BECMI Chapter 538 – Taking a Bite out of Dream
It took most of a week for Castle Doomrose to make it all the way down to Arktos. Most of the fleet, and even a lot of the dragons, went ranging out ahead rather than escort the Castle the whole way at such a slow speed.
They would prove to be a rather hard-hitting distraction. Our first initial push was going to be on the cephalid territory.
The squid-headed brain-eaters were nasty bastards, with psionic powers tied to the Far Realms, mind control, genius intellects, parapsionic weapon technology, enslaved servants, mutated pets and servitors, thrall races: the whole kit and kaboodle. Them and the cerevores occupied one of the nine sectors of Arktos, and we decided to hit them first.
Main reason? They would have the hardest time regaining numbers, so they’d be dependent on Leng giving them help.
Cerevores would be annoying, given how resistant to damage they were, but we had a lot of folk with adamantine Weapons now, so that wasn’t going to be as dangerous as it had been… and prismatic sabers worked just fine against them, too.
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The four-legged thing that looked like a pulsating pale gray brain with claws leapt for his face.
Laird divided the stone-hard corpse right in two with one cut, then continued on to cleave the head of the umber hulk behind it in twain, which also happened to bisect the next cerevore riding the skull of its host.
Most of the creatures trying to fight them were ceph-bloods, like the hagrenzi made from troglodytes and lizard-men, or the botchkor made from various oversized animals, mostly giant rats here, but some polar bears and wolves, turning them into ferociously cunning killers.
Monstrous and magical beasts? Almost always manned by a cerevore making use of the body, or being led by one doing so, exerting its will over them.
Snow serpents blasting cold at him were never appreciated, but the Leng Scorpions were not welcome, either. The nine-legged things with three pincers and forked stingers were simply not enjoyed properly by humans, and tended to get a lot of pulse-fire at point-blank range when their scuttling cow-sized bodies were seen.
If they were bigger than cow-sized, they got the pulse-fire at range, of course, being easier to spot!
A Reaving Wall of Fire nearly two hundred yards long blazed up, and promptly started sweeping north, raging and consuming everything in its path as it did so. Only the very toughest of creature survived the moving twenty-foot inferno as it raced away, able to last for more than a few miles and tearing a great big hole through the heart of the raging horde coming out to fight with them.
In return, arcing spheres of compressed spores were flung out towards the lines of invading mortal races, but the Rings of a dozen Masters waiting for such tactics glowed and altered the trajectory of the munitions right back down towards the hordes beneath them, causing powdery, lethal explosions among the incoming thralls that sent them convulsing to the ground, clawing at their mouths as their organs, or fungi tendrils, or blackened blood, or leaking yellow vapors burst forth, bodies flapping as mushrooms sprouted over them, dissolved off their bones, ignited in yellow flames, or other nonsense of diabolical alchemy.
The Mick wasn’t here so much to fight everything as to make sure nothing really dangerous wandered up and started chewing through the troops. Kids had to grow, and even using tech weapons, there was plenty to go around.
That one looked to be impressive. It was another purple-skinned squid-headed cephalid, but a head taller than the others, and it had six facial tentacles. It had a personal squad of hagrenzi looming about it, all taller than it was, obviously a personal guard team, and was gesturing emphatically while saying nothing audibly, clearly giving orders telepathically, while utterly disdaining at least three pulse-shots that slammed into it and didn’t singe its flowing puce-green robes in the slightest.
Ulathallid, he knew, one of the rare leaders of the race, spawned maybe one in a hundred from humanoid victims… victims taken from Leng slaves, since they definitely weren’t getting any from Arktos now.
Brave of it to show itself. Probably had a psionic Resist Fire up to resist the pulse-shots coming after it, and likely something against non-magical missiles, too.
It hadn’t managed to notice that it was in visual range of a Forsaken Eternal warrior who actually wasn’t too worried about crashing through hundreds of its minions to get to it.
But, no.
“I’ve got a big U in eyesight. Lightning mortars target a path and fire,” he barked into coms, following it with exacting range, which would be verified by spotter drones up above, calibration would occur…
Wump, wump.
The ulath’s lidless-eyed head jerked up, and it was running with its guards almost instantly, probably timesighting the shots.
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It was okay to miss a bit, but the key thing was them opening the way.
The munitions blew twenty feet from the ground, waves of force, shrapnel, and lightning crackling wildly in the blast zone as they went off… and into the explosive mess the Mick charged.
He had no problem finding his way, his tremblesense fine-tuned after thousands of years of doing this, crushing some creatures’ skulls as he Crushfooted by, impossibly steady and sure for the speed he was moving at… and the ulath wasn’t going to see him coming with its damn timesight, either.
He was out of the sparking cloud that had ripped him a path at a dead run, right on the tail of the ulath, who looked back and promptly ordered its entire guard to stop him as it realized what was chasing it.
The big ones were made from gator-men or lizard kings, the Mick noted in the back of his head as he came in on the charge, moving much, much faster than anything else on the field, and hit them like a cannonball.
