Chương 332: AF Chapter 331 – Moar and Moar Hunting Practice

Rock to Mud is normally a pretty impressive spell in area, with basically two thousand cubic feet per Caster Level, which was often Shaped with Metas into forms more flexible than the default 20x10x10 foot cubes the spell defaulted to. When you Widen that, that volume increases eightfold, and the area gets pretty freaking immense. The spell had a lot of key uses. Among other things, 'Rock' was a misnomer, because you could totally use it on sand or dirt, not just rock.

It made instant pits, for instance, and could bring down buildings and walls, breach dams and earthworks, open up underground chambers, collapse mountainsides, and a bunch of other uses. Amusingly, the 'mud' it made, if Dispelled, did indeed revert to solid stone, so you can use the spell to generate rock out of normal earth just about everywhere. If you let the Mud dry out, you actually got viable normal dirt as the magic faded. It was a great spell in many ways.

Aelryinth used it to create raw material for Pyramids or building projects if there was no viable source of stone around, and it was very, very good at breaking cavalry charges. I always had demands for my V Slots, but getting VI Slots was helping that somewhat. Popping this from Mana and supplying the Widen from Valence gave me a lot of room to work with.

I first popped the ley line link the Deep had somehow managed to finagle for this temple, which removed the mana-reinforcement on the sand and coral construction of the thing. Staggered strips of shoreline went straight to mud, and the weight of the building and its walls tore apart under its own weight, breaking apart and sinking into the mud and disrupted brine of the spawning pool.

That drowned the young moarsmen in the pool and precipitated the fall of the whole complex down into the sand, sea, and muck I brought up underneath it.

"Nice," the Mick said, before promptly tossing me into the front of the Wagon and booking it counter-clockwise around the shore. The Aspirants had already re-boarded the Wagon and popped out the windows around the thing to watch the show as the Autobowers up top resumed picking off the moarsmen who were chasing after us, perhaps a little outraged after we'd taken out their spawn-temple.

The Blades of the Wagon were still out, and the Mick was anything but reluctant to use them, the Waveskating Steps sliding smoothly between whole groups of the moarsmen come to bug us and promptly butchering them on the razored vanes on the front and sides of the Wagon.

We didn't have much problems with the stuff in front of us turning around to chase as the Mick refused to just evade them when he had a multi-ton engine of death almost twenty feet wide totally capable of scything them down like bloody, stinking wheat. Still left a trail of vivus behind us as he raced around to the other side of the island. I kept busy ID'ing all the moarsmen around us, giving everyone plenty of targets to pick from and letting us know what was ahead of us.

Pointedly, that meant the real moarsmen who came into range, and if they were in the way, the Mick unabashedly altered course directly for them. A charge, impalement, Shield-slamming with Clan's burning Spikes, and then levering them aside as he kept right on going while multiple levels of razored Blades finished the corpses he made of them made it quite a viable tactic. I knew Kris was taking notes.

She'd put the Blades on the Wagon as a lark and a threat, the main purpose of the Wagon being to transport stuff around, not be an engine of war. Well, I could have told her about multi-use applications of levitating battlewagons, but it really hadn't occurred to me. Engines of war in magical universes could be brutally dangerous things on low-tech battlefields not prepared for them. It was something these moarsmen with no common sense and no ability to adapt were finding out in particularly gory fashion.

We blew through easily a dozen living moarsmen, which stopped a whole bunch of the shouted orders to the Summons. Without such orders, they ran about blindly as the rote programming they were imbued with at creation reasserted itself… and then they turned around and ran back to their points of origin. If the moarsmen at the back of the island wanted them to hunt us down here, they'd have to step up and start giving orders. I was totally ready to snipe them down when they did so.

We ended up in another pitched scrum with incoming moarsmen by the second temple, but amusingly enough, the walls of the temple were convenient for keeping us from being surrounded, allowing the melee Aspirants to keep a tighter shield wall and bring the moarsmen down much more easily. Point-blank headshots, Darts swooping through whole clusters of them with Kickers, and of course Lord Mick blatantly slaughtering everything that threw itself at him piled up the dead as fast as vivus as could Burn them down.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Then I collapsed the temple behind us, and devastated calls sounded from the distance as watching real moars bellowed out their dismay at having their spawning pool destroyed. Amusingly enough, it didn't inspire them to come charging down and add themselves to the slaughter of their Summons taking place on the beach.

The Mick watched the whole thing collapse, Bunita building frozen arcs of death in front of him as he asked, "Any reason to stick around?"

"We're done here," Sir Darvis confirmed, the incoming numbers of moarsmen having thinned out considerably.

"Everyone aboard, then get us back home, Lord Mick!" The Aspirants hustled back aboard as I covered them with Darts, the Autobows thrummed and stragglers pitched over dead. In an impressively short time, the Mick went down the beach, out over the waters, and headed for the Shoreward. Silver Magic shattered open a short-term path for us out of the Shoreward.

