BECMI Chapter 453 – Eggs have Nests
Oard reinforcements were just starting to stream into the main wormhole chamber behind us as Helos and I booked it out of there, chased by laser and plasma fire that couldn’t hurt either of us.
Thor pounded through the side door Lunia indicated ahead of us, leading us away from what looked like an important computing center, probably managing the field modulation for the Severance effect. Since we didn’t want to be here when that happened, we had no intentions for it, and the forces arrayed there and shoving some spider-bots at us with plasma chewing up the corridor weren’t worth wasting time on.
They were a bit surprised to see Helos and I come racing up a bit late and take the hard right, emerging into a buried subterranean silo, with a rock jutting up out of the floor, atop of which stood a familiar Portal.
Sif tapped it once with Dirre, it sparked to life, and Helos and I didn’t even have to slow down as everyone dove through ahead of us.
I was the last one to hop through, and even as my feet were coming down on the other side, I flicked Dread back and disrupted the Portal behind us.
“Thirty seconds left, so about five minutes on this side. And then, who knows how long before it stabilizes, but I doubt it will actually be all that bad. Time’s going to pass in an instant, then mostly lock down,” I informed everyone before turning around.
“Well, we have a lot of work to do before then,” Dame Adama told me.
The Portal was on a hill, and around us rose a forest of alien trees and towering fungi of all kinds and unnatural hues, absolutely nothing cheerful about them in the slightest. Spores hung in the air, and everyone reflexively reached up to make sure Masks were on and attached. Around us, tendrils were coming out of pulsating stalks, fibrous branches were bending our way as fleshy flowers with moving stamen opened in jarringly unnatural patterns and hues, and things were starting to rise above them in the distance as ripples of color traveled in waves through the forest.
“Mu Spores?” I had to ask as the gigantic floating fungi rose above the forest of unnatural trees and shrooms.
Dama Adama nodded once, her expression grim. “The road through the forest before us is built of mugor, crystallized mu hide. It is a valuable material for Aberrant biotechnology and biomagic.”
I eyed the glossy ‘stones’ that shifted and pulsed under my gaze. “Just plain eww, Dame.”
“We cannot hide from them in the forest. We have to make our way to the plateau there,” she pointed out ahead of us, to where the road led.
I waved a hand. “Dimensional magic is Interdicted. That’s not a real moon or stars,” I said of the pale orb hanging in the sky.
“It’s alive,” Arbor stated grimly, gazing at it with narrowed eyes. “Might be a true elder of the Mu, or something else.”
“Wonderful. We do this at speed, then.” Disks flashed out, everyone piled on as I popped my Wings, and I was in motion even as Helos faded us from visibility.
The simple Illusion wouldn’t fool the approaching giant mushrooms a bit, but it would fool the photosynthetic eyes of the alien trees and fungi forest. At the same time, Catleya strummed a haunting tune that accompanied the shadow-real mirror influences Helos also sent off in all directions, just like us, swirling the spores in the air that formed a quasi-telepathic sensory web and really mucking up who was going where!
For that same reason, we stayed below the tree-line and line of sight of the mu-spores, the titanic drifting floating fungi all pausing as they suddenly had the impression we had split up and were fleeing in all directions.
Their pausing made it easier to slip through gaps, even as Helos was manipulating the course of the shadows. Everyone made sure not to use Divinations on the massive creatures that might attract their eyes and attention, if not quite so dangerously as they would true Aberrants.
“There’s mu-ents within the forest!” I hissed, Detect Plants reaching out in the local area only, allowing me to identify the varieties of creatures and their capabilities when packed with an Assay. It was something Arbor was also doing, both of us dumping the data into the Markspace being maintained by everyone being in physical contact, Sif and Dame Adama holding onto Dread with me as I streaked along just above the ground.
“This is turning out to be a very dangerous place, indeed,” Haki commented subvocally behind me, everyone nodding at her words. “Mu spores do not raise forests on any healthy world. The death in this place has drawn them in, and they have grown this forest over the ages. We will have to purge the entire island.”
“Think Bhelemur still lives here?” Sif asked, refusing to let the scale of the threat disturb her at all. A hundred-foot tall floating mushroom monster was still a mushroom to her.
“The plateau is clear of mushrooms. Something does!” was Thor’s grim reply.
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I was busy leading a train of Disks, Gallivants and Ranthas all laying on their bellies for easier streamlining and maneuvering as I raced by and beneath the writhing and massive shrooms, stools, puffballs, and mounds of fungi, and around the wriggling tentacle-vines hanging from the grasping branches of the flesh-trees. Primus’ command of the air was keeping our disturbance of the floating spores impossibly small for our size, speed, and mass, and the forest around us was reacting to our passing only after a delay of a few seconds, a phenomenon that seemed to be spreading in all directions behind us.
