BECMI Chapter 338 – The Collapse of Caergard
Necromantic holdings and agents were identified, broken down, plans were made, and then they were executed with murderous swiftness.
There’s something extremely gratifying about professional undead hunters going in and doing their jobs with lethal speed and swiftness, and doing it all quietly. The Rangers were taking particular glee in covering everything up with illusions, modified terrain, a few Charm and Forget spells, and arranging matters so that wankers messing around with dead things vanished into the night and shadows and nobody even knew it was happening.
Not all of it could be hidden long, as there were far too many innocents around for it be covered up completely, and the sudden lack of communication or production from several mines manned by undead was going to be noticed.
However, two days’ leeway was enough to proceed to phase three, which was the complete removal and annihilation of the undead armies hidden away by the nobles and wizards of Caergard and Transyvia.
There was a lot of hidden undead that had to be killed, it was going to be violent, and it was definitely going to cause a ruckus when it happened.
There were too many nobles in the territories controlled by both Houses to sweep them all. Furthermore, wiping the lesser undead nobles was going to warn the higher ones that there were problems when their control hierarchies evaporated. The buried undead troops were not inside the active hierarchies, controlled using spells on the higher-ranking undead or Amulets binding them or some other similar nonsense, but not actively bound to a Master since they basically sat around and did nothing.
Those armies of undead that could be unleashed upon the living were the targets of the next group efforts. What were the nobles going to do, complain publicly and call for the heads of those who had wiped out their undead armies?
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The hillsides were on fire. It was about the farthest thing from subtle one could get.
Everyone knew something would go south, and even if they tried really hard, it was going to happen. The Mick was already getting razzed by the other teams for being the first, although there were two other fights that were spilling out of control in Caergard, one dealing with a graveyard burning with black-green flames and withering disease from the bog mummies ensconced beneath it, and another where a fleeing population of ghouls was probably going to make it to the surface and explode up into the town of Ochwallar, creating massive problems when they did.
Rangers disguised as Zanzyran soldiers were trying to contain things, but folk were going to see, misdirection was being put into place, and none of the fights were quite like the forest fire going off in the Transyvian Oskvaralls when the local Wight Baron left in control of a barrow of enhanced fast zombies, swordwights, and some revenant and druj officers opened up their barrows and let a whole lot of escaping mine gas flood out with them.
Poisonous gas didn’t hamper the undead at all. One Fireball raging down hundreds of feet of narrow tunnels in all directions it could? Yeah, it had found the mine gas.
The gas had found the mostly-expended coal veins and all the coal dust stirred up by undead in motion. The resulting chain explosion of the whole tunnel network going in had collapsed half the mountainside, sent flames gouting out a score of mines, vents, and secret exits to the place, and the trees, already wasted a bit by the negative energy of so many undead around, went up like tinder.
The Mick grabbed the Hand Druj streaking for his throat, his Null and Ring neutralizing any danger from the poisonous and life-draining touch respectively, and impaled it right on Laird’s point, the sanguinal in the metal passing right through him if his Crystal ki didn’t prevent it.
The withered, severed hand of a murderer twitched and writhed and kicked as Holy flames, Banefire, and vivus split it open and began to roast it, ensuring it wouldn’t last long and wasn’t going anywhere. The thing was set alight and couldn’t unstick itself from the hungry, multi-hued Flames.
A group of swordwights, units of soldiers fallen in battle and bound together in death as squads of quick and tactically-aware undead, saw this and came charging for him with their decaying graveblades, the rusted remains of the weapons they’d used in life, now capable of channeling their life-draining touch.
No threat with his Null and Ring, of course, nor his Armor and Laird’s dutiful point.
He ripped into them, slaughtering the first one to reach him with his first swing, driving the weapons of the others to the right and left and then taking a torso, a head, bisecting a fourth, removing two arms, and ending with the last one having Laird buried into its chest in surprise, insides exploding beneath its armor as the combined effect of the Wrathfires had their way.
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He kicked the twice-corpse off his Sword, the druj falling to ashen remnants as the swordwight unit also collapsed, a casual figure-eight harvesting the heads of the two whose arms he had cut off as they stumbled back to their feet, a bit awkward without their arms to help with balance.
Eight balls of fire came streaking out of the sky and into the open maw of a mineshaft, racing inside with trails of white left behind them. The stream of armored undead trotting out of there stopped instantly, one of the Meteors detonating at the entrance to claim the nearest of them, and he heard the detonations receding into the mountain as they blew off in series within, making sure none escaped.
