Chương 548: BECMI Chapter 547 – Holes of Dholes and Bholes

"You've killed dholes." Their deaths were in Mortus' mnecromonic history.

"This is a bhole, their progenitors in Leng. Half-again in radius or bigger, and they can be so long they can encircle whole worlds multiple times. The oldest of them are said to stretch from one edge of Leng to the other through the tunnels they have dug." i. e. millions of miles long. Jörmungandr was probably a dhole!

"I see. Well, Purified Spell gives an increase in damage dice against Fiends and Undead, as you know." Oh, ho!

"And you noticed the extra damage boost against Aberrants as well!" I deduced.

"I had never fought them in great numbers before, so I never noticed the surge. Also, very specifically, if they are Evil, they qualify as Evil Outsiders for Banes … and it stacked with Bane/Aberrants, for some reason," he went on." Champion of Creation must be a joint Title awarded by Heaven and Nature," I theorized primly, the zigzagging crack coming our way now clearly visible as something really, really big extruded itself in our direction beneath the surface.

I noted the stone base of the stand beneath us was expanding, and then a Valence was expended. A hundred swirling Stars rose from Mortus Dius and gathered about Aelryinth's head. His Halo Crown, muted dimly out of consideration for me, was now accentuated by what seemed to be an entire galaxy of sparkles about his head.

The rumble was now perceptible to anyone, like an earthquake coming this way as a massive creature forced the earth aside, unable to create dimensional space or just Earthglide through matter right now. We both had our Wings out, and Dreadskulls to Aberrants sitting on our Staves. Mine was a shrunken Gargantuan Beholder and dearly departed preferred Son of Delphax, Dread's Black Star Sapphire seemingly serving as its central eye. Aelryinth's was the same Gargovian Grandmother I remembered, no reason to change it…

although he had numerous dhole skulls being worked up for the same reason, and if there was one thing we were not shy on after putting up with Leng for so long, it was Bane and Dreadskulls for Aberrants. And here it was, turning upward and coming up underneath us. It came up through the solid stone like a Dune sandworm, fifty feet wide and trifold jutting jaws splaying wide as it lunged up out of the ground, intending to swallow us and our stand at the same time…

which didn't work out so well when the stand's edges just happened to perfectly align with the jaws of the creature. All it did was push us up out of the ground, then momentum launched us beyond the length of its jaws as they closed, and the Augment Object on the stand meant its stone form didn't crumble.

Under the radiance of the Celestial Cerulean Sign above Aelryinth, its unnatural flesh and jaws were already beginning to smoke inside and out, but the bhole persevered in trying to eat us with a bellow that shook the air, then tried to inhale with miles of stomach behind it to form the suction effect to do so. Ael looked down at the thing, Spellwarped his Crown of Stars with over one hundred stars on it, then Split the resulting Shardray.

A galaxy became two beams of Light and Force, wound about with whorls of nebulae birthing stars. The Shardrays were too bright to look at, 100 dice of damage each concentrated into two Seeking Rays that bent around the stone stand and went looking for the bhole's brain, past its splayed jaws and into its braincase beyond. Its body was immense and could be hacked on all day, even cut off, and it wouldn't hurt the creature at all.

It would just seal the wound, regenerate it closed, and at some point burrow back around and eat its old body, regaining its size and length. Nope, you had to kill the head. 200d6, er, d8 of Shardrays to the head, Consecrated, Blessed, Energized, with a whole lot of + damage per die modifiers, burrowed into a skull bigger than a small mansion, found its brain, and behind the ecstatic leadership of Dreadfire going after all the crucial spots, tore it apart.

The stone beneath us prevented the massive jaws from closing, jamming them open as we drifted down from above. The worm-like thing, its ugly gray maggot-hide skin rippling in confusion, went suddenly still beneath us, leaving its motionless head jutting over a hundred feet out of the ground. We both came down gently on the still-intact stand wedged firmly between the jaws which had crimpled the edge of it, but had been unable to close. It only took minor adjustments to make the stand completely level again.

"I think this skull would look really good on the barrel of a rail gun tank or something," Ael observed with the lightly casual manner of someone who did a lot of this.

"I share this sentiment." I snapped my fingers, and a flash of green crossed behind the end of the skull of the massive creature, just barely out of the ground a hundred feet below us. Vivus bulged out of the Disintegration cut even as the flesh tried to warp and settle around it, and unwhite mist began to leak out onto the Land and crawl up and down the sides of the head with mounting speed, like a dried tree starting to ignite from its base. This story originates from a different website.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. A whirlwind of living air gathered to Ael's hand, celestial energies swirling around it and making certain that it was not a servant of Leng, here on the borders where the world-wide remnants of the Spell of Preservation were not the strongest. Aelryinth took out a crystal sphere the size of his fist, made of Holy Air-Energized sapphire.

"Take this ball all the way to the end of this bhole on the inside at maximum speed, exit the corpse, consume the crystal, and go home," he told the small but very impressively strong Air Elemental there. The words sent the Elemental cavorting around in absolute glee at its payment for a simple task. A Wall of Lightning in spherical form erupted around us, Golden, Silver, and Rainbow crackling arcs harming nothing alive here, but they were also imbued with Vivic and Holy energies.

