Chương 295: BECMI Chapter 294 – Iron Walls are Built on Stone

The fire giants were hiding to the sides of their hall in alcoves, under absolute cover and out of the way of the magical spells that had decimated them whenever they grouped up. The formidable temple guards clenched their red-hot axes tensely, knowing a fight was coming, but at least the foul magic of the little ones could not hit them while they were shielded behind stone!

The Walls of Icefire flashed up in the middle of the long approach corridor, and spread laterally to each side, hugging the walls forward and back, and not incidentally sweeping right through the fire giants taking cover there. Frost and Banefire drove into the jotuns with dreadful heat-sucking power, and now the entire hallway there was covered by the icy flames. Only the two underpriests of the central temple to Surt beyond were Warded from the anathemic flames, and even then the terrifying cold seeped through.

The cruel jaws of the Banefire amplified that tiny amount into cold daggers reaching into the flesh of the acolytes of Surt.

Bellowing in pain, the fire giants thrashed about, but there was no cover in the hallways to either side of the main gates at all, and all they could do was run desperately out of hiding and charge madly towards the figures that didn't even come to their waists, who were waiting down at the far end with Baneflames the hue of giant blood about their Weapons and accenting the magicks that gathered about their hands.

Still, the giants' shields were up, and could laughably bounce off most spells aimed directly at them, here on ground holy to mighty Surt! Mighty Surt, whose people, like those of Thyr, had been hunted and hounded across the Jotunbrul, and now, although the warriors had not been informed of this, were left only in this one place, the great volcano that was the heart of Tukhahjem, and the holiest of holy grounds of the God of the Fire Jotuns.

Here it was their empire had been founded, when they tore themselves free of Cloud and Storm and claimed their own destiny in flaming hands over the corpses of giants who thought themselves mightier and greater than Fire, and had paid the price for it. If any considered the irony that they were being killed off by beings smaller than they, as they had thrown off the Cloud clans that had thought to dominate them in the past, there was no sign of it. Certainly they had not used such foul magicks…

and the power of Charconadyx, the Club of Contention, to rile up conflict and strife within the ranks of their enemies, certainly did not count. The elves, humans, dwarves, and hyn ahead of them paused, and lightning gathered ominously about the hands of scores of spellcasters as the towering fire giants, the least of them sixteen feet tall and weighing in at over two tons, all of them bearing hundreds of pounds of weapon, armor, and shield, thundered towards their lines, an unstoppable avalanche in motion.

The giants raised red-hot Weapons high to cut them down and sweep them away, trample them underfoot, and show them the power of the Sons of Surt! Thunder roared, a hundred B olts of crackling, intensive power in the hands of spellcasters who'd gotten very good at eking all of the power out of every spell they could, and certainly when Casting alongside one another like this. The spells didn't hit the wall of towering shields coming at them.

Instead, to the startled eyes of the charging giants, the bolts went up to the soaring ceiling in the hallway, and angled to the sides at multiple vectors, bouncing up, off, past… and then they hit the doors of massively wrought and Enruned iron at the far end, whose Runes bounced the spells off contemptuously, like mere pebbles ricocheting off a stone wall. Down and backwards and at angles, right into the backsides and legs of the temple guards charging at them.

20D6 was the maximum limit of any individual Bolt of Lightning, but there were a great many of them there, and the shields at the front did absolutely nothing to stop the doom blasting into them from behind. The crackling, writhing power of all those spells dancing over armored bodies drowned out most of the screams and calls of the giants entirely. Plate armor meant to protect conducted the voltage around and through their wearers, and they had no special defense against the magic to stop them.

The ricocheting and dancing Bolts and streams of Lightning flashed by over the heads of those who had initially Cast them, while dozens of dark-skinned bodies with bright red, orange, and yellow beards and manes, now rapidly dimming to ash, crashed to the ground in twitching, convulsing impacts of meat and metal, the foremost of them skidding to a halt not ten feet away from the lines of Daisho teams. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The meaning of Daisho teams had expanded during the length of this last phase of the Jotun fight. Human and hyn was still the most common pairing, but humans and dwarves had also come about, and even elves and dwarves or hyn was not uncommon. Seeing a dwarven Wizard or Artificer fighting in tandem with a skilled human warrior or Paladin was always entertaining, and tended to confuse the heck out of giants, who were far too used to thinking of dwarves as the warriors, and elves or humans as the vile spellcasters.

I walked forward out of the line of troops, as the kneeling spear-bearers forming a thorn wall whose effectiveness the giants likely would not have believed rose to their feet.

