Chapter 6-174: The Portal is Closed

“Hah, hah...” Sergeant Hilda was hyperventilating, looking around and knowing she should be dead. Instead, she saw that the ground around the three of them was untouched, and the devouring fires that had turned everything around them to molten ruin weren’t getting within ten feet of them.

Centered on Warrant Officer Sama.

The pale-skinned, dark-haired Dame Grace just closed her eyes and issued a prayer of thanks to providence and Mithar for sparing them to fight another day. She had not known that the demon would blow up on death, but it didn’t change her resolve at all. Destroying it was something that had to be done, and perhaps one of the greatest uses of her life possible.

If there was one way for a mortal to sell their life, taking out a balor had to stand near the top of the list!

Sama stood up, staring at the white-hot center of the explosion, drawing a slight smile at the sight of the vivisized stone starting to spread out into the area and devour the demonic essence distributed by the explosion.

Then there was that hugeass Sword, eight feet tall, driven into the molten ground by its own weight, glowing with heat over there.

“Tremble!” she snarled to nobody in particular, took three steps, and jumped.

Tremble’s song was joyous as she hacked down into the jagged Blade, cutting a gouge a foot deep into the demonic metal, searing it with vivic flames, Blessed energies, Sundering, Breaking, Axiom, and Banefire. The mixed array of energies began to burn at the thing, devouring the Evil and Sin it was empowered with, and Tremble began to feed.

Sama left her Sword there to devour the balor’s Weapon. The Damned thing was a Zeks Sword, 72k of gold value, 144 goldweight. Properly Burned and Devoured, it was worth months of work and effort, and she was definitely going to make use of it.

“Everyone with a Named Weapon, bring it here!” she shouted out crisply, totally ignoring the dazed looks on everyone’s faces. “And do not touch that Whip!” she added, pointing at the barbed thing lying amid the molten ground, untouched by the blast.

Her Floating Forge unwound from her back as she walked towards the Whip, staying above the molten ground. She grabbed the meter-wide Disk from where it was floating, and without ceremony, used it to shovel the Whip up off the ground from where it was laying... and the Forge naturally lit up with its built-in Pattern for digesting magic items.

The Whip writhed, but could not escape the Forge. Sama walked up out of the blast area as the rest of the company gaped at her, set it on the ground, and started to build an empowerment Pattern around it.

“Smith! Put a Disk up above this! Everyone who wants some free empowerment for their Named Weapons, stack them on the Disk, and sit down to guide the power into them! Everyone else, stand watch!”

With a crunch, a certain Gritworks mini-gun was the first Weapon to come down on the Disk. Sama raised an eyebrow.

“I have just Named him Demonbane,” Hilda declared in satisfaction, while Dame Grace put her personal Sidearm onto the Disk as well. Threads of vivus were already starting to spiral up to the Weapons, so Sama just pointed for them to sit down as she gouged out the Empowerment Pattern in the soil.

With shouts, the rest of the women who had appropriate Weapons, berated into Naming them during basic training by Sama, hurried forward to deposit them. In the end, a dozen Weapons were scattered on the Disk together, and all their wielders sat down in the circles of the Pattern on the ground to guide the Empowerment.

It was enough to take each Weapon from Einz to Zvei. Twelve goldweight was not an amount to just pass up so easily!

Multicolored flames were spitting demonfire sparks on the massive Sword, while the Whip was writhing and burning in her Flying Forge’s fires. Sama looked around coolly, especially up at the sky, where the Shroudcloud was dissipating back into normal Haze.

There was still a line of chaos in the sky, and Sama’s eyes turned in the direction of the border.

Well, it looked like things were making trouble there, too. She would have to do something about that...

==========

Back to the present...

“Wait, you’re the Guardian Bitch of Portal?” I had to blurt out. Hey, I didn’t make up the name.

Sama smiled smugly. “Spent the rest of my tour there. Wasn’t as horrible as it could have been.”

With the border officially smudged there, and lots of fallout from the rupture in the Veil, Elemental and Fey spirits had started trying to force their way across the border, damaging the marker stelae there and trying to get free to wreak havoc as they pleased.

Into that bit of chaos had strode the Guardian Bitch of Portal, who had erected a Challenge Circle right between the border markers there and taken on all those spirits, one by one, using first a borrowed Sword, and then her own, over the following week.

Nothing had gotten past her. When it stepped into the Circle with her, she hacked it apart. Spirit after spirit, from wind walkers and air Elementals to wendigos and dream-eaters, had entered that circle to cross the border and had been hacked down. She hadn’t used vivus on them, so they weren’t perma-dead, merely returning to wherever to be reformed and reincarnated, but not once had she lost.

Standing there all night long, daring them to come down from the wilds of the north, and when they did, they died.

The Circle of Portal was one of the most famous Challenge Courts in the world now. The best melee combatants in the country went there to test the spirits of the north and stop them from passing the border. If they lost, or nobody dared to challenge the spirit, it could pass the border without further effort.