The cumulative explosions were a bit much for the hillside to handle, however, and the entire facing of it blew out and collapsed, spewing flaming rumble over the dried pines and a massive cloud of flaming gas and coal dust billowing for the sky.
His wife, a wide smile on her face as she got to unload her favorite spell, never looked prettier than when her pyromancy was lighting her up for attention.
The Wight Baron bounding towards her blindside with a huge bone mace in its hands was probably thinking it had her cold on the rebound from sending out a IX Valence magic, certain it was about to reap itself an overconfident archmage.
She just sort of looked back at it, snapped her fingers, and the Castling went off.
The bone mace clanged on Laird, screamed, and chopped itself apart on the adamantine edge of his Claymore. Overbalanced, the Wight Baron jerked past the Mick, his foot came out at exactly the right moment and tripped it to the ground in a clatter of withered flesh and rusty plate armor. Before it could get up, he’d spun smoothly into a crashing step on its backplate, slamming it down against the stones with his crushfoot, and drove Laird down through its skull in Nail to the Stone.
Steel crunched like butter before Laird’s superior metal and edge, bone stronger than the steel didn’t offer much more resistance as the Claymore bit through and pinned the skull of the writhing Wight Baron to the slope.
The revenant in full armor bounded in like its legs were made of steel springs, coming in from twenty feet up as it covered the distance to him and swung a greatsword larger than Laird with skill and power as it came down.
Excalibur, Liberate from the Stone.
Laird was ejected from the stone like a shot by a surge of his ki along it, coming up and through the descending sword instead of being pinned by the stone. The Mick brought the blow on through the shoulder joint of its armor, steel screeching in protest as it and the supernaturally-tough corpse covered by it was sheered through. The revenant hit the ground, four feet of its five-foot blade shorn off the stump of the guard, and one of the hands holding it lashing past and torn off the heavy blade as it whipped itself down to the ground.
It tried to hack at him with the sword, but although it was very strong, leverage was still a thing, and it wasn’t THAT strong, to ignore physics like it would have to in order to have any chance to strike him. The Mick could read the motion and the angle of the attack without even being able to see it just by how the thing set its feet. He took a step and idly deflected the blow into the ground without trying, removed its forearm on the forward swing, and swept its head off with his equally fast backswing, hewing it just as it was trying to bounce away from him.
He watched the headless corpse shoot up into the air, and the stump and skull fall Flaming vivic in different arcs as the armored skull kept going. The corpse dropped sooner, King Gravity admiring Queen Physics’ admonitions on dramatic interactions of kinetic energy, mass, and velocity like that.
The Mick paused for just a moment to read the battlefield, as scattered and broken as it was.
They’d still managed to obliterate well over half the undead force here while it was still in the tunnels, and had rather surprised the undead by having traps set up at most of the hidden exits, and all of the obvious ones. Walls of Fire roaring down those tunnels had done for a lot of the fast zombies and swordwights trying to get out, leaving scattered survivors to be rounded up by Wrathfire’d missiles, the occasional spell going off (Shards looked an awful lot like magical bolts, he’d noticed) and other blasts of fire or lightning opportunistically added to the magical toll taken of their enemy.
Laur glided up to him, the Stillflight keeping her tied to the ground, but using her Staff and Mage Steps to cover more distance than was appropriate. It had really limited the ability of the undead drujs to get around, as the normally-floating things had to drag themselves along the ground until they tried to jump at someone with a surge of motion.
It generally meant the things could be batted around without much effort, their ability to fly gone, and so they were impaled or shot through without much difficulty.
“Any still buried, me love?” he asked, his dark eyes flickering back and forth as he watched the Rangers and undead hunters dealing with the remnants of the undead. With their masters slain, the lesser undead were largely uncoordinated, generally just trying to charge the nearest living to slay them. Not very smart when your attackers have Area of Effect magic… and not a few grenades with Runes of Fireball on them.
“There’s at least two large rooms deeper in that are untouched so far, and haven’t made any move to come out,” Laurentine murmured, her burning golden eyes glittering with the Detect Undead magic Cast at VIII, punching right through the stone to get a picture of the existence of the undead in all dimensions around them. “Given what they’ve likely sensed, they are staying put. We’ll have to go in after them.”
“Dinnae sound like something I be wanting to do,” he muttered, eyeing all the burning tunnels. “We didnae Interdict the place for a reason. Ask a few o’ your plasma pals if they be not ready to set some undead on fire.”
Laurentine just nodded and began to call out, the Summoning Circle leaping to life as she called out for some of the larger fire Elementals under Lady Firerose she knew of, always the best to deal with. Those undead hiding below weren’t going to have a good time…