“Lord Mick, opinion.” I was standing in the corner of a square, carefully out of sight of anything below, peeking around a support column at what was on the level below us.
He ghosted up next to me as I yielded the spot, looking down at the contraption below with hard, dark eyes.
Purple arcs of lightning reflected in his gaze as he studied the device below us attentively. His gaze darted here and there, head tilting back as he considered the long spinning shaft connected to the windmill far above, and other gears and shafts extending through the stone and out of the room.
“Virindi make,” he stated firmly under his breath. “I dinnae recognize the metal, but the style be unmistakable. I cannae tell if the lightning be coming in or out from above, but it definitely be coming in from the cardinal shafts. I be seeing nae outlet or focus for the energies, an’ were nothing special going on up above.” He looked up thoughtfully. “Weather were clear, but the Obsidian Plains have lightning storms blow up in moments, rage fer short times, then die just as suddenly. I seem t’ recall the windmill pulling down lightning when the storms went by, but it never seemed t’ do anything.”
“Coalescing extra Stones?” I offered.
He thought about that, nodding slowly. “It were not a problem back then, the recharge rate on the Stones were ridiculous. Five minute wait, no longer, get yerself a new Stone, easy as ye please. If the extra energy t’ do so came from the storms passing, we’d not have known it, especially when the Stones lost all importance an’ nobody bothered t’ come t’ these places anymore.”
“Is the coalescing point underneath us?” The Map of the place was hazy and unclear, typical of a maze-like Dungeon nobody had visited in years, but quite sharp where he and I had just passed and cleared stuff away.
“Nay, it be off to one side, but I dinnae recall which way,” he admitted. “Place was annoying at the best o’ times. Northeast, belike?” His shrug said not to trust his memory. “Been twenty years, lass.”
“Could they have moved the coalescing point?” I asked archly, and that got him thinking.
“Well now…” He screwed up his face, considering. “It were a long narrow room, an’ the Stone spawned on the floor like it were nothing important, just like all the others. Elementals were guarding it, aye, nothing too dangerous. I dinnae ken anything important about the room at all, other than the number o’ shockers messing around. I dinnae know the rules about the materializing point there, nae, but I dinnae put it beyond the virindi t’ change it to something more efficient for ‘em… or, mayhap, adding a second point?” he offered brightly.
I put a hand on the wall, feeling the current running through the place, matching it to what I could see in the thaumaspectrum down below. “That sounds much more logical,” I admitted. “Messing around with the existing flow of lightning mana here would be both surpassingly dangerous and very unstable, and might break the entire Vault rather badly. Tapping it and drawing off extra mana using the existing array formations seems a much better way of doing things.”
He gestured at my back. “Ye kin track objects, right? Might tracking a Shocking Stone using a Shocking Stone cut through the interference here?”
“Interesting bastardization of the Similarity Rule. Let’s see!” I pulled out the Enruned Shocking Stone that had been the Hollow Servant’s Core, and slowly and carefully invoked a Locate Object over it.
It sparked instantly, and little purple sparks danced over the nearby walls in resonance with the spell. The prevailing interference dropped away as like called to like, and suddenly the spell was hopping between points in my head, dancing erratically from place to place as it latched onto harmonic equivalents within a very extended range.
I painted everything into our rough Map as they happened, points of contact blooming here, there, and everywhere below and around us.
There was a nice cluster of them just ahead and below the engine we were looking at, stored inside something floating above the ground just out of sight there.
The Mick was watching the results in the Markspace Map coolly. “There be the natural one,” he declared firmly, pointing to the northeast. “The others…”
“That’s a repository of Stones, probably held inside one of the virindi floating flower-chests,” I judged of the most intense point, where the spell was bouncing around over a score of Stones in one place.
“Likely with a guardian or three, including two Lightning Servants,” he nodded grimly, eyeing the two nearby points of contact my spell was still jumping erratically between. “The other points likely be more o’ the Lightning Servants, then…”
“Are there tougher ones than the Hollow Servants?” I asked.
He ruminated on that. “Aye, in the Virindi Edifice, there were Hollow Reavers, and a single Hollow Servitor. The last was a right bastard t’ kill. Three hundred or somethin’ in Level.”
“Might have two of them, plus their boss.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“The boss o’ the Fulguris were a Virindi Signat, as I recall,” he said with a wince. “Seven thousand Health or some ungodly number.”
I eyed the prize. “Twenty Shocking Stones, plus all those in those real Servants there, and likely at least one Virindi Amulet per Virindi.”
He eyed the map carefully. “As long as we can avoid a swarm o’ them an’ being surrounded, we should be able t’ clean up the place,” he agreed slowly. “Especially if the Hollows be stupid an’ we kill the controllers first.”
“From there, it’s a case of picking our ground and making sure they can’t double or triple-team us.” I reached over and tapped Clan. “They also don’t know you’ve Stealthslaked Clan and your Armor, and they are non-conductive, so beating on you with Lightningphasing isn’t going to do jack or squat. It might even be to your advantage to not Dispel their Cores, just because they aren’t going to do much to you.”
