The fire-eyed corpses sitting atop the ledge there, blazing fireballs in hand, were poised and ready to jump out at us, tossing their spells.
They checked themselves for just that crucial second when the first thing they saw was nine Guns burning with vivus clearing the edge.
The first fusillade wasn’t strong enough to kill them, but it really messed up the molten orbs of fire they were about to throw, which promptly blew up and swallowed them in fire... fire which blew into vivic whiteness as the Qi was consumed by the follow-up shots.
I waved a hand, and a flight of Shards drove into the mess and found homes. There were multiple detonations, and in my Eyes of Heaven, a bunch of dark things burning with malevolence winked out, painting the entire ledge and the tunnel behind it a fresh and zesty white as they did.
A scarlet light overhead and to the left became an acid rain plunging down, eliciting screams of agony from something with a healthy set of lungs. That scream faded with a crack of thunder and flash of lightning from the swooping Helix.
“Red dust of mortal desire,
Reaving steel of vivic fire.
As you corrupt , as you feed,
Now you writhe, now you bleed,
TREMBLE, WE COME!”
Something squealed like a stuck pig, right on cue. Something else hammered, crump crump, and took up the beat as stone shattered and scattered in the air above us for fifty yards.
Endure was beating a deep, humming rhythm. I knew Briggs was dying to join in, and also knew he was just as seriously holding his voice in check.
If Briggs started singing, I was going to have to Sound Bubble us. I did not want to hear Briggs singing, especially if he did it with energy. My exactly one recollection of such an event from Aelryinth made that VERY plain.
The Song took a side turn as we came up above the edge, and saw Briggs and Sama mixing it up with six Cultivators... who were looking pretty astonished that they couldn’t do jack shit to the pair.
“That little natal soul woke up and ate you,
Poor luckless idiot, what could you do?
Fret not, worry not, Briggs is on the job!
We’re coming for them, and we’ll put things hob!
ENDURE, WE COME!”
Briggs’ grin was nearly splitting his face at her words as his Hammer spun like a whirlwind, in perfect control at every moment, slamming into spear, swords, staff, axe, and whatnot with unbelievable force and power, taking all their Martial Techniques on with impunity.
He couldn’t sing, but damn if he couldn’t have Sama Sing for him!
Some milk-faced woman in a blue dress was filling the air with a whip that was extending to a good sixty feet long, obviously TK’d, the barbed thing writhing about like a serpent in the air.
Sama hit the thing, and her Null promptly shredded its transformation magic as Tremble struck it. Sama flowed right into it, wrapping it around her as it shrank, and she spun twice, getting drawn instantly across forty feet of space and suddenly right in front of the woman, whose cream-white face looked plenty surprised to see her do that... and then looked down, to see the Sword trailing golden-red banefire that had plunged into her chest.
The Sharding blew out the woman’s backside, taking her spine and life with it, and Sama promptly cut the Cultivator in two with a flick of her wrist, setting Tremble free.
The heavily armored Cultivator - well, that grandiose Armor was some fruitcake’s idea of heavy armor, at least - screamed and charged at her, raising a massive Axe that had to weigh as much as Briggs’ Hammer... except it was much bigger and flatter, of course.
The power of his attack was meant to lock her into place, force her to take his stone-splitting strike. The mighty golden lion materializing above him roared with deafening amounts of thunder down on her as he came in for the kill.
Yeah, he had no experience with Forsaken at all, did he?
“FOOL.”
The Axe came down, and stone shuddered and exploded into flying shards of black rock in every direction.
“Pasty white skin and soulless eyes
Do not a mighty foe make.”
Sama, in the Archer Stands Thrust and right up in the face of the big man, calmly levered him aside as if his easy two hundred kilos of mass was nothing much. Tremble flicked from where she was impaling his throat in the seam between gorget and helm, and someone’s disbelieving head popped right off, like a snipped dandelion.
“Join your bitch in burning blight,
Your spirit is doomed, as was your fight!
TREMBLE, WE COME!”
Nine guns roared together, a perfect box, and the spear-user who was trying to duck away dodged two of them, and screamed as the other seven found some very energetic homes, sending flesh and Qi flying.
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A little distracted, he could only watch the vivic Darts plunge into his chest, find that nice reservoir of Qi inside him, and detonate to feed on it.
His appendages went in five directions as he blew apart, and then there were three.
The swordsman in red was the most decisive, immediately abandoning the fight and fleeing for the caldera, followed by the staff-user and the other swordsman in yellow. They wanted to leap into the air and fly away, and, well, Sleipner set foot on the lip, all the Disks were safe, and Briggs Put His Foot Down as he heaved Endure.
The yellow swordsman screamed as he leapt into the air, and an eyeblink later was starting to fall, out of control. Endure struck him right in midair while he couldn’t dodge, and drove him twenty yards through the air, slamming him into an outcropping there. Bones cracked like the shattering stone beneath him, and chunks of organs erupted out of his mouth as he stuck there for a moment, upside down, unable to act.
The lads were sharp. Three of them filled his chest with burning buckshot, and that ended him.
The Staff wielder managed to keep his feet as he hit the ground again, rolling and tumbling as whatever evasion technique he used tried to overcome the fact that he couldn’t fly, couldn’t warp momentum, and basically couldn’t do any better than Ki lightfoot could to move him around.
He also watched the arm holding his Staff go falling away, as Sama’s Sharding got him right as he hit the ground. He gasped and swore, turning and spinning away from the next cutting line of force, then a very bright shot with layers of multi-colored Wrath around it punched all the way through his chest and out the far side. The Cultivator got to feel the alien energies of Profound Powers that were opposed to all that his alien self was blow through and devour his body and inhuman spirit.
