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

The olthoi horde’s shrieks at the concentrated death-scents Kris had just shucked off made absolutely sure they weren’t going anywhere but inwards and onwards, while Princess Kristie and I scampered upside-down across the ceiling, back out the gateway, and then up the side of the grounded Citadel.

-That leads way back into the mountains,- Kris /remarked as she pumped up the side of the Citadel on her Cloudstepping Sandals, the slight mists they exuded unnoticed as we headed up higher at ninety degrees.

-Unsurprising. The Dungeon Lord Mick described was absolutely huge and couldn’t possibly fit into an Empyrean Flying Citadel. Slightly more worrisome is the Interdiction across the Veil. We can’t ‘port out of here...-

-Oh, so the bastard didn’t want people to run. That it extends outside must indicate that his trap does, too.- She /veered quickly sideways, while I watched the olthoi horde streaming into the valley below and slowly overwhelming the various Elementals, even starting to pick at and tear apart the reinforced stone of the Citadel with their mining pedipalps.

The Citadel was actually leaning against the canyon wall. Kris made the leap over to the natural stone smoothly and booked for more height.

The whole olthoi horde was streaming into the open gates now, the Elementals not having enough mass or numbers to stack up and stop them, or disintegrating as acid-streaming and magically-enhanced pincers and pedipalps punched into them and tore them apart. The alien bugs were quite resistant to Elemental energies overall, so the spells being tossed by the Elementals weren’t very effective, and the missiles and pummeling attacks didn’t do much to their armored chitin at all.

Eh, didn’t matter. Couldn’t kill Elementals without vivus, they just discorporated until magic brought their spirit together again, and I was sure the numbers of them that could spawn here were without limit… just not with instant speed within that limit.

A pulse of violet came up the plume of oily dark smoke, as if something had ignited down below. Kris watched it pass us up into the sky, and her feet glowed golden as she suddenly shot forward, moving MUCH faster than the olthoi had seen her, aiming for the lip above us with all due speed now.

We cleared the lip and slid through the curve up and down like riding skateboards on a loop, instantly flipping over and heading downslope, distance increasing and height decreasing as our speed hit a whooping new high, equal to a plummeting in free fall as we drove through the sky away from the citadel.

Green pulse.

A breath later, blue pulse.

We both held our breath, and the crimson pulse flashed up.

Something lit up down below and behind us, a garish and harsh illumination with no natural origin lighting up the sky with a medley of very wrong hues, while the manafield bounced and went bonkers as all the Elemental energies there jangled and twisted themselves into knots.

The blast of Elemental energies didn’t reach above the valley, but off to our left, what looked like a tidal wave of thaumic annihilation spilled out of the Citadel canyon like a living thing, rampaging over the landscape and destroying everything in its path as it did so.

The sound, the roaring of Elements in pain releasing and finding all sorts of fun ways to vent their ire on the world, slammed into us a moment later, but all it did was run into my Ward Wall, pushing me back into Kris’ feet, which braced against my back as we let the shockwave of the explosion push us across the sky and away from the stream of para-volcanic devastation that had just made sure nothing was going to get out of that valley alive.

-Some fuckhead had a bit of a temper after being tortured in a prison of his own making for years,- Kris /snickered, stretched out flat in the air like she was body-surfing as we were shoved across the sky at a couple hundred mph, at least.

The crack of breaking stone and ground reached us then. Immense jagged lines flew up around the valley’s walls, and hunks of rock the size of small castles began to fall from it.

-Huh. Did he trigger a volcano or something?- Kris /asked, rolling her eyes. -Some fuckheads just can’t stand not making a goddamn spectacle out of everything, can they?-

-I be Gaerlan, feel my might, you insignificant Isparian curs!- I /announced silently, concentrating on keeping my impromptu sail up as it shoved us across the sky. -Five seconds, start running, don’t stop. The Interdiction zone is miles wide at this point.-

-Hey, we can explore that Mansion!- she /exclaimed brightly.

-Yeah, I think the olthoi are going to be a little bit busy in a moment...-

The glow from the Citadel Valley was getting more crimson and lurid, while the molten wave of Elemental fury had collapsed into a massive fan of boiling, burning, sparking, shattering stones covering the ground for quite some distance. Thaumic chaos writhed over them as the different magicks tried to dissipate and warred with one another while trying to do so, kicking up a vortex of mindbending colors as they clashed.

The mountains were shaking all around, the ground was rippling with shockwaves, and here it came…

The explosion was loud enough that we both would have been deafened without Thunder resistance. The top of the Valley’s ringing mountains just vanished, which meant they had been suddenly launched skywards and would be coming down in all directions.

-Fuck!- Kris /swore cheerfully, getting her feet, still glowing Golden, back under her and booking for more distance. Tower-sized hunks of rock high in the sky were arching in all directions, including at us, and a massive mushroom cloud of superheated stone, ash, and random Elemental furies was boiling up into the sky for our appreciation and aggrandizement, send donations to www. Gaerlanputsonnashow. com.

