Chapter 193

“Go, Rho'dan, Karwl, Liadran! Get everyone out of this mine, I cannot assure your safety!” Varrus ordered without taking his eyes off the enemy. 

A second after issuing his commands, the spider lady started saying something, but Varrus wasn't going to pay attention to her lies. He had to seize the initiative, and work with Nightsong & Omen to send this bitch back to Oblivion, where she belonged! 

“Tiid. Klo. Ul!” Varrus shouted as soon as the bewitching Demigod Daedra fully emerged from the portal. 

Time crawled to a slow for half a minute, and Varrus got to work on his magic. 

As this was a confined space, he refrained from immediately blasting the scary bug lady, and instead opted to buff Nightsong & Omen instead. 

Besides, the pair of melee combatants had already started to dash at the spider woman, and he would be at serious risk of hitting them. 

By using the spell Channel Energies, Varrus was able to cast all self-beneficial spells that would ordinarily be exclusive for himself, onto his allies. 

He then started things off by sending out all of his Illusion spells, like Rally, Call to Arms, and Courage. By stacking all these together, Varrus enhanced their Spell Power, Crit Rate, Weapons Skills, Health, Mana, and Stamina by 200%+. 

Next, Varrus added two more buffs, this time from the Restoration skill tree. They were Tree Rings, and King's Heart. 

Tree Rings: Creates 10 layers of shields worth 500 health each. 

Kings's Heart: holy spark slowly follows the caster for 60 seconds. When it is nearby, it fortifies most skills by 15% and heals 100 points per second.

Considering that health translated into the strength of someone's bones/skin in this world, Tree Rings transformed Omen, and his mom's already formidable defenses up to another level. 

King's Heart, meanwhile, was just the last bit of added gravy, buffing the already ridiculous stats enhanced by the Illusion spells, and providing active healing at the same time.  

Lastly, he threw down a series of AOE debuffs to help his allies take Eli down. 

They were: Ruin, Circle of the Moons, Circle of Strength, Sotha's Maelstrom, Talons of Nirn, & Thrumming Stone. 

In summary, Varrus's debuffs were actively draining Eli's mana, stamina, preventing regeneration of mana/stamina, creating tiny tremors in the ground to knock her off balance, spawning in sharpened earthen skewers every time she touched the ground, reduced her magic resistance by 140%, and reduced all her skills by 15 points! 

30 seconds of slowed time passed in the blink of an eye, and a cacophony of light, and power swept into the chamber as all of Varrus's various buffs & debuffs took effect. 

Eli hadn't been sitting idle whilst this was happening, and had been casting a spell of her own. 

Exploding from her hands, a white ball of webbing instantly expanded, and covered the entire cavern from the miles high ceiling, down to a perilous drop down to an empty void of darkness. 

This was no ordinary webbing either, and carried with it concepts of concealment, bendability, fluidity, and pheromones that enticed males & females to act stupid when they saw someone they were greatly attracted to. 

The entire environment was altered by Eli's zone spell, and he had lost vision on her too!

Even when he tried to locate her via Detect Life-and all other spells-there was nothing! 

‘Damnit, of course the daughter of the Daedra representing the sphere of hidden murder would possess stealth skills! If only I had more Dragon Souls, I bet Aura Whisper would reveal her! The “useless” Dragon Shouts are more useful in real life situations than I gave them credit for!’ Varrus raged to himself as his enemy hid herself. 

Unfortunately, he didn't have enough time to sit back and blast the webbing, because Eli had gotten off her spell just as Omen and Nightsong were at the apex of their charge. It was quite literally too late to go back now! Like a diver jumping out of the plane, or a man proposing to his woman, pulling out at that moment would be a fantasy! 

“Ruff, ruuuuuffff!!!” Omen excitedly charged headlong and Eli, and spat out a pale moon beam blast from his mouth. 

The dog's attack carved a hole in the substance, and he jumped through without any hesitation! 

Acting like cotton candy drifting on the wind, the hole suddenly seemed to have a mind of its own-and, like a tailor sewing a tear in a pair of pants-sewed itself back together as if it had never been there! 

