“Which naturally translates to?” I went along agreeably.
“You’re cheap?” Sama piped up cheerfully, then looked at Clavus and that bright red Luan Core sitting atop it, worth mucho dinero. “Okay, greedy?”
“I prefer thrifty and acutely aware of the monetary requirements of my chosen career,” I replied loftily, and they both guffawed. “Given such a well-established monetary habit, exactly how likely do you think it is that I’d actually dump forty goldweight down the drain just to make two Walls of Icefire Permanent?”
That narrowed the eyes of both of them. “Okay, you’re doing something clever... and thrifty,” Briggs added nicely. “So, what did we miss?”
“Do you think I’d blow forty goldweight on something I couldn’t pick up and take with me?”
They both gaped, then turned their heads skywards and muttered something about spellcasters too smart for their shorts or something. “What did we miss from way over here?” Sama asked with a sigh.
“That’s two Icefire Walls... anchored to the top of Shaped stone rods buried in the ground. Sama could trundle over there, pick them up, and say, put one rod over there, and one here, with the flames facing the lava.”
“It’ll freeze the stone solid and create a bridge in seconds!” Sama stated, blue eyes lighting up with a feral light that promised bad things to some people. The Sword playing at dagger-hood behind her began to chime in a certain ominous two-tone nobody with sense wanted to be the target of.
Never said Cultivators had any sense. Challenging the heavens was much safer than challenging Sama!
“And look at all the nervous nellies who’ll still be constrained on the far side while a couple goober no-magic Forsaken smash shooty-shoot holes in their little pyrotechnic show’s finale.”
Whatever Hagchildren had, being non-expressive wasn’t part of it. Her smile was wide enough to qualify as comic horror as she burst out cackling, and pretty much everyone felt something going down their spines, even if they were immune to fear.
Yeah, she’d been hacking on crap for basically a day straight, and when she wasn’t, she was butchering it, and she was still ready and eager for a whole lot more.
Just like everybody from the game back on Terra-Luna...
“We’re gonna need another half-hour at least to clean this place up,” Briggs spoke up before Sama bolted across the lava. “What’s the degradation of the Dome looking like?”
“Two hours,” I said calmly.
Gold glowed over Sama’s hands, turning her fingers into Vajra-buttressed knives. “Time to demonstrate proper butchering technique from the Sage of Swords!” Sama announced to no one in particular, and darted off to get the necessary but boring part of today’s regularly scheduled gory entertainment completed.
Briggs hmphed and went to do the same. Endure was pretty good at being a faux axe and splitting skulls open to make it easy to get at their Cores... although we were also saving a lot of said skulls to make Baneskulls out of them. If they had the beasts here, then they certainly had a lot more of them out in the Orient by now...
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It’s remarkable how much you can fit in a Widen II’d Tapestry, 20x20x10, when you have custom crates and square jugs to pack everything nice and tight and keep it organized.
You can fit even more in a bunch of them, and then you can fold them all up pretty easily.
A whole lot more goldweight was stacked up and reduced to an image on some fairly large sheets of cloth I’d had my Allegiance acquire ahead of time (sailcloth, mostly).
When all was said and done, Sama did indeed take off across the lava pool, ignoring a couple thousand degrees of temperature, maybe more with the Fire Qi laboring in the air.
Her speed raised a wake like an arrow, but there was no way the Cultivators could see her to anticipate what she was doing, and so maybe stop her somehow. We all sat and watched her zip across lava that could melt iron (in her bare feet, no less), hit the black magma at the far side, and zip right on up to the end point of one of the encircling Icefire Walls.
I had good eyes, and even with the distortion, saw her hiss when she got too close to the cold flames, glancing at me across the lava in annoyance, to which I just smirked. She dug out the short-capped rod in the stone I’d Shaped up when I’d made the Walls, pulled it up and turned it over, and with the bottom of the Wall anchored to the lower side now, zipped around the Dome, the Wall naturally shortening as she did so.
