The volcano might as well spew red-hot magma or death-black blight with equal chances. If the blight in those catacombs underneath Cymeria was pneumonia, the one here was the lovechild of the black plague and Spanish flu.
It was refreshing. I was healed by blight, courtesy of my brief tenure as a banshee in the underground Dungeons.
I kept my elemental form and auras, killing the carpet of undead creatures crawling over the island by Attribute starvation. A creature with straight zeroes in all ten Attribute scores was considered dead by the System. With three sapping auras, the ones that didn't die were easily crushed by me.
They weren't my goal. The vaults were. I searched around for an entrance and found none. Without much choice, I dove into the stone and searched around, blindly swimming through the rock. I discarded an old map of Auvanini to make room for the map of this island. This way, even if I was going blind, I knew where I've been.
I used the Minecraft diamond-mining strategy. I could "see" three meters to each side of me. if any pocket of air or tunnel was in this distance, I'd see it. A tunnel had to be at least one meter wide. I went back and forth, searching with seven-meter gaps between the "shafts". I didn't need to remove material, so there was nothing to worry about cave-ins, or as any Minecraft digger knew, pockets of lava.
Because, you know, it was an active volcano.
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I sensed the wards before seeing the tunnels. The same wards as the sanctum in the catacombs. After turning off my Light Elemental form, I slipped past them easily. On the other side, I found a library just like the one in the catacombs. I raided it with my item box and moved to the next room. A laboratory, also identical. Down to the beaker.
That made me suspicious. Why would Kel'Caldor need identical laboratories and libraries? Taking a moment to examine the books, they were the same ones I'd spent a year deciphering. Didn't the guy have a perfect memory? The layout of this place was also the same. I found the bedroom with the same painting. The necromancer's workshop-slash-torture-chamber. I cleaned it all anyway. All that was left was the door leading who knew where. I phased and crossed it. The moment I step outside, the whole sanctum behind me exploded, pushing me forward and into an open-air chamber.
At first glance, it seemed like a natural caldera except it had a polished black granite floor, smooth and level enough to make water too lazy to flow. Around me, I could see pillars of solidified obsidian and a pool of magma on a corner of the arched cavern. I'd landed conspicuously in the middle of the granite. After I got my bearings, I examined the floor. It had carvings... a magic circle. In the words of the Mon Calamari rebel Admiral Ackbar, "It's was a trap!"
I tried to move but the circle activated. Magical chains sprung from the floor and wrapped around my eight limbs, forcing me down with the strength of a titan.
A portal opened, letting Kel' Caldor walk into the cavern. "Greetings, 'Old Soul'," the lich said. "It's so kind of you to accept my... invitation."
I checked my item box. The doll was still there, with the soul of Kel'Caldor, the lich. "Who are you?"
I tried to phase but the chains didn't let go. Accessing the ethereal also proved impossible. The magic circle was blocking dimensional travel inside its area. It was a containment circle with some nasty surprises. I only recognized half the runes.
"Pleased to meet you. I'm Kel'Caldor, the lich."
Another twenty portals opened and other liches entered the room. "I'm Kel'Caldor, the lich," each one of them introduced themselves with the same voice in sequence.
I knew they weren't illusions. All of them identified to the same level with the same statistics. Was Kel'Caldor a title and not a given name? But the soul I'd captured was not a fragment or a splinter. It was a complete soul of a lich.
"I see the disbelief in your face. However, we can assure you we are all Kel'Caldor," one lich declared.
"But we are not all of Kel'Caldor," another added.
"Even if you can defeat twenty-one of us, you cannot find much less defeat all of us," A third one completed.
Like all people inebriated by power, this guy liked to gloat. It was not a characteristic unique to villains.
"But it doesn't matter. You'll no longer be a part of this world after today."
I snorted and laughed. "You think you can do what the whole pantheon of this world couldn't?" I stared at their whitewashed skulls with beady red flame eyes. "The Gods are aware of you, Kel'Caldor. Yet they never thought of using you to get rid of me. Your overconfidence will be your undoing."
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
That gave the liches some pause to think. Meanwhile, I was busy using {Eat Magic} to absorb the energies of the magic circle and the chains through my {Pseudopods}. While the circle blocked my sight of the Ethereal outside of it, inside it worked just fine. I could see the circle attempting to drain my Energy. It failed because of my {Pinnacle of Magic} Perk. I could also see the massive expenditure of power the chains and circle took to keep someone like myself imprisoned.
But if this was all part of his plan, he had years to prepare. I wouldn't escape this trap easily if I escaped at all. Time was on my side. The longer I held them from doing whatever horrible things they had in store for me, the better. My Energy was overflowing now, charging above the soft cap. I turned off {Erode Curse}.
All the liches took exact copies of the same staff. I had one too, from the one I destroyed in the catacombs. They didn't it in perfect synchrony, however. The small differences in timing didn't seem to follow a pattern I could recognize but they reinforced the idea that they were all autonomous entities, even if they obviously had a deeper connection.
