It was basically a martial slaughter, as the numbers and simple tactics of the moarsmen simply weren’t prepared to deal with a shield wall and experienced phalanx tactics, nor the gut-punching point-black fire of the Autobows patiently pumping and releasing overhead.
Bodies going vivic sprawled behind us as the Mick slowly advanced towards the hill where more real moarsmen were watching… and those moarsmen were considerably tougher than the ones we were facing.
Not that the Mick was worried much.
When the spawn points nearby were basically blazing vivic, I focused fully on weakening the incoming spawns, Darts zizagging through two dozen targets each and setting them on Silver Fire mixed with holy flames, vivus, and Banefire for all the fun and jollies.
The arbalesters quickly found that one shot, two tops was enough to take anything wounded and Burning for more than six seconds, and fire at will began to reap them ever more quickly. Their target-picking in such a rich environment was steady and concise, headshots proliferating at close-range on the wounded moarsmen.
The only break in their killing volleys was when Sir Darvis pointed with a Rod, and a real moarsman who’d snuck into the mass was pointed out by Faerie Fire. Four Autobows oriented on the targets with the pale blue or violet flames around them and took them down before they could take any real command of the Summons and tell them to use some tactic other than ‘charge in and be killed violently’.
Bunita was picking up speed as Cleaves proliferated between the moarsmen in front of them, the Warden Lord of the Royal Scouts shifting back and forth slightly to shear down more targets with the arcs of deadly glittering cold that were his Claymore.
The Wagon advanced steadily as the Guard Aspirants stepped with it, careful and measured, not allowing a break in their formation and the wall of their shields staying intact. As the Summons were stupid and went after the first viable target they could lock on, they didn’t go after the Wagon itself, and the elevated Autobowers above and out of their reach were ignored in favor of the Isparians below swinging about shiny Swords and glowing Shields.
Without intelligent direction, the moarsmen came and they died.
“Reaper blades coming out!” I announced, not willing to let this come down to an endurance fight if we wanted to make real progress. “Bring it in tight! Lord Mick, pick up the pace!”
The Aspirants stepped back against the wall of the Wagon as the Blades on the front wedge of the Wagon snapped out, gleaming arcs of death backed up by the whole mass of the Wagon.
The Mick picked up his pace considerably as I focused all three Darts ahead of us, and six dozen moarsmen burst into Silver Fire over nearly a hundred paces of area.
The archers were picking off the moarsmen trying to crowd in and pursue from the sides as the Mick kept picking up the pace. The melees were trotting faster, and any moarsmen who made it past the Mick were running into the razored edges of the big Blades that had snapped out of the side of the Wagon, or were bouncing off the Shields of the men while casual stabs thrust in at necks and bellies.
I turned my attention back to the clusters to left and right as we started up the hill, the Autobowmen kept headshotting moarsmen if they were on fire, and the Mick kept moving forward.
“Lass, spend me a Mass Imperil on these blighters, will ya?” the Mick asked, as the red dots of the real moarsmen finally started to move this way.
They were taller and broader than the Summons, that much was obvious, but I didn’t much care. They were also fewer in number, and I blew the Mass Imperil IV through the lot of them with speed and prejudice as they charged down towards the Mick.
Rather than holding his position, he charged to meet them.
The first one exploded from the charge going off with x7 or so multiples, and the Cleaves went off, Attacks of Opportunity triggering at the claw and bites at the Mick. The moarsmen, their hides reduced to scarcely better than leather armor, exploded apart as the razored cold cut and shattered their blood and flesh at the same time, hurtling corpses bouncing off the front of the Wagon as the Mick ripped into and through them without stopping his hacking and slashing. Their furious clawing and biting at him became excuses to die and their bodies shattered apart on the front of the Wagon wildly as he slaughtered them.
The stuff coming in behind us was clustering up again as the Mick reached the hill, nothing left up there. Without the slightest hesitation, he started down the left side of the Wagon, right into the teeth of the moarsmen still coming up from our flanks, and really began to tear them up.
The shieldmen peeled off the Wagon and reformed the shield wall, pressing back against the Burning moarsmen and hurrying them along to their fates as the quarrels from above hammered home and more moarsmen were dropped.
The Mick’s murderous, frozen-corpse advance didn’t stop until the moarsmen began to thin. He stepped back to let the Aspirants finish them off, pushing back, crowding the pungent-smelling creatures together and backwards, vivus taking the smell out of the air as they died rapidly to thrusts coming in fast and clean from the left and right, not just straight ahead.
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The Mick went back, reassumed control of the Wagon, and turned it around in the direction of the three o’clock moarsman Temple. Twoscore moarsmen were brought down inside thirty seconds to the combined punch of the Autobows up above and the thrusting swords, everyone involved gasping and breathing hard as suddenly everything around them was dead and Burning en vivus.
“More coming. Respawns kicked in, but they’ve a distance to run, and no guidance. They are just following the beach and straggling in, looking for something to fight,” I reported, my Detect Aquatics VI+1 scanning the area completely. “Nearest real ones are probably a mile to the west, and don’t have line of sight to us anymore. The spawn points within my range have all been Sealed, as far as I can discern.” If anything else had respawned on them, I hadn’t seen it in the general flow, but nothing close by was directing them, either.
