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

Levitation got me up a steeper part of the hillside of the city, a place where no drudges were waiting. Once again, there were no city walls of note, making me shake my head in wonder at the lack of defensive planning.

The grounds were like the village we’d come from, with foot-trails winding through overgrown yards and the snow drifts, houses half-collapsed and only bare efforts made to repair them. The smell was exactly like those of animals: body odor and pits of shit and offal, the latter from remains of caught small prey, probably from the thrown darts and knives they liked to use, and assorted shreth and reedsharks who formed the basis of the crude armor the hunters wore.

Like most human cities, the streets led towards the center, with the style of the homes indicating former upper-class, and signs of wealth in the surviving scrollwork on the frames and borders indicating relative station and status at a glance. I flitted through the place, invisible and unscented, only the smallest of the drudges and presumably their mothers left behind as the others went out to gather food.

The city opened up towards the middle as I both dodged the numbers of drudges still running about haphazardly here, mostly young playing games in the snow with one another, and...

And.

There was another of those greenish pedestals here, the one that had borne a drudge Construct back in the other town, probably a failing defense meant to protect the place.

The pedestal here had been ripped apart, shredded by powerful claws that had not allowed it to fix itself. The statue that had been on top of it was a mangled, dismembered Construct that wasn’t going to be repairing itself or threatening anything else, ever, who knew what it once was.

Stacked around it were skulls and bones, heaped up in a broad ring at least fifteen feet high and a hundred feet across. Even the snow didn’t want to gather on them.

Watching through my eyes, Kris hissed exactly once, the sound just a whisper of the death that was coming. Quaver slid out of its sheath, and she was on the murderous hunt.

She had her answer on how to regard drudges.

There were going to be a lot of dead drudges for this, and that murderous one be damned. I stared at the circular mound of dead, at least a hundred feet in radius. Thousands of bodies were piled up there, not all of them human... but most of them were, and they were of all ages, from the youngest of children, whose skulls seemed favored for tossing games among the drudge whelps, to elders with failing teeth and every age in between.

There were other skulls and bones, too, some of which I had seen before, but not in this much detail. Shattered and crushed mechanical men, ripped apart by claws that had to have cutting power like adamantine. At least two species of other anthroids, one long-faced and tusked, with tails and digitigrade feet, and the other built incredibly tall, thick, and stocky. They weren’t numerous, but they stood out among the human remains.

There was another rare species of bones, noticeable because they had decaying, vestigial magic on them, like it had been running through their bodies and still wasn’t gone. They otherwise looked humanoid, and I couldn’t tell much about them.

A tally of unmitigated slaughter. I marked how many of the armored bones, skulls, and ribcages had ripping injuries on them, as if terrible claws like adamantine razors had carved through them and their rusting metal armor, irresistible and unstoppable. Claws that were about the size of those that had mauled the pedestal there into unusability...

Something incredibly powerful, yet not too large, had torn through these people like a reaper’s scythe, perhaps because they had lost all their powerful defenders at the same moment, and there was simply no one left alive who could stop him.

I exhaled softly, and then kicked off from the edge of the house I was barely standing on, out towards the mounds of bones.

The drudges weren’t messing with the mounds themselves, contenting themselves with carefully playing around the edges of it. After all, there were a lot of rusty metal bits and shattered bones there, easy to get hurt.

Prestidigitation could push me enough to get me to the center pedestal accurately, and then I simply dipped below the sight of the surrounding houses.

Shooting Vivic Darts into the ground wasn’t considered a violent attack, and so wouldn’t disrupt my Invisibility spell. So, I proceeded to do just that. Banefire to Humans and Holy flames fed what was to follow very quickly as I sent vivic flames exploding into being down in the interior of those mounds of bones, and lit off a hungry vivic inferno aborning there.

Unless they cared to take them away, all of the bones here and scattered in the dirt and grime of the vicinity were going to be dust before sunrise. I kicked off and away from the ruined pedestal in satisfaction, the oppressive weight of the area already starting to depart as the vivus did its work, sweeping the area with my eyes.

Hello, what is this?

There was an old drudge sitting there, wrinkled and bent, but bright blue of skin and painted with stripes of crimson. He held an unmistakable air of authority, with talismans and feathers and fetishes hanging about him, and all the other drudges were carefully giving him a respectful berth.

Looked like a local elder and wise shaman type, although his Level was over 100. Most importantly to me, he was leaning on what was obviously a well-made staff, bound in gold and more than a little gaudy in the Aluvian style, perhaps a former staff of government office. It was now topped with three skulls, of human and anthro races one and two, with a tiny miniature mechanical man dangling from the human skull.

Since they were avoiding him, Jaunting up behind him was effortless, and he was wrinkled and bent, his senses not as sharp as they might have been. I made no sound as I reached out, invoked Shards as a Touch variant, and also applied the Copper Frost Bolt to the back of his skull, reaching out to grasp his staff as I did so, my Zojak Quapaj completely mental.