Ass. More ley line disruption going on. The idiot had no idea what might be Sealed under this island, what those ley lines might be keeping in place, and he had just helped punch a conduit DOWN into the island!

Kris caught my trepidation as she studied the wild display of disrupted energies through my eyes. -He made a volcano,- she /said, as the first steaming, sizzling, freezing, and molten bits of rock started to fall down around us. I tilted my head back to look up at the sky for her, so she wouldn’t have to skate backwards to dodge the crap coming down. -He shouldn’t have made a volcano, should he?-

-All of the volcanoes of Dereth are tapped and controlled… except this one,- I /informed her coldly. She slid aside, and a house-sized chunk of lava streaming frozen mists plummeted by twenty yards to our left, hitting the ground and scattering molten stone and freezing mists in all directions. A random olthoi caught one of the chunks and blew apart, superheated innards freezing in midair as the various body parts hit the ground and shattered like china.

-You think that thing that was reaching out for you might have made contact with him?- Kris /asked, legs still pumping as she regarded the sky behind her through my eyes, sliding this way and that to ignore the debris coming down around us and trying to pelt us.

Zeks’ Telekinesis reached out and began to shove the smaller rocks this way and that, clearing the air above us of lighter stuff so Kris only had to ignore things larger than a bowling ball. Happily, the energies sticking to the things made even the smallest chunks fairly easy to see and track, with some of them even exploding into dust when knocked aside or into one another.

-Fucktard Empyrean who enjoys bargaining with fell powers being tortured by the end product of his own maddened efforts might be receptive to corrupt power promising much and delivering something? Especially when he doesn’t realize he doesn’t have a choice in the matter?- I /sniffed.

-That sounds like classic irate evil madman needs to have a good healthy ranting monologue, tell us all his sinister plans, and get ganked.-

-You Ranthas, the very definition of understanding and hospitality for the insanely deranged.-

-Fuck, touch the Hag Akasha someday. The nature of the Planar Lore we get off those Skill Ranks is puke-worthy to any normal person. Yeah, we understand ranting villainous tirades pretty damn well.- She rolled her eyes for emphasis.

-Thank you, no. You wouldn’t even have said that if you thought about what might happen to a Powered who had that kind of access to a Sinborn Akasha.-

-Eh, right. Sorry,- she /apologized without hesitation. A chest-sized rock falling about half the speed it should have as lightning crackled over it and emerald acid trailed it tumbled slowly on by us towards the ground below. The landscape below was now a veritable pyrotechnic display of uncounted Elemental energies lashing at everything around as devastation dropped from the sky, above and beyond the huge psychedelic field of ravaged stone already there.

I’d alerted all the Casters I could, who’d passed it on to their companions so the huge hiccup in the ley lines didn’t disrupt anything important. Tools were put down, Rituals paused, and Casters waited for the shockwave of the eruption to pass on by and the ley lines to settle once more before resuming anything magical.

-Decent karma,- Kris /pointed out, and I looked at my personal Assay.

Huh. -Well, we killed a lot of olthoi, a lot of Elementals, triggered a trap so it did the absolute minimum amount of harm possible, and even warned distant people so there’d be no ‘happy accidents’ stemming from it. It’s not a Glory Award, but for magnificently useless fits of pique, we did a pretty good job foiling it, didn’t we? And even led a bunch of bugs into it to enjoy the sensation.- Really good planning, says I.

-Maybe there’ll even be something useful in the Mansion for us to use,- Princess Kristie /smiled hopefully, and I had to chuckle as I kept my eyes peeled for all the stuff still falling from the sky we had yet to outrun.

Naming Karma was saving our bacon as long as steady advances were going on, but more loot and goldweight was something we were still sorely lacking. The huge pent-up demand for such for everyone meant there simply wasn’t enough to go around, even for the extremely useful low, broadly employed magic that was best put into place.

I definitely could have used those mountains of pyreal that the Mick liked to talk about, goldweight of salvage and stuff in just silly arse numbers being coughed up by the magic of the system without any restrictions or reasons.

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The Mansion was remarkably intact, all things considered, with remarkably few olthoi tracks around it, and even fewer other creatures. The doors had been ripped off the hinges, so the entire thing was open to anything that wandered in. Judging by the remains of stuff splattered on the walls and floors here and there, this was a potential den that the olthoi basically cleaned out on a regular basis whenever anything moved in, and basically left alone otherwise.

So, there were signs of combat here, and the furnishings and décor had definitely taken a beating, but the olthoi hadn’t reduced it to a big pit, which they most certainly could have with little effort.

It was still forced up off the ground by the emergence of its dimensional basement beneath its existing basement, and the fact it was on a mountainside meant solid stone all around, so it was accumulating water steadily from rainfall and melting snow.

I bored a hole with Shape Stone and drained the water out and down the mountainside, the whole thing emptying out inside ten minutes and making it much easier to Sift through the remains.