NOVEL NEXT Chapter Eighty-One – To Poppa Slug
Yes, Demons can be Real too...
I was behind the arc of sight of the Sluggor. Sure, it had a bunch of self-exploding little goobers running around it, but what were they going to do, alert it a little girl was coming at it?
Tremble waited behind me, sheathed and ready as I arced across the battlefield behind the huge mass of the thing. It had to weigh more than a whale, but it also had to be tremendously painful and unstable for such an unnatural thing to endure here.
No worries. It was moving at a good clip, closing in on the panicking elves, whose arrows were basically sticking in about three feet of hardened fatty hide uselessly, and they were making to run as the crazed Warped men they were fighting bayed at them and pursued heavily.
I kept the smell and the purple-yellow Aura completely at bay with Vajra and Null respectively. The stench of the Sluggor could kill, and the mist was combined poison, disease, and acid, a lovely thing.
It was dragging itself along quicker with its huge arm, leaving a swathe of putrescent slime behind it as it went, none of which touched my feet as I swung in behind it, raced past a couple startled Pusboys, and leapt onto its back.
Tremble bit in, in full Legendary Demon-Slaying Mode, and +X drove into the thick hide, splitting it open like a rotting fruit as I raced forward, not quite touching the heaving bulk.
A trait of these disease-and-poison resistant bastards was the ability to totally ignore the infections racing through their bodies, not feeling any pain. It was the blessing the men who’d been gifted with that purple Aura were using to press on in the face of the Fireballs that hammered into them and cooked more than a few of them to ash.
Still, the power of that much anathema parting its back open belatedly got a reaction from the thing as I sliced the bastard open, and I leapt into the air as it turned its bulb of a head around, not really possessing a spine and so more elastic than would seem possible for its size.
I was twenty feet in the air, Tremble pointing down underneath my feet. It stared at the massive wound opened along its back in surprise, but didn’t look up in time to see Tremble coming down onto it.
She buried in hilt-deep, which caused something like “Awk!” to blurt out of its mouth as a Spirited Valorous Charge punched a whole lot of Banefire deep inside it. I bounced up as the fat and whatever passed for organs around Tremble exploded out, and then came back down to hammer my Sword’s quillons with my feet, driving it completely down into the resulting hole from the gore explosion.
Whereupon Tremble began to inject a Blooding Sharding into this thing every three seconds.
I reached back to my Masspack, and drew out Fall.
My Autobow was only up to +Drei, so no true Speed at work yet. I did a full layout somersault in midair as its sprits rotated, the string drew taut, and I brought it down to start popping my first Pusboy before I truly hit the ground.
Force quarrels sped out as fast as I could rack it, keeping the Strength bonus down to +5 for ease and speed. With my Girdle on, I could effortlessly pump the action, pull the string back, and the Force quarrel would manifest in place.
Pusboys began to explode as fast as I could rack and pump. Alas, no vivic on them, have to clean them up later.
The Sluggor, however, had stopped moving, and was now merely flailing about wildly with that gargantuan meat fist. Given that its bulb of a head was on multi-colored Wrathfire, and suspicious smoke was starting to spurt out of the huge slobbering mouth on the front of its lower body, a lot of startled eyes were turned its way.
Mistfires were flowing off the wound on its back and ignited its back trail quickly, leaping along it like gasoline. Feeling opportunistic, I popped the Pusboys in that direction, and their explosions of virulent goo also burst into vivus as the unwhite flames fed upon the spurting Warp energy within these creatures.
I maintained fire as the incensed Pusboys converged on me, popping them precisely as they clustered up. There were a bunch of them, but that only meant they were easier to shoot as I crouched down, skated backwards, and drove a bolt through two or three of them at a time.
I was poking and popping the last of them, a trail of vivus following along smoothly behind, when a really weird groan came from the Sluggor.
There was an odd light glowing from the cut on its back, which seemed to be ripping open in the death throes of the demon. Its body seemed to be swelling, and there was a strange popping as its virulent Aura was devoured in a second, ringing it in a circle of whirling vivus. Vivic fire was drooling out its mouth, like it was puking out its guts, but there wasn’t enough left of the head above to really scream as it seemed to glow.
And something came up out of the ground.
There was no denying the sight, as a pair of giant, wispy jaws, like a surfacing worm or snake or something, lunged up and closed, fully enclosing the struggling Sluggor… just before it exploded.
The sound was silent to all but the soul, but it staggered everyone else on the field and hammered my Null, sending me back three steps in reflex. The Warp army was ripped through by a moving wall of vivus, and every one of the bastards that had sold their souls to the Warp gods fell down in shock and horror. Corpses of their own lit up like bonfires across the field, and suddenly there was waist-high unwhite mist everywhere, tugging at them, feeding on them, and drawing out the unnatural strength and vitality they’d been given by their Patrons.
The Pusboys naturally blew up in little balls of vivus, and everyone could tell there was only mopping up left to do. Where the Sluggor had been, the ethereal jaws had pulled down and vanished, and there was no sign of it left behind. Well, unless you counted a battlefield full of vivic mist.
Tremble spun back to me, pulsing with excitement. She hovered over my shoulder as she watched me using Fall. I skated through the mist and held down the trigger as I worked the action, moving from one target to the next without stopping, sending the horrified marauders spinning and dying one after another.
There was one big sucker, with irregularly spiked skinplate in the vastly impractical designs and huge pauldrons favored by the Warp, crying out and trying to force back the vivus, riding away from the fight on a red-scaled beast that looked a cross between a scaled bull and a demonic bulldog.
I punched two bolts into the hind legs of his ride, ending that little flight attempt, but there was no need to do more. Two Lightning Bolts on the ground, and one Thunderbolt descending from above as he screamed defiance, blew him, his injured mount, and his horrible armor aesthetics into scraps of metal and flesh, which all began to burn readily in the eager and hungry vivic mist around.
I hit my Name Karma cap on Fall, and while I kept him out, I raised him up and didn’t bother to kill steal from these others. There was a unit of powerful men who were putting up some kind of fight, until probably two hundred Shards ripped into the center of their formation, taking out the middle of the lines and opening them up for the elves to rush in and encircle them. Weapons crackling with channeled electricity from Energy Grasp made contact, and they twitched and fell one after another, smoking and popping with residual voltage.
I saw Briggs and Estemar in the middle of the field, where Briggs was blowing open a path for eager elves to press into and follow him, hollowing out the middle of the Warp reavers’ formation and sending bodies falling or flying in every direction with irresistible strength. With their morale somewhere around their soles, the raiders wanted only to flee, but those who started to do that only earned themselves some accurate and meticulous arrow fire in the back... of the neck, usually.
Off to the left, I saw a group of elven soldiers in light mail mounted on deer-like, graceful steeds come racing out of the forest, spears bright and moving to ride down any fleeing troops heartlessly. Just so they wouldn’t have more to do, I skated that way, picking off any runners as I headed back in the direction I’d left Forge and my stuff.
On my back, Mikle spoke up for the first time in something more legible than “Weee!” or “Aaaaaah!”
“That big demon was really ugly,” he said somberly behind my ear.
“Greater Sluggors are known for disease, gluttony, and being hard to kill, not being winners of beauty contests,” I agreed. “Look at this mist. The Land is feeding well! We’ve done good work here today. I hope they send more of those things!”
“Is that what those jaws were?” He shuddered slightly in awed memory.
“Yes. The Sluggor attracted some metaphysical Attention, and the vivus was a great excuse to get eaten. This field will probably be filled with flowers by morning…”
“Wow.” The little brownie was enraptured. He’d probably never imagined he’d brush up against a manifestation of Nature at that level.
“Let’s go pick up Forge, and see what these elves have to say…”
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Forge anchored itself back to my belt as Mikle and I watched the unwhite flames rolling across the pustule-ridden backtrail of the marching army. It was slow and gradual, but it underscored just what it meant to Feed the Land. The Land’s attention was here, and it was using the harvest of vivic fire to actively digest the external energies present across a wide area.
More feed, more fuel!
The elven riders came around in an impromptu escort as I skated back out of the tree line with Forge and its load in tow. They gave it and me some very weird looks as I skated along. I totally did not notice that their slender mounts had to work to keep up with my leisurely pace, and I’m sure they didn’t notice, either.
Mikle, however, waved at them in a friendly manner, seated up on my shoulder now that everything was all done and taken care of.
It also gave me my first good look at these formal military elves.
High gear quality, all of it Master’s Work, and a fair chunk of it with light Enchantments. I didn’t know enough to know if they were elites or normal, but they didn’t feel like a true elite company, although they carried themselves with the skill and ease of veterans. These antelope-riders were all mounted archers and spearmen, the apex of light cavalry, and truly dangerous skirmishers. I hadn’t seen any heavier cavalry, which wasn’t a good sign… but then, these guys weighed less than a hundred pounds, so heavy cavalry was a monumentally stupid thing for them to be.
At least they weren’t wearing any stupid armor, which always made me cringe when I saw it. So, no overly tall helms or crazy fluting. Their armor was graceful, light, and all the alloys tended to have some mithral in them, making them the equivalent of the finest steel by weight. They did seem to have a great preference for wonderfully-made cloaks delineating them by units, but I could forgive that because the style points were so high.
And yeah, straight swords instead of curved on these fellows, although spears were universally more common, as expected of soldiers.
Briggs called out as I came running in, bumping his vivus-burning Hammer into piles of corpses being set up by the elves. Vivic explosions accelerated the slow process of the Land, as the mist that had spread out everywhere had mostly dissipated.
There were several elves in rather more splendid attire hovering near him, and their large eyes turned on me as I came skating in to join them, towing my luggage behind me. Estemar, looking a bit shell-shocked at how everything had gone down, had more than a little awe in his eyes as I came up to join the conversation.