Chapter One Hundred and Seventy-Eight – Tens at Work

Thrice Way of Waters, -6 to opponents' armor or natural armor. Water always finding the weak points in a rigid defense.

Thrice Way of Fire, -6 to opponents' dodge or dex bonuses. Fire consumes all, erratic, unpredictable, your own movements used against you, just that little bit of randomness throwing off reflexes.

Thrice Way of Storm, -6 to opponents' abstruse bonuses, like deflection, sacred, insight, profane, luck, or other odd things. The wind and the thunder hit everything, immaterial defenses ignored.

This Vile Dancer had more then +6 in all categories: demonically tough skin, supernaturally coordinated, and +Charisma to AC as a deflection bonus.

The One Strike Charge avoided her parry, which meant base AC was all she had to stop me... and that AC was eighteen points lower then she thought it was.

She/it effectively dodged right into my path, I tore right through her aural defense, and Tremble at +X didn't find her supernatural toughness at all an impediment, carving a line through this Vile Dancer's face and popping off inside what passed for a brain.

Snake-bodied ultra-marilith went flopping, spasming as vivic banefire ate at her brains, and then there was that pitched scream as the End of her Eternity came.

The Land couldn't sense what was going on here and come in to feed, but that was A-OK. Vivic flames spiraled into the air... and instead of getting sucked into the bounding pillars, dove in and went into that marble pedestal following Briggs around, glowing vit der ubah powah.

I left the burning multi-armed half-snake Kali-wannabe behind, and hurtled towards the screaming, frenzied anthros going out of their minds on a very nasty convergence of alchemical immiscibility and psychotropic drugs.

That was okay, they were dying all the same.

A One Strike turned a Banestar stroke into a Penetrating Shot as I worked the angles, and if it was only seventy feet long, that was okay, as nearly a dozen of the packed brutes screamed and fell, chopped halfway apart right through their chests and that vital pumping organ. That created a nice walking path for me I could slip into invitingly, with enemies on all sides, and I began to Cleave.

The Firesword and Shadowknife were dancing through the four-armed Spiral Dancers, their Helices surrounding them in a wild blur of magic-purifying power. The Shadowknife's blades struck through moments in time, bringing their time to an end in a flash and flicker as he moved through them at and above the ground, his motions flowing through their dance as if they were his partners, not his victims.

They didn't even get to join the Firesword's dance. Weep reached out, and the power in their dancing died, the point shearing through them, sucking away the magic of life, pouring it right back out as annihilation. Vivic fire was consuming them before they could hit the ground as the Helices around his weapon literally tore apart the essence of them, and set it free.

Ancientaxe's Glaive had hewed down that overgrown Cyclops mercilessly, and the chimera that had come over to investigate had rapidly lost all three heads, now leaking on the ground while the manticore flung poisoned tailspikes at the Urukhar, which he avoided so casually it might not have been throwing them at all.

Over to the side, the main group had slammed into the main lines of the anthros, who were trying to gang up on them, and failing utterly.

Briggs was slamming everything in front of him improbably hard. It didn't matter if they were twice his height and eight times his mass, he crashed into them, through them, over them, bones cracking and organs pulping as horned and hooved bodies went flying this way and that, opening the way. His heavyfoot crushed them as he ran over them, caving in skulls and ribs with every step, and Endure bounced from here to there like it was made of rubber, never stopping its arcs of metal and bone-crunching doom.

To his sides, the two Dragon Warriors reaped, explosive impacts and cut-through strokes that could reach out twenty feet or more, sucking hapless stoned-mad anthros up into deadly sweeping strikes, exploding earth, icy sprays, conducting impacts, and multi-strike blows that sent bodies flying in multiple parts without fail.

The Brothers operated outside this template of brutal physical force like reaving scythes. Helices wrapped around Weapons, and harvested the magic of life. It wasn't fancy, violent, or explosive... but everything around them folded and died, without exception, swirls of black-pink-purple banefire following their weapons through arcs and curls, sweeps and lunges, and the Warped fell down went ugh! around them.

