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

There had definitely been some kind of fighting here. There were chop and stab marks all over the walls from acid-sheathed pedipalps, along with the cuts and crunches from magical Weapons tearing into stone during combat and spells going off, largely piercing and bludgeoning spells leaving their telltale penetrating or ring-like impact signs behind when they’d missed a target.

There were no olthoi remains per se remaining, and any form of ornamentation or furniture that might have indicated an Isparian presence had been chopped apart or acid-sprayed, and were probably buried under mounds of phosphorescent slime of olthoi origin growing here and there.

“No way out of there? That’s just a deathtrap then…” Kris commented, as the Eye slowly panned across the room, Devilsight lighting it up as brightly as a noontime plaza. “Any indications of magic?”

“Not a one. Note the lack of spores in the air, and the spread of slime looks more like a dying network trying to hold on, rather than something expanding into this area.”

“Huh. Something here is killing the ecology?” Kris obviously liked the idea. “Then examine the floors in the middle of where it isn’t growing, right?”

The Eye tilted down to more closely examine the ground. “Definitely something lying down there,” Kris murmured, leaning forward unconsciously to inspect the image in her head. “Looks like a knobbed staff made from some really long legs, right?”

It was broken in two, but it was also right in the center of a circle that the slime wasn’t approaching on the floor.

“Kind of janky and jagged for a Weapon, but manageable enough,” Kris judged. “If there’s more than one down there, that’s worth popping in and collecting them all.”

I turned to glance at the unnatural mound of the Paradox Hive over there. “Guesstimating ninety percent or more that whatever is generating the fluctuations in magic I can sense is going to sense a Dim Door popping up.”

Kris nodded coolly, even as the Eye stopped on top of an axe made from two melded and molded pedipalps fused together, the haft shattered, but the head still intact. “You can Shape a tunnel up and we can get out of there quick, come back here, grab the Disks and get out of there?”

I just sighed. “But you’re not going to leave it at that, are you?”

“Godsdamn, Ryin, you know me too damn well.” Eight canines gleamed with vengeance.

“It’s like two monstrous butcherings of olthoi in one day aren’t enough for a Hag, or something.”

“We can assume a Hivemind, so the response will be quick.” I waved the Disks into a tight circle and lowered them to the ground, taking the Orb off the top of Crown to float in the middle of them to give them a magical focus so they wouldn’t dissipate once we got out of range.

“I’ll take the tunnel-”

“Speed run the chamber and paint it in your tremblesense,” I interrupted her calmly. “I’ll grab everything relevant with TK.”

“That’s faster,” she agreed without hesitation. Quaver fluttered motes of Lost Light as it slid into her hand. “Let’s do this.”

I flicked up the flat, rectangular darkness of the Dimension Door between us, centered on the Eye down below, and we leapt through opposite sides of it at one another.

---

One of the things you need to do if you work with Dimensional Magic is get used to the disorientation of skipping points in space. There are many things that your body registers and compensates for that you aren’t consciously aware of, from air pressure and magnetic orientation to gravitational pressure and illumination. I had to say that this was a great world for practicing that stuff, since the rapid Mana Renewal allowed a lot of ‘porting to and fro via everything from Blink to Teleports to get used to the disorientation, and Kris had been with me for most of those sessions, popping all over isolated areas, gridmapped out for precision ‘porting tests and visualization practice, including to areas only seen through Divinations.

That tactic had a particular name: Whizbanging. Take a team, drop in on a position, and hit it with overwhelming force. If there’s any type of opposition remaining, ‘port on back out before they get an Interdiction up and can whelm to trap you.

The existence of the tactic and it being used against you was why Interdictions were so damn common in any society that had dimensional movement options.

The variant the Olthoi Queen in the Hive nearby used was different than normal, a vibratory shaking of the Veil that would rip any other dimension-shifting magic apart even as it was forming. I guess she had experience with Isparian adventuring teams coming in and beating on her brood and didn’t want them just Recalling out when they were all ready to go.

That said, normal Isparians had never had the movement options we had.

Kris slid through and took no time to readjust, her exquisitely sensitive Tremblesense snapping from details of one location to another with a resilient speed that completely ignored the stress of the abrupt relocation, while I just pivoted and looked around with layered Divs to see what else I could see around here.

The edge of her Tremblesense brushed past some of those mounds of fungi and slime, and I grimaced as she snarled. Vivic Darts promptly exploded on those mounds, blowing them apart, and the heaped bones that somehow still remained at the bottom of them were exposed as the vivus began to Burn on them, despite being so long dead any hint of negative energy should have been long gone from them.

Zeks yanked, and a Wand was pulled out from under the first pile of bones and slime, spinning end over end before being deposited on the Disk that unfolded out of my Masspack to receive it.

I could feel a hissing and vibration of the psiscape, indicating that telepathic commands were coming out from the Hivemind.

