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

The tauroid olthoi sentinel, vaguely humanoidish torso atop a weaponized insect body, clacked slowly and confidently into our sight, the other olthoi keeping a wary distance from it, even retreating back up and outside to free up more room for it to fight us.

“How fast can Quaver devour a Weapon?” I asked Princess Kristie quickly.

“Depends on how powerful it is.”

Things clattered as a broken, jagged-edged Sword stood up, hilt upright, on my Disk. “Quaver, eat fast.”

Kris slammed down her Sword onto the pommel of the broken Sword, and Lost Light sparked and flowed, streaming down over the black chitin of the blade as golden Light pumped into it, cracks flaring with magic and energy and a hissing stream of greenish energy arose from the chitin. It was promptly surrounded by swirling Lost Light and channeled right back into Quaver, while the dark organic material crumbled swiftly and fell apart, cracks spreading and then spilling out as the magic inherent in the broken blade was devoured by Quaver.

Runes etched themselves into the blue-black adamantine of the Blade, pulsing and ringing with a sharp ding, ting! They also sparked with an emerald hue that fell off them, out and over the metal and its Golden edge, giving it a poisonous green hue that definitely attracted the attention of the Sentinel in front of us.

“Olthoi Slayer active,” Kris confirmed, getting Stand ready as she settled into position. “Mind telling me why it was so urgent?”

“One hundred thousand Health,” was my short reply, staring at the thing. “Paradox, basically anti-magic on its pincer attacks and bite.”

She eyed the swirling blue and red lights, as if the cleaver-limbs and jaws of the things were lined with refined chorozite. “And it’s intelligent, even if it can’t understand what we’re saying.” She looked right and left. “I note it’s all the weak olthoi who retreated, and the ones left don’t look like they are resting.”

“It probably wants to pull you away from me and send them against me while you are occupied. They are all above one-shot kill status for me, at least two thousand Health each, with Paradox attacks so my Force Armor and Shields are basically worthless.”

“Well, let’s nip that in the bud, then, shall we?” she asked rhetorically, as the Tats on her waist glowed. The spidery black lengths of her Arakne Arms grew out of her hips and reached up to grab her Autobow Drop as it rose out of her Masspack and into the grip of the Soul Magic appendages.

A bolt slid up from the magazine and into place as the untiring Arms racked the Weapon, and it thrummed out, sparking off the hide of the Sentinel with a bright greenish flash of Health Qi evaporating, leaving no injury behind.

Tireless arms of soul energy racked the Autobow again, while Kris basically held down the trigger and didn’t take her eyes off the Sentinel as she fired again.

I brought up a full flight of Shards, condensed them to Orb, Ray, and Split them out in a chain of diamond pulses, punching into and through two dozen olthoi with angry pulses of Force Magic tripping on the Slayer effect from the Wand I was wielding. Double damage to the first olthoi, Kickers and all, full damage to those after… I’d be punching them all down in quick order!

The Sentinel snapped its head around, realizing what was happening. They were all only Summons, but its tactics obviously weren’t going to work. Perhaps it thought offering a duel was going to make us stupid.

With frankly astonishing speed, it leapt right at us with the confidence that it couldn’t be killed, pincers raised and lashing out.

The Archer Stand Thrust drove right through its head, its whole body convulsing and its attack faltering because Sword in Brain is not an acceptable living condition. It also vented a metric ton of Health Qi instantly from the triple-damage braced thrust, quadrupled crit, and Slayer double damage on top of it all, eating in excess of 4k damage or something instantly, likely harder than it believed it could possibly be hit.

Well, duh, slam your head down onto a spike and see if it don’t hurt, I thought, unleashing another round of Shards, this time Paired up and so doing twice as much damage as the one before. My single primary target up and died instantly, while the olthoi crowding in behind the Sentinel writhed and sprouted a diamond pattern of Flaming holes in their chitin as the magic punched through two dozen more of them.

The Sentinel was trying to drive Kris back, and she wasn’t having any of it. With only one opponent to focus on, the others unable to reach her due to the Sentinel’s size, Quaver was a blur of ringing tones and motion, meeting pincers and legs and arms with Sunders that made those limbs convulse in nervous feedback before the Health Qi would annul the hits. They created awkward imbalances and openings in its fighting style as it lurched this way and that, constantly ‘losing’ legs to her swings, while Quaver chewed into and through its natural armor as if it were soft leather instead of harder and more malleable than steel with Brilliant up and running, a blur of light sliding through its carapace and into the burning acidic blood beneath.

It did manage to tag her a few times, whereupon we discovered that its offensive power wasn’t much better than any other Sentinel, it wasn’t really any stronger, and so her defenses and Fast Healing could take care of most of the fighting.

It also turned out it could breathe fire at short range, which was plenty amusing, and something we’d noticed among several others of the olthoi, typified by bright red scales around the thorax/throat of the things. Since fire was less of a threat to us than acid, that was all fine.

There were around sixty other Summoned Swarm olthoi in the chamber. Three spells later, there were thirty-two, and three spells after that, there were none, but a lot of freshly Burning carapaces were scattered about and feeding the vivus here.

I shifted methods from Chaining to Echo, and now sent eightfold volleys of Dartrays into the bastard at point-blank range.

