Rooms packed with undead were targeted first with wide-area spells to weaken them all, then cleared with speed by lower-level Casters unleashing more targeted attacks as finishers. They were either Pure Fire or Holy Water, as appropriate, boosted by Disruption effects that by themselves could wipe out a third of a chamber instantly. Knowing what was ahead by Divination Magic, a good deal of which Lady Fae was providing with constant updates, what to hit them with, the layout of the rooms, how the troopers should prepare and where they should fire; it all made such a huge difference.
With all the troops having Tier-5 Stars in their combat Elements, they hit like trucks, like every single one of them had at least a Spirit Seed, and Disruption and the Huando Meshing Method on top of that just sealed the deal. The fact the attacks were MORE powerful against undead, instead of less, turned their legendary toughness on its head, and made the undead more vulnerable to the magic of the living, not less, regardless of how tough they were supposed to be.
Oh, it wasn’t an easy fight. The Undead Hunters still had problems if the undead managed to get within melee range and into physical combat... although fast point-blank undead-killing magic solved a LOT of that problem. When it came time to Cast, they had to do so with precision and speed, which they had a lot of practice with these past few months, drilled into firing in salvoes and volleys. With the damage boost from Disruption, and its instant-kill ability, hitting multiple targets was as or more important than wasting all of his power on a single foe, and so Chaining was de riguer for many of his spells, watching a third of his opponents just get blown to vivus instantly, before the following fusillade of spells descended upon them to finish the job.
The Mick was defending more than he was attacking most of the time, making sure his troopers survived, that they were moving to where they needed to go, and they were ready to fight and able to contribute. He evacuated the wounded to get Healed, sometimes to their protests that they could still fight, and he monitored their Mana as they might not be doing, pulling them out to recharge in the reserves and bringing fresher men up to the front.
There was a lot of moving around, mortals threading through the maze-like extraplanar structure like they had been living in it for years. They were constantly surprising the undead with how they got from position X to objective Y so damn fast, weren’t there a whole lot of undead in the way, and how did you meatbags even find us?
That was especially true for the Mick’s personal team, and the one headed up by Red. With Fae watching their flanks and making sure any huge attack from one of the other avenues was doomed, they were ranging ahead of much of the information network of the undead. The enemy seemed to be light on the Psychic and Sound Elements which would have greatly aided communication, and the first news many of the Nobles/Archmage-level things they were running into had of the unthinkable idea of mortals invading the Pyramid was when the advance kill teams came streaking up a connecting hallway, barged into their chambers, and hit them with a devastating assault of magic.
Briggs was with Driver Sam, whose Silver Magic was leading the main force crashing through the strongest magical defenses, leaving flabbergasted undead wide open for brutal spell assaults from the troopers, or the attention of Briggs’ own Hammer. Driver Sam had reported that the Commander had swept the heads off of four Noble mummies and skeletal liches so far, leaving their bones Burning behind him as the main force advanced.
The Mick was with the attackers going into the next room, like many of the others a baroque chamber covered with pictograms extolling the greatness of Tezcatlipoca and the Aztecs he’d risen from, the great deeds and conquests they’d made of their neighbors, sacrifices, the whole lot.
Waves of Disrupting attacks smashed into what looked to be a priest of some sort, with a powerful set of attendants around an altar. Swirling barriers of Air, Water, and Earth held some of the attacks back, but the first wave of attacks was specifically meant to blast apart magical defenses, and when the Dispels from the Typeless wizards along for the ride hit them and brought them down, the damage was real.
The Mick instead raised Forked in one direction and Bolt, his Scepter, in the other, and blew a whole lot of voltage up and down the length of the room.
Since he knew it was there, he could see the power inside the stone pulse up as his Earth-Meshed Lightning chewed into the stone and destroyed the runic structure that made up the empowering Formation in this room. The Poison magic that was supposed to flow down and kill them all kind of coughed and sputtered, and flanking mages quickly blew flaming vivus into whatever clouds they could see with Fire or Air magic, making sure none of it got close to them.
He could feel the black eyes of the lead mummy upon him as it glared at him, his incredibly eye-catching fusillade of magic that had been wasted on the walls revealed as the utterly perfect play to counteract the undead priest’s machinations.
It pointed at him, eyes pulsing red with Curse Magic.
The Mick flicked out Forked, and Void-Meshed Lightning crackled out with blue-violet fury, the scream of an eagle shaking the chamber. The Bolt bounced off two walls, came in behind the priest, and smashed into his backside, launching him out over and past his surviving minions and into the middle of a lot of magic in a sparking, twisting, Lightning-wrapped package of skin and bones.
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None of the mages so much as looked at him, not bothering to waste their magic on a Ruler-class undead. However, Hopper, popping out of his Contract Space, was not nearly so limited.
The lich priest looked up in smoking disbelief at the Storm Runner looming above him, and then the Woodpecker Hammering began.
Chokchokchokchokchok, Hopper’s head came down and crashed into the lich, vivic-laden Lightning sparking and flaring with an eagle’s call with every hit, two or three times a second, incredibly fast for such a large Bird.
