BECMI Chapter 249 – What Lies Above

Briggs, Sama, and I could have gone onto a rip-roaring rampage of gore and combat, spells flying, swords and hammers ripping and rending, carving a trail of gumption and grit through a great underground fungi forest festooned with Brobdignagian bugs bristling with venomous vengeance and vitality, but no.Briggs looked offended at even considering the idea, just giving Sama a look when she proposed it, then pointing at me repeatedly.

Sama promptly pouted petulantly, her grand display of physical prowess foiled.

“Come down on it from above, through the stone, after a bit of a walk, and we’ll get rid of the betathaumic source, maybe cap an Avatar while we’re at it, and introduce the schiders to the reality of the rest of the world, letting them know they can’t let their bugs do all their fighting for them,” Briggs counter-proposed.

Sama just threw up her hands, whining about how he never let her let off any real steam.

“Gotta feed the kiddies, Sama. You know that,” he consoled her with a casual chuck to the head that would have kayo’d most people alive. “Let’s let Edge do her job first, and then take this place out.”

Sama turned on me, almost threatening. “I need a place where I can let loose!” she stated firmly. “Do you know of one?”

I eyed the two of them, basically Eternal-Class Bloodlines, empowered by a Curse that transcended multiverses, functionally superior to Immortal Avatars in combat, if not full Manifestations.

“ one?” I repeated. “Yes. Can I reach them? No. You’re too big for this world and you know it. The only places you can go are out in the Astral, where Immortal creatures exist. If you want to flex, it’s in places that you want to do so, or where Immortals are bringing creatures from to fight here.

“Quit trying to bully the babes in the sandbox, Sama,” I said tiredly.

Her pout was very artificial, but her groan was heartfelt, if theatrical. “I didn’t learn all this stuff just to not use it!” she complained loudly.

“You do know how much magic I don’t use every day, right?” I asked her with some amusement, to which she just put me in a headlock and mussed up my hair in mutual frustration while I flailed at her helplessly, knowing she didn’t mean anything by it.

Not being able to flex because you needed to teach the kids to flex was totally something, and we all got plenty of Karma for arranging for that to happen…

I went with twenty-four different ‘launch sites’ as I sped around the place in . The bugs happily didn’t seem to have any varieties here which preyed upon undead or had necromantic powers, at least near the fringes. However, a distant examination of the central part of the cavern indicated that necromantic energies did indeed abound there, and I had the distinct impression that a rather large contingent of undead bugs and necromantic Constructs made from the bigger ones were probably in place and waiting to be used by the schiders here when they were called upon to drive forth into the world above and lay waste to it in glorious service to their Patrons.

Also, from the ether, the whole area was festooned in spider-webs, so it was fairly obvious there was a major phase spider colony in the area, too. Nobody was going to bug them from that direction!

We’d just have to see about doing something about that.

They were basically just deployment chambers out of the stone and with a Seal Focus put in place. I made sure to Lived-Line the entire outer area just to keep continuity of things, skimming the ground as I zipped around as little more than a shadow on a greatly spell, effectively replicating with new variations of spells being researched for just this purpose.

I had Sims with a lot of time on their hands whose whole jobs for millennia had been securing copies of all the spells they could, and making up new ones to replace effects we could not do. The Twilight Libraries were probably the most complete collections of magical knowledge that had ever existed on this planet… and there wasn’t even only one of them, as copies of each of the smaller libraries within the main one were located elsewhere, scattered across the planet and surrounding dimensions in case the main one was compromised and had to be destroyed, collapsed, or shunted out of reach of something.

Yeah, I had access to all the spells I could want and need for special purposes. It was like being an Archmage with access to thousands of years of devoted spell research and inherited lore was a benefit, or something. Who knew?

So, I mapped out the entire periphery of the cave system, which turned out to have at least six different sub-levels and other caves scattered through it, those closer to center the abodes of the schiders and their pets, the ones on the fringes devoted to specific breeds of bugs.

I looked at the millions and millions of ants filling one of those caverns, each of them a yard long or longer, the bigger ones the size of war wagons, and just shook my head at the implications of such things getting out. No other bugs intruded into these caverns, for good reason. The ants would swarm them, and they’d die.

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I was thankful there was no cavern of bees, due to lack of flowers, but wasps were definitely present in their hives, and there was a cavern with a remarkable number of moths, filling the air with a virulent poison that tended to kill any non-moth who entered without breathing protection. A flight of these going over a city would effectively poison-gas everything within to death.

We were going to need a lot of anti-poison, anti-gas, anti-Swarm, and anti-Bug stuff for those fighting down here. Well, just more stuff to do. Procuring the skulls for Baneskulls wasn’t going to be too hard, and Swarmbane Clasps were not hard to make.

