Wayfair was in a foul mood.
She wasn’t affected by the overarching chaotic magic they were using to warp minds and wills, of course. Nor was she susceptible to their Charms, Illusions, and Glamours, having natural True Seeing and looking right through all that stuff... which naturally made it to the MUD for targeting purposes. She had lived among the Fey, who tended to use Glamour to cover up their lack of will to do maintenance or innovate new designs, and who lacked their own drive.
She absolutely loathed what she was seeing here. The lack of style and balance, the assault on the aesthetic senses... she could tell what they were trying to do, and it was so off-kilter and offensive, and they were so bad at it, that she was filled with a rather over-the-top urge to Burn It All.
On the other hand, that thing where the Luvvers want you to stand there and gape at their awesomeness and style as they cut you down? She was absolutely taking full advantage of it with her 50 Charisma shining out there with its unreal, supernatural grandeur. Way too beautiful, way too stylish; leading with bright silver death, and leaving with explosions of blood and gore, she Killed Them All.
Especially the hentai demons that were making such a mockery of her origins.
I turned off my Halo Crown so they could appreciate her all the more. After all, she was literally everything they wanted to be, except she wasn’t a slave to ANYONE, and her scorn for them was blazing out the stars in her eyes.
She tore apart their attempts to make great Charm Patterns with clipped advice on which way to run, and we zipped all over the place disrupting all the mad designs they were trying to whip up. Her good horse Sama brought her in looking like a star-fallen demon, brought her away in a light-and-death show that just had them gaping after her, wanting more, more, more. She shut down their musicians, finding their carpish and erratic wailing an affront to Chaotic music, their fingering dreadful, and generally fixed by silver bolts to the face. They danced and swirled, and she curled her lip and shot out their legs. If they flexed and posed, she was personally affronted that they could even think of comparing with her, and filled their chests and faces with fatally disfiguring bolts.
Of course, she snickered and blew final kisses to all the Dancers I was running through, mocking them for not knowing a real battle-dancer like she did. She crippled a lot of the Luvvers just so they could experience being trampled uncaringly to death by their own, showing them that having friends and allies in mutual respect was a much wiser life choice. She mocked them in sound and verse they couldn’t help but crane their ears to hear, and they died in rapture listening to her.
She came, and they trembled with longing for her. She delivered unto them her blessing, and they trembled no more.
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Their most lethal forms of attack nullified out the gate, the Luvvers didn’t last as long as either of their predecessors, much to their dismay. There were some instances where performance teams worked together with marvelous synchronicity, and as soon as that was displayed, they were primary targets and got dead really quick, poor them.
The rain stopped, the vivic flames burned, the thunder went quiet, and we didn’t have to put up with the idiots anymore.
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“So... jRaztl next,” Briggs said thoughtfully, as we spent our two hours of down time in alternate forms of meditative release. With teeth!
“The lord of ambition, watching everything and sure He has the perfect plan to thwart us.” I grinned into his hairy chest. “I’m sure He’ll enjoy the show that He’s put on for us.”
“So, a directed attack at the Obelisk, and tons of Casters to stop. Much more focused than these last few ones.” He rubbed my back with a huge hand, and I laid there and let his Source stream past with a zillion tickles on my Null, while he enjoyed the rock that wouldn’t budge. Our Vajras were much more active, of course, revolving against one another constantly, more intimate than skin.
Superhuman sex was meant to be enjoyed at ALL the levels...
“The Brothers will be doing much less outright carnage and more Caster-snuffing. I doubt the Casters will appreciate the sincerity on their behalf, but I’m given to understand that just about all adherents of jRaztl get mutations to use spell-likes, so there’s no stopping all of the magic.”
“Man, they are not going to like the Forsaken,” he mused cheerfully. “I think we’ll return the favor.” His flat nose bulged with a big exhalation. “That means the final push immediately following...”
“Yeah.” I pushed up and looked down at him, leaning on those steely pecs, meeting those violet eyes that were so much smarter than that craggy face would indicate. “You cool with that?”
“It’s what we’re here for, right?” His deep baritone descended to the floor, somehow keeping all its clarity. “It’s just that I didn’t expect it so fast...”
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“All games end once you’re too high-level. Well, it’s time to show them that this isn’t a game.” I gave him a slug, which kind of bounced, kinda didn’t. Yum. “Games aren’t games when there are consequences for playing them. They stuck out their toes, thinking they’d get some jollies. In doing so, they opened the door for a whole lotta whoop-ass to come in on them.” I cracked my knuckles. “Little frogs in their little well, thinking they are something special. Time to enlighten them.”
“Can’t help wishing it was someone else,” he said, self-mockingly. “We just made ourselves too damn good, didn’t we?”
“Powah Gamahs fo-evah,” I told him, and snuggled up again, as he clasped a steel-bending big hand on my back.