The Hew and Finish combo killed them all as he butchered the first one, tearing right through it with strength that was closer to a Titan than a human, shearing it right in two, carapace armor and all, and Laird swirled and went through the other three without stopping on the Cleave Train.
Then he was out and past them as they fell in pieces, leaping for the ulath.
The thoracsid was probably supposed to take him by surprise in midair, impale him with four strength-draining limbs, and then start sucking him dry.
Instead, Laird was in exactly the right place for the nightmarish Far Realm bug-thing to impale itself on the tip in rather quivering disbelief, and then he hit the ground, pivoted and flung it straight up into the air.
A volley of automatic pulse-fire edged in cerulean Dreadflame punched it apart in mid-air nicely, throwing insectile body parts in all direction as the Mick kept moving.
The ulath turned around and let him have it with a Mindscream.
The horde creatures around him writhed and collapsed from the pure mind-crushing force of the blast of psionic energy, but the Mick only felt a dim pressure that might as well have been screaming at a lake. The Pscream plowed into his Null and vanished, and then the Mick was up on the creature, Laird was rising up and underneath its skull, and he brought its four-fingered body right up off its two-toed feet before flicking with his wrists and taking the skull off of its neck.
For some distance around, a number of the horde-creatures convulsed and collapsed as the ulath’s death throes were fed into their brains, sharing its agony from the Dreadfires about Laird as it died.
His Oathring Clan silently retrieved that skull and that of the thoracsid, as well as some interesting valuables on the ulathallid’s corpse, and tucked them quietly into his Masspack.
Vivus was already starting to ignite on everything around him. The unmoving, half-stunned horde creatures reeling from the death of their master made perfect targets, and were dying to rapid fire from the troopers on the walls behind him.
The cephs weren’t in best of positions, having to build the walls in long arcs below the various small canyons and hill trails coming down off the Leng Plateau. It wasn’t like the four Great Maws, the massive canyons that led down from the heart of Leng and could accommodate millions of creatures. The lesser Aberrant forces were broken up, scattered, and harder to isolate because of the multiple smaller channels in the lesser lands they’d been ceded for this fight.
The Great Maws were like gaping throats. These Maws were more like mostly-closed jaws with teeth jutting up.
Still, the Cryptomancers had put up the defensive walls with breathtaking speed, able to push up miles of forty-foot or higher walls in but minutes if needed. They took the cephs by complete surprise, as permanent fortifications were only used as retreat points for raiding Eternals to rest and recover at before this moment, not true defenses.
The numbers of men and gunmounts on the new walls, as well as air cover, indicated this wasn’t just a raid anymore.
Partway up the hill, the Mick looked back, and saw it there at the edge of the horizon, coming closer.
Tall and black and quite visible for miles. It had likely just hit the edge of the icy shore of Arktos, and was coming this way.
The cephs had already seen it, had no idea what it was, and could only conjecture as Castle Doomrose came closer.
The Mick got back to his casual slaughter, only showing off if something truly dangerous tried to get involved, and instead it died.
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The yellow-gray clouds that marked the edge of Leng’s influence on Arktos began to distort, and were summarily pushed back.
It was summer down here, the wan sun up all the time, and many an Aberrant didn’t much like that as the cloying, clinging shade of the clouds was suddenly and rather swiftly driven back, subjecting them to the illumination of the arctic always-day.
Cheers came from the men on the wall as the incoming hordes of creatures broke, mostly because the unblinking eyes of their cephalid masters could not handle the bright light and had to quickly retreat up the broken hills and passes back into the shadows beyond.
Most interestingly, the clouds were pushed back and back and back, and yet the boundary of Leng never changed in the slightest, despite the distortion being obvious and visible. The ground in front of them didn’t change, although it was perfectly plain that the arc of pressure extended for miles in both directions.
Leng’s solid manifestation didn’t change, even if the space it was occupying was actually less!
Still, the Castle’s Domain had managed to push that edge back, which brought us time to work.
Castle Doomrose settled down to the stone below it with a dull boom and crunch of stone giving way under such weight, automatically Shaped to perfect smoothness as it came down.
New walls began to rise up and extend around it as Master and Eternal Cryptomancers started lifting up the stone against the attacks that would be coming… and Leng would definitely be lending its might to them, just not as readily as if we were closer to the Great Maws.
The first Pyramid would go up just at the edge of the Castle’s Domain, forty miles from the shore, while Leng’s Plateau rose a hundred miles from that shore in all directions.
Without the Castle, we’d have had to start AT the shore, which would have involved making a third Pyramid for real effect.
With the Castle here, we could erect a second Pyramid just behind it, and then a third one right up next to the Plateau.
In doing so, we were going to put pressure on Leng and its borders, seal them up, and make it difficult for anything to get out of there and to the Prime.
Leng would fight us with numberless hordes of thralls, slaves, and monsters dug up from Dream and Nightmare.
Progress would be slow. Take years.
But we would do the job.