BECMI Chapter 455 – What Shrooms Fear
Ultraviolet was a form of radiation damage when it was intense, an easy thing to protect against with long-term spells under the Radiant energies paradigm. Also, Masks stayed on in case of illumination changes.
“Don’t expose yourself unnecessarily,” I warned them. “Technological weapons can have extreme ranges.” I moved up to the entry and peered outside.
Nothing was growing out there. The surface had been seared extremely smooth, almost glass-like, as if subjected to a gigantic melting lens and then resetting without interference, even any bubbles that formed etched off the face of the land.
Off in the distant there was a bright light in the UV mounted on a-
The laser was a heavy one, cannon grade. The air flamed in its wake to a super-heated state, punching past me, above the others, and then bouncing down and past and over them through the tunnel off the slick stone of the corridor.
I looked down at myself, dusted my skirts off slightly, and stepped over to the side so the beam cutting past me wouldn’t go down the ramp if it shot again. “That was really unkind,” I announced to nobody in particular, gaze focused into the distance now. “Five miles out, there’s a circle of walled towers, looks like automated turrets. They shouldn’t even be able to see me!” I still had Vampire’s Veil up!
“That means they have biotech controllers,” Thor spoke up calmly. “Pure light and heat, that shot?”
“Yes, no harm done.” Thank you, Ritual of the Burning Heart, inherited. “That doesn’t mean they don’t have-”
The BOOM was the sonic barrier going apeshit. Primus took most of the air shockwave, Thunder resistance took the rest, and I was still picked up and bashed against the wall of the exit ramp’s housing.
In the distance, something exploded.
“Ouch?” I murmured as my boots almost hit the ground, getting my balance as the swirling air tossed everything around me but me. Well, my hair was a bit wild, because Primus liked to see my hair fluttering.
Everyone by now had stolen up to the entry just enough to watch what was going on, and covered their faces as the blast of wind tore past them.
“That was a railgun!” Sif announced angrily. “If it hits you, you’ll explode! What just happened there?”
“It’s a launched missile, not a living thing or acid or anything. Reverse Missile at IX sent it back where it came from, for twice the damage,” I replied calmly, mostly unbothered. “I don’t believe there’s a railgun cannon there anymore.”
There was a pulsing strobe, flashes of bright crimson cutting past and around me, like flashlights trying to cross me and light me up and doing absolutely nothing to me except redden my skin for a moment as they passed.
“If lasers and railguns are all they-”
The crash and snap of the particle beam boomed and broke over me like a chained thunderbolt driving for some hot electrons to the head. It was blinding, loud, and definitely going to reduce anything material behind me to wreck and ruin.
There wasn’t anything behind me, as I’d moved away… and my Lightning Hexar Shield had soaked in what was basically lightning damage before it could harm me, drinking it all in like a magical lightning rod and leaving me unaffected.
I wrinkled my nose at the fairly harsh ozone tang in the air. “I’ve a pretty good idea why there’s nothing growing up here, and the shrooms can’t manifest. Whatever is up there is keeping its entire arc of fire clean and smooth. Any fungi starting to grow up here gets glassed off instantly.”
“It’s using visual or radar to aim with. Can you cut them off?” Thor asked, while I stared at the firebase in the middle of this knocked-down plateau in the distance.
“Hmm.” I brought out my other Hexars, had them increase to full Tower Shield format, six feet high and thirty inches wide, a proper scutum. I also had them angle at forty-five degrees, while sliding one of their studs open and instantly covering the area in Eternal Darkness, also Upcast to IX+1 and covering a sixty-foot radius.
From the outside, an absolute dome of darkness centered on the Lightning Shield cut off all visible sight.
I had Devilsight worked into my Mask of Crimson Tears, so that didn’t affect me at all, an adjustment everyone else had included in their own Masks, such useful tools.
There was a flurry of flames and smoke trails jetting up in clusters, then turning and speeding right for my big black target here. Lasers strobed in, sank into the darkness, and faded away. Another plasma pulse reached out, thundered into the black dome, and vanished with eerie silence.
Since I controlled them Telekinetically with Funf, I just set the Shields out a hundred meters ahead of me, and waited as the warheads came crashing down.
There were four of them, and while I could have gotten fancy with TK pushing the missiles around, I instead just let them plummet in and watched them explode just above ground level, spreading out the effect of their blasts in a layered explosion of microfusion warheads, and an explosion that should have been absolutely huge.
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My Heat Sink Shield basically drank it all in. The missiles plunged into the black cloud, detonated, and maybe they got to hurl some missile parts and debris around… but all the flames and displaced air was sucked away. Basically all that was visible was some scattered debris falling in all directions away from the impact location, and a whiff of smoke rising out of and dissipating from the globe of darkness.
Even the whump of it was pretty subdued, and the ground didn’t even shake, for an explosion you should have been able to feel a mile away easy.
I kept the dome between us and the firebase, everyone rising and moving quickly behind me and the darkness there.
Hissing slashes of laser light flashed past our flanks, and all the debris scattered around to the sides of the dome of Darkness began to vaporize or melt down to smooth droplets that fused into the nigh-polished stone of this place with frankly astonishing speed.
Disks came out, everyone sat on them, and I spread my Wings again to start gliding forward at a steady pace over the polished stone, pulling them along.