They rained beams of light on me. I shifted to {Light Elemental} form. They swapped their attacks to Darkness. I didn't really have a weakness to Darkness magic. The damage their spells did was ridiculous, lower than the threshold to break my bare skin. Were they playing with me?
They turned up the intensity of their magic and shifted to Force attacks. Instinctively, I shapeshifted into a lamia and used my {Snake Fortress} form. To my surprise, some of the chains disappeared, only those around my wrists remained. Another chain came and wrapped my tail but didn't break my formation. I activated {Eye of the Storm}. Force attacks were physical and while there wasn't a specific resistance to this type of magic, they instead followed all rules for physical attacks. So did damaging spells that conjured physical mass, like Wind, Water, and Earth.
"You are a sturdy one," Kel'Caldor commented.
They ramped up their attacks. I started to meditate to increase my resource regeneration by 95%. They would need a DPS [1] of five million to start to chip my HP pool.
"You are insufferable. We need more!" He shouted.
More portals opened. Twenty, fifty more liches entered the fray. They kept coming. A hundred or more of them now. All of them were equipped with the same set of gear. That's why the first one had a replacement for the ring. This guy was mass-producing his own artifacts.
How did he create his copies? I formulated several theories in my mind. Did he kidnap children, named them Kel'Caldor, trained them in magic, and then turned them into liches? No, they displayed no individuality. Split his soul and create more liches? I doubted it. How to create perfect copies of oneself?
Of course!
By treating his own mind as software, and the lives of other people as hardware. Kel'Caldor would take prospective children and then turn them into copies of himself with mind magic. If he did it early enough, the child would have nothing to cling to. They didn't yet develop their own individuality. The child would know all it had to do to level up with the support of hundreds of liches, eventually becoming one themselves.
All of them mind mages, all of them able to connect to one another and transmit information between them. Kel'Caldor was a magical virus. The undead version of a botnet. The Lichernet.
More liches arrived. About two hundred of them. All with the same skeletal grin, all dumping their spells on me. The {Manastorm} did nothing to them. Even the guaranteed damage to undead was negated by their protective spells.
They started to wear down my regeneration. I felt like a world raid boss. Slowly but surely, The wounds piled up and some critical hits (getting one's magic to have a critical hit chance was very hard) would even draw blood.
{Avatar of War} kicked in and I gained the Attribute bonuses. My rage would last forever as I got more than one critical wound every minute. My HP still went under 66% and {Regeneration Boost III} kicked in, increasing my HP recovery by 52%. Eight and a half million HP per second. My regeneration surpassed the damage, but the very nature of the ability meant My HP would fluctuate around 66% as it turned on and off.
Their solution was to double down and open the gates of Northrend. Four hundred liches rained magic on me. The damage surpassed the HP recovery again. I tried to cover myself with water to gain the bonus from {Mermaid Royalty} but it was impossible to keep the water from evaporating under the heat from the magical assault. All some liches had to do was to shift their magic to fire once they noticed my intentions. I saved my Energy.
My HP reached 34% and another of my {Physical Mastery} abilities kicked in, recovering 34% of my maximum HP pool. The angry liches shouted and redoubled their effort.
Physical mastery was in its fast-growth stage and kept ticking up. I felt an upwell of hope when the first group of liches stepped away from the circle because they'd ran out of MP. More portals opened and they swapped with other liches, entering the portal they came from.
How many copies of himself did this guy have?
Why hadn't he "Agent Smithed" the whole world yet?
And why did the Gods let him do it? Was there some sort of agreement between them?
> [Administrator Hotline]
>
> CALL START
>
> Snowdrop: Hey, this Kel'Caldor guy, is he legit?
>
> Wyxnos: I can't answer that, and I wouldn't even if I could.
>
> S: He can theoretically lich the whole world and faith-starve you guys.
>
> W: He won't.
>
> S: Oh. Then you do have some sort of shady deal with him. This is not a question.
>
> W: Are you done fishing for information?
>
> S: I have half the mind to hunt him down. Individually, they aren't a big threat and they needed four hundred of them to pin me down.
>
> W: What is your point?
>
> S: I bet these liches are a thorn on the pantheon's side. Give me a quest to exterminate them.
>
> W: I don't think that's going to happen.
>
> S: Does he have any leverage on you guys? I thought I was the nuclear deterrent to the pantheon.
>
> W: Not funny. Too soon.
>
> S: You didn't deny my speculation. Good to know. Can he eavesdrop on you?
>
> W: No. And he is not immune to the System. I can kill him anytime.
>
> S: Thanks, Wyxnos. I owe you another one.
>
> CALL END
The lazy admin gave me enough information to form a plan in my mind. I already knew how to take down these liches in one fell swoop. I just needed to wait for the right moment.
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[1] DPS: Damage Per Second.