The Power of Ten
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BECMI Chapter 140 – Yellow goes White
🕑 Added 2025-07-25 23:00:08 +0000 UTC« Chapter 139 | Index | Chapter 141 »
I looked at the mass of the thing, swollen on the fertilizer and bones of hundreds of generations of morlocks, fat and unhappy that it couldn’t seem to spread itself outside of this circle. I hadn’t seen any other cases of the stuff in the jungle, nor was I Detecting them now. I was guessing that the trees, in addition to being immune to psionics, could also sense it, and if a zombie tried to amble away carrying Yellow Musk, it got dumped on and fed the Quiliver stands as morlocks did the Yellow Musk.
Which didn’t mean the damn thing didn’t need to be destroyed. I looked it over, decided on my course of action, and began to weave my spells to get rid of this thing that was probably a horrible and alien god to the morlocks, calling on them to sacrifice themselves to create its animated slaves, yet forever chained by the uncaring trees that were immune to it and its servants.
Acid Fog wasn’t a spell I used a lot, but it seemed ideal for what I needed here, especially the fact that it could cover a massive area. I wasn’t worried about any kind of increasing damage from the spell, in return for which I replicated the moving ability of Cloudkill to it, allowing it to slowly flow over the ground as it did its work.
It didn’t have to be fast, but when it covered enough ground, that magnified the power of having a large area of effect spell, and I was working on a monstrous fungal blight a half-mile in diameter here in front of me.
Desiccation damage, derived from the other side of the PH scale, was what I was looking for here. This thing might be able to adjust to energy damage, but desiccation effects were horribly effective on plant creatures, including fungal pretenders, and they didn’t inflict energy damage; they tore water out of the targets and reduced them to brittle dust in doing so, quite the opposite effect.
Also, I spent nine points of Immortal Power from Dread to make this a very non-mortal spell, something capable of killing what could reasonably be called an Old God in other worlds.
I spent ten minutes casting the spell, keeping it slow and simple as the Holy Widened Vivic Immortal Plant-bane Withering Fog gathered slowly and patiently into being just past the trunks of the Quiliver trees. The trees felt the hostility of the magic, and I saw their roots writhe and bury themselves slowly in the area at the merest touch of the water-eating magic.
Then the greenish swirl of the Fog was stretching for hundreds of feet at the edge of the clearing, like a strange mist that had gathered into being. Whatever the zombies and the creepers animating them were using for senses couldn’t see them, it hadn’t noticed the magic gathering with the slow and subtle Casting, and now the Fog began to roll slowly, slowly forwards.
It hit the first stands of Yellow Musk edging out inexorably into the sludgy soil of what were probably previous acid sprays, and I watched the entire mass of the thing ripple from over two hundred feet in the air, yellows darkening to browns or shooting to whites in sudden alarms.
Zombies standing guard caught in the mist had the creepers winding about them fairly explode as the water was torn from them and all the magic went hunting for them, nasty Kickers feasting on Yellow Musk.
This thing was definitely not-Good, Aura a malevolent and self-concerned Purple of violet alien hues and mauve thoughts, run through with rotting Black here and there just to stain the whole mess. It naturally probably thought the whole process was perfectly normal and its space on the hierarchy of predator and prey exactly where it should be, but that was only with its competition completely repressed and devolved.
Duum and I watched the Withering Fog wind through the zombies on this side of the Yellow Musk and rip them into clattering, fleshless bones, dry and brittle, in an instant. The spores up above popped and evaporate almost instantly, whatever vestigial psionic power was in them making the top of the Fog sparkle and dance as Holy, clear Banefire, and Vivic flames danced and popped over the twenty-foot high wall of the stuff.
The very ground and mass of the thing was all Yellow Musk, and the Fog didn’t rise up to the top of the mass. No, it tore apart the ground with explosive speed, the wall of hefty, dense organic Creeper masses, buried encephalic nodes, pulsing nodules of quivering matter, and winding tendrils carrying sparking psionic power all falling apart like sand that had lost cohesion, the very landscape the Yellow Musk Blot formed collapsing in a wave of fungi-eating death.
I could feel the alien sensations as the Yellow Musk realized it was being attacked, and its body was simply crumbling away slowly in the face of the magic. Psionic power began to crackle and snap in the air as other zombies turned to face the Fog, but there was nothing they could do, nothing to fight and claw at, and all they did is hurl themselves to an explosive death as the Withering Fog sucked them dry and dropped brittle bones to the ground.
It was surreal, watching the Blot there collapse as the Fog advanced on it, almost looking like it was dumping itself into the pitiless green vapors and the trifecta of magical Flames at work tearing through the squelching wet mass of the Blot.
The Quiliver Trees around it seemed to shimmer and sway a bit as the psionic energies ripped through the air. The Blot didn’t seem to have any actual weather control, so it couldn’t blow the fog away, cold wouldn’t do anything to it, nor would fire. Absolutely dousing it in water might, so making it rain could save it as the spell would be saturated by the incoming shower, but that didn’t look like it was going to happen.
