BECMI Chapter 302 – Charred Cold
A whole lot of violent giants with dark skin, steaming blood, and lots of armor had come through the doors to aid the Titan at some point, charging out ready to fight.
They had run into Lady Edge’s Lessons on the Practical Application and Universal Usage of Heat in Magical Fighting, Especially Where Cold Magic is Not Allowed.
In a magical universe, Cold was an Element of its own, just like Fire. Specifically, it was tied to Earth, the slowing and solidification of everything, and a natural counter to Fire. It was one of the Negative Elements, and where it touched on Water, the Plane of Ice also existed.
In a scientific universe, cold and hot were just different points on the same damn scale. Shift energy hither and yon, and fires would ignite and heat up while cold was what was left behind.
Getting magical spells to do that, namely Heat Sinks on shields, meant that you could Cast, say, Ice Storms and Cones of Cold and Walls of Icefire, by dint of draining the heat out of an area, basically doing exactly what the actual Cold spells did, and then dump the extra heat somewhere else.
Since we were surrounded by things immune to fire and possibly even healed by it, just dumping all the heat you sucked out of something into a Heat Sink Shield that absorbed all the fire magic in the area was a totally viable work-around to not having any cold mana to work with, even if it made the spell a bit more complex.
Otherwise the stolen heat would explode out from you—unless you were really good and could somehow fit it into another spell, which was totally possible, but that involved a devoted Admixture method and higher Valences—to be used when we wanted both ice and fire versions of the spells to come out either together or in rapid succession, ahem, ahem...
This was the tactic the Casters of the assault teams were using, spraying Cold versions of attack spells and venting the heat with Sinks on their person or on those around them.
Totally not expecting such lethal attacks, especially from such skilled Casters, and being all bunched up in tight quarters on top of everything else, the fire giants racing to help ran into a deadly crystalline blizzard of driving ice harder than steel, cold that seemed to suck at their very souls, and of course a lot of Coldphasing Weapons and Arrows driving home with skill, speed, and force.
The Daisho teams and adventurers knew their jobs and performed them well. I watched frozen fire giants, their hot blood sometimes spurting out cracks in frozen flesh, falling stiffly and heavily as their vitals froze solid, chunks of meat cracking and shattering off as they toppled in mid-stride. Our warriors had to dodge tons of falling giant as the Walls of Icefire and howling IceStorms battering and freezing them did the job of killing or nearly killing off the charging giants who weren’t protected against the deadly cold that should not have been there at all, and their vulnerability to it made it even worse.
None of the chokepoints had fallen yet, but the giants fighting there seemed to be rather demoralized after watching their boss and his happy Blackfire Crown blow up and change the very atmosphere of the area at the heart of the Fane of Eternal Ash, the core and heart of the Arch of Fire.
On the far side of the White-Hot Lake, which was not melting those black spots in it easily, I watched Sama get up, shake herself off once, reset her disjointed shoulder socket with a spin of her arm, realign her broken nose by slapping her face, and go racing for What Is Behind Door Three. They seemed to have some coal giants working with hell hounds to give our lads there a bit of trouble there, using the breath of the hounds to break through the Walls of Icefire and allow them come to blows.
Well, that wasn’t going to go too well for them when Sama showed up. She covered two hundred yards in about six seconds, and the giants there barely had time to get wide-eyed at her speed before she was up off the ground and ripping through them in a Valorous Spirited Charge, the force of her blows chewing through necks as wide as her shoulders and sending sprays of boiling blood shooting and steaming redly into the air behind her path as she Hewed her way through them all with aplomb, finesse, and three-dimensional Cloudskating that had her fighting upside-down and sideways as often as right side up.
Really, it didn’t leave a whole lot for me to do. Blowing a single IX spell to get rid of ALL of the scorpyro was a pretty significant contribution on my part.
Oh, and having my Sims build these Pyramids on the far side of these Wormholes maybe a thousand years ago, just waiting for the moment to Seal these damn things.
That’s what they were, two special-purpose Pyramids finally sucked into the Wormholes and now hurtling forward to a date with destiny.
Behind the Pyramids, the Arch of Fire was hollowing out and unwinding internally, but the outer part was still intact for the moment, anchored in the complete dimensional stability of an Immortal-enhanced Wormhole, even as the IP sustaining it was being sucked away and corkscrewed into a really impressive prismatechnics display, all silvery sparkles and rainbows flying off in all directions from inside the Arch on both sides as destiny hurtled in skull-motif black Pyramids zipping-a-do-dah, zippity-aye’ing their way at breakneck speed through the sky.
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The fire jotuns, now fully in an alarmed state, could not even see what was happening, although the Elementals, more sensitive to pyromana and ambient energy, could feel the nice, safe warmth of the Arch being shredded in waves of magic that seemed to be screaming in the Sublime Chord with a thundering drumbeat that totally belonged on the Day of the Dead, yessir.
