The two young women got out of the black panel van, and joined him in watching explosions going off a couple miles to the west.
Dark clouds were starting to gather there, the Haze thickening and red hate lightning gathering quickly.
“There’s two helicopters pouring in some missile fire,” Sama said, ornate Mask Tats around her eyes, making them glow inside the pupils. “That might be some sustained gunfire underneath it...”
There was a flash of ruby red definitely coming from sky to ground, leaving a black imprint in the air for a moment. “Scratch one helo,” Sama reported calmly, and in reply half a dozen explosions lit off over the area, the fires whitish in hue. “Gods, they are using phosphorous. Anyone without fire resistance in that area is toast. It’ll burn to the ground.” The crackling boom of the thunder drifted past them, momentarily overwhelming the distant sound of manmade explosions and gunfire.
“I’m thinking we got here a mite bit late,” The Mick observed heartlessly.
“Oh, I dunno. Inconvenient witnesses and everything.” Klitza turned her head towards a pickup racing their way eagerly.
“If they touch my car, I’m going to kill them straight off,” The Mick promised casually.
They stood behind the posts so the incoming truck couldn’t do something dumb like run them over, and it screeched to a halt in a spray of dirt and gravel.
“You, you outland bastards, are going to pay for what you’re doing!” the first one to jump out of the truck shouted at them, already getting a little hairy.
Totally ignoring him, Sama asked, “Lord Mick, what are those secondary explosions coming from over there?”, pointing at some scattered plumes of smoke and fire going up.
The Mick made a show of squinting at them. “They look like mortar shells, coming down, sweet thing. Never been on the other end of an artillery barrage?” he inquired.
“I try not to be in the area of them,” she agreed, totally ignoring the werewolves gathering and glowering at them. Klitza was attracting their attention, as they instantly identified her as a Packless werewolf, and of course The Mick could instantly be sniffed out as a Blooded.
They weren’t quite sure what in the Hell Sama was, but the way she was ignoring them as irrelevant gave them pause despite themselves.
“You!” the first speaker started forwards, hands balled up. “You are intruders in our territory, attacking-“
“Shut up and get out of the way, idiot,” Sama said, not even looking at him as she pushed on his chest. With a shout of surprise, he went up over the hood of the pickup, and crashed into the windshield, fracturing it. “Look at that damn sky over there... hooo, the fuckers just lost the other helo before it could run far enough...”
The black line of the lightning stroke was some distance from the fire zone, but a flaming spiral was spinning towards the ground out there regardless. It didn’t stop the clouds above from roiling and churning.
Even the werewolves paused at seeing the unnatural agitation in the air.
“The dumb fuckers did it,” breathed out the Mick, as that turbulence began to widen with unnatural speed. He could feel a tremendous Aura swelling there, far beyond anything he had ever felt before. “That’s some old, old power there...”
“The Owl Woman,” breathed out one of the native werewolves, all their eyes going wide now.
“You’re watching the wrong thing. Look at the trees...”
Eyes dropped at Sama’s words, and the way the trees in the distance were agitated, moving in what seemed like an uncertain wind, rocking and swaying...
Sama very deliberately turned to an old maple tree at the edge of the property as that racing wave of power hurtled towards them from the epicenter. Despite themselves, all the eyes followed her gaze, everyone tensing as the wave blasted past and over them, cries escaping throats from the Powered, dust and small stones kicked up and flying in a sharp gust of wind...
Except around Sama...
The tree over there swayed impossibly at the gust, limbs bending far too much, and even the main trunk swaying like it was made of rubber.
Then the roots began to move, pulling out of the ground in huge, snaky ropes, lurching free of the ground in an immense web that lifted the tree right up out of the ground, the dirt and soil all around it starting to sink as the roots were withdrawn.
And every single tree in the area was doing the exact same thing!
“She’s bringing all the trees in the area to life!” Sama snarled, and shot towards that old maple tree with startling speed. One of the native werewolves was in the way, and got knocked aside like a bowling pin as she raced between the writhing, rising roots, closing in on the trunk even as it seemed to bend and turn to focus on her...
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Four roots and three branches coiled and lashed for her, and suddenly a glowing golden Sword like a bar of light was in her hand.
Three of the roots were chopped through and went flying, one was ducked underneath. The branches slammed down left, right, left as her progress used the roots themselves to push off and change her course, and then she was up on the trunk and slashing up through it.
Something visibly popped to all the Powered individuals behind her, and the tree quivered and stopped moving.
In the next second, the roots began to flow back into the ground they’d pushed themselves out of, the branches of the tree snapping back to proper positions as it buried itself back down where it belonged.
That, of course, did not stop any of the many, many thousands of trees within their range of vision from Animating.
“THE TREES ARE COMING TO LIFE! RUN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE!”
The ki-backed voice was like thunder, extending out for hundreds of feet in every direction. A hundred yards away, a young oak tree smashed into the side of an old ranch house with branches and roots, and proceeded to rip it apart in no time at all.
