BECMI Chapter 347 – Dear Dad not so Old
Whatever powerful undead were within the coffins didn’t wake up, and no alarm was sounded. Perhaps they were in torpor, a sleep deeper than mere sleep, and the lack of alarms didn’t rouse them. Tremble’s Ruby edge found their vulnerable spots, and they died instantly, Banefire and vivus exploding through them and making sure they wouldn’t come back with Wrathfire and True Death having their day.
Something was coming.
My Detects couldn’t pierce the walls here, sure, but just physical noise and spiritual chill were great ways of sensing the undead. Undead could be supernaturally quiet, but disguising the negative energy that empowered them and affected the environment was something difficult to hide, and, of course, they often stank rather badly.
The click of nails on the stone was enough to warn me as I stood guard at the door, Sama moving quickly and professionally from one stone casket to the next and slaughtering the dormant undead within. Starting about two minutes behind her, the caskets began to ‘bleed’ whiteness through their stone sides, spreading slowly through the coffins and into the slabs they rested upon.
The ghoul coming down the corner moved with the grace of considerable power locked into a scrawny frame. A long tongue that looked more like a whip, burning with a purple-black nimbus of fiendish power, hung down from the gaping jaws of the distorted head, clearly mutated and warped by Entropic energies into something a wee bit stronger than just a mere ghast.
It still didn’t see me until I flicked Dread out in front of it, and even enhanced reaction time didn’t give it the space to react before the Disrupting Shards smashed into it.
I moved my head left as the tongue-whip lashed out instinctively and gouged out a piece of the wall behind my right ear. In the next eye-blink the blasted bones of the Abyssal Ghoul were flying back through the air down the corridor, flaming white and disintegrating as they went.
I watched a Master link or six go abruptly quiet, chopped through and severed before any orders could be relayed out. I didn’t know the hierarchy it was in, likely a guard to a more powerful spellcasting undead, probably a lich. Such things might notice the link going dim, but it wouldn’t flare up in alarm, they weren’t that interactive.
Of course, the bright bones sizzling unwhite, staining the stones white and covering them with ethermist, might draw attention of their own.
Sama noticed me Casting, but stayed focused on her task of eliminating some powerful undead. She knew exactly what she was killing, as mnecromonics on her Sword registered the death, and she was staying very focused on the killing.
The chill in the air was the first thing I sensed, seeing nothing. It was clearly negative energy and supernatural, not actual Elemental or natural cold, I could totally tell the difference, and my Death Ward on Funf was humming in reaction to something.
Something coming through the walls, meaning an incorporeal.
I shifted position, aiming to triangulate its movement and position, eyeing the vivic flame Burning softly on Dread right now and which way it was aiming…
I stepped away from the entry, two, three, four paces, and brought up rose petals of Shards, devolved them down to a Touch Spell, and waited…
The head of the ghost poked out of the wall, the faint echo of the chains binding it to its doom sounding as it broke through the surface of the stone.
Immune to magic but not to internal ethereal travel, I reckoned, as its gaze turned my way. The twisted image of the man stared in surprise as Dread snapped over and knocked it on the head.
Its wail of surprise was cut off halfway by being Disrupted into ectoplasm, which became a meal for the Land and splattered all over the wall it was partially inside, and the floor, ceiling, and opposite wall as it blew apart.
Dread made a snickering sound. The only thing better than blowing apart undead was blowing apart Entropic Immortals.
I eyed the fellow in my mnecromonics, noting the clothing style was probably eighty years out of style. Another wizard who had crossed my paternal ancestors and paid the price.
Regardless, his Malevolent Aura hadn’t affected me, he’d been surprised, and he wouldn’t be rejuvenating at the dusk. Whatever fate was in store for his soul, he was experiencing it now.
I didn’t know what would have set him free, and didn’t really care at this point. I presumed killing my grandfather was going to satisfy a lot of such things, as well as cause a lot more problems…
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Sama finished up her quiet executions and came back to the entry.
“Tally?” I asked her, as I began rendering down all the caskets. Unsurprisingly, there were definitely some magical things among the dust of their remains, most of which weren’t even Cursed or using negative energies.
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The things that were magical I laid out in a line in midair, and Sama swept Tremble through them all at the same time with a flicker of a backhanded stroke. They cracked and sizzled and fell to the ground, Null-Sundered and useless.
“Twelve vampires, eight revenants, some big honker of a ghoul, and I think that was a Wight Baron over there.” I assembled his suit of plate armor in front of her, all chased white, and with a series of crisscross strokes she scattered the shattered pieces of the white-stained armor all over the place.
I had to giggle just a little. “Wight-stained armor,” I pointed out to Sama as she glanced at me. It took her a moment to get it, and she groaned in proper homage to a very bad pun.
Stone began to pour up into the chamber as I began to Shape it into oblivion with Primus, no need to keep it around. And making my grandfather dig it out again, only to find nothing there, would probably equal the expression on his face when he tore doors open and saw only more stone behind them.
“Yours?” she asked me, glancing meaningfully at the hallway.
