“Well, folks, this is it, the fight you’ve all been waiting for. Who wins the race to head on down before Nifl first: her High Priestess here, leader of your entire people, who has reigned over the destruction and massacre of Her creations, or whoever the challenger is supposed to be, some doughty hero from the ravening hordes of surface-dwellers?
“Oh, what’s this? The elf with the bad nail job and skin like a moonshroom is stepping up? No, no, I don’t resent having to come here at all and watch all this, no sir, no relations between us. Neutral party cheering for nobody, I am.”
I just looked up at the sky, the Avatar looking around in infuriated puzzlement at how the speaker managed to stay so concealed.
“Oh, right! Sorry, I get distracted when engaging in slave labor for fun and entertainment! Folks, what we have here is the Dread Mother of Niflgorm, Queen of the Many-Hued Peoples, She-Tyrant of the Underrealms, Majestrix Demonica, and all-around complete awesomeness, Sonrjra!”
The whole audience of Beastials came cheering right to their feet as she raised all four arms, pulled up by fanaticism and belief. They thought she was their link to Nifl, unaware she actually was Nifl, more than mother, the complete creator of their entire race and people. She might be restricted to mortal power and methods in acting like she did right now… but that’s why she had two Artifacts with her.
“Supporting her with the challenged fashion sense and probable color-blindness is the elfin called Lady Edge by the unrepentant horde of surface world butchers and foe-cleavers behind her. Look at her nose, she probably started this war with you all because she didn’t like the way you smell. Ohhhhhh, still, this doesn’t look like a close contest at all, folks. She’s a few arms down, about six feet of reach, and I think everyone can see the sparkle and sizzle of that magic protecting the Mother Queen, there.
“Is there a betting pool? Can I get in on that? No? Pity…”
I let the prattling continue on autopilot with a thoughtstream plenty happy to heap up ill-will on my name, stopping forty yards away from the leader of the Beastials and Avatar of a very powerful Immortal of Entropy.
I could feel a half-dozen Immortal presences in the area through Dread, making sure Nifl didn’t try anything out of line. She naturally wasn’t happy for all her sons and consorts getting butchered like they had, but all she could do was mark their killers and their bloodlines and wait for some vengeance.
Pointedly, it was the only version of her here.
“You. An elf. Think to best me?” she growled at me in the common tongue of Iberon, and was probably irked when there was no surprise on my face.
“I’m not here to best you,” I replied neutrally into her extremely confident glare. She’d seen all of our champions who’d come out, and was naturally sure she could have beaten all of them.
I was just an elf. I could not possibly be the warrior or mage a human could be, and really, she feared neither, being physically superior to the former and the equal or superior of any of the latter. The combination of the two would be basically invincible without a full Fellowship devoted to bringing her down.
And here I was alone.
I stomped Dread upon the ground, and a pale green Ray in a particular color shot toward the ceiling far above us.
She recognized the hue instantly, her horned head jerking back as it drove up at the speed of light and struck the ceiling far, far above.
Where it spread out, and formed a really BIG Rune of Magic.
With a distant crack that didn’t reach us for five seconds, the ceiling chuffed stone… and then the Rune began to grow in size.
Rapidly. Unlike humans, terminal velocity for things with tons of mass was much, much higher than 200 mph. Thousand-foot pillars of stone weren’t slowed down by the air anywhere near that much.
She screamed in outrage, raising her arms up. There was a snap and hiss as the Force Field rose over the former area of the temple, the arena, her worshipers, her creations, all of them staring skywards and screaming, begging for the goddess to save them.
I could see it strike her as the pillar came down, ever increasing in speed, the Rune becoming clearer and clearer and clearer.
It was a Rune of Disintegration.
It was falling on a Force Field.
Her head snapped back towards me in fury and comprehension. Her people saw it, and they knew.
They knew their goddess had failed them.
The pillar was moving near the speed of sound when it hit the Immortal-Class Force Field, but that was a Rune of Disintegration at IX+1 for Earth Spell, X level Magic with Bane of Legends also upon it.
A pale green light shot through the blocking dome of Force and it shattered in an instant, unbreakable energy shards spraying in all directions as the unimpeded pillar from a mountain’s roots came down atop them.
Belle was already well in retreat, everyone else was up on Disks or on hovering equipment to get off the ground. I was merely in a Sound Bubble, flicking up a Featherweight as the edge of the pillar slammed to the ground not fifty feet in front of me. It kicked up a really big wind as it kept going, the rock completely shattering over the dungeons beneath it, plus, you know, a million tons of stone coming down on it like the mountain above dropped a turd on this pile of shit here.
Wind. Dust. Sound. Primus alleviated the first two enough that although I was pushed back, I was not harmed or overwhelmed, and with a Sound Bubble I was also under complete control. The Avatar’s scream as she leapt from underneath it just enough was lost in the annihilation of the last of the Beastials and the crunch and crack of doom coming for them all, and wiping a threat to the living from existence, or at least mostly.