“Time to be going!” The Mick pronounced, with only a glance at the shocked werewolves watching as a pine tree flung an old truck twenty feet into the air down the road. Their expressions were something like amazed glee and shocked fear at the display of the power coming down all around them, and the screams of the people fleeing their homes and trying to make it to their cars to get away in time didn’t make it any worse.
Sama had already taken off for a tree that was chasing down an older woman. The Mick peeled Bone Marrow directly away from the center of the pulse, reasoning that the Animation effect had to have an end, and the closest edge of that circle was in that direction.
Klitza followed him, having little better to do.
The native werewolves watched them go, staring as trees made for homes and especially the people within them, killing those they caught by grasping, crushing, and tearing with animated wooden limbs, plowing through their buildings, flattening their vehicles, and roots beginning to tear up the roads and render them impassable...
Then they noticed that the trees were also closing in on them...
The wait staff and other people in the bar behind them had already piled out into their own vehicles or those of others, and were urgently gunning it for distance. Some were nice enough to slow down so that others running away from the killing trees could hop on, others just ignored any runners in their panic and fear.
Nobody was paying attention as the four werewolves ripped out of their clothes, going into their lupine forms, and also fled for the distance.
There was no recognition of them as allies or friendlies; the tree roots fanned out and lashed out for them, trying to bind them, constrict them, and then pull and tear them apart.
One wasn’t quite quick enough, and a tree root burrowing completely under a roadway whipped in on him from his blindside, slamming him into the air. Before he could hit the ground, a half-dozen more were wrapped around him, and the tree that sourced them was shredding its way through a mangled silo half-full of sorghum, flowing towards the werewolf on a writhing mass of roots.
The werewolf wrestled and transformed, trying to shred and tear and rip at the roots gripping it, but even with his unnatural strength and power, he couldn’t escape all the roots that were tightening their grip on him.
He looked up as the maple tree towered over him, and then two branches as thick as a man’s thigh came pounding down with supernatural strength.
The werewolf was very resistant to damage and harm, but even such damage resistance could be overloaded by enough force, and those arms coming down were like greatclubs wielded by giants.
Still, it took a couple minutes to reduce the werewolf to bloody smears and chunks of fur on flesh and shattered bones. The roots flung the pieces in all directions, and the tree turned to complete its destruction of all the unnatural things about it... roads, driveways, houses, cars, silos, walls... anything and everything that wasn’t of nature was getting torn apart.
In the distance not so far away, the trees were moving out in all directions, and anything they encountered that didn’t satisfy that paradigm was also being destroyed.
The forest was alive, and it was coming for blood...
------
See, this is why Melees invest in Close-Quarters Fighting, Sama thought, smiling as she sliced through random roots trying to grab her, Tremble sounding off with dreaded two-tones that rang through the air as she slashed her way through the botanical army.
Magic was Animating them, and magic could shut them down. Slashing the roots didn’t do it, but a Null Strike through the trunk, in Mercy mode so she didn’t actually have to hack through a foot of wood, did the job.
The nexus of the spell was both tough and elusive. Caster Level 20, at least a 30 casting Stat, and a boosted thing at least Valence X, something not possible for a mortal.
Eternal-Class magic. She needed to hit the equivalent of a 40 AC to shred this with her Null.
MAB+6. Weapon Mastery +3 with Master’s Gloves... of Ogre Power, for another +2. Sword specialization for another +1, Sword Talent for +1, Flowing Waters Swordplay for +1, Strength of 28 for +9... and Rule of Valus exchanging damage for increased to Hit, for another +3 to hit. Tremble was Greater Ki-Bound, Enmity to The Natural, and Bane to Plants, for another +8. -4 to its magical protection by Way of the Wind II, Cutting the Breeze.
Heartsong for another +2 Morale bonus, to top things off. Effective +36 to hit, -4 to its AC. Beyond Law and Chaos meant she didn’t miss on a one, so this spell was exactly right at the edge of what she could tear apart with a blow, every single time.
The trees she was cleaving through went still, and then the residual magic in them drove them to bury themselves back into the ground as smoothly and irresistibly as they’d come forth, right where they were standing.
Sometimes she got there in time to save someone; an older woman running for her life, a truck veering off the road about to be surrounded by multiple trees, dragged over and down... panicking cows trying to get away from the trees lashing at them from all directions, fences and stalls and barns exploding, as pigs, chickens, horses, dogs, and cats fled in all directions in blind panic at the world going crazy.
Fires exploded into existence as power lines were torn down, and live cables ignited dry grass and the wood of homes, and soon the whole area was filled with climbing uncontrolled fires. Some of the trees were on fire, still moving as they lumbered around, unable to feel pain, and spread the fires through the dry grasses and cultivated fields and gardens also being torn apart...
But in her wake she was leaving a line of inert trees that served to partially block those coming after, or at least slowed them down...