The goldweight bar in Aelryinth's hand vanished as he made the spell Permanent, and thus capable of lasting to the end of the bhole's corpse, however long that might be. The compact whirling vortex of the Air Elemental was only about three feet long, but spinning at a couple hundred miles an hour as it took up the crystal generating a kaleidoscopic array of dazzling Holy Vivic lightning that harmed it not in the slightest.

It bent in the equivalent of a bow to him, and then, defying any of its own claustrophobia, dove down into the gaping jaws of the dead bhole at great speed. A plume of vivic mist billowed up past us on all sides, churned up by its tight vortex, and now the jaws around us were en vivus, too. Elementals weren't subject to fatigue, and that one was basically Called and executing a sworn duty for excessively nice payment. It would follow through to the end, regardless of how long the bhole's body was…

and the planar pressure of Leng would squeeze the energies of the vivifying body right back along the path it was making to the Prime Plane. Up above, if you had really good eyes, you could see a very slender thread starting to extend from the starry heavens and out into the direction of Leng's heart as our plane's influence followed the igniting vivus now crackling up inside the core of the creature after the Wall of Lightning sphere ignited the guts of the bhole's impossibly lengthy corpse.

"You Energize to Sacred on gold for goldweight sacrifice?" I had to half-laugh, mock scandalized. So typically grandiose a use of down-time Energizing!

"All my spells end up Holy, so it works fine," he smiled back. Below us, the stone reaching up around the bhole's head extended up to the foundation of the stand we were aloft on, stabilizing it so we could sit back down. Feature zipped back out to full size so we could lounge inside his coils, totally ignoring the Burning jaws of the creature still closed about us.

"I think Nown will get quite a feast out of this sucker." According to Mortus Dius, there had been two dholes among the dead killed by his earlier Jaws of Creation, the Thunder damage reaching through the soil to ignite on the full length of their buried bodies… which had only been about a mile and two miles long, respectively. They had still been the single biggest contributors to the open sky overhead of us, simply on account of their mass.

"I saw that you had killed a great many dholes on one world, along with… I'm not sure?" I queried for more information. He had definitely done something like this before.

"You haven't run into Yithians yet." It wasn't a poke at me, just a statement, and by his tone, I was fortunate.

"Body-jumpers…" I murmured under my breath.

"Just whispers and rumors from my sources. I never pursued looking for more details…" I nodded slowly.

"The ones I encountered managed to run afoul of Leng somehow, probably learning things they weren't meant to know. Dholes were released on the planet they were on, and started eating and worm-holing the crap out of it. The planet wasn't alive, so it couldn't fight back, and the Yith couldn't deal with them while also being assaulted by flying polypae.

Their normal method of evading winning enemies is to jump into the future and swap minds with a race there, leaving those unfortunates in the past to take on their enemies for them or be made extinct. However, doing so on a dhole-infested world just meant they were projecting themselves forward into an even worse catastrophe."

"Hah! And Leng cut off fleeing through dimensions…" I guessed promptly, remembering that killing sequence in Mortus Dius' mnecromonic memory.

"So they were looking for an alien race to swap into on another world in that universe, when I came down." I winced theatrically.

"I'm guessing they thought they'd jump into a world of innocents, and Sylune or Mithar got offended?" Ael nodded agreement with my deduction.

"I ended up killing their elders off to stop the transferal and doom of another species, brought down their defenses, and the dholes came in and devoured them by the thousands while the polypae razed their cities to the stone. I went from enclave to enclave, the dholes and polypae followed, and the Yith were eaten alive and ground out of existence there.

"I used the opportunity to Rune-mark all the dholes, and when they were done feasting and there were no more Yith, I hunted each of the things down and fed them to the world. Took a lot of Earthgliding to do it, especially when they went down and tried to hide in the molten core of the planet!" he muttered in satisfied irritation.

"The polypae?" I had to ask. They were known as a species of mass murderers and genocidal conquerors of Mythos.

"They decided I was worth exterminating, too. It was fine, they were usually quite surprised by the range I could kill them at, and my ability to locate their last bodies."

"Last bodies?" I blinked.

"Ah, they are a multi-body life form? Truly things of Mythos. They've been wise enough not to get involved here, however…" I murmured thoughtfully, glancing around. Wisdom, or just chance?

"They tend to operate in the real world, not Dream. They did wait until I exterminated the dhole to act against me, rightly believing they were almost powerless against the worms," he told me.

"An appropriate ending for all," I agreed blandly. Because of Leng, even the Yith's temporal explorers would not have foreseen their end coming, their trips to other times false and giving no indication that Leng had moved against them from Outside of Time.

"Which reminds me! I didn't bring it out because of the potential reaction, but…" Ael reached inside his sleeve and pulled out what looked to be a rough disk displaying a five-sided star of uneven and wavy, even somewhat jagged lines.

In the center of it was wrought a six-limbed oghamic branch, which in the light of the Cerulean Seal above promptly lit up with a harsh and pale blue flame, spreading along all edges of the star with anathemic glee that perceptibly pushed back the very substance of the plane of Leng around us!