The incidences of oozes increased quickly as we made for the borderline unnaturally steep slopes of these mountains which should not be here, following the distant wails on the wind.
Listening to a shoggoth screaming its song in various pitches and tones was a nice way to go barmy, so I was humming a countersong as we approached, suffused with the Words of Creation to basically take the teeth out of the Aklo-infused semi-chant of the shoggoth.
I was also tracking harmonics, and was pretty sure we’d heard at least five, but who knew? A shoggoth could manifest as many mouths as it wanted to, all of different shapes and sizes. I wasn’t actually looking at the sounds, but the energies attached to them, which on the level of a Heartsong were as individual as fingerprints, just like a Caster’s spells.
The number of energy signatures was increasing steadily as the wind whipped around the peaks, carrying and resonating with one another in an ever-increasing cacophony. I was flaming down oozes of one kind or another every hundred meters or so now, and the mountains themselves seemed to be trembling in some kind of resonance to wind and the sound the shoggoth were building.
Twenty signatures. Thirty. Fifty...
-----
We pulled up atop the ridge of a valley, madness clashing about us in an unholy scream-chant of voices from orifices not human raised in something as close to absolute discordance as they could manage, and a horrible symphony all its own, hinting and alluding to mad insights and truths about Creation humans should just stay away from.
There were tunnels and caves carved in the mountains here, hidden by clefts and crevices either artful or natural, it was hard to tell. The whine and moans of the winds whipping through them built to a maddening fever pitch, and the insane song chants of the shoggoth came shrieking forth from within them.
It was impossible to tell how many were nearby, and how many were far away. These mountains were conducting the chant from peak to peak, valley to valley, and the multi-layered level of noise made it impossible to tell which sprang from near places, and which from afar.
But I was definitely hearing at least a hundred different signatures...
I looked down the miles of peaks behind us, and the miles of peaks ahead, both stretching to the horizon.
-They are following a different arc. The Transantarctic Ridge is on the other side of these, convex to us. These are following a concave arc towards the Pole.-
Master Fred was surveying it all, eyes narrowed in concentration on my Voice and Song against the maddening interplay of the wailing winds and the moaning, shrieking shoggoth cacophony of teke-li-li-li. -A whole mountain range, coming out of nowhere. Why towards the Pole? It naturally shifts with the planet over time.-
-Just coincidence, or something stirred up by the Frozen Shroud?- I /hazarded blindly. -This line of sonic conductivity cannot be a coincidence. If Lovecraft is right, there’s a city of the ancients of some kind ahead on a high plateau above us. We’re on a line of spatial bending that’s being suppressed by the Shroud, but I’ve got a Lived-Line lock here now. Even if the Shroud vanishes, I can still come through it.
-Let’s follow the Mountains of Madness, get a rough map of at least one side of them, and see what they lead to.-
Ah, exploration. A true vacation, and even picking off every ooze that came into range didn’t change that.
-And the shoggoth?- he /asked reasonably. I pointed, and he turned, his new Glasses sparking as he fed them energy for Eagle Eyes.
The creature was base black, but its insides were swimming with twisted shadows of various organic hues, rippling into view and back out again, both moving around, and forming and unforming within itself. Likewise, the pulsing surface of the thing was constantly in motion, forming and unforming eyes, mouths, tentacles, arms, legs, pincers, tendrils, pseudopods, and other strange appendages hard to describe all over its surface slowly yet constantly.
It rolled like an ooze, bulging and creeping, and at the same time managed to slither, creep, crawl, and hump forwards, the combination moving its multi-ton bulk with incredible speed. Some of the pseudopods could enlarge in reach with dangerous quickness, whipping out to twice the length of its body with no difficulty whatsoever, helping drag and pull it along in its incredibly uneven, but remarkably quick ambulation.
We were anything but concealed up on the ridge like we were, the darkness being the best cover, but when it could manifest eyes larger than a dinner plate that could see multiple spectrums, that wasn’t a defense.
It had come outside for some reason, perhaps smelling us, perhaps sensing our Aura, perhaps even something as minor as a sudden disruption to the airflow, or the very subtle whine of Sleipner’s engine. Whatever the reason, it had seen us, and was coming our way.
For an instant, starfire ignited on the slopes of these dark and dreary hills, and even the wailing of the wind and maddening song was drowned out by the sudden popping of ice melting, air superheating... and silvered starfire reaching across a thousand meters as almost eighty Weaponized Shards came down on the thing.
Yes, it was highly resistant to energy... but that didn’t include Divine, although it might include Primal. These were elder creatures, from a time before the influence of the modern gods, and it could not possibly have built up any resistance to Divine power, although I didn’t feel the same about Primal.
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Shards of jetsilver burning vivic plunged into the ever-changing, protean mass, turning pseudoplasm into vapor like a rain of deadly arrows, plunging for its core. Banefire shot along the equivalent of nerve pathways and weak points, wreaking havoc on whatever forces kept it intact and whole against the assault of ages.
It wasn’t an Evil creature, so the Holy Metas had no effect on it, more’s the pity, and it also wasn’t undead. I wanted to see how many Shards it could handle as the volley played across it, as my Assay couldn’t reach it at this distance.
Five Shards from the first volley embedded themselves harmlessly in the thick layers of empowered cells about it, doing no harm whatsoever, but the rest drove in deep, lighting up things inside it I really didn’t need to see.