“Yol. Toor. Shul!” Nightsong unleashed the shout to Fire Breath, and blasted a hole in the webbing before she too ran inside. 

“Come, Varrus, stick together! The children of Mephala are inclined towards stealth and ambushes, we must overwhelm her with the strength and ferocity of our namesake!” Nightsong said over her shoulder, then she too entered the breach. 

“This is a bad fucking idea.” Varrus muttered to himself, and then he too blasted a hole where Nightsong had, following in behind her. 

Omen was a dog, and didn't know any tactic better than ‘charge forward’ but he had been hoping his mother, the famed General would know better. 

Maybe being a Shard of Akatosh gave her some strong draconic traits, arrogance being one of them? To be fair, she was also the strongest person she knew, so was it really arrogance if you could back it up? 

Shaking his head, Varrus focused up as he jumped through the hole he had burnt open. 

The place that he found himself in could no longer be described as a cavern. It was a world of white, one where there were only webs for as far as the eye could see. 

From Varrus's perspective, this domain spell was quite sinister. In fact, he felt as if there were a constant drain on his mana just being in here! 

The connection to the Sunwell was completely neutralized due to this domain! As it stood, his mana regen was back to its base level. 

This shocking revelation came with another one. Even though he had entered right behind Nightsong, he couldn't catch hide nor hair of her. That meant this domain spell must have an ability to block the senses, or had a teleportation feature. 

Either one of these theories seemed awful, and Varrus hoped it was just his hyperactive imagination at work. 

Beginning to feel his skin crawl, Varrus cast Detect Life again, and was relieved to see that some distance out, about 3 miles, was a glowy figure he had come to associate with Nightsong. In the other direction was one that corresponded with Omen. 

Both seemed to be rapidly moving in a pattern that suggested they were fighting. That was not a good sign. 

Silently swearing to himself, Varrus once again cursed that he had practically been caught with his pants down. 

“I really, really fucking hate caves.” 

Varrus then decided to stop his moping, and get down to business. 

First, he was going to reunite with Omen, because the doggo was just straight up weaker than Nightsong. If anyone was at threat of death down here, it was Omen. That and himself if he allowed arrogance to grip his heart again. 

He had almost lost to Malfurion just a week or two ago, and couldn't think he was invincible within the Demigod tier. Getting split up like this was exactly how a lone Demigod-one who specializes in assassination-could murder him. 

To mitigate a gank happening from behind, Varrus began to set up three contingency plans. 

1) Varrus unleashed the Destruction spell: Incendiary Flow. 

It was only an Adept level spell, but in his hands, it was as powerful as a geyser of pressurized magma launched from the tip of a volcano. 

The spell was just as the name implied, and a constant stream of lava-like liquid fire was gushing from the palm of his hands. 

With this fiery magic in effect, Varrus burned down everything in his path, and made sure that he wouldn't get stuck, trapped, or have his escape route denied. 

2) He went scorched earth, and began implanting his Mana Stones in the walls, ground, everywhere and anywhere. These served to absorb the ambient mana from this domain, and prevented the passive regrowth feature that this giant cocoon seemed to have. 

The Mana Stones doubly served as a means of attack. By absorbing so much excess energy, these already volatile boulder sized objects were each worth the payload of a modern bomber's entire payload. Thanks to Old Man Vandercross's memory crystal, Varrus could now remotely detonate the Mana Stones as long as he was within a certain range. 

As soon as he recovered his teammates, he would high tail it out of here, and kablooey the entire friggin mountain! 

3) Last amongst his contingency plans was to spam Fire Runes all along the walls between the cracks, and on the Mana Stones. 

If that spider bitch so much as touched a loose piece of rubble, then the whole thing would cascade in a chain reaction explosion! 

It was with these three spells in mind that Varrus secured both his flank, and his advance. 

When in doubt, burn it with fire! Thick bands of lava=like fire left the palm of his hands, and melted through mile after mile of webbing.

