Not a thousand of them, I judged. The true elites would come in as the numbers dwindled, with the very best not coming in until two thousand or less remained.
“Now, you all are the prey,” I whispered, but my voice carried to everyone. “You cannot survive if they all do. Therefore, they must die. They will reap, there is no need for you to do so anymore. They are going to kill you all, unless you kill them back. There are one thousand of them.
“They will not kill one another until all of you are dead. You can only do the same if you want to live.
“You hunt the strong now. You cannot do it alone.
“They will kill some of you. You cannot stop them. You are the weak, and they are the strong.
“If they chose to kill you, your greatest weapon is your spite. Block them, hold them, even for a second, and the murderous bastards beside you will finish the job.
“If you kill one, congratulations. Chop off their head, tie it to your belt. You are now a preferred target. The rest of you, stay close to anyone who has a head. The masters will flock to them, preferring to kill them. Pick your own target as they do, and try to live.
“There is no need to turn on those next to you. The drow will do the slaughter now. It is time for your last clawing attempt to live, and if you fail, to try to bring your killer down with you.
“Best of luck. Go get some allies. Group one, with her.” Celestia walked off towards the cellulocusts. “Group two, with her.” Jensa headed off towards the Kundi Queen. “Group three, with her.” Keva headed off for the shoggoth, who, unlike the vast majority of its spawn, was intelligent and could understand Aklo. “I will see you in the thousand. If you get there, I heartily recommend you kneel down and get the Hell out of here as fast as you can.”
A hundred or so gladiators followed each of the girls, the first time we’d really split up, leaving me alone, standing there with Chalice.
I turned towards the nearest edge of the arena, and I’m sure many drow in the crowd were leering and shouting and pointing when they saw me moving to intercept at least one of the incoming gladiators.
The four of us had definitely garnered a bunch of attention. Doubtless we were all favored targets for the more arrogant of the gladiators, and that was going to get a bunch of them dead before they realized they should be focused on taking out the weaker survivors.
Some infighting was already occurring in the weaker units, as they finished off their wounded or the weakest among themselves, trying to get that survivor counter down faster, faster, faster, not realizing they were making the job of the drow that much easier.
The girls would be working with the three swarm generators, who were definitely powerful creatures and thus would be targets for glory, attracting attention. They wouldn’t expect help from any of the creatures, but it was just a way to gather the drow and have a nasty creature who wouldn’t attack them occupying a vector.
The fight was entering its second to last endgame. The true entertainment was just beginning.
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The average incoming Drow was a minimum Elf/10, Melee/3, Psi/3, with Scout and Assassin Levels to keep them busy when they weren’t in the arena preening for the crowds. They didn’t dare use their psi actively for fear of losing their souls and causing Warp incursions, but they had powerful psionic Feats to boost themselves passively, Psychic-powered Gear operating off a powerful foundation, and naturally their own biosciences and alchemy to draw on.
They had Dex scores of 30 at a minimum, ranging up to 40 for the true post-Ten elites. They were fiendishly intelligent and calculating, going for the 30 Int to supplement their finesse-style dodging style. Partial Psychic armor would add at least 8 DR of protection. Force fields or Cha-based psychic fields would add deflection bonuses of +5 or higher. Wired Reflexes, combat logic boosters, cognition amplifiers, and the like would add another +5 or more.
Their Soak would be maxed out and over 100. Their Health would be similarly boosted to the 150 range, seemingly delicate and lithe bodies charged by psi and harder to hew into than ironwood.
That was a tremendous amount of punishment they could take, even before any blood-drinking Weapons or nanite-healing was figured in.
They were Finesse fighters, and would be using armor-ignoring weapons of preternatural sharpness. Unless your armor was Energized, they’d cut through it like tofu, and then Sneak Attack damage, crits, and rending attacks would rip you apart... if the weapons weren’t poisoned with stuff that could make rocks bleed.
With a dodge-based AC of 40+, the average combatant here was going to find it nigh-impossible to hit them, and if the drow fought defensively, most of the elites here, too. This was their home ground, they were Geared to kill upon it, and there was precious little except one another that they feared inside it.
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It was going to be a slaughter, of beings who had just fought their hearts out, and were truly the strongest and best of the survivors.
But they were also wounded, tired, and not geared or equipped to take the drow on.
Except for me and my girls. They were definitely not ready for us, and Hags disliked us some bouncy-bouncy Finesse-fighting types. They were not going to have fun trying to cut through Nog Energized Armor, Crystal Shield DR, and DR 10-12/Holy Silver, they were not. If they could hit our 50+ dodgy AC, anyways, learning how it felt to strike at a ghost flowing through your strikes...
My first opponent looked like a Noble Champion; one of the smaller houses, an elite duelist and assassin who looked down on all of lesser status, which included pretty much all aliens, and definitely included breshkt.