The Mick was taking careful breaths and flexing his arms, but he hadn’t stopped walking in the direction of the beach temple. “If they be straggling in at the speed they respawned, we can handle ‘em fair easy, I be thinking. The smart play would be sending them in a huge mass again, but they dinnae strike me as too bright.”
“If they suddenly start playing it smart, it probably means there’s undead here,” Sir Darvis noted with professional cynicism.
“I’ve not seen such, but you are likely correct, Sir Darvis,” I agreed with him.
“Can we take out the beach temple, or would it be wiser t’ Seal the Summons points?” the Mick asked genially as he walked along. The Autobowers were gathered to shoot ahead of us now, Sir Darvis pointing out the moarsmen getting too close with his Rods and the Faerie Fires they tossed out.
“How’s the practice been down there?” I asked the Aspirants, and received a general reply of tired enthusiasm. “We want some of those spawn points open, Lord Mick, but that will eventually kill us if we can’t get rid of the real moarsmen controlling the Summons. So the living ones are the real targets, and the temples with the spawning pools breeding them are how they established themselves here. Those are what we have to get rid of.”
“So, we kill off the temples, then retreat back to the Vesayans, come back all sneaky-like an’ off the real ones after we find out where they are?” he asked me.
“There’s good training, and then there’s an endless grind of Summons to butcher repeatedly. Unless you want to make the summary judgment of Sealing all the Spawn Points, that’s basically what we’re going to have to do,” I agreed.
“An’ that won’t even get us up the back slope t’ see the Deru Tree,” the Mick shook his head. “Were hopin’ this trip would nae be such the bother, lass. Me apologies, Sir Darvis.”
“We needed the exercise, Lord Mick,” the Royal Guard officer stated grimly. “No need to apologize for what you’re not responsible for.”
“Chances there’s undead here?” I inquired of the Mick.
“Pretty damn high,” was his guess. “The Deep came in here an’ established its minions. The undead aren’t going t’ be liking that, especially it using the moarsmen they bred into existence as the tools t’ do so. I don’t think they be in control o’ the invading moarsmen, but they might be controlling the sclavi at their own Temple there, an’ aiding the moars up by the Tree.”
“I do not see us getting this all done in but one day, Lord Mick,” Sir Darvis confessed. “There are simply too many moarsmen, and they are respawning.”
“Gor-damned Summons, always a pain in the arse in numbers,” the Mick agreed with a long-suffering grumbling. “How many did we kill here, lass?”
“Five hundred and ninety-two so far, Lord Mick.” THRUM! “Five hundred and ninety-four.”
“And just starting on the respawns. How many points ye Seal?”
“Two hundred and twelve, Lord Mick.”
“Ye were busy, lass.”
“Echoing Darts, got me to twelve a cycle,” I replied honestly. “Alright, going to do a Mass Vitality for Stamina for you lads. You’ll regain more quickly, and it’s more effective over time than a Revitalize.”
I wound the spell up, golden sparkles circling around everyone as the stamina-replenishing Life Magic swirled over them, boosting their recovery rate by more than a hundred percent and sending precious ‘yellow’ stuff flowing back into them on the expanded Fellowship Status I also had up and working.
“Gor, that be the good stuff,” the Mick said cheerfully, working his shoulders. “How’s the ammunition situation up top?”
Sir Darvis quickly got the numbers from his Autobowmen, and frowned. “We’ve gone through over five hundred bolts, Lord Mick. We’ve got perhaps another thousand in the magazines.”
“The lass can feed ye ammo in an emergency, but it won’t last long. Let up on the sniping for the moment, let us walk over an’ cut the bastards down w’out spending the king’s coin, aye.”
“Bows up! Shields, they are yours!” Sir Darvis agreed. “Blue team, stand down, Violet on overwatch just in case!”
I could also Dart down the incoming moarsmen, and was happy to set them to Burning and dying before they ran into the sharp or cold pointy bits eager to send them to their final end.
“Lass, ye got a fast way to take out the temples, or do we gotta pound the damn things down again, like back at Mayoi?” the Mick asked up at me.
“No worries, Lord Mick. You’re talking to the Stone Shaper, right? I can drop it into a pit in the seawater with about ten minutes of work,” I assured him.
“Right, then! We’ll keep them off ye while ye do that, and make the judgment o’ tryin’ for the other temple once we be done.”
“You can certainly run over there faster than the spawns they send after us can run back there,” I pointed out to him.
“Och, aye, but draggin’ the whole lot o’ them after us as I do so. Mmm, will be fine shootin’ for the lads up top, though, an’ for ye as well.”
“It’s also going to bring us in range of Sealing off the Summons for more than the northern half of the island, which should really help if we need to leave and return.”
“Sounds like a sound strategic plan fer the moment,” he agreed, as the first moarsman ran at him with a couple partners. He slid right, left, swish, swish, swish, and all three moarsman hurtled on past him, missing their strikes or bouncing off Clan, and their frozen heads tumbled free as their corpses hit the ground, falling under the Wagon as they did so. “Aye, be a waste for me to kill these, lads. Teams of two per moars, now. Set yer Swords to the point, alternate high and low, an’ kill them as they come, now.”
“Sir!” the Aspirants called out, getting into the basic double-team Wolfpack formations. As the moarsmen came running in, they were cut down from each side with precise blows and pressure, impaled if they ran straight in heedlessly, hamstrung or disemboweled from the side or flank otherwise as we continued across the hills toward the temple on the east side of Xi Ru’s island.