A fireball went off, limned with Banefire, right in the heart of the packed anthros. Flattened against the ground, the forty-foot sphere was a hemisphere closer to sixty feet across, and caught scores of them in the blast. Half of them died instantly, the rest charred and tottering from the impact, almost dead.

His arm a blizzard of motion, Noir Rabe picked those wounded off, driving the arrows of his Queen through their heads and chests with merciless precision. If he got a clean shot, he could potentially one-shot these creatures, but in their maddened state, it was unlikely. Those wounded but not slain by magic were perfect victims for his arrows, with no need to do other then shoot constantly and reap their lives.

Briggs slammed into a great bull-horned minotaur in armor, a commander of some sort, scar-runes seething with power carved all over his black fur and green scales. The Rutterhorn bellowed and breathed a toxic cone of gaseous acid right into their face.

It ran into Brigg's Source and evaporated. The bull-man was still exhaling when Endure came up under its chin, lifted it right off the ground in full extension, and then the Hammer came around and hit it in the side, jolting it sideways just in time to catch Master Chardon's Glaive in the neck and lose its head over it.

Wham, wham, two more minotaurs stumbled away, managing to get past the two Dragon Warriors as Briggs came out the back of the formation. They were still trying to regain their feet when the wildly mutated anthros in front of them deflated and folded over silently, and the Mindring and Bonescythe came right through to send Voidbound Weapons slicing through their thick bodies, the Runes carved into the brutes all going silent... and then tearing apart the flesh about them as they were disrupted.

Using Sir Harbrom and his cycles of Smites, Condemnations, Castigations, Imprecations, and Exhortations as the pivot at the end of the left flank, Briggs swung around in formation, and their flying wedge didn't try and get away at all, oh no. Over the carpet of burning dead, and the vivic flames getting drawn into the Pedestal, he smashed right back into the thick of the Warped. A lightning bolt roared with power and blew apart dozens more of them, and they slammed into the crazed Warped again.

---

The Shamans keeping a careful distance in the back gawked at the scene, even in their stoned-out haze. They started to bleat out more calls of power, magic conflating to come down in a killing miasma of bestial vapors and tearing spirits-

That the Helices of the Void Brothers tore apart before it could even form. The shamans all staggered at the sucking feedback as the power was ripped out of them and cancelled before it could even manifest, like a great black hole had devoured the energies of the Warp and left them with nothing.

They turned around, and the Firesword and Shadowknife smiled politely at them. Their bleating calls weren't heard by the frenzied mob of their clanmates, but then again, they didn't last more than a breath, anyways.

---

Sama crashed into the far side of the formation at a near sprint, or so it looked to everyone watching. That sprint didn't slow down as Tremble was just a blur, a beautiful trail of interlinked arcs and spirals shearing through everything around her non-stop, and she only seemed to speed up as she killed. Bodies already coming apart in front of her were smashed out of the way to get to the screaming fanatics behind them, filling the air with burning blood and gore as bodies collapsed in every direction around her... and then she was out the far side before the anthros even registered she was there as a threat.

Briggs crossed her path, spun fully around to send two bisected corpses sailing across the line into the stunned and reeling anthros shrieking there, and the flying wedge chewed through and out the rest of the far side in a bit more time then it took her to go through all of it.

Even the most stoned of these creatures realized that something really bad had happened. Reeling, the quartered mass of anthros, having lost more then half their numbers already, found themselves staring at the spurting, burning corpses of their own, some of them not even having managed to die even as they were burning away.

The demons were smears of white, arcing up and descending en masse into that glowing carved rock. Burning arrows didn't stop hammering the stoned-mad anthros as Briggs paused and turned around, everyone following with him.

