BECMI Chapter 391 – Into the Remnant Kingdoms
Going through the Emperor’s Flight and around the Maelstrom at its far end was almost anti-climactic.
I took Duum out and we basically went hunting the Emperor’s Admirers. There were twenty-six of the bloody Gargantuan Hydras, with two having mutated into the aquatic Scyllan variants that had flippers instead of stumpy feet. The Land (and Sea) was happy to point them all out to me, as they were blatantly magical creatures that would not exist naturally, and the only thing that had prevented them from eating out the whole ocean was their reproduction rate was absolute crap, plus enough focused firepower could actually kill one if it was needed.
Nothing natural in the ocean could take care of them, either, although there were some UNnatural things in it which might have been able to do so.
Their biggest advantage was their incredible fast healing and regeneration. Gargantua healed four times as quickly as their base creature, which for a hydra was 10+number of active heads in Health per six seconds.
All of these suckers were at least eight-headed by default, with the oldest all the way up to sixteen.
Sixteen also meant 108 Hit Dice, just stupefyingly tough and physically larger than a great whale or, heck, The Great One himself.
A dozen Meteor Swarms at once were probably not enough to kill the elders. The only thing keeping them contained was that the elders couldn’t swim, and the rocks of the Emperor’s Flight extended to the edges of the sea, but to no other landmasses. The hydras had eaten virtually every other animal on the stones, and had to subsist on fish by plunge-fishing in the waters, or simply going achingly hungry.
A fleet of humans coming through was like a conga line of a buffet table, just lining up waiting to be plucked forth and consumed.
But, as I’d noted, they weren’t very intelligent, and their only defense against aerial bombardment was to go to ground… and going to ground was not a good way to escape me.
Nor was Blooding magic very respectful of their insane ability to heal themselves. Seriously, a minimum of 72 points of Regeneration was a bit much!
It took slashing weapons to chop off a head, and then you had to blast it with fire or acid magic to prevent two more from popping out in response. Each head was going to have hit points equal to its Hit Dice, and only half that damage applied to its total as damage. Given I wasn’t cutting off heads, what I was doing was loading them up with general damage they couldn’t Regenerate, then killing them before they could go to ground.
No Perpetual Spell meant no unlimited killing power, so I had to fall back on the old substitute for massive long-term damage: multiple Call Lightning spells, shifted to the Element of Fire, screaming down from above and pounding things bigger than elder wyrms into the stones, leaving burning Shardrays as finisher moves for them.
So, that’s what I did, winging over the Sea of Exodus and the channel called the Emperor’s Flight, surrounded by a brooding sky heavy with clouds that weren’t going to form a storm, because the winds were still in the favor of the fleet. I painted the Emperor’s Admirers into my personal Commune-map, flew over and located each over-sized hydra, then dropped four Screaming Heavenly Firebolts down upon them with 36 HD per bolt, then finished them up with a Split Paired Admixtured Shardray with all the fixings upon it.
Two if they were particularly big.
I admitted that it was a huge waste of meat, but I was assured by Duum after an obligatory sniffing over that nobody was going to want to eat them, like nobody wanted to eat troll.
That said, all of them had lairs, all of them were at least a century old, with the big ones having millennia under their hides, and all of them thus had loot from prey and dimly remembered hoarding instincts ensconced within their lairs, particularly the two Scyllas who wrecked whole ships, raided shorefront communities, and picked off fishermen with aplomb.
They also had a lot of heads which self-Empowered as Baneskulls to Magical Beasts, and could be improved to Dreadskulls, given the power of what they came from (and the largest couple self-Empowered!). Not the highest demand for said Skulls, but waste not, want not!
In due course, massive reptilian creatures erupted out of their stony camouflage as the heavens vomited great flaming Skulls down upon them, and their scattered corpses were still Burning vivic as the fleet reached the canyon channel. Escorted by powerful Water Elementals making sure the finicky currents didn’t send them crashing into the walls, they sailed down the length of the Flight, threaded the needle past the maelstrom draining the sea, and one by one sailed out on past into open waters beyond.
I had to set a few more wrecks below the surface en vivus, as there were more such ships scattered the length of the Emperor’s Flight, and around the maelstrom beyond, too. Hydrosa’s Elemental servants were happy to just pile up the precious belongings on the raft of Disks I had sitting there by the sides of the Scampering Wave waiting for it all, to the amazement and envy of the crews watching the gold, silver, and other glittering treasures from countless destroyed ships and crews being heaped up for me.
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The Land was happy enough, countless new undersea reefs would be seeded even further by the wrecks, while the tasteless remnants of civilization were cleaned up from the sea bottom.
