Chapter 6-167: Showing Some Genius

Her base damage was 3-21 +77. There was 14d6+12 extra dice on the stack.

Her first attack hit deep, and adamantine powered through the animated earth and wood like it was tofu. Kinetic energy amplified by magic and ki and whole lots of other stuff ripped a huge howling gash in the creature.

She knew she didn’t crit, but still, 500 points of damage for the opening attack was a huge amount on the way to go to getting rid of this creature.

Despite itself, its forward momentum slowed, and even as the landscape was falling apart around her, she was dancing above the thing as some of those massive pseudopods started blindly batting for her.

It could tell approximately where she was simply as she cut in at it, going after the roots of its tentacles, and Tremble’s Blooding didn’t let it suck in extra mass and disgorge the injured matter to help it heal. The gaping gash in the hill she was riding on stayed right there and did not mend itself as she lashed out in all directions.

It was still moving underneath her, continuing its rampage even as it flailed at her. That sparked an AoO against her Hedged Stance, and she sent a tentacle flying and banefire burning into its bulk.

A tentacle slammed down blindly and missed her as she kept moving. The once-a-round Riposte AoO severed it and sent Banefires raging down its stump, tearing at its life force. Sword beats Fist triggered as another blow came in, and she sliced it away as she flipped over it; it might have reach normally, but she was literally right next to its base, so its reach meant nothing.

Then a blow slammed into her with tremendous blind speed and mass, 4d8+20 pounding through her DR, and it started to coil around her, met Tremble as Close-Quarters Fighting went off, and she cut it off and away, bouncing away over its mass as another lashing tendril came falling down to crush her flat.

The three cuts she ripped off in a Flurry of Blows tore massive gouges twice the length of her Sword into the bulk of the thing.

Seven more attacks went off, and by the size of one of them, which was fairly erupting with Banefire, she’d interrupted some sort of nexal circuit or meridian. Crits, yay!

That should be -1200 on the stack. Another tentacle clipped her as she hopped and twisted parallel to the thing’s bulk, was smashed down against it, rebounded back up and away as three different tentacles crossed and slammed down where she’d made contact with it.

The combat cycle reset and renewed, two of those tentacles blowing apart as she sliced down their lengths. A fourth one tried to wrap her up with serpentine speed, and she whirled around twice, slicing through thirty feet of it and blowing it apart in a spiral around her, carrying through to cross and carve its mass down, and sending Banefires raging through its body, massive ripples of pain finally starting to register on it.

The descent of the 20d8 thunderbolt from on high was expected... but her Rantha Resistance to lightning was the highest of her Elements, and her Vajra stacked on top for 62 points of damage reduction to a 90ish-point shot.

Soak washed away as it conducted the trailing lash of the current away and around her, her hair dancing with stray voltage.

She let one of the tentacles hit her and knock her away, pushing away with lightfoot to get beyond its grasp as the grounded lightning seethed over the thing harmlessly. She slid over the ground even as the lawn collapsed and caved in all around her, and the works of man fell into pits and holes reminiscent of the wounds they’d chewed out of the land.

She circled through the ongoing devastation as the now very pained, shuddering bulk of the genius loci tore through four houses in a row, reduced fifty yards of the highway to rubble, and with an ear-splitting crack, split the entire length of asphalt for a half-mile in either direction in two.

So good to have thunder resistance, she mused.

The noise was ear-drum-blowing loud, and the sky was going wild, multiple lightning bolts now descending every cycle. Houses were blowing apart, with propane and natural gas fires leaping for the sky in all directions. The loci seemed to be screaming in rage at the heavens as it shook and shuddered from the Banefires upon it, wondering why it wasn’t healing, how this could be happening to it, where its rage and hate was going to, and what manner of an unseen foe was assailing it.

“You should have brought your slave along with you,” Sama murmured to herself as her next charge drove into it, somehow threading a path through the flailing tentacles lashing wildly in all directions, and the layered Sun Strike went off with it.

This hit had the vivus in it.

