Chapter Two Hundred and Twenty-Three – A Bone to Pick

Still hanging in Zone 14...

"If I'm gonna uplift 'em, might as well go all the way, right?" I narrowed my eyes in the direction of the holy council taking place. "They've got good intentions, such as they are, and are very malleable. Last thing I want is some demonic butcher-god getting into their heads, right?"

"Truth. Gonna keep Hazé around to help with the undead?"

"That depends. I'm hoping she earns enough brownie points off of this to get that Perpetual Spell meta direct from Sylune. If she gets that, and her Soul Magic is to snuff... well, undead are the perfect practice targets, no? And we've got like a hundred-mile crawl of that shit to go through... I don't want to be hung up here that long."

"Especially since there are other zones of them to go through after we're done with the Obelisks?"

"I wouldn't be making sure everyone has the Baneskulls and Tokens all good to go for a reason, would I?" I snarked back.

Errant just laughed softly. "I wonder if Hazé knows how you're steering her around. She's already irked your mental Stats are so high..."

"She's probably figured it out. The key part of being the servant of a god is serving the god, something hard for us modern types to get into. She wants to go out and butcher things with magic like a super-powered gamer... but that's not what Sylune wants. By doing things which further the Cause of Good, she's suborning her mortal impulses to a higher cause, and Sylune is seeing it.

"She's making crazy Karma and beaucoup brownie points doing this. She just has to fight the urge to act like a gamer and stay the most powerful mortal servant of Sylune that we know of."

"And just maaaaybe she realizes that her talents are even more useful outside of combat then in it?" Errant ventured. Because, you know, we could fight like all the Angels in Heaven, but we couldn't Teleport like her.

Well, Tremble could, but nobody needed to know that. Tremble was floating out there with Quaver, adding whistles and bells to the music, which the apes really appreciated. "Says the man who can cast Walls of Fire all day?" Errant's smile was cheerful, indeed. "Even if it's only one active one at a time, that's still impressive."

"And given the numbers we're facing..." I just nodded to him. "I'm just so glad there's nothing like a lich among them. There might be some undead Knights, but I haven't seen them yet..." Nothing like a Death Knight lighting you up with a twenty-die fireball to say 'Hello, how are ya?' after all...

"That Wrath treatment working on the dragons?" Our five genius flying energy-breathing spellcasting not-dinosaurs were having a time of it. First some pipsqueak pseudonaturals half their size nearly butchered them, and now there were so many undead they were abusing their fundamentallums trying to strafe as many as they could... and not really making a dent in their numbers.

"I think so. Takes a solid half-hour of treatment to get it back to steady, but that's better than forcing them to go gorging. Isn't there some sort of mental disorder tied to overuse of breath weapons?"

"Apocalypse Gluttony. Pyre Dragons revel in it. Eat, breathe flame, eat, breathe flame. The more they eat, the more they burn."

"Oh. So, Riggibuhl and Klaw having a puppy together."

I tilted my head at that mental image. "You know they can hear you." When he said their Names. Hear him, not me. Him not Forsaken.

"And I'm sure they find the concept of having a puppy together fascinating." Naturally, he wasn't afraid, and they couldn't act directly against another faction's Warlock, anyways. We tunked gourds again.

"So," he asked, giving me the silver eyeball, "exactly what course gets us through them in only fifty miles?"

I could have come up with fifty miles being all they could stack in our path, but I just smiled. "The one that leads to the Obelisk, of course. Pretty damn sure there's more pseudos there, and the lads are just spoiling for a rematch."

With Baneskulls, Totems, and Bane of Legends to help out. Gear up properly, own the bastards!

"That could get really nasty if they are Knights," he pointed out helpfully.

"If the three of us have to go up there and hack them down by ourselves, we will. But I highly doubt the Hags wanted anything that could be a magical threat to them in charge of stuff. So, I'm thinking just Skeletal Warriors."

He rolled his eyes. "Almost magic-immune Nines to Twelves. I suppose it fits the theme of animated and forced to serve..."

"See, we're doing a great good deed, sending them back across the Veil," I chirped at him.

"Indeed, indeed, my dear young woman!" he agreed, speaking through his nose in a bad high-class pontificating accent. His eyebrows rose as Veis and her partner exchanged dips, chortling with one another, and he shook his head. We both looked at Amber, who had discovered that the primary visual sexual focus for the champa-ka were teeth, arms, and shoulder hair. Out came the alchemical dyes, teeth were being painted, shoulders curled and braided and colored, and clickers and jinglers being put around wrists. Add in some grass skirts in colors for the swirling motion, and when they suddenly spun into the circle, all the male champa-ka almost lost their eyeballs on the ground.

Amber started putting them through what amounted to a not-so-toned-down stripper dance, and the jungle erupted in pure primate appreciation...

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La la la, Zone 14, still grinding...

In the end, it took ten days of building up before they made the run for it.

AA led the way, as he had to, Briggs following and driving the Wake after him, and Sama had to follow and lock it down.

