บท 214: Chapter Two Hundred and Fourteen – Some Gratuitous Carnage

Okay, an average lizard-man is a 2 HD scaled humanoid (lizardoid? Okay, bipedal sentient carnivore). They've got a decent bite attack (as in, it would rip off a normal human's face), and weak natural claw attacks. They're stronger than humans, but slower afoot, excellent swimmers, and prefer swampy/wet environments... and naturally there were subspecies with magical bloodlines that existed in other terrains.

Historically, large lizard man settlements end up dominated by gator-men, or Kroks, who are a head or two larger, and mass what an ogre does, with about the same strength, and have six to eight HD.

Adding dragon blood thickened their scales, gave them acid resistance for their Mire bloodline, maybe a breath weapon, and made them stronger... much stronger, if they were full half-dragons, with wings and everything.

Maybe they had 2-3 more racial hit dice, being part of a draconic kingdom ruled over by dragons. But in the end, it really didn't matter when they were slammed into by a wave of tricked-out Tens.

Yeah, I had a few of them behind me. Namely, fifty berserkers crazy eager for a fight. The North Wind. One hundred Ironblood axe and shield, bracing fifty elite dwarven spears, fifty elite elven archer/swordsmen, a score of gnomes on the Autoballistae, and twenty hyn infighters and hole-pluggers.

The order of battle was very plain and I had hammered it into them on multiple occasions.

The strong killed the weak. The weak ganged up on the strong. The really strong killed the really strong.

This was naturally completely at odds with what you were supposed to do, going up against foes of equal power for glory and proving you were better.

These foes were here to be slaughtered, not to be dueled. We were here to massacre them, not teabag them.

That meant the big berserkers with individual totems began a cleave-fest on the weakest of the lizardmen, one-shotting them and reaping on to the next. The big Kroks or mutated commanders were double and triple teamed by the pack-oriented berserkers, and taken down from multiple angles in seconds.

The dwarves crushed forwards in a line, a stalwart wall anyone could retreat behind, a moving juggernaut of punching longspears that let nothing past. Behind them, staying on their Disks, the elves drew endless arrows out of One More Arrow quivers, sparkling with various magical Reserve energies, and nailed them point-blank into the writhing walls of scales in front of them. Spears retracted, scaled bodies flopped and writhed, spears extended, and iron boots crunched into their scaled heads. Anything that managed to move past the dwarven spear line found itself instantly attacked on four sides by leaping hyn, and ceased to be a threat within two steps. The archers hardly bothered to glance at them.

My Ironblood kept the flanks of that spear advance clean, and swept up after the rampaging berserkers with unmoving expressions, sweeping past to rescue those held up improbably, finishing anything on the ground, and available to dogpile anything that looked particularly tough.

The North Wind roved and played favorites with the enemy, Casters being free in their loosing of spells, be it fogs to interrupt line of sight, fireballs and lightning bolts to open up lines, or Rays of death at specific Casters to tear them down instantly. A grizzly bear the size of a small elephant was sending lizard-men flying in every direction, Jhon and Talatha were cutting down the toughest commanders in seconds, Grym and Feist were shadow and fire in a driving wedge, leading my little sisters in a wicked, weaving dance of cutting blades, driving Spear, and roaring Hammer.

I was wielding Quaver, an adamantine longsword I'd also made at QL 55, but with a distinct catch. Quaver was +I Main Gauche, which meant she reflected the magic of the other Weapon to which she was attuned... which was Tremble.

This was because Tremble was flying around bestowing Cures on anyone who was too wounded. This was especially true of the Berserkers, who weren't too focused on defense when Raging away like they were. Through Quaver, she could initiate Transfer Wounds if need be, and I could simply heal them up with Healing Edge while on Cleave-trains. The berserkers were the main beneficiaries of this, as zipping Transfer Rays or AoE effects would wipe away the marks of ironwood spears, nasty bites, claw attacks, tail swipes, and hacking stone axes and clubs, and I'd be pummeled by the same... yet when I Supreme Cleave'd my way through a score of shrieking lizard men and buried Quaver in the skull of a Shaman who couldn't believe I could get through them so quickly, 20d8 of healing would inevitably wipe away the Health damage, and open wounds would vanish as fast as they were inflicted on me. Ow! Ahhh. Ow! Ahhh. Ow! Ahhh...

The berserkers were the only ones who weren't all Marked by me... although a few of them had evolved their viewpoints and taken that step into fighting for a greater cause, and helped lead the rest. Nevertheless, they were inside my Warlord Aura, and to a man, they all had Courageous Weapons, Greater Soulbound, and Furious, the last giving them +2/+2 while Raging, which was all they did. +5 To Hit, Damage, AC, and Saves was only a shade below +6, and with Tremble singing overhead and dispensing heals to everyone, their chances of dying were slim to none... which only spurred them to even greater frenzy when killing.

We'd learned that there was indeed a per person limit on Tremble's Cures... one per Valence Level per day. So, five Cures, from Light Wounds to Deadly Wounds/Mass CLW in step... or unlimited Transfers. If I was willing to take the hits, I could take it all.

In mass combat and with Healing Edge? Yeah, I didn't mind at all, and I had the Health to give a massive shot in the fundamentallum to even a dragon. When the big Shield Dragon Corgun, being ridden by Sir Harbrom, saw me take a 100-point six-foot long, scale-peeling and flesh-rending wound from him, and then Healing Edge it away in under six seconds, well, even the dragon was impressed by that... but not enough to stop him from ripping apart the mammoth-sized Behemoth Shadow Rhino that had given it to him back then, while I left a whole lot of wisps of Dire Shadow Rhinos burning behind me through the stampeding umbral crash it was leading...

