BECMI Chapter 301- Bigger than Titanic
My job was to deal with the scorpyro. I counted at least three hundred bodies emerging from the lava, clear in my Detect Evil once they surfaced. That many bodies could conceivably swamp Sama and really limit her maneuverability… although I was also pretty sure it would also set up a really, really sweet Cleave Train through the smaller bodies, the ones she could hew right on through and keep going.
Well, that was sort of what I was doing, right?
Hordeminds and Swarms were covered under the same Bane, happily enough. That was nice and convenient for what I was about to do.
Scorpyro had various bodies ranging from car tire-sized 1 Hit Die, all the way up to potentially 25. They could easily bud off and make bodies that grew all the way up to 10 HD with magical speed, but anything larger than that had to be tempered and actually live for a while to increase in size, and they had the advanced mental capacities that increased the hordemind’s actual intelligence.
As a result, most bodies of the scorpyro were 5 HD and less, things that could be rapidly grown to 10 HD in size, although they became bigger, hungrier, and more awkward to move around as they did so.
Total maximum Hit Die of a Hordemind was supposedly about 10,000, a mind-boggling number. There was no way there were that many of the things present here, maybe 1,000 HD from what I was seeing. I assumed that the majority of the thing’s existence was on the other side of the Portal, nice and safe from any nasty surprises on the Prime… or any ire from the Avatar of the fiery Immortal it was working with.
354 bodies, by my count.
That was totally fine with me. 15 Shards, Paired to 30, Admixtured to 60, Chained 25 times was a nice 1500 different targets, so I could hit most of them five times, but naturally I didn’t need to.
I only needed to hit the bigger ones more than once, the Kickers did the rest as Bane of Legends, Swarmbane, and Bane against Fire, combined with Holy Kickers, did all the heavy lifting on the smaller bodies.
Oh, and I was a Child of Ice and Fire. They were the same thing to me. This inferno was exactly the same to me as a chilling icescape as far as my magic went.
The thirty skulls that swirled into existence around me were crystalline black ice, surrounded in pale blue flames that were cracking the air as it froze about them. Flaming roses ignited in their eyes, and Lightning and Thunder danced around them with horrifying holy Light streaming from them and stabbing at the multi-faceted eyes of the hordemind there.
Then they went screaming out, Thunder turning their shrieks into an extremely intimidating rolling ghostly wail as I picked out their targets in all directions, and things began to die.
The shrieking Skulls were faster than bullets, arcing in all directions, speeding into and through their targets. Primal Fire and Frost gave the creature of Elemental Flame the very unique sensations of burning and freezing to death at the same time, as Banefires tore apart its existence and Holy Light seared its spirit in ways neither it nor any of its kind had ever truly experienced.
Swarmbane also had the unique effect of broadcasting residual damage through the entire body of a hordemind or hivemind, the thing that made it truly dangerous.
In short, the Skullshards I was sending out were slamming into them for like 3-18+22 (40, Topped, doubled via Piercing Cold to 80) damage on their first targets, half that to secondary targets. If even one point of damage got through, the Kickers went off… and the Kickers were something like 12d6 combined damages, Topped off by Consecrated Spell to 72.
Always full damage.
So, one point, then +72. If the initial target died, then the remaining 79 base damage was sent on to the next nearer part of the swarm that was eligible, i.e. a body part that had not been hit already, and subject to the same rules.
Ninety percent of its body was right on the other side of the Wormhole, and that was where basically all of this passing damage was going, since I was making sure every body on this side got hit twice that was eligible to do so.
What it meant was that all of its bodies were in range as Swarmbane carried the damage along its own bodies’ links to one another, one point of damage activated the Kickers to tear apart the weaker bodies, and the damage kept going, and going…
No damage anywhere was wasted. One point of damage, apply Kickers, sometimes twice, and then the extra base damage went looking for extra homes, and found them.
Every screaming Skullshard hit the maximum number of Chained targets, meaning all the big bodies were hit four times, and most of the little ones, too.
And after all those Kickers finished everything here in one wild exploding orgy of nigh-absolute zero plunging screams of cold freezing them solid and then blowing them apart in Fire, Lightning, Thunder, Holy, and Banefire damage, it all went hunting at maximum efficiency for the many, many other bodies of the scorpyro that it was still linked to.
Four sets of Kickers was enough to take out even the toughest of its bodies as all the spillover damage naturally concentrated towards the larger bodies as the Kickers did the lion’s share of the killing.
It probably had somewhere between two and three thousand bodies. The opening salvo of sixty Skullshards was already 4800 base points, before the Chains added 25 x 60 x 40, or another 60k in primary damage to the base… and Kickers were up to 4 x 72 on each body, accumulating before taking the base damage and applying it to the total of that body, killing it and passing the rest on to the rest of the swarm.
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Was that enough to kill a 10,000 Hit Die Swarm/Hordemind?
Yes. Yes, it was.
The scorpyros shrieked in disbelief as the magic rippled out from the wild and twisting eruptions and chaos of the lava lake, the most penetrating of Elemental Frost tearing at the pyric mana here as the ringing notes of the Sublime Chord seemed to crystallize the fires and shatter them wholesale, while great black stains erupted throughout the White-Hot Lake itself as scorpyro corpses were blasted into frozen ice and instantly solidified the lava around them.
