The Power of Ten, Book Five: Versatile Wizardry

“You seem to have acquitted yourself well,” the Colonel noted, glancing at the stacked heads, and their prizes of petrified eyes and drooping mandibles. The Mick happened to look at my eyes, saw the anger starting to build, and just sighed.

“To be honest, we were expecting to have a bit of trouble collecting our commission and needed some spare change to tide ourselves. The Spiders volunteered,” the Mick informed him calmly. He clenched his own fist, and a barrage of stone coming in from the side ran into the arching volley of dozens of bristle-missiles. Shouts from nearby indicated that we hadn’t been the only targets of the hundreds of hair-spikes in the volley.

The much-reduced Swarm had managed to reach some populated areas. The people had long since fled to areas with stronger Wards, but there was a lot of fairly normal livestock that had been left behind.

The Spiders descended to feed upon those fairly normal cattle in a bloody frenzy. I took one look at them, shook my head, and detoured around the slaughter, aiming for the Commander.

“Why aren’t you helping kill them while they are massacring the cattle?” the Colonel demanded, still sticking with us as if trying his best to irritate me.

“Those Spiders are all dead. Whoever runs this ranch has access to some potent Poison Magic. All of those cattle were Poisoned with a terrifically dangerous insecticide in their blood, and only had hours to live, whether or not the Spiders made it here. Someone knew you wouldn’t hold, and decided to make their cows a weapon.”

The Commander Tarantula was barreling through the barns and corral area, its sweeping legs sending explosions of debris flying in all directions. Warriors ripped their ways into every house and building in the area, looking for living prey, and sent everything not natural tumbling in their frantic hunting for more Human prey.

The Mick whistled, his eyes drifting over the thousands of Spiders feasting on the unfortunate, terrified cattle in all directions, the steers’ terrified calls only egging the Tarantulas on. “Stone cold...”

“Venkman,” the Colonel sighed in resignation, his voice sounding suspiciously unsurprised at the result. “No doubt he’ll play it into full reimbursement for his ranch, despite the fact he shouldn’t have a ranch out here at all.”

The Mick glanced at me again, and I just narrowed my eyes.

“I’m going to Chain my way through the Warriors and take out the Commander, Captain Mick,” I told him, ignoring the Colonel. “It’ll probably take four volleys to bring it down. Spikes!” I warned them, shifting aside. Glenn and Red did their combo, the Colonel also astutely dodging aside this time and taking advantage of their cover.

“We have you covered, Lady Fae. Take it out!” the Mick nodded.

I would have liked to just volley it down four times, but I didn’t have my own Commander-class Beasts for blockers. Residual and Repeated Magic would make each shot more dangerous than the one before, but oh well.

I spun up my first set of Shards from a thousand feet away, ignoring the Colonel’s very interested expression at the sight of them, and let fly. Shards converged to the point of an Orb, beaming out as a Ray, which Split from a Force prism into two identical Rays and burned through the air across the intervening space and slammed into the Great Commander’s thorax.

Its squealing chitter carried clearly back to us, but I was already on to Chained Dartrays, which had their own Repeated pattern built up that I was exploiting now.

The Spiders didn’t get dusted instantly, but they did fall burning, and would be reduced to ash in short order within a few minutes. Chains of Rays snaked around like things alive, unerringly seeking out targets and burning holes right through them, and I grimly began to press into the last of the Spider’s defenders.

-----

“Where the fuck did you find this girl, Mick?” Colonel Harrison hissed, having blatantly jumped off his Earth Wave onto an empty Disk and taking over a blocking vector with his Ice Magic.

He was much more powerful than any of the Hunter group, and could erect a towering Ice shield over a great area with barely a pull of his arm. He was also glancing at her to see if she noticed how awesome he was in comparison, too.

“She’s a Void Mage. Fell out of a spatial rift after I blew that Hunting Horn I used to have.” The Colonel nodded once, not seeing the Tool the Mick had been wearing at his side earlier. “A sixteen-year-old Void Mage,” the Mick pointed out, “with default silver eyes.”

The Colonel’s eyes widened as he read into that, realized he might be out of his league, and then they all juked hard left as rows of cleaving spikes that looked like clutching spider legs erupted out of the ground all around them, cutting down at them with cruel barbed spikes. With astonishing smoothness, the Disks parted around the writhing, hacking legs and came back together, the Colonel hurriedly sending out a wave of Earth to destabilize the ones in front of them, while the other Earth-wielders heaved a dozen others over sideways to prevent them from scything through the group.

A second later the waving spike-legs of Earth Magic were out of the way, and another deadly pair of coruscant Rays derived from over a dozen spiraling colorful Force wedges woven tighter and harder than any magic the Colonel had ever seen punched out, drove into the Great Commander, and then spiraled out to tear into any Warriors close by in a web-like linking of magic. The stony jaws of the Black-Banded Azurite Tarantula screamed in pain as one of the stumps of its legs exploded, and the tree-sized limb blew off from its side.

The sky seemed to explode with bristle-missiles coming down at them, and all the Spiders in the area seemed to be charging at them.

The Colonel hurriedly joined the effort of the two Ice mages with the squad. Ice congealed in the sky, and descended into an arctic hell ahead of them, instantly layering the Spiders there in rime and soul-blasting cold, slowing them down. The incoming volley was slammed to the ground by the pure mass of the descending magic, weighed down with Ice.

A Note of the purest Sound the Colonel had ever heard arose out of nowhere as Lady Fae lowered that beautifully simple Staff she was carrying, and more crystalline wedges of Force, each in a different color and pattern, condensed into existence. All of their magic thrummed and seemed to pulse into time with them, the magic coming to them more purely, easier, and faster than before, as if waiting to be wielded.

