Ch.24
With a small grin from thinking about my ornery old Sensei, I formed my new Mind Blade into the shield gauntlet form I’d chosen for it.
I was a little surprised to find that it was a bit harder than it had been when I’d practiced forming it. Nerves? Is it harder because I’m nervous? That makes sense, I guess. I failed several times in a row, but finally managed to get the combination of mental imagery and manifestation of psionic power. Nice! There we go!
Once I’d formed my new Psionic construct weapon, I went on the attack!
Energy Spark lashed out, two rays of electricity both in scintillating blue and white reached out and touched one of the necromancers... and blew a pair of holes through him! “Ouch! That looks like it hurt, don’t you think?” I asked the guy standing next to my electro-perforated target with a grin.
Their companion had enough time to look down in shock at the twin holes in his chest and then fell over, dead. After my comment, the other cultists and their Quasits all suddenly were completely focused on me.
The big guy in the center of everything, who looked kind of like a giant, fat, Ghengis Khan expy or maybe an Evil, bald, Santa Claus, screamed in rage, pointed at me, and said in his best Christian Bale Batman voice, “Bring me his skull as a chalice filled with his heart’s blood!”
It made me pause, blinking... everyone was staring at me. I rolled my eyes and snorted; I couldn’t help myself.
I mocked him for his attempt at an intimidating and commanding tone, “Your overlord, the Mighty Evil Fat Ass, commands thee! Bow down at his feet! Bow down! Make sure you don’t smell them though, huh? Pheweee! Why is the first thing to go with you evil overlord wanna-be's always personal hygiene?!”
Of course, I’d never met a wanna-be Evil Overlord-type before, but taunting bad guys who were too full of themselves was a time-honored tradition! It was practically required!
The necromancers and the Quasits all paused at my comment. Even the demons seemed a little shocked that I’d sassed him like that. One of the men in the city’s livery up on the wall snickered audibly.
Screw it, they were just standing there. I dashed forward, spent Bronze Knuckle and discharged my Halo (aka psionic focus) to fire off my Psionic Weapon Feat. All of it looked like one big multi-colored electrical discharge, probably because of me consciously attuning myself to Lightning, and hit the nearest cultist as hard as I could.
Pneuma-powered Lightning, Qi, and Psionic energy all combined into what HAD to have been a critical hit! Even with everything I was pouring into it, the results were too big and too devastating for it to be anything else!
My flying axe kick landed on the crown of the robe-clad cultist’s head, which promptly disintegrated underneath the enormous outburst of kinetic and supernatural energies that I was pouring into the attack and my foot continued down through his chest and out between his legs, essentially cutting him in half!
It had to have been at least a 60 or 70 point crit hit.
The discharge of energies left very little left aside from a smoking, charred ruin.
It surprised everyone, including ME! To call that attack overkill was a major understatement. I had to consciously force myself to focus instead of staring at the mess I had made!
The cultists were very definitely taken aback. Even the Quasits hesitated for a moment, but undead... undead don’t really understand fear. Even intelligent ones like the ghouls required a display of holy power to really have a chance to cause them any fear.
The undead began to lunge at me. Even using group tactics, they couldn’t help but miss me, and I started taking advantage of my free trip attacks from Redirection and Defensive Throw to get my own hits in.
Two ghouls lunged at me among the pack, the most dangerous of the undead, and I used their misses as an opportunity to trip them.
Naturally, I succeeded on both trip attacks and slammed them to the ground.
Both of them took my unarmed damage from Great Throw, and then my unarmed damage plus my +1d6 of sneak attack damage on the Vicious Stomps that the successful trips triggered, since a prone enemy was denied their Dex bonus to AC!
It all added up to massive overkill! These ghouls couldn’t take two hits from me, no way, no how. 1d8+13 + 1d6+6 twice, plus an extra 1d6 for my Sneak attack damage was just shy of 60 points of damage for the two hits both ghouls took when it wasn’t even my turn to attack!
I was actually a little surprised that they’d managed to survive the damage from just Great Throw!
Of course, the first kill triggered Cleaving Finish, which I now directed at the nearby Quasit of the cultist I’d just killed as a roundhouse kick. It killed the little bastard, but I could somehow tell that my electricity hadn’t even bothered him.
A quick Lore (Religion) check told me that Quasits, and most demons, actually, were out and out immune to lightning!
Well, that’s not great. Earth attunement or Iron Palm Stance? I’ll change later, for now, lightning is working on the necromancers just fine, and THEY’RE the ones I need dead! Still, three kills when its not even my part of the combat turn? Just wait until I get a chance to start using Flurry!
