Princess Kristie put her hand to her forehead. “Ugh, right. Only, what? Four places the Mick knew of to hunt Luminance in. This is arguably the tamest of them…”
“Pretty sure the Temple Island of the Moarsmen is, really, and that is a place we have to wipe clean. It really is devoted to T’Thuun.”
She looked at me. “Oh. Crap. No one bothered to tell me that…”
“Same slithis tentacle crap as was around the Deru Tree, but scattered randomly all around the island. Corrupted and Blighted creatures, even including Golums. We’re lucky there’s no undead on it, but there were active Isparian converts to T’Thuun at some point.”
“The influence of the Blight on this island should be gone now, although I understand the Mick said it routinely reached up to Freebooter Keep and chased away the garrisoning forces, having to be purged again regularly.” Kris shook her head away again, having exactly NO tolerance for Blight or Corruption. It all had to go.
“If that means excitement tomorrow when we go up there, so be it.”
“Ah, fuck. You can’t fill this place in until you strip it down, can you?” she abruptly realized.
“She gets it in one. The tree hives are naturally going to seize this place if they can.”
“How many Tapestries a day?”
“Figure twelve tops. I can close off each level as I strip them, of course, and I should be able to get all the honey today if it’s all I do.” Left unsaid was that I was leaving more Slots for emergencies, including Teleports off of here to anyplace I was needed. Rapid Leveling of the Support Healers was already taking much of the load off.
“How are you going to round up the wax?” Kris inquired curiously.
“Earth Elemental. Amorphous, stronger than the wax. Can fold it all up and clean any dirt out of it at the same time.”
Kris looked around at the dead hive, the golden light muted and dim as some of the magical nature of it decayed with the death of all the wasps. “Damn, this place is big.”
“Gonna be making candles out of this thing for decades,” I agreed with a sigh, watching the golden honey streaming past as I emptied out the cells with dead grubs and eggs all around.
“We want to take on the Keep and whatever is holding it, more for peace of mind than anything else. The Roaches already took off to scout it out for us.”
“If you need me to take it, I can get up there quickly enough, but you’ve got backup Casters, and just use smart targets. Everything has to be Summons, which means they are stupid.”
“Shouldn’t be an issue. I’ll keep you informed.”
-------
“A few more sclavi and moarsmen than I be remembering,” the Mick admitted, as the two teams of Scouts and Knights linked back up.
It looked like a more recently-made Aluvian design, but was rather overgrown with black ivy growing thickly upon the blued granite and even up the narrow tops of the showy and ornamental towers. It was certainly stolid and strong enough for a basic assault, but the main gates were standing wide open, and the Sclavi forming the guards there were sitting in their formations silently, as they might have been doing for the last fifteen years or something.
Somehow, the grass hadn’t grown any taller, either.
“We want to keep the wounds to a minimum,” Kris said. “I see six archers among those sixteen sclavi out there, and another twenty archers on the walls to either side.”
“Aye, weren’t so many in support before.” The Mick sniffed slightly. “Smell that?”
“Yes, they’ve got moarsmen inside as reinforcements,” she nodded. “Immaterial without a living leader to give them orders. The key is to pull the guards over and out of range of spell support on the walls. We don’t need to be bombarded on the approach.”
“And they don’t have shields. Easy enough. Ye want the central line?” he asked rhetorically. “I’ll have the kids break out the Bows.”
Kris smiled slightly. “Ten on each side, lined up so nicely on the walls. Kris would just set them all on fire from out of range.”
“We’ll have to be content with Imperils and Cold Vulns,” the Mick sniffed. “The big problem is that there be no battlements on the inside. The entire length of the walls be exposed to the inner courtyard.”
Kris just shook her head, raven locks fluttering. “Show castle indeed.” She pointed ahead to the Mick. “Go snap the bowstrings of those archers and pull the guards up. We’ll get in position.”
“’Tis done!” he agreed happily, Bunita slapping into his hands. He quickly ordered the Roaches to take up their Bows and Crossbows and line up on the bridges to support the Knights who would be coming up the middle behind a shield wall of Energized Shields that could slough off War Magic and take the direct fire of the archers without flinching.
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Then he gestured, murmured a few words, and turned Invisible as he raced for the opposite side of the bridge.
The tactic was simple, because Summons weren’t smart. The six archers among the guards were standing there with their bows, the weapons exactly as real and unaffected by time and weather as they were, all in the same position.
An opportunistic sot running along that back line could cut those bowstrings without any difficulty when suddenly coming out of surprise and make a Sundering Cleave Train along the back of their formation.
Tautly-drawn strings that had magically held their strength for who knows how long snapped wickedly, startling the sclavi even as the black blur ran along behind them, hewing through bow and strings with equal opportunity, while reflexes dulled by the passage of time just watched him in astonishment for a moment as their weapons were destroyed. Then programming kicked in and hisses of alarm rose, turning the heads of the melee contingent of the gate guards.