He’d been taking full advantage of that property against the Lightning Elementals on the way down, letting them bash on his Shield while nothing conducted through. Bunita Grounding out the voltage that wanted to twist and thrash up to his arm was also very useful.
“We be having to keep a clear line o’ retreat, might even have to fly back up the central shaft t’ run away if they start bringing things in. Can they do so?”
I shifted my Vatic Sight to the Veil, studied the ripping and rending chaos of it, and pursed my lips. “If they have a Gate set up to be powered by Lightning Mana, it is possible they could drive something through the interference. The Veil is otherwise a mess here, equal to any Interdiction effect you care to name.”
“Aye, the Portals here were nae something you could Tie to, in the past. Chaos in the Veil, that be a good reason for it. But, ye didn’t rule it out,” he noticed.
“Magic is annoying that way,” I admitted. “There’s always a chance someone discovers how to do something previously thought impossible. Like, boosting the respawn rate of a Vault so it pops up more Stones?”
“Clever little buggers that they be,” he agreed with a nod. “So, we take this careful an’ slow, see if we can do this, an’ if shite goes south, we take what we earned an’ we leave.”
“With wings on our heels, because they’ll probably be chasing!” I agreed.
------
Slow and careful it was.
The Locate Object proved to be very useful in verifying where virindi spawns were and warning us when to pull away the nearby Lightning Elementals so as not to draw in other enthusiastic combatants. The Mick could rip the Elementals apart with no problem, and, as it turned out, there were a lot of zigzag corridors which made problems for virindi trying to hang back and blast, interfering with line of sight and effect. They allowed us to cut down the Hollow Servants that came racing up to melee range fairly easily, then deal with the Masters and Directors more simply if they closed as well.
Bunita’s Sound Bubble also held in any screeches of alarm or garbled technobabble from dying virindi, so they didn’t warn their compatriots. They could sometimes call in Lightning Elementals from behind them for reinforcements, but again, such things were rarely a threat.
Unlike the virindi, I had access to Seeking Shards, which could totally bend around corners to hit their targets, I just couldn’t Cast them quickly… until I took the Major and Minor Sparking Stones I had and mounted them in Crown. Suddenly my Shards were in resonance with the pervasive Lightning Mana running through the place, no more out of place than a random discharge of mana, and did not warn all the virindi of someone Casting wildly in the area.
It looked like the incredible amount of static in the air was messing with their own perceptions, too, as even the Casting of their compatriots just bled its mana echoes into the pervading field and dissipated into the greater flow of Lightning Mana all around, alarming nobody.
That naturally allowed me to contribute faster and more smoothly, especially against the Hollows. With an Imperil to reduce armor and a Vuln IV+1 to double the acid damage, the Mick could rip through any of the things with astonishing speed as Bunita Crit for massive amounts of damage with astonishing regularity.
The Fulguris were the hardest to deal with, having over 5,000 Health and being capable of launching Incantor War spells, VIII’s, with their +1/+1 War/Life Magic Amulets equipped. I had to make sure we had no Vulns on us, Dispels inside Arcane Fusions ready to go as I shut the enruned bastards down repeatedly, their powerful War Magic popping and sizzling ineffectively as Silver Magic countered and unraveled them as firmly as they were being Cast.
Dispel + Vuln to Acid, Dispel + Imperil, and watch the Mick go to town on them. If Elementals came racing up from behind to help, unload some Acid Shards on them and blow them away as needed.
Of course, that didn’t mean we got away scot-free.
---
“I see that wasn’t Lightningphasing,” I noted to him. His ulna and radius were jutting out his elbow, and I could see his humerus there through the rupture.
“Valus and his bear, that fucker hit hard,” the Mick swore, looking at the arm that had been shattered right through his Shield. “Aye, perhaps half and half. It were hitting at least as hard as a souped-up Minion, the lightning were added on top. I fergot how damn hard the damn things pounded on ye, an’ the speed only made it worse!”
At least until he chopped one of its arms off, then one of its legs. It had found it difficult to hit him while laying on the ground and flailing about wildly. He’d jumped over it and engaged the Fulguris, his arm still broken, while I cleaned up the Hollow Servant with Fastcast Shards and put it to sizzling, oozing rest.
My Heals on the Mick had gone to restoring his Soak after the frustrated Fulguris resorted to melee. Its hand-scythes screeched across Clan repeatedly, trying to reach him from a multitude of angles, or catch the Shield and rip it away from him, something that also proved hard to do. The Mick was quite good at getting those hand-sickles to slide right off the silent metal, while the virindi’s Health Qi and then Health ruptured out of it from blurs of crosscutting and stabbing emerald plunging in seeking the play of energy inside its armored robe.
My Fastcast Shards driving into it repeatedly, residual damage crackling over and eating at it, helped with the expenditure of its Health, and finally its robe ruptured open, vivus blew through the psychoactive energy it was made of, and it crumpled to the ground as its minions had.
“That’s almost like a Vuln or Slayer effect then,” I said warily, my hands on his arm as Healing Reserve kicked in at 12 points of Healing every six seconds. He grit his teeth as silver and red lights wrapped the jutting bones, slowly pushed them back inside his flesh, and fit them back together as the tears in his muscle and skin rapidly closed.