Broken Lands

Two Pillars fell during the second Fall, another unusually low number, and the cleanup was actually faster than after the first Fall. Maybe this Meteor Pillars was going to defy the odds; it certainly looked good so far.

The third Fall was more difficult, closer to what Notii expected. It happened to be a fight geared to his team’s strengths, however; the creatures that emerged from the rock that sheltered them as they fell were plants, and Lith’e was recovered enough to fight. Thorn-filled bushes, acid-spurting flowers, clinging vines that dripped a paralytic toxin, and even a giant fern that tried to flash-freeze him were no match for Lith’e.

Notii would not have allowed it if the enemy was anything else, but it was counterproductive to prevent Lith’e from fighting plants; taking control of them and using them to replace the destroyed vines was beneficial to the drained plant-mage. His was a very focused specialty; Notii remembered when all he could do was steal vitality from plants, not control them or make them grow where they did not exist. He’d come a long way.

They all had. This was simply Lith’e’s moment to shine.

The monsters of the third Fall didn’t die immediately when they emerged; instead, they fell under Lith’e’s control and he used them to destroy each other. It was fortunate that the monsters of the Meteor Pillars were not truly sapient; Lith’e’s power could be fought. Without an understanding that something was wrong, however, these plants simply obeyed.

Notii was easily able to offer assistance to the nearby Pillars long before the end of the Fall. One accepted when they learned they had a healer who could cleanse the paralysis affliction; the others did not need the assistance.

It was a little disturbing to know that someone who could literally cleanse a deadly affliction killing multiple people of their own upgrade with a single spell and then heal the lingering damage with passive mana use was not a primary healer. The fact that it took half an hour did not reduce how unbelievable it was, not when he was healing everyone at the same time while he diced with some of the others on their team.

Notii was happy that he got to join in the dice game, at least. It was a good way to pass the time. He even won a few aurichalc leaves off the fools who got entirely too close to an obviously constricting enemy.

Nine Pillars fell before the end of the Phase. That was fewer than Notii expected; with the return to a more normal difficulty, he’d expected to lose more Pillars that only barely hung on through the first two Falls. Nine was on the high end for the third Fall, but losing twelve by then was unusually low. They’d also lost only eighteen people; at a guess, that was a combination of people forfeiting before the paralysis killed them so that they could get help and a Pillar being overrun. The teams at the other Pillars must have fled to ones that still held.

302 Pillars remained. It made it hard to know exactly how well they’d do; there was less room than Notii liked but at the same time they were nowhere near losing.

The fourth Fall was worse. It was both the first Fall with a controlling unit and minions and the first Fall with any creature that wasn’t driven solely by its need to kill. Whether it was wolves or aht’keet, the smart ones were always worse than the same thing without the smarts.

This time, it was aht’keet. The only good part was that it wasn’t a range of aht’keet; every single one of the minions was the basic version, a winged humanoid with scaly green skin, spikes that rose from its head, and flat white wings and eyes. Their controller, the aht’ko, was similar except that where the aht’keet’s spikes were wholly green, its head-spikes shaded to white at the tips. That and its size, nearly four feet tall instead of the two of the minions, were the only obvious differences.

People who were lucky would only face aht’keet minions; without coordination, they were relatively easy to pick off, because they were extremely straightforward. Those who were less lucky but still lucky enough to have the aht’ko appear when there were few aht’keet around to control; without minions, the aht’ko was similar in power to the aht’keet, easy enough to kill if you concentrated on killing it before more aht’keet arrived.

Two aht’ko was not terrible, either. They’d fight over the available aht’keet and weaken both sides, concentrating on each other when they should pay attention to the Pillar and its defense team.

The only truly dangerous situation was when the team wasn’t able to get ahead of killing the aht’keet and the aht’ko landed far enough from a Pillar that it wasn’t noticed and killed before it amassed a following. Those aht’kos usually required the combined effort of more than one Pillar to remove, and the Pillars were far enough apart that it wasn’t always possible to reinforce them in time.

Nearly every Pillar would have to deal with that situation at some point during the Fall, but it was just Notii’s luck that they faced almost exactly that situation early. They’d only been killing aht’keet for ten minutes when Ci’an called out that a meteor cracked open at roughly the center point between their Pillar and two others and disgorged a far larger creature. The aht’keet near their Pillar were dying quickly, but their reach didn’t extend out that far and the other two Pillars weren’t killing out even as far as they were. There were roughly two dozen aht’keet near the aht’ko’s landing place and that would only get worse once it took control of the aht’keet and stopped them from immediately charging the first Pillar they saw, even if it wasn’t the closest.

They needed to get someone out there to kill it immediately. Notii couldn’t depend on the support of the other Pillars; he’d reach out to them, but he already knew what the answer was. They’d help, but it would take time they didn’t have if they wanted to remove the aht’ko before it had enough aht’keet to be a real problem.

