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

Kris ran her fingers over etch-marks on the Mansion’s wall. “Their fliers were down here. I imagine they sensed anything magical and removed it for their acidic feeder pools and stuff.”

There’d been absolutely no magical remnants left behind in this place at all. For a Mansion located a long, long way from any intelligent scavenger who might have gone through the place, that was pretty telling.

“None of the normal devices the Mick listed as common Mansion fixtures for the Allegiances using them were around the outside or up on the balcony, or on any of the internal fixtures. Even the flower pots were broken and the magical plants removed or eaten, and the keystone marking the owner was shattered and its nexus point dug right out of the ground.

“So, yes, I agree. The fliers probably came down before it was all flooded, picked over everything, and then flew back up out of here.”

We still had Disks full of raw salvage which had been heaped up and were laying around, bags and stacks of various minerals I would Itemize later so we weren’t hauling a full train of the things overland.

Kris prowled around the wet floor, looking at everything, and shook her head when there was nothing more to be found. “Raw materials to Burn is nice, but we’re coming out of this with a whole lotta not much, Ryin.”

“You know we’re also pretty scarce a lot of olthoi skulls for Baneskulls, too.”

She glanced at me sharply. “That’s right, we left the real ones Burning with the Summons, didn’t we? I suppose that means we should hunt down some of the stronger ones and abscond with the heads they won’t be needing shortly?”

“It may be a little crazy, but I volunteer the Paradox nest. Plenty of real bugs there, they are pretty much all strong enough to contribute skulls, and you’ll enjoy carving them up. Downside is with that Paradox infusion, they are extremely magic resistant. I could punch Shards through, but I’m not sure about Vulns and Imperils, especially 100% of the time.”

“Can’t get over the fifty percent hump with Arcane Mastery?” Kris asked quickly. The ability to take 10 on Caster Level checks meant that if you could succeed 51% of the time, you could succeed all of the time. It was one of the big Feats you took when eligible at Nine or Ten.

Conversely, if you couldn’t hit 51%, it was 100% failure and you had to trust to luck to land your spells. Chaos was seldom reliable in such circumstances.

“I’m not sure. The Paradoxes were among the most magic-resistant things I’ve Cast on here, even worse than the Baishi hive, especially those centauroid Sentinels. Mid to high 30’s at least. Plenty of Paramounts without the right Feats and Buffs would just be bouncing off them.”

“More gloriously unwelcome news from the swift-kill department, one more nod to the glory of melee supremacy!”

“You do know how big a bitch they were to kill, according to the Mick?” I asked archly.

“I’m confident of my ability to hit them, but that’s a lot of Health Qi they have,” she nodded. “But if what you said is right, and if the way they are scrapping for magical items here is any indication, then they probably have an even lower birth rate than we expected. It’s just thrown off by all the Summons points. The major hives being expanded like that, instead of them building new ones all over the place, speaks to them concentrating their power, instead of expanding it. It’s further noteworthy that the little hives we’ve seen have rather intense numbers of Summons on or about them, to the point they may only BE Summons, at some point.

“Look at how small the Holtburg true olthoi presence was, by the numbers you gave me. Surely they should have produced more olthoi and expanded, and even had the eggs and grubs for it. Just… nope, didn’t happen.”

“Magical bugs who shouldn’t be able to support their own weight need magic. Shocking, just shocking. I don’t understand whyyyyyyyy…” I whined extravagantly.

Kris just snickered as she hopped onto a Disk and rode it for the surface, instead of skittering up the wall herself. “Let’s head back south and – whoa!”

I came to a stop there, ten feet below the fallen hallway gaping open to the nave and doorway outside. The stone of the basement gave way to wooden walls, my Detect swept outside… and pinged the shit out of me!

There were suddenly dozens of olthoi crawling over the area just outside! And more were coming!

“Why do I get the feeling that we were seen escaping the blast by random olthoi, and they decided to wander over and investigate the Isparians falling out of the sky?” Kris snickered, Stand swirling out of her backpack and into her off-hand as Quaver popped into her left and extended out, trailing swirls of killing Lost Light.

There was a rustling and a clattering, and a pure white olthoi, pedipalps and pincers swirling with the magic-defying light of refined chorozite, came up to the edge of the floorboards and looked down at us, its talons clicking on the protesting wood of the main floor.

It looked at us, we looked at it, and then it squealed, a sound echoed and taken up by a large number of bugs outside, who began to converge on the doorway.

The next second Kris had jumped up and across the gap between it and her and slammed Stand into its chin. Its carapace shattered as its magic-chewing pedipalps glanced uselessly off the Tempered adamantine, Quaver went in and out and in before it hit the floor, and she was spinning around it into the face of the dark black walking beetle trying to fit in the doorway with its massive pedipalps raised above it. The death shriek of the Hollow Olthoi as it fell on past me into the basement drove the swarm into a familiar killing rage, and in mere seconds insectile limbs were chopping into the walls of the Mansion, intent on tearing it down and getting to the intruders within.

I rose up to the level of the hallway, Shards spinning up as Kris kept Stand lifted against the punching assault of those primary appendages stabbing down from above. Quaver pumped in and out like it was held by a steel bar, punching through steel-hard chitin and deep into the alien flesh beyond, drawing gouts of flying acidic blood as it did so.

