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BECMI Chapter 143 – Cavernous Elimination
🕑 Added 2025-07-27 23:44:27 +0000 UTC« Chapter 142 | Index | Chapter 144 »
It was a base 25 boosted Greater Shards, each dealing about 33 damage, added together in Ray form and the Kickers and Boosts stacked on top of the whole for another 100 per Ray or so.
Yep, it was about a base 5500 damage, and the Pierce All Defenses delivered it all to target. Then it was doubled via Disruption, and then it was increased by 50% because of the thing’s Vulnerability. Sacred Kryptonite, here we come!
Pairs of blindingly bright Primal/Divine Radiant/Force/Cold Rays blew through each set of its triple jaws and went down inside it. There was a pulse in the maddening waves coming out from the creature as the pure threat brought it out of its insane dreams to a very brief, very perfect moment of perfect lucidity as those Rays carved down and through it… and then they dumped all that energy into what was basically a perfect fuel for vivus and positive energy to have a feast.
For a moment, one might well be wondering if the sun had ignited under the earth. The final scream of the dreaming Annelid faded away in an Aria of transcendent light and harmony, devoured by choral light and radiant sounds, and just a secondary effect, washed a Disruption effect across all the undead that received those final thoughts and were enslaved to this creature.
Their detonations were like firework displays going off for literally miles around in pyrotechnics of psychically-conveyed Disruption blowing through them. Such didn’t harm the living, of course… but without the dreams in their head guiding them, the ignition of the Annelid blew Holy energies through them which basically did the same job as it wiped the Evil from their minds and thoughts… and conveyed Evil was all they had left.
I watched thousands of staring Beastials ignite like candles going off all over the place. Incorporeal ghosts, druj, shadows, wraiths, and spectres wailed and were devoured like a hand wiping steam off a window, while numberless moaning zombies, wights, and ghouls ignited and Burned away.
My sympathy quotient was pretty low, basically believing everything below was now much better off.
I kept the Raging Elements and Elemental Sheathe as Duum glided down, daring to open his eyes, as he’d been flying blind. They’d make me easy to spot.
Softly glowing white stone and countless corpses Burning down to vivus covered what had been sickly gleaming black rock painted with ages of Entropic energies. Indeed, the whole cavern was now pretty much glowing white, and a surface dweller could see without any difficulty as the stone bubbled and blistered, popping and peeling as vivus wormed into it and ate into the Entropic energies here.
“Belle,” I said calmly in Magevoice, “Mass Disk and get moving. I’ve a feeling this cavern isn’t going to last very long.”
Thirty seconds later Princess Brittabelle came shooting around the corner, trailing the entire company packed onto Mass Disks or their own Disks behind her.
Duum tweaked an ear up at the ceiling above and promptly swooped off to one side. A breath later I heard the dangerous cracking from up above and understood.
Belle understood it, too. A Dimension Door flicked up in front of her, and the entire line of Disks poured through it behind her for the few seconds it was open.
They appeared basically right next to me, Belle reaching out to grab Dread, and Duum kicked on the afterburners.
His wings doubled in width, and were filled with stars and bloody suns. Crimson streaks in a wide and blood swath followed him as his speed promptly doubled, and he shot across the sky as deafening creaks and cracks of protest started to resound all around us.
The degradation of the stone was naturally worst closest to the blasted glowing hole where the Annelid had died. With a somehow gentle roar that felt more like a sigh, that hole began to collapse in a crater all around it. I knew for a fact that the hole went down for probably twenty miles, and there was plenty of room for all that stone to go somewhere.
As the crater behind us passed two hundred meters wide and was expanding constantly as stone went white, crumbled, and joined the free-fall, the ceiling above it also decided it was time to let go.
The dust that was getting kicked up behind us was glowing white, but no friendlier to us as it billowed out and began to chase after us.
I held up Primus and blew a Gust of Wind at Twenty over and past us at an angle. Duum promptly cut across it and rode the oblique of wind pressure faster then the wind was blowing, holding wings and tail absolutely rigid in a trail of bloody light streaming behind us like someone had opened up the veins of a god to paint the undersky.
The destruction of the ceiling was expanding faster than the crater on the floor, due to the minor problem of literally having a mountain of rock above it. Stone was shattering and sloughing off, vibrations traveling at a couple miles of second to further make things difficult to us… but the entropic weakness was at least obeying the laws of physics and getting weaker with distance.
Everybody behind was screaming with fear and exultation at the speed we were moving at, and the speed death was chasing us. Hanvol got a Ward Wall up in an inverted V above us to deflect anything dropping down from up above us. Duum’s shriek of echolocation was actually audible as a single quavering Note amplified by the Sublime Chord into a vibrant sphere of colors around us, and tiny adjustments shifted his course as we vectored through at something like three hundred mph on the edge of the raging wind and disaster behind us, dodging the first small rocks that were being shaken loose from up above, or the glowing falls of vivic sand pouring down.
