Ebook Two has a deadline of Editing done by October. Working on it...
Epilogue Two of THR is done...
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I had plenty of experience inherited and my own acting as a Support Caster.
I was up in the sky, invisible, totally unconcerned that there’d be any flying parties at this point. I still had Watersight going, so I could see the things coming in from the sea quite clearly, as Devilsight and Eagle Eyes did their combined job.
Whoa, where’d that come from?
Briggs didn’t pause in his deployment orders, getting people into position, but his eyes narrowed as the creature flowing through the water, hidden by the presence of the krakens, suddenly popped up in my feed.
There was a shoggoth here! It was doubtless being Dominated by the krakens via some unholy Ritual, and there was no doubt whatsoever it could run right over any kind of a standard defense with impunity. It was flowing fluidly through the water, easily keeping pace with the swimmers.
-I’ve got me Free Action memorized!- The Mick /piped up eagerly upon seeing that, /echoed by Amaretta. Unless you had anti-grappling, fighting a shoggoth in melee was suicide. It would envelop you, crush you to a pulp with internal pressure, and digest you very quickly. Free Action made it almost impossible to bind or grapple you.
It took monstrous amounts of Spell Penetration to get past the thing’s base Spell Resistance, too, and with energy resistance and ooze immunities on top of it, unless you were a totally broken min-maxer, shoggoths were pretty terrifying.
And I was looking right at it, and the Waters still couldn’t tell it was there...
-It’s in a Greysphere,- I /informed the three of them. Given that it could fast-heal, that meant it was nigh-impossible to stop without concentrated tank fire, or a lot of mortars coming down on it.
Or, you know, Orbs.
-Heavy Magic Shells t’ bollox it,- The Mick /cursed. -Have to be pining a shilling off ye, lass.-
-Just say when.- The three of them knew perfectly well I could wipe the lot of these Deep Ones, but allowing others to do so was far more useful in the long run. One thing I did not have was Karma issues.
And there it was, a subsonic growl to proceed. The first raiding scouts were moving forwards to the conspirators standing guard and not giving the alarm. Those treacherous sots were already Tagged and not going to get away, by my hand if nobody else’s.
The first slime-scaled fish-guys, tall and powerful, heavier in build than sahaug, their faces somewhere between toads and fish with almost no necks, and clutching onto spears, tridents, and crossbows as they cleared the water, moved with steady speed over the rocks and breakwall.
All the normal soldiers were already off-station. When the infiltrators burst in to ambush those that were supposed to be on duty, they banged open doors, barged into rooms... and were promptly blown apart before they could even shoot by the waiting men there.
Such excitement was all part of expecting the other end result, so the raid continued as planned. Lights abruptly flickered and fell along the water, giving humans no chance to see the Deep Ones coming... or the great and bulging masses starting to rise out there in the water, and undulate forwards on great tentacles.
Still nobody shooting. I waited up there in the air, watching everything as the Deep Ones lumbered ashore, seeking the breeding females they wanted, being useless drones without them, and the lines of the Irish waited, waited...
Briggs charged forward in silence. The Mick and Amaretta flitted on a parallel path, swirls of glowing crimson girt with red, white, and pinkish flames about their swords.
The deep calls of alarm rose hesitantly from the Deep Ones as the Blooded and the brute crashed into them, and then through them. Scaled flesh compressed with crunches of meat and bone that would make anyone flinch, and Deep Ones went flying wildly as a grim drumbeat pounded with the slow and steady surge of Briggs’ heart, moving about half as fast as the invaders were exploding around him.
The Mick and Amaretta were like poetry, both of them with Way of Water III, Cut the Waterfall. They flowed back and forth as if they were liquid themselves, the white and the black joined by the crimson, cross and recrossing as they flashed through the ranks of the Deep Ones, converging on the tallest and most mutated of them... and more precisely, the spellcasters burping out subsonic moans and chants to command and inspire the Deep Ones with all the power of mighty Father Dagon and Mother Hydra and- urk!
The first one’s head went flying as Amaretta chopped through his Trident, and cut off the hand making gestures off to the side. Pale greenish blood exploded and blew apart the whole arm there, and she ended it by hewing right through his neck like it wasn’t a foot thick or something.
And she was such a slender, elegant, dark-haired, and crimson-eyed Blakhamar Witch, too.
The Mick smashed aside two lunging spears gripped in two arms and two tentacles, totally shocking the looming Deep One a full two feet taller than he was. He then proceeded to robe-cut it from left hip to right shoulder. Its blood detonated inside it, literally blowing it apart in a wild spray of burning gore that rained down all around it, sizzling and searing its companions, but not harming either Blooded in the slightest.
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Briggs was a bit more direct. He went directly for what looked to be the biggest warchief, driving forwards in an Avalanche Run Lite. He didn’t have the chi to make it really work, but he had all the AoO’s to shake a stick at, and damn, Endure just wasn’t slowing down as he moved. That sound of pulverizing meat and bone being reduced to paste just made a person wince, you know? Watching them go flying ten, twenty, fifty feet after their chests were reduced to jelly, while a couple were holding onto him and not even slowing him down before Endure happened to arc up and back and smash their piscine skulls from above against his helm...
