Chương 300: BECMI Chapter 299 – Heading to a Titanic Meeting

I tilted my head at the simple ingenuity of the infiltration plan Briggs proposed, while Sama arched an eyebrow and just nodded her approval.

"Clever," I acknowledged. The causeway itself would cover our approach, we'd just be coming in single file underneath it, rather than on top of it.

"The only way we might be seen is from below, and they'd have to be watching carefully." I could spread the dimple of our passage out to the sides. It would look like nothing more than a bulge.

"The stone has likely been magically hardened. Will you be able to Shape it?" Sama asked critically. I just huffed.

"We are dealing with an endemically lazy bastard who wants to show off but not do the work for it. The causeway is likely held together with Force magic, and the stones are reinforced specifically against fire, not destruction. A proper Hardening would have taken much too long for no aesthetic benefits. Double up on the fire resistance, and 99% of the problem is dealt with, volcanic basalt can withstand the other 1%." Sama grinned her feral eight-canines.

"The twat made it just like the causeway on the Far Shore, didn't he?"

"He is only imaginative and clever when compared to giants, and in truth a rather lazy fool, for all His boasting of mastery of fire and cold." I wasn't impressed by Gulguz in any of His incarnations. Anybody could get skilled in tearing things down. He was an idiot at building things up by anything other than violent means.

"He didn't even make the Arch of Fire. He tore this Portal open and built it up until it was a free-form catastrophe in the making, planning on turning the entire center of what was his old Jotunbrul kingdom into a Charland hundreds of miles across to His own glory. The Elemaster of Fire opened up Firejaws to swallow the flames and restrict the Archlands thereby. The two have been out of sorts for millennia for him daring to interrupt Gulguz's fun."

"He's definitely an arsehole of the first degree," Sama conceded.

"Let's get moving. Spell durations are ticking, and we don't get time to rest and renew."

"True enough!" And with that, I opened a new tunnel, somewhat wider this time, and with jagged slits in the sides allowing us to see the moat-lake of Fire and the Portal and its energy blasting skywards and covering the heavens in flame from within its tube.

I didn't have to worry about lava flows, sitting above the moat as we were. Any such pressure flows this close to the surface would have long ago worn down the stone and joined the general lake of lava. I did have to worry about smaller Elementals, grue, magmin, mephits, and other less powerful beings of Fire swirling and scampering about.

They enjoyed the sensation of the energies of their plane pushing past like we might enjoy getting hit with a hair dryer's warm blast at the edge of an icy field, so they were swooping and diving in and out of the uprush or into the lake below. They were fully capable of diving into the lava from the near-molten cliffs, climbing back up, and diving back in again for hours if not days on end in simple-minded fun.

I just slid by under their feet, ignoring the pattering above, and made sure to make no windows which just might register as having low-heat somethings flitting by to the heat-sensitive denizens of Fire. It was still some distance to the other side, but it didn't take all that long, and I could feel the excitement rising through the Marklink and such as the warriors looked at the lake and across it to the rebuilt Fane of Eternal Ash.

There were plenty of remarks about how it looked pretty damn identical to the one we'd trashed on the Other Shore, and which I was pretty sure a nuke had finished off here. I was also fairly certain it was going to have fewer Fire Jotuns, although the newer Lava, Ash, and Coal bloodlines would likely be represented.

On the other hand, even if there weren't a lot of Elementals interested in getting involved in Immortal affairs, some would doubtless be caught up in things, so we'd be seeing a lot more Elemental 'pets'. Happily, there were indeed ways of getting rid of Elemental beings that you couldn't use on giants, extraplanars that they were, so I wasn't too worried about that, other than their propensity to have more ranged magical attacks than giants would.

Giants just tossed things, which, given their size and heat, was a pretty good attack form all by itself. They just preferred to use stones instead of pre-formed balls or weapons most of the time, because giants find it pretty hard to get with the times and all. Was fine by all of us. Made it much easier to fight them when we didn't have to worry about magical missiles coming our way…

I came around the lake and underneath the causeway, butting up against the blocks of stone and the first arches of the thick road-like ramp/pier that extended out and across the lava to the great black iron gates and walls of the Fane of Eternal Ash. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. The bridge extended along about a hundred feet above the lava, keeping it on a level with the Fane's island out there in the middle of the caldera…

which also had its own secondary volcanic lake inside it, where sat the Titan who was directing all of this. The road was also a hundred feet wide, making it look massive and able to endure forever as it extended out over the flames. There was no magic to tamp down the heat, of course, but the stone was all Energized to Fire and then Treated to resist even the lava boosted by raw elemental energies.