Behind her was Errant and Hazé, and a line of meditating Heavenbound. Meditating, because they formed an interlinked Wall of Fire around themselves over sixty feet across, burning a path through whatever remnants of the undead managed to survive the slightly-staggered carnage being wrought by the Forsaken in front.

Elder Arg rose over the center of the flying wedge behind them. They'd elected not to stick him on Haul, but simply have Hazé cast Enduring Flight on him. The delighted ape was zooming along two feet above the ground, arms spread wide, and anything that got past the three in front and the rings of fire was smashed to the ground by his bulk... or bulldozed and held in those rings of heavenly flame, cooking to nothing in mere seconds if it tried to fight.

Two Healers were on his broad back, making sure he suffered no lasting injuries from the fighting.

To either side of him, the Hellpoodles formed the outer edge of the wedge, being big enough to slam aside any of the man-sized undead, and fully capable of blasting down much of the bigger stuff.

Anything too huge, the dragons were strafing ahead of time, slamming frost and lightning into the animated bones in their own One-Twos, and the skeletons of great dinosaurs and beasts blew apart in great moving explosions ahead of us.

The center of the formation was generally clear, things collapsing from the edges were the only real danger. The circles of divine fire from the Wrath of the Heavenbound consumed all of the weaker skeletons as they raged past them, ready spears and arrows caught the leapers and lungers, and other arrows hissed out, whist-whist, as Reserve Casters let loose at short range in endless salvos.

The griffons were spotting out ahead, looking for the undead that stood out, big ones obvious, smaller ones trying to hide in the press but not escaping the eagle eyes of the griffons, who knew what to look for.

Sama's calm voice was issuing silent orders as the Marks-Up Display interacted with the Visual Files of the troops, and painted over their vision with a wild worldview of information from all sources. Positions of everyone, ranges, threat levels of the enemy, coverage and motion, coordinating missile, magic, breath weapons, following the terrain, scouting information in real time, allocating targets and converging cross-fire...

The more intelligent members of the group realized they would have cracked under the intellectual load of Warlording to this level of threat and efficiency. The Elevator Music of Heaven was the Elevated Music at this point, drumming out a dire beat which had long imprinted on the bipeds fighting, and now had claimed the hearts of the primates who were coming with them, now pounding on drums with beats that even had the undead wavering as they came.

Intimidate checks at -20 can affect even the fearless if successful, and at +55 to start, the penalty was still far from what the undead could withstand, orders of their masters be damned or whatnot.

The dire beat and endless Song resonated among many magic Weapons, which added their own hums and songs and beats to the melody. The bardic-types took turns with stanzas new and old, adding ever more to the lexicon as they beat a requiem for all these undead, who shuddered to see flames black and unwhite coming for them, and final rest for their tormented souls at the end.

They trembled in hate and relief and fear, and True Death came for them.

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Okay, it's the middle of Zone 14, finally...

It was made of stone, but it was still a tower shield, albeit one sized for a giant. Elder Arg heaved it up, and the massive fireball detonated against it, splashing away and to the sides, sparing the soldiers and apes behind the great gorilla.

Two streaks flashed by on either side of him. A pale white ray flashed down on him from a Sword floating in the air, and stole away his burns and the impacts of half-a-dozen boneshard arrows punched deeply into him, forcing them out of his flesh, and redistributing the wounds through Quaver into Sama.

Twoscore reinforced skeletons and wight guards blew apart in wrathflame explosions, positive energy from Healing Edge wiping away the wounds almost as fast as they were inflicted. Elder Arg bulled forward like a bulldozer, crushing and trampling the undead in his path, many of them made from fallen apes and great lizard men, his mailed feet trampling them flat with no fear of sharp points at this time, and exploding balls of Fire Reserves exploded non-stop along the sides of the furrow he was making.

A cone of cold flashed down one way in front of them, a bolt of lightning came down an eyeblink later, conducted out along a greater width than normal, and blew apart a whole line of elite corpses of great beasts gathered to meet them. The hellpoodles howled and cleared away the chaff to the sides, and the burning Weapons and fists of soldiers and apes poured up the steps of the landing towards the Obelisk.

Sama slammed into the formation of ogre and Jotun skeletons, weaving between scything weapons, crashed into the skeleton of a Tyrant raptor being ridden by a skeletal Bone Knight, and three strokes collapsed the animated beast and sent its rider into a free fall... which would not have harmed it at all if Briggs hadn't wandered up that way, striding through a press of dozens of skeletons that were exploding around him, and Hammer met skull on the way down, to immediate deleterious effect.

Elder Arg continued forward behind his shield, too big and strong for anything less than the skeletons of great saurials stop him... and those were the instant targets of a dozen fiery Rays coming in from all directions.

The wedge drove up into the central plaza, where the leaders of this place were waiting for them... some few of the Knights, and the twisted, distorted, tentacle-waving skeletal figures of cursed warriors beyond them.

Errant, Briggs, Sama, and Ancientaxe converged on them in streaks of banefire and vivic flame. The misshapen skeletons, each bearing three extra bony tentacles with spatial-shearing barbs on them, leapt to meet them with distorted, impossible agility... and found out that their otherworldly insight didn't work against these foes...