In the face of the constant rain of arrows trying to impale me, I began to glide forward, and shoot back.
I didn’t need to gesture, and technically I didn’t need to speak. I was Singing through, because the Sublime Chord and Words of Creation were conflating to a fat and juicy Song effect in the 40+ range, which was +4 to Caster Level... which was doubled by the Words.
I Cast Control Temperature 10’ Radius at 30. The past-boiling heat around me plunged 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was now Severely Cold, with ice motes starting to fall around me instantly. Cryomana swirled around me, despite the fact I looked like I’d just stepped out of a furnace myself, and all my Snowcasting Buffs promptly went to maximum.
These Pyre Knights were too strong to one-shot with a single Shard, so Shards would be there just to regain Ki, no more or less.
Hastsezini was drawing and firing with inhuman speed and power, and I was simply batting each and every one of them away, Ki feeling out their paths, Clavus responding faster than I could actually move him, slapping the powerful arrows aside like annoyances.
There were flashes of holy cold meeting profane flame, and the ground behind me exploded with demonic fires and crashing impacts from the burning missiles being sent my way. I blithely ignored the consequences of being hit by the things, absolutely certain that such a thing was not going to happen.
I didn’t need my hands to cast Shardrays at all, and so I began to reap.
The riders belatedly realized that they were going to get picked off if they just sat there and I shot them down from fifteen hundred meters. They were close enough together that I could get full Chains off whatever I was shooting, which meant 25 different targets after the main one were exploding when they failed a Save of 41 to dodge them.
Base 10. +5 for Casting a Valence V, using Ki or no. +5 for Greater Magic Weapon Infusion on the Wand of Shards inside Clavus from my Artificer Levels. +15 for Intelligence 40. +2 for Good Spell Focus. +2 for Ice Magic. +2 for Fellfrost Prodigy.
A 10 HD Pyre Knight MIGHT have a Reflex Save of +15 at best, meaning these bastards didn’t have a chance unless they got extremely lucky.
Which, when you’re hitting a hundred of them, does happen. 1/20 is horrible individually, but when you’re targeting a bunch of creatures, is pretty common.
Which, unfortunately didn’t apply so much to me, being Beyond Law and Chaos. The lucky equivalent of a natural 20 only gave them a +5 bonus to the Reflex save... which would end up at 40.
Still hosed. Suck it!
And did I stop at four beams? Of course not, that would have been a waste.
It had taken fifteen hundred reps each for Admixture, Paired, and Fastcast to get those Metas Efficient to a II, but the Fireborn had been extremely generous in helping me Make It So. Residual Magic meant I could trade one of those off every Casting Cycle, making it free.
Split Ray, of course, was already free.
That was my secondary attack. My Primary Attack used Arcane Fusion to set up a basic thirteen-point Shard attack, aiming for Kicker boosting, while I replicated the Twin/Admixture combo without Fastcast to get the Residual Magic cycling.
So when I really, really started going, there were sixteen Shardrays spearing out, all of them Chaining, all of them starting at 18 d6+8’s, and all of them adding on heaps of undead slaying Boosts and Kickers.
The base Shards? They were just there for killing off the riderless bonemares, and generating excess ki, not that I wasn’t killing the primary sixteen targets of my Shardrays right off and getting the ki back off them. After all, each spell only cost four ki...
I was getting closer to them, not because I was inordinately foolhardy or defiant or whatnot, but because I had to keep the pyre knights in range. Even if there were a lot of them, when you are swatting four hundred of them every six seconds, the closest ones tended to go away quickly.
I had Thoughtstream One doing nothing but deflecting the increasingly frustrated arcs of the fire arrows and moving, which literally interfered with nothing else. My Concentration check was more than high enough for the extra slapping and dodging to not mess up what was basically some constant singing and breath control.
Thoughtstream Two was on the Sublime Chord and Words and filling the air with glorious cold, cold power that was cutting through His troops like a cold knife through hot, brittle tissue.
Thoughtstream Three was on target acquisition and adjudication for up to four hundred separate hapless targets.
Thoughtstream Four was actually doing the spellcasting, bringing all the spells together in the magic field here, igniting them with all the energies, and sending them out in an eye-freezing, shining sixteen-fold array of the deadliest and most powerful combat magic ever wielded on this planet.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
To say those watching were a bit agog would not have been wrong, but heck, I wasn’t even doing mass massacres, because these were not the weak undead; these were strong, and I had to use Shardrays.
Still, four hundred and sixteen per round was a good start.
I tossed up Cold Sheathe and Thunder Sheathe as self-Buffs because I could, adding another +2/die kickers to the array, and reckoned that I would need to learn Repeating Spell to really add some holy overwhelmingness to this barrage of death.
The ambient temperature around me was dropping rapidly, but I kept my local temperature at around -50 F, more than cold enough for me to do what needed to be done.
The pyre knights were charging me now. The problem for them was... they were distributed over fifty square miles of territory, which meant it took them time to get to me. They had to gallop through the sky on their untiring mounts... well, undead found it hard to gallop, so triple move their bonemares along in my direction, which unfortunately for them took time to cover that distance.
