BECMI Chapter 230 – Red Sword, Black Hammer

Sama smiled almost too wide for her face. “I’m hoping he’s so cocksure as to do that, and forgot the lessons of back then. At least back then, he knew we were coming.”“Yeah, we kinda did announce ourselves rather arrogantly and all,” Briggs nodded. “Thankfully, I have matured past such childish ego-flexing and moral outrage, and I’m just going to kill them all thoroughly and be done with things.”

“No sign we are or were here sounds fine to me, Fuzzy.” She reached up to rake razored nails over his chin, like scritching a brick. “Shall we?”

“Oh, we very much shall, my hag, we very much shall.”

There were many screams in the following hour, some of the loud, all of them fanatical, many fervent, most surprised… and the graciously allowed all the dying men and women to vent their curses and shout the alarm and call for their god and scream their prayers and shriek their pain and hatred all they liked as they fell.

No one heard them, or the slamming of pulverizing meat, the crunch of bone shattering to powder, the protests of bending steel, or the grinding of wood and stone as they were pounded into or through with alarming alacrity and force.

A famous Greathammer was stalking the wall of the fortress-temple with the familiar stride of someone who’d been here before, was perfectly at home here again, and whose tremblesense was noting any updates or changes with every step. The pressure plates and pits actually hadn’t moved all that much, the and other magical Traps and Curses went off and did nothing as Briggs dragged spike back across them and destroyed them, while casually working against the circling patrols with alarming speed and thoroughness, then starting on the gargoyles and other magical monsters slaved to guard the inner temples and screech out the alarms even louder.

Nobody heard them fighting and falling, either.

Sama ghosted through the sleeping chambers. Some were locked, many weren’t, some were rigged, and the combination of her Tremblesense and meant nobody heard her disarming or picking the locks, and those within died in silence, dead before they realized they were under attack.

The Master’s acolytes and priests were snuffed out of existence, one by one, True Death taking them all and leaving bodies Burning down behind doors closed behind her.

The two sentries outside the Master’s door were quite skilled, magically alert, well-equipped, and benefiting from the Wards of the Temple as the blessed warriors they were, ‘holy’ in the sense of being adamant in their faith and fully ready to die for their lord.

The one lost his head and the other was impaled through the ear as Sama came out of shadows above them, hitting the ground before they did and easing both bodies to the ground.

The other three men in view of the door were all dead already, nailed to their positions and motionless to the view by a few long adamantine nails taken out for just that purpose.

She could have gone through the door and its Wards, or even carved a way through the wall if need be, severed the hinges or the cut the locks and bars. She could see them all clearly in her Trembling Domain, but saw no reason to do so.

The Master was also elite, so his room was elevated, and had a view of the outside. It took only a couple drops of a Potion of Shrinking to get through windows thin enough to only admit the occasional bat seeking shelter, and she could scamper around on stone walls and ceilings with surprising speed and grace.

Even more amusingly, Sama could feel and see the tiny patterns of her nail-holds from her last visit nigh a century ago, when Fuzzy had kicked in a different door behind her, along with half a dozen guards in various pieces, and made for the Avatar and the croaking beasts He’d Summoned in to amuse himself with them.

He hadn’t been too happy when Sama took Him in the flank back then and chopped Him down while He was distracted by the huge looming brute with the oversized Hammer in full armor chewing through His minions in their fine leathers and desert robes. Mortals weren’t supposed to be able to do much harm to Immortals, especially once their Anti-Magic neutralized their magical Weapons.

Forsaken Auras had neutralized the A-M, overrode Immortal defenses, and the very magical Weapons had carved a fast and deadly tale into the Master back then.

His minions had been horrified, certain the two of them were Immortals themselves come to punish them, and had promptly fled for their lives. They’d been able to leisurely loot the temple and walk off into the desert with a fortune, chuckling the while.

Her nails found the open shutters, not oiled so as to make more noise if opened. A concealed the creaking as she pulled them open, only the size of a pixie at the moment, and flowed over the sill and down onto the floor with no hesitation, feeling no motion in the room.

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Her feet on the floor, she glanced around, and found the layout and the furnishing almost identical to what had been here a century ago. Doubtless the fuming Avatar had rebuilt everything as it was to convince Gimself it had not happened, He’d just been careless.

That meant His reading room was there, and private scrying chamber was over there… yep, He was in the scrying chamber, probably watching the excitement and disaster in Siricil… and looking for her and Briggs.

Outside the door, bereft of presence magical or physical, Sama considered her position. By the position of His feet, the Avatar was facing the doorway, a simple and wise precaution against being sneak-attacked. She could vaguely hear things that sounded like both imprecations and curses, and smirked at the mental image of Him pulling His hair out as events did not turn out properly.

