Now, there were others who wanted to get in on this, including our Exemplar Lite Paladins and so forth, but I inquired who might be able to survive a pond's-worth of poisoned, diseased, and acidic vomit being dumped on them, and they shut up and decided to work on the other things we had to get into place.
So it was that dragons fought thessaldragons, Pseudo-nats fought Exemplars and Primals, and Forsaken fought a defecated army of Warp demons.
Ah, high-end slaughter and Karma. You take it where you get it.
Our two kaiju sat there like mountains, but in actuality both were watching with great interest. After all, they could now get an idea of the action at our levels, which didn’t look like ants tussling, but some seriously nasty combat, and way faster than they usually moved at. We were some awesome entertainment, such as it was.
The enemy didn’t know what it was dealing with, and try as it might, Exemplars are not something easy for even the Divine to duplicate. Given how much the Warped fucked with both Fate and Luck, I doubted either force gave them any face, and so trying to replicate what an Exemplar was capable of was just something they couldn’t do.
Pseudo-nats were nice, but Exemplars were better. The best thing Pseudos had going for them were crazy tough bodies and being impossible to crit with their unreal anatomies, but Exemplars didn’t care about crits.
Exemplars with Class Levels were waaay past them. The Pseudos could try to Dispel their Buffs, but they had more Buffs than the P-nats had Dispels...
That Dire Rhino was every bit as big as Lord Ivory... until Lord Ivory set off his Quickened Animal Growth, and suddenly was two dozen feet tall and massing a hundred tons. Great tusks blazed golden with Brilliance, and their mutual charge was thunderous... and resulted in that whale-size rhino being picked right up off the ground and tossed like a sandbag.
King Gray was in a fang dance with the Nine-Tails, his Mastery of Spell Resistance defying the enchantments it was putting out, ignoring its illusions, and his jaws ripping at its tentacled, many-eyed, amorphous body with glowing golden fangs.
King Gold was in a straight-up mauling contest with the Dire Tiger, also twice his normal size with shining teeth and claws... and doing damage to the Tiger way faster than he was taking it in return.
Yeah, nothing to worry about for the Exemplars, who were faster, stronger, and waaaay tougher than their opponents, even as they rolled and fought through the demon press with complete uncaring aplomb, splattering happily gibbering plague spreaders.
We just cut our way in, of course.
The air was full of acidic disease-carrying rotting slime flying in all directions, spewed forth by all these happy jiggling sluggors of various sizes, their Pusboy cheerleader squads, and whatnot. That was fine, fine, it just meant vivic fire had that much more unnatural shit to burn.
Yeah, they thought they were tough, what with immunity to pain, organs like jelly, all that mass to hack through, and tough hides and stuff. But, you know, vivic and Banefire don’t really care, and Cutting Life, well, the caress of Void Brother Blades and Axes and Glaives opened them up, set them on fire, and they felt their life and power burning away. It might not have been painful, but there’s an absoluteness to it that must have been kind of horrifying, judging by the way they started squealing in voices that sounded like constipated farts.
The big, swimming pool-sized mounds of oozing fat and pus might have taken a little longer, but Hell... how many Forsaken were on this field with Greater Demon-killing experience? Hello, like, all of them. Could these things move faster than us? No. Could they teleport or fly on us? No. Could they throw magic down and just make us rot where we stood?
No. And once we got into combat range, it didn’t matter that their hide was two feet thick. They were immune to rot and disease and poison, but they weren’t immune to vivic fire, which found them just tasty, thanks, and when two or three Brothers with glowing Brilliant swords carved through them, they lit off one after another after another, popping off a lot of Pusboys we were basically ignoring as they did so.
That Pandemic Sluggor was spitting out an army, but it seemed a lot slower now, and the pestilence Swarms flying around were spontaneously popping into unwhite flares from the amount of vivus in the air. I claim to be no expert on demonic kaiju facial expressions, especially when their head kept dissolving back into the body and a new one formed somewhere else, but it didn’t seem to be too jolly happy as its lovable little squirming horde burned away to white ash, the Land ate them up with nary a belch, and all their little diseases went away with them.
The thessaldragons might have done really well if they could have gotten to melee, owing to all those heads, but, alas. The five dragons were much faster and more agile in the air, and the lightning and cold breath weapons the thessals had delightfully been made impervious to ended up being multiple cones and bolts of flame coming in to pick them off one by one, while the acidic gouts they offered up in turn pretty much went nowhere. Given the born-of-disease nature of the things, the dragons didn’t even bother to get into melee combat with them, a combination of fire magic and cumulative burning breath weapons sending them falling from the air one after another.
It wasn’t a challenge for the dragons, which was only proper for Classed Exemplar Lite Dragons, no?
The number of Pusboys weren’t worth counting, the lesser Sluggors and their bosses numbered in the hundreds, if not over a thousand, and there were twenty-one dead Greater Sluggors and their mound-of-sewage corpses feeding the Land, several proccing the great jaws and making the kaiju blink, the Land coming up to drag the burning demons down and feast. The Pandemic didn’t look too enthused, and even its occasional burbling was going quiet.
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The waist-high vivic fog hissing against the slime and pus on its hide probably had something to do with that.
Its lunging forward and sudden forming of a gaping mouth-cannon hole was anything but unexpected. We were separating in all directions even as it formed, breaking this way and that, four of us drawing a clearer arc it followed for a chance at hitting us all –
It thought it was immune to fire. But, as Fuego had been inspired to realize, Fire was just atoms in motion really fast. So, focused fire was just Fire moving really fast, and just as much about force as heat.