The Dagonic Priest to the side didn’t get out of the way of eight feet of muscle and steel coming its way in time, and its burbling head blew apart as Endure came around. Briggs’ gauntlet smashed one lunging spear up into the other, both skirled off his armor as he spun with totally improbable lightness and grace for his bulk, actually picking up speed, and the other Priest there also got his head introduced to an alternate state of existence before the Hew crashed into the warchief with the abruptly bladed damage of Endure.
Yeah, it was a big boss-style creature, but that was a full Spirited Charge and One Strike. The first Priest died by AoO (casting spells in range of someone with Mage Slayer, not smart... oh wait, it wasn’t an issue when he was fifty yards and twenty minions away five seconds ago), a Cleave to the second, and Hewing to take all that extra damage left over and pile it on the big guy whose idea of armor was wearing coral and sharkskin and obsidian plates.
True to form, the boss Deep One didn’t die, even though he now had a two-inch deep cut right across his chest. That was fine, as Briggs slammed right into him, took him off his clawed feet, drove a gauntleted hand into his chest up to the elbow, and kept going as about eight hundred pounds of aquatic commander was flung out of Briggs’ way to the side. A long trail of organs extended behind the Thing Formerly in Charge as it went flying. Briggs dropped the crushed heart in his hand as he accelerated through the shocked Deep Ones behind leading to the water... and the thing raising a whole lot of tentacles to greet him behind them.
“UP!” he Growled.
I Flared the sky, and painted the whole area below as bright as day.
The firing commenced, Bane to Aquatics drawing flaming lines from the positions of the shooters as flashes of death began to reach out and cut the invaders down. I shifted position with a flicker of Dimdooring and was out and behind the last of them.
A Wall of Icefire underwater had a nice secondary effect in that it made ice. A lot of ice.
That ice also floated up and accumulated rapidly, far faster than it would drift off in the current. Under the 90/10 rule, a simply massive amount of ice would build up quickly in a slab twenty feet thick, totally unmovable, and the only way to get over the thing would be to leave the water and climb over it, making a nice big target of yourself.
Amaretta and The Mick were slicing through Deep Ones when a strong tenor rose above the field, carried on Voice.
It was in Gaelic, but laden in Tongues.
I raised an eyebrow. There’d been a massive revival movement in the Gaelic tongue with the advent of magic and the increasing nationalism of the Irish, just another sign of their breaking ties with the English who had ruled them for so long. The coming of the Human Tongue had completely swamped that movement, however, completely bumping it from the status of anyone as their base tongue... but it was still a language, the speech of the people who had lived here for centuries, and it still had power to it.
I also knew that The Mick was a big fan of really hashing Death Metal and that whole genre of music, so hearing him Singing out a really old Irish Ballad was startling.
He was doing it with Bardic Heartsong, too, and he was putting his soul into it!
“Fare you well, my own true love,
Farewell for a while;
I'm going away, but I'll be back
If I go ten thousand miles...”
It was filled with all the longing of a son who’d been away from home for far too long, and he was finally setting foot upon these sacred shores once more... and he was happy, happy to see this filth and scum crawling up out of the sea, because now he could finally fight for his homeland and his home, and not just fight to fight.
He’d been taking Bardic Levels!
“Ten thousand miles, my own true love,
Ten thousand miles or more.
And the rocks may melt and the seas may burn
If I no more return.”
White and black, bound by blood and fire, converged on the lashing tentacles as thick as a man, spiked suckers that could grip and tear a human apart like tofu.
Sword and Blade cut, and man-thick tentacles of rubbery flesh as tough as tire rubber flopped free. Serrated edges whispered past them, Soak fluttered free as the two Blooded twisted and flowed through their dance, and Healing Edge took the edge off their injuries as they somehow avoided every attempt to grab or entangle and surround them, squirting free impossibly from between interwoven gripping limbs that could rend steel, hacking as they did so.
I watched Orbs delivered by the edges of Smior and Piit detonate, the black blood of the kraken exploding like gasoline and shredding more limbs as they pressed in, and in, and in. The limbs used to hit them were flying everywhere, and their Soak was dropping fast as it did... but so were the numbers of those attacks. They converged on the squid-octopus-eel head of the kraken staring at them, and it finally got the idea that it should move.
The Mick’s Song hadn’t stopped, either, but I was pretty sure the newest verse wasn’t historical.
“The Blood of the Irish rises,
the Emerald Isles Call.
Her fiery sons rise proud,
Her daughters all stand tall.
Their eyes look afar, across the grey
and thankless briny deep,
To catch a glimpse of their long-lost love,
Ere they for’er sleep.”
He had come home before he died. That parrot’s beak of the kraken opened and it urgently shoved itself towards deeper water, rubbery flesh spewing black blood igniting with Banefire and Vivus as it sprayed in sea and air and whirled around the two strongest Blood Mages on the planet.
Had he taught it to anyone but her? It was hard to say. I hadn’t checked, and it wasn’t my place.
Whatever, he was certainly powering up the whole of the Irish defense. A Song of the Heart was not something to ignore in mass combat, and I was pretty sure that Rose in his lapel was a Rose of the Heart, too.
“Ten thousand miles, my own true love,
At last I see you true.
What came before, forever more,
We shall no longer rue.”
He had chosen Bardsong, not Minstrelry. He had gone for the old, classic path, against his own preferences and nature, because Bardsong tapped into the heart of the land.
Druidic magic.
He was aiming to be King!