[Hlaeth] Ch 1 - Another Diversion

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            Progress through the Aether Flux between realms seemed to be going...okay for the moment. The impetus of the magic was sending me back in the direction I needed to go, Find the Path at IX enough to chart a course even in the chaotic flows between multiverses.

            Not for the first time I cursed at the utter discrepancy in the amount of power required to get home as opposed to sending me out this far. Sure, it was a Thirty. Sure, it was a Death Curse. Sure, it was boosted to Eternal Levels.

            There was no damn way it equaled the amount of power I was using to head home. I could only theorize that the damn spell had grabbed every shortcut, taken every single flow heading out and away, and maybe even shifted causality to open a ton of roads and pathways all at the same moment, all of them linked for just the precious moment it needed to hurtle me through them, momentary links that faded away as soon as I passed, and all of them randomly headed Away.

            So bloody annoying. I was having to actually travel points and distances I had skipped right over on the way out, travel upstream against multiversal flows that I’d been swept along, and do so repeatedly as I tried to make my way back over a specific course, to a specific destination, where the damn Curse had taken every opportunity possible to shortcut a route that would send me as far away as possible.

            And Mithar was taking advantage of it, because I had just felt the course home… shift. As if the path I was following had just received a subtle update far down the line, and that shift had promulgated through the magic and instructed the spell to send me this way, towards a looming multiversal Veil coming up before me, which I was pretty sure I had been going to skim around.

            Punching multiversal Veils took a lot of energy. There was no way I was going ‘through’ the place. I sighed to myself as I realized I was going to be making another jump, which meant another Pyramid, and there was going to be something there Mithar wanted me to take care of without His fingers seeming to be messing with anything.

            It was fine, fine. I was sure that temporally, it would make no difference on when I actually got back. I was exploring strange, new worlds; meeting new life, new civilizations; boldly going where no Terra-Lunan had gone before!

            Fractal sprays of a Veil being pierced folded around me, and then immediately resealed precisely behind me, barring the existential Chaos of the Outer Spheres, the existence Beyond Creation where dwelt so many things of Mythos that wanted to get into and ravage Creation of its brightness and souls…

            And waaaaay up ahead, my Divs could see my path intersecting with something else, touching on another Veil.

            Those same Divs, combined with my Mask of Clarity, Eagle Eyes, Feature opening his eyes on my forehead, and a lot of arrayed Detects combining with my Find the Path, indicated that what I was seeing was the course of a dimensional Portal or Gate between two different worlds. The aggressive magic reeked of orcish shamanism, fed with bunches of Blood Magic to make it strong, and was orienting on a section of a Veil where someplace that did not want it there was sitting like a big fat target.

            Mithar was such a cad at times. A little bit of Theurgic Math and it was plain the whirling spiral through the Aether here was what such a Gate would look like from the outside.

            The same kind of Gates that were dumping thousands of otherworldly invaders upon Terra-Luna, basically every day. Invaders that were then being killed in their thousands, every single day, by the grim humans who happened to live there.

            I sincerely doubted whoever or whatever was on the other side wanted the orcs there, as the orcish gods would have sent them to a prime place to ravage, not to a place where all they could expect was a good fight.

            Also, looking at the effect from the outside made it utterly plain how to take the damn thing apart, Flare the magic it was made of, and if I disassembled it in the correct order, to cause a blowback of dimensional stresses of cataclysmic proportions.

            The Spellflare at IX assembled in my hands, the writhing chaos of the effect pulsing in three spectra as it assembled and I came in closer, closer, all speeds relative, massive dimensional distances who knew how long in real space, suddenly afar, and then suddenly up close.

            The Gate had just touched the Veil. I saw a massive pulse of hostile magic traverse it, slamming into the Veil and shattering it instantly, just as I came in and released my Spellflare.

            The eruption of magic was instantaneous, even if I didn’t stop the pulse. Arcane and Binding magic directed the effect of Seven Traditions disassembling the massively reinforced spell with wild fury, overwhelming Caster Level, and great precision. The Spellflare fed backwards along the length of it and sucked in the entirety of the Ritual-cast, souls-fed magic as it did so.

            The connection to the Veil there ruptured just as I arrived. I was utterly unsurprised as the impact of it blasted me right across the Veil, and as it sealed behind me, a tsunami of dimensional stress chased after the massive blast expanding along the Gate back where it had come from.

            I knew exactly what was going to happen on the far side from that. Space was going to turn inside-out, and anything material there was pretty much going to be hosed as space was going to break up like a picture puzzle being disassembled and shaken up. When it reassembled, nothing was going to be intact.

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            The boom as I crossed over was pretty impressive, even with my Thunder resistance at 55, all my dimensional velocity translated into physical and dumping into the surrounding area. The air was forced back as Primus automatically deflected enough air so that I wouldn’t be rubbed out against the friction, but the whole thing superheated regardless, even as I was crackling with a whole lot of spare magic that was also dumping out around me as my momentum bled off.