The exit to the cavern was a few miles from the center of the cavern here, which was thankfully not as large as some of the larger settled caverns we’d had to clear. Duum raced through the whole mess, banking left and right with uncanny speed and agility, and a speed impossible for any natural creature. Sandfalls and falling stalactites, plummeting boulders, frenzied air currents, none of it distracted him from the task of finding a way through the blindingly white fury being stirred up behind us as a ribbon of blood was chased across the undersky, and swallowed by the whiteness behind us.
We all saw the crack race across the ceiling above us towards the tunnel out, shedding boulders like falling rice, and knew we’d been outraced.
But, hey, Wizard here.
The Dimension Door rose in front of us as a black square. Duum tucked in his wings and we blew through it in less than a second, crossing nearly a mile of distance and into the tunnel beyond as the entryway behind us collapsed with the roar of a falling mountain.
Duum promptly slowed down in the much smaller tunnel, losing the bloody lights and showy wings quickly as the Gust of Wind was directed into a gentle cyclonic field to keep the new cloud of dust from catching up to us and covering everything again.
A Sound Bubble rose away around us, and suddenly the noise of falling mountains became gentle and thankful silence, so quick and rapid that the beating of our own hearts thudded like the caves were still falling upon us.
“I regret to inform you that the cavern ahead of us may have a bit of warning that something has happened behind us, and be coming to investigate odd events,” I noted in a dry voice to those behind me. “Fear not that you’ll be getting your share of combat today.” Clouds of sparkling white dust were still advancing around us, even thought the dust wasn’t getting through the gentle Gust wrapped around us.
“You just collapsed an entire city-cavern behind us!” Guy blurted out for everyone coming off the adrenaline high. “You didn’t leave anything for us!” he complained loudly.
“To be fair, Master Guy, I didn’t leave anything for anyone.”
Everyone craned their heads to look back, save those already sitting backwards and watching the show.
“Surely there had to be some loot back there,” he found reason to protest, and everyone chuckled immediately. He still had quite the nose for sniffing out goldweight for everyone in one form or another, which down here mostly amounted to crudely enchanted magical items to Burn away, or raw nuggets of gemstones or precious metals that would need to be processed.
If I had casually pulled tons of ore out of the stone in some places, or loads of gem-bearing stones, it was what it was, and nobody was complaining when I handled out ingots of gold, silver, platinum, or whatnot from the later results after smelting the whole down after some alchemical refining.
“Indeed. But now ahead of us will be the single biggest settlement of the Beastials… although we will be bypassing it to head east under the Ertobolle lands and those settlements. The last thing we need to be is surrounded with our enemies figuring out some way to stop Teleporting from working.”
They were the pet race of an Immortal, and there was dimensional locking in effect down below the mantle of the world, so they definitely knew how to alter magic to stop such things.
“That would be bad. A lot of retreating through stone while we ran away,” Buck commented thoughtfully.
“Correct. And our mission is to wipe them, not to be encircled by them and give them a valiant last stand, or die foolishly while fighting them,” I agreed coolly. “Let them wonder about what happened here, while we take the adjoining passage and continue with our own mission.
“We should be seeing combat inside another hour, and this time, I will leave most of the fighting to the rest of you.”
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Maybe they were taking enthusiasm from the Northmen above, but these Beastials seemed enthusiastic to get to close quarters and die valiantly in mortal combat, much moreso than most of the other tribes we’d run into. Sure, sure, the big ones always wanted to get to grips, while the medium ones tended to want to throw spears and javelins first, and the little ones wanted to gang up in clusters or slit throats and backstab and whatnot.
Here, everything liked to come screaming in berserk fury and try to brain or hack on us.
I was never going to be doing a proper Cleave Train, but I had Supreme Cleave trained just so I could smoothly hack through these small hordes with appalling speed, and I was quite happy to teach all who wanted to learn them the same things.
The Cleave Mastery proliferated rapidly thereby, as did the Hedged Thorn Stance that generated so many Attacks of Opportunity from the moving Beastials coming at us.
Of course I could kill more of them with just volleys of Chained Thorns ripping through up to 78 of them at a time, every six seconds, but that didn’t help my companions Level Up and work on their mass slaughter.
The Cleave Mastery line meant that the melee warriors actually were getting more kills in than the archers were, much to the astonishment of the archers, and horde tactics from the Beastials just stacked up the dead impossibly fast. All we basically had to do was erect a Wall of Fire or some other similar impediment across their charge path, making it impossible for them to encircle and thus overrun us, and the melee fighters could handle the incoming horde of the smaller Beastials without issue, while the archers easily feathered down the big lumbering ones that were the main threat.
I knocked a lot of heads. Belle swirled through the hordes of them, a silver and golden blur in her Armor, followed by over two dozen elves eager to follow her and reap their own terrible toll in the face of so many Beastials… and that was after they set up a gut-slamming field of Fire Reserves blowing apart so many of the charging hordes before even having to resort to their Weapons.
The Beastials fought, they charged, they died in savage valor, and we fed their misting bodies to the Land.
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Comments
Caleb McLaren
Woot woot! What a mighty blow!