Laughing and hissing out something particularly insulting in Falatacot he’d had Kris inform him of, the Mick turned the corner of the formation and ran up the orderly side, bumping the sclavi warriors there and breaking their formation up, spurring their fighting instincts up, and happily bolted for the centermost of the three long bridges that led up to the gates of Freebooter Keep.
The archers on the walls woke up too, and Phased missiles with Elemental attacks peppered around him as he casually zigged and zagged, not incidentally evading hurled Bolts of magic missing as his erratic course threw off their aim, and his Magic Defense dealt with the remainder.
A hissing swarm of long-legged, slender serpentine forms in armor belatedly pounded after him with strides half again as long as him and superhuman quickness… but they weren’t quite able to catch him as he raced for that Shield Wall of kneeling and layered Shields that were already bouncing a bunch of War Magic.
Without breaking stride, his lightfoot took him ten feet into the air and over the wall of metal, and the angry sclavi nipping at his heels ran into a whole lot of braced Swords, Spears, and Shields shining with icy perfection and spirals of glittering icy Motes around them.
From the side bridges, the Roaches lined up and ruthlessly shot into the sides of the sclavi mess with Coldphasing arrows, picking them off with skill and speed.
Tossing them off the sides of the bridge was nominally a viable tactic, but nobody expected the six-hundred-foot fall to kill them, and they’d just pop up on their spawn points again.
The Knights advanced steadily, impaling the frenzied sclavi ruthlessly as the arrow fire drove into their sides. In a remarkably short time, their killing was done, and the way was open.
Contrary to expectations, the Knights immediately withdrew, then instead trotted down the left bridge, the Roaches trailing after them.
The archers on the wall on that side, out of range of the fight on the bridge, had gone into waiting mode, but snapped readily back up into fighting stances as the Knights crossed onto the open space between the bridges and the gates.
Their attention fixated on the men and women with Shields locked and raised, they weren’t prepared for Kris and the Mick to pop up behind them and smoothly toss them off right over the battlements.
Although supremely coordinated and fast, the sclavi still hit the ground awkwardly, the bows in their hands sprawling and snapping as they landed, or spinning away.
Smoothly, Wolfpack teams drove into them, pinning them up against the walls as the next pair of sclavi archers came hurtling over the edge.
Whatever was waiting for them inside the castle finally woke up to the fighting on the walls, but that didn’t stop all ten archers from doing headers over the battlements into the hungry blades waiting for them below.
The two leaders promptly followed the last sclavi over, landing just outside the trios and foursomes swiftly and ruthlessly cutting down the scalvi before they could truly gather themselves. A sip of a Potion by one and another whispered spell by the other, and they vanished from sight.
Sixty seconds passed while the Knights and Roaches rotated over to the other wall, and sclavi began to fall from above with hisses of surprise, spells hissing and crackling up above.
Two minutes after that, Kris and the Mick ducked inside the central gatehouse, and then Kris ran along the north wall towards the east, while the Mick headed back west for the west wall. The archers on those walls naturally picked up on them, and the corner towers for some silly reason had no doors on them at all, while those outside swiftly plied vivic flames to the very visible Spawn Points of the gate guards, Sealing them from what would probably be a rapid respawn.
Shields raised, Mick and Kris separately charged directly ahead and crashed into archer after archer, slamming them sideways off the walls and down into the courtyard, whose entire contingent of multi-colored moarsmen and sclavi were now focused on the two of them. Archers came in from the sides, magic thundered and lashed for them, and moarsmen below paced them along the walls as the two charged down the length of the east and west walls opposite one another, and batted all those slender sclavi archers off the walls.
The sclavi archers on the south wall naturally oriented on them as they drew closer.
The Knights and Roaches spun into the inner courtyard about then, smashing right into the flank of the sclavi and archers trying to snapshoot their leaders, while the entire moarsmen contingent was now pacing the duo up on the walls from the ground, along with the displaced archers.
Mick and Kris had their attention, and as Summons, said attention would not shift from them unless they were attacked from another quarter. The Keep’s entire melee contingent from the inner courtyard was following them from below, occasionally trying to leap up and attack them, not bright enough to find the nearest set of stairs and head for them as long as they could see their hated enemies.
The Roaches and Knights took full advantage of that, charging into the backsides of their selected targets and taking down a full dozen of them almost instantly, before duos paired up and viciously cut down the Summons down from behind.
Kris went up on the southern tower to take out the sclavi there, while the Mick peeked over the edge of the tower and proceeded to start sending Sharding arcs of cold scything down into the heads of the sclavi, as they were the ones Casting at him. The Knights and Roaches reciprocated by chopping at the arms of any sclavi Casting, interrupting their spells and spoiling the attacks, sometimes earning the attention of the snake-men, sometimes not.
If they did, it didn’t matter, as the Mick happily chopped into them from up on the wall if they turned away, and the Wolfpacks took them down.
Two more sclavi came hurtling down from above, their bows cracking loudly as they hit the ground, shook their heads, and stood up, just in time for Kris for come down on top of them, driving them both to the ground again, one impaled fully through its skull with Quaver’s icy length.