BECMI Chapter 523 – Elementary, My Dear Carnifex...
Pyramids were built up. Territory was claimed. The enemy raided with forces Gated in from strange dimensions mostly now, some Underworld connections, but no Fiends.
The Realms that had allowed any Fiends to be brought here no longer existed. It was a fine incentive for other Immortal Realms to utterly forbid any Gates opening into them for that purpose for the duration, and quickly sever any wormholes or the like that popped up naturally.
Elemental Rulers who allowed their minions to be dragged into this conflict died as well. Fire Elemental nobles were particularly happy to allow armies of their servants to go marauding across the mortal plane, burning everything and watching it all char. They weren’t quite as happy to be frozen solid into a monument warning other Elemental nobles to stay the fuck away from Nown.
That incidentally opened up positions within the Elemental hierarchy for my Sims who’d gone and made themselves alive and wanted other options of advancement… as well as other Elemental Grandmasters who had come after them.
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Time passes...
Two hundred Earthquake Spellglyphs went off at once.
They had thought they were clever, building creches underwater and thinking it would avoid our attention. Land, sky, seas… we were looking everywhere for them, all the time, but it made it convenient to ignore them, see if they were arrogant enough to believe we had missed them… and they were, even taking steps not to send out new Carnifex from them so they couldn’t be tracked back.
Twenty different Creches quaked and rocked and the Land broke beneath them as it fractured and collapsed down. Spells to keep the waters at bay didn’t matter much when they stayed put, and the floor dropped out under them.
But just to be on the safe side, twenty Disjunction Glyphs went off and popped all their Airy Water and Air Bubble and Permanence spells at the same time… as well as any standing Buffs on the populations of the Creches.
Like, oh, Contingencies.
The Interdictions settled into place third, even as the sea churned, tons of subsurface stone fell into new fissures, followed by mud and water as air boiled and bubbled and went in the opposite direction.
It was hundreds of feet underwater. The change in air pressure was as lethal as the water pressure itself.
Nothing escaped.
Hydromancers in Water Elemental forms flowed into the sites, Vivic Weapon on their limbs, and made sure to seek out the bodies and light them up, making them impossible to recover.
Thousands of Carnifex who were too clever for their own good died in the simultaneous strikes, the largest one-day kill of them in the fifteen hundred years the war had been going on. Many were young ones, of course, not nearly as dangerous as the elders who we’d been tracking for all these centuries.
Their Mind Blanks disrupted by the Disjunctions, Nown and I could see them clearly and easily, and made sure none of the bodies would be coming back… and also guided the geomancers to the stores of loot the Creches had built up.
Goldweight had never lost its importance.
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“The Seapurge is complete,” I informed everyone quietly, opening my eyes.
Cheers erupted all around, along with quiet curses and many clenched fists at the success of the operation.
“Two hundred goddamn years waiting for that,” Sif swore on behalf of everyone, the Empress looking rather relieved that the building threat was finally gone. Carnifex took time to grow and Level up ‘naturally’, and we weren’t giving them many opportunities to gain Levels in combat. There were plenty of things in the sea they could have fought, but doing so would have been noticed, word would have gotten out, and every non-Entropic race on the planet knew about the Carnifex and what they were doing by now.
Everything was just food to the Carnifex, and they could eat incredible amounts of food if it was before them. Likewise, they could starve for centuries once mature if they had to. So, they didn’t need to eat, but they WANTED to. Being able to feast on other species reaffirmed their status and place at the top of the natural order, where they ate everything, but nothing truly ate them.
Except Nown. Nown had eaten a lot of them, and never got tired of the taste, thoughtful Megalith that it was.
We had finally moved in on them because the full numbers of the Carnifex had been considering opening dozens of Gates to worlds with lifeforms that could only be called kaiju, and which in all honesty were environmental disasters waiting to happen. Huge numbers of gigantic aquatic monsters, some of which could definitely make the transition to land, would have been brought in. They would have devastated the ecosystems and occupied our attention for many, many years trying to kill them all as they emptied the seas of life, while the Carnifex just sat back and laughed.
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I activated the central Holo.
A lot more technology was in place now, especially after Dame Adama had Ascended to Greater God and made it very plain to certain Immortals that She was a backer of technology. The Immortals on Nexial who came out to take down the satellites we had ‘finally’ put into orbit were chopped right in two without warning, and those satellites stayed right where they were, finally giving us true working global reconnaissance and communication without having to take intermediate measures beneath their notice.
It also meant our aerial transportation went through immediate upgrades, and work on technology began to quietly accelerate.
The Immortals could only watch from afar as these events happened. In their eyes, this war should have been over centuries ago. The Carnifex should have done their work as Bringers of Apocalypse, and then been thrown back in their prison once again until needed, clearing the world for the Immortals to start over with.