There was a rumble through the floor, faint but impressive, as if something big had fallen over. The floor and walls shook, and the motion within the chamber turned, as if wondering what they’d sensed.

“Khalif! Ahkbad! Did you feel that?” He called out to his guards, who were definitely not going to be answering Him, but the door to the chambers was closed. Feet moved quickly towards the door, Sama hopped into position as it opened, and a turbaned man of swarthy features and a long master arch-villain’s oiled and pointed beard stepped out, just radiating smugness and irritation. “Khalid! Ahkbad! Did you feel-gkk…”

The Dagger inserted into His ear morphed into a full longsword as it burst out of the other side of His head. Contingencies and protective spells were sheared through by the Null Strike, which ignored them all, and the Interdiction going off completely bollixed up the attempt to spirit His body away to a safe place where a would restore Him instantly to angry life. denied the that was supposed to overcome the death strike, and the Avatar couldn’t even turn His head to see who had killed Him… and then He wailed as and True Death reared up inside His physical mortal shell, and they came for Him.

Sama, restored to full size, twisted her wrist and wrenched, ripping the skull of the Avatar from the stump of His neck, taking two steps, and leaping for the window as the headless corpse actually stumbled towards the wall, where what should have been blood instead spat up some vivic sparks (she’d never seen that before), and she crashed through the shuttered window and was out into free fall with her prize as beat, beat…

The world went white above and behind her, blasting past her with a hefty wall of air. Already in , she was blown tail over teakettle for the distance as whiteness swallowed the world. Her Trembling Domain did register the outer walls of the temple passing by below her as she skidded along and through the air, losing altitude but in no danger of a plummeting descent as she deftly reclaimed her footing and basically skated down and out of the explosion and towards the ground.

Briggs didn’t seem to be too perturbed, strong and steady as always radiating from his Markdoor.

She was a quarter-mile away and down two ‘steps’ of the plateau by the time she hit the ground, the dust of the explosion really restricting visibility. All the disrupted Wards and magic in the temple contributed to an ongoing storm of restricted visibility that would have had a normal person desperately covering their face up to avoid abrasion and breathing the gunk in.

Hooray for Vajras. Growing a passive magic Matrix had been an absolute requirement to getting one online. There had been very few Casters over the years they had trusted enough to allow them to draw on hers, especially with the cost to refill it being take Constitution damage like it was.

Briggs would naturally have no idea where precisely she was, but that was easily solved. She just raised her foot and brought it down on the stone, hard as iron and imbued with ki, and let the impact of it radiate out from her, just like hitting a hammer on a stone.

Sound traveled through stone a lot further and faster than it did through the air. His tremblesense would note the regular rhythm, orient on it, and he’d come this way.

True to expectations, she soon felt his footsteps coming through the dust cloud, heavyfoot locked and stable with every stride, regular as a drumbeat. She couldn’t see him until he was less than a hundred feet away, but that was fine.

Briggs loomed up out of the swirling sand and dust that was still clawing at the earth and sky, and just pointed to her. Concealed by the devastation by distance and the grit in the air, the two of them kept low and to the shadows, the dust swirling tightly around their Vajras and making them just blurs as the vivic-charged sandstorm from the death of an Avatar continued to grow.

Whether other Immortals were investigating was immaterial. The main body was probably doing so, wondering what had just happened and how things had gone this out of control again… when dealing with THOSE TWO.

There would be no sign of their arrival by left by now, and they were making fast and easy time moving with the wind away from the center of the storm. They’d head home when the dimensions loosened up a little bit, and leave an Immortal to wonder if they’d had a hand in anything.

Of course, Tenha had instructions to create illusions of them here and there, resulting in them being spotted all over Siricil by random people, who were collectively unreliable, but so many sightings had to mean they were still there doing something, especially with all the vanishings and exciting fighting and all that, right?

In any event, they’d be heading home quite soon.

“So, what was the big thump?” Sama asked her towering husband as they strode along at the pace an average person would consider a fast run, something they could literally keep up for days if need be.

“Ah, made it down to the treasure chamber. Still in the same place as before. Even saw the indents from a couple of guards creasing the stone from back then, although they got rid of all the real damage.

“Turns out one of the walls was actually a stone golem, and a pretty big one. It kinda fell over on me, trying to pin me… and the juggernaut rolling out from behind it was meant to steamroll me flat.”

Sama half-laughed. “Okay, that’s a new one, if it surprised you!”

“On the bright side, there’s this new model of juggernaut out there, and I seem to have gotten a really good look at its inner workings somehow, imagine that.”

Sama’s grin grew even bigger. “I bet the bastard thought he was so clever…”

“He needs to channel a better inner engineer,” Briggs agreed, and they trotted on, as the storm behind them grew taller and meaner as something powerful was unleashed by an angry Immortal behind them...