CHAPTER 287: SUMRANN’S HARVEST

“Petulance.” The Hierophant’s voice cut across us like an icy breeze. The air shuddered as the titan tried to reassert its control over the thousands of souls, all of which ground to a halt for a brief moment. “Chicks diving for the kernel they’ve dropped when the nest is filled with seed.”

“All right,” I thought, ignoring the Hierophant’s opaque insult. “I didn’t know Tavio had Spiritual chops that good.”

Some unspoken communication went on between Pio’s group and the captain dropped down beside Tavio. She knelt next to the major, and her body joined in the man’s glow. The souls began crawling back towards the Hierophant, despite Pio’s assistance.

“It’s Divine,” thought Xim. “He’s calling on Sumrann.”

“What are they trying to accomplish?” asked Varrin.

Xim waved at the corpse-littered battlefield with a hand that was halfway back to normal. Her beast-mode transformation was wearing off, reducing her to just her bloody-haired and haloed Angel of Fury form.

“Sumrann is the Littan god of harvest and bounty,” she thought to us. “But his concepts are broader than they might sound. He’s worshipped by soldiers as much as by farmers.”

Etja descended to hover next to us, having finally made her way down from where she’d been fighting two miles above. “May Sumrann sow the seeds of our victory and smile upon its harvest,” she thought to us, reciting the short prayer Tavio had given back on the birdplane.

“This battlefield’s been sown,” thought Xim, and I followed her gaze as she surveyed the endless dead monsters. “Now, it’s time for the reaping.”

Madel flew over to Guar and gave the man a sharp pat on the side of his helm to jolt him out of his stupor. The heavily-armored Littan blinked, and his eyes went back to their normal, dim golden light. Madel took him by the arm and dove down to deposit him next to Pio and Tavio. After a moment of disorientation, Guar knelt and joined the impromptu ritual. Madel hovered up and back into an overwatch position.

The spiritual tug of war continued, and the souls halted on their way to the Hierophant.

Baltae floated over and held a hand out to Xim. “Care to lend us your aid, oh mighty cleric of Sam’lia?” he asked with a charming grin. At least, I assumed he was grinning, since his face was obscured by his ominous helm. There was definitely a grin in his voice.

“I’m not the most well-suited for a holy ritual, in the traditional sense,” Xim replied, crimson flames licking up from her eyes. The way she’d said holy implied a depth that I didn’t have insight into. Baltae seemed to pick up what she meant without trouble.

“Perhaps,” said Baltae. “Sam’lia gazes down upon creation, while Godqueen Yara asks creation to gaze up, but they are both goddesses of civilization.” He shrugged. “Besides, even if our mothers do not get along, all are welcome at Sumrann’s table. If the ritual cannot be holy, then let it be righteous instead.”

Xim’s eyebrows went up the slightest bit, and her eyes ran over Baltae. She held out her hand, the Littan mage took hold of it, and the pair of them flew down to the others.

“If we survive this, those two are definitely having sexy time later,” Etja thought to me and Varrin. “Oh! Maybe once we’ve saved Krimsim, Var will get his chance with the empress as well!”

“What happens in Litta stays in Litta,” I added.

“I mourn for your lost innocence, Etja,” thought Varrin.

Xim’s hair returned to its normal dark curls as she allowed her final transformation to end. When the divine aura spread to her from the Littans, there was a nearly imperceptible shift in the world’s colors. Warm tones grew a touch more vibrant and saturated, until I blinked and thought that I’d imagined it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the corpses of the slain birds squirm, but they stilled when I looked directly at them. There was a scent of fresh apples in the air and the warmth of a hearth at my back, both as tangible as a distant memory.

Then the souls flooded towards Tavio.

The air shook, and the massive sigils over the staff pulsed as the ropes of mana–halted during our negotiation–began churning into the glyphs once more.

“Tavio,” I thought to the beefy Littan. “What, exactly, is the plan?” The man was completely lost in his invocations and didn’t reply. I had Grotto link all eleven of us up. “Does anyone know what the plan is?”

Cezil was the one to reply. “No.”

“Well, damn.”

Then, all at once, the souls were cut. They scattered into motes of light, flowed into Tavio, then poured back out from him in waves of Divine radiance. I felt a calloused hand on my shoulder, and an incomprehensible power flooded my body.

