Running down the enemy in Reality...

Briggs looked over the scattered dead around, causes of death quite apparent by the arrows left sticking out of them. Wolves seemed to be the majority of the corpses, targeted by archers ensconced along the steep hill above, and others likely waiting in ambush below.

The whole place had been trampled flat by a very large number of people, and the fallen corpses, hacked apart for meat before being thrown aside, showed they’d made at least one stupid attempt to get up that hill.

A huge, fresh gash running along the top of the hill seemed to have destroyed the sniping positions, but he didn’t see any native dead hereabouts… or rather, traces of them, as they certainly would have been totally ripped apart.

“So, what the heck made that?” he asked aloud, gripping Endure uncomfortably.

“I remember reading about a spell that Summons a massive pendulum axe from above, ripping down the line of a foe. Looks like they might have Summoned one, but it didn’t do what they expected,” Sama spoke up, watching Tremble flit about and start the corpses burning.

“Like someone told them what to expect, and they were looking for it,” he grunted.

“Yeah, the manifestation period is pretty long compared to normal Casters,” she agreed. “If you see it coming, getting out of the way isn’t terribly hard.”

“They have moved off south,” Estemar noted. “I do not know of anything in particular in that direction, we are pretty far out in the wilds. There might be tribes of natives here-?” he hazarded, thinking and watching bodies starting to burn with misting fires.

“Elven lands. The raiders are just roaming around looking for a fight at this point, maybe trying to track the Rangers as they withdraw,” Briggs mused.

“Who’ll lead them right into an ambush, if they can. Those people deal with invading raiders all the time. This is just a question of scale,” Sama agreed.

“You think formal military is here already?” Briggs asked, astonished. “That’s pretty impressive…”

“Elven civilization. Think how much magic they have laying around for stuff like this. They could do anything from Teleporting to Wild Rides to Wind Walking to get here, pumped up by Valences from the citizenry.”

“Yeah, and they have the lifespan to work on long-view projects, too,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Okay, so, they’re maybe a couple hours ahead of us, that’s less than ten miles for certain in this terrain.” He pointed at the hill in front of them. “Zip up and survey, ya masked swordswoman.”

She favored him with another toothy smile, and did just that. Estemar stepped up beside him to watch as she ran up the side of the hill as if it were level ground.

“Castle walls don’t seem like much of a defense anymore, Master Briggs…”

“They never were. Too many ways to get around them once you figure magic into the equation. They’re only good against dumb grunts with no access to higher powers.”

“I’d heard that there were Wards protecting the home I grew up in, and the Chapterhouse of the Order, but I see now how necessary they were, beyond the walls…”

“Aye, especially when you’re talking about the ruling class. You need Interdiction to stop things like Teleporting in, ghosting through walls, or people Summoning in stuff to kill you. You need Stillflight to stop things from flying over and dropping bombs on you. You need some sort of reactive effect to stop long-range spell bombardment, and you need something in the ground to stop burrowers underneath you.”

“That effect she is using… Cloudstepping Sandals?” he asked, watching the small figure atop the hill, looking south above the trees.

“Aye. And she’s coming down fast.” Rather than running back down, she simply leapt off the side, and instead of plummeting down, rather slid down the air, carrying herself away from the slope of the hill and back to their position. It didn’t really stop her momentum, but the way she tucked and turned in the air turned the skidding fall into a graceful work of art.

She did two turns around a tree, turning vertical momentum into horizontal, and ended up right before them, hopping off a skid-trail of clouds and back to the leaves and earth with a perfectly straight face, as if she did it all the time.

“There’s a fight starting to the south. We need to hurry.” Without another word, the two young men hopped up on a Disk, and she touched it before sprinting off. It and Forge zipped along after her, maintaining the same distance from her as they glided along after her.

“Hoi! Give a fellow a hand!” called out a wee voice, and Briggs looked back, to see the brownie Mikle waving from atop the Alchemy Cabinet on Forge. Briggs politely extended out Endure, the brownie latched on, and he calmly circled it around to drop the little Fey on Sama’s shoulder, where the brownie promptly made himself at home, standing in the Masspack on her back with her golden hair draped over him, grinning excitedly as she skated through the forest.

“What did you see, Sama?” he asked grimly.

“Black clouds from Summoning magic. You can’t really see them through the trees here, unless we get to a clearing.” Her voice was all business now. “I’ve the feeling they brought in some reinforcements.”

“Warp demons?” Briggs frowned. “We can probably handle the little shits, but anything sizable is going to be dangerous. Any idea whose?”

“All depends if it’s a secular or united warband. They could have any of them.”

“Mmm.” Briggs made sure Reach was in hand, in case there were any surprises along the way, while Estemar made sure of the position of his shield.

----------------

“Ugh. What happened here?” Briggs swore, as they dashed past a clearing. All the grass was dead and moldering, the air smelled of rotting blood and pus. At the center of it was a mound of skulls piled high.

“Blood sacrifice. I’m guessing Riggibuhl. Look at that trail of rot.”

“There’s a feeling of foul power in the air, like it’s waiting…” Estemar spoke up suddenly, looking rather ill as he clutched at his temples.

“Storing up power for a big surprise?” Briggs surmised. “They must know they have a fight coming…”

“Oh, they want to bring in something big, do they?” Sama sounded intrigued. “A Greater Sluggor would be pretty hard to deal with, even if it couldn’t stay around that long.”

“Disease is also a weak point of the Elven. There’s not much that can affect them, but if it does…” Briggs mused.