His smile when he saw me gliding in was a bit forced, because he could see how fast I was moving, that my feet weren’t touching the ground... and if he had any brains, he’d seen me fighting.
“One of the Four Fatales!” he proclaimed, proving he wasn’t a total idiot as he drew out a flexible hooked thing you might call a Dire Rapier, making me roll my eyes. The metal of it was definitely able to whip about almost as easily as a rope, making it a dangerous weapon, and the barbed dagger in his other hand wasn’t any nicer.
“One of the dead fools!” I replied, coming straight on in.
He moved to parry, and encountered a Problem as Chalice not only didn’t get knocked aside, but it was moving very fast, at a strange angle and twist that was neutralizing a good portion of his attempt to evade her point, and I was completely ignoring the threat of his bending blade and dagger as I pressed closer. I raised my other hand, the black nails looking very much like the lethal claws that had torn off the faces of demons, cyborgs, and aliens.
I sliced a gash from his nose to his ear, somehow twisting his rapier to slide by me, my hand coming over to clamp down on his wrist as he tried to bring his dagger into play, and he weighed nothing, nothing at all. Both of us could toss around the other, but when my hand closed and his bones creaked in protest at my grip, he realized he was in big trouble.
My head went down sideways, my foot came up, and suddenly he was three feet in the air, his head nicely extended back from where his jaw was trying to reach his nose... and my other hand was still on his wrist and jerked him right back down as I brought Chalice down back-forth-back while he was still inverted.
His mail mesh peeled away from cut layered into cut, and on the third cut, I caressed the crystal-reinforced pillar that was his spine as I completed my cartwheel, and let go as he slammed to the ground, his organs spilling out of him, and banefire and shadowfire ravaging up his spine to his still-befuddled brain.
Yeah, I had actually chewed through all his Health and Soak in the equivalent of four strikes. Suck it, elv-boi.
His spirit wasn’t on the way to a Vat via necrosciences, either. The Gloom was daintily touching up its lips with shadowfire.
I didn’t much care about his fate, other than he wouldn’t be coming back, and some other drow would stride up over some other dead drow and take his place without any hesitation. Opportunistic promotional influence, I was.
That badge on his armor of his noble house was clipped off and stuck into my hair, however.
I turned and ran towards the next one, a coven Bladewitch who was converging on some hapless umbvar and drow who had sort of meshed up in mutual non-slaughter.
The lives of one thousand drow balanced against one million dead. They had quite the arrogant view of themselves, but it wasn’t surprising. They would pop off a million kills as readily as stepping on a fly. No, sooner. Killing flies didn’t give any emotional libations, and they lived for that psychic distillation to give meaning to their own worthless existences...
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I was keeping an eye on the screen overhead with Grim, and so watched the drow start to cut down the survivors.
Knowing the math behind it, the invisible forces of chance and fate, luck and skill pairing off, I could only shake my head at the killing that was going on.
The drow masters were very experienced, and doubtless all of their gladiators had killed multiple elites of every race still alive here. If nothing else, the Favored Enemy bonuses from Achievements was yet another edge, even if they weren’t real Rangers. It was just a huge wall to climb.
Luckily, our templates had already climbed that wall, and all we needed was the Karma to get up there, without having to actually butcher specific foes. Not that we hadn’t done just that on our way here, repeatedly, for just this reason.
The drow were literally eye-blurringly fast, and the gladiators couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with them. Their knives and short blades could literally cut an armored human in two without slowing down if they didn’t have energized Weapons and/or Armor, and the drow would be dancing right on to the next.
With precious little help between the aliens, the drow expertly winnowed out individuals one by one, or daringly danced into the middle of them and unleashed slaughter. Occasionally they’d get caught by a strange move, or a lucky hit, but it generally didn’t help at all. Blood in all colors and viscosity leapt into the air, and the survivors began to die with speed they didn’t quite believe after everything they’d just been through.
There was a little bit of a problem when they got to my group.
It wasn’t that my gladiators were any better than the other crews, especially the surviving drow volunteers. It was that they didn’t kill one another, and they moved in groups.
Each drow had to kill ten of them, but generally speaking, three or four were a match for them if they worked together... which was difficult to keep up with, but when you had so many fighting styles overlaying one another, damn hard to defend against.
I watched one drow gut and take the arm of a gladiator, who somehow managed to grab onto the drow’s arm for just a second. In that second a power claw ripped into the drow’s armor, a spiked tail swept him from his feet, and a nasty monkey-like furball with bloody metal claws accentuating his own swept into the bastard and was atop him, ripping with terrible fury. Furball fell off the drow, nearly cut in two, and then that power claw ripped across as the bloody drow tried to dodge, and literally smashed off his head.
One down...
The cyborg who’d done the kill mounted the head on one of his useless, slower arms. The gladiators saw another drow coming their way, gritted their teeth grimly, and the cyborg prepared himself to try and not die...