BECMI Chapter 540 – Grim in Dreams
That left the Ethergrim of the minor powers.
Based on harsh, unemotional alien logic that was precise, daunting, disciplined, and in the end rather predictable, the sort-by-color nature of the Ethergrim was suspiciously similar to the tsurlons, but the spindly alien creatures displayed no psionic talent. They all had magical ability, the common Reds having the ability of a Nine Wizard, the Blacks at Thirteen, and the Whites a full Eighteen, equal to archmages, with the rarer and specialized Blues, Greens, Yellows, Purples, Grays, and Oranges spread out between them overall.
They also had Weird Science all the way up to plasma-spears, force fields, portable shields, techno-magic Constructs, piloted eidolon suits, and they loved Summoning, Creating, and enslaving powerful beings and creatures to serve them, while also being firmly of the attitude that running away from dangerous creatures was proper and right, and sacrificing their lessers was to be expected of a great commander to preserve themselves.
They didn’t particularly like the Dead Magic Zone any more than we, and they definitely didn’t like vivic fire, which feasted on their spirits and didn’t allow them to reincarnate on the Ethereal plane like they were used to… but such a threat only made them more determined to take us out in some respects, and they vatted Red ethergrim by the zillions to march out and oppose us because of it.
They were clever, precise, and opportunistic, but they were also painfully dependent on rank and command, and taking out a commander could utterly paralyze whole squads of them if another one wasn’t in range to keep the lower castes under control and on target.
In the Dead Magic Zone, they really gave the infantry something to fight and oppose, with the eldritch energies of their plasma lances particularly hard to resist. Their absolute discipline in formations, enhanced by unleashing powerful monstrosities across the entire spectrum of potential thralls, made fighting them a particular challenge. They had excellent mastery of siege warfare on the defense and offense, and digging them out of their holes was never fun.
What they didn’t have an answer for was Eternal mages being able to use magic in the Dead Magic Zone, and so counter many of their worst attacks and schemes, including rift-breeches, virus bombs, mind-shredding brain bombs, molmech swarms, armies of multiple droid designs that included air power to meet our own, and the like.
Like the orbus, our end goal was less to eliminate them than to drive them back into theirMawland canyons of Leng, greatly restricting their mobility, and so keeping them occupied with defending against our own raids and disruption of their supply lines, production facilities, and vatting factories.
We were closing in on four centuries of battle before we finally locked them up in their section of Leng effectively enough that they couldn’t push out, but we still had to devote dedicated troops to holding that section of the Walls full-time. Strong raids into their dizzying and dangerous defenses were still mandatory to keep them preoccupied with rebuilding rather than raiding.
With the lesser races fully bottled up, the sealing of the Great Maws could commence.
Murder, and then Mystery were pressed back over the decades, enabling us to complete the second set of Rings and further press upon the border with Leng, allowing them less and less room to range, forcing them to spend more power to stay connected to Nown and reducing their reality and dream manipulation.
If we could’ve stopped the arctic winters, we would have cut at least two centuries off the time taken to do all of this, in the end.
But in the end, towering Walls, bristling Obelisks, obdurate Pyramids, and a great willingness to use mini and not-so-mini fusion warheads enabled us to bottle up the great canyons against whatever numbers they bothered to throw at us, the Nested Worlds’ production capabilities able to keep pace with the nigh-infinite numbers of the Leng hordes as needed.
Only Malice remained.
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Multiversal space…
Another day, another hopscotch across realities. I could only sigh to myself as I left behind a techverse where greater magical abilities simply were not possibly, and I’d been restricted to ki.
My passives had been useful and powerful enough to stay alive and get done what I had to do, and my ki strong enough to eject me into a higher Plane where I could shuffle myself along and out of there.
It didn’t want me there, anyway. The same laws of reality suppressing the greater energies I could touch helped to hustle me on my way.
The multiverse I was coming up on seemed to be fairly extensive in scale, my sense of these things improving as I kept getting tossed between them. Why Creation decided it needed so many of them I had to chalk up to Chaos having to explore simply ALL the possibilities.
Sure, sure, some multiverses had completely similar universes within them, but that was all part of the fun. This looked to be one of the big ones ahead…
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Breach Multiversal Wall, fueled by all eight of my Theurgies, swirled into place on me from Contingent Spell, a V+4 (+1) that was more than sufficient to open the incoming boundary as it swelled before me, impossible size matched to impossible speed, and suddenly I was in and through.
Find the Path at V+4 picked up Funf’s trail instantly, intersecting as it did with my original meteoric banishment crashing through this whole sphere, barely registering it passing through at that time as I carved out more of my soul to get the Death Curse off of me.
I was speeding through an Astral Plane of some sort, a transitory plane between lower, higher, and parallel dimensions. Detect Dimension at V+4 showed me bewildering varieties of realms I was passing. Many were very small and limited, others infinite in size and promising endless secrets within.
