The slaughter of the moarsmen was fast and pretty brutal, especially when the wall un-Shaped and the shield wall of the phalanx drove into them, stabbing and pressing as the moarsmen impaled themselves upon the spiked Shields in mindless savagery.
I had rows of Darts ripping through the whole mass of them endlessly, keeping them Burning, Kickers riding them and helping everything die faster… and I also had all their Spawn Points mapped out in my Visual File, bombarding each and every location with a Dart or Shard to make sure nothing respawned there.
The sclavi were quite tough, not so much when lit on Silver Fire with Kickers, and they were outranged by the strength-amped Bows of the Aun and the Autobows countersniping them. A solid mound of moarsmen was Burning down en vivus and disintegrating as I un-Shaped all the stone walls I’d put out, and the Wagon came for the sclavi.
The moarsmen weren’t prepared to deal with the Mick’s frozen Bunita ripping through them, or getting impaled or chopped down by the Wagon behind him tearing through their positions as the Mick zipped past them. Spells rang against the walls of the Wagon, but did basically no damage to the very tough walls enhanced with a layer of chorozite just to stop spell attack shenanigans, and the missile troops up above were plenty happy to pick off the sclavi from behind the mantlets on the top of the Wagon, while they were trying to run to or from the Mick and dying haplessly.
The fight to claim and clear the temple itself was a bit tougher, but the undead who’d found they couldn’t flee did try to make a fight of it, coordinating the last of the sclavi and some tougher moarsmen to defend them as they tried to launch spells at us.
My Shardrays didn’t care about their cover, and Disruption didn’t care about their 2000 Health, either. They were hit, they took a lot of damage and Kickers, and they Burned and died.
As for the others, I dropped the silver lightnings of the Haste spell on the Guards, and watched them swarm up on the shocked sclavi and moarsmen with incredible speed and vigor. They basically knocked them over, stuck them while they were down, and went rampaging through the three floors of the open-air temple with speed and energy the serpent and fish-men anthros couldn’t match.
It took less than five minutes to clear out the temple, and less than an hour to wipe the entire cove of any opposition. Vivus covered everything with white mist, and the Dark aura hanging over the temple was slowly eaten away and removed by the vivus after the Falatacot Dark Priestesses were wiped away.
Had they gotten a message out to their superiors? I had no way of knowing, and really didn’t care at this point. They obviously had an alternate way to get here, but that was something that I could fix with a Pyramid dropped on this place, something I was more than capable of doing.
Once it happened, the only way to get here would be for them to cross the water like everyone else, and nobody here had ever seen the undead take to any boats. Perhaps they might ride one of their Battle Platforms here, but if they did that, we’d see them coming from a long ways away… and a Stillflight Field with sufficient power out over the ocean could be disastrous.
Xi Ru’s Island was ours, and I could put up a Long Jump and a Pyramid here to secure it as our own.
-----------
A few weeks later...
“Shaping twenty levels of terraces into the valley walls and rerouting the water outflow through them was more than a little help to the mosswarts,” Kris congratulated me as we watched the first Aun settlers depart through the Long Jump to Xi Ru. Four-fingered hands paid the mana cost, and they and their children flashed across the miles to the island on the horizon.
The first rotating companies being trained in mass combat against savage combatants were also rotating in. Tactics learned and practiced against the eager moarsmen Summons would be revised and used against olthoi and other unorganized foes, refined in Dungeons as the soldiers Leveled up.
“It was easy enough to do. They’d been very careful to keep to their territory, and weren’t inclined to break out with the stealing and everything. I gave them an easy but hidden way down from their valley, and expanded one of the inlets into a cave for them. They’ll be able to do some sea fishing too, and trade with the Aun for other things to eat.” I tapped my forehead. “You know eight hours is all I really want to do on the Pyramid stuff a day. Terraforming some infrastructure is a LOT easier, and more fun.”
“Do they actually produce anything unique or worthwhile?” Kris asked, shaking her head.
“Not really, but they do have gods, and those gods sometimes reply to them…”
Kris grimaced. “Call me crazy, but a very Brown-oriented species is not something I’m overeager to teach the Cleric Class to. They just don’t civilize well.”
“Plenty of use for barbarians in a magical world, but I hear you. The Aun are treating it as an example of old agreements on territory, so it’s not unprecedented. If things go poorly, we can always move them off to the Blackmire with the clans there, if they’ll take them.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“Flora is a goddess of aquaculture too, you know.”
Kris snarled at me. “Dammit, you’re supposed to be on my side!”
“The fact they have gods who respond to them means they have natural piety and are believers in things beyond themselves. The problem is the gods they follow, as much as anything.”
“Primitive peoples call out to primitive gods. Ahg!” The Aun themselves had been most drawn to Aru and Sylune, as the Sun and Moon made powerful totemic symbols for the Sun of Suns and the Queen of the Heavens. “Florans, is it? Do we have any farmers to send to them to teach them about terrace-farming?”
“Asking around, there were a couple who volunteered to help them out. Funnily enough, they also are assigned as Healer duty to the Xi Ru fighters there. So, a little something they can do in their down time.”