They had some people up on their picturesque little walls, who naturally yelped in surprise when they saw the burning blue flames suddenly going away on one side of their defensive Formation. They didn’t see what was causing it before the icy fires were down to a narrow sliver of cold between the two rods, and she zipped over towards the lava lake with both rods in one hand.
The Dome over there sort of stabilized, although it was kind of wobbly. It didn’t stop the degradation, just slow it down. She plopped one of the rods down on the ground over there, and held the other one behind her, anchoring end down, as she zipped back across the lava at a speed to annoy any cheetahs looking on.
The supernatural cold of the icefire blackened the lava instantly, and within seconds it was starting to solidify behind her. When she reached us, she skidded up to the edge of the lava, set the rod down, and a two-hundred-meter line of blue fire, the cold-burning side down, was raising great swathes of mist as it warred with the heat coming up from below. Black rock was spreading out to either side of the sideways Wall, bubbling and rippling with the conflicting temperatures, sizzling and competing audibly.
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“Am I wrong in thinking that your Wall might eventually cool the whole caldera?” Briggs mused.
“It’d just be putting a cap on a pressure cooker. Not a good idea,” I answered, and he inclined his head in agreement. Mt. St. Helens had been a thing not too awful far from here. Permanent did have a time limit, we just weren’t sure what it was. Tying it to an anchor also meant that if the anchors were ruined, the spell would still collapse. Needs must and all that!
Mass Resist Cold was more than sufficient to allow everyone to walk on the super-cooled rock... or trot, as the case might be. Sama held the second rod, skating ahead of everyone as we advanced over the searing-cold pathway that was steaming with restrained mist, safe on Disks that could repel above the stone, regardless of how unstable it was in reality.
The Cultivators were definitely waiting as we came onto the shore of their little island, watching us through the wavering protection of their Dome.
They appeared to have not learned a certain lesson. That was fine, we were perfectly happy to instruct them once again.
Tremble’s two tones rang out sharply as two Shardings swept out, and the watchers on the walls flinched despite themselves as the cutting arcs sheared into their burning protective barrier, forming two sides of a triangle with an ear-cutting protest of steel and force. Those inside started to smirk as the Dome took the hit, and then Endure smashed right into the center of the crossed lines, blowing a clear triangle open in it with a BOOM of metal on metal that might have sent them stumbling as fire-force shards of Qi went flying everywhere.
Keep smirking!, I thought.
The Split Shardrays came from two circles of eighteen Shards; Admixtured Acid got added to the combination to prey on what looked like a bunch of Fire-users, and pale green Shardrays drove into the primary targets, conveying a hearty dose of Wrath from Master Fred, while an empowered alchemical Acid bomb in my hand vanished politely.
The primary target was simply obliterated, exploding into steaming goo that didn’t even reach the ground, his expression as the Rays came in just under Briggs Hammer quite something to behold.
Twenty-five potential arcs, Reflex save something like 37 to take half damage and end the arc.
Every potential Cultivator in range took the hit. Most of them blew apart under the impact of that much damage. A couple managed to get up Qi barriers to deflect some of the damage and absorb some of the shock, at the cost of a great deal of their Qi reserves.
Sama didn’t slow down, and Tremble was still cutting on the approach, cutting arcs chewing into the edge of the Dome as it struggled to heal, and burning shots from some very magical Guns were peppering the area around the hole and preventing it from sealing.
Briggs went first, a mighty jump clearing the six-meter wall as he went through the hole. He ate no less than six fiery blasts to the face... all which faded to nothing against his full Source field.
He hit the parapet with a heavy crunch, Endure already leaving his hand, and the nearest man, staggering with his clothes blasted away, barely dodged aside from the arrow-fast Hammer that would have reduced his skull to nothing. Unfortunately, the man behind him wasn’t nearly as prepared... and was the actual target.