            A forest. I could see that, because I was burning my way through the wood and the green as I hurtled onward, none of it having time to hurt me before I charred a path through it all and kept going without harm to myself until-

            WHAM.

            Ugh. Just, ugh.

            I was abruptly and suddenly stopped. A massive wall of organic mana had just taken the impact of me, bled all the energy away, shunted away the kinetic energy, and taken my physical impact with the remainder as a living barrier, compressing an outer layer of bark a bit, maybe searing it a little.

            I had all the alchemical Preserve Organs Discoveries, and possessed a massively reinforced internal structure, especially with my brain. Regardless, the entire front of my body had just been crushed back two inches by the impact, but because I wasn’t completely reliant on my organics to be able to think any more, I was not completely stunned.

            The sudden stop was disastrous, like a bug smashing into a windshield. My Soak flattened instantly, taking the majority of the hit as it was designed to do. My link with Feature flared to life, shunting a good chunk of the harm over to him, and his Health total crashed to barely able to sustain him, almost dissipating him back to Eidolon form and away to recover.

            My own Health went to -32 and stopped, leaving me there pressed into the incredibly tough bark of this tree, like putty molded onto it.

            With a wet squelch, gravity and blood pressure slowly peeled me off and away. I fell backwards and away, down to the ground, where Hands of the Angels automatically caught me and I settled onto the thick carpet of grass there… which promptly charred and died as my superheated skin flared it away, and the dirt beneath hissed and melted and fused as I set down upon it.

            My Staff was still in hand, Indestructible, as were my four Rings, similarly treated. My Die-Vest was a smoking ruin at the moment, but it was rebuilding itself as designed, while my Gloves, Boots, Bracers, Armband, and Amulet were safe with my Crown in Itemized storage.

            I didn’t have eyes, and so couldn’t see normally regardless, and all my non-Permanent spells had been broken apart and would have to be re-Cast, while my Permanents were rebuilding themselves and would come back online in a few minutes.

            Smoking and radiating a plasma furnace worth of heat, I shifted six Soul Essence into Blood and Soul, supercharging my Fast Healing, and immediately blew three Vigor at the same time, each of those worth 73 points.

            The type of my Fast Healing was the Warshaper variant, which was 4 Health per round as natural and practiced shapechanging altered my body back towards its ideal state. Blood and Soul increased that by 1 per Soul Essence invested, so boosted it up to 10 Health. Furthermore, if I could picture the amount of harm done to me, as represented by a Concentration Check, I could up that Fast Healing from base 4/round to 10/round, net 16.

            Concentration was kind of my thing. Heck, I even triggered my Alchemical Blood Healing to give me another short-term boost.

            While I was doing that, I keyed my Reserve Healing and poured that into Feature’s Tattooed Form. If he had been material, he would have been a mass of bruises and broken bones right now, so his 5 Health/round was buttressed by an extra 18 I poured into him.

            I wouldn’t have been in danger even if I had died. Ward, my third Ring, was on my finger, and its Regeneration effect was perfectly functional. Sure, it was slow at 1 Health per minute, but it worked even if I died, and Ward was as Indestructible as my Staff Mortus Dius was. I would have been returned to life, and then my Fast Healing automatically start rebuilding me, even if I wasn’t conscious.

            My Vigor uses were worth 73 each, turning 219 points of Soak damage to temporary damage. Nominally such temporary damage would heal at level/hour, or 18 points, but my Melee Level was at Ten, so I instead healed 18 points per ten minutes that way.

            If I could get off some Healing magic, it would do double duty, wiping away a point of temporary damage for every point of real damage it healed, too.

            I had a lot of Healing to do. I sat there on the fused and cooling ground, looking up at nothing, and sighed.

            I really didn’t want to have to fight while like this, although I supposed the sizzling and burning around me would encourage something to NOT eat me while I healed up…

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            They were shadows moving through the forest, little more. Advanced treeslipping was an ancient magic of their people, and instead of hindering them in any way, the forest both concealed them and accelerated their overland travel, skipping over spaces between trees, moving from one cluster of brush and ferns to another instantly, all without making barely a noise or causing even a flicker of motion to most eyes.

            The thunderous detonation of magic had likely been heard for dozens of leagues, a sound like glass screaming in pain as it was blown apart, then a titanic detonation of thunder louder than most of them had heard in their lives. Unnatural fires, first yellow-green and purple-red, had exploded across the horizon in uncounted strands of alien, hostile power, leaving behind black streaks in the earth and sky, as if they’d just cut all of existence apart in front of them.

            Then had come the second BOOM, except that one had sounded like a massive bell tolling, grand and glorious, with an impact like a hammer as it smashed those cracks right out of existence, chased away the flames, and with shocking abruptness, the twisted sky and warped clouds were right back to normal.

            Well, not to normal. There could be nothing normal when gods or whatever was behind the events came randomly to play around...

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