Of all people I’d thought might help us, I wasn’t expecting The Hurricane. Nor was I expecting her to be actually effective. Fourth tier or not, I hadn’t thought much of her abilities when I’d seen her goofing about with wind and clouds. Even throwing lightning around wasn’t all that impressive compared to some of the stuff I’d seen since then.

It seemed