“It just launched an aerial drone!” Sif announced, squinting ahead. I just moved the Shields and let them fall back, extending more domes of Darkness trailing from the lead one, lengthening the Darkness in a line that I swept inside before whatever biotech was in the aerial drone could spot us.
“This is an interesting tactic. Impervious, unmoving darkness which swallows energy beams and missiles like nothing and is racing towards you over the landscape. Might they mistake it for an, mm, a Sphere of Annihilation or something?” Dame Adama wondered aloud, the eyes of her silver and pale blued-steel helm-like visor of a Mask glowing as she looked ahead.
“The Shields are angled to deflect radar ahead of us into the sky, so they aren’t getting a return signal. They can’t determine our range, only the vector, and the line of absence doesn’t perfectly match the center of the Darkness, either.” I could see pulses of laser fire probing at the Darkness, but they were just mundane light, if intense, and couldn’t pierce it at all, while the Lightning Rod Shield was blithely absorbing any plasma beams being sent our way. “I am not sure Invisibility to Technology will work on biotech sensors or governing systems. The combination might be impervious to standard Invisibility means.”
“We need to move it from an illusion basis to an alteration version then, either actual camouflage by material, absorption, or routing the light and radiowave signatures around us instead of covering them with Illusions,” Helos said promptly.
“A mirage effect, instead of a ‘you can’t see me’ effect?” Catleya said thoughtfully, picking at her lute as she sat there. “I might be able to manage that by Upcasting a Camouflage spell of a sort…” She immediately started working on some very intricate and inspired fingerwork.
“As an alternative, just shoot the targeting eyes?” Molniya pointed out bluntly.
“If the fungi become aware the base is blinded, the mu spores will float up here and annihilate it quickly,” I acknowledged our berserker. “I expect we’d only have days before the entire area was rolled over and carpeted in fungi.”
“I take it we are expecting this technological firebase to have some resources that may be of use to us in clearing Shadow Kheper?” Haki asked directly.
“I’m hoping it’s got access to something that can take out that thing in the sky,” Thor pointed up grimly, drawing their attention back to it. “Any ideas on that, or just an Elder Mu?”
“Just an Elder Mu,” Chardon repeated his words, clearly highly amused. “Would that it were only an Elder Mu…”
“Things from Outside Creation can come in a multitude of forms. Even our Primes cannot claim to have seen them all,” Lunia explained slowly for the benefit of us mortals. “Whatever that is up there is clearly larger than any Elder Mu I personally recall, the eldest of which was about one hundred and twenty-three miles in diameter. Granted, the TRUE elders are supposedly capable of reaching the size of a moon, but things usually conspire to kill them long before they reach that size, given the Mu’s habits of seeding whole solar systems and turning them into fungi gardens, so the elders generally stay deep in space.”
“I’m sure they are just fine neighbors and tolerate organics of all types. Variety in the fertilizer and all that,” Sif quipped automatically.
“As whole worlds choke to death on spores and parasitic symbiotic transformations turning them into more fungi,” Thor murmured, blue eyes scanning the area. “We should be expecting perimeter defenses when we get closer. Hypersonics would be my guess.”
“And both disruption and shock fields, maybe force field containment. We haven’t offered any offense beyond their own returned to them, so they haven’t erected such yet, but the likelihood of them not having such defenses is low.” Not that such would stop Helos or myself for even a moment.
Disruption fields would literally vibrate apart those who passed through them, while lots of power meant covering areas in electrical fields was a totally viable defense, especially against swarms and the like, flash-frying and cooking those within it.
“Mechanical defenses also completely likely, although they may avoid munition weapons after the example Edge set for us,” Sif noted happily. “Biotech probable, of course. They may be revving them up for personal defense.”
“This ‘Bhelemu’ or whatever seemed to be influencing the upper worlds some, although not the oards…” Dame Adama pointed out.
“They may have been positioned there as guardians, hapless and having no choice but to serve. I would hazard that whatever is here either doesn’t want the Mu to get out, or didn’t want anyone else finding out about them and getting in,” Chardon agreed with that assessment.
“Well, look where that got them,” Molniya smirked. “And we don’t know how old this realm is, if it was created by someone or occurred naturally. Only that the thing in the sky doesn’t belong inside Creation, let alone some private demiplane isolated by an idiot or coward!”
“The removal of that entity is important,” Dame Adama shrugged simply, getting agreement from everyone. “Ideas?”
“Could one of the native Immortals handle the task?” Jian spoke up instantly.
“The Hierarchs could likely deal with it, but it might take several of them, depending on how powerful it is. However, if they pop up, they’ll likely purge the island, and that was likely what happened in the past,” I said over my shoulder. “There was no trace of any of this on the Other Shore. This place was purged and transformed into a darker twin of Kheper’s ecology. They wanted no remnants left. All that remained was a very large, very deep hole that the Mother Spider built her temple over.” I pointed emphatically ahead at the fortress. “Not even in the ground. No technology of any sort or its remnants. This place was purged completely.”
“Our Karma! Our Mu-spore goldweight! Our apocalyptic reaving of the terrain and slaughter of myconian lifeforms!” Catleya promptly sang out piteously, grinning shamelessly.