Kris zipped around the whole room in less than ten seconds, and then was Skating out the tunnel leading in here. A grim smile was on her lips and a wide arc of Lost Light trailing behind her as Stand flipped onto her right arm, and she was off to intercept the olthoi who would be coming this way.

Zeks grabbed and pulled at multiple targets on the floor and under mounds of olthoi slime after I blew apart the latter. Multiple weapons, all of them broken or damaged if in the open, fully intact but leached of magic if under a mound, tumbled onto the Disk floating behind me.

They were all obviously made from olthoi body parts, particularly the pedipalps. There were also pieces and shards of olthoi armor from at least ten different sets and people, left behind just as the weapons were.

It was quite a mound, and I had to stack things up smartly as Zeks dragged them over to me, even as I stepped towards the access tunnel myself.

I reached over and picked up the first Wand Zeks had pulled over. It was cold and had no mana within it, none of the supplemental Runecraft that the Mick had indicated was integral to them… except one.

A spark of thirst and enmity to olthoi ignited in the Wand as I brought power in through it. I established a conduit of power across my shoulder blades, moving from Crown to this Wand, which was happy to accept the energy and do all sorts of fun things to it.

I heard an olthoi scream at the far end of the tunnel as Kris jammed Quaver up through its thorax. Her Tremblesense was telling her that a lot of olthoi were moving this way to help the three, two, one, none Summons left in this place. She was only smiling in expectation as she moved towards the incoming ramp to give herself some opening room to retreat… and me to Chain shit through a whole lot of them in tight quarters.

There were going to be a lot of olthoi dying in here, although I didn’t know if it would do any good. I was pretty sure the Queen was ordering the Summons this way to be the ones killed, and the real olthoi would be left outside to help maintain the Interdiction.

Thus, our fighting here would be ultimately pointless. We’d only shut down a handful of Summons points, kill a bunch of constantly-replaced Summons, gain some Naming Karma, and prove to the local Queen that Isparians had returned and were deadly enemies once again.

That last was going to be important. Would it trigger an invasion, or fortification? Would the Queens understand what we were doing in this place?

In the end, it didn’t matter all that much. Kris was pissed at them, wanted to vent, and Naming Karma waited for nobody.

---

We held out for a fairly easy two hours. Bolstered by the Slaying effect on my Wand, even endlessly repeatable Darts had impressive olthoi-eating Kickers to them, and enough Chains tearing through the packed olthoi trying to get at us could wear down even the toughest of them eventually.

Still, there were too many of them to prevail against, especially since their Summons points just brought a new one back within five to ten minutes, all of which were simply added to the rush coming after us.

That was fine. A whole lot of olthoi died as I punched holes in lots of them, Slaying Fires in multiple colors ignited on them. Kris would then run a Cleave Train out and back through them, chopping down dozens with harmonious death-shrieks in just seconds, and was back in position to take their charges and punish them for it before any of them could get past her to me… not that I didn’t have plenty of reserve Casting to deal with them with more force if needed, but we both knew that wasn’t very important.

The Slayer effect was very noticeable, the enhanced Kickers rendering the Cantrip offense nearly as effective as spending minimum Mana on a I Valence Shards… which meant infinitely sustainable useful firepower.

The olthoi actually couldn’t shove us back down the tunnel. They were too wounded by Burning alive by the time they crowded into it and made it to Kris, who basically chose when to charge into them, reap them all, then retreat and start the process all over. I just punched holes and lit up everything popping up on my Detect, streaks of hard force piercing through two dozen at a time and winding their way through the swarm of bugs until they dissipated.

They even twisted up out of the Dungeon itself and played havoc with the olthoi outside. I noted which ones retreated to safer distances when the Darts got in among them and reaped them some real olthoi who were a little too close to us.

---

“Time?” I asked her politely, another trio of Darts coming up around the Wand made from polished olthoi spine and tipped with precisely ground-down mandible tines.

The vivus was literally waist-high at this point, so many Summons dying and the ground stained absolutely white. Olthoi slime and mold was falling off the walls, pillars, and ceiling, revealing veins of white shot through the stone as they did so, and it was pretty plain that the olthoi were not very comfortable in here.

Well, any that were in here were Burning alive, so that was kind of redundant.

“Yeah,” Kris admitted reluctantly, sliding and spinning to a stop in front of me once again as she finished another Cleave Train. Flaming carcasses gouting glowing green acidic ichor dropped to the ground, heaped on top of other Burning carcasses whose chitin shells had not yet fully discorporated, but which fell apart under any weight or pressure.

Then she turned around, and I looked past her as my Detect registered an abrupt halt of the olthoi. Indeed, they were parting ranks, as if making room for something.

“That is in no way at all ominous,” Kris remarked upon seeing the odd behavior. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Sending in a champion-class to really test and see how tough we are?” I asked her. “Here it comes down the ramp…”

Quaver began to ring louder in anticipation. Kris barely shifted her Stance, but advanced up seventy feet of tunnel, the corpses of the freshly killed kicked out of her way and breaking apart as she did so. I followed calmly.