I heard the mental alarm before the shouts in the distance, the skirl of steel, and the distant eruption of spells. He glanced that way and sighed again. “They made a run at the Obelisk with a strike team, huh?”
“Yeah, Brothers saw ’em coming a half hour ago. The hyn waited until they started their ambush to take ‘em down, give them and their bosses some false impressions.” I waited while the reports came in. “They had explosive stuff to take it down. They know it’s important.”
“Good news,” he growled.
“Not too much time to work on stuff tonight.” I reached up to noogie his nose. “Ready for ending their game?”
“No, but I Swore I would, and damn if I’m going to stop now,” he said, and it was on.
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jRaztl is the total pain in the neck of the Warp Gods. He’s the patron of personal power and personal ambition, which makes Him both the most magical of them, since magic is all about individual empowerment, and the cleverest schemer.
His main problem is that all his followers are individuals and out for themselves, and so they backstab one another more readily than all the other factions. Sure, the forces of Klaw will go berserk and fight one another if there aren’t any enemies around, and the Riggors will try out new plagues and promote one another to undeath, while the Luvvers casually ignore any sense of empathy for one another as they go about their individual obsessions and find test subjects to inflict them on.
Razzers will mess one another up for the stupidest of reasons: getting rid of threats from below, taking down a superior, eliminating a rival, killing someone who has something you want, dealing a blow to another faction, answering an insult or taunt with instant escalation to death, pure ego, did he look at me funny?... all of these were perfect reasons for overly intelligent psychopaths to slaughter one another, even as they are dealing with unenlightened fools who had not seen the proper way to power, and who all thought they were the smartest/wisest/cleverest/most cunning person/best leader in the room, and everyone should be obeying THEM like good little minions should...
They started off the fight with a scouting attempt and trying to cut the head off the snake, not that anything stinking of the Warp was going to be able to move around here easily.
Oh, right, right, all those agents they had among the mercenaries and free troops suddenly found it was time to move. It was really funny how their targets were up and waiting for them, and so many of them got dead. They all tended to be assigned to just the wrong locations to get their jobs done quick, or were crumped up so others could converge on them when they turned coat. Basically, their whole sudden treachery didn’t work so well in a universe where you could actually see the Evil in men’s souls.
So, the chaos in the back line turned into a final purging that we’d been waiting to undertake for months. Sure, there was some loss of life, but in general, guys depending on treachery to win a fight don’t do too well walking into a prepared battle line waiting to kill them.
So, the clever shit didn’t work all that well. The coordination on our end was politely murderous, they definitely weren’t prepared for it. Some sleeper agents were pleased to get back to their own faces, too.
----
They drove in their beastmen adherents first, having quite the swarming vanguard of endless stupid, magically mutated, fanatical servants, souls presold at cheap prices and ready to die for the cause and a better grade of beer.
Yeah, they were chaff. They could still do things like call down lightning, breathe fire, or call forth piercing needle rains of ice, poisonous fogs, and similar things. They could not, however, Summon jack shit, which I think put a bit of a crimp into their battle style. Bringing in even more slaves to overwhelm stuff on top of what they had was certainly their preferred style, although they didn’t work with necromancy much.
jRaztl loved him his rainbow and loud, solid colors. So, his servants and champions tended to peacock, parrot, and bird of paradise coloring... loud, scintillating, attention-getting, look-at-me-I’m-awesome. Units that served Him tended to be of any one primary color, chased with any one other color, and then with scintillating rainbow badges indicating their allegiances to jRaztl. That way, they could easily identify rivals on a battlefield for attention among themselves, while also confusing an enemy with the crazy clash of colors.
His demonic servants were always illuminated or surrounded by whorls of magic, drawing attention to their feathered selves, multiple limbs, and the mighty magic at their command, phear them.
Wayfair was quite happy to play on their tendency to infight, taking control of unit commander after commander and leading them into charges against their own troops. Given succubus and unlimited ability to Charm, this raised considerable havoc on the battlefield as we went scything through it.
But, lots and lots and lots of chaff.
They had jobs and they did them, despite the losses, clearing away lanes through the stone blocks, bringing in siege bridges and ladders that the other forces hadn’t bothered with, and in many ways acting like an intelligent attacking force should. They did try and bring in hellish siege cannons, and were not pleased to learn the range, power, and firing rate of the Autoballistae, especially with adamantine heads that promptly spiked their fire-vomiting little toys and rendered them useless (to be Burned later... thanks, lads!).
The sheer quantity of demons kept Briggs and I busy, and the number of Casters had the Brothers running all over snuffing them, having to cut through hordes of tough bodyguards to do so and otherwise slowing down the wholesale slaughter of the troops. Cleave-Training was not as productive as usual, and even demon-bombs when the Land came up to eat the six-armed, glowing-eyed, mouthless plumaged Spell Weavers didn’t catch many, as the surrounding troops ran away, ran away! from them.
It was all little things, but clever, and it all added up. They were going to make a time of it.