Scheming towards immolating this Daedric arachnid, Varrus hovered on his flying carpet, and systematically advanced towards Omen's position. 

After about five minutes of obliterating sticky strands of webbing, Varrus finally came across his doggo friend. 

Bursting through this section of the cocoon, Varrus instantly cast Vanish, and Shroudwalk so that he would lose all detection from enemies nearby, and go invisible. He did this so he could assess the scene, and hopefully pull off an ambush. 

Taking in the area before him, Varrus noticed that  the golden retriever was surrounded by 10, puppy sized Heroic spiders. Each of them were fast as heck, and even to Varrus's senses, were difficult to keep track of! 

Even though Omen should be stronger, and capable of one-shotting any one of the tiny things, they were so well coordinated, and speedy, that they outmaneuvered Omen at every turn. 

It also didn't help that Omen was not connected to the Sunwell, therefore, this cocoon domain spell was actively draining him of everything he had. It was only a matter of time before Omen went completely oom! (out of mana). 

Varrus took this as a lesson, reaffirming why it was important to hang his arrogance at the door. Even Heroes could be threatening if they were placed in the right circumstances! 

This sobering thought was backdropped by another, more dangerous idea. If Omen, a literal dog was having trouble with this speed, then his mother might be in trouble, since she must be facing the Demigod head on at this very moment! 

Scowling at the thought, Varrus quickly scanned his reservoir of spells and perks to see what he could do to help Omen without catching the doggo in the crossfire. 

Whilst Varrus scanned his spells, Omen was fighting for his life. All this running around, it was like he was a yard dog chasing a rabbit, or his tail. For all his effort, he couldn't do a damn thing about it! 

Raging mad, Omen was blasting holes in the walls, and tearing the webbing to pieces with his moon-white glowing claws. 

Chuckling to himself, Varrus thought the scene was a little adorable, and secretly recorded it with his scrying orb as he came across just the spell he was looking for. 

“Omen, here boy!” Varrus called out, and broke his invisibility. 

Perking his head to the side, Omen saw Varrus, and ran at him with his tongue out. 

“Ruff, ruff!” Omen barked in a tone that could only be a swear. 

The spiders that were harassing Omen were quick to nip at his heels, yet none attempted to bar his way. 

Reaching Varrus's side in an instant, the mutt turned to glare at the spiders with a look that said ‘you little shits are getting it now that my master has arrived!’ 

“Alright, let me hop aboard, we're gonna smash'em, just like in the Emerald Dream!” Varrus commanded. 

“Awooo!” Omen yipped in joy, and increased his body in size. 

Hopping aboard, Varrus cast the Alteration spell, Thundering Hooves, and increased Omen's movement speed by a staggering 300%! 

“Heh heh heh.” Omen panted at the spiders mockingly as they came at him in the same old predictable patterns. 

Varrus ruffled the dog's hair, and felt as if he were riding Clifford the bid red dog from the childrens books. 

His animal companion went absolute beast mode, and stomped on one spider after another. 

Tail wagging, Omen crushed the arachnids like an overzealous child would when stomping on snails. 

Orange guts and debris scattered everywhere, and Varrus's analysis proved correct. So long as Omen could hit them, he'd one-shot them! 

“Gooood boy!~ Good boy, Omen! After this, we'll get you a treat!” 

At the word ‘treat’ Omen just about lost it, and ran in a circle so fast, Varrus almost lost his balance, and slipped into some nearby webbing. 

“Alright. Alright, Omen!” Varrus yelled in a commanding tone. 

“Hah, hah, hah, hah.” Omen stared up at him, and layed down to winnie, as if he had done something wrong. 

“Alright, alright, I'm not mad. Let's go to mom for a fight, and then a treat, got that? You remember her scent, right?” 

“Ruff!” Omen stood up once more, tail wagging, then bulldozed his way back the way they came. 

“Oi, wait. Wait wait wait, Omen, those are Fire Runes-!” 

~~~~

AN: If Omen could talk: “Ruh-Roh!”