Mr. Evil Boss Cultist type looked like his eyes were about to bug out of his head the whole time, like he genuinely had thought no one would try to oppose him. I’d just killed four of his minions in about twice that many seconds... I was a bit confused as to why he was so confused.
Really, though, I don’t give a shit. Inside the caves felt like a fancy game... this feels real for some reason. I won’t leave these poor bastards being crucified here to die. Even if they are just NPCs, this feels too damned real to just write them off that way... hell, I’d never be able to look Sensei in the eyes again if I didn’t!
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The big guy decided to express his unhappiness with a spell of some kind. Some kind of ray made out of green fire, I wasn’t quite sure what it was, and I frankly didn’t care.
Huh? My Spellcraft skill is telling me that it’s probably Hellfire. That’s probably not great. Hellfire was an attack that did both fire and profane, that’s Unholy/Evil damage. It was considered both at the same time, so if you were vulnerable to either or if either bypassed your defenses, it was like the whole attack was whichever one was the worst!
However, Rays and similar kinds of ranged touch attacks were precisely what Arcane Shield was for. I spent my Counter for this round on his attack, and a sapphire blue shield of Force popped up, stopping his spell, dead.
Not super surprising that my Spellcraft roll is higher than his ranged touch attack roll, considering how many Feats and Masteries I’ve taken to make sure it was as good as it could be... pretty much specifically so I could do that!
It was totally worth it, as Mr. Big Bad Cultist’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head.
“You! YOU DARE!” he shrieked at me.
I swear, I don’t know where all of this snarkiness is coming from. “Duh. Obviously, I dare. Lard ass!” I told him, flipping him the bird as I said it, reflexively.
I was slowly being surrounded, and decided it was time for a reset. I did a leaping back flip covering about 20 feet, right over the heads of all the zombies trying their best to get at my sweet meats.
Saying the cultists looked surprised was an understatement! Jumping twenty feet through the air with only a few steps is... well, not exactly normal.
Damn did it feel good, though!
Then I retreated while they kept trying to hit me. None of them could keep up with my 70’ base speed, though two of the Quasits took to the air to get a better shot at me. Qi Sprint and Speed of Thought are already showing how powerful they are!
I started using Pneumatic Meditation. It took an entire round of combat, during which I couldn’t move or defend myself. All of my remaining Maneuvers cooked off, along with all of my stored Pneuma, but I got to pick my maneuvers from scratch again... giving me Energy Spark again, which was the whole point.
I needed that ranged attack.
Next round I’d have two Pneuma... but losing ten points of Pneuma and a combat round in exchange for all of my maneuvers being restored was totally worthwhile, at least in this situation.
Then I ran around to the other side of the cultists, hitting the opposite flank I’d just struck from. This time I targeted two separate cultists with Energy Spark. One died as ray of blue and white lightning punched a hole in his chest, and the other one was very obviously badly injured by the bolt that struck him!
Well, we can’t have that, now, can we?
The majority of the undead had followed their cultist master’s orders and were clumsily chasing after me... the problem with that was that I was more than twice as fast as they were, and I could Run for that sweet x5 movement speed multiplier – and zombies literally can’t run, not even for the basic x4 multiplier that almost everyone else gets. They’re stuck at normal movement speeds, so even the x4 modifier everyone gets means that a normal human should never get caught by zombies.
At least for normal zombies. There are a terrifying number of versions of undead, and some of them can ignore general rules like that.
Fast zombies absolutely are a thing in L&L, and in hordes they’re just as nasty as you’d think...
However, these guys were still heading in the wrong direction when I’d popped up behind them all and thrown my Energy Sparks at them. After all, I was running close to 40 mph, and the zombies were just walking!
The cultists had, of course, kept themselves safely behind the undead... which meant that now there was nothing between them and me!
A teensy problem for you, huh? Maybe? Probably?
The cultists I’d just hit with lightning bolts hadn’t even known I was there until I’d punched a bolt of electricity into them!
Now I punched the surviving cultist, through his chest. “Hmm? Tactical error, what?” I said, grinning at the guys now staring at me in horror, the realization just dawning on them that they had ordered their meat shields to chase me and that now they were all twelve to fifteen seconds away from being able to get back here to help them!
I Cleaved into the Quasit standing next to him, discharging another 3-Ring Halo Burst. It was a simple answer to them being immune to Lightning.
It worked quite well, too. The little demons might be immune to lightning, but Qi-empowered Mind Blade plus a Psi Burst and Psionic Weapon’s psychokinetic force damage seemed to sort them RIGHT out!
