Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

I was standing near one corner, and the only way out was at the opposite corner. I considered that for a moment, and all the olthoi who had come running to the rescue, and didn’t consider that all that unreasonable. If the pheromones weren’t spreading, or this slime wasn’t conveying alarms with colors or something, the olthoi wouldn’t have come here from further afield.

That said, I had no doubt what had formed the foundation of a lot of this stuff, and being opportunistic about random destruction, I began to shoot everything.

This was the perfect time to use a Pyroclasm, but alas, lacking in the spells department right now, thank you.

The resin was pretty thick, but whatever its chemistry was clearly was unacceptable by the standards of vivus. I wasn’t destroying large areas with every shot, but I was setting it en vivus. The mistflames perked up eagerly, especially whenever they touched a vein of the glowing yellow-green stuff, which was either fuel or food, and I didn’t want to know what, especially as acrid as the stuff in the bowls smelled.

Dumping a Vivic Dart on them made them go up like I had just lit an oil lamp.

Amazing how much damage could be done just with Cantrips and decently powerful Kickers attached to them.

In case it all happened to be part of one whole gargantuan living organism, and might be by the way of the veins of bioluminescent stuff were throbbing, I bombarded the area all around the other entry, effectively cutting any connections off from the rest of the stuff leading out of this place.

If this was all one organism, one of its limbs had just gone completely silent, instead of being Burned away slowly.

I walked to the right across the room, shooting with every step, clearing a misty path slowly and surely, the tip of a slowly spreading vivic feast, until I could look into what had once been another connecting room... and another of those tunnels hacked through the living stone was leading into it, larger than the prior one, and with one of those membrane-doors on it.

I backed off enough to be out of any easy sight, and continued my patient bombardment of the entire room.

It took patience with only three Darts at a time, but that was fine, as I was going to be thorough about this. I ringed the highest reaches of the place so the vivus could Burn its way down, the mist sparking against the unnatural fungi-wax and eventually taking root in it.

One by one, the bowls of goo Burned up and let go, the liquid within gushing out into the vivus below and starting a virtual bonfire of the stuff.

I also noted something glittering in them.

Detect Precious Materials pinged some gems on them, elements condensed out of the goo and filtered out by organic processes, further convincing me it was food, and was acting like a food bowl for the creatures.

I Minor TK’d the gems up, watching as the stands themselves slowly Burned down, adding the new haul to my Disk.

Then I came across the scattering of Air Gold coins down at the bottom of the first column to completely collapse. They were just randomly scattered on the ground underneath the resin-mold there, as if something had fallen there and simply left them there.

I turned and looked at how many other feeding bowls there were.

Six more...

No signs of bones or iron anything. I imagine the bones had been dissolved and processed, too.

I grimly swept up the Air Gold coins and dumped them on my Disk, my thoughts still dark.

-----

There were more coins under each of the feeding stations, and some minor ornamental jewelry. They’d been built atop corpses to get the raw materials needed.

I stood opposite the nictitating membrane in the carved tunnel and blasted it once, twice. The organism forming the door withered explosively, the membrane became liquid goo, and the way to the next stage of the complex was open.

I Cast my first Run spell. For the next five hours, I would have +10 to my base 30 ground speed, plus whatever Mira had paid for, which didn’t seem to have really done much.

If I had to book it, that would be +30, which should be more than enough to outrun any of the bugs I’d seen, since the fliers couldn’t come through a smaller tunnel at speed.

Coming into this room should slow them up. Leaving my Disk behind for the moment, in case I needed to run and didn’t want it behind me in the narrow tunnel, I stepped ahead of the vivic mist spilling this way from the wall-to-wall feasting going on in the previous room. It was silent, but carrying fresh air into the spore-laden, acidic-smelling air beyond.

The resin and slime-trails of glowing goo were even thicker in this room. I stepped out into it carefully, looking down the length of the room quickly.

It was some kind of landing. On the opposite side, stairs led down and around to an area perhaps twelve feet below, with a single hallway blocked by another membrane-door leading out.

There were two olthoi I could see from this point, one of which was a Worker standing upon a location with no resin underneath it. A Summons...

The other Worker seemed to be moving along the wall, scraping at it here and there. In the corner was a feeding station, which it eventually moved over to and rubbed off scrapings into, also scooping up goo on its pedipalps and beginning to daub them here and there over the wall stuff.

I couldn’t see over the edge of the landing if something was down there. I had a feeling there was.

