[Be Gone] Ch 15 – A Game of Fox and Hounds

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There was no more nonsense about me sacrificing hapless and unsuspecting soldiers to guarantee my own safety. Sure, it was the safer play, but my job wasn’t to play it safe.

            I might be crippled at the moment, but I was a goddamn Fifteen. What other people called horrendously dangerous I called the place I was meant to be.

            I was also not alone. I had three intelligent magical items of superlative power, and the most dangerous Familiar imaginable with me.

            These demons did not have the slightest idea what they were actually messing with, and I was going to enlighten them only at the very end.

            Having the hum of Heaven in my ear making me Fearless sure did help me regard the world differently from normal people, too.

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            Those riding with me weren’t quite so gifted, of course, but the Aura of Courage I was projecting helped them deal with any dread of what was coming much more easily, and of course I looked so relaxed and confident even as the demons drew closer that it could not help but affect them.

            A woman’s crisp /voice suddenly swirled in my ear, -Ringlord, this is Lady Bea. We are at Little Teakettle. Is that you burning to the north? It looks like you will be caught as you reach here.-

            -Mother Bea, this isn’t a race, or I already would have won it,- I /replied, Primus pulsing with the Whispering Wind that would empower a Message /reply along the incoming track. -Where do you want me?-

            The next Message took a minute to come back. -There is a ruined bridge about a quarter-klik upstream from the road leading to the Fortress on your side of the river. If you could be ‘caught’ right there, we can prepare a suitable surprise.-

            -Certainly. Make sure they are Good, and they’ll take no harm from my Wrath,- I /replied easily.

            Again the delay, as if she was speaking to someone. -You’re Heavenbound, too? There’s... been some exciting things happening to us in the last few days, Ringlord. We’ve been able to gain Levels, take Feats, and advance Masteries that have stymied us for years!-

            -I take it the underlying system here is not the Power of Ten?- I /replied calmly.

            This /reply was faster. -No. It is called The Five Rings. Less structured, more fluid. They don’t mix well with Power of Ten, but we have access to many things they just don’t.-

            -I have a scouting team of korobokru with me who tipped me to the fact that vivus isn’t known here? With you guys here?- I /inquired.

            -We didn’t have it active on any Weapons when we arrived here, nor were we able to duplicate it with the spells we all had in memory. We have been trying for nearly fifty years!-

            I twitched despite myself at the frustration in her /voice. That was like knowing the perfect solution to a puzzle, but being unable to say it. -Fifty years? It’s only been a decade back home. More about that later. I’m currently in Matrix disarray as I finish fighting off a resoundingly powerful Death Curse, so I can’t contribute any spellcasting. Basically I’ve got Wrath with some Windfire and Soul Magic boosts, and my Gear.-

            -We have this,- she /stated confidently. -We may not have been able to Advance, but we could go Deep and learn everything that we brought here among ourselves. It’s been our major saving grace all this time.-

            I reflected that a bunch of Deep Tens would be a major power anywhere in a less advanced world, even if magic was here... unless the Power of Ten system was totally inferior, and I was of the impression that if magic was stronger on a given world, the Valence system of Power of Ten grew much, much stronger, too.

            After all, the Valence storage method might be more rigid, but it had to have more power than a pure pool system with a softer system that embraced fluidity over form, giving up versatility for strength.

            I hadn’t seen much of the local magic, but that was what it looked like to me. The effects were more controlled and very dependent on the Caster’s ability to shape them into something more. The Sublime Chord boosting Okopik’s Caster Level had been a clear shock to him, something he hadn’t really felt before.

            Basically, it looked like a Stat-based system instead of a Class/Caster-based system. Karma gave you xp to boost your Stats, there were no hard ‘Levels’ save for total Karmic accumulation, and thus no hard structure to advance along. I could ‘read’ someone as the equivalent of a Six or Eight as far as Karma went, but if they super-specialized, they might be more adept than a Ten in one area, with a resulting weakness in others.

            “Warriors,” I said aloud, and in the tongue they’d been speaking in, “I have been contacted by members of the House of the Tiger. They are indeed known to me, and will have an ambush set up and ready by the time we get to the fortress ahead of us!”

            There were little whoops and cries of joy and astonishment at the good news. Suddenly their tension was relieved, and they were looking forward to what was going to happen.

            I calculated the speed, and had Feature speed up a bit, smirking despite myself.

            Primus wasn’t using his full power to Fly at all. Right now we were moving at a base of 120, triple-moving in a rush that Feature could maintain for literally hours, and had. That was based off a speed of 30, +30 for lightfoot advances, and doubled for having both Soul Magic Cloudskating Sandals and Pact Angel Walking, one to fly, one for speed.

            Kicking in a Fly spell would move that starting number to 90, +30 to 120, and doubled to 240, which would definitely make us faster than any of those demons, and we could do that at literally any time.

            If Okopik added a tailwind, we could be moving even faster!

            But that wasn’t the plan, of course. The plan was to get there just ahead of the demons so we could be caught, and then they’d all die...

            -Be aware there’s a Stillflight Field and Interdiction Zone going up ahead of you. Normally it would only be active on the other side of the river, but we figured the demons deserve the greeting,- came Bea’s /voice again.