"Butcher and drain them, vivisize them," I instructed those behind me, meaning use magic to speed the process up.

"I will open the doors." The Runes of Giants were likely the first and most established of all such things, but I'd had Sims spend two thousand years and more researching them, and was more versed in them than any Runecaster among them alive today. Giants didn't assemble great universities of learning to concentrate, exchange, preserve, and grow the knowledge of their people, after all.

My Sim Runechyld was actually probably the single greatest source of giant history and learning on the whole planet, back on the Far Shore. I knew their Rune Tradition better than any giant alive, and likely better than anyone but Gulguz Himself, the Immortal arse who masqueraded as the Patrons of both the Fire and the Frost Jotuns. Flensing and Bone River spells were brought up behind me, each targeting separate giants.

Tendons and sinews, hair, blood, hearts, and skulls were the limit of what we wanted from the giants, the rest to be vivified and fed to the Land. Necromancers cried into their blood wine at the loss of so many great skeletons and corpses, but ah well. A lot of people actually expected me to make undead troops out of all such things, and the fact I never, ever did rather surprised and disturbed them about how they were reading me, even after so long.

I certainly had no problems making Baneskulls out of them, however, which verified all their doubts about me, la. I glided over and past all the flash-cooked and still-steaming fire giants dead on the ground, noting that the separate tribes of Ash, Cinders, and Lava did not seem to have come about yet, this far into the past. Gulguz pulling off some breeding experiments?

There were indications that some of the biggest nifloids had been taken in by hill giants, and their children were now populating areas of the far north and west, forming a new race of stable ogres and trolls with far more giantish blood to them. Filling in holes in the array of monsters after the eradication of the beast-folk races left openings to exploit… Something else for budding adventurers to practice on for Karma, I reckoned.

And if they all were miraculously wiped off, let the Immortals come up with something original for once… The great Doors leading to the caldera and Fane of Eternal Ash within loomed up before me, Runes burning hot, ready to ignore me or defy me. I reached out to the Runes, grabbed them, studied the array at a glance, and clenched my fist. With a quiet hiss lost in the rumblings of the caldera beyond, the Runes on these great doors went out, and it would have immediately swung open for us to enter if I desired.

I instead waited patiently until those behind me were done. It was time for the final battle, after all, lots of giants waiting on the other side here in that Fane… and undoubtedly Gulguz was going to be present, incensed at me like He was. It was what it was, but it didn't mean I wasn't prepared for it.

The causeway was of magically-supported volcanic basalt, defying the ravages of the molten pool of stone all around. The air itself was at a thousand degrees, the gasses here were obnoxious and rather poisonous to creatures not of Fire. Probably to the surprise of the giants on the Fane watching across a half-mile approach over molten stone, I didn't immediately advance with my people across their causeway and thereby make a huge target of our numbers on open ground.

Giants could toss rocks a long distance, after all, and I was pretty sure had giant-sized ballistae and trebuchets that could cover almost the entirety of the bridge. It was fine. To gain the benefits of the Ritual of the Fiery Heart and the Ceremony of the Frozen Soul, you had to visit centers of Primal fire and cold, bathing in the magical energies there, then be subjected to the spells that would bestow their Blessings upon you, permanently making you a Child of Ice or Fire.

There were definite advantages to this status if you were following Elemental Schools. For Moorian Dwarven Wizards, the Ritual also immediately advanced their status from torhuv, Mountain Hearts, directly to chamhuv, Volcano Hearts, expanding their magical reach from pure Geomancy to at least some minor access to Pyromancy. Someone who was already chamhuv was instead promoted to brunhuv, Worldheart, with full Pyromancy access.

The Ceremony of the Frozen Soul had been much less popular, with the primary recipients being natives of Eislas from the Far Shore, who had to endure some really crushing winters. Elven hunters from the far North were the most likely to ask for the status, although a few barbarians I'd allowed back through also accepted the state, which would allow them to remain fully active in winter… and they were still going through one Hell of a winter there.

The only way to gain the benefits of both effects was to be able to Cast both spells yourself on yourself, no way to include others on this world for both, the second spell would overwrite the first. Thus, my status as a Child of Ice and Fire was unique and would remain so. It was also a move calculated to incense the giants, taking place right in front of them, tapping the power of the last volcano whose heart they needed to visit to complete the Ritual.

I initiated twoscore people into the status of Children of Fire, mostly dwarven wizards and humans, only two hyn and one elf. From the direction of the Fane of black magma poured into an edifice of worship, rocks hurtled up high, but came down well short of us, raising huge lava splashes as they hit the molten rock. Then it was time to advance.