That Cultivator’s chest imploded under the impact of the very Heavy Hammer... which promptly ricocheted off and into the back of the head of the man who had ostensibly dodged it, losing none of its momentum as it did so.
His milky-white skull exploded as Sama flowed through the opening, trailing a line of Disks that followed her smoothly through the hole, and then she kicked off along the top of the wall as Guns began to roar.
Guns were not as easy to dodge as arrows; you needed to be capable of dodging Rays to do so. That said, most Cultivators loved to use ranged attacks too, so they could indeed dodge Rays... but that was only guaranteed once every few seconds, meaning that someone attacking multiple times, or multiple shooters, could overwhelm some guaranteed dodging, at which time normal To-Hit and Armor Class took over.
All that, and you couldn’t dodge a One Shot that way, either.
A crackling windshot from Helix got a dodgy guy who thought he could lightfoot around and be evasive square in the chest, voltage blowing out his orifices as Stormbound Wrath, Lightning Reserves, and Windfire did their thing.
Helix coolly drew back another shot. One Arrows couldn’t be guarantee-dodged, so he was picking his shots firmly... and if he was combining Arcane Archer, Eldritch Theurgy, and Reserves, maybe with a True Seeking shot, I wasn’t saying anything.
The smart Cultivators went after the shooters, of course, correctly judging them to be the weakest of our group. Master Fred’s Wards were on the job (with Sleipner staying back in the cave behind us at the moment) taking Fire attack after attack on Hellfire-imbued Ward Walls that basically ignored them completely.
Sama and Briggs had split in different directions, and were happily chasing the Cultivators down.
I brought my hands down, and the Sudden Topped Widen II’d Flamestrike came howling down from on high, jet and silver. It came down right on top of that pagoda and blew its fire-resistant construction completely to shit and all with Primal and Divine fire intermixed and combined, giving them a great idea of what we thought of them and their techniques.
The pagoda blew out, floor by floor, in less than one second, and that probably would have been fine, if it wasn’t also the center of the Dome’s Formation. Naturally the energy channels got disrupted, fed back into the pagoda as the supply to the Dome was disrupted, and the whole seven stories of the thing basically went off like whatever inside was made of TNT.
Everyone sort of hunkered down against the blast that tore apart the Dome and distributed the pagoda’s materials into the lava lake, washing the sky and air in jubilantly ambitious sheets of vivus. The air temperature immediately began to spike, and the island under us began to rumble dangerously. Where the pagoda had been, a bright new firefountain of molten lava was already jetting forty feet into the air and growing swiftly, giving us an idea of how much pressure was under here.
“Time to go!” I Announced, my Voice carrying over everything, and Briggs and Sama left off ripping off an available skull and slicing one from a neck respectively, turning around and heading back in our direction.
If a bunch of Baubles, Weapons, and other interesting items off the dead managed to get dumped into a few Disks just during that minute or so of surprise and ammo expenditure, well, things just happened that way.
Sama got up onto the wall, slapped my Disk as she passed by, and we all jerked sideways, following her up and off the wall as Briggs cleared it and raced off on his own errand.
The surviving Cultivators were not in good shape, and without their environmental protection, suddenly were in danger of being burned to death here, especially as very hot lava was eating through their little volcano-capping island like warm butter. They saw the Icefire Wall on the other side, realized they probably shouldn’t go that way, and took off after us.
They were kind of a sorry sight without their flight abilities working, but they did manage to run up their wall and jump over the edge. The first of them saw Sama’s disintegrating bridge of stone across the lava, sneered, and made to run across the lava in another, safer direction.
The dolt got two steps and shrieked as he went right into the lava in a face-dive. His struggles only lasted a few seconds as he started to burn, and those behind him froze in disbelief.
No, my good, good friends, not all basic lightfoot techniques give you the ability to run on liquids, I mused as we reached the far shore, and spread out to enfilade the dark road of stone that was slowly disintegrating into the lava.