Renewal came and passed. I pulled Tremble from the destroyed powder of the Sun Brother's Sword, and eyed it speculatively.
Vivic, Arsenal: Blooding
Sharding.
I'd wanted to add Bane, but didn't have the room. This would satisfy my needs of the moment.
I strung the Greater Token against Fireborn I'd made onto the pommel, again QL 35, carved out of the horn of the Salamander officer. It had already reached the DR Suppression stage of a Minor Token, now I'd work on the Lesser Token power of extra damage against Fireborn. Given the amount of killing I was doing, I didn't expect it to be difficult. The more I killed, the faster it would empower.
Vivic would feed these creatures to the Land, reduce them to vivus, help the Land reinforce the Veil and make it harder and harder for more and more of these things to come in, as the Land would get more and more hostile to their presence. The extra +d6 of damage against negative-energy life forms (i.e. undead, usually) and convenient corpse disposal were nice extras. Always nice not having to worry about your kills rising from the dead.
Arsenal: Blooding would be my first alternate. Blooding was a Curse-level magic that specifically shut down unnatural forms of healing, regeneration, magical Curing, alchemical treatments, and so forth. It was specifically designed to kill trolls and vampires, both famous for their fast healing and regenerative capabilities. Blooding at a basic level always faded away at the Rise of Life, Natural Renewal, i.e. dawn, but that was usually more than enough to stop enemies from retreating, healing away their damage, and coming back to fight you. With more powerful Weapons, the effect lingered longer, to the square of the enhancement bonus, or simply 'never heal this magically' if the Enhancement exceeded +5/25 days.
Sharding was a +Zvei enchantment that turned a blow of Tremble into a ranged attack, with an increment of ten feet. I had the Far Shot Feat, which extended the increments of my ranged weapon attacks by +50%, and increments were five in total, so I now had a ranged attack of up to 75 feet or so available from my Sword.
It wasn't an Autobow, but it was a ranged attack.
On top of that, my Cleave attacks could work through the Shardings. If I killed something with an arc, it would just keep right on going into anything behind it. Furthermore, I had Penetrating Shot, which was one of the ranged One Strike options. It allowed you to line up and hit anything in a straight line, at -4 to hit for each successive target beyond the first. So, even if I didn't drop something, I could still cut down others beyond.
In other words, I had an Area of Effect attack. Nominally, it was linear… except I could always keep swinging at other targets. Sharding was not something that could only be executed 1/rd. It directly transformed an attack into a ranged attack.
I put the other Shield into my new Forge and the Transfer Pattern. Sure, it was only 9k of Karma, but that was nine days of acceleration. In addition, I heaped all the fundamenta and blood I could into the thing, and it ate it all.
What I was doing was making a high Caster Level, shrunken and combined Wall of Fire and Heat Metal effect. The combination would be able to readily melt even adamant, and heat reinforced adamant to the point where it could be forged, and do it extremely quickly.
My Floating Forge was the first real step on accelerated Gear making!
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I had to work in a Floating Disk feature, so that I could use the Forge outside of combat. But as normal, each day was a fifty kg increase in the weight limit, so it would only increase slowly. Still, it had 18k of Karma, which was enough to get Furious active and 150 kg on it, while paying off the Heat Metal effect at full power.
Furious was a combination effect. It doubled the speed of crafting when using the Forge, and applied a +5 Equipment bonus for having a 'perfect flame' and control of the flames on things heated within it.
I'd need another fifteen days to get the actual 'fire' part of it active. Oh, and 15k of power comps related to fire. Although I suppose sucking up the heat of an Elementally active lava flow would probably suffice.
I hammered down part of the gildensteel bracers to a size that I could use, feeding the magic from the rest of the Armor down into the Bracers as I did so.
+III Armor bonus, derived from a force effect. Feeding it the Karma from the other suit would get it another 9k worth, enough to get it to +IV… but that would be silly.