Gouts of acid and expulsions of spores jetted down behind us. Vines whipped out, lashing between trees to form nets in our wake. Puffballs swelled and exploded too late to catch us, scattering more spores into the air. Layers of skin-flowers opened in various hues behind us, marking our trail and our path with disturbing directness, flying polyps that looked like vegetable butterflies with thorns for heads scattered into the sky in multiple directions behind us, like living alarms that intruders were snaking their way through the forest.
The mu-spores didn’t know which way to move to intercept us, and everything was moving fast, indeed, the alarms rising up only after we had passed, instead of in front of us.
I was avoiding any mu-ents in the forest, eyesight alone not sufficient to pick them from the rest of the alien vegetation. If the meat-trees were sentient (a distinct possibility) at least they were stupid and their senses seemed to be localized or keyed to the floating spores and seeds.
Very importantly, our Vajras didn’t let the spores stick to us and we weren’t breathing them in, meaning they really didn’t know where we were, only the confusion left behind as something passed by without touching or accumulating the spores.
Anything normal and mortal would probably have been choking and dying from inhaled spores by now, then harvested by the meat-trees for a meal.
I wasn’t on the road through the place, but I was paralleling it and had crossed over it twice now as I wound through the trees and stayed out of direct sight of the mus moving to intercept us. They weren’t that fast, but they could Animate the fungi, as could the mu-ents, and that was the next step, telling the forest ahead and around us to block us…
I saw the whipping of vines and the extending of limbs, and veered us right and lower sharply, ducking under an acid-dropping monstrosity for a moment to get into clear territory before uttering, “Clear the way!”
Helos dropped the shadows, as they were about to run into a vine-web and break up regardless, decisively turning and erecting a Blade Barrier ahead of me as I came out of the forest and up the road into the view of the mu-spores. Countless sinew-vines and meat-branches lashed out to one another and turned the whole world around us into a restricted path we could not help but be bound up in or hack our way through.
The standard Barrier spell for Clerics was actually made up of hammers, the Bladed version was more from the Aruan realm. It was still viable and worked perfectly well, forming a ten-foot cube of basically whirling saw blades of razor-sharp force right in front of us.
I drove into the wall of sinew and meat in front of us, and unnatural shrieks of somethings not animal screaming promptly arose as the whining silver arcs of the Blade Barrier tore right through them.
Everyone shut off their noses via the Masks at the smell. The spray of gore was mostly held off by Primus’ winds, and Vajras dealt with the rest. Vines and branches were screaming and spraying pus-like sap as they were ripped apart violently, snapping the holding limbs back and filling the air with jets of ichor and worse stuff as I just doubled down and moved even faster.
I noticed the soapy earth was heaving, roots threatening to rip up… and then such things stopped at the road of mu-hide, as if unable to touch or disturb it.
Jian, sitting at the back of the line, spun around tightly to look back and give everyone a clear view of the debris from the BladeBarrier burning and hissing with unclean vapors as it was rapidly roasted upon the surface of the road below us.
Obviously the forest couldn’t stand the touch of the path that was leading to the plateau, which didn’t mean they couldn’t grab anything walking upon it or flying above it. However, it did restrict the tools they could use on us.
“Hexars to the sides and above, turtle up. Stay low, Edge,” Dame Adama said quickly. Telekinesis gripped the Shields, and they snapped down to the sides and above us, forming a quick testudo around us.
Unsurprisingly, she was right on time, as a combination of spore-bombs, flutterwings, seedpods, ejected acid fountains, and bullet-like thorn launches converged on us from all sides, crashing into the adamantine Shields and erupting in chemical explosions, clouds of poison gas, acidic splatter, hungry drilling spores, splattering winged bodies, or ricocheting splinter-thorns unable to pierce through +V Impervious Bright or Blue-slaked adamantine, especially as the Hexars attuned to Acid rapidly removed any caustic properties from the alchemist-level bio-acids trying to eat us away.
Helos had mated the Blade Barrier to an Improved Invisibility 20’ Radius, so the forest still couldn’t physically see us, even if the mu-spores themselves could. Too, the web of sinew-vines and meat-branches was filling the air with spurting fluids, so there was no detail to be seen, as well as lots of lashing stuff spraying goo and worse stuff everywhere in pained reaction.
Ahead of us, the mobile Blade Barrier preceding us was completely unaffected by any acidic properties of what it was cutting through, rotating sawblades of force being rather nice that way. It was filling the area in front of us with severed limb fragments that this particular configuration of blades just so happened to channel to all sides of us rather than into the middle, and I was basically locked into following the road at this point.
The forest began to close in ahead of us, the towering giant fungi and meat trees moving in to overshadow the road and strike at us.
Oh, didn’t they realize that the Blade Barrier in front of me was actually supposed to be much bigger?
Helos grinned as the Barrier suddenly multiplied in size, as if it were released from a jack-in-the-box. It unwound in a spiral without getting any less dense, increasing to a twenty-foot cube in front of us, and then was replicated back over and around us, wrapping comfortably around our flying testudo in a spinning carriage of death.
It didn’t stop the ranged attacks from coming down upon us, but when the forest started swinging, the forest started coming apart!