Which left the swordsman in red, who was screaming as he fell down the inner slope of the caldera, crashing into the jagged rocks, cursing, swearing, trying to get his feet and bounce and dash and get away-
He actually spun around and deflected two of the Shards, but I was using auto-targeting versions, which left him eleven more to deal with. He was a fire stylist, and the Penetrating Cold drove into him so hard chunks of his body were freezing solid as they hit him.
His defiant scream kind of ended as, unable to control himself, he hit the slopes again, and his legs and sword arm shattered off and fell away, parts of his torso ripped off, and then he smashed into the rocks hard. Bits and pieces of him flew in all directions.
There was a huge fireball from about a hundred yards over thataway, rising and boiling into the sky, getting everyone’s attention. Helix came flying up from under the edge of the outer rim, The Mick’s bat-swarm form swirling around him. Clearly, they had upset whatever surprise was over there, and given the blast had knocked out a section of the rim, whoever was over there was now quite dead.
The Mick swirled down out of the bats just outside the Stillflight zone. After trotting up with Helix, he remarked blandly as he dusted off his white suitcoat, “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”
Oh, right. I turned back to look at the Oriental building that had been built on a basalt island right smack dab in the middle of the burning lava at the heart of the caldera.
Arcane Sight parsed what was going on around it, as everyone studied it through the heat haze of the molten rock, taking in the curved walls, tiled roofs, and the pagoda tower at the center of it all, all looking so bizarrely out of place here, but clearly unaffected by the fury and heat of the volcano.
“The minarets and towers are the anchors for the Fire Qi Transformation Formation,” I informed everyone calmly. “It’s taking the pyric energy right out of the volcano and transforming it.”
Well, hey, it was perfectly visible to ME, at any rate...
There was a rumble, and then a roar as living fires suddenly belched up out of the lava. We all thought for a really bad moment that the thing was exploding on us while we were right here, a really nasty surprise, but then the swirling magma rose up in a Dome that swept over the walled pagoda, nearly covering it from sight.
Everybody untensed after a moment, gasping in relief as we watched that Dome of fire rise a couple thousand feet away from us.
“Huh,” said Sama, walking up with the Whip and head of the woman in one hand, her jewelry hanging from Sama’s hair, and the armored corpse and head of the man in her other hand, his Axe in her teeth. She spat the latter onto an empty Disk right there, dropped the heads and Whip and bangles after it, and proceeded to start taking the idiot’s corpse out of his picturesque costume Armor without looking at it. “That looks like it will be fun to get through.”
I just stared at it, examining the bindings of power about it. “It’s like a Wall of Force made out of flame, regenerating as long as it has the caldera to tap. Should stop dimensional magic, too, by the disruptions it is causing.”
“It’s a taunt.” Endure had literally walk-tumbled end over end on the ground to get back to Briggs’ hand, but come back it had. The shooters were already grabbing the remains of the other Cultivators and taking what was important. The Mick was quick to get some of their blood as the corpses were ransacked and then set alight. “Trav, what’s your read?” he asked.
“You and Sama could probably bash a path into it, but I’m not sure you’d want to. There’s a better way that is more to our liking. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that looks like a way down, there and there, right?”
Eyes turned to a couple sections of the slope that were unnaturally smooth and without random obstructions, leading into dark tunnels no longer being filled with lava, although they obviously had been at one point, and there were at least two other streams of lava floating out of the bubbling fountain of molten rock, and fairly swiftly at that.
There was general consensus on that, and I smiled. “Gentlemen, Sir Pellier, I’m going to do a very bad thing, and I’m going to do it very, very well.”
Eyes lifted all around at my statement. He’d been singled out, so Sir Pellier asked for everyone, “What do you mean, Lady Traveler?”
“One of the reasons I don’t use my Druidic powers is because they come through exercising use of unclean magic,” I stated calmly. “However, that is exactly what is needed here. I am going to Blight that entire bloody area of the Dome, and drive the life of the Land out from it, Cursing it to heck and gone.”
They all looked at me, then at the Dome of fire. “They’re running that there pimple of fire on the power of the volcano,” The Mick remarked thoughtfully. “My, what might happen when there be no more fire t’ draw on?”
“It’s going to start sucking the Fire Qi out of the air to sustain itself, reversing everything it was previously doing,” Briggs stated in grim approval.
Master Fred gestured, letters flaming, IF WE ASSAIL IT, PARTICULARLY WITH VIVIC FIRE, IT WILL CONSUME THAT QI AT AN INCREDIBLE RATE.
“I was thinking a Wall of Icefire made Permanent all around it, and then just shooting it all we could possibly want to,” I offered.
“Me Ice Diamonds!” the Mick moaned piteously.
“Precisely the kind of shit we should be throwing money at to kill. I think this sot’s Armor pays for it.” Sama’s toe sent the now-naked and blood-drained burly axeman’s corpse through the air, landing it on top of the vivic-burning spear-user in purple. Well, it had been purple.
“A moment.” Father Bower frowned in thought. “It will start consuming the Fire Qi. What effect will that have on the surrounding area?”
I smiled widely. “The pressure of the world will drive the Qi back as it is consumed here. Spirit creatures loathe the presence of mana, and this is a heavy pyromantic zone. They’ll retreat with the Fire Qi.”
“Coming here!” Shooter Two exclaimed.
“Coming there and there,” Briggs corrected mildly, pointing at the two paths below...