It still couldn’t get past Kris, who was punishing it with an absolute whirlwind of primary attacks, Sword Beats Fist, and Opportunist fun, along with Hedge of Thorns punishing it for pulling back and attempting to charge back in on her. Too reliant on its armored carapace and monstrous Health Qi, its ability to predict and anticipate blows to dodge them was minimal, and Kris was shredding it for thousands of points a round, the Biting Strike on Quaver triggering again and again for monstrous x4 crits from Crippling Blow. Health Qi vented constantly from wounds that gaped open, then glowed and silently closed.

To her thousands of damage I added my own, piling in on top of her to accelerate her attacks and offer her more Opportunist attacks. I was burning Mana and Slots if I upgraded to Shards, but doing thousands of damage, its Health Qi dropping in free fall as it tried to pound at Kris, grab her, throw her, bite her, spit at her, tangle her up, and open up the way to get to me.

Kris just wasn’t having any of it.

The thing ate her Shield Stand bashing it at least six times, shattering mandibles and teeth each time, while the blade of Quaver played around in its head, abdomen, chest, and throat, hewing off arms and legs repeatedly and letting it know it wasn’t all that. Ding, ting! rang out again and again, reverberating in their minds and chitin that wouldn’t understand our speech, but smashing itself onto the hivemind as the sound of death, coming over and over again.

“Health Qi gone!” I said, stepping back and going down to mere Darts as a thrumming quarrel from Drop punched into the Sentinel… and this time the blazing hole hissed and leaked flaming acidic blood.

The souped-up Sentinel seemed to realize it was about to die, and chose to charge in a frenzy, attempting to overwhelm her with one last smashing flurry of two legs and two weapon arms behind a blowtorch breath.

I scooted back another ten feet as Kris did the same, and she once again planted herself.

The reaching, rearing pincers o’ doom fell a bit short in chopping down, actually losing most of their force before they could descend. As the fight had started, so it ended, as Kris retreated enough to turn its lunge into a charge, and it hurtled forward to plant its warped insectoid skull on Quaver’s point, nailing itself to the unmoving spike there that finished all its thoughts for it.

Kris actually held the whole corpse upright as reflex action began to curl up its legs, so I stepped past her, force-blade snapping into existence atop Crown. I politely hacked through the exposed neck, the magic reinforcing the Sentinel’s carapace dying and fading as it did.

The carcass fell down, but even losing the weight of it didn’t break Kris’s Stance in the slightest. She flicked Quaver absently, and I watched the gaping skull arc over her back and fall onto the assembled weapon and armor pieces I’d salvaged perfectly.

Before she could say anything, I asked, “How fast can you harvest its carapace?”

She turned to look at me, ignoring the squeals coming from up above as the smell of its passing ignited both fury and terror, and the air was vibrating with the fury of the distant Paradox Queen.

“Hah!” she grinned, her Arms grabbing both Stand and Drop and moving them out of the way. Soulclaws crystallized in golden razors over her right hand, Quaver was down to Brilliant heavy knife size, and the Hag’s Laugh that erupted out of her throat with the motion churned the vivic mist over the place as she began to rip the fucker apart in a literal explosion of motion and acidic body parts flying all over the place.

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The olthoi were just starting to stream into the place when blurring hands tossed limbs and body parts into the gutted shell of the thing, Kris hefted it onto on her Disk she had brought out, and we booked for the rear room.

The olthoi could only attempt to run after us through the twisty tunnels their rigid bodies couldn’t navigate so easily, and I was nice enough to Shape up bunches of wall razors and spikes to greet them as they charged in. The very sharp and pointy obstructions drew screams and shrieks behind me as enraged Summons drove themselves onto the things, hacking and beating at them as they came after us.

I pointed at the wall, and Kris splayed her fingers, Golden claws sank into the stone from both fingers and toes, and she began to climb.

I rose up after her, the Disks under us, while below us a wall Shaped up out of the floor and filled in, while ahead of us a tunnel slid open in the ceiling to admit Kris as she climbed up as lithely as a monkey.

The olthoi could come into the room, follow the scent trail of blood and gore, and proceed to hammer on the walls there all that they wanted to. They were just burrowing into stone, while we went straight up.

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The tunnel and chamber of this place were actually underneath the main slope of the mountain, meaning we didn’t emerge directly underneath potentially a whole olthoi swarm surrounding that hole in the ground. We came out about a hundred feet up when Kris pointed, and I turned vertical tunnel into horizontal.

Kris stepped out into the new tunnel I was Shaping out of the way, and walked steadily behind the receding stone as I rose up and our Disks trailed after. The last layers peeled away, and air rushed in and out as we hit the night sky, allowing us to look out over the fun below.

I eyed a good thousand olthoi gathered all around the hole in the ground, numbers streaming inside it as fast as they could, until they couldn’t gather any more because there was no room to fit them and they were really backing up outside.

There was another shrieking in the psiscape as the Paradox Queen realized that we’d escaped. All the olthoi below went into a tizzy, running around and scrambling wildly, trying to find something that wasn’t there… although the wasp-like ones buzzing around madly in the air didn’t help us out much.

“Can you cover the scent on that thing?” she asked, tossing a thumb back at the carcass of the Uber Sentinel.

“Yes.”

“Then toss up some Invisibility and let’s get out of here.”