You have gained 179,610 stacks of Blessed!

For the next 6 seconds, you may spend any amount of Blessed to restore 10 health, mana, and stamina per Blessed spent.

Your current stacks of Blessed exceed your Blessed threshold by 179,584. Excess stacks of Blessed will rapidly decay.

“Holy fucking shit!” I said, looking at the number of Blessed stacks I’d just gained. I quickly dumped enough to bring me back to full on all my resources, which was a pittance compared to the number I still had. In the time it took me to do that, I’d lost more stacks to decay than I’d even been able to spend.

“Ready to tell us the plan?!” I thought to Tavio.

“It is the same plan that we have had since the beginning,” he replied. “We kill the thing that is attacking us.”

I looked at the massive sigils, dominating the sky and filled with more chaotic mana than I’d felt since the time I’d handled a cracked void sphere. I turned towards Krimsim, seeing that every last bird was flying away from the city at full speed.

I’d come to have a level of respect for Tavio, but I still didn’t think he was the most forward-looking person.

The edges of an idea came to mind, and I made a snap judgment. Before I could execute, the first sigil fired.

A mile-wide beam of azure energy screamed across the gap between the Hierophant and Krimsim. Not knowing what else to do, I opened a Closet portal to the side of the Littans and placed the exit ahead of the beam. Guar’s body became a bonfire of divine energy as he blasted through. He appeared high above us, and one of his Shield Walls sprang into existence, swallowing the sky.

The beam struck, but the Shield Wall was still too small to stop it completely. Guar cut a massive slice out of the beam, its edges deflecting to either side and landing to the east and west of Krimsim. The land erupted under the force of the attack, and fissures snapped out from the impact, crackling under the city’s foundation.

I cast Shortcut to appear next to Tavio. The man looked like he was about to jump into the portal after Guar, so I grabbed his shoulder. He gave me a sharp glare in return.

“A damage race is too risky! Guar can’t possibly stop that for long!” I shouted over the quake. “But he won’t need to stop the beam if the city isn’t there! We can kill the fucking thing after!”

Tavio’s whiskers twitched. “What do you need?” he asked.

Rather than telling him what I needed, which would have taken too long, I bundled the idea up into a truth bomb and tossed it into his soul with Reveal.

“Madel!” shouted Tavio. “Get me, Arlo, and Pio to the city center now!”

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The lieutenant didn’t waste a moment, sweeping down and grabbing us. Cezil even grew extra arms so she could get a good hold on all three of us. My joints popped under the acceleration, and the world stuttered from a series of rapid-fire teleports. Less than a second later, the four of us hovered over the center of Krimsim.

The second beam fired, a pitch-black ray of pestilent rot. I couldn’t spare a thought to understand how it wasn’t annihilating Guar, but I assumed everyone we’d left behind was handling it somehow through judicious expenditure of Blessed.

Tavio’s eyes went unfocused as he gained the familiar look of someone studying his System screens.

“The general will probably forgive me for choosing my Level 70s this way…” he muttered as he made some selections. Then, he held a hand out to Pio. “Use your Unwavering evolution to tell everyone in the city they must consent to a teleport or they will die.”

Pio blinked, took Tavio’s hand, and threads of Spiritual mana shot out from Tavio, connecting to tens of thousands of points around the city. I followed the threads with my Sight, seeing that each one was making contact with a soul.

“People of Krimsim,” said Pio. “This is Captain Pio of the Littan Imperial Army, speaking on behalf of Major Tavio of Seqaria, who is the current regent of your city. The city is under imminent threat of destruction. Prepare for an immediate emergency teleport. Do not resist the teleportation, or you will be left behind and die. I repeat…”

While Tavio and Pio worked their social magicks, I started working my planar ones. Etja and I were still connected through her soul hug, and I’d shot the mage a thought to get her online with my plan. She was already working to hold back the Hierophant, but she had more than enough focus to juggle both tasks.

As for what I was doing, it all hinged on the Sacrament of the Dread Star.

Sacrament of the Dread Star

Whenever you use a teleport or portal skill, you may spend 1 stack of Blessed to reduce the mana or stamina cost of that skill to 0. Additional stacks of Blessed must be spent for each effect that increases the resource cost of that teleport or portal, such as a mana shape, doubling the Blessed required with each additional effect.

