect Dimensions at VIII, Behold the Wonder of the Weft of Worlds, said I was going down a dimensional hole, a rupture in the planes caused by a planar collision/fusion/invasion. Joy.

Looked like my wild ride along the skein of realities was coming to an end...      

------

            Damn!

            I was falling from the sky, toward what looked like a lake of dark slime below. My stomach and my brain stopped trying to exchange locations as I focused as hard as I could, fighting down everything to recenter and readjust myself while my alternate senses threw up into my skull. My Eyes of Heaven had kicked back on urgently, and I rocked back mentally.

            I willed myself to stop, reaching out for that incredibly reliable ball of shining Words older than the universe wrapped around my soul, which not even that damn devouring Death Curse could touch.

            My Pact was formed by the foundational power of Heaven. What was a little Death Curse from a Legendary Death Titan Demi-Lich to that?

            Angel Walk kicked in, and I was first slowed, then stopped for a moment in midair.

This place was on the receiving end of a cesspool of transcendental Evil influence. Mentally, it felt like I was standing underneath a waterfall of sewage as the Sin of that alien world anchored itself here and exerted its grip on a mortal world.

Behold the Wonders of the Soul of Reality, Detect Alignment at VIII, by default oriented on Evil and synched up with my Heavenpact to stack for an impressive nine-hundred-foot range forward range, half that in radius, let me know with searing exactitude that I was feeling a force of Evil and Chaos that was way, way more powerful than I was all around me. It had latched onto this mortal world and was dumping all sorts of happy Black Sin upon it, like shedding dry skin dust, in doing so.

I was literally in an area that would be like Hell on Earth.

I felt an instant massive and extremely hostile presence whelming in the air around me, and could make out corrupted Elemental spirits all around, infused with Sin and turned from their original purpose. I knew that I was attracting their attention being up here, a massively opposed Aligned figure, and only the threat of Primus, my Prime Elemental Command Ring was holding them at bay. Without a second thought, I released my momentum again, and started sliding back down towards the ground.

            I was back to basics in a way... although basics with high-Level Gear was going to be okay, and the Permanent spells and Warlock Pact certainly helped.

            Oh, and the Tats, too. I couldn’t actively manipulate them, but I could still assign Essence on the fly, and reassign it at Renewal.

            With an Inspiration from my Melee Levels, I could shift any Essence involved in Soul Feats, too...

            I slid down rapidly through the air. It was not free-fall, still controlled, but obviously not flying. The angry presences in the air were still whelming, but not as hastily as before, content to see me ‘running away’ to the ground.

            The ground wasn’t going to like me any more than they were. Suck. The whole ground below was utterly saturated with Sin, which meant any living thing was going to be demonically-infused, or something similar, Corrupted and Tainted.

            I grit my teeth, feeling Aelryinth’s thoughts grinding away in motion in the back of my head at a speed I couldn’t even comprehend, and a dark, gnawing presence there chasing him around and around within it.

            He might be awhile before we could get together again. That meant it was up to me. Me, without that massively buffed set of mental Stats, making me feel so dumb and slow.

            Oh, well, it was time to be a full gamer, and work with what I had.

            I was basically Featherweighted, falling at about six feet per second, and the ground was a couple hundred feet down. I didn’t have a lot of time.

            Staff!

            Mortus Dius was tied to my soul. I’d lost my grip on it when the Curse had gone off, but it was never out of my reach. I reached out, closed my hand, and there it was.

            And it was off-balance?

            I looked at the oversized crystalline skull impaled on the Spear of the Four Seasons, polished obsidian licking with vivic flames and purification, the soul that had been attached to it consumed and gone forever after defying death for all those millennia.

            Well, fuck him. I am going to make a Dreadskull out of the bastard, see if I don’t.

            It probably wanted oblivion more than punishment, anyways. Taking it down had finally destroyed the Shroud attached to Pentara. Likely only destruction of its soul could truly do that, if it was one of the original Casters who’d made the thing, regardless of how far down the line it was.

I yanked the Skull off the Spearhead and tossed it back into the Masspack I was still wearing. I grit my teeth, going through my other assets as rapidly as I could, while the Spear receded into the head of Mortus Dius.

            Soul Magic and Pact Magic meant I had staying power, but not burst power. That meant I could fight basically forever, but taking down something tough would be problematic, as would taking down large numbers of things at once.