More to the point, I had not lost sight of her, Dread still locked onto awareness of the Avatar and her Artifacts. My headlong flight became a bending of currents, arc, and plummet as dust as thick as water filled the air about me, and I came down through the grit onto the sprawled body of the Avatar, plunging out of the chaos.
It was a Spirited Charge One Strike, with Dispel Magic from Arcane Fusion leading the way, sheathed in Pierce All Defenses to get around the Anti-Magic generated by her Club, and a Touch Sharding array at VII all channeled through Dread, right into the heart of her.
She couldn’t have huge amounts of Health Qi in a mortal guise. Sure, She could be tough… but not as tough as what I’d just done to Her, with an effective +XII Weapon impaling Her Skull, Vivic and Bane to Legends teaming up for a Field day, and Bane to Nifl making this a True Death effect for Her.
The explosion of the Avatar’s total death and destruction was a flaring blast of Unwhite that was much, MUCH brighter than the stompy-stomp of the pillar coming down.
It didn’t stop the Sudden Paired Sudden Fastcast Disjoining from targeting both Artifacts still in Her hands, things She had doubtless made Herself, and were now being subjected to Her annihilation while still being held by her.
They had no effective resistance as they were destroyed in resonance with Her. The Immortal Power within them was also released and went vivic madly.
Surelife kept me alive, making sure I didn’t go below 1 HP even with three horribly dangerous explosions going off at the same moment. I could go a fair amount negative, but this was something like 80d6 damage or higher, not something I was supposed to be able to live through… but fuck them all, I totally would, and with the dust in the way, nobody was even going to know I was responsible.
However, I was really sent sailing by the explosion of a powerful Avatar hitting True Death and two Artifacts of Entropy being abruptly destroyed in tandem with an aspect of their Creator.
The things I do for a really good roller-coaster ride…
Duum came swooping down on me, naturally the first to find me, not reliant on vision and fully capable of zipping around in the hanging, hacking cloud of dust.
I got off the Heal on myself with silent concentration, sitting on the ground absolutely fried at one Health and no Soak. All of it, even a hundred points of Temporary Soak, had been burned completely through by the blast.
For the second time in this life, this close to being dead, and both times only living because of that spell.
I was never not going to have it in memory. Ever.
My Bat nuzzled me in worry as I got up, Primus spinning up a shield of wind around us to stop the dust, beginning the local process of precipitating the grit out of the air in patterings of condensing pebbles.
“Alive, I’m alive,” I assured him, taking a deep breath as the injuries from Immortal Power rampaging through me Healed up and were taken care of. I was still down a lot of Soak, but whatever, I didn’t care.
Much of the power was happily eaten by Dread, whose IP Reserves had spiked noticeably under the infusion.
-Trophy?- Duum /asked, looking at the tip of Dread, his Hat still at a jaunty angle and unaffected by all the tumult.
I turned my eye on what was impaled on the adamantine Spear there, gleaming like dark crystal, bony jaws agape, stripped of flesh and organs and screaming there in disbelief still.
There was a lot of potential Bane power coursing through the thing.
“I think I just got me a Dreadskull against Entropic Immortals,” I informed him with a small contented smile, reaching up to grab and remove it before anyone else saw. It still needed the Runework, but that was a done thing at this point.
And I, I was solidly Rank M now. Suck on that, Nifl, who would not even be able to remember and recall what had happened here today, or who had done what.
Perils of being an Avatar and everything…
“Thanks, Geoff,” I told the mighty Earth Elemental, presenting him with the Energized Diamond, empowered with unchanging Adamant as a Concept and power, something hugely valuable for his growth and advancement in strength.
Quite pleased with this Summoning, the Primal Elemental of ancient bedrock and diamond eyes receded into the stone around us, sent back to the Elemental Plane of Earth with his prize.
Behind him, he left the treasury of Nifl’s temple. Base metals, of no importance to him.
The edge of my lip came up in an unstoppable quirk of a smile. The nuggets and chunks of gold, silver, and platinum were kind of mashed flat by a thousand-foot pillar of stone coming down on them like a piledriver of the mountain, but that didn’t mean anything to an earth elemental. Shuffling it all out of there from its mashed state wasn’t difficult, and if the magical items that were in there were all crushed flat by the impact of millions of tons of rock, welp, too bad, so sad.
I was just going to have to be satisfied with hundreds of years of tribute offered up to Nifl getting whisked away and used for my own ends.
I dumped it into the Widened Tapestry. Mangled, crushed, and flattened into one another, there was nothing identifiable here, but there was no way I wasn’t going to melt the whole mess down before getting it anywhere out of a Scryward.
My attention turned to the distance, where flickers of power were dancing at the perception of Dread, like spiderwebs being plucked in the distance as bundles of Immortal Power moved around.
Obviously something very exciting had happened out there. An Immortal Avatar had not been killed, it had been extinguished. Wiped away. No doubt they’d contacted Nifl Herself, and verified that She’d lost all knowledge and awareness of the Avatar, as well as all power invested into it.
The two Artifacts She’d been wielding were missing, too. She probably didn’t say much about those, however, since She’d also permanently lost the Power invested in those Tools as well!
Pity that. Dread thrummed happily.