Bony limbs withered, ignited in misty fires, and went flying. Ribs flew, the spine shattered under the crushing spear of Hopper’s beak, and the lich couldn’t do anything about it as the Lightning ravaged its mind and made it impossible to Cast.
The beat-down terminated with Hopper snapping up the lich’s disconnected skull before it could roll away, flipping it backwards flawlessly towards the Mick, and then spreading his wings to reveal the Gatling Shock Guns there.
With a warbling salute to his Emperor the Thunderbird, Hopper bounced up and over the shields of the surviving undead acolytes, landing right on top of the bloodied altar behind them, and opened down on them.
A withering hail of Fire-meshed Lightning rapid-fire tore into the acolytes from behind as the looming Storm Runner spun daintily, tearing all of the undead off of their feet, interrupting their desperate defenses and setting them ablaze with Lightning-fueled vivus.
The hard and accurate spells that came raging in a moment later took care of the rest. Within a minute, no undead were moving inside the room.
“Skull harvest!” the Mick ordered sharply, his Thunder Element making sure that he was heard. The skulls of the undead were dutifully collected for turning into Baneskulls later. “Commander, objective cleared!”
-Totally disable that Poison Formation and crack that altar,- /came the instant reply. -Deploy around the base of the altar, there should be something coming through the main doors there in about two minutes.-
“Defensive wedge and deployment around the altar, facing the main doors! We have probable incoming from the front, and our reinforcements are five minutes out!” the Mick shouted, Scepter and Staff glowing together in his grasp. Violent Earth-Meshed Lightning ranged out to start chewing into the walls and scenery. None of the men even ducked, confident he wouldn’t hit them, as Colonel Mick tore the shit out of the magic inlaid in this room and removed the threat it could pose completely.
Up on the altar, Hopper simply took a step off, brought his beak back, and hammered down six times in under two seconds.
Violent black and redness swarmed out as the altar shattered under Lightning and Storm Runner, was swallowed in a burst of hungry vivus, and then Hopper kicked out twice, sending the two massive chunks of stone out towards the doors where something should be on the way.
The Mick finished up his barrage, leaping into position in the middle of the Formation, where the men had already lapsed into instinctive Meditative circulation to draw in Mana, even if it was for only a few seconds. Every little bit helped.
Hopper spread his stubby wings again, revealing the Lightning Gatlings slung there, which slowly began to cycle up, crackling with voltage as he crouched slightly, centered on the big bronze doors leading into the chamber. Magic lit up around everyone, began to mesh together, and the vanguard team hummed in readiness as the Mick crossed his two Implements in front of him and gathered his own power.
When the great doors were flung open by the power of the leading undead Jaguar Knight coming in, the revealed formation of elite undead cavalry behind him was definitely not ready for the Void-meshed Lightning that opened up in a Sage-level wall of utter disaster coming for him and his troops.
The few who managed to survive were unloaded on by the waiting mages and Hopper’s direct assault, ranging far down the hallway to find any targets that hadn’t exploded or crumbled straight off.
-Sweep them and proceed to the next chamber,- Briggs /ordered, and Colonel Mick simply pointed.
In silent, tight formation, the vanguard team headed down the hallway, harvesting the Skulls of elite undead for Colonel Mick to stow away in his Pocket, while Hopper vanished back into his Contract Space, ready to come out when needed again.
Two minutes later, the next company rolled into the room in their wake, coming in from the left-side doorway the vanguard team had used, proceeding quickly across the still-misting, blasted, and rubble-strewn room to set up in front of the opposite hallway there and await another force of undead trotting to relieve the lich-priests from a different direction.
They weren’t going to like what they ran into, either.
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I had multiple Wizard Eye variants up all over the Pyramid Space now, monitoring everything, tracking, charting, keeping the Heavens-Up Display current, and the Markspace one even moreso.
Information was king. I didn’t need to react to surprises if there were no surprises, right?
The news that the Pyramid was being actively invaded had reached the sanctum of the Jaguar Ahaw, judging by the agitated racing back and forth of the messengers in there. Guy had to learn modern communications or something. Although this was non-Euclidean space, so Psychic magic didn’t work between chambers.
Eh, his loss.
-Hey, Noona-che,- I /called out to Big John’s main squeeze on the SAR team. -Why don’t you hop over in front of that Wall of Fire in the next chamber and put a really powerful Firebolt down the full length of it. Needs to reach, oh, four hundred yards?-
A bunch of yellow and green dots popped up on the HUD, marching up toward the blocking Walls. They couldn’t make it through, but they might want to do something stupid like toss spells through it.
-I’m on it!- the Japanese Retrieval specialist called out, zipping that way quickly on her Wind Trail. Within fifteen seconds, she was in front of said Wall, and Lightning-Meshed Fire was swirling up around her and her Mace-Scepter Hearth. It was chased with vivus as it blew through the Walls when her Awareness pinged the maximum amount of undead on the other side, their own Awareness completely flummoxed by the Holy Vivic Flames burning in the way in front of them.
Nope, no surprises was quite fun. I didn’t expect hundreds-year old undead to have any knowledge of proper surveillance and counter-surveillance tactics, either.