“Guards on patrol or investigating when other guards went silent or didn’t return. Ah, a Demon Ghoul, the Ghost of a slain mage, two Greater Shadows, and an Eyeball Druj leading a Hand Druj to find out what is going on. They don’t know what is happening, but they know things are going silent…”
We both turned to look down the hall as something brushed us with the edge of an Aura of Corruption. Don’t be bringing holy water and Potions around those kind of undead, unless the containers are lead crystal!, I warned/mentally recited to nobody in particular.
“That’s a stronger one,” Sama judged, not bothering to move, Tremble dipping lower and getting ready to Shardstrike.
“If there was an eye and a hand, there’s probably a Skull Druj giving them orders. Shoo.” I waved her down the vivus-blasted hallway, dark stone splattered with whiteness and misting fog swirling at calf-height.
She grinned like a chesire cat, taking two long strides down the hall and raising her hand. I noted she was just to the side of the vivus-Burned stone… because an Incorporeal undead couldn’t pass through the stone.
The Skull Druj, glowing green-black and red flames dancing in its eyes for additional style points, came floating through the rock carefully, started to turn… and Sama grabbed it with the golden claws around her hand despite its incorporeal state, threw it against the biggest vivus-splattered area of the wall across from her, and chopped down once with Tremble as the druj crashed into the unyielding stone and wavered in disorientation for that helpless second.
Both halves split as Banefire pushed them apart from the nigh-seamless blow, and the Burning halves fell into the mist, shattering to fragments as they solidified and hit the white stone on the floor, dead before it could even think anything about us.
“That one was definitely part of a hierarchy. Something might know we’re here,” I informed her as the last of the casket chamber filled itself in. Very specifically, that included a lot of small vent holes for things traveling in Gaseous Form, because I wasn’t a bloody idiot. “The walls and ceilings of this place have a lot of tiny air vents for vampires in mist form, if you were wondering why they were there.”
She actually blinked as she glanced around, naturally having seen them in her Tremblesense. “Ah, of course. I wondered why they put in such small ventilation ducts, but undead don’t need to breathe, and they shouldn’t have any living prisoners down here…”
“It saves on the food bills,” I agreed knowingly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way in or out is via those ducts or by magic. I would normally blow a Valence to map the place, but the Wards would stop the reading.” I tapped the walls sourly. “I don’t see a paint, but that looks like an alchemical treatment to stop the magic but allow incorps through, if I’m reading the Shaping right?”
She simply reached out with her nails and scraped the stone, leaving clear gouges in it. It was okay, they were vanishing as the hallway filled in behind us. “Yes, some sort of treatment has leached into the rock,” she confirmed. “It’s probably topically more resistant to Shaping, but you’re just cracking it and overlaying it, right?”
“Correct.” The double doors ahead of us seemed to be rather important, as they were twenty feet high.
Also, we’d just stepped into another Aura of Corruption passing through the door, emanating out from whatever was beyond.
She looked at the ground through the door in her tremblesense. “There is a monstrous worm sitting on the other side of these doors, all coiled up in front of them.”
“That would probably be a Nightcrawler, given the Aura. Highest form of the undead, favored tool of Entropics before sending out the Fiends.”
“Yeah, Briggs and I have stumbled across them in some very old and forbidden places, and some newer and vile ones, too. Immortal Power?” she asked.
I pointed ahead and off to the left.
“Blood tie?”
I pointed ahead and off to the right. Of course.
“Always the hard stuff. Do we think this thing is alone?” She was shaking her head, and I joined her.
“It’s always a servant creature to something, although it isn’t stupid. Either a Nightwalker or a Nightwing, or a powerful Caster. It is probably under a Master relationship with them or Granddad.”
Sama tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Okay, it’s probably swathed in darkness right now, uselessly. It will open up with that black acid breath stream of necroic stomach vomit or some death magic. I can take it, no problem, probably fastest doing it from the inside out. Think you can handle anything else in the room?”
I raised the end fingers on my left hand like horns, and spots of light gleaming with little rune-wrought skulls riding thorns circled around my black nails. “I don’t even have to break the cap here. I’ll just use two spells if needed, and I can go as high as sixteen.” TwinnedArcane Fusions of Twinned Spells, and a Fastcast version of it if needed. It would drain a LOT of Spell Slots really fast, but there weren’t going to be many things left alive if I needed to do that.
Always felt good to have great firepower available for those brutal moments in life.
“So, how do you want to handle this?” she inquired.
I looked at the doors, glanced left and right. “My, but the hinges are still set into stone,” I deadpanned at her. “I don’t think you need to go maw-diving. Just split open a worm.”
She looked at the doors, over at me, grinned, and flexed her hands as she set her feet.
I waved my hand, and suddenly there were no hinges to the doors.
Sama smashed into the top of the great panels at the same second as they hit the ground with a crink of heavy metal, and toppled them over onto the inky black death worm-thing horror waiting on the other side, inside the wall of blackness rising to obstruct our view… not, both of us having Devilsight active.