Four readied tentacles slammed into her like a wall of earth and wood, and only her instinctive CQF prevented her from being wrapped up and crushed to a pulp, half-severing all three of them as she took a penultimate waiting Master One Strike to the face for x4 damage, saved versus the shock damage that threatened to gel all her organs and kill her instantly, and went flying in the face of 16d8 +80 damage.

There weren’t a lot of people on the planet who could have survived that hit, let alone the four she’d already taken earlier. It blew through the rest of her Soak, and she was already blowing a Vigor as she let the impact take her for a ride, rolling into a backflip in her easily hundred-foot arc to watch it die.

White fires pulsed within the creature as Feybane took the immensely lethal cutting kinetic force of the charge and applied it in all the deadliest ways, then leveraged those open with Banefire. Death whelmed in the air, poised and poured into the loci... and vivus rose up to eat it all.

The explosion billowed up as the crazed nature spirit died, tearing through the entirety of its body... which was also this entire area for miles around. With cracks so loud they would have deafened and knocked out any living human still here, the underlying vivic fires blasted through the entire area, ripped apart the living spiritual structure of the Fey creature, and reduced it to base energy for the Land, getting rid of it forever and feeding it into the natural energy of the area.

North America probably wouldn’t even notice one of its pimples going away.

Of course, it shattered the landscape like porcelain on concrete as it did so.

Sama hit the ground, or just above it, and promptly jumped again as it crumbled away beneath her. Ignoring the physical trauma of getting hit by the equivalent of four flexible I-beams, and her complete lack of Soak to deal with it all, she booked as the land began to fall behind her. As Sunday Lake started to rumble and flood in, sweeping everything away as the landscape began to fall and settle, the hills split, and the forests broke apart in dozens of new and interesting ways, and she was chased by the unhappy death and new life splitting between the shattering landscape as it began to spread.

A half-mile before her, her view leaping ahead with her Mask of Clarity, she saw the fighting was winding down there, a lot of burning Swords waving around. She grimaced as her Floating Forge came up out of her Masspack, spun out into Disk shape, and settled in behind her.

“Get ready to get on board!” she called out, and the Mark in Edward’s nasal cavity spat out a much clearer picture of what was coming.

---

With a shout, Edward hamstrung a worm-furred werewolf, and as its leg folded and its balance shifted, green-haired Lily's Spear Vines came in like a bar of steel, up through the throat and into its brain, releasing a nice discharge of mystic lightning as it did so. The werewolf convulsed, and without pausing Lily stopped, yanked her Spear out, pivoted as she flipped it up, and threw it.

The second-to-last werewolf, mismatched horns on its head and one arm a snapping pincer, howled as the Spear drove in under its upraised arm, rather interrupting the blow meant to take off Jonathon Koczenaz’s head. Instead, the Fire Dancer disemboweled it with one blow, drove his other Wingblade into the opening in its guts, and blew an Ignite the Flame into its torso, reducing its heart and lungs to ash in an instant.

That left one werewolf remaining, already deep in battle madness and not about to run away, despite the terrifying rumbles coming through the ground.

“Senpai is coming, prepare to get on board!” Edward shouted at them, racing to get Old Henry from the overturned plow. Ignoring his own blood from the gashes across his chest, arm, and face, he leapt up to the side, tore the door open, and cut the seatbelt as he grabbed the old man’s arm and hauled him out with a burst of chi. Throwing the limp elder over his shoulder, he leapt as far out as he could, and heavyfooted it up to the road as a whirlwind of perfectly-timed and executed teamwork ended with Kamiko putting the point of her slender Sword into the last werewolf’s brain and freezing it solid.

There were six of them; Jamahl was bleeding out on the ground. Alicia rushed to drag him up, trying to ignore the forest, the road, the whole damn world that seemed to be following Senpai Sama as she raced towards them along the road that had already been split in two.

“Space it out, I’ll stand in the middle!” Edward ordered, gesturing them to four corners. Larry took Jamahl in his arms, and as Senpai slid into the middle of them, Edward jumped up, landing squarely in the center of the meter-wide Disk where he had been taught more magical forging than he had believed he’d ever learn, cooked a lot of incredible meals on, and roasted marshmallows over.

