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

Kris went down to the lower hill, and I heard the crunching of metal, the crashing of War Magic going off, and I think another building partially collapsed. It persisted for quite a bit, and then the princess came limping back up to the henge with a smile on her face, her shoulder and ribs not in the right spots... but twisting slowly back into place as I watched.

“You have Fast Healing?!” I protested strongly.

“Us Rantha Hags have so much cool shit to make up for the fact we can’t Cast,” she nodded. I listened to her bones grind and pop and shift under her skin, having an excellent idea how much that hurt. “It’s about five points a round boosted with Blood and Soul. Mom’s sitting at around ten or twelve or something.”

“Mithar, I don’t know specifics. I only know about the original Sama, and she uses Human Levels, but your Health must be way higher...”

“I’m a Rantha Hag/8, which is d10’s of Health. Maxed, of course, with Con and plenty of boosters.”

“Of course.” That was a given. “With a Con of at least 30, 35, I’m assuming?”

“You do know your Nulls!” she said cheerfully.

So, a minimum of 160 Health, plus Kickers. On the other side, her Melee Levels were also d10’s, with Favored Class bonuses on top, so her Soak was going to be 180ish minimum.

I looked at my paltry 99 combined, and just sighed. “I’m not even at a hundred total yet.”

“Pretty good for a Three... or a 30!” she replied heartlessly. “What are you standing at after morning investiture?”

“Well, the Assay gets wonky, because it’s adding in bonuses from the Matrix side. My functioning Focus is eighty points higher than what is invested in it.

“But from a pure Karma side, I’ve invested to a 31 on the Isparian side.”

“And you’ve got a billion Karma floating.”

“Yeah, and then some.”

She waved her hand with a disparaging blurgle my way. “Sweet Mithar. A billion Karma? There were only a handful of people in all of Ispar with that much Karma!”

“I’ll let you know how good it feels in six months or something when it’s all invested.”

“You do that. In the meantime, you’ve still got Naming Karma to earn daily, right?”

“Yes.”

“I have noticed that you have an exceptionally basic wand there.”

“I have an exceptionally basic back-up one sitting over on that Disk, too,” I confirmed, nodding off to the side. She craned her head around and picked it out, sitting there on the ground with a crude grass cover on it.

“Ho ha!” she crowed, hopping to her feet, ignoring her ribs that were inflating back into place. I could have just maneuvered it over to her, but she grabbed it, dragged it back to where she was sitting, and sat back down as I continued my rep counts. Removing the cover, she began to go through what I’d scavenged.

The scarabs caught her eye with all their glitter. “Are these what I think they are?” she asked, lifting up the strange ones.

“I believe they are.”

Kris whistled sharply. “There’s Isparian magic beyond Gold. That’s very significant.”

“You’d need both time to develop that, and a manafield which could support that,” I agreed between spells. I was getting really good at moving into and out of Aurora Stance.

Her eye turned down the hill. “That drudge bronze Construct down there was at least a Fifteen CR. It chewed through all my Soak and most of my Health before I hacked it down, and that was using an optimized Weapon against it.” Constructs weren’t unknown in Ispar, they just weren’t very common. Of course she’d had it added as a Bane to the Slaughter of her Sword. “Adamantine Acidphasing double-School Acidic Bane Weapon. I was unloading on the thing. It was definitely worth being a town guardian. Thing should have had 200 Health at best, and I know I did over 500 to it, if the math follows, and it slammed through all of my Soak and a big chunk of my Health, and that’s with DR 8/- working on it.”

I glanced down towards the thing as I blew off Vivic Shards, limned in unwhiteness that was using less and less of the second Valence with every shot. “It’s like EVERYTHING here has massive amounts of Soak or Health Qi from the manafield. A Construct with 500 Health? It should be the size of a house!” I shook my head. “And it had inbuilt War magic! Did your Null handle that?”

“Yeah, luckily. It was tossing Gold.” I winced, I knew the math on how strong those were without Prots. “You’ve got about ten goldweight here in worked jewelry, not sure about these coins? What’s the metal?”

“Air Gold, hence the green-gold hue.”

“Huh. Never seen it before. Any special properties, other than being light?” She tossed one in the air experimentally.

“Other than being useful for making Air-themed magic?” I shook my head. “I don’t remember Aelryinth ever working with the stuff. All the gold Isotopes he worked with were Earth, Fire, and sometimes Water, or he custom-energized anything more exotic for special purposes.”

She peered over the mess of trinkets and minor jewels, lifting up the perfect two-foot wasp wing with a raised eyebrow. “Two weird things, then.”

“Yes?”

“None of the other stuff is Isotopic.” I lifted an eyebrow, but didn’t refute her. “Second, none of this stuff has any trace of magic on it, which is damn weird given how easy the mana is worked here. Did you get this stuff out of that crater with the dead you mentioned?”

