NOVEL NEXT BECMI Chapter 147 – Death is, in fact, Quite Proud
"Forward magnify. That giant four-armed female on the balcony there."
Captain Emeril manipulated the holo display of his forward view. It leapt forward, centering on the towering figure there, actually nearly as tall as what were the tallest and brawniest Beast-folk we'd yet seen, some scaled, some furred, some with hide. One had three arms and was bright yellow, one was reptilian and bright crimson, and another was black and had a scorpion's tail, among other things.
She looked right back at us, and I flicked my hand out to cut the holo field, while Captain Emeril jumped back in shock when the emitter burst into sparks and began melting down in front of him.
"As I thought. Lady Edge to all gunners: Do NOT put your target locks on the big green four-armed female Beastial with the crown of bone, or you will lose your targeting comps and might lose your eyes. If there's any question of her presence, you go Mark-1 eyeball. Reply if you understand."
My ears rang with dozens of acknowledgments. If this were any kind of a normal fight, doubtless the Greens would be wondering at such a nonsensical order. However, they'd all been exposed to all the crazy possibilities of magic now, including worms that could burrow through solid stone, immaterial spirits, death spells coming in and reducing brave soldiers to instant corpses, six-leggedlizards that petrified those that met their eyes, and walking corpses and enough mutant things that shouldn't exist to just shrug and accept it now.
The discussions about the giant bugs that shouldn't even be able to breathe, and should collapse under their own weight, were particularly energetic. Cow-sized spiders were pretty horrific things, after all.
It did mean nobody was going to snipe her off, which was a shame. We could laud the Beastials' savage bravery and fanaticism, and still had no problem mowing them all down.
Swaths of white covered the landscape behind us, glowing stone over two days turning into pale phosphorescent mushrooms feeding on the vivic energy imbued into the land, changing the very nature of this place. A quarter-million and more corpses had fed the stone here so far, two-thirds of them undead, and the rich bounty was going to turn this place into a massive mushroom jungle if it survived the fight.
We'd lost a couple hundred soldiers to perma-death, lesser soldiers who'd been struck with high-Level magic like Death Spells and were instantly slaughtered. Those launching the spells had been dealt with instantly, and most such spells were Countered, Dispelled, or blocked, never reaching their targets before the Casters were picked off and dead.
If lasers didn't work, magic Arrows or an opportune STS missile could do the job, too, and there were no Casters who could threaten us from beyond the range of Archers using Bows or Crossbows with Distance and Accuracy active on them.
The Beastials had worked out and spread the knowledge that lasers were like fire and plasma shots like electricity, meaning that some of the more dangerous individuals and forces were being treated to Resist both.
Railgun loads and auto-cannons with Bane to Nifl on them, not so much. Those things had quietly gone into high production after such tactics were posited.
The main temple in the center of the cavern was a big pit in the ground, slowly being filled by waters from the dwarven Vivic Fountain. This last temple was the final hold-out of the Beastials, not the least because I'd long since collapsed and Shaped shut all three other exit tunnels on this side of the cavern, all part of clearing the cavern networks on the far side of them and basically the other side of the continent over the last twelve months.
There was no Annelid tunnel going down from here. The dungeons under the place might be big enough to store a lot of undead, but we'd already shown we weren't interested in exploring the dungeons and clearing them for loot and fame.
We were here to kill them all.
Long-range cannon shots detonated against the walls, shaking and cratering them and igniting vivic fires. There was no need to blast through them, as the vivic flames were devouring the necromantically-treated bones with greedy speed. In minutes the craters were collapsing the walls around them, occasionally precipitating some crowded defenders as they Burned down and gave way.
Whereupon everyone got to learn that dark priests Rebuking undead could drive vivus away from the area of effect with Divine rebuffing. It didn't stop the unwhite fires on the outside of the wall, but it did on the piles and interior.
It also helped expose those priests to sniper fire, and what was a thousand yards to a railgun anti-material shot? Hypersonic slugs of metal punched through hapless Beastial shamans and anything behind them as we rolled up slowly.
Great worms, both zombie and alive, were buried in the stone and ready to rise up among us. Seismic sensors picked them out, tremblesense narrowed them down, vivic saturation drove them up out of the ground to attack, and the circles of fighters they lunged up among cut them to shreds.
Undead corpses concealed under thin shells of stone, their own graves, burst out of them to do the same thing at distant commands. Lasers and point-blank arrows to the skull got most of them, lunging spears from multiple directions the rest.
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Lines of undead made from strong and sturdy corpses, treated and reinforced by unholy magicks, lumbered out to meet us. They were mowed down mercilessly and continually, Bane to Nifl and Icy on the barrels of the auto-lasers keeping them cold and able to continually fire at lower power and do the job.
The last final rush of clawing spirits surged out, hit the Interdiction, and hot hard light smashed into them and Burned them away like wisps of flammable vapor en vivus as they were forced to materialize.
The temple walls came into the extreme long range of the sidearms, and pulses of Vivic-chased light sprayed the walls from all directions, setting them on mistfire far, far faster than the shamans within could snuff them… not that any of the shamans saw fit to expose themselves to waiting snipers after the first dozen were picked off.