            -Noted.- Since I wasn’t flying, it wasn’t an issue. The first demons to run into it weren’t going to appreciate the falling, either, but I was sure the rest would recognize it and dive to follow on land.

            Since I planned to stop to face them, things were going to be fine.

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            The inky semi-Black ribbon of the river was now clearly visible, as was the wall a half-klik on the other side, a mighty twentysome-meter high barrier of stone the same hue as the mountains behind them, looking like it had been lifted right up out of the ground to parallel the river and deny demons entry.

            Magical world, that was probably exactly what had happened. It was a damn long wall, but really, with magic the speed you could build something like this would defy the imagination of any civilization without mechanized transports and use of cement.

            The ground on both sides of the river was a killzone, although the opposite side was kept much cleaner and more level, turning it into a clear killing field, where engines of war could draw clear arcs of fire to any target daring to set foot there.

            There it was, a klik ahead of us, the ruined foot of a broad bridge. I could see the pillars that had once supported it out in the black waters, slimy moss or tendrils or something growing up around them, the path they’d once supported presumably collapsed to deny it to the demons. I assumed they used magic of one form or another to cross the river, perhaps water-walking stuff.

            There were literally thousands of flying demons of at least thirty different varieties trailing across the sky as they labored to close in on us. The smaller and swifter ones were naturally ranging ahead, and I had been coolly picking them off for the last three miles, burning out another Shardwand and tossing it aside as I threw another one into my Wand Chamber.

            Only three hundred shots left to use!

            There were a couple really big flying demons, one of them that roc-sized no-neck bat variety I’d seen before, only bigger, and one that looked like a giant flying octopus or something, swollen and trailing tentacles as it moved with great speed.

            I imagined both of them were truly ashamed to be picked off by Wand charges, of all things. I had to hit each of them twice with the Split Shardrays, but 32d8+176+32d6 of Kickers was not at all appreciated by them... nor were the Chains appreciated by the demons either riding on them or flying in the wake of them.

            The Horse soldiers goggled as the behemoths came crashing to the ground, great rents burned right through them from the Shardrays. They’d been moving too fast and weren’t maneuverable enough to get out of range before the second shots, but whose fault was that? Their crashing tumble, the explosions of magical energies accentuated by feeding vivus, and the scattered splatters of the other demons around falling with them made for quite the show.

            It didn’t stop the buzzing, beating, shrieking, screaming, yelping, and singing horde from coming after us, of course. It just gave them all sorts of motivation to stop us when those massive carcasses and their splatter-demon accents started burning so cheerfully... and turned the ground white.

            Some of the demons tried to fire off spells back at us, but their range was generally pretty bad, and I was perfectly happy to parry with Wrath, feeding the stronger stuff back on them by Flaring it, while Feature deftly dodged the shots that didn’t run into my Ward, or weren’t turned into burning feedback that often resulted in another demon with wings burning falling from the sky. The moth-things were particularly pretty as they fell down with silvery wild magic raging all over them in weird and violent displays of the universe having fun with them.

            “Aspxix!” Okopik murmured, pointing towards the rear of the incoming horde. Feature glanced back at the trio of semi-wasp, semi-bat humanoidish things there, patterned in yellow-red and black, and exuding a rather more severe Aura of Sin than most of these things, which ranged from flying polyps and slimers to mutated drakes and tentacle-legged tigers with wings.

            Well, whatever.

            “New to me,” I noted, unable to get a good read on them. We were closing on the bridge. On the far side of the river, I could see an army waiting and arrayed, in bright colors of Gold and Green and Silver, but that didn’t do us much good here.

            Which was cool, as the demons were thinking that too. They cut us off from the narrow approach to the river, and forced us to the footings.

            Feature glided along the ground to a stop at the edge of the broken stonework, marred and scored by many energies and blows from weapons mortal and demonic. Wrath exploded up around us protectively in a ring as Feature drew up in a long coil in front of the soldiers, who piled off the Disks, this time drawing their bows, many of them using the quivers of arrows I’d given them, and without ado they set to shooting right through the Wall of electrum Fire in front of them.

            That was about when the leading demons hit the Stillflight Field.

            Unnatural flying shut off as King Gravity waited there with his thumb down in disapproval for their lack of aerodynamics, and his thorough monopoly on what was allowed to fly here was made manifest. Demons streaking in suddenly began to glide awkwardly, then start dropping precipitously, and the lower the bodyweight-to-wing size ratio, the faster the transition happened.

            Hundreds of them fell from the sky before they could reach us, crashing awkwardly to the ground as they beat their symbolic wings in disbelief, obviously not experienced with this kind of magic.

            The ones that hit the ground were hit by arrows burning with some of the Fire from the Wall they’d just been shot through. They shrieked and yelped and bellowed, most of them having broken bones, snapped wings, and otherwise completely incapacitated by their rapid plummet and the accepting stone of the land, so eager to see them come down.

            That naturally made the older, wiser, and trailing demons check their forward progress sharply. They could clearly see the point where the demons in front of them had lost control, and they pulled up sharply less than a hundred meters away from us, but unable to reach us.

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