The Paired Salvo followed, and something reached critical mass inside it along about the tenth Shard. Fire blew through the entire mass of the creature as a hundred different maws, mouths, sphincters, and orifices suddenly screamed in different tones and keys, and then the shoggoth lost all cohesion and began to fall apart into pseudoplasm, half-made organs, protoplasm, and just plain goo.
The Admixtured set coming up behind reduced the entire blob to a blazing mass of feasting, hungry vivus in a white-hot, pounding rain of almost two-score Shards.
-Three hundred-some Health?- Master Fred /judged, having seen me shoot a lot of things with Shards, and developing quite the eye for their damage potential.
-Thereabouts. Health based totally on size.- There was motion in a whole lot of the other caves, but he made no attempt to get moving.
Shoggoth had no ranged attacks, and no supernatural speed. From a certain standpoint, they were simply big, fat moving targets that had to be cleared off the land regardless, or they’d simply destroy anything that set them off, i.e. The Blob’s bigger, angrier cousin. There might be a mutant with some sort of ranged attack, and there certainly were ones that could fly... but that wasn’t going to help them much, either. We just had too much of a range and speed advantage.
Four wheels of nineteen Shards like thaumaturgic starfire spun up around my arm again, but this time there was a prism floating in front of my hand. -Let’s see if four Rays can do for one of them, and take out two at once.- As the bulging masses of pseudoplasm lurch-roll-crawled to the entry to their caves, I picked the nearest two in range, and let fly.
---------
I didn’t know if they just didn’t have a self-preservation instinct, if they were mad, or just didn’t realize I was actually killing their compatriots, but they just kept coming.
It actually wasn’t an issue. I had lots of room to work with, because they had lots of ground to cover to get to me. It didn’t matter that they could go up and down walls with impunity, or that the terrain was raggedly uneven and greatly increased how far they had to get to me.
In any event, I picked them off, including the one that suddenly exuded a bunch of fins and rough wings, and started spinning, lifting off the ground and shooting towards me like a very weird flying saucer.
Four Shardrays sliced it apart, and the burning pieces blew all over the place, raining down all over the valley as it went down.
The oozes I hadn’t destroyed on the approach coming up behind us was an interesting development, confirming that they could respond to their progenitors by some method, even if they were technically mindless. They were spread out far enough I couldn’t Chain them, but spending a Valence I Shard was enough to wipe them, what with their Fire vulnerability and my spells being so nicely boosted by the cold. Fourteen Topped Shards doing double damage to their lack of a face was a lot to take, regardless of how big they were.
It was literally a perch and a Karma harvest, but that was absolutely fine. None of these creatures were natural, they all had to be killed, and even if I was the perfect weapon to do so from safety, they still had to die. The natural imperative was there, and I wasn’t going to stop it. For a good fifteen minutes I shot down dozens of oozes semi-intelligent and not coming from all directions, converging on me and my Shards and Rays, which lit up this place like actinic flares under the cold and gloomy Haze of the twilit sky.
Briggs and Sama were cursing good-naturedly in the distance. Shoggoths were a lot of Karma, and even if it wouldn’t be as easy for them as for me, they could still take these things out, and they wanted to.
But that was fine. It wasn’t like I was going to clear the entire mountain chain of them, so they could certainly come hunting for them later.
-------
When the cries were pretty faint, none of them seeming to be local, and the oozes from below didn’t seem to be coming any more, Sleipner headed off along the side of the steep slope, looking to reach the other side of the mountains.
The proper way to map and scale these mountains was to zigzag between them and the known Transantarctic Ridge, tracking my Lived-Line across them in case they decided to disappear again, and fixing them between their proper location in known space. It would greatly increase the amount of ground we had to cover, but it wasn’t like we didn’t have tons of oozes to snipe off along the way to keep us occupied.
The rule was just to stay in motion as we moved back and forth, zigzagging back and forth over the landscape, Detect Location getting anchors inside and outside wherever these things had been hiding.
There were endless oozes to snipe off, so Karma harvesting was basically constant. A pass through an occupied valley usually generated one or two shoggoth snipes at least, and if they took initiative to be out there waiting for me, considerably more.
We didn’t stop for them, however.
The mountains got taller, and more obviously carved and shaped, getting steeper and steeper despite being taller. The moaning howls and wails of the wind were getting more transcendent, and plenty of people simply couldn’t listen to it if they tapped into the hearing I had online, even with me Singing softly to counteract the effect of it.
That was some nasty high QL shit there. Imagining the scale of the song, and how long this thing had been here, and the fact that it was still working...
I had severe disbelief that there were Elder Things involved here, but then, I didn’t know if that race even existed in this reality, although I supposed I could have directly asked a Ghoul Sage to verify it, and indeed, I sent that out as a request. Whether they dwelled here in Earth’s past was a thing...
And if the Yth had been here, mass bodystealing to avoid death, well, I was definitely going to have to do something about that...
I still couldn’t see the Shroud around the pole, but it was getting closer as we stopped for eight hours to get infusing and Meditation out of the way, and in this place where Dusk Renewal was pretty weird as time zones could be crossed casually in no time, another day of time passed.
Hrm. Didn’t even get to see the Southern Lights or Cross in this world. So unfair. It would be so thematic to be riding across this plain of ice under the totally clear sky and the bright, bright stars...