Defiant enchantment, +2 to armor bonus against a specific foe, +2 DR/-, the counterpart of Bane. Defiant to Humans, Armory/Fireborn as an alternate. Instead of +IV to everyone, +III to everyone and +V against anything with the Fire descriptor... or Humans.
My current AC was, hnn, +8 from Dex, +6 from Intelligence, +5 Natural Armor, +2 from Melee Class, +1 from Monk Class… base of 32. I could start parrying and get another +4, shift style to Expert Defense for -4 TH and +8 AC. So, I could already boost to 45 if I needed to. With Beyond Law and Chaos meaning Luck and Fate couldn’t affect me and Skill Ruled All, that would mean a foe had to have a TH bonus of +25 to have ANY chance of hitting me. That wasn't usually found on any foe with less then a Combat Rating of 10-12.
In other words, this weak crap I was fighting really didn't have much of a chance against me. The Sun Brothers were probably rocking +32 with their Swords, and with the AC penalties of charging, I couldn't have avoided them, period. Basically feast or famine. The key thing when fighting stuff like that was simply to kill them quickly… and I was pretty good at that.
Now, I needed time. Time for the Shield to burn down, so I could slap on my first set of Bracers. That meant eight hours after the next Renewal.
Happily, there was a fine source of Karma sitting right over there to keep me continuously occupied for the whole of the next day, and they'd yield up corpses I might be able to turn into other things.
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Like, better clothes…
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Basically nothing else made it out of that cleft alive. That included the stuff that wanted to ride the lava flow out.
I killed everything within twenty-five paces of me, which covered a good chunk of that river, as well as the stone next to it. I simply sat in front of it, and everything that came out, I cut apart. Flying, running, crawling, bounding, walking, trotting, strutting… Tremble Sang, shardblades of force, arcs and points and hammers of hurled energy, smashed into those above, around, and before me, those that tried to run past me, or who charged at me.
Where they hit, the Fireborn died.
Lots of elementals. Lots of flying swarms. Magmin. Mephits. Salamanders. Burnhounds and charcats. Fire striders and fire newts. Brassmen. Ifrit. Fire drakes and fire snakes. Thoqua, molten worms drilling through the ground. Plume wisps, the fiery counterpart to their will o' wisp cousins.
The bodies didn't stack up, because I carved out of them what I wanted and then let the rest burn away into vivus. If I messed them up too bad, I didn't even get to salvage anything.
Ah, well. The problems with overenthusiasm.
Between flows of creatures, if I didn't have anything to do, I simply knelt down in Waking Meditation. I still needed a couple of hours a day, but nothing said I couldn't do that in dribs and drabs.
I'd accumulated those Feats to use them, after all. Accumulated a whole lot of Feats…
Arcs, points, and hammers of solid force raved through the air, Fireborn died. If they actually came within reach of me, they died even faster.
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Time passed. I ground the extraplanars away, salvaged comps, meditated.
Renewal came and passed.
I set up the Forge to condense down and refine all the magic Weapons and Armor I'd accumulated, just scattered amounts of lighter stuff, as well as more gildensteel, eshbronze, nurbrass, pyralumin, atargold, eldrcopper, ogonpewter, chariron, and huosilver. They were melted down into ingots I might be able to do something with, shaped out of the magma and simply dripping through the filter field in the middle of the Forge. The sentient Fireborn also carried some of the gems of Fire, although most were simply fire-Energized versions of terrestrial gems. The truly unique jewels of Elemental Fire wouldn't be owned by the stuff I was chopping into Land-food.
Forge was also sucking all the magic out of their Gear with impunity, while floating over the lava and absorbing all the wonderful Elemental Fire goodness as a free power-up. Had to like that. The flowing currents of magic around it looked like some kind of fiery flower, very eye-catching.
The Transfer Array inherited my Bracers and the sets of Sun Brother Armor to munch on, and got to work on my self-protection.