Oddly, none of the really powerful spirits had materialized there after Sama stopped coming, as if those challenging them were unworthy of them. It had irked some of the egotistical Dragon Warriors looking for a fight, but when they started to get beaten up by less powerful creatures, they finally realized what she had managed to do, and went home chagrinned and ever more eager to get stronger.

She’d always been Masked; the troops there never mentioned her name, and it never got into the media.

“You killed a balor!” I pointed out. “And you’re still not a Seven?” I had to ask.

“Karmic Award divided by thirty-four,” she replied. I screwed up my face. Okay, that was a heck of a divisor... “Which meant a metric arse-load of Karma got dumped on those girls, even the ones who were so terrified they fainted. They were taking Levels for a week, like it was mana from Heaven.”

“I’m missing something,” I had to admit. “Are your Rantha Levels really that pricey?” I had to ask.

She inhaled, her nostrils flaring in irritation. “There’s a limit where we have to pay stuff, and it starts at Six. A lot of stuff.”

“A ceiling? How heavy?” I asked.

“Epic pricing.”

I blinked, reviewed that, made a mental leap, and found my lips pulling back in sympathetic horror. “Oh. Oh, shit.”

“Yeah, oh shit,” she agreed.

Epic pricing was something theorized in the game, a ceiling mortal magic hit, after which you were getting into Eternal-Level effects. Nobody had been able to get a straight Weapon Enhancement above +V base; ditto to Armor, or Natural Armor, regardless of your Caster Level (and they used lots of method to boost it to test it out). Likewise, temporary Stat Enhancements were limited to +6, which was the CL 12 limit. You could get ‘effective’ higher bonuses for Strength and Natural Armor by use of Polymorph Magic, but that was it... and overuse of that was another problem...

Aelryinth had verified the existence of the Epic Pricing via the World-Angel Urlhmenuus, as well as needing a post-Twenty to make something that could exceed the limits.

It was a cool million gp, 2000 goldweight, JUST to break that barrier for Enhancement bonuses or Slots on most items. For Stat Boosters... exceeding +6 multiplied the cost by ten. There’d been very few attempts to make mental Stat enhancers due to the side-effects associated with them, and even physical ones were watched warily for signs of addiction. Girdles of Giant Strength were about the only Items that seemed to have no major side effects...

“So, what have you got that’s exceeding +6?” I had to ask.

“Basically most Stats, for this Level.”

36,000 in comparative cost for +6 to her Stats, suddenly rising to 490,000 for +7. 454,000 for another +1. 15 months of patient investing in one Stat and nothing else...

“Mithar.” No wonder she hadn’t broken Six. If all this was coming to a head at this Level...

“One point of Regeneration alone was 90k equiv.” Same as buying a magic Ring of Regeneration, except nobody could buy that magic Ring, because nobody here could make Rings.

Then again, it was Regeneration. It kept her alive with a severed head. It was totally worth it!

“And you can’t break Seven in Classes until you do it in Race?” I had to shake my head. “Okay, that is a freaking tall order of a ceiling, Sama.”

“Yes.” Her toothy smile was back. “So, please, feed me Shroudzones before I head off to China. I have to break it before I go over there and wreck them.”

She had literally the opposite problem that I did: awesome Class Levels to take, and an endless appetite for Karma. I was being sent into all sorts of secondary Classes to maximize my efficiency of Karma, had a surfeit of Karma, and couldn’t Level up, either.

Both stuck and slow right now, for different reasons.

Ugh, so crazy. That was one Heavenly Racial Class she had there, and looking at the later benefits, I could totally see why. Those were just insane potential Stats...

“You alluded to Imprus having something to do with all this?” I asked, going back to her story.

“They figured out who I probably was, and one of their disciples in the service specifically tried to stop Tremble from eating that balor’s Sword.” She smirked. “The git screaming excuses about power sources and magic and study and stuff tripped, fell, brushed up against the Sword, and took his 10-100 damage for doing so.”

I flared my fingers, and she just nodded. Any enthusiasm for stopping Tremble probably evaporated with said idiot blowing up messily, and the officers in charge simply dithered on making a decision until Tremble was done treating a demon warlord’s Sword as a power-up, and the point was moot.

They hadn’t known how dangerous the demon’s Sword was, and they had found out in graphic manner. Don’t try to study the power of Evil, thank you, have a bad day...

“But, I was untouchable for securing Portal... and when they learned I could actually make magic Swords for the correct price, I instantly became prized material. I had officers from every branch of service requesting melee Weapons from me.”

“Hack all night when needed, pound all day. I bet those two years passed pretty quickly.”

“Yeah. The senior spirits would return every now and then for a rematch. Kept things fun, and the Karma was pretty steady, as things go.”

“Is Tremble fully sapient and talking yet?” I asked quietly. I hadn’t spent that much money on Einz or Clavus yet, because there was literally nothing for them to do.

“Yes!” piped up a soft stereo voice from behind Sama, barely audible. “Need more goldweight or Naming Karma, please!”