“That’s the opposite of what happened,” I answered after shooting off another spell. “There was absolutely NOTHING on the dead. No scraps of clothing, armor, jewelry, anything. Not even false teeth. The salvage there was dropped from corpses underneath fungi mounds and the olthoi’s resin-slime, with the rougher jewels condensed from the bottom of the olthoi’s acidic goo in their feeding basins.” She gave me another sharp glance. “Yeah, you’ll know when you see them. You remember Hivergreen. These bugs gotta go.”

“Are they responsible for those mushroom stands I see all over the place?” she asked shortly.

“Similar but bigger ones were growing in their nest before I Burned them down with vivus there and out here.” Let her draw the same links I had.

“So, we’re talking an unnatural, invasive ecology. That does help matters,” she nodded in agreement with my actions. “Did you check Karma when you Burned them?” she asked shortly, shrugging once without a wince at a final popping as her shoulder snapped back into place.

Duh! “No,” I admitted. “I will next time.”

“I would be extremely surprised if there is not some reward, given you’re cleansing the Land. Do you have magic item creation Feats yet?”

I just sighed. “I’ve been here for a day and a half. Create Wondrous Item is on the list for tomorrow morning via Artificing Mastery.”

“You did notice the difference between Resists and Vulns, right?” she asked.

“Couldn’t miss it.”

She nodded once. “I might have to prevail upon you for a full array of Protections. At this point I’m basically pass/fail on my Null, and if something gets through, I’m going to be half-dead instantly on the higher tiers. Isparian base War magic is no joke.”

I considered that, doing the math behind it all. “I can use Elemental synergy on one set and Force synergy on the other set, resonating and keeping the cost to base, I believe,” I said slowly. Isparian magic was somewhat awkward and rough to put into magical items, operating on a charged basis...

I turned my head around sharply. “Well, damn...” I muttered.

“What now?” Kris asked archly.

“You’ve been up the hill, right? Saw how it looked like it exploded from below?”

“Yeah?”

“And if you recall the trip through the dungeon, you’ll realize there was no way in or out of the two sections connected by those olthoi tunnels, right?”

She hesitated a moment, going over our trip out in her own Visual File. “That is true...” she said thoughtfully after a moment.

“Abrupt materialization of empty spaces into an existing material environment via Veil pressure...”

It was her turn to look around and back at the dungeon. “You’re saying that was a dimensionally-expanded holding? No, you’re saying it was completely extra-dimensional, and the only way in or out was via dimensional movement?”*

“A powerful enough surge to interfere with an existing dimensional structure. How might that have happened?”

She half-frowned, half-smiled. “The folks really did a number on that Viamontian Ritual,” she offered with a snort of contempt for the blues. “You’re saying it caused some sort of surge here?”

“How do Isparians make most magic items?”

She tilted her head, hand moving automatically to her Sword. “Well, unless they are fixed items, they don’t...” She glanced at my feet in the vivic mist just as I did. “Fixed items tap into the existing manafield directly with a constant draw,” she corrected herself. “Portable items have a reserve that they draw down to power their effects, which have to be recharged with special methods, jewels, or the like.”

“There are no charged items in that collections of gems and jewelry,” I reminded her. “Nor did I find any Arms or Armor with such.” Or I’d’ve taken them to be Burned down into something else.

Her head turned thoughtfully back to the town and what she’d seen there. “The bowyer and the smith’s shop exploded from within, as did the mage’s buildings.”

“And they had devices tapped into the ley line here which blew out and melted from within.”

“As if an utterly massive surge of magic swept through the manafield.” She looked back at me. “You think it went into the charged items...?”

“And blew them apart, at the same time as it overloaded so many of the things tapping directly into the ley line.” I was hushed as I considered the circumstances. “High magic world, yet we’ve seen absolutely NO magical items. The dead in that crater were wearing nothing at all...”

“As if all their belongings were suddenly destroyed,” she agreed, nodding slowly. “Okay, that tracks. If this world has easy magic and depth like all those Summon spots, it follows that magical items would be everywhere, perhaps even really powerful magical items.”

“And if we’re talking high magic, we’re talking easy pocket planes and dimensional spaces. Suddenly the Veil is massively reinforced, crushes in on those things, and forces them back into the material plane.”

“And we get weird things like that,” Kris tossed a thumb at the nest. “If you’re a high magic society, that is utterly catastrophic!”

==========

*Ryin didn’t notice the ‘no entrance’ aspect previously. The space that came back in had NO WAY in or out to the outside world, the olthoi literally dug in to access it and link up the sections. The only way to move in or out of ALL of the sections was dimensional magic!