Every six seconds I was killing another four hundred of them. Notably, I wasn’t killing all their bonemares, which promptly lost control and moved around randomly once their rider was dead, which interfered with the movements of the other pyre knights, especially as hundreds, then thousands of the riderless things were milling around.
They’d been upgraded and weren’t exactly mindless, but they were made to obey a rider, not stampede an enemy independently. Controlling them was very different from commanding the pyre knights, and I’d just made a mess of their advance, even if they were coming from a broad cross-section.
Delays were good. It only got more of them in range of my spells, but not them in range of me.
The freak with the Bow shooting me from five miles away lost sight of me when all his burning riders got in the way, which probably meant he was going to mount up that big black-boned flaming skeletal horse-thing that had been sitting next to him, and come on over and introduce himself.
Maybe. I had the feeling that if he ran into an arc and got himself chilled, he was going to realize I could bombard him pretty good.
Regardless of his appearance, Hastsezini was either undead or a powerful negative energy user. I’d thought he was a magmawight, which he still could possibly be, but it was entirely possible he was a primitive demigod-level existence of some kind, a byblow of some divinity left behind on this world and never evolving with the times.
Certainly the force He commanded was monstrous, and His flames were Profound Flames of one kind or another. If He actually unleashed this army of His against the mortal world, there would be precious little mortals could do to stop Him.
He hadn’t done so in the past, meaning possibly He was restrained by others, or possibly because He enjoyed being worshipped... or possibly because He hadn’t had this army, and had only developed it after the Shroud materialized and claimed Him as one of its own.
If the pattern of the Shrouded we knew had continued, He would have been suppressed by the Dark Hierophant, forced to help turn this world into a Shrineworld to Death, and then been dispatched with somewhere between one and two hundred million undead to another living world, to take it and claim it for Himself as a Dark Hierophant.
Given He couldn’t escape the Shroud, it would have been the best thing He could hope for, a dull future surrounded by Burning Undead, trapped under the Shroud.
Unfortunately, He was now a Dark Cardinal-class undead, an anchorpoint for the Shroud, and if He didn’t die, the Shroud wouldn’t leave this world.
Given the glowering Evil of His servants, unrepentant and fierce, and the legends attributed to Him, I had no problem with sending Him on His way.
Could I kill Him directly? Not while His horde lived. He could jump into one of them with a thought, rebuild His body in seconds to full health, and He’d start re-accruing all the Health Qi I would have to blast through to do that to Him in the first place.
But doing so would have been stupidity, anyways. Killing Him meant one of His servants would promptly be invested, and I’d still have to kill all this shit.
So, it was best to kill it all ahead of time!
---
I was killing four hundred of them every six seconds. That was four thousand of them a minute.
It was taking them approximately three minutes to cover a mile of distance and reach me. Given the furthest was eight miles away or so, that was roughly twenty-five minutes for the last of them to reach me.
My main problem was the middle surge of them would overwhelm my ability to kill them... except for the part where they kept getting hung up on the waves of still-living bonemares milling around, slowing everything down with the obstructions. Even with Hastsezini trying to command them to get out of the way, more riderless mounts were being added to the array every six seconds, which meant repeating His order, while incoming riders were still obstructed, which backed everything up and slowed everything down.
Still, the first ones hit the magical five-hundred-meter mark, and suddenly literally HUNDREDS of some 20d6 fireballs were heading my way.
It was so nice of them, thinking I was that dangerous.
If I had completed the Ritual, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest. They weren’t actually unholy flames, having no Divine or Primal side to them, so they wouldn’t have hurt me in the slightest. Their negative energy side my Death Ward would simply neutralize instantly.
Alas, I wasn’t quite there yet, I still had a few miles to go. But, there were alternatives!
Lightning Rod is a simple III Valence spell that you can Cast on an object, and it promptly becomes the automatic target of any lightning spell in its vicinity. Nice, no?
It had an Elemental Descriptor, which meant that with Elemental Mastery, you could change the Element it affected. This variant had been dubbed Heat Sink.
The sphere I tossed away was just a rough ball of adamant with a small loop on it... Hardened to +15, and I had Cast Resist Fire on it, just to be on the safe side.
Mechanically, what happened was that the course of an incoming Fire spell bent, and was redirected to the floating sphere. It impacted, and the sphere took the full brunt of the spell, sucking in all the damage.
Now, a 20d6 fireball averages 70 damage. Fire does half damage to objects that are not flammable. That damage was then reduced by 30 by the Resist Fire, and then had to overcome the 35 Hardness of the sphere to actually do any damage to it.
Or, in other words, a Topped 20d6 Fireball that could blow through a foot of stone with 120 damage would do absolutely nothing to that sphere.
The streaking fireballs came in like the hand of God His Own Bad Self, filling up my view with lots and lots of pyromana... and then abruptly veered off to the side and vanished down the drain of the Heat Sink.
La.