            I could fight reasonably well, at least by normal monster standards, but I didn’t consider myself a Melee person, regardless of how well I could do at it as an Eight. I was like living in a game character. I didn’t have access to the Matrix which powered all Ael’s spells, and which, just glancing at it right now, was in a total bollux as the Curse was ripping out and destroying things, while Aelryinth was waiting to write himself back into existence in a new and improved way.

            Star Mage on top of Master Archtheurge. Wouldn’t that be something? If I lived through this...   

            Okay, I needed some form of big hit. My Staff was the reasonable resource... I should still have passive Caster Level, but with no access to my Matrix, even Sieging and Reserve Casting would be offline. Unfortunately, the Spells in my Staff were more the Binder/Sealer types, not intended for major damage to single or multiple targets.

            I hadn’t set it up like a classic Staff of the Magi, after all, figuring that was just a waste of time and power for someone like me. Oh well...

            It would have to go back onto Shards, but I had no access to even Cantrips at the moment, let alone my beloved Perpetual Shards.

            Oh, wait, that isn’t quite true...

            I reached over into my Masspack and drew out a Wand.

            It was crude in Aelryinth’s eyes, although it looked fine to me. A length of oak, carved with sigils of containment, focus, alignment, and direction; a very basic starter Wand, literally the first Wand carved by a Wizard or Artificer... Artificer, this one.

            A Valence I, Caster Level One Wand of Shards.

            This was almost a completely useless Toy from a normal standpoint. One Shard wasn’t going to do much damage to anything, and with only a hundred charges, what were you going to kill? You might use it for rabbit hunting, if you could get close enough, because it only had a range of a hundred and ten feet.

            But... if you had the Wand as Staff Feat — picked up as Mulcaster and I worked out Wandslinging and a bunch of things — along with a whole lot of Shardcaster passive abilities, this was a hundred shots of brutally powerful stuff, made really cheap. The Artificer Use Magical Device-related stuff didn’t require a Matrix or Core at all. It was all Skill-based!

            A section of Mortus Dius clicked out, and I inserted the Wand into the slot there. This didn’t intrinsically substitute for Wand as Staff, but allowed the spells from the Wand to benefit from the magic on the Staff, without me having to enchant the Wand. It was a Wand Chamber, one of the most useful ways to use a Wand from in-game.

            I had a bundle of a dozen more of these things in the Masspack. Even if I couldn’t ride and stack two dozen Metas on top of them, I still had all the passive effects.

            I also had access to some Theurgies, and could stack some Soul magic, Windshots, and Wrath on top of them, none of which required a Matrix.

            There were not going to be any stacking spells, what with my Matrix currently being shattered and frittered away to get rid of the dregs of the Curse. Damn, Ael was Refocusing basically every two seconds as he was doing this, pulses of diamond-like Concentration battering the back of my brain, all those thoughtstreams going crazy as the copy/pasting and grinding continued.

            Seven times he’d sliced away chunks of himself and me, insulating me from the agony of it, but that was only until we came back together, and then I’d remember it all too well.

            Now he was shoving all that loose Karma down into me instead, probably deducing that the Curse wouldn’t go after the rest. That was pretty efficient, as I was processing all the basic non-magical stuff we had. My only limits were time effects, Class Levels, and the fact I was a lot dumber than him, so I couldn’t fit everything in... but that was fine, I just had to fit enough.

            Things were surging through the swampy morass below where I was going to land. That wasn’t a good sign. Lifesigns that were Black with concentrated Sin were in the soupy liquid Sin below...

            It was about that time that I realized I didn’t mind so much not being able to visibly see all this. The magic here was heavy with Black Conjuration and Alteration, never a good sign, and the Elemental signatures were severely bent by concentrated Sin. I had to grit my teeth and actually back off my sensitivity to this stuff so the filth on my thoughts was pushed away, and I could only see the mounds of shit, as opposed to what the mounds were made of...

            This is a byproduct of massive planar corruption, I realized promptly. The Undead Baneskull on Mortus Dius lifted off, exposing the carrier space below it. It zipped inside the Banespace as it shrank, the Dark Bishop’s skull becoming another dot, while a certain horned skull belonging to a malebranche named Gorgrispiel spun out, enlarged, and settled over the top. Black banefires promptly lit up on the horns and eyes of the skull.

            It was Bane against things with the Evil Subtype, which basically meant Fiendish in some form or another, which was basically what Sin Corrupted you into...

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