To the side, a single masked girl who didn't come up to their shoulders had slid to a halt, the Sword in her hand Singing a Song at them that was cutting right through their drug-addled minds with bone-deep fear and the knowledge that their souls were being harvested... and not for Amourae.

Fanaticism was cut through like a razor, and they finally realized why they were going to die.

Ice pounded down with steel-hard hailstones over a massive area, crushing and cracking and finishing off the wounded, hammering at the rest. Burning arrows continued in non-stop, the Warped bleated and died.

Sama and Briggs charged together. There was no chance of them meeting, Sama was out the far side before Briggs hit halfway through the remaining mass, and then she just curved into the heart of them and began to sweep them up, Tremble's song never stopping.

Briggs' wedge never wavered in shape or form, sweeping back and forth. Those who were crazed and fought, died.

Those who screamed and ran, arrows chased, or Sama did. They couldn't escape the pillars of the Bloodyard anyways, and so they died.

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The corpses of the dead burned quickly, being shot up with Warped alchemy and stuff like they were, and the Warped outside the Bloodyard, and the Presences beyond the yawning swirl of the Rift, could only look on in silent fury.

None of them had died. There had been very few chances for the enemy to even strike at them before they died, and naturally there hadn't been any lethal wounds.

They were dealing with Tens, after all, and the Void Brothers and Sama were Deep Tens. Briggs wasn't, but he was a Grandmaster of the Hammer, a brutally strong Source, and there was no way to stop him once he got moving.

"Well done," Sama told them all, as General Moonriver helpfully directed their looting via magic for burnable and occasionally worthwhile plunder. The Brothers were far from too arrogant to collect it all, especially when it started heaping up. The four-meter Swords of the Vile Dancer and the smaller ones of the Spiral Dancers all made worthwhile loot, and the shamans, commanders, and minotaur brutes all had magic stuff worth picking up, along with precious metal ornaments. They seemed to have a fetish for nose-rings and horn-bands...

"My lady Sama," Sir Harbrom said, with more respect then he had likely ever shown a woman in his life, "May I ask what the harvesting of the vivus is actually for?"

"What, you think I'm just going to toss it outside the Bloodyard and let Mama Land come down and feast?" Sama laughed lightly. "Nope, nope. It's going to be a part of that." She pointed, and everyone turned to look at the nearest fort going up in the distance against the Ring.

Briggs caught it first. "It's fuel for the Obelisk," he said, pale violet eyes gleaming.

"Yez!" Sama reached out to pat the brimming white stone. "A couple thousand points worth. We need about two hundred thousand more."

"A couple thousand points," repeated Brother Firesword, as they all started walking casually out of there. The watching Warped Riftwards from them didn't dare to loop around and try to meet them. They had just seen what would happen to those who tried. "A greater demon. Over a thousand anthros."

"Yeah." Sama pointed up, and they all looked up, to see a sliver of blue sky had somehow opened directly above them. Just a sliver, however... but it showed that the Land was reaching in here. "Any fight in this Bloodyard, the Pedestal goes with them. Outside, the Pedestal is going to be out there. It can't take all the vivus, the Land is too hungry here, but it can take most of it.

"We are here to stop that Rift, close it, and send the Warp Gods back to their own realm, licking their wounds and having a good reason not to try this shit again. Sure, they're insane and will be back sooner or later... and if it works, we've given the gods a very good blueprint for what to do to really hurt them, if we do it right."

"That is a lot of killing," the Mountainhammer murmured, a strange light in his eyes, reflecting the crystalline streams of the Helices wrapped around his Hammer.

"It is, isn't it?" Sama's Masked silver-black eyes were like obsidian and diamonds. "And the wonderful thing is we get to keep all the Karma, and man, is there gonna be a helluva Glory Award when that damn thing behind us blows."

Heads craned to look up at the quarter-mile ripple of intruding reality shredding into their world.

"I have no idea what that is, but I definitely have to be here to see that," murmured Sir Harbrom, and everyone else agreed...