Very interestingly, there were still a lot of Aquatics in the radius of my Detect as the Mick accelerated north across the open waters towards Ithaenc in the distance. -We might have attracted some attention, - the Mick /observed as he lengthened his stride and really began to pick up the pace. The Aspirant Guards whooped at the speed he was moving at, the wind beginning to pluck at their eyes inside their helms.

"Most of them are real moarsmen," I informed everyone with Magevoice, snapping up a full flight of Shards, Pairing them, and unleashing two strobing Shardrays out into the waters at the two biggest packs of things converging on us. There was about a one-second delay, and those packs disappeared from the Detect, as I wasn't scanning for dead things out there. A couple of the non-moarsmen packs altered course in the direction of the suddenly and violently dead moarsmen, too.

Two more volleys of Shards, Echoes popping up, and eight more packs of moarsmen vanished, thinning out the screen tremendously. The opportunistic remorans who made up most of the other dots suddenly found many convenient targets for their appetites to focus on. The watching sleeches kept a wary distance, a couple breaking the surface to watch us race past, but they didn't even take a potshot or anything. Poking the bear got the bear to eat you, after all.

-That be the first time I've seen moars out in the sea, - the Mick /confessed to me, a fact seconded by Kris. -O' course, we ain't run out t' Moarsman Island yet an' made our displeasure known t' them. What do it mean here? - -Active support of the temples? We may have a horde of them try to stop us from returning, although that would admittedly be difficult… unless they can breach the Shoreward and flood inside.

But if that were easy, the creatures of the Deep would have used it pretty frequently to assault the places on land, - I /pointed out. -Unless they can fly or walk on water suddenly, I be massively unimpressed with their chances, as long as we know they be there. Although they might try t' get lucky an' drag me under while I be running do come to mind. - -The moarsmen aren't too bright and probably have not realized how I can sense them at a distance.

The sleeches know my Detects are pinging them, and that's why they didn't engage. It doesn't mean they can't move more of their kind into position for another run, if you remember how things went in the Channel. - -Right enough. Do ye think there's another one of the big bastards around waiting t' be eaten by its own? - he /asked thoughtfully. -I be wanting a kill o' me own, not one I be sharing with the remorans. - Said sentiment was silently /agreed to in the distance by Kris, we both noticed.

-Something is in charge around here, but there was a reason I announced I was here, with this very recognizable ride. I don't want to worry about a boss creature getting in our way. If they want to take a risk of becoming part of today's nutritious menu by coming up and bugging us, hey, let them take their lumps. If they want to sit down there where it's nice and cool, live and let live, I say. - -Fair enough.

I be still wondering what those tentacles pickled fer six months in Old Grory's brine would taste like, tho. - I /heard Kris smack her lips from all the way in the Direlands, and I had to admit that was a tempting thought. Old Grory had a pretty nice pickling brine. -Maybe we'll get lucky and pop a naut at the beach, - I could only /console him, and he just grinned and kept up his run.

We came streaking into the Ithaenc Beach settlement of the Aun, breaching the Shoreward and coming into safe waters without further incidents. We did get lucky with a flight of three remorans not being smart enough to realize that we weren't really viable prey, and they tried to make a stab at taking out the Mick. Bunita burned through one of them, one was impaled on the prow, and the third was chopped open by the extruded Blades.

That left us two to throw on a Disk easily and tow into the holding of the Aun as catches for dinner, paying for our presence at the communal feast that evening.

"Yes, we have seen the moarsmen out beyond the Shoreward, swimming by sometimes," Aun Lorpesco nodded. The senior Aun fisherman was happy to relate his experiences.

"They swim up viciously to attack, run into the Shoreward, and turn away in disgust. I do not recall ever seeing more than one at a time, however." He called out to his fellows to verify that detail, and some called back confirmations, a couple half-jokingly commenting that there was a truly massive moarsmen or two they'd seen that way over the years. They weren't pleased to find out the moarsmen had a Beach Temple on Xi Ru's island, and were delighted that we'd destroyed it.

A shaman spoke up and said that over the years the fishermen and Aun hunters scouring the beaches had prevented at least a dozen attempts to build such Spawn Temples just on Ithaenc, with somewhat fewer attempts on all of the other islands that had moarsmen inhabitants. The Mick had to wince.

"So, Freebooter Island will have them. It were crawling with moarsmen, even if they were nominally held t' the Deru Tree. If they could be corrupted by living moarsmen…"

"One problem at a time, Lord Mick." Freebooter Island was far more dangerous than Xi Ru's, which now had a huge swathe of its Summon Points inert and was much lower-Level, to boot.

"Also, I believe the slithyr tendrils were the biggest threat to the tree, and that Entity was no friend of the Deep. I daresay that any moarsmen on the island are going to be ripping the tentacles out of there by tooth and nail if they show up. What the Deep will do about the Tree proper we don't know."