And yeah, that had freaking hurt...

So, Tremble was taking over very active healing duties, and had a little sister who could borrow her combat powers, so I wasn't lacking for anything.

They outnumbered us better than five to one. Alas, it just gave the lads more bones to chew on.

They lasted about three minutes. The Mass Acid Resistances from the elves basically took care of their breath weapons from Ancestor Dearest, and after that, this bunch of buffed-up and impressive scaled bastards just died. The opening breath weapons of the dragons wrecked their formations; the berserkers got into the middle of them; Briggs, AA, and I blew through their commanders and Casters in a spray of scales and gore, and there were loud complaints that we weren't to do any more Cleave-runs before the main line smacked into the reeling scalies and displayed why you don't mess with an armed force of Geared-up Seven through Tens.

Tremble flitted here and there, healing any large injuries, while the Healers among the Elves dealt with the rest. I could Transfer while fighting and even during downtime, if Healers worked on me together, so I could even reload everyone's Soak as quickly as the Healers could bring me back up, converting Health Healing of the Reserve into the Soak Healing which Transfers could do.

What goldweight there was to salvage was quickly snapped up while the healing was going on, some blood harvested from the true half-dragons for power comps, and after about ten minutes of recovery, everyone mounted their Disks again, and followed after Briggs, AA, and I as we trotted up to the Barrier at a leisurely thirty mph or so.

-----

Nine hundred miles in a day. I was impressed despite myself. In a 100x temporal zone, that amounted to like fifteen minutes Outside. Behind us was an almost straight line of solid reality intruding in, reinforced by incidental vivus, and now anchored by this huge vivic feast of drac-blooded lizard men we were giving it.

"I can feel it growing," murmured Ancientaxe, looking up with his crimson eyes. The clouds above were distorting, a sign of reality readjustment ongoing. It would still take the full day and Renewal to get through the full spatial distortion... but the temporal shifting would precede it.

"Then we don't want to stay here." I pointed ahead of us, and felt the hum of expectation coming from those behind.

From the moment we entered it, we would go from 100x to 400x, and basically had a year to travel thousands of miles to the Obelisk cities and foil whatever the Hags were planning to do.

We'd just proven we could run nine hundred miles in a day. We could definitely do this.

AA grunted, and drove Zeitgeist into the wall of sliding time in front of us. Everyone tensed as his black and grey Helices spun out into the flow of time, grabbed, and began to twist, test, and pull.

In addition to being more energetic, the distortion here was also harder, but AA wasn't the same Void Brother he'd been a virtual year ago. His Helices moved with grace and precision from one point of temporal flow to the next, subtly twisting, distorting, crashing the irregular and naturally imperfect flow of time against itself, aided immeasurably by the weight of Creation streaming down a nine-hundred-mile Wake behind him.

With a grunt that brought a spray of crimson from his nose, he threw his arms wide. His Helices writhed, locked, spirals in gigantic concentric patterns flared across the Barrier, and he tore it open with an awful sound of plastic space and time being rent by applied Eff You.

"Rah!" Briggs brought his Hammer down, and everyone here was a Null or Caster of some sort, even if it was only Soul Magic. His Source Interdiction erupted out like a wave of invisible sunlight, forcing its way in against the power flowing out from within, turning the jagged edges of the breach into a smooth tunnel, pushing and burning away whatever forces were trying to keep it intact.

-UP!- I raised my foot, and all the Nulls in my Ironblood did the same. -DOWN!-

"FUCK YOU!" we all shouted out together, as we all Put Our Foot down.

The Veil blazed with our Interdiction, vivus blew through the dimensions and locked them down tight as adamant, visibly making the Casters twitch at the sensation of massive indomitable spiritual weight crystallizing all around them. The writhing, burning edge of the Barrier trembled and stilled as the Veil solidified far, far harder than it was before, and time and space seemed to spin around everyone for a second, before settling into something old and mighty and Proper.

Maximum length of a Forsaken Interdiction was one day. But we'd driven a spatial nail into here from outside, had a nice offering of vivus to make it stand and lock in place, and so that One Day was Real Time, not this unbalanced 100x shit.

Three hundred ninety-six days awaited us.

The view ahead was hazy with an early night, but we'd already seen a lot of this through the eyes of Void Brothers scouting our path and targets.

It was a fog-shrouded land, with all kinds of terrain. Forests hundreds of thousands of years old, both plant and fungal; blasted hills and desolate moors, improbably steep and high mountains, yawning chasms, howling cold steppes, and sun-scoured deserts. Whole areas swayed with interplanar instability to Dream and Leng, and the nightmares of unclean things lived alongside the bent and twisted descendants of the city and those who had come up from below. Empires warred, mortal creatures died, and timeless things looked on from the shadows and laughed while the sacrifices millions fueled a vast scheme beyond their knowledge...

And we were going to tear it all down. Mwahahaha!

I pointed. AA took point, Helices extending out, and the most powerful Source and Null in the world followed behind.

The nail in the sky grew longer behind us, a clear path to follow, a Wake of reality, if but the natives were fast enough to follow it. Who knew if any would take up the challenge...