“Florans are Divinely inspired on farming techniques, even weird ones, right?” she asked for confirmation.
“If they take the Community or Plant Domains, yes.”
“Building up mosswarts. Well, the gods take all kinds.” The fact it was bound to go sideways in the future as other gods made overtures to the mosswarts was certainly not on both of our minds, nope, nope.
Still, the Good thing to do. The gods we’d picked to follow didn’t discriminate on basis of species, although they weren’t idiots about such matters, either.
“Almost a little surprised that you’re up for Freebooter.” It was our next stop on the ground-claiming/clearing enterprise that we’d found ourselves on. “Everything I was hearing was that everyone involved was having a blast throwing their weight around in the Direlands.”
“That Withered area is like Valhalla’s killing fields, a Divine blessing for melee fighters, and the rest of the Dires is like limitless opportunities for actual strategies and tactics against all sorts of enemies. Not as good as thinking, living opponents, of course, but enough to get a lot of practice on.
“Still, you know the Matrix system doesn’t like mono-focusing for Karma. Become a specialist fighting something, you have to kill more and more stuff than a normal person for the same Karma, or get less and less help, or fight tougher and tougher things. Starting the Favored Enemy Slayer progression is nice, but advancing it takes a LOT of killing.”
That standing +5 Morale Bonus to-hit and damage enemies was indeed a great boost to the confidence of being able to take something down. “Fifty kills gets you the Achievement Feat and allows you to start the Mastery. I wasn’t tracking the kills closely on much of anything. What is the total to get the +5?”
“A thousand.”
“Eww.” That was a LOT of slaughter of just about anything. “Because Summons, right? Real ones are less?”
“Real ones might count as five, but if they are too low of Level, five times a fraction that is much too low is still low. Happily, most of the stuff we’re fighting is either focused on a specialty, or skilled enough with magic to still represent a viable threat if the new knights are stupid.”
“But not to you?” I asked knowingly.
“Not really, unless I jump into a whole swarm of them and dare Chaos to bring them all into alignment and get a whole bunch of good Spell Penetration rolls.”
“The RNG is never your friend in the long-term,” I acknowledged. “Those coincidences WILL happen if you keep tempting them,” I chided her.
“Which is a wonderful pressure to test just how thin I can make those odds and how fast I can recover in between them.” Which generally meant how many attacks she could get off within a few seconds with Healing Edge returning Health to her at 1-8 per hit. “Got Greater Vampiric in Arsenal now, just in case.”
Quaver popped out from behind her waist. “It’s not enough when she needs it!” the Sword piped up woefully. “It maxes out at a hundred Health per Renewal. Just, blah.”
“Enough for her to run out of danger, however, right?”
“Yes, but still annoying,” the Sword huffed.
“Bodyfeeder would probably be ideal, then,” I mused.
“Bodyfeeder, Bodyfeeder…” Kris murmured, furrowing her brow. “Sounds like old school Vampiric, where you got half the damage you did in Healing?” she asked hopefully.
“No. Psionic effect.” She tilted her head, thinking, then shook her head. Obviously there wasn’t perfect carryover of alternate advancement paths outside Power of Ten through her Hag Curse. “You might be able to replicate it with a Ki or Soul-based energy sustaining it. Grants temporary Health equal to the damage you do on a crit for ten minutes.”
A dark eyebrow raised itself up slowly. “You are not bloody serious?” she asked me very emphatically.
“I don’t imagine it would stack with Crushing Blow, but it should with Biting Strike,” I wagged my finger at her. “But, yes. And although it does stack with itself, it does renew on every crit.”
She just stared at me. “You do realize that if that works here I’d probably never receive a significant injury from just about anything that isn’t simply goddamn overwhelming…”
“I don’t know the pattern for it. We know it exists because of the Mentos who snuck into Terra-Luna some years back, and we took a look at their Weapons and other Gear before we sent them back to where they’d come from. However, Terrans don’t have the gene for psionics, so it was more for the children they left behind than for us, and we couldn’t replicate them with other energies. Psionics was viable and locked in as a potential avenue of power, so we couldn’t sneak in sideways on it like we might be able to do here, where the rules are different.”
“Would Psychic Weapons be possible?” she asked with a dangerous calm.
“Oh, remember those, did you?” I had to smile.
“Can you confirm they stack with magical Enhancements?” she asked me.
“Yes. The Mentos tested it out, even though they didn’t trust magical powers. magical Enhancements in Slots did stack with the non-Slotted Psychic bonuses, where similar psionic bonuses did not.”
“Without an Artificing basis to go on, I can’t add it by Smithing or Naming Karma,” she said thoughtfully. “Send me over the Infusion or anything they might have had, and I’ll see if it can be adapted.” I complied promptly, and she shuffled it off to her Crafting thoughtstream as something to eagerly work on. Finding an alternate method to replicate psionic Crafting would be a truly wonderful avenue of further experimentation.
Just another way magic could be totally cheesy if different systems intersected…