If he sent people close enough to attack, the aht’ko was likely to see them and run towards one of the other Pillars, and neither of those Pillars was particularly strong. It was a little strange to say that his Pillar was the strongest of the three, but it was self-evidently true that the others weren’t doing as well against the horde.

He turned towards the only true stealth specialist on the team. A couple of others, like Ci’an, could hide, but no one was better at being undetected than Ssssit. He needed that; it was simply too bad how limiting Sssit’s ability to hide others was. He could pick one person and hide whatever they carried, both items and people. That meant he needed the person who carried everyone to be relatively strong; a winged serpent longer than most humans were tall was not light. He’d also need anyone else he did send to be relatively small and not needed for the defense. That pretty much limited him to Ci’an and Mareth, and Ci’an’s bow required her to be in her human shape, not her owl shape. He had a few options for who the best person to carry them was, but only one of the three options hadn’t needed to fight yet and Notii wanted to see what he was capable of. “Ssssit, I need you to hide yourself, Dav, and Mareth. Get over there and kill the aht’ko before it knows you’re there, then fight your way back.”

Notii was able to watch as Dav let Ssssit wind himself around his chest and over his shoulders. It wasn’t the best arrangement for fighting, since Dav fought with a sword, but there wasn’t a better option; Ssssit needed to be securely carried and simply holding him would be even worse. In comparison, Mareth was easy. He started by landing on Dav’s head, but after a few cautious steps, Dav had him move to his left arm, just below the shoulder where Ssssit lay. In that spot, Mareth could grab onto the jacket Dav wore with his talons and be far more secure.

They spoke for a couple of minutes before Ssssit finally made them disappear. As usual, Notii wasn’t entirely certain when they disappeared; he was watching them and then the next thing he knew, they’d been gone for a bit and he wasn’t entirely certain how long they’d been gone. It was eerie but as always it worked well. Notii had no idea where they were.

He even had a hard time remembering that he’d sent them, because that might imply where they were. Ssssit’s ability to hide was seriously annoying; he noticed the aht’ko several minutes later and started to look for Ssssit to send him after it before he realized he’d already done that.

After that, he refused to take his eyes off the aht’ko. He expected to see a short fight; even Ssssit couldn’t actually strike while he was removing all evidence of his presence and anyone he was hiding didn’t know exactly where they were or where anything else around them was until Ssssit dropped the veil. They’d simply miss if they tried to strike from within.

Anyone other than Dav, that is.

The first Notii knew of it was when he saw the aht’ko’s head tilt to one side and fall separate from its body. Dav stood beside the dead monster, his location revealed by his actions. The surprised aht’keet around them took a moment to realize what happened, time Dav and Mareth used well. Mareth started with a shriek that stunned all of the aht’keet except for the two that were closest to Dav. They leapt for him, and he showed them why aht’keet were considered minor threats without an aht’ko: his blade sheared through one, then the other, before they managed to reach him with their claws.

Notii knew that shriek, though it was one Mareth didn’t get to use often. It could be shaped to an extent, which was clearly why the two closest to them were unaffected. They had to have planned it.

Before the remaining aht’keet could react, the trio vanished again.

When were they going to get to … the aht’ko was in two pieces. Right. They already had killed the aht’ko. Notii shook off the confusion from Ssssit’s location-fuzzing Ability. Now that they’d moved, he wouldn’t have any trouble remembering what they did; it was only a problem for that moment where it might imply where they were. “It’s too bad we can’t send them out to kill other aht’ko. That was really smooth, an assassination team would make this Fall a lot easier.”

There would be other assassination teams, of course; everyone knew the aht’ko were the real threat. That didn’t mean that one more wouldn’t make a difference, especially with how quickly the aht’ko went down.

“Why can’t we?” Sophia’s question came through the Lifeweb clearly.

“Distance,” Notii answered gloomily. “They have to move pretty quickly to get to an aht’ko before they have too many aht’keet gathered to make it worthwhile and Dav wasn’t moving that fast. It was fine here, but for crossing past several Pillars? That’s too far.”

“Dav wasn’t moving at his top speed,” Sophia answered. She was silent for a long moment. “He says the snake … Ssssit? … is awkward to carry while still leaving his swordarm free to strike. I’ll summon an Echo to carry him; from what he says, Ssssit should be able to make them all invisible as long as he targets the Echo.”

It worked entirely too well. By the end of the Fall, the trio killed over forty aht’ko, limited more by the combination of distance and how infrequently they appeared than anything else. They weren’t the only highly successful assassination team, but they were among the best.

Admittedly, they were only competing with teams from other Pillars with a significant number of people. Teams with only four members were unlikely to be able to dispatch anyone to serve as roving assassins, even if they were an upgrade higher.

The final result was good for any Fall. For a Fall with sapient commanders, it was incredible; Notii expected more Pillars to fail than during the previous Fall, not less, but only four disappeared. Two hundred and ninety-eight remained at the end of the fourth Fall and Notii definitely wasn’t the only person to start thinking this might actually be an Event where they went all the way to the last possible Bonus Round. He’d never been in one, but this was beginning to look like it might be possible.