I reflected, as stone parted before me and space opened up inside solid stone, with absolutely no indication outside that there was anything here.

It wasn’t going to be too much different than slaying undead, a huge Karmic harvest, with the difference it was all underground and in the bugs’ terrain.

I was wondering where we were going to get a major Karmic harvest for the lads to Level up in, and now it was plain it was going to be here.

I could only gain Caster Levels and attack bonus now, a maximum of six Levels to the Mortal Limit of 36, so I had no huge drive to reach the top with so much more to do of my plans.

I had time for my ambitions, unless the Immortals decided to come down personally and swat me, and hopefully that shouldn’t happen.

There were no vibrations as I the tunnel into existence, coming in horizontally from one of the six shrunken tunnels that led out of the Bug Zone. Both Sama and Briggs were using lightfoot, while I was flying, so there was no betraying vibrations from any of us as we traversed the miles with remarkable speed, the stone giving way before us and shrinking to a mere inch-wide straight tunnel behind us

All of us could , Sama and Briggs using and to do the job for them, so retreat wouldn’t be a problem, and I was not going to leave a trail here that the schiders or the bugs could exploit. Any bugs small enough to enter the tiny pipe would die of hunger before they reached the end of it, and a simple mesh at the final exit point would keep out all but those the size of real ants.

delivered us straight on to our destination. I paused after miles of walking, looking straight down.

“The apex of the Pyramid is within a ten-foot radius of this circle, but about a thousand feet down below the ceiling. There are a lot of ethereal webs on the way down, and real ones woven between supporting stalagmites connecting ceiling and floor, but nothing directly below us in real space if we just drop in, do our job, and drop out. Everyone ready?” I asked calmly.

The Weapons in the hands of my massively dangerous companions remained completely silent, as sound traveled through stone, and even with a up to remain quiet, we weren’t taking any chances, nor were we mind-speaking with some potentially mentally-aware hiveminds around.

I began to peel away the stone directly below us, and we began to drop quickly.

Sama and Briggs slammed their hands onto my arms at the same moment. “STOP!” both of them ordered, Source and Null Auras combining to instantly shut down magic, which both of them were quite familiar with and could nullify in an instant.

I just looked up at them, and saw both of them were gazing down very intently beneath our feet. Their ki was still connected to the ground, so their Tremblesense was still working just fine.

We were prepared to enter free-fall, so the ceiling being close couldn’t be the problem here. “Yes?” I asked softly.

“There is something living directly below us,” Sama whispered, her voice tense. “It’s very, very big.”

“Image?” I asked, and one of the gems mounted in quillons glowed, throwing up a for me.

It wasn’t an image of something. It was an image of somethings, touching the stone beneath us. Somethings that looked like giant, rigid hairs, in most cases poking INTO the rock, like steel barbs backed by a lot of pressure. I could see the scars of minor movements and hundreds of tiny holes, just in the area they could show me.

I considered the size, and the location, and the possible things it could come from.

“That’s something resembling a Devastation Spider,” I said calmly. “We’re seeing the bristles on its top or bottom carapace. One of the hairier versions, some form of wolf spider, I am guessing.”

“A Devastation Spider. That’s a new one. What are we talking about in size?” Sama asked intently.

“Verdana, the green moon orbiting Terra-Luna, is ruled by Devastation Insects, kaiju-sized bugs of all types, commanding billions or trillions of lessers of their kind, constantly at war with one another over living space, food, and other things. The big ones can be a thousand feet long. One managed to get on the planet with the help of a god or something, and they killed it with Boulders from God, suitably enhanced. You needed +VI to even scratch its carapace, and the damn thing’s chitin was over two feet thick, too.

“Basically, the smallest of these things had bodies two hundred feet long, and from what we saw, those were basically considered expendable babies and leaders of swarms by their elders.”

Briggs was tapping thoughtfully. “That’s the ultimate size evolution, then. Up to kaiju, or even bigger?” he asked grimly.

“They located the Grandmother Mantis with a great deal of effort. She was fully a mile long, strode over forests instead of through them, even the out-sized ones they had. Her getting up was like a mountain rising to watch, literally part of the horizon rising up on its feet. Very impressive.”

Briggs just glanced at me. “Inherited memories, I’m assuming. They killed it?”

“It turns out that magically-enhanced atomics coming down at orbital speed are actually capable of killing some really nasty stuff. Yeah, she’s quite dead, and the mantis-ships making it through the planetary rings have stopped coming in. Thri-kreen equivalents are not something we want to deal with, either.”

“Mantis warriors. Mmm, probably not,” Sama agreed. One such creature would be a deadly opponent for any normal human, a pack of them a scourge that could wipe out dozens of people. “And we’ve got one of those bugs sitting here directly above the Pyramid.”

“Don’t you just love Immortals?” was all I could say.