Magic was powerful here, but… striated, banded differently, familiar and yet different at the same time. Higher and Lower Planes didn’t seem a good description for how it was organized.
And… I sensed no local Heaven resonating with my Heavenbound Pact, although the existence of Necromancy fairly screamed Evil had a strong presence here, and Law and Chaos were playing their normal tug of war in the field and laws of magic, varying wildly among the realms I was passing.
No extant force of Good here. Well, that was hardly a surprise. It was more than a theme in many of the places I’d been to.
There were some powerful intelligences and entities hereabouts, but basically I was up and past them so fast, traveling at light multiples as I was, that I was about as important to them as a passing tachyon, homing in on the destination Mithar was aiming me at through the vagaries of space and time.
Distance closing in, warping in along a trail in parallel, speed dropping…
Heaven!
I felt the pulse of connection through my Heavenbound Pact, a concentrated realm of Good nearby!
A whole bunch of profound beings and realms seemed clustered around my target ahead, metaphysically attached and linked to my destination, including what seemed to be a nascent Heaven!
Somehow, it being extremely busy around my destination didn’t seem at all unexpected. So many times I’d been dropped right into the middle of something, even though other times it was totally random.
A lot of that attention was being focused around the entry point to the realm I was heading to.
I’d passed lots of other Astral Portals to the same universe, which had gaped huge and infinite behind them, balanced Elemental and Profound influences, possible the anchoring Prime Material Plane here.
Must be close to a destination world there. At least most of my destinations seemed to have been Prime planes…
I flashed and was past those Entities, their timesighting flashing them alerts of my presence only after I was already through the Portal and beyond their reach and vision.
Down to a blue world with white clouds… and a landscape that looked like a nuclear war had reduced it to ruin, which seemed pretty odd with the level of magic I was perceiving.
My course was taking me down to the southern (positive) pole, where some sort of dead magic zone matched the one in the north around a gaping crater or hole there. There was also a really nasty and familiar dimensional rupture overlapping the area, an incursion from a place nobody wanted a connection to.
Leng! The Nightmare-connected realm of The Yellow King, an Avatar of Hastur, one of the Great Old Ones of Mythos and something you did NOT want to mess with without a Divinity behind you.
Primus deflected most of the friction as I came down, but I was still aflame as I slammed down to the surface of the continent there at orbital speeds… and Featherweight blew most of my momentum out around me, while the fires blew out the ground beneath me and raised a ruckus.
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The meteor came down out of the open sky, plunging through layers of stinking clouds in a flash and impacting against the ground in a fireball easily a hundred feet in radius, blowing out and away from the impact point, sending Leng spiders, beastfolk, and some Leng ghasts flying and burning.
There were general call-outs from the spotters, as there wasn’t any mortar fire in that area, and it had come through the clouds, no missiles were due incoming, and we tended to save those for really big blasts regardless.
I instantly accessed the satellite feeds and records, but there was no sign of some meteor bombardment coming in over the last few minutes, and whatever it was, it hadn’t show up on any of the broad spectrum scanners looking for orbital strikes or pulled asteroids from deep space.
It wasn’t really anything I was too worried about, occupied as I was with dumping Skulldarts nonestop into scuttling hordes of Leng creatures in front of me, the Kickers off Dread making them really hurt, if not killing any but the weakest of them instantly. The silver of Moonfire was what really brought them down, residual damage buffed by Holy, Dread, and vivic Flames eating away at them long enough to do the job.
No visible record from the satellites meant magic concealing it or a transplanar arrival ending here at the last moment. Either could mean some very bad news, although that was a pretty light impact for the speed it had come down at.
I was keying out forty Skullbarbs a volley now, which was pretty impressive, enough to really keep an area pretty clear, and if focused, take down all but the toughest Leng creatures with one spell, which was much more impressive than having to rely on Reserves… although I could do that, too.
“What in the fucking Hell.”
I heard that Voice, and a ghost crawled right up my spine and turned my head around.
I think everybody heard the Voice, because a lot of heads whipped around to that impact point, and a lot of gunfire abruptly slowed and stopped, as did a whole bunch of the incoming horde.
Ignition.
A Pyroclasm lit up and off, erupting to its glorious full-sized hemisphere of Primal Arcane Divine flames in nigh an instant. It was immense, as big as anything I could manage, at least a thousand feet in radius. It rang with stylized black Flames like a starfield edged in silver, dripping golden Holiness, pale blue Dreadfire to Aberrants, multiple Elemental Kickers, and very, very hungry vivus.
And everything touched by it was instantly blazing with Silver Fires that kept the Kickers going, and going… and then it was gone, and everything was ablaze out there.
Creatures were falling flaming from the skies in multitudes, even before the point defenses could even pick them off. The ground was a carpet of writhing bodies Burning up with supernaturally intense Flames that had nothing to do with natural fires at this point.