The breath the Tyrant had been slowly building shot across the distance and into the orifice that had been kindly formed to lead right into the innards of the Pandemic.
Whatever it was going to vent out onto us didn’t quite make it out of that sphincter as the narrow, starfire-hot ray of plasma drove right into the opening. The sound the Pandemic made nearly had me projectile vomiting with the images of turning innards it brought forcibly to mind, but being the wise Forsaken that I was, I settled for getting out of range of the thing as fast as I possibly could, while kaiju dino and ape rose to their feet and started pounding towards us with monstrous steps that were as terrifyingly quiet as ghosts.
The Kings all had their fights under control, which didn’t mean they weren’t eager to leave. Heads of P-nats went flying as we streamed past them, and were plucked out of the air like the opportunistic sots that we were, trophies that were going to make some nice Baneskulls. The Kings were all wearing similar ones from prior victories against creatures like this, and were kind enough to donate them to the general cause, while we all put the tarsals to the floor and got the deck out of Hodge.
It was, after all, time for the Big Event.
That Pandemic massed more than Fuego and Mono put together, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Its jaws were actually big enough to swallow a good portion of them, and neither of them wanted contact with whatever was inside it. The arms it had made for itself could swell to impossible size and didn’t really have bones, meaning they had great amounts of reach and flexibility, all moving at impossible speed with their supernatural strength.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know what five Bars of Philosopher’s Might does for something?
That’s an effective +20 points of Might. Or, in simpler terms, that is x16 brute Strength. Elder Arg bounced around like a wee monkey with it up. When a Kaiju sets those alternating bands to burning, and their effective weight to themselves becomes a fraction of what it was... well.
They came in on that Sluggor fast.
Fuego breathed out again. This breath was white, but it wasn’t hot plasma. No, this was cold and serene, sweeping across the ground and then lashing across the front of the Pandemic from a half-mile away. In its wake, frozen oxygen snowed down, the ground cracked and erupted as it froze solid, and the misting vivus was replaced by drifting dry ice and slowly boiling gasses.
Emperor Mono’s great Staff, the fires within glowing but not bursting out, swept out. In terms of reach, not even the massive Arm that swelled to sickening life from the Sluggor’s side could match it, and it crashed onto the frozen front of the Sluggor.
Okay, that was tons of metal crashing into the thing at literally supersonic speed; we all heard the BOOM. The Warp Gods had chosen this Sluggor to be immune to fire (hah!) and lightning, because of the show both of them had put on prior. It was naturally immune to acid and poison, which left it merely resistant to cold.
When Fuego was ripping the Fire out of something, mere cold resistance wasn’t going to work. When the Staff smashed into that frozen hide, it instantly shattered the chilled subs-for-flesh and tore it apart. Massive chunks of Pandemic went flying as frozen body parts ripped free of the rest of it.
Mono had been getting some good Staff lessons. The fires on the Staff ignited enough to repel any bits of Pandemic that wanted to stay attached to it, while the Staff came around and slammed into the reaching arm, pounding it to the ground. Unfortunately it didn’t have any bones or they would have broken, but a spin and a reverse and it came down right on the current bulbous head still jutting out, slamming that bellowing thing down into the mass of the rest of it, even as the great jaws in its belly opened to spit something out.
Yeah, we watched a few thousand tons of monkey go diving aside like he was a baby chimp, hit the ground, do a shoulder roll while stirring up almost nothing, and then bounce right back to the attack on its flank even while that totally vile mixture of chunky stuff and something blargh hissed and sizzled on the ground, creating a new pond of ugh.
Fuego wasn’t going to take a bite of this thing, and didn’t even want to rip at it. But that was fine, because he had just taken some Fire, and Mono had the physical combat side all covered with his Staff on this slow-moving thing. It could take a lot of punishment, without a doubt...
But Fuego had also just sucked up all the drifting vivic fire from the burning of its little army. He hadn’t been throwing out cold, he’d been taking Fire. Verra subtle but important difference.
Mono circled faster than the Sluggor could spin around, pounding down with the Staff, making its gelatinous body distort under the impacts and wriggle like jello, shockwaves from the hits making it wobble and jiggle, and if they didn’t really hurt it, well...
That was what a point-blank shot of kaiju-enhanced vivic fire breath weapon was there to do.
Fuego wasted none of it. Mono was kind enough to set up the Pandemic for a full broadside, and the Fire Tyrant let it all go.
He didn’t strafe, boring his breath hot and narrow and in one location, going for depth and targeting the energies that kept the thing moving inside, whatever key things had to remain intact there for this animated turd to keep moving. Even with a hide a dozen feet thick, we could see the glow inside, and the Sluggor squealed out a million lungs worth of breath through its sphincter holes. The two kaiju found themselves reeling at the stone-shredding sonic power of the scream despite themselves as the ground around them was shredded.
Ah, Thunder resistance, you are still such a nice thing, even from a couple miles away...
Outraged, Mono and Fuego switched sides, circling around it with totally inappropriate lightness, and Mono found that massive hole in the side of the thing totally the right size to shove a couple hundred feet of burning Staff into and probe around.
There we go, move that thing forward, drive it out the gaping front jaws, wedge it against the far side there, and lever it backwards. Sure, why not? Massive muscles worked, Philosopher’s Might bars longer than I was tall burned, and the Pandemic heaved as it tried to resist the leverage and totally out of scale Might of the Ape.
Strength out of scale for a Kaiju. I was laughing to myself, despite everything. They were too strong for their size!...