About twelve seconds a mile, fifty miles, ten minutes for the light show to come together, two Pyramids soaking in Immortal Power, their bases attracted to one another like two magnets, reaching out across the miles, negotiating proper position, lining up, prepping the Inertial Shunt, all that magic and Immortal Power trailing afterwards…
“BRACE FOR IT!” I announced to every mortal within three miles… which was basically our people. They knew enough to disengage for a moment and blow their opponents back, then turtle up for just a second.
At a combined velocity of over the speed of sound, the two not-quite identical black Pyramids hurtled together, and only in the last centimeter did the Inertial Shunt go off, turning all that velocity to nothing, just an eye-blink before they made contact.
The magic and IP corkscrewing up behind them didn’t slow down in the slightest, however.
The burst of harsh white light and psychedelic rainbows blew through the sky. Spirals of cutting power rotating in opposite directions chewed back down the Arch in both directions, heading for Firemouth and Firejaws behind a decandescently black surge of power that was eating up all the residual Elemental energy and hurtling back down the Arch, if not quite as swiftly as a lightning bolt, at a highly commendable rate of speed.
Above us and the fighting, the sky went black. The fire jotuns who were outside and wondering why our groups had turtled up inside Walls of Force looked up, gaped at the somehow brilliant blackness writhed in spinning, shredding crystal blades miles wide, rainbows and fractured silver chasing the shreds of the Arch across the sky as it came down.
Hard.
Magic KICKED. The Portal shattered with mind-numbing force, every Caster, including myself, going to the ground as something really strong and fixed into the structure of the world shattered at all the key points and broke apart… and then there was an eruption and a rush as that released power was absorbed by the cold and darkness and blew out in all directions.
Fire-Energized matter, leaking planar openings, open lavafields, gouts from magma chambers forced into being, streams of lava, fumaroles, firefalls, gas vents; all the signs and manifestations of a Charland were extinguished in a rolling wave of darkness feeding upon and neutralizing all of them.
Marginally safe within a Wall of Force of my own, I watched the White-Hot Lake instantly cool to frozen black. The air temperature dropped below freezing. Ice coated stone and iron that had been hot enough to ignite wood a moment ago, while profound Runes carved into those stones exploded violently all around the center of the Fane, their magic distorted, imbalanced, and now destroyed, more fuel to the effect that was canceling out all the power of the Archlands and rendering it a nice cold Hell to the Elementals that were here… Elementals who had lost their ways home, and who had no fuel to burn to help stave off the winter that was now falling upon them.
Unprotected fire giants cooled down and fell as the counterfrost blew through and past them in a black wave, giving them no respect and less consideration as it did so. All their forges went cold, ice frosted their armor and their lungs ached as icy air filled them, refusing to be heated.
There was no fire to warm them, except maybe down, down, down deep into the land, I knew. Whole magma chambers brimming with centuries of distilled fiery essence had it frozen away in an instant, turning into icy caverns of silence that slaughtered thousands of Elemental creatures down there before they could get away.
“Now kill them,” I uttered, shattering my Wall of Force with a gesture.
Null Strikes hacked, Force Magic gave way, and the attack was on again. I could hear Briggs’ Warlord Voice echoing through the stone with savagery, and the shaken, half-frozen fire giants who were still alive could only try and muster their resistance as Giant Slayers who were strangely all ready to function in severe cold fell upon them harshly.
I glided back towards the fighting, where the Slayers at the doors were now pushing aggressively, the slowed and stiff giants no match for Masters of their weapons moving with speed and teamwork. Cold Reserves battered at the giants constantly as Coldphased Weapons turned heated flesh to brittle chunks in passing.
Sama was basically leading a charge into the halls beyond, reaping as she went, giving no quarter and calling for none.
Outside Firemouth, the molten slopes of the volcano were all now black and cold. The snow of the Wolf Winter was sweeping in after that incredible shock to the weather patterns, and the bright lights of the Elemental creatures of Fire scattered across the landscape were over half-gone, with the strongest ones urgently heading towards one another, looking to share their heat and stave off the cold.
I saw one adult red dragon who laired here taking off in disgust, a couple chests in its claws full of its loot, unwilling to remain in such a cold and nasty place to live now. I was sure others would soon follow.
More importantly, there was a narrow band of burning light falling down slowly from the sky. It was eye-catching if visible through the snow, descending with controlled grace and power, and not in an uncontrolled freefall from the apex of the Arch over thirty-six miles up in the air.
The Elementals could sense it coming, and were urgently converging on where it would land. It radiated narrow, intense Fire, all that was left of the Arch, and that meant a way home from a vacation frolic that had turned into an utter disaster of apocalyptic proportions to them!