The last of the undead were mowed down by the auto-lasers, and the gates of the temple closed, even as the stone holding them upright was smoking as its mortar turned to dust and was crumbling down.
The walls were Burning down, mist pouring from them from thousands of vivic impact sites, and any defenders on them or the towers rising off them was abandoning them as stacked bones and skulls mortared to stone became a loose tangle of random rocks held together with disintegrating grit.
There were no relief forces, no flanking forces, no attacks from behind or below us coming in. We'd wiped out all the migratory, expansionist caverns of the Beastials over a good two years of fighting now, and then I'd sealed them off so we weren't chasing new numbers into those caverns. I knew where all the connecting caves and tunnels were, and such things weren't there anymore.
On top of that, Ritual Interdictions had been invoked, and extraplanar relief wasn't coming, either, nor was dimension-bending going to get anyone anywhere. I'd felt some of the attempts to Plane-Shift, maybe Earthjumping or Recalling elsewhere, or even going Ethereal… and nothing was going to be going anywhere unless it could beat my Caster Level check reinforcing the Veil, something very, very unlikely to work.
Even when at least a couple of those attempts were at post-Mortal levels. I swear I could feel the surprise when they failed, too. Attempting to open a Gate and bring in some really nasty things, it seemed…
There were Immortal eyes on what we were doing here, too.
The clerics of the Iberon Pantheon had dutifully been keeping their Patrons informed, as well as passing on the knowledge that Nifl was the Patron Immortal of these creatures, and likely had created them out of nothing. The complete extermination of a sponsored vassal species was a Masterstroke against the Patron Immortal, and the Immortals of the Pantheon were very keen on seeing this through, while making sure there was no Immortal interference.
I'd also been 'leaking' Immortal Power from Dread. This was designed as something they could detect imprecisely, and basically made it plain that Nifl was trying to pull some tricks off without the watching Immortals detecting Her. I'm sure that annoyed them greatly and they were watching very closely now, which meant that any overt retribution against us simply wasn't going to happen for what we were doing… although I'm sure She had a long grudge and, well, there was a Doom on the horizon, anyways.
I didn't know what had wiped the other Darkmoor, but I could NOT believe that the Entropic Immortals had ignored it. They loved bringing down successful things, after all.
A demonstration of the power of futuristic technology as a show of what mortals were capable of was a completely different and entertaining show, too… although I had absolutely no doubts that once the ramifications of scientific progress turning mortals away from the Immortals started to manifest, that was going to change quickly. Can't have endless games of manipulation if everyone just ignores the fact you exist, after all!
Accordingly, things were now coming to a head. The settlements, caves, and hidey-holes of the Beastials had been razed, collapsed, sealed, and eliminated. The only fortifications left standing were the Temple to Nifl in front of us, and it didn't look all that good with its walls falling down.
There were at least ten thousand surviving Beastials jammed into the place, most of them probably stuck in the dungeon caverns occupied by the lawn-mowered undead they'd trotted out to work on us. All the sly exit tunnels had already been blocked, collapsed, or filled in abruptly, so no more unsurprising assaults were coming from below the ground, either.
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"Bombard them, Lady Edge?" Captain Emeril asked during the impromptu tactical meeting. King Antius, Elder Equavus, ex-Regent Karrackheim, the Great Jordie, and Marius the Bronze were gathered with me to discuss our options. The latter wasn't the most powerful mage here, but was the most widely known and friendliest for most to deal with.
I was considered cold, distant, strange, unsettling, and quite intimidating. Couldn't imagine why.
I just looked at Marius, who was happy to pipe up, "You likely cannot see it with your machines, Captain, but there are unseen Force-fields in place around the temple, likely raised by Nifl Herself to protect the last of Her creations. You would be expending the devices to no effect whatsoever."
"Can they be brought down or disrupted?" he asked promptly, as there were certainly methods that could bring down scientific versions of the same.
"Why, yes," Marius smiled, his dark eyes dancing. "I believe the Lady has a surprise in store for them to that effect, pursuant to her disappearance for an hour or two before dawn."
"Everyone has memorized Mass Disk at least once, and the troops know they are going to need to get on them?" I inquired of Marius calmly.
"Word has gone out. Everyone remembers the shockwaves from the falling stalactites, and nobody wants to go flying like that." The brutal impact forces had sent hundreds of men flying off the ground as the force of the groundquake picked them up and flung them away like leaves. There'd been a lot of bruises and broken bones to fix from that incident, so using Mass Disks to get everyone off the ground had been brought up as a counter to it.
I'd let the spell go without anyone needing to pay for it. It was another of the 'goods-transporting' spells that could revolutionize logistics, and, well, wizards never needed excuses to learn new and useful magic that wasn't always of the flash-and-boom variety.
There was no such stalactite in position above the temple, of course, but I could Shape monstrous amounts of stone with Funf, so what did that matter, except make the detection of it nearly a mile up in the undersky more difficult?
"SEND OUT YOUR CHAMPIONS!"
The bold and very loud roar was perfectly translated and understood by everyone, echoing across the stone. I even heard it in Elven, amusingly enough.