Potentially three olthoi, one of them a Summons, but that ‘door’ should stop any pheromone alarms, maybe... or have to shunt it through the walls.

The Summons had to die atop its Summon point, or I was going to have to deal with another one. The other visible olthoi had its back turned, and I should be out of the arc of vision of those glowing eyes when the Summons turned to look at the one working...

Now.

“Zojak Quareth!” I murmured, and the rainbow spheres shot out, zipped past the Summons, and slammed into the back of the Worker, shattering its shell and splattering glowing acidic blood all over the resin-coated wall as it slid down with barely a death cry.

It turned around to look and see where the balls of colored light had come from, but I’d already moved back around the corner, and there was no enemy to see from its angle.

A chitter from below, and I watched another olthoi race for the covered stairs, almost a ramp with how thickly they were coated with resin.

Excellent. I eyed the membrane, but it didn’t open, which was great.

I swung back around the corner, picked out the watching Summons, and said, “Zojak Qaureth!”

It didn’t have time to move before the spheres smashed into it, its front carapace ruptured, and it dropped where it stood.

The third olthoi, running to where the first one had died, paused at the second shriek and turned my way. It couldn’t see me, but it could see the dead Summons, and it was just starting to move that way to investigate when the Ice Darts came out, clipped both its legs, and it fell to the ground face-first.

Two more volleys of Ice Darts as it tried to get off the floor, not advancing very far in doing so, and then its head blew apart and I was alone.

I promptly hit the Summon with Vivic Darts, and its ectoplasmic body was feasted on before it could dissolve back into ether. That should stop a follow-up Summoning...

Fza—fwoosh! A big thick stream of vivus fountained up, then fell down heavily, billowing out along the ground in all directions. The resin-mold began to sparkle and prickle immediately.

Follow-up V-Darts hit the dead olthoi, and I promptly went into Waking Meditation, drinking back in the 22 mana and 2 Slots I was down intently, letting the vivus spread without me for the moment.

Nothing was going to come from behind me. I bid my Disk float up behind me, sat down on the edge of it while keeping my meditative stance, and it glided over to the edge of the landing near the wall, making sure I had a clear firing lane to the whole room.

Four minutes later, I was full again. I hated the tedium and repetition, wondering just how big I could get my Mana Pool... but more importantly, how fast I could get the Mana Renewal up to, the real deciding factor without the exchange/transferral spells!

Or the necromantic Drain effects of Life Magic, but I hadn’t seen anything worth pulling mana out of yet.

I did walk over to the rather thick feeding station in the corner, and I blasted the damn thing with ten separate sets of Vivic Darts, sending the insides sloshing out like liquid fuel for happy vivus, and blowing apart the supports to it to reveal what it had been Burning atop.

Detect Precious Materials pinged dozens of times.

“Ah,” I murmured as I saw the tiny ceramic and glass jars, the fallen gems from the food basin glittering among them, their contents either absorbed or scattered in a mess beneath the sculpted resin as it fell apart. Many of the containers were broken, but some were not, and that meant usable.

I went through the mess of stuff, using a combination of Sift and Prestidigitation to round up the dusts and powders, clean the usable jars, and put the former into the latter, bolstering my supplies.

No tapers. I guess paraffin treated with mana was good for the resin...

I paused as I came to the scattering of scarabs.

A mental count let me know I’d already burned one of my Iron scarabs, with no way to get more... except, it seemed, off the dead.

Prestidigitation brushed away the remnants of the resin, and the scattered scarabs were revealed to me.

About a dozen Lead and Iron scarabs, a score of Copper and Silver, and fully thirty Gold scarabs, showing this had been a much more powerful and wealthy mage than I was, able to handle both the spells and the costs.

But Gold wasn’t the most common of the hexagonal scarabs.

Off the ground lifted four scarabs in hues Mira didn’t recognize, and so I didn’t, either.

The first was bright green alchemically-treated Air Gold. It could be made into scarabs?!

The second was heavy and dark blue. I recognized the metal, Mira astonished to see it. Alchemically-treated Platinum scarabs, five times as valuable as gold, or somesuch thing.

There were absolutely dozens of Crystalline scarabs, more than the rest of the metal ones put together. Some sort of alchemical poured compound, solidifying like glass into the proper form, a Rune etched into it and filled with mana.

And there was a softly glowing light blue scarab, clearly imbued directly with mana, heavy and powerful and ready to power something quite strong.

-Four additional levels of spells, past Gold?- Mira gasped in disbelief.