Diamond wedges wrought in a dozen hues and schemes coalesced down into a single orb of chromatic radiance, extended out into a Ray that hit an unseen prism in midair and fractured into two equally strong Rays, lunging out above Kris and on either side of the olthoi she was actually forcing back into the press of its own kind scrambling to get at her.

There were a lot of screams as the primary targets had holes punched right through them, and then fifty more got to feel the impacts as the Rays Chained through randomly close members of the swarm beyond, killing the weakest of them and wounding the rest… wounds which would break them down as Silver Fire and a bunch of Kickers raged over them, ignoring their Elemental Resistances entirely.

Stand shattered the spindly legs of the bug and it fell over, Quaver blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quick as it plunged into and out of its glowing right eye, and then the Eviscerator behind stepped up to take a shot at her, one of its arms already wavering weakly from the hole punched through its left abdomen and the Flames eating away at it hungrily.

Vivus burst up around the acidic blood spilling and hissing on the wooden floors of the Mansion, ensuring that the olthoi weren’t going to survive this fight intact any more than the walls of this Mansion and its internal rooms were. The area around the doorway was already shredded, more olthoi were savagely ripping at stone and wood reinforced by ley line magic, their acidic pedipalps able to dig into stone doing savage work as they tried to expand the area to get at Kris.

Kris wasn’t going anywhere, laughing softly as she engaged the Eviscerator, its natural weapons skirling off Stand’s polished blue-black sheen, heavyfoot anchoring her against the mass of the bug and superior strength defying it as two of its arms went sailing off, severed through by arcs of Lost Light. Then Quaver was up in and out of its head, and Stand slammed it aside into its fellows to greet the next one clawing to get at her with the Archer Stand Thrust, the olthoi Soldier in purple running up on the point and impaling itself nigh-instantly.

My Detect Vermin was getting packed with bugs. I shook my head, brought up my Shards, and let go again, while Kris hooked Quaver right through the dripping, burning hole in the Olthoi Noble that came prancing up on her and spitted what passed for its heart instantly. She heaved the dead bug over to the side, drawing and reversing Quaver into a backstroke up under a Worker’s chin and killing that bug instantly, as well.

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I made sure every olthoi within potential reach of Kris had Flaming holes in them with every volley, before randomly sending Dartrays through the incoming swarm that was trying to press in and overwhelm us. The waspish fliers rising from the masses attracted primary attention from me as their acidic bile peppered the entryway and dissolved it into sludge under the weight of multiple volleys of the stuff. It normally wouldn’t have been very effective, made to dissolve flesh and not stone, but it seemed to be mixing with the acidic splatters of the stone-chopping diggers trying to get at us, and so it did the job marvelously well.

Kris was in the zone, laughing constantly as olthoi shrieked and died around her, taking their potshots on Stand or hewing through stone-cutting pedipalps and pincers, Quaver shifting length on demand to flicker-stab in and out towards their weakest points. The joining point of the thorax and throat, the mouth, the eyes, and especially any holes I punched in them saw her Sword’s point go in and come out in ripples of Lost Light, tearing open their insides and the acidic blood within. Acid spurted, vivus ignited, and the dead began to heap up nastily even as they began to crumble.

Out in the Swarm, I was hitting over twoscore at a time, killing the weak, staggering the stronger, and annoying the strongest with the Kickers from the Darts I was putting out. They clearly had no familiarity with multi-target magic like this, the acidic attacks of the waspish fliers being similar to Isparian War Magic, and so the horde of bugs did not understand the sheer amount of damage I was doing to them over time as the Kickers were soon burning on hundreds of bugs at a time, even if only for eighteen seconds at a time.

With a whoop, Kris blurred forward out of her position, leaving me open and exposed as she plunged through the horde. Everything behind the first olthoi in front of her died, was shoved off the motte, and down she went into the numbers scrambling over one another to get up to the doorway and after us.

The Cleave Train plowed right into the numbers of wounded olthoi. One-shot kills sprayed violently in all directions as she smashed dead and dying bugs out of her way, plowing them back, stepping on them, over them, under them… and around her, the Lost Light swirled in and out, and olthoi collapsed and died everywhere within her reach.

The profound nature of the attack made her move ever faster as the killing progressed, and she was out there and then coming back as the olthoi by the doorway first turned after her. Only then did a couple see me bring up Darts out of the corner of their eyes and actually saw me standing there in the exposed hallway.

They were just starting to turn back at me when Kris came back, crushing the head of a spidery Eviscerator with Stand and riding a Noble down with Quaver hooked around to insert into its eye socket.

Behind her, dozens of olthoi staggered and died as the arcs of Lost Light joining each and every one of them faded away, and vivus spurted up and raged in a carpet of dead shelled corpses thirty feet wide in front of the Mansion and its motte.

There was a dire hissing shriek, and bounding up came TWO of the Olthoi Sentinels, although thankfully not Paradox ones. The other olthoi scattered from their path as the tauroid beasts, their humanoidish upper torsos waving pincers as cleaver-like spidery legs launched them up the motte at us, came in to fight.