BECMI Chapter 348 – The Writhing Well
I looked past the undead wurm as it writhed backwards instinctively, throwing off the heavy doors weighing down its head. It was big, so it covered a lot of ground, but that didn’t matter.
Sama was already on its backside. Tremble was out and full-length, and she was dancing down the length of it in motion, cutting arcs waaaaay too long for a sword both opening up the length of it and splitting open the segments with every step she took effortlessly riding around it as it coiled away, black and white flames spurting madly inside of it as she cut it open.
First volley, there.
It was in the shape of a headless bat-shaped thing nearly the size of Duum, hanging up at the middle of the ceiling sixty feet above, giving it quite a good view of what was going on below, which currently meant watching its companion die.
The twenty Shards coming in, Runeskulls riding silver-tipped black thorns the size of javelins and trailing shining blood-red petals behind them, converged with urgency and purpose.
They also blew a whole lot of holes into the thing. The air warbled with a wordless shriek as vivus began to consume it piecemeal. It convulsed and released its grip, tumbling down awkwardly towards the twenty-some foot giant of ink and shadow standing there below it. Said giant came into my view as the nightcrawler writhed out to full extension, splitting open and blazing vivic fires Burning on some very unholy fluids, its attempt to lunge up and strike at Sama just blowing the massive wounds on it wide open and flopping its spherical eyeless maw back to the ground uselessly.
Maybe six seconds had passed, the startled nightwalker snatching up a very nice sword probably made for a cloud giant, all of black steel and swirling with necroic energies as he lifted it and took a long step, cutting for Sama.
He definitely wasn’t expecting her to hop ten feet up and forward, land on his sword in midstroke, kicking off it to close right in on its eyeless face.
Ah, the dumbarse just set himself up for an Acrobatic Charge. He was even still moving forward into it!
“TREMBLE.”
Just a hiss and a whisper, and the ruined remnants of the nightwing were falling down behind them to explode in vivic puffballs on the floor, joining the line of vivus that had split half the nightcrawler open as suddenly her Sword was out, trailing Wrathfire that seemed to solidify into a giant lance thirty feet long extending out before and behind her.
It wasn’t going to be able to evade. Maybe it thought it could avoid it, but that wasn’t going to happen, either, as a Spirited Charge boosted by five-fold Way of the Sun, Sword-as-lance, and all the Power Attack you could shake a stick at drove into the nightwalker’s skull, and kept right on going.
I released my second volley.
There were a dozen various undead around the room, most of them getting two of my Shards, and all of them getting all the Chains… and the Kickers, of course. The whole chamber lit up with lightning-fast, screaming Runeskulls riding great thorns flashing in every direction in a heartbeat, and the various lesser undead under the control of these things just exploded around us in vivitechnic fireworks.
Sama’s feet hit the ground in a smoothly polished glide across the stones, scattering nightwing remains. A bunch of lesser undead of various types fell down in Burning bits in all directions and the nightwalker crashed to the polished obsidian tiles, minus the head that had exploded around Sama from her charge. The stump was blazing vivus and ethermist joining the flow of boiling fluids spilling out of nightshade corpses and undead remains to start painting the floor of this place.
There was no hesitation at all on Sama’s part, an angry shout coming from the neighboring room as something felt its minion die and shouted in outrage. The way was open, that was the direction the Immortal Power was in, and if there was a threat, she definitely preferred not to wait for it.
Well, it was what it was.
I definitely wasn’t as fast as her, even with Flight magic helping me skim along at great speed, but we both knew that, and my job was to stay at range and back her up, anyway.
Big long hall, kind of roughly hewn from the stone… or rubbed and rasped by things continually, destroying any finish and corroding the stone.
Something really vile and nasty was ahead of us, and something tall was rising up on the far side of it.
Ahh, let’s see. Mandrill’s face, pig nose, boar tusks, ape’s body, ridiculously small wings, stubby little goat legs holding all that mass up…
Ah, type IV, the nalfeshnee, called a Groaning Demon here. Like Titans, they were Immortal Creatures, but not Immortals themselves… unless an Immortal chose to look like one. Didn’t get all the bells and whistles, just most of them.
These were the weakest of the Greater Demons, and the ones most focused on spellcasting, trying to stay away from physical combat.
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The sonic attack of its Groan trembled at the air, slamming on the ears and wracking on the bones and blood alike, threatening to stop me in place. The sound was just a carrier, the effect worked fine in a Silence effect… well, a Silence or Sound Bubble effect that wasn’t at IX.
Dread popped up his Sound Bubble, while Sama, well, she just ignored it, while the pig-ape-monkey with the oversized hands and huge belly waved its hand urgently over the hole in the floor ahead of us.
“Fuck!” I skidded to a halt as I recognized the thing.
The Writhing Well! How the fuck was that thing moved here? It was supposed to be on the other side of the world!
Fucking Immortals. Another one of Thanatos’ little play toys. This thing was a potential world-destroyer! Who the fuck had given it to Prince Morphail?
