It took them about eight hours. I got the initial Infusing of my Helm done. I could send the Tiara back to Detroit for the Penitent to power up.
I was planning a Tiara of Brilliance... both styles, without all the charged stuff.
Helms of Brilliance are some of the nicest passive magic items there are, totally ignoring the charged gemstones you put on them (and which you don’t want, because they can blow up, and if you use them all, the Helm goes inert).
So, you put on the gemstones, and you either never charge them up, or you turn them into x/day use things. A minor design tweak.
The Helms come in either a lightning variety or a fire variety. They provide strong Elemental Resistance to their type (+30 points), and Elemental damage of their type to your Weapon... stacking, non-Slot.
They also glow with holy Light, doing 1-6 damage to undead within 30 feet of them. That’s not a lot, but it IS steady and debilitating... AND it can be enhanced by, say, inset Tokens and Baneskulls. +4d6 damage in the area is really nasty to most things, and there’s no saves or spell resistance. Also, it’s a light source, and so gets rid of darkness. Add on the right gemstones, and a spell Raised to Valence VII, and that prevents a ton of magical darkness effects, too.
I, being the far-too-rich overachiever abusing the Wealth By Level rules totally, was definitely not going to be satisfied with Lightning OR Fire; I wanted both!
+2d6 Kickers to all my spells was just more damage on the stack, after all. Sure, it wouldn’t harm a lot of stuff with Elemental Resistances, but I didn’t care. Clearing away armies of chaff took Kicker damage, and the definition of ‘chaff’ got more and more extensive as more damage went on the stack.
The Elemental Resistances were nice, too; one less thing to Cast, or to help buffer.
Being a shiny Light-topped beacon of holy radiance would naturally make me a target. That was fine, it wasn’t like the Caster up in the air sending down unending streams of Shards and slaughtering thousands of undead was NOT going to be a target.
So, lightning was centered on one spire of the crown, fire on the other, and the potential Dreadskull of an Old God-bug of Death, Cold, and Vermin was going to be sitting front and center in the middle for some real fun, a Token vs. Undead and Fiends hanging from its mandibles for show.
Most importantly, it was going to synergize and incorporate with my horns.
Yeah, I was gonna have me a kickarse Crown, if and when I ever managed Legendary Toys. But that was in the future, and one thing I did not have a surfeit of, in the long run, was time.
Einz was also finishing up his +2 Sacred Protection for me today. He would keep up with it and continue with the +3 tomorrow.
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They came out of the Dive within minutes of one another. It wasn’t hard to notice, because the killing intent that rose in the air and Markspace was freaking murderous, powered by post-30 Charisma Stats and making sure everyone kept a safe distance.
Briggs finished before Sama, stepping outside the tent they were sharing to sit down on his Disk and glare at nothing, his pale violet eyes almost shining with storms of wrath.
The fighters he had been Warlording all this time swallowed at the pure elemental fury boiling off him. He’d always been a storm, but his wrath and rage had always been controlled, leashed, something people could hop on and use to drive themselves on, trusting in the source of that wrath to help motivate them, knowing he hated the Cultivators and undead as much as they did.
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Right now it was just swirling, without the target and focus that would normally channel it, and oh, was there a LOT of it. They were realizing they’d never really touched the rage that could erupt out of their Warlord’s heart.
Sama’s killing intent was pure Hag murder, and even I had to hiss when I felt it cutting out. Briggs wanted to go apocalyptically violent on something, while Sama wanted to bathe in their blood and organs while they died, feeding them to the Land and laughing at them as she did so with all the glorious slaughtering glee of the Hag Coming Around as she did so.
Nobody was going to bug them. Hells, I was the only one within a hundred yards of them.
She came out of the tent, her blue eyes like icy spears of death, just ready to impale anything that got in her way.
“Nadezhda?” she asked, staring at Briggs in a most peculiar way.
“Dragomir?” Briggs replied calmly, holding out his massive hand.
