These guys weren’t dumb, I’d cued to that pretty quick. Most of them were working off Intelligence as their foundation mental Stat, which meant they were sharp on the pick-up and thought things over.
I was talking about killing a lot of creatures!
“Man, wish I’d seen this stuff two years ago. We might all have Tier 5 Stars,” muttered Glenn.
I popped out the first Soul Crystal, passed it back to the Mick. “Press it to your forehead and pull the power out, apply it to your first Star. Make damn sure the Stars are all in the Sets of Seven.”
He nodded quickly, taking the gleaming small Core gingerly and pressing it to his forehead as his team watched him with burning eyes. There was a pause of a few seconds as he concentrated, electricity flickering about his head for a moment.
His sudden inhalation barely preceded his eyes flipping open as the Core shattered into less than dust. “It works!” he hissed, his fist clenching.
I held up the second Core, and floated it over to Driver Sam, who took it quickly while trying to look as composed as possible.
-------
The Spiders moved with pretty good speed, all things considered, easily a good thirty kliks per hour. It took us a good fifteen minutes to catch up to them, even at the rate we were being blown forward.
We did run across some stragglers, mostly smaller pig-sized Spiders too young to keep up the pace, but trying nonetheless. I sniped them off, and they went tumbling. Sometimes a Lightning Runner would pounce on them, and other times smaller members of the flock above would peel off after them for a snack.
Injured and damaged Spiders lagged behind, and I punched burning firefrost holes through them, breaking the pressure their legs needed to work and sending them tumbling in tight bundles. They weren’t close enough together to do Chains, but I just sniped them off one after another, and let the Beasts figure out who was going to eat them.
I did note that the Lightning Runners had a terrifyingly fast beak attack, just an eyeblink of hammering motion that trailed static after them, and so realized why the Vultures and Bats weren’t messing with them.
Then again, plenty to go around... although somehow our flock of followers up above had freaking doubled in size during our travel time here.
“What’s the signal for ‘help’s attacking from over here?’” I asked over my shoulder.
“Two yellow bursts,” Red replied instantly. He seemed to be the details guy here, the others leaving him to it.
“How much are they going to believe it with all the fliers up there?” I went on, and he paused.
“Nobody in their right minds is going to trust Yellow Screamers or Great Canyon Vultures in a fight like this,” Red finally admitted, as we swung just to the side of the massive dust cloud the Spider Swarm was throwing up. The Lightning Runners and flocks above shifted right along with us, clearly enjoying what we were doing for them. “Nobody will come here regardless of what we signal.”
I just smiled. “Excellent! Then we’ll signal so they can wonder and can’t say you-all ran away!” I fired two yellow Bursting Darts into the air, silent poof-poof sparkly fireworks overhead. “Okay, we’re coming up on the main mass. Remember, we get the heads and a bunch of legs from the Warriors!” I shouted up at the flocks above once, three Darts now revolving around my hand. “Okay, break the Winds, I have point. Set up a rotation of Bats to come down and scream at the Spiders. Red, prepare to block for them. I’ll finish the targets. When the Spiders start responding, mire them down. We’re in no hurry, we’ll kill as many as want to come after us now.”
There were affirmations, and I began to shoot at the scrambling edge of the horde, now two hundred paces away, a writhing, scrambling combat of mutant Spiders that shouldn’t even be able to move, let alone at this pace.
My first Dartray punched out, zigzagged through a score of the smaller Spiders in a line of spiral flames, and sent them tumbling and falling as they were punctured. Lightning Runners converged on them eagerly, while the larger Spiders finally noticed they were being pursued.
Winds howled up in front of us and swept away the first flights of bristle-missiles. I followed up with another Chaining Dartray, while above the first Bats were swooping down at the order of their Commander, preparing to scream.
Bristles snapped up in a wave to greet him, the Spiders obviously knowing what the Bats were trying to do. Red clenched his fist, and a shield of Light flashed up, intercepting the spikes of rigid hair, and the Bat swooped over the swarm, screaming.
Spiders wobbled and nearly fell over, some spinning around in circles, others collapsing to the ground, unable to focus.
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Streaking Dartrays parted and killed the Spiders on either side of them, saving them for the next volley, and in effect doubling the effect of the stun scream. The Bats flitted away agilely from the next volley of bristle-fire, and another group from above prepared to come down.
The nearest Commander was most of a mile away, leading the stronger members of the Swarm as we closed on burning lights in the distance, perhaps ten miles away at this angle, clearly lit up and ready for the Spiders... or at least pretending to be. This was a lot of Spiders, and I wondered if they could mobilize enough people to deal with them.
Being capable of doing two things at once, I naturally asked about it.
They let Red answer, as usual. “The Wards will weaken the Spiders tremendously, allowing even Novice mages to be able to kill the Spiders more quickly, while the Adepts can clean them up. The Commanders will drive the lesser Spiders in, trying to wear out the mages, before they commit themselves.