I was going to stay up here and watch as a thing that likely thought it was never going to die was reduced to dust and sand, just like the many, many bones that were being revealed and crumbling away in the wake of the Fog’s progress.
It did not escape me that the… let’s call it betathauma radiation I’d seen in the tunnel existed here, and who knows what that would do to lifeforms that couldn’t escape it over time. Mutate humans into morlocks, and give killer fungi self-awareness?
The Quiliver trees had shrunken back and curled up on themselves, but I was guiding the Withering Fog past them, so they were in no danger with their roots all hasty wriggled and buried. Of the Invulnerable World was a free effect for me here, and they were considered neutral plants, part of the landscaping, unlike the sentient Blot. They wouldn’t truly be harmed, and they weren’t targeted.
The Blot might or might not have known its own fear, even if it had sensed that of its countless victims, and might not even have been capable of feeling it. Regardless, telepathic screams and waves of alien, non-animal anger and desire to live, rage and cold disdain at the effect that was devouring all the parts of it rolled out repeatedly, vestigial effects breaking through my Astral Ward to let me know vaguely what they were… and every thinking creature within a mile I was sure was absolutely paralyzed or bleeding out the brain right now from those crazed and frantic telepathic waves.
Oh, it was trying to bring in reinforcements.
Duum calmly gained more altitude as creatures began to swarm in, the vibrations of their progress setting off the acid rain from the trees, larger airborne bugs getting squirted out of the air and falling down onto the trees… whose surfaces turned out to be sticky, and the dissolving corpses dropped nicely into the sponge-like holes that covered them. Given the numbers that were soon peppering them, the trees were going to be feeding very well both on their base and their trunks.
The swarms of bugs and lower-life forms descended in a frenzy upon the Withering Fog, but the damage wasn’t restricted to sapient plants, Holy could work on anything non-good, and desiccation worked perfectly fine on flesh.
They flew, crawled, slithered, scrambled, and jumped into the sparkling, popping mass of green mists, writhed around for a few seconds… and dropped, their flesh crumbling off their carapaces and bones, both falling to the ground to form a new layer of nutrients for the soil, whenever the rain fell from the ceiling when the humidity rose too high and the temperature dropped, as might happen here soon.
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It took about six minutes for the Yellow Musk Blot to die. About minute five it couldn’t maintain control over the beasts it was bringing in, and they faltered, stopped, looked around dazedly, and promptly headed off in any direction but here. The Quiliver trees seem to have mostly run out of acid, and were probably engaged in recycling the amounts dripped on the ground, but the heaped and dissolving corpses of thousands of vermin and lesser beasts dying within reach of their roots indicated they’d done perfectly well for themselves, and would have nothing to complain about if they were sapient.
Well, maybe that I was costing them their uncontested food source, and now other things resistant to acid would be spreading in here to take this territory from them, but I didn’t see anything really getting rid of them at this point. They were simply too big, powerful, and formidable, although I supposed an acid-resistant mold or something might go after them.
Not my problem.
What was left behind was a great clearing of whitish dust, vivus having a field day with the raw, condensed life energy of the Blot’s massive corpse, feeding it to the Land and doubtless spurring some sort of massive growth that would cover this entire area in greenery tomorrow. Bones and chitin shorn of moisture were crumbling to nothing but fertilizers that would form a new soil base as soon as more organic material and water were added to the mix, something I doubted would take long.
And there was something revealed there in the very middle of the thing, its highest point, but that had only meant a longer fall into the Fog’s densest mass when it was struck below, and what remained gleamed cold and almost polished new, durasteel resisting the acids and psionic energies of the Blot… and if the glow from it was correct, it was likely the source of the Blot’s mutated existence.
Duum slowly flapped down from above the misting whiteness swirling four feet deep around the clearing. I noted the roots of the Quiliver trees surfacing to touch and sample the vivus eagerly, totally unsurprised by that. He glided slowly and carefully towards the plug of metal standing there, coming to a complete hovering halt twenty feet away with no intentions of advancing further.
Betathauma readings from it were now quite intense. This thing was a source of hard radiation, although nothing like a working fusion core, and definitely not antimatter.
Anguska Nuclear Ordnance 1657, Yield 500 Mega, Serv 2218 was etched into the metal around the base of it. Presumably there were supposed to be other things painted onto it, but those were all missing and gone with the paint.
A 500-megation nuclear weapon, sitting down here for at least three thousand years, by Detect Age.
And the thing was still viable. Detect Technology made it completely plain this thing was active, undamaged, and ready to pop off given the right commands.
Like, if it needed to wipe out a particular subterranean facility completely.
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Comments
Robert Drouin
The Immortal rules were that spells were basically 2 IP per Valence, multiplied by hostility of sphere (x1, 2, or x4 in cost), and different spells and effects were divided among the Spheres. Entropy was hostile to everything. I'm using 1 IP to overcome Immortal Immunity to mortal magic, or 1 IP per Valence to ignore mortal limits on spells. The second rule subsumes the first, so 1 IP means a level one spell ignores mortal limits and Immortal Immunity to mortal magic. Doubtless much to their surprise.
J B
How do you (or, does she) determine how many points of immortality power for a given spell?