It wasn't treated to ignore physical harm and damage, much beyond what being a multi-ton block of stone brought to the table. The specific treatment did have a greasy and uncomfortable feeling to creatures of Fire, sloughing off random lava spray and repelling the empowered ash falling regularly from the sky, leaving it nice and pristine, without Elementals crawling all over it, ash burying it, or firemoss or lavaslime or pyre lichens growing upon its black stone.

It was not designed to defy being un- Shaped and reshaped, although the feel of it was that lava/earthquakes would have just gone through it like a liquid wave and done nothing. In any event, I wasn't hurting its continuity, I was just molding it a wee bit deeper on its bottom side, keeping everything intact but stretching it out to put a yard-wide hole through the many stones, actually joining them together and making them just as strong as I did so.

Couldn't mistake where to go, Sama basically just pointed straight ahead and didn't change her direction. If there was something above us, twenty feet of solid stone was in the way and we didn't care. It took me only two minutes to cover the half-mile gap to the foot of the Fane there, but naturally I wasn't going to surface. I just kept burrowing straight in, looking for a place we could start disembarking that had some cover.

After all, I had several hundred fun-loving Adventurers, Rangers, and other malcontents along with me aching for some of the excitement they hadn't gotten on the Other Shore. Legendary treasury, the wealth of a fire giant nation, never plundered because it was bombed all to shit… Yeah, the money would be gone really fast, but it was the bragging rights, you know? And maybe another one of those Glory Awards for crashing the Arch and putting the bastard down in this timeline.

Sama pointed, swerved, and halted with her hand motions, her hair out like a web, reading everything. She slowly moved us sideways, and then whispered, "The walls are thick enough we can walk between the rooms. We'll have to get off the Disks." I stuck a Magic Mouth right where I was that would repeat the same thing to everyone coming in, and changed what I was Shaping from a round tunnel to an upright rectangle big enough for Briggs to move sideways.

Sound Bubbles so as not to be heard scraping were going to be key. I popped one that would expand along the walls, while in the Markspace, Sama began to erect a partial map underlaying the visible Fane above, to the great interest of everyone. It was soon plain we were moving through a series of chambers that had been hacked out of the magma by Jotun axes and hammers, not anything truly constructed down here.

The workmanship on the other side of the stone was pretty good, from what I could feel, but naturally there was a lot of stone between rooms. We did have to go up and down to get around corridors and hallways, but they also had a lot of room between levels to play with, so that wasn't a problem. The Sound Bubble I had put up couldn't go through solid stone, so it just expanded along the walkway I was making, meaning the warriors coming up behind me were as silent to them as the wind.

Even the foot vibrations were going to be lost in the constant gentle vibration from the roaring of the Portal vomiting Fire into the Prime Plane outside, so even feeling the walls wasn't going to reveal anything. No creatures of Earth around with Tremblesense to sound a warning either, pity them. Probably because they'd stand out to the Elementals around and be easily sensed, and mortals, well, mortals just snuck on by.

On the other hand, we could occasionally feel the tromp of giant feet hitting stone, loud bodies scraping against the walls, and probably could have made out voices if we wanted to. Discretion ruled, however, even while Sama was making a pretty good map of what was along our path… especially the rooms that had nothing in them. Briggs was backing her up and confirming those empty rooms remained empty as we passed by. We were rats in the walls, and we were going to come out with some very, very cold knives.

The concept was wonderful and functional. Our first strikes should be pretty devastating as we came at them from inside their own defenses. At last Sama's hand raised to stop, at the same time I felt the Shaping flatten against a wall of hardened stone treated and altered with magic, too. I wasn't going to be bending it without spending Valences specifically to do so, and likely setting off lots of alarms.

"Okay, there's ten feet of hardened stone to an open area here, with carvings into the walls of the stone done with molten fingertips, if I'm reading it right," Sama said shortly. She drew the pattern in the air with the Holo from her helpful Oathring Ecran.

"There's plenty of room between the individual Glyphs, so I'm thinking a precise Disintegration is going to be needed here." She indicated the area, which included a section of the corner of the floor.

"It's not a smooth entry, but that's fine. I'm sure we can handle it."

"Everyone lives for some lightfoot and parkour workouts," I replied dryly, waving her to the side as a glowing green dot hovered between my fingers. She wisely got out of the way as I focused on altering the shape of the area affected by the beam, picturing it firmly. There were two effective Metas dealing with Shapes. One excluded areas from a spell, allowing you to lob an Area of Effect magic into a fight and not hit any of your allies with it.

The other changed the form of the effect from, say, a sphere, to a cone or line or square or other valid form. This was simply doing the same.