Shardrays separated into nearly a score of lines of death as Void Magic sang in the air, and shot out in all directions.

Frozen Spiders exploded wildly in front of them, blowing apart in eruptions of ice and whiteness as a road was plowed right towards the Commander.

“MORE ICE!” Lady Fae demanded, the treble of that incredible Note still thundering in their blood. All of them heaved at the magic, expanding the frozen zone out in front of them for the Spiders to run into and freeze solid almost instantly.

The Commander had formed an interwoven shield of Earth Magic about itself, and was raising a massive Web in the sky, aiming to bring it down on them and encapsulate them.

Seventeen differently-colored lines of energy, all of them sharing the same flames spiraling about them, converged on the Great Commander after they tore through its horde, bent up and around its shield as if alive, and descended on it.

The Web in the sky evaporated in mid-Cast, and the Great Commander bolted from its cover.

It only had six legs now, and was definitely not moving fast enough to escape her range.

“Damn,” the Colonel breathed, seeing the smoking holes and glimmer of frost around the multiple holes all over the massive Tarantula. The amount of punishment it had taken was breathtaking, and it wasn’t about to end. Lady Fae swirled up another assortment of seventeen crazy Force wedges wound about with those multi-colored flames, pointed with her Staff, and they converged to a point, then into those Rays, Split into parallel beams, and lanced out.

A towering wall of rock and dirt rose to intercept them, but the Rays merely turned, each of them speeding all the way around the sides of the wall to find the target hidden behind the Earthen barrier.

Everyone recognized the deathcry when they heard it, although it was rapidly drowned out by the terrifying purity of that play of Notes dancing in their hearts and souls and pounding on the nerves of the shocked and dismayed Spiders all around.

The stone wall ahead of them collapsed, as did the previous one the Spider had put up. Behind it was revealed the Great Commander Spider, fully ablaze with the misting white fire, all of its legs blasted cleanly off, and holes punched through it big enough for a man to jump into.

Lady Fae ran them right up to the corpse as it became a misting bonfire, and proceeded to start punching Dartrays out in all directions as the Spiders all around went berserk and charged at them, losing all sense of direction or guidance.

There were no barrages of bristle-missiles, only berserk Spiders leaping and trying to reach them in a rapidly growing pile of blazing Spider corpses. They rose slowly up the heaping mass of corpses and crawling Tarantulas below them, and rained Ice and Chains of death down upon them.

------

The Swarm finally ended after twenty minutes more. The Colonel brought down four consecutive Skyflame Funerals, turning the entire area below us into a complete inferno and consuming the last of the Spiders as it did so. Boosted by the Sublime Chord, his magic covered twice the normal dimensions, and the late-coming Spiders simply ran into their deaths as his Verdant Fire woke up to greet them with delayed eruptions of greenish fire from the ash.

I was pretty damn sure he’d sold out The Mick’s squad to start this entire process. That rancher hadn’t had time to poison all his cattle like that, unless he knew the Spiders were coming very early...

I picked off stragglers, while the squads of soldier-mages still around the fringes killed those too crazed or confused to come after us. The Sublime Chord certainly helped. Sound Magic, Sublime Chord, and Magevoice combined marvelously to give the magic of the Humans in the area a +4 Caster Level bonus, which here meant about double damage or a full Widen of the area of their spells.

Of course, I had a lot of Crystals to gather. Fortunately, Eyes of the Eagle, Mask of Clarity, and Void TK working from line of sight meant I actually didn’t have much problem doing so.

“What kind of Seed burns like that?” Colonel Harrison had to ask, watching as the massive collection of incredibly tough Spider carcasses, including the massive Commander, burned down to fragile shells that were collapsing into fine white ash with incredible speed, coating the ground with knee-high mist as they did so.

“A Firefrost Seed,” I replied in a clipped voice. “Works by tearing the molecular motion out of part of the target, then subjecting the other half to the stolen heat. The effect is something like freezing the outside of a pitcher of water into ice, and then turning the inside into super-heated steam. The dead break apart rapidly, as the bonds which hold them together have been shattered like fine glass.

“It’s a rare Seed, so you’ve probably not heard of it.” So rare that obviously only the most elite and wealthy people would have such a thing. Not that my Seed had anything to do with vivic flame, but I was answering what kind of Seed was burning like that, not what kind of Metamagic Feat was.

“That... sounds like a nasty way to die,” the Colonel confessed, shaking his dark shaven head. “Can’t think of anything better to use it on,” he added quickly, looking around at the huge area of white ground, and the very small mounds of white ash that were all that remained of the dead Spiders.

“I heard you mention the owner of the ranch. Make sure his compensation takes into account that the dead Spiders are all contributing to the fertility of the ground here because of the Firefrosting Spiders there. He’s going to have an absolutely incredible harvest if he plants here for the next few years, or sets up an orchard or something.”

The Colonel seemed to find that idea pleasing. “I’ll do that, Miss Fae,” he agreed. “Let me extend the thanks of the United States Army for your help here. May I ask where you are from? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

“An interesting question,” I admitted, appearing to think the probing question over. “I admit I haven’t visited your nation here before, even though I’m quite well-traveled. I believe my citizenship was kind of whatever was convenient for the family at the time, and I don’t have any identification on me.” I glanced east, and shrugged, then smiled slightly. “I also don’t have any desire to return to the family for the moment.”

None of which was not true.

“I’m sure we could arrange some form of a visa for the Lady quickly enough!” the Colonel spoke up swiftly, clearly ready to get into the good graces of an elite.