Shortcut was a self-targeting spell, but I could expand that out to affect every entity in a five-foot radius around me with the Bubble mana shape. Etja could weave one of her skills into Shortcut through her soul hug, even without taking advantage of the Finishing Move combo. We would need Siphon to make my idea work, and Siphon had a thirty-five-foot radius. When Etja’s skills combined, it took the best of both worlds to create its fused product. Thus, that took Shortcut up to a thirty-five-foot radius as well.

Etja had so many bonuses to mana shaping that I could barely keep up with it. She rapidly cycled through three shapes, quadrupling the radius to 140 feet, then kicked the process over to me along with instructions. I started burning Blessed like nobody’s business.

One Blessed made the initial cast of Shortcut free. Two, four, then eight Blessed repeated Etja’s shaping cycle. Without her bonuses, it was a mere doubling, taking Shortcut to 280 feet. Sixty-four Blessed took it to 560 feet, 512 Blessed took it to 1,120 feet. My Blessed stacks screamed downward from decay even as I shoved them into Shortcut with every ounce of will I could muster.

“Grotto! I need an empty spot in the Closet with at least three hundred feet of vertical clearance and a 1.5-mile diameter!”

The Delve Core didn’t respond verbally; he just sent me the coordinates.

I tore open a Closet portal, making it as wide as I could. It was not big enough for an ultra-redwood tree, coincidentally, but the size didn’t really matter. I just needed a line of effect to the inside, but I’d gotten a touch excited and made something big enough to drive a cruise ship through.

My vision was consumed by golden light that burned until it turned white, then shifted and became an utter void. I could taste the anxiety of a hundred thousand people, flickering in my Sight, feel their presence through my spell, but all my mundane senses were lost as I was wrapped in a power vastly greater than what I was meant to wield.

My stacks plummeted as I worked to expand Shortcut until finally, at the cost of 32,768 stacks of Blessed, Shortcut’s area of effect was a 4,480-foot radius centered on me.

Krimsim had a one-mile diameter, meaning that the entire city, its walls, and a decent chunk of the lands around it were well within the effect of my spell.

One frequently asked question from novice Delvers was what the System meant when it included the word ‘entity’ in a spell description. Did that mean a person, a thing, anything the spell could logically target, something else entirely?

The answer was that an ‘entity’ could be just about anything.

I finished targeting a 1.5-mile diameter chunk of the Littan Empire, cast Shortcut, and teleported the entire capital city of Nohrrin into the Closet.

This was where Siphon came in. I did my best to shape Shortcut so that it wasn’t a perfect sphere, and gave Krimsim a flat bottom to land on. I’d also done my best to be as precise as possible when making the teleport, so that the city didn’t fall after appearing in the middle of a giant empty swath of the Closet. Coordinated Thinker made this possible, but the entire city still dropped an inch and landed on foundations that had already been shaken by the Hierophant’s attacks.

Etja poured in her own stacks of Blessed to strengthen Siphon, which had gained all of the same radius bonuses since it had been combined with Shortcut. Her gravity spell took hold of the entire city and helped guide it down gently, only releasing its hold once we were certain the whole thing wouldn’t collapse in on itself. The mage could only do so much, though, and some of the buildings and walls weren’t going to make it. She also couldn’t sustain her hold for long.

Tavio and Pio had both come along for the ride, and I turned toward them. This section of the Closet was completely devoid of light, but their souls were clear as daylight.

“Tell people to leave the buildings!” I said to Pio, who jumped and quickly relayed the message to the citizens of Krimsim, using whatever Spiritual mojo Tavio had going. People flooded out into the streets, and when Etja’s spell ended and several buildings began to fall, I could only hope that most everyone had made it out.

The portal I’d taken Krimsim through was above us, and there was a blinding flash of multi-colored light as the Hierophant’s attack landed in the crater where Krimsim had once been. I immediately closed the portal to avoid the blast and looked at my party interface.

Xim’s Lifeguard spell had triggered on everyone outside. But they were alive. For now.

I looked down at the city below, seeing the glow of Delver souls beginning to move hesitantly in the wake of the chaos I’d just created. Above us, lights began to flicker into existence as Grotto started teleporting hundreds of glowstones into the ceiling above.