It was a nice distraction to the Titan trying to beat on Sama, because the whole Arch of Fire pulsed and lurched suddenly at the disruption to the core of this outgoing Wormhole of a Portal. A thousand explosions of vivus blew through the Wormhole, reinforced the Veil, and suddenly the entire core of the Arch was sealed shut for the moment, receding and sucked away above us, leaving the air here startlingly clear and filled with crystalline and pure cold mana.
Not enough to totally stop the outer edges of the Wormhole from emptying out, but enough to make it seriously wobble, that was for certain.
“Cold where none should be, a fate fell and dead icy,
A thousand deaths, it seemed!
A thousand fears it screamed!
Damnation called, and it Could...Not...Flee!
TREMBLE, WE COME!”
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Sama had a lot of practice with Air Walking/Cloudskating in three dimensions. She bent bonelessly about the monstrous mass of the Hammer swinging at her, sliding through 360 degrees in an instant with a swirl of fluid motion, and then was over and past and coming around the cursing Titan’s neck. She ignored the Avatar’s howl as it lost an eye to a solid swathe of icy adamantine slicing through it, flailing at her like batting at a bee and missing. Terrible gashes from Tremble’s ever-moving edge chewed through his golden-black skin, spewing flaming blood that chased after her as if alive and failed to catch up to her.
I felt the surge of Immortal Power. It couldn’t use mortal spellcasting because she would interrupt it, but IP just took thought.
There was an explosion of blackened flames in all directions from his darkly sparkling Crown, a Meteor Swarm detonating directly atop him in multiple balls of fire that should have blown her away like a fly.
Yeah, someone forgot to tell him Rantha Hags aren’t susceptible to fire, either… and he couldn’t get through her Null, regardless.
She came in right through the blast, right over the Hammer lifted too late to stop her, and then gave him a pair of matching bisected eyeballs both freezing and exploding at the same moment, turning upside down and spiraling sideways thataway. She dropped just enough to get under his chin and shear through his metallic beard and thick throat with three full spins executed in under a second, leaving three massive crosscuts in his throat.
Flaming blood exploded out as his throat tore apart, thicker than a fire hose, skin as tough as metal freezing and shattering as it was subjected to far too much pressure from such a huge thing, and its massive internal heat did its thing.
There was another surge of IP as the Titan clutched at his throat, astonished at both his blindness and how quickly Sama had ripped through him, unwilling to believe a mortal could deal that much damage that quickly.
But she had, and now he was blinded, and had to Heal himself desperately, which he definitely tried to do.
And, ah, ran into Blooding, which stopped the Healing effect cold with its Cursed effect.
Sure, he could simply get rid of the Curse and then Heal, but, ah, did he have the time?
No, no, he did not.
Sama came in behind him, Song rising in triumph even as her strikes seemed to be in slow motion that was actually faster than the eye could see.
“It is time to behold your future!
It is time to die, oh sightless cur!
Time is passing, and you’re not lasting,
And in time, only Death is Sure!
TREMBLE, IT COMES!”
Three strikes across the back of its neck, certain as taxes, splitting what passed for vertebral disks, and then a plunging strike drove into his spinal cortex, letting loose a Sharding attack for maximum brain blenderizing.
All laden with Bane to Immortals and Legends, Vivus, and consequently True Death.
My TruenameSeeker slammed into his forebrain as his thoughts scattered. The third of Gulguz’s Truenames escaped his thoughts as he died violently, and the world started to go white.
Started to. Didn’t quite.
There was a very loud ripping sound, like something breaking apart and sealing, and the whole White-Hot Lake jerked upwards, that empty throne out there rising with sudden speed and a huge surge as something big and black tore through the Portal, yanked through by the disruption in Immortal Power.
Sama had been blasted back past the edge of the Lake by exploding Immortal Avatar. She actually drew quite a cold blue arc in the tumultuous air as something came up out of the Wormhole, through the White-Hot Lake, and was drawn into the air and sent hurtling up the Arch, swirling with a whole lot of Immortal Power as it did so.
It was all black and had a ton of skull motifs on each and every block of it, too.
Behind it, a massive torus and spiral of conflicting Elemental and Immortal energies followed what was very obviously an upside-down Pyramid taking flight and sent hurtling up along the Arch of Fire.
From the very far distance, resonances with this Wormhole blew through the Sublime Chord, indicating a similar disruption had happened on the far side in Firejaws, and the released Immortal Power was now really fucking things up.
Eagle’s Vantage Upcast to V was sent zipping WAY up in the air, so I could get the moon’s-eye view of what was happening.
Specifically, over at Firejaws, where another geometrically precise object of black blocks with skull motifs on them had come through the Wormhole there, and was using negative pressure to get itself sucked up the Arch, propelled up through the center of it at breakneck speed.
It wasn’t a fast process, because there was a lot of distance to cover, and even moving a couple hundred miles an hour wasn’t going to cover over a hundred miles of the Arch of Fire in just a few seconds… which gave me time to look around.