I noticed something else. Discipline Focus (Broken Chains) let me use my Monk’s unarmed damage to improve the damage of my shield gauntlets, in order to take advantage of the better crit range and the +1 shield AC they provided.
Greater Unarmed Strike was increasing that even more, making my unarmed strike hit as if I was four levels higher.
But that was all based off of a human’s base unarmed damage, which was 1d3. A Soulblade’s base damage for a weapon of this size was 1d8. I should be hitting for 1d8+14 physical damage right now, with all of my bonuses from Styles and Power Attack...
It feels like I’m hitting way harder than that! Is my unarmed damage progression being applied to my Mind Blade? Instead of going from 1d3 to 1d4 to 1d6 to 1d8, three steps up the chart, am I going from 1d8 to 2d6 to 2d8 to 3d6, using the Mind Blade’s damage as the base? If so... wow!
Things were still trying to kill me, so I really didn’t have time to ponder it too much. Cleaving Finish killed another ghoul the cultist had kept back next to him, my normal punches and lightning damage plenty to make sure its potentially eternal life, wasn’t.
Fatty McBoss Cultist had realized that he’d been flanked and lost a couple more minions at that time and tossed another ray, that my Spellcraft and Lore skills were still telling me was a Warlock’s Hellfire, so either Fire damage or Profane, i.e. pure Evil, damage, at me, and I was more than happy to show him that I could block it a second time, using my recharged Arcane Shield again, and again spending a point of Pneuma to get its defensive benefits to linger.
He wasn’t happy at all about that, doubly so when he realized that there was nothing left between us that could reasonably be expected to stop me.
“Not the brightest bulb in the pack, are ya dumbass?” I said, covering the sixty feet that he probably expected me to take a turn to cover in about two seconds.
Time for the showstopper! I thought with a huge, shit-eating grin!
He was already casting a spell of some kind, but there was no way I was going to let him get it off! “Hey, asshole, I’m coming for my pound of flesh, buddy! Of course, as freaking fat as your dumb ass is, I probably need to take a coupla HUNDRED pounds of flesh! Don’t feel bad, though, I got that covered, too!”
I activated my Bronze Knuckle Boost as a Swift Action, which lets me do +2d6 damage and ignore all DR until the start of my next turn, and then hit him with Leg Sweeping Hilt... Broken Chain’s 2nd level trip maneuver. +2 to a trip attack, success triggers an immediate free attack. +2 more to hit because I spent a point of Pneuma to boost it.
Yeah, that’s a +19 to trip attacks.
I faked a punch high, then ducked and swept his legs out from under him, taking the maneuver’s free attack as a hammerfist that I smashed into his chest on his way down to the ground! If my guesses about how my unarmed damage was interacting with my Mind Blade was correct, that was a hit for 5d6+14+1d6+6!
Of course, it was a trip attack, so Great Throw triggered, letting me automatically do my unarmed damage on a successful trip! It would be a little lower for that, only 5d6+11+1d6+6 that time.
Then, of course, he landed prone next to me, triggering a Vicious Stomp! Which of course landed; prone people being denied Dex and Dodge bonuses really IS vicious... another 6d6+11+1d6+6.
19d6+54 off of a single combat maneuver... not bad!
When my Vicious Stomp descended, planting itself firmly on his chest, he probably should have died already! Evil McFatAss was only 7th level and probably didn’t have higher than a 16 Con. Even if he had maximum hit points for his level, average damage rolls should have overkilled him by at least fifty percent!
Even if he had a butt load of DR, Bronze Knuckle would ignore it.
Which reminds me to not rely too much on DR. If I can get a maneuver to ignore it, other people can, too!
Somehow, though, the slimy bastard was still alive! Dumb ass tried to cast while prone, though, giving himself hideous penalties to his Concentration check, which he failed.
I took my attack of opportunity, ANOTHER 5d6+11 + 1d6+5 +1d6 sneak attack damage... and he was somehow STILL ALIVE!
He looked damned smug for just a second at what was probably a look of dismay on my face, but then I smiled. There was some trick here that I didn’t know about, but when in doubt, hit ‘em back first and harder, just like Sensei Kai always says!
I could see the look of grim acceptance cross his face as I threw a full round Flurry at him, spending a point of Qi for a third attack... all of them were essentially Qi and psionically powered stomps to his face and chest!
He was essentially helpless, and if this had been a duel or some kind of an honorable battle, I might have considered letting him get up... but he’d crucified people, plus he was a demon worshipper AND a necromancer.
Two stomps and a leaping axe kick to the face finished him pretty gruesomely.