“Well, the sky isn’t screaming, so they haven’t brought it up yet.” She leaned forwards, and began to pump her arms and legs more strongly. The wind kicked up as she sped up from her traveling pace, putting in some serious effort. Mikle screamed in glee.

It wasn’t like they could lose the trail. A swathe of ground a hundred meters wide was completely decayed, and rot was spreading in tendrils up the sides of the trees there. He could see pustules forming here and there, and unnatural tendrils were growing out of the soil in hues of purple and pus-yellow.

Estemar had to swallow as he saw the corruption eating away the green all around them.

“Every one you kill and send to vivus will get rid of a good swathe of this,” Briggs said under his breath, and Estemar nodded slowly.

Abruptly, Estemar took a breath and clutched at his head. “They’re doing something!” he swore loudly.

Ahead of them, the sky suddenly turned dark, even through the trees. A great foul cloud colored an unnatural purple and yellow swirled in the sky, and began to pour down to the ground as something big and unnatural was Summoned into existence.

“We’re going straight into a fight. The Caster will likely be at the back of the lines and not looking for us to come out along its back trail,” Briggs said calmly. They watched as Sama waved her hand, and Forge broke free, quickly slowing down and coming to rest within a stand of ferns to the side, outside the path of putrescence. “If he has guards, make one a Smite target and be ready to act!”

They both saw the trees clearing out ahead, and their Weapons were in hand as they broke out of the forest cover and into the long grass of a clearing.

It had been trampled flat and molded away in fast swathes. Ahead of them were dark lines of armored men and half-men, in the spiked armor beloved of their Patrons. To one side of the field were figures swathed in a purple mist that looked almost liquid, the land about them rotting away.

Silver flashes of light signified arrow fire coming down from a line of brightly-clad figures near the tree line. There was the flash of a fireball coming down on the misting figures, the low roar reaching them a second or two later.

But dominating everything was what first looked like a moving hill, and then was more obvious as a swollen, fleshy thing, bulging with waves of fat. It was moving with four stumpy legs that seemed like little more than swollen warts, but making good headway for all that. There was a bulbous thing atop it that might be a head, and it had two arms, one almost ridiculously small, and one swollen to the size a titan might enjoy, currently helping drag it along.

As it moved and breathed, yellow and purple gasses swirled around it, and from between folds and fat and out of bursting warts and blisters, small bouncing figures fell down, like little globes of almost luminous pus with legs and cheery smiles, bouncing and rushing towards the fighting taking place before them.

Estemar’s breath caught in his throat at the pure feeling of ancient, unrepentant, even jovial Evil in front of him. He wasn’t afraid, but the revulsion at the sight of it was something he’d never experienced.

“Yeah, that’s a Greater Sluggor, all right, letting loose its Pusboys.” There was a really bright flash as a Thunderbolt descended from the sky onto the huge creature, blinding everyone, the boom popping a dozen pusboys like zits, and spraying foul purple-yellow slime steaming in every direction.

In its aftermath, the Sluggor didn’t even seem to have noticed the lightning, and was hurrying towards the fighting line, where the complex melody of horns and shifting patterns of color had started to change.

Now Sama really pulled out the stops, charging for a trio of badly overweight and corpulent fellows in a Summoning Circle well behind the fighting line, with a couple overdone chariots drawn up in front of them to shield them from the eyes of the elves. They were laughing and congratulating one another and making signs of obeisance and submission to the monstrous thing waddling as fast as a man could trot toward the fighting, where it was doubtless going to break the elven lines wide open… and the elves knew it.

Briggs knew that on the front of the Sluggor, out of their line of sight, was a huge pair of jaws, wide enough to engulf a wagon, and certainly able to swallow anything whole here that got in front of it. Pusboys cheered and ran alongside their progenitor towards the fight, living chemical bombs that would spray both flesh-molting acid and horrific disease upon everything when they were struck.

There were two hundred yards between them and the Summoners. Sama covered the distance in about eight seconds.

The mages didn’t know what hit them. Tremble drove into the back of the neck of the guy with the most tats on him, came out his nose, and carried him forward. From behind him, Estemar leaned out, Briggs’ sure hand clamped on his shoulder as a holy light shimmered on his Weapon, while Briggs swung Endure out like a steel beam.

Doc cracked into the back of the head of what looked to be an apprentice or aide, while Endure shattered the skull of the guard there like an egg, inside his steel helmet!

Tremble twisted, and the head and body of the lead Caster went in different directions. Flicked Shardings whirled up Tremble’s length as Sama left the ground, easily hopping over the ten-foot railings of the chariot she picked, and the bodies of the two guards the young men had killed burst into vivus, along with the remains of the main Caster.

“Can you take that thing, Sama?” Briggs asked urgently, and heard her laugh softly as she landed.

“Yeah. Let me drop you off near the lines there. Paladin, you stick on his backside like glue, and anything he drops that’s still moving, you finish. Shield edge to the neck is probably the easiest, but don’t hesitate to use Doc if they can still hold a weapon.”

“Yes, my lady!” he said quickly, pulling up his shield and slinging it on as they hurtled towards the back lines of the Warp Reserves. That line was a hundred men long, and at least four deep. While he wasn’t afraid, he knew that it was tactical suicide to do such a thing, but Briggs seemed totally confident in what he was doing.

Sama veered off thirty yards from the back line, the Disk was set free, and delivered the two right into the back of the press.

Briggs leapt out ahead, Endure raised in hand, and Estemar sprinted after him, the wedge of the Katar Doc ready in his gauntleted fist!