The Forge didn’t flinch in the slightest under the impact of him and Old Henry. The other four basically jumped in, turning around in mid-move, and slammed their backs into his legs, all their ki combining together, locking everyone in place as Senpai shot into motion again.

They couldn’t hear one another think as the ground shattered behind them, cars screamed with the road as both fell away, and all signs of their fights descended into a deepening gorge carrying away all signs of the fallen.

“Potion!” Senpai called out, the long golden hair none of them had ever seen before flowing out behind her like a cape, not whipping about like it should. Lily took the flask that had arrived wrapped in that golden hair. She was closest to Jamahl’s head, and she popped the cap, wrenched his jaw open, and poured it down.

He was probably close to bleeding out entirely, but the gaping wounds that had cut through skin, muscle, and bone, and which she could see his liver and lungs through, suddenly drew back together, obscuring his insides from view. He stopped bleeding entirely, and everyone gasped in relief as he sucked in a breath and blinked his dark eyes open.

Edward had moved Old Henry to a cradle carry, and was radiating enough chi to force the wind away from around him in a faintly burning trail, joined by the mists, fires, and whorls of the other students. Lily was the only one without chi, but she had the same kind of Null Vajra that Senpai had, and the speed at which they were fleeing wasn’t even stirring her long emerald locks.

------

There were no other cars coming. They ran for at least another mile before Senpai straightened up and put her feet together, coasting forward on pure momentum as she turned around slowly, radiating stern and complete confidence. The Forge moved up next to her as she looked back with all of them at the advancing circle of destruction coming towards them.

While it was no less loud than before, and trees were still falling wildly all over the place, the landscape didn’t seem to be dropping and settling so much here. The six of them stared, their hearts in their throats, as the dropping landscape rumbled up towards them, eyes on that edge as it came right up to six feet away from them... and a great sigh seemed to fill the air all around, coming from little dashes of whiteness down around the dirt revealed below.

They looked right and left at the circle of devastation curving away from them, which now seemed to be settling back down as the ‘shockwave’ went back in the other direction, two steps from reaching them.

“Wow,” Larry said for all of them, letting Jamahl down to take his place as he stood up.

Senpai walked up to the wounded Detroiter, put her hand on his chest, and ignoring the massive bruises painted across her entire front and the nose flattened into a smear across her face, the Medallion in her fist glowed and began to draw his injuries out from him slowly.

Edward saw her release two more Vigors as she did so, and winced at just how much damage she must have taken to make that necessary. Then again, Jamahl was as tough as any of them, and whatever Senpai had been fighting must have been dangerous as Hell...

“Kill it?” the tall and very curvaceous Lily asked, looking back towards the town. They could see frothing waters in the distance as the lake had come in, and doubtless underwater reservoirs had spurted up to contribute their mass and clear out volumes of area for the landscape to settle into.

“Yes, but no need to tell anyone that. As a matter of fact, you probably don’t want to mention that you know anything about what it was or what killed it at all. You just ran for your lives.”

They all looked at her, at one another, and nodded slowly. “Except the Mazed Werewolves. We can mention them, right?” Edward asked calmly.

“Yes. Make sure Old Henry is taken good care of. A lot of people owe him their lives.” Sama reached up and put her hand on his head, and began to draw out his concussion and internal damage, a gash moving from one skull to the other and vanishing. The old fellow soon moaned and coughed and relaxed, but did not wake up.

“I promise,” Edward agreed. “What about the school, the students?”

“I’ll be setting it up again later. You’re qualified to teach the basics of the Ways and foundation swordplay. Take any of the kids who want to learn from you back down south and get a school set up there, start spreading the news.” She barely glanced at Lily, but Lily nodded the most firmly.

“Where are you going?” Edward had to ask, wondering if he should go with her.

“I’m going to be hunting some Mazed... and whoever told them that a certain Bane Stelae was there to be breached. As far as you all know, you don’t know what happened to me when I went out to save people.”

They all nodded together. No reason to let the werewolves know she was coming...