“Captain Pio,” said Tavio. “Stay here and communicate what happened. Try to get things organized.” He turned to me. “As for you and I–”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s go finish this.”

I connected to the portal that I still had open near the Hierophant’s hippo corpse and activated it to reveal a wall of dark flame. Tavio and I both rushed in, eating the Wicked damage and beginning to ascend from the rot and char of the Whippomorph’s original body up along the length of the massive staff.

You have entered the–

I dismissed the Dungeon notification. Tavio grabbed me by my cuirass and carried me along as he rocketed upward with his charge skill. Once the momentum began to slow, he held on as I carried us forward with my wings.

A thousand feet up the body of the staff was the vague, fleshy suggestion of a face, wrinkled and twisted in anguish like a decrepit infant having a tantrum. Slick roots squirmed from the edges of its features, as though each was a writhing vein extracted from something’s body and eager to return to its bloody home.

Tavio hefted himself up onto my shoulders, crouched, and launched into the face, thrusting his spear deep into one of its half-closed, jaundiced eyes.

I was being used as a springboard quite a lot on this day.

As Tavio landed, two dozen arrows appeared all around him. Vaporous sprays of dark blood misted the air as the invisible paths of the arrows terminated in the Hierophant’s skull, releasing a massive payload of Toxicity into its body.

I felt mana gathering for a Cleanse, but the Hierophant was nearly tapped out. It had little left in its wooden body and no multitude of heads to cast on its behalf. The spell was a far more potent Cleanse than normal, but the cost was within the realm of reason.

I cast Dispel and negated that shit.

The Hierophant wailed, its serene voice turned to child-like shrieks as Tavio ripped into it with spear and axe. Its flesh began to melt and decay, sloughing off in massive chunks as Nuralie’s poisons did their work. Meanwhile, I threw as many supercharged Void Hammers as I could into the festering wounds, annihilating beach-ball-sized chunks of flesh until I started hitting whatever passed for this thing’s organs. Then, I kept throwing.

It hit me with Psychic retaliation damage, but I didn’t care. I let it tear my health apart until my own Lifeguard buff was triggered and healed me nearly back to full. I spammed Rejuvenation every handful of seconds and hurled more hammers until my brain was ready to drip out of my ears. Even if my neurons died to the very last one, I’d still have 70% of my mental faculties left.

Another Dispel, more arrows, Tavio going absolutely HAM for a short while longer, and the Hierophant had nothing left to give. The ‘face’ along the lower portion of the staff was little more than a bloody crater, and with one final swing of the hammer on Tavio’s poleaxe, the two-mile-high staff tilted, then began to fall.

It took nearly five minutes from when the staff started to pitch to one side until it finally went full timber and hit the ground, obliterating a massive stretch of the Forest when it landed, but that wasn’t something I stuck around to witness.

I disconnected a few plates from Gracorvus to give Tavio a platform to stand on, and the pair of us watched the massive object fall for a moment, both breathing heavily from the adrenaline coursing through us. The staff wasn’t even close to hitting the ground when we finally got the notification we’d been looking for.

Your raid party has slain Hierophant of the Abductor: Whippomorph, Grade 34!

Your raid party receives no System-issued rewards for this victory.

After that System message was a round of notifications showing me a few skills that had advanced during the fight, but I pushed them away. I needed to check on the rest of my party. They were all alive, but I had no idea what condition they were in since they hadn’t joined in the final fray. Aside from Nuralie, that is, who was apparently fine enough to fire barrages of arrows.

After that, I needed to figure out how to get an entire city back out of the Closet when I didn’t have a hundred thousand Blessed stacks greasing the wheels of Shortcut.

Yeah, I had no idea how that was going to work.

Regardless, the threat was dead, the city was more or less in one piece, and I was ready for a fucking nap.

But there was no time to sleep. Before we could even begin to think about how to get Krimsim back where it belonged, we needed to get inside the Closet and start working on disaster relief. There would be hundreds trapped under rubble and collapsed buildings, thousands more injured, and an entire population without reliable access to food or water.

I took a deep breath, watched the Hierophant continue plummeting towards the Forest for a moment, then opened a portal.

Tavio and I went through it wordlessly, on our way to find answers and save what lives we could.