BECMI Chapter 81 – A Failure of Technology
The Teleportation Circle I Cast dropped us into the back farms of the temple well after dusk. The slaves were all back in their cages, the late shift had come on, and there was nobody around, save on the more distant walls.
All of the stealth agents, most of them members of the Catcher’s own corps of operators, were invisible by one means or another, but not relying on that. All of them were also capable of flying, whether being included in the Mass Fly I had bestowed on my people or their own power.
They were not counting on invisibility to hide them, so they also were all recipients of a Mass Vampire’s Veil, which rendered everyone immune to technological items spotting them, including low-light goggles and infra-red scanners, but not necessarily motion detectors.
They all had specific load-outs, and were working in teams. One of the team was the designated killer, the other had a selection of amusing spells memorized to diversionary purpose tonight, specifically illusions.
While I was also bending the weather to create a rapidly rising fog to further limit visibility, the big thing here was for all the cameras to show nothing was going on, the sentries standing around were all fine, and so forth.
Putting an illusion in front of the camera which overrode what was visible was the best way to do that, and even minor Casters could toss out half a dozen such spells if they were all Still Images that didn’t move. Such simple illusions could last for hours.
Attacking anything disrupted the magic of Invisibility, but the attackers shifted to Improved Invisibility if they had the skill, being mostly elves or rogues good at stealth attacks. I’d already located the cameras, everyone knew where to go and to stay out of line of sight of the tower tops and the guys with the goggles as they got closer.
Sound Bubbles rounded out the stealth attack. Unlike Silence, they didn’t cut off all sounds, a clearly unnatural event, just making things go ‘quiet’ as sounds didn’t pass through the spheres of the Bubbles.
Sleep spells could put down small clusters of sentries, and Shocking Grasp riding a knife to the throat could generally take care of anyone tougher.
The passive mages zipped around, setting up illusions in front of the cameras, and the kill teams swiftly disposed of the living.
When they gave the all-clear, Princess Brittabelle Cast the second Teleportation Circle and led the main army through, organized in platoons led by demi-humans with darkvision, all of them having seen the map of the area, and all of them knowing their objectives.
Within minutes hundreds of soldiers were spreading through the fog, racing across the bridges, and some short but brutal fights concealed with Sound Bubbles had neutralized important guard positions.
The alarms went up when the first wandering cultist team bumped into a platoon, and fighting erupted without Sound Bubbles. The leader had a laser, started shooting, and the bright lights rapidly attracted attention. Soon enough the walls of the Basilica were lighting up, the guards inside trying to see what was going on in town, someone was calling out over the loudspeaker looking for reports, inner guards were mobilizing, and as the cultists woke up, they were hit hard.
The attack magicks into the initial clusters killed a lot of cultists, then the elites with the Resist Fire spells on them took the brunt of a devastating volley of laser fire, eating it all up without the slightest bit of injury, a rather demoralizing blow to the confident and mind-controlled cultists.
In return, a lot of very accurate missile fire and magical spells zeroed in on those shooters.
The first time a volley of grenades was thrown out, all of them were caught in mid-air and then lobbed back where they came from in bright explosions among the tossers that didn’t help their morale much, either.
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I led everyone out of the tunnel I’d Shaped with Funf through the stone of the island, emerging through the wall in the great cave where these demented fuckers were breeding killer giant frogs with goddamn teeth.
The overgrown amphibians saw us emerge, kind of hard to miss as we were, and the tenor of their croaks changed… but it didn’t much matter when I waved my hand and dropped a Cloudkill on them all.
The great cloud of poison gas looked kind of like a yellowish fog, and the animals had no real concept of it being dangerous. It billowed out across the entire ceiling of the cavern, and then fell heavily down to the stinking pit and pond of the cavern, swallowing the sides and central muck of the place and immersing it in a sea of silent fumes.
The croaking and shuffling below went very, very quiet. Then there was a first poof, a spot of white igniting below inside the cloud, and it spread rapidly as vivic fire lit up on the dead and began to eat them all away.
I tucked away the vial that had sourced the poison, an extra alchemical twist making sure it was water-soluble and was going to kill everything nearby and under the water. None of these creatures were going to get away, although too many of them had obviously already escaped or been released. The poison itself would dissolve as soon as the spell’s duration was up...
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Duum was outside now, flying silently through the night, starting on the important task of killing as many frogs as he could in the area. Since they croaked incessantly, he had no trouble locating solitary frogs or clusters of them, swooping down out of the sky to rip them apart in ones, twos, and threes, and they never saw or heard him coming.
The Commune with Nature had counted over two thousand of the things spread out over the miles, with rough locations and favored mass nests. Duum had a lot of work to do, but he liked frog meat, so he was perfectly happy to get with it.
Once the Basilica was down, I could help him out, and another Mass Fly would mean my Free Company could help him, too. I could guide them to everything in my Commune from a central point, and let many hands do the work.
Teams moved right and left under my orders, the officers leading the way. Everyone had lots of experience room-clearing in tight quarters (imagine that), and I had a Detect Living up at VII right now, passing right through the stone and indicating where living people were.
If doors were electronically barred, that meant I was needed there to Shape a passage next to them and allow us through.
The cameras weren’t seeing us as we wove through the passages, and the lads and ladies set upon the guards and breeders down here with vicious teamwork and the power of surprise.
No glory, no grandstanding. Kill them all fast and effective and keep moving, take note of anything interesting… and hand off any technological firearms to the person towing the Disk, as well as any other interesting things I flagged during a room scan, including gold and jewels.
The surprise on the faces of the cultists and guards when point-blank lasers to the face did nothing to any of us, and none of us blinked a jot at the laser-swords when the first security officer ignited one, cut, and also didn’t do any damage to anyone were quite comical, however.
Alarms started blaring over the speakers, all expected, all ordered to be ignored icily by me as something anticipated. Used to my spooky magic and me being able to talk to them from anywhere close by, what were more sounds coming out of metal disks in the walls? The fighting continued brutally, the Basilica forces obviously not knowing anything of what was going on below yet.
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The smell was bad, as the cultists were less than considerate hosts, and the torture chamber down the hall had been seeing some use.
Nevertheless, I popped up the Mass Disks as we unlocked the cages for the prisoners. None of them were in good shape, obviously worked over by the demented sots now Burning away inside their iron maidens for effect, but I recognized the Baroness of the Lochs easily enough.
She wanted to fight, but was obviously in no shape to. I gave her a sword and shield and told her to protect the others if something got past us, knowing that was going to be unlikely, and she took that seriously enough to not have her honor affronted by being a rearguard.
That, and some Really Good Apples restoring some color to everyone’s cheeks helped tons.
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The first group of breeder cultists came running down the stairs to release the frogs, right into an ambush. They were wrapped up, brought down, and sworded or knifed with enthusiasm and speed as their attempt to release the frogs to create a distraction failed.
We could feel faint detonations of grenades and maybe some spells through the walls, and it was plain that the fighting was not going as the cult planned.
I put up the Interdiction with a smile, as well as the Stillflight, warning everyone not to try flying.
It was good timing. Less than five minutes later there was a massive surge of magic as the defenses of the Basilica were urgently keyed, and a wave of temporal force blew out… then ran into the hostile Interdiction and was stopped like it had run into a steel wall of Fuck Not With Time, Ye Arseholes.
“The temporal phase shift they were planning has failed!” I announced with Magevoice, meaning my people heard it, and everyone outside of the Basilica heard it, too. “Operators, eyes peeled for invisible people trying to escape!”
With their mobility options extremely limited, as Stillflight even worked on alternate forms like Polymorphing or Gaseous Form, the people inside the Basilica were going to have problems… especially since I was closing in on the generator room.
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The warbots and cyborgs were a nice touch. The former were mechanical things of steel on four semi-animalistic legs, armed with particle beamers and lasers combined, while the cyborgs were slightly greenish, mostly humanoid in appearance until they were cut open and circuits were exposed beneath rubbery skin.
Resistant to both fire and lightning, with weapons Burning with Bane to Constructs, the designated Smasher team went to it with axes and swords Buffed up with Greater Magic Weapon. Writhing tentacles were hacked through, steel carapaces were ruptured, legs bent and broken, and magical Weapons crashed into sensitive innards and most especially the power sources I had helpfully pointed out, the taking out of which would preserve most of the creatures and allow us to salvage more from them.
The generator itself was a big glowing thing of fusion power pumping out the energy that was trying to keep all the doors closed on us. Since I didn’t want to destroy it, I simply waved my hand at it; a Mass Itemize shrank it down to a fraction of its size, and then turned it into a thick paper scroll.
The head technician, clad in a form-fitting suit of exotic armor crackling with a personal force field, nearly popped out her eyes when she saw me do that. Then all the lights went out, came back on a second later under dim emergency lighting, and there I was with glowing ruby eyes, just looking at her thoughtfully.
She shot me three times point-blank as I stared at her... and tensed in disbelief when it did absolutely nothing to me.
I flicked a finger at her, and Argent Savancy shattered her defensive force-field, making her twitch and dance and crash against the wall as the feedback blew over her mesh-armor.
“Alive!” I noted to the others, and she went down under some bashing fists quite quickly. A few eyes glanced at me inquiringly, not questioning the choice, just wanting to know why. “Neutral Brown. We can work with that. Haul her up here.” The limp technician was hoisted up to me. I stuck a finger behind her neck, invoked an Activate Cantrip on the internal switch there, and her armor opened up along an invisible seam in the back. “Get her out of that, then toss her on a Disk and roll up the armor on another.” I held up a pair of fairly standard well-made handcuffs. “Behind her back, don’t take chances.” She didn’t strike me as an escape artist, so there should be no problems as long as she was watched… so I put her right in front of the Baroness du Lochs and headed off to join the fighting upstairs.