I was making a huge amount of money and loot out here, too. Some of those ships were even from Delphax’s own fleet of followers, judging by the age of the coin and some of the magical treasures which had survived the centuries, and that included stuff shat out by the hydras in their lairs and just preserved there for the ages.
Wasn’t going to argue with the haul. Killing, looting, and dumping it all into my Sanctum kept me busy the whole time.
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It took three whole days for the entire armada to traverse the Flight and thread the maelstrom, gathering up on the far side while the ships were escorted through safely one by one.
A day later we were into the island realms that bordered the three human empires left on the primary remnant of Delpha, said empires the last obstacle we would have to get past.
It wasn’t difficult, until the fog came up at night, stories from the natives abruptly made it to my ears, and Duum and I ended up winging out into the night, just in time to intercept a fleet of ghost ships, animated hulks with undead crews dredged up out of the sea, making their way in the mists towards the fleets.
They probably should have checked to see how many ships had crow’s nests with Eagle Eyes and MistsightPermanently on them, and how many Clerics incredibly frustrated by not being able to show the might of the Patrons were ready to infuse ballista and catapults with Vivic Weapon and then bombard those water-logged hulks from all directions zealously.
Yeah, the ghost ships were supernaturally powered and so pretty fast, for all their size. That was fine, as the marines on the longships were spoiling for a fight, and we weren’t outnumbered, so the larger ships just hove in close and gave them tons of fire support.
The skies boiling and bringing down Screaming Skullbolts like falling moonfire didn’t reassure the undead much either. Or greatly reassured them, given how many fell and Burned away to them, while the living weren’t harmed at all by them.
The force needed a victory, so I was happy to stay aloft and organize them all, picking off the ghosts, spectres, and wraiths who flew up to harass me with ease and impunity.
The longships wrapped them up and slowed them down, unwhite arcs of fire came lobbing in from all directions, and every couple of minutes another screaming peal of Thunder heralded another ghostly white moonfire Bolt slamming down from the angry skies and giving them the what-to.
By the time the engagement was done, all the undead were Burning with their ships, which were slipping rapidly beneath the waters, and a few Elementals re-Summoned were happy to loot what they could for the men, which wasn’t insubstantial at all, all things considered.
I guess it was a truism that Immortals dropped a lot of loot around for valiant warriors to recover, especially when it was obvious one of their enemies had arranged such a thing.
A victory in battle against a foe worthy of being killed was definitely a shot in arm for the lads after being harried by unkillable monsters and storms by the Immortals making a show of them and their relative helplessness.
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“Not going in, Lady Edge?” Captain Sigmal asked, as the fleet sailed past the Isle of Skulls, the dreaded home of so many undead and death upon these seas, according to the native sailors.
The place loomed like something out of a bad dream, completely with black clouds you couldn’t see from five miles away, dark mists rising up out of the waters around it in a poisonous gray haze, and a brooding, ominous atmosphere right out of a goth horror flick or something.
If you squinted just right, that budding mountain at the center of the place? Yeah, it did indeed look like a great pile of titanic skulls, piled up and waiting for the foolish.
There were a lot of eager eyes looking that way, greed for the reputed legendary hoard of the undead sailors overcoming fear and dread of what might be encountered there. They had beaten the undead unwhite and loved the feeling, now was it time for more?
“Lady Edge to the Fleets: Under no circumstances are you to attempt to enter that island. That is not an island. It’s an open portal to the Sphere of Death. What you see as an island is an extruded extraplanar realm poking into this one, violating the laws of time and space. An hour there is equal to a month outside here. There’s no base of operations or trite cave or glowering castle waiting to be sieged there. There’s a pit the undead are crawling out from, and sometimes they manage to get far enough into the waters to stay there without getting sucked back into the pit.
“The undead we fought are made from the fools who went in there, died, arose as undead, and then came out and commenced killing others.
“Mortal magic isn’t going to clear that place, there’s no loot to be found, and our job is to get you home, not turn you into undead sailors cursed by your murderers to sail the seas endlessly and drag more living souls into undeath with you just because they were smart enough not to desire a fortune that isn’t there.
“We get the fuck out of here with all speed, and see if the Immortals want to do something about this great gaping hole the Entropics left in this world for fun.”
Meaning I could totally come back here and do a great flipping service for the Land by axing the thing, and I was totally going to, but not today.
Flipping arsehat Immortals.
We set our course for Omicra, who constituted the largest number of our rescued sailors, and headed away from the Island of Skulls.
There were other minor tribes and nations in the scattered islands, and in the distance, what looked like merchant vessels of the survivor kingdoms. None of them made the least effort to stop us, perhaps because a hundred battle-ready ships was not really something they cared to beard.
They weren’t the Delpha of old, after all…