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It announced itself with multiple discordant and overlapping hisses. I registered the heavy footsteps; one huge one, two smaller ones. Three-footed…
Then the little tongues of flame licking out mouths and noses, scattered through the air from dark stalks waving too and fro. As it came closer, obviously attracted by my Forge, it became clearer in the light of the lava and the white-washed stone that seemed to be getting a lot of attention from it.
A sixteen-headed pyrohydra. And I wondered why I put Blooding on a Weapon so quickly…
A whole lot of reptilian heads about the size of an alligator, on necks five meters long, weaving back and forth about themselves in hypnotic fashion. Its hide was a deep, dark crimson, bands of black and scarlet forming on the necks and heads, with the spinal crests being a hue of scarlet fading to gray. It had one huge forward foot for its rather squat body, two powerful rear legs to power it forward, and was drawn back like a bear, its heads reaching way up into the air, looking particularly dangerous.
Well, at least it wasn't a dracohydra. They had wings!
I sighed and rose to my feet. Hydras could be monstrously dangerous if you couldn't stop their regeneration. All those heads added up to a lot of attacks ripping into you very fast, and the dizzying neckwork could easily throw someone off their game. That huge reach meant you couldn't really go after the main body, and its regeneration rate for the body was massive, the sum total of the healing ability of its heads. For all practical purposes, unless you could take the body out in seconds, it would all just heal itself back.
The default way to kill a pyrohydra had to involve acid. I did not have Acidic worked into Tremble yet. Just hacking a regenerator apart and not letting it heal wouldn't necessarily kill it. When Blooding failed at dawn, it would put itself back together rather quickly, just waiting for the chance.
That was okay. I had a workaround.
Tremble began to Sing its two-tone as I altered Vivic to Blooding, standing there unafraid in front of the hydra with my golden-edged Blade. It began to spread heads out to come at me from all angles, snapping and snorting torch-flames eagerly, all the heads wanting to take a piece of me. Its ideal scenario was that it would grab me with six or seven heads, and simply rip me apart. Then its multiple heads could wrestle with one another for my remains.
It took another step forwards, and Tremble snapped up. A lot of eyes followed the motion, and the golden edge on my Sword seemed to incite some wariness. But a creature that could heal from anything obviously wasn't going to consider one Sword a true threat, and it poised itself for only a second before lunging.
Eight heads, coming in from all angles. That was fine.
I slid five feet forwards without shifting my Stance, which brought me inside the converging circle of their jaws before they could adjust to the change. Foot-thick necks filled my surroundings, rather interrupting the vision of the other heads, and I cut.
Cleaving Sunder. Hacking off each head was basically a sunder attempt. The Feat let me keep right on going, and Improved Cleave removed all limits to the number of Cleaves, while Supreme Cleave let me move in between them.
All those heads were moving in slow motion; I could plot the course of each of them, and I could cut them with sublime accuracy and terrifying force. The Sage of Swords was on the job!
“TREMBLE!” I grandly informed it in Draconic.
Two to my left, sliding forwards another step; continuing the stroke, the two above me lunged themselves right off their necks; between the two on the bottom, coming down on the two to my right as they tried to arc backwards towards me, and fell away. Spinning, moving backwards as the bottom necks converged behind me, went spinning away in flames and burning blood, and I was basically right up against the base of the necks.
Snapped my hips and both hands on Tremble, ding-ting, and I came straight across, like cutting a bunch of wheat stalks clumped together. A meter of steel went across in a line geometrically straight, ki so hard and pure around my Blade it was nearly cutting space.
Profoundly Artistic and sublime.
The whole batch of sixteen heads fell away from their stumps heavily, writhing in surprise and confusion as they hit the ground and life left them rapidly as the elemental fire of their life faded.
The stumps spurted blood, stilled. They didn’t bleed, but they didn't heal. The main body fell slowly forwards, collapsed, and sprawled out as I skated back from it, cutting upwards as I did so. Thick hide and thicker bone cracked and parted, seemed to pulse, and failed to heal yet again...