But no, we’d survived, and all their worshipers were long since dead. Numbers of faithful of any of the Immortals only existed down in the Hollow World, and was basically restricted to those directly preserved from annihilation by Immortal Powers, which weren’t many. The Carnifex still went hunting down there for food and sport, after all.
The Brightmoor Empire had expanded significantly this last century after technology had kicked in. Despite the constant war against mutant things coming from the ravaged lands south of Olos and the continuous deployment of forces on other continents to enforce the borders of the Pyramids going up and keep them secure as we expanded, the core lands of the Empire were remarkably safe, healthcare was quite excellent, and having large families was a patriotic duty.
There were plenty of lands that needed to be redeveloped and resettled, after all. The whole ravaged world awaited resettlement, as soon as we exterminated all the filth that was being released upon it.
The continent of Erto was nearly secured after five hundred years of expansion, following the thousand years to absolutely secure Olos, the Brightmoor Empire, and Heaven’s Reach.
That still left us the huge swathes of Swahib, the incredibly dangerous lands of Rikada, and the frozen reaches of Arktos to clear off.
All of those territories held Creches, and all were now infested with mutants, mutates, horrors from other worlds, undead, and elemental terrors of various sorts. The Carnifex themselves were few and far between, but they still bred monsters, Created them from nothing, and altered and enhanced them for danger, fecundity, and aggressiveness, just because they knew we had to kill them all.
One more servant minion dead was just buying more time for the Carnifex to make more or dig a new hole for themselves.
“Two more Pyramids, two more months, and Delph will be considered done,” Thor broke in, a millennia of rulership looking good on him. Everyone was silent as he spoke, he and Sif by far the most dangerous Eternal Forsaken in the room. Eyes glanced my way, knowing who did the most work on those Pyramids, and who commanded the dragons who came to secure them.
“In three months, we proceed south into Swahib.”
Hoots and cheers answered that. Our southern border with Swahib’s depths was energetic, to say the least, and the Great Wall of the South cut across the landbridge for five hundred miles to keep out the constant attacks from the creatures there. Imperial soldiers were blooded on the Great Wall before they were ever considered for the Vanguards that had protected the Pyramids and their Domains from incessant, devoted attacks.
“We expect the assault that will hit the first Pyramid beyond the Wall that goes up to number in excess of a million creatures, goaded and sent north by their Masters to deal with us. The whole weight of the continent will be turned on us.” Which, it being the largest continent on the planet, was very much not a small thing. “However, we will be deploying with both tanks and artillery to secure the Domains, even if claiming land will still be done with infantry.”
Which was very counter-intuitive, but even with Dame Adama on watch now, the gods had their own rules to obey, and wouldn’t have to come down and stop Immortals getting antsy if the Immortals just stayed away.
The best way for that not to happen was to continue to make this a grand and grinding war of willpower, mortals rising to Master status… and almost none of them ever making it to Immortality, because no Immortals were lounging around down here awaiting aspirants coming to seek them.
No, we had Eternals, who just weren’t visible as such to Immortals on the Prime… and we didn’t leave the Prime unless we were going through a Gate to butcher intruding creatures on the far side, and that was rare, since we usually just severed the Gate.
If the creatures on the other side managed to open the thing again, THEN we went through and after them… violently, and not afraid to leave a fusion bomb there to emphasize how much we did not want them on Nown.
The fact the Carnifex could always find new violent worlds to draw inhabitants from to come over and wreak havoc meant someone or something was supplying them with names and places, as their own information should have been millennia out of date, and who would want to work with them if they could help it?
Nevertheless, there were massive presences of alien creatures, ecologies, and servants prowling Swahib, and even more dangerous ones on the hills and mountains of Rikada. The shrooms and cellulouses were particularly worrisome...
What existed in the Dead Magic fields of Arktos we didn’t want to think about right now, only know that the natural creatures of the icy lands around the southern pole had died off long ago, and things lived in the ice and snow that had no business in this dimension, let alone on the planet.
We knew that because it was where the Senior Forsaken and Eternals went to spend their time now, leaving the lesser fighting to the Knighted, the Masters, and the Aspirants to the Eternal.
Up on the icy plateau, realms of betrayed Dreams came and went, and whispers of a word that crossed multiverses swirled in the air.
Leng, and the King in Yellow.
The fact the Carnifex had invited the King here only spoke of their desperation and insanity. But it gave Eternals much to occupy themselves with, for Leng had infinite amounts of dream-birthed horrors to unleash upon us, too, and until the Pyramids got there, it could not be forced away… and it could certainly spread to the rest of Nown if it was not contained with vivic fire eating its people and fogs and denizens constantly.
Doing that over the last thousand years had actually made the dimensional boundaries around Arktos the toughest and strongest in the world.
But still, it was Leng. Corrupted Dream held all of Arktos around the Dead Magic Zone, wherein dwelt things of ice and cold in a land where magic held no power, and things as old as Leng held them at bay, promising to be total pains to dislodge when it was time.
We would get to them… eventually.