She flowed into his grip and they embraced in a long, slow kiss that probably would have set off sparks across the Markspace if I hadn’t muted things.
“I have the feeling you two died together in an epically bad way,” I noted as I finished up the touches on the mithral and adamantine Tiara I was making.
Sama took her place on his knee, which basically kept her at eye level with him. “I would not say epic.” I could hear Russian accents in both of their voices now. “We were far from the first, and doubtless not the last. Just two more helpless souls overwhelmed by greater strength and uncaring bastards.”
I think the air flinched at the snap in her voice.
“Who?” I asked neutrally.
“The White Wolves of the Borea, and their Five-Tailed Witch.” Briggs’ pronunciation was like pronouncing a sentence of death, complete with the ground rumbling in acknowledgement. Fate swirled around HARD, combined with all that lethal killing intent from Sama, and settled down like a raised axe, gleaming and sharp, ready to descend.
Doom. This was very similar to the feeling of the Death Curse that had been pronounced on Aelryinth. Something was going to die, and Fate was going to help Make It So, because the strongest Source on the planet had said so.
That someone was one of the Great Packs of the Werewolves, and possibly the strongest living Pack Queen. The Five-Tailed Wolfwitch of the Borea was literally a force of nature in the supernatural world. The werewolves of the Slavic northlands were famously strong, brutal, and warlike, and she had still managed to dominate them for a good century.
Unfortunately for them, they now had to face two severely pissed-off Rantha Hagbloods, Deep Levelers with insane Stat mods that were only going to get crazier with Levels.
I didn’t feel sorry for the werewolves at all. I was sure they had earned everything that was coming their way.
“You should take Sleipner overland to get a Lived-Line lock,” I told them both. “He’s the fastest way to do so.”
-The Wolfwitch Queen is the Grantor of the Frozen Heart of Winter Pact,- Legion’s /voice came from the distance suddenly. They were knee-deep in demon-dragon-Blooded scalefolk, hacking and shooting a path through the reptile-folk of the Empire of Cold Blood with increasingly savage speed and frenzy. -That is a Chaos Pact. Werewolves cannot be Pact Grantors, as they are Cursed; they can only be guides to Totems.-
I lifted an eyebrow, while the eyes of Briggs and Sama narrowed ever more dangerously. “And she has five tails, and is female, and a Witch-Priest...” Briggs hissed out.
“A lilithi?” Sama ventured, and I swear some icedrops fell out of the air.
“Probably Possessed by one,” I ventured. Sama and Briggs tunked their heads together, their fists crackling hard in unison.
“We’re going to need our Weapons upgraded to Teleport VII,” Briggs said after a few seconds. “We’ll get the Lived-Line with Sleipner, and start hopping up there with downtime to let them and their caerns know what it feels like to be terrorized and hunted.”
I nodded. “I can do the initial structure for you, sure,” I agreed. “Minor favor.”
“Yes?” Sama asked archly.
“If she’s a lilithi, they are apostatic Priestesses who don’t actually venerate a Patron, the model for Ur-Priests. If I Bind her and Burn her, my Ur-Priest and possibly Witch Levels will probably take it as a direct infusion of Karma as she dies.”
Both of them raised their eyebrows at that. Sama sniffed. “Damn! I wanted to eat her and get more tails!”
“We get to listen to her Burn for a good long time,” Briggs consoled her.
“Tails, is it?” I gave Sama a knowing smile. “Hey, Shvaughn, those hu-hsaio you want to take out with Legion... wasn’t there a set of triplets under the mother there?” I /inquired into the distance.
Sama gave me that look, turned her head to look down at Briggs, who suddenly looked very curious about something, and then she turned back to me, her smile as wide and ferocious as could be, the faint sunlight gleaming off her canines. “That’s a sale!” she agreed happily.
Multiple fox-tails and some fox-ears were definitely better than succubus tails, after all... and she already had the Manticore Tail made, and she could evolve the spikes on her own...