“Sama! That’s the Writhing Well, and he’s opening it!” I Said, Magevoice carrying past Sound Bubble to her.
There was a flick of her hair to show she’d heard me, but all that did was speed her up.
Grinning hugely, as if it was about to watch a great show, the Demon threw its arms wide. Immortal Power surged, tearing at reality, a rip that was already there in the Well and so couldn’t be Interdicted easily was torn wide open!
I did see its little piggish eyes widen in alarm as Sama cleared thirty feet high and ninety feet long in her jump, and one word cut through its own exultant cry.
“TREMBLE!” she snarled at the thing, the Banefires on her Sword a very ugly green-black and a furious clear Gold as Bane of Legends kicked into high gear… and the Dreadskull of an Avatar of Entropy blazed on the pommel of her Sword.
Then the world exploded between us.
The shockwave threw me backwards out of the hallway, Primus taking the wind and turning a wild ejection into a smooth push backwards. Abyssal energy howled past me, the vivus splattered all over the room rose up like wind-blown flames to feast, and the whole area shook wildly at the planar disruption.
Fucker had just ripped open a portal into the Entropic Planes. No walls here, Detects working just fine, and I could feel sources of Evil coming up from that Well there-
A source that was already there expired, Primus letting me know it sounded like something wet had just coughed really badly and died. There was an explosion of Immortal Power there chased in unwhite, blowing away the dark mist and fogs from the wrenching of dimensions.
The things coming out of the dark hole in the floor turned around in shock, seeing Sama standing there in front of the bisected demon whose halves were sprawled against the wall behind it. It was Burning away very rapidly, leaving the streaked blackness of the wall striped with vivus as it did.
I did not miss the fact the vivic mists from those flames were also flowing into Tremble, and smiled thinly.
Like Dread, more than one way to get a quasi-Artifact into play!
Her eyes met mine as claws, wings, tentacles, hooves, pincers, legs, hands, suckers, and oozy things were clawing at the edges of the Well, and random unreal things were heaving themselves out of it.
The Writhing Well tapped into the planes of Entropy and brought forth the endless variants of the Damned, things called hordelings, wrought of Sin and souls and mindlessly devoted to endless fighting. As long as the Well remained open, they would come.
A very clear Ding! Ting! rang out, carrying right through my Sound Bubble. Her eyes met mine, and her smile showed all eight canines.
It was an invasion of hordelings from the Entropic Planes, who would keep spilling through until the Well ‘healed’ itself shut.
They’d just keep coming. The weakest of Immortal creatures, still not mortal, unleashed on the mortal plane, only wishing to hate and fight.
“Tremble. Oh, oh, ohhhh, Tremble, She Comes!” she crooned, and then she was coming for them.
The ones closest to her managed to shriek in instinctive alarm, and the slaughter was on.
It was like my grandfather was trying to make her happy, putting something that Summoned endless dangerous creatures from beyond the mortal plane here in unending numbers, a Karmic Buffet that would literally never run out.
She could just keep fighting until she killed everything.
I looked up at the ceiling where the nightwing had been roosting upside down, hanging there… right below the Phase Door that had allowed entry and egress to those who could see it.
A Phase Door that had just snapped shut.
That was because the hordelings were utterly uncontrolled and would kill everything down there they could get their hands on. They’d be sucked back into the Well if it was closed before too long, but nobody in their right mind was going to come down here while it was spewing out unlimited amounts of even minor Fiends.
Nobody except a battle-starved Rantha Hag starved for meaningful combat and foes and looking for a really good time. Technically her Stupidity Stat was occupying her right mind, and the rest had occupied her left mind in delirious joy for a run of Karma.
I flexed mentally, and a Circle of Protection from Evil at VII+1 drew itself across the hallway there, effectively pinning in the hordelings. If they tried to run from her, they’d slam into the edge of it and go no further, and then she would carve them up.
Anything else down in this buried dungeon was going to hunt all the cover it could, because the Fiends would tear them apart and devour them and their damned spirits as readily as they would anything living. The undead were not spared their attention.
They couldn’t Teleport without knowing where to go, there was hundreds of feet of rock to go through before they hit the surface save for that one area with the Phase Door, and the Well would close eventually.
Eventually coming much faster with vivus reinforcing the Veil and putting pressure on that Well.
They probably aren’t expecting us to destroy it, I considered, knowing that was exactly what Sama was planning on doing.
As I glided towards the smaller hall leading in the opposite direction, I glanced up once.
A thousand feet above, the foreboding expanse of Castle Bludevich glowered over the surrounding valleys and mountain peaks. Quite the tall and moody Gothic castle, set up well in the mountains, nigh-impossible to assault, definitely to siege (starve out undead? Really?) and fully capable of concealing a LOT of secrets.
If you were someone who lusted after magical secrets, the wealth of a Prince who’d lived and ruled here for over two hundred years, and didn’t care about stirring up a lot of necromancers, why, I’m sure you might have been interested in infiltrating the place and seeing what you could uncover here.
If you didn’t care about any of that, well…