“The nearest full military base is an hour away. If they mobilized as soon as they saw your earlier signal, they could get there in time. If not, they are going to get there as the Spiders are overrunning Fort Parker.”
The Forts were probably the anchors of the system, their Wards providing cover for Humans to expand into. People likely didn’t live outside them, but between the Forts and the coverage of their Wards.
I didn’t stop my fusillade, slaughtering the stunned Spiders before they recovered, even as their kin either ran on or turned to attack us. At the same time, I shook my head at how different it was from the Beast Realm, but then, I’d not seen a massive action between two different species of Beasts going at it, either, and I assumed that was definitely something that happened. There was only so much space and resources, and their only population control was one another. One of the jobs of the more intelligent Beasts was driving their lessers to fight and kill other Beasts to keep the populations in check, as well as helping evolve the survivors...
We only had to chew through a fraction of these Spiders, who were meant to die pushing back Humanity regardless, to satisfy the appetites of the other Beasts. It didn’t mean there wouldn’t be conflict in the future at all, but if we were willing to set a plump table, they were willing to feast.
The key here was just being careful and staying at the edge of the Swarm, not threatening the main mass. Of course, I still had to kill at least two Commanders, but that could wait until they hit the defenses ahead of us and had driven their mobs of supporters on ahead to be massacred.
---
Coldly and methodically, I butchered the Servant and Warrior-class Black-Banded Azurite Tarantulas, working our way slowly towards the Commander over there as I did. Vultures and Bats were diving down out of the sky to enjoy the meals, Lightning Runners were ripping and tearing in sparking frenzies at the corpses, and I was pretty sure other scavengers were running in from the distance to also enjoy the feast.
True to their promise, the Warrior-class Spiders’ heads were dropped down on us, along with whole sets of their legs. I stowed them in my Pocket and my second thoughtstream continued crushing them, extracting the eyes, mandibles, and tips of the legs, and tossed the rest back out for the foot-long Shale-Shell Ants to eventually round up and drag away.
I didn’t know how much each of them was worth, but the cheerfulness of the men as they silently counted the heads vanishing and then being tossed out without the pricey stuff indicated that they were feeling good about their finances.
Occasionally yellow-Bursting our location, I just kept up with the slaughter and reinforcing our income levels. They probably thought I was rich as heck, and yeah, I had a lot of raw gold in my Pocket for Burning, but only because gold wasn’t worth anything to Beasts, and I wasn’t going to trade it away if I could help it at all. Trading away Soul Crystals would start a whole bunch of trouble, I was certain, and I could do without that for a while.
Entering the mercenary economy, I was. I was also pretty damn sure that regardless of how much money we made, it would evaporate very quickly, because wasn’t that just how it went with adventurers and Gearing up?
I was very sure these guys would know all about the financial side of being Casters. I guess I’d just have to see how bad it was...
------
I could see the Wards through my Mask of Clarity Soul-Tat when we came within a mile of them. They extended out in a great dome into the sky, and I could immediately see the effect of the Spiders intruding into them. They immediately slowed down, wavering, finding it more difficult to move and scuttle about.
Regardless, they were still forced ahead and obeyed, right into the teeth of the first Human defenders.
The initial discharge of Novice-class spells wasn’t anything special on its face, but the people were using some kind of Formation which agglomerated their magic and effectively boosted its Tier, enabling multiple spells to hit as one and so kill their targets quickly and efficiently.
The Commander Spider on the flank here was dead. We’d gotten too close, it had turned on us, and I’d popped it off with a Split Shardray to the thorax, the Chains wiping out its escort of the toughest Warriors around it at the same time.
The Commander Bat came down with a scream that leveled all the Spiders in the area, its own escorts rapidly falling on them as the local Spiders stewed in fear and agitation at the assault from above. I helped it by killing any who stuck around in the area quickly, as well as those reeling at the edges of the Bats’ shrieking that they were happy to unleash on the milling, unguided Spiders.
Dozens of Warrior Spider-heads descended upon us, while basically the entire wing of Bats was quickly down here gorging away. There were two or three Spiders per Bat, at least, and the boss of them had ripped open and was slobbering up the insides of the Commander Tarantula greedily.
“We good on our agreement, Elder?” I asked it calmly, and it paused enough to give me a look and another screech, turning its head to look down the swarm towards the next big Spider greedily.
“Fine, but I get their heads!”
He grunted assent, startling the men, who watched as Noble zipped over to the head of the Commander, its Golden edge cut down, split the thick carapace, and then a Void Magic TK wrench tore the halves apart, punching down on the eyes to free them from the rigid shell. The edge hacked left and right, freeing the meter-long pedipalps and their gleaming black curves... and then I opportunistically sent Noble around the carcass, hacking off the tip of its tree-trunk thick legs, grabbing up the ends for us and dumping everything into the Pocket as my Staff spun back to me.
“Wow!” blurted out the Mick on seeing the haul.