The spell didn’t get to explode, instead drilling deep into the back of the old drudge’s skull, over his body, and blowing through his insides with superchilled frost carried on the racing and eager edges of Banefire. He didn’t even get to meep as he died, and I removed the staff from his grasp as his freezing blood raced down his arm, convulsively letting go of it before his hand could freeze tight about it.

Startled drudges all around were blinking at me as I gestured shortly, and me and my new staff faded from sight once more, as if we’d never been there, kicking up off the ground and towards the east, where I’d seen something else just as grim.

Flashes of blue crystal, and another crater of dead.

---

This crater had hundreds of dead crammed together in it, and like the previous ones, the snow didn’t gather in it. It was significantly larger than the previous two that I had seen, the bones actually merged and meshed into one another, as if they had materialized into, through, and with one another, with no sense of personal space, at the same time being impaled by dozens of the blue shards, and shattering and cracking with some explosive force that had broken and crushed bones and bodies.

The meat on them was long since gone and decayed, and vestigial energies running through the things had left the bones cleansed and polished. Still, the sight of so many screaming skulls mixed into and through the remains human and not of those who had died here was extremely unsettling, and the psychic horror and pain that lingered about it was not a phantasm.

Horns were blowing behind me as some astute drudge sounded an alarm. I didn’t know if that would bring back the hunters or not, but let them try to put out this fire!

I flashed only two salvos down into the pit, but they splashed over multiple bodies, and vivic fire ignited over the densely packed bones instantly. It would be a bonfire of vivic mists in less than a minute, Burning away the remains of the dead.

Just like the mounds, which would soon start steaming.

There was a lot of activity on the ground, drudges running around everywhere trying to find an intruder, and I so, so wished for Perpetual Spell so I could just start mowing them down and removing them from the world.

The simplest Detects rated them as Brown to Purple, with the levels of malevolence notably higher among the older ones. If they wanted genocide against humans, well, I was more than happy to return the honor to them.

They were chanting and calling out, and after a moment I realized it had to be the name of something, said in reverent tones, as if they were calling out the name of a god.

Being the wise person I was, I immediately got behind some cover at an oblique angle, looking all around, and then saw the wooden fortress to the north, atop a low hill, just visible between the trees outside of the main city.

It also had carrier balloons hanging in the sky above it, which for some reason had not been visible from, like, miles away. I just blinked at them hanging there, wondering if they were tied down somehow, masked by illusions or what, and then saw it, that distorted push/pull in the manafield, moving out from that fortress toward the city here.

I wasn’t going to take a chance at being in its line of sight magically, Invisible or no. I made sure I was off its approach vector as I floated back into the trees, watching the distortion move with the speed of a decent horse from the fort in the distance toward the city.

Being the opportunist I was, I headed for the edge of the killing zone around said fortress as the creature went in the other direction.

Ho, look at this, I thought a few minutes later. Kris wasn’t looking, and I wasn’t interrupting her, as she was ripping through one of the drudge warbands, the Sound Bubble emanating from Quaver making sure no screams for help or sounding horns were being heard by anyone. Drudges were dying messily and quickly all around her.

This place was replete with brightly-hued drudges in even brighter paints. Stark white, pure black, bright blue, deep crimson, green, purple, yellow, orange... a whole panoply of actual fur colors, with bright if standardized paint patterns on each and all of them.

They were all Summons, just standing around and not responding to anything in their dark spots in the snow, although there was a small stream of real drudges with the same hues heading for the city in the wake of their leader along a road and well-trod path through the snow.

My eyes fixed on a snow-covered mound to the north, and the monument there.

It was a monument, because it was an olthoi queen, one at least twenty feet tall. Her blue and red carapace was shattered and clawed apart in multiple places, then reassembled and mounted on a crude wooden framework, pincers and arms spread wide, displaying all of her might and power... and the fact she was very, very dead.

Next to her was sprawled the stacked and heaped chitinous shells of real olthoi. No need to worry about their meat, the acidifying blood took care of that, but the shells remained behind when the real ones died, and that was a heaped-up hill of thousands of olthoi.

Obviously, they hunted the olthoi and kept the numbers down, and it was entirely likely a horde of the bugs had tried to sweep in here and evict the drudges... and it hadn’t worked.

Hadn’t worked impressively badly.

Kris took note of the olthoi queen and how it had died, and that it was probably not a good idea to cross hands with the Killer Drudge before then. Of course, that was no reason for me to leave any of this display of puissance alone. As I’d said, setting the dead on vivus was not an attack... and Summons didn’t do reports.

They were a distance away, but that was fine, as Reaching Spellwarped Split Ray Darts ignited their infernos in the mounds of olthoi trophies... and on the proudly slain olthoi queen, likely a huge ego boost. The Summons there just watched the Rays emanating from empty air, not knowing what was going on, their territoriality specifically restricted to threats to themselves. Soon enough, misting unwhite fires were ablaze on the mounds of remains, while the scarecrow of the queen was Burning down merrily.

And then it was time to go. New horns were beginning to sound here as living sentries blew another alarm, and I didn’t want to test the big fellow’s sense of magic, at least until I had some anti-sensory spells I could bring online.

No reason not to swing down by the lake, now, was there?