BECMI Chapter 298 – Ants Creeping Along through the Stone
I could bore a three-foot tunnel through over a hundred feet of stone every six seconds without much problem. Disks could be configured to float off the stone right above the bottom, conforming to the sides, meaning those using them could sit down or lay down in comfort as a big long train of them followed me through the ground.
The main danger was approaching any lava fields, where the stone might heat up and give way, flooding the tube rather quickly. Unfortunately, lava underlay a lot of the area, although the back side was not nearly as swamped underground as was the area under the Arch.
The rumbling of the ground was constant, distant cracks and groans as shifting magma melted, fused, broke, and butted heads, all the while the wildstorms above ravaged the landscape.
Communing my way through the place wasn’t that difficult, helped by the fact that the whole of the Archlands were like a malignant zit on the face of the world, and the megalith wanted it gone. It just had no power to get rid of it in the face of an Immortal.
Me, I was not so limited.
Everyone was treated with Resist Fire, so the fact the passage was as hot as an oven didn’t discomfort anyone too much. The entire fighting force was stretched out in single file on Disks behind me, except for Sama, who was directly in front of me, her hands to the sides as the stone flowed away in front of her, reading the ground thirty feet ahead of and around us for any surprises with her Tremblesense.
Briggs was laying down on his back about a hundred Disks behind me, basically monitoring what was going on through the Marked and the Markspace.
Sound Bubbles were up everywhere behind us, cutting off the rumbles of the ground and weather that might make the soldiers nervous, and ensuring that nothing they said, heard, or did was going to echo through the ground and alert any natives in the lavafields that something was coming via burrowing.
I’d used this tactic multiple times on the Other Shore to enter fortresses of both ice and stone, bypassing their defenses handily and letting them learn the hard way that a good defense in a world with magic required more than high walls of stone and guards tromping about. The Fortresses had a Forbiddance around them from their temples, denying dimensional hi-jinks, but that hardly stopped burrowing, or even ethereal infiltration, if one was of a mind to, nor even something as basic as invisible fliers swooping over the place.
I hadn’t given them the Stillflight spell, after all, and all the people who could Cast it had Bloodbound copies and couldn’t sell them. Pity them. Let the Jotuns learn their own arcane defenses, or something. I wasn’t teaching them the Runes...
“Any activity?” I asked Sama as I moved forward. I was coming in at an angle initially, moving around an old and slowly cooling lava pool, then shooting straight for a few miles between several streams, closing in on a larger pool where I was going to have to surface twice and arch over some tributaries to get past it.
“There’s been two groups of fire Elementals we’ve passed under,” she replied quietly, eyes closed as her fingers and hair were spread out all around her like a sensory net. “I’ve felt waves of motion from the distance as we moved by lavafields, flow distortions that indicated things in them. Did you feel them?”
“No. There’s too much planar energy here for the Land to sense anything in detail. I can sense approximate numbers in an area, but nothing specific. So I know there’s like three hundred Elemental creatures within a mile of us, adding up to about two thousand hit dice, but I can’t see where they are spread out to.”
“Well, that’s not too bad. Have you got a surfacing pattern figured out?” she asked calmly. “Any motion in the lava is going to attract attention from some of the things living in it now…”
“Actually, I figured a proper ice storm coming down and freezing up the surface in an explosion of cold would be properly distracting and a nice way for a lot of magma to suddenly accumulate. I’ve got a Called Icebolt array ready to come down and mess things up, complete with a twister to back it up and chase away the curious.”
“Thatagirl!” Sama grinned, her head turning sideways and focusing on something we moved slowly and smoothly past. “So glad this isn’t a lair with Earth creatures, or this would never work.”
“True.” They’d ‘see’ the hole extending through the ground, even if they couldn’t sense anything inside it. It would likely prompt them to wander on up, stick their heads through the walls, and see some easily-crushed mortals inside. “The lava-dwellers have the same, so I have to disrupt their senses with a little kinetic confusion.”
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“Stop.”
Everything froze, especially the stone I was moving out of the way. Sama turned her head, focusing on something. “There’s a crack in the stone opening, it’s leaking lava this way. Something is nosing through behind it…”
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I immediately put a vent into place around our tube. It would make the stone very hot, but it should hold long enough for everyone to pass, especially if the mages shot it with cold Reserves as they went past it.
“Swap,” she murmured, and I flattened myself to my Disk and spun it so I was against the ceiling, while she and her sensor grid of golden hair in all directions flattened down and passed beneath me d. She deftly slid Tremble out of its scabbard as she came to a specific section of the wall there.
Buck, who had insisted on being here to watch my back, and was the next step in the train, silently pulled out his own Dagger and shortsword as Sama watched the wall of this tube I’d just Shaped.
A section of the wall that soon began to glow very red, indeed.
I could control stone or potentially fire, but lava actually required a spell of its own… or it had to be frozen into magma so I could manipulate it easily.
With a cool blue rush, Tremble’s blue-black adamantine Blade turned the ghostly blue of Icephasing, and Sama crouched in place, motionless as a silent huntress as the stone grew white-hot, all my control was lost, and it began to run. A thick stream of lava start to surge into the open space, with something wriggling and writhing riding it into the open space beyond.
Triangular jaws opened slightly, perhaps surprised at finding open air, and then Sama slammed forward, inserting her arm right into that mouth as Tremble expanded to full length, and she rammed it instantly home.
The jaws clamped shut around her arm, molten hot and made of barbed stone, doing so just as there was a burst of icy death from inside those jaws as the Icy Burst went off and gave the lavawurm there a really bad day.
The red-hot hide of the wurm cooled to black instantly. Sama smashed one tri-jaw with her open hand. It instantly fractured and broke apart like brittle sandstone, flash-frozen on the inside, allowing her to retrieve her arm, only a few holes poked into it, without much effort.
Frost Reserve Darts smashed into the lava surging in like slow molasses, freezing the surface layer, growing deeper and more solid as Eryis and Yrvyn, in the fifth and sixth spots behind Guy, added their own efforts as he and Buck moved out of the way of their shots.
“It’s solidifying, and plugging the hole as it does,” Sama stated. I smoothed the bulbous intrusion of cooled molten rock out and merged it back into the stone. “Mark this as a hot spot, and have the Casters shoot it as they go past.”
“Sending word via the Rings.” I quietly marked the area with a blue light to let people know, as I sent word out through Marks and Rings serving as Insignia items, avoiding the free /tellepathy as something extraplanars might be sensitive to the presence of. The wearers of both were spread out through the numbers of those following for just this reason.
“Let’s go.” Sama slid by past and underneath me, I returned to my normal upright position, and our forward progress resumed.
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I’d exchanged its lightning for cold, but not touched the thunder, so the bolt of Frost magic that came hurtling down from on high and crashed into the lava stream ahead of us was a dancing conductive bolt of a whole lot of pure cold energy backed with some concussive force. It brought with it a writhing cyclone of spinning air from the crazy weather system as it came down to let the Archlands know the Land’s opinion of them.
The whole stream of lava basically exploded from the impact, and was flash-frozen at the same time everywhere within thirty feet of the impact point, jagged stones clattering coldly to once-molten rock. Likewise, the tornado was ripping molten lava up, up, and away, almost instantly freezing it and turning it into wind-driven spikes of lethal force, which heartily encouraged everything nearby to rather quickly take cover from it, and not incidentally really made a mess of the lava lake and stream we had to get over, too.
Turning that mess into surface cover and piled-up magma over the flow wasn’t actually all that hard, just had to add some artistically jagged flourishes and shattered plates of magma lying here and there in the molten lava as our bulge of a tunnel became the edge of the blast crater. An artfully broken series of cracks below us gave the lake a place to vent its mass well below us, keeping the main pressure of the lava lake away from and under our tube.
“Two more of those?” Sama asked, as the tube dipped back underground and our speed picked up.
“Until we get to the moat,” I confirmed, “and this trick won’t work there,” I reminded her.
“Fuzzy already has something thought up,” she waved it off, and I just shrugged, wondering how Briggs planned to address the issue. Would I be making up stone boats for us to cross? Extending a ‘pontoon bridge’ across the lava and hope nobody spotted it from this side, maybe using an illusion to conceal it? Hallucinatory Terrain might do the job...
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Twice more Frostbolts of devastation smashed down from above, clearing our path out as the accompanying tornadoes ripped up the molten rock, cooled it, and created a mess I could Shape to my advantage to get us past and over the lava flows.
With the third stream crossed, I could plunge into the edge of the mountain, making relatively good time through the walls of the volcano as we came to the caldera.
I broke out of the stone about sixty feet above and forty feet back from the lakeshore of really hot lava. It was fluid enough to actually have some wave action moving about it as the howling blast of the Portal to Fire manifested atop the two hundred feet event horizon ‘ceiling’ above the surface of it. The Portal grew thicker and stronger as the fire rose relentlessly, until up above us was a howling furnace of destruction peeling for the sky as it erupted from the crater of Firemouth and headed for Firejaws so many miles away as the grand Arch of Fire.
“Alright, Briggs, I’m out onto the moat. What do you want me to do?” I asked, as Guy and Buck peered past me at the familiar sight of the moat and the island at the center of it… although the sky of howling flames consuming the heavens was a bit new to all of us, thank you.
-Bring us around the lake and up under the causeway. Shape the rock under the causeway into an extension of the tunnel, taking it from behind if you can’t bend the causeway itself,- he /replied promptly.