-You don’t do things small, do you?- I /asked rhetorically.

-Hey, don’t blame it on me! How was I supposed to know that was a real Matron and not a landscape Summons! They all look the same to me!- she /shot right back.

-Admit it. It was obviously the head of the Arwic Hive and you just wanted to kill it.-

Princess Kristie /grumbled somewhat. -Fine, I wasn’t taking a chance.-

-And now we have literally a thousand bugs chasing us.-

-Which we can run away from at any time, and which is totally cool because they are offering themselves up to be wiped away by the army-slaying Magos I drag around to do such stupid things.-

I rolled my eyes and sent off another set of Split Shardrays, the diamond wedges of Piercing magic ringing the beams and showing that the damage was not generic Force, it was strictly defined piercing damage. The Rays slammed back into toughest members of the horde of olthoi racing after us in single-minded frenzy, hundreds of them Burning with multiple flames right now.

Kristie hadn’t bothered to wipe off the death pheromones of the Matron from herself, and the monstrous magical bugs wouldn’t stop chasing until the smell was gone. They were also generating their own ‘Kill Her!’ pheromones that were sweeping up every single olthoi Summons we stumbled across, in addition to random hives and nests we crossed, grabbing patrols and everything and sending them raging after us.

The air was thrumming with the wings of the fliers, droning like thunder as they tried to catch us, and instead ran slam-bam into a Magos with ceaseless Darts with Kickers going off, and a damn Hag who could outrun a bird overground, let alone these clumsy fliers who could barely get their weight off the ground.

Even the spider-like killer olthoi chewing at the ground with four limbs as they scuttled after us had no chance of catching her. And, well, if a group came up in front of us, Kristie had no compunctions whatsoever about barreling forward at full speed, smashing through startled olthoi, shattering carapaces, sending acidic blood flying everywhere, bugs shriek-screaming and filling the air with death pheromones as they died and Quaver issued its dislike of them in swaths of Lost Light cracking and crunching them loudly.

I didn’t have to worry about Dispels, so I was switching between Chained Fastcast Darts to deliver Kickers and Split Chained Shardrays for some damage to the tough things, pounding and pulping into the mass of bugs raging after us. Carapaces in green, violet, red, dark blue, black, white, and brown screamed and dropped when the Shardrays punched through them violently, creating great holes in their armor and organs and splashing glowing green acidic blood everywhere, while they just kind of stumbled, fell over, and died, trampled by those behind them when the Kickers bit in deep and did their things.

Vivic fire spurted and feasted at the magical creatures’ death, nom-nomming away in trails of unwhite fire the olthoi ignored, as well as the way mushroom spores popped and Burned around the vivus…

I was leaving trails of their dead behind us, and had been for miles. If I was good, I could time a spell right on top of a Summons area, and so Seal the point even as Kris dragged the Summons on top of it away and they were lost in the shuffle of bugs jostling for position as they ran after us.

There were some tough bastards in the mix here, but the majority of them were under 300 Health, and ninety-plus percent under 500. That was enough for Shardrays to pop them, especially with their vulnerability to piercing damage, and the Kickers riding the Shards were enough to finish off those that weren’t killed with the initial hits, or the numerous weaker ones trailing and trying to keep up. Wailing and shrieking olthoi in all four main body-types screeched and died as they pumped out their lifeblood, and we let them drop and die and Burn.

Wiping the fliers was primary, as they were the only olthoi with ranged attacks. We weren’t exactly vulnerable to the Acid they were spitting, pre-Cast Resistances and Protections up, but I didn’t like to take chances. The swarms of them buzzing above their fellows made perfect targets to swat out of the sky and send tumbling and crunching to the ground.

For the rest, it was just killing the fastest and closest ones most likely to reach us, at which point Kris slowed down so we wouldn’t lose the rest. The bugs would get a second or tenth wind and charge up closer, and then go spitting and spraying ruptured innards in tandem with those before them.

I was getting up to 75 kills every six seconds at my best rate, and the horde behind me wasn’t going down in size. Kris was running by every spawn, nest, and hive that she could see as she booked it across the landscape, and the olthoi were squealing and charging immediately to the attack, no hint of hivalry, rivalry?, for being in different hives or swarms apparent at all.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

I had already killed thousands, and the swarm behind us was actually GROWING. It was surreal to watch, even as streaks of burning jetsilver diamonds pulsed into them and sent dozens at a time shrieking to their deaths all Burning alive and whatnot, to be trampled uncaringly by the single-minded pursuit of those behind.

-I confess that your talent for pissing off bugs is extreme. I can smell you from here, so you must be driving the olthoi just insane.-

-I’ll line ‘em up, you knock ‘em down,- she /replied breezily, keeping a look out of my eyes and the Detect Bugs and Evil I had up. The latter actually Detected non-Good and thus they overlapped some, but the Detect Bugs was more specialized and had a much longer range given the fact olthoi were alien to the environment and what Primal Magic I had reacted adversely to them.

A normal Isparian mage only able to target a handful of these things at a time would have been overwhelmed by everything, but that wasn’t me. These lesser olthoi weren’t much danger to me, and the Paradox Olthoi clustered around that mountain at the south end of their territory had absolutely been the first ones I blew all to shit, taking multiple spells given how tough and magic-eating they were.

-Three miles to the Citadel Valley!- Kris /announced cheerfully, giving me a look at the cleft in the mountains to the west ahead of us where Gaerlan’s grounded once-flying Empyrean Citadel was stuck. She zeroed in on the gaps in the peaks there, and we both noted the dark, sparking spiral of smoke worming its way up into the sky there.

-Don’t recall that in the Mick’s description,- she /grinned. -Looks like something with too much Elemental energy around is burning, maybe?-

-No, no, I don’t think so,- I /lied badly. -Just a coincidence, some minor Ward leakage, nothing to be concerned about. He’s still in there, trapped in his Phylacteric Prison, assaulted by uncontrollable energies all hours of the day and night, yes, indeed.-

-Such an optimist you are!- she /answered cheerfully, slowing down another beat as I scanned the horizon. -Hey, that looks like another Mansion on that hillside over there.- She’d been a bit preoccupied with overrunning spawn sites and hives and whatnot to notice the building standing forlornly on the mountainside miles behind us.

I /agreed with her. -Why don’t we swing by and investigate it in between dodging thousands of olthoi?- I /asked her.

She just /laughed back, glancing north, where a dark wedge was spilling down the mountain ahead right for us. -Hey, more bugs to join the fun!- The dark stain of a major hive sprawled down from the top of the mountain, home to at least hundreds of bugs, if not thousands of them, tunnels worming through the stone to house them all. It looked like all the excavated stone had been brought out as sludge and packed up into the fifth towering major hive structure we’d seen since coming into the Olthoi North.

Master Oswald had assured us there were at least eight of the things scattered in the mountains and the plains below said mountains, and likely there were several concentrated on the Olthoi Island off the coast.

They’d been attracted by all the buzzing following something, and had enough brains to turn out in force and try to join the fighting and the hunt. I looked at the angles and realized they actually would cut us off on our direct course at this speed, Kris figuring it out at the same time.

Kris kicked it up a notch, laughing at the olthoi behind us, who seemed to find new life and frenzy with the approaching olthoi in the distance.

I spun my Disk around and let those coming in from the north trying to broadside us have it, especially the fliers skimming over the landscape and leading the way. Given I had a range of a thousand yards, I got started on their progress pretty early, even as they fanned out to try to surround us for a nice swarm envelopment first.

They didn’t calculate that Kris was moving at maybe half her top speed and had no problem sustaining it, while even the best of the bugs behind us had to be getting tired. They could probably run themselves to death, but that was fine, the chase would be largely over soon.

The fastest olthoi of the new hive in the advance were popped off in spurts of glowing green and chitin-punching diamond pulses and Flames in five colors Burning over them. We swept by within ten feet of the pincers of lunging spider-olthoi, squealing in frustration as they missed us, and then fifty of them blew up as bouncing, piercing Shardrays passed through them violently.

Behind us, the two swarms merged together without issue, united in their fresh territorial hatred of us, and we swept into the narrow, high-walled canyon that led into Citadel Valley.

The second clue that something was going on, other than the unnaturally thick spiral of inky smoke peeling skywards from the top of the Citadel, was the fact that the ground had dozens of Elementals of all kinds scattered around it, and not the weak ones.

They couldn’t miss our approach, of course. The numbers of olthoi were shaking the ground as they charged after us, and didn’t look like they were hunting us, it looked like we were leading them to the attack! Which viewpoint I was happy to mislead along as I stopped firing backwards and started firing ahead, while Kris had Quaver out and extended like a shining lance, Prismatic anathema to Elementals gleaming off her Blade and letting them know we weren’t friends at all.

I popped an entry wedge even as dozens of Elemental spells were going off, Kris juking as the Bolts and Arcs slammed past us and into the incoming olthoi, who ate it all up and didn’t slow down in the slightest as more bugs died.

-So, you wanna do some exploring, or just spring the trap?- she /asked me, as I crouched down and tight behind her as she juked and swerved with impossible speed and surety through the collapsing crowd of Elementals.

It wasn’t a real question, as we weren’t going to be exploring anything. -I would like to engage in patient looting of his libraries and appropriation of any significant cultural mementos or useful tools that we might run across, of course!- I /answered aloofly.

-Spring the trap it is.- The gaping doors of the Citadel yawned before us, bunches of Elementals on guard in front of it, bracing for the incoming olthoi horde that had crashed into the Elementals, bowled them all over, and was running over the knots of combat that had resulted without really slowing down.

-Displacing,- I /murmured to her, and she acknowledged it as the image of the two of us slowly slid three feet to our left, and the missiles and spells coming our way followed it, as did the eyes of the enraged and frenzied olthoi.

Kris didn’t charge through the lines of Elementals, of course, letting the Displaced image race in between them and fade away, at the same time as she vented away the stink of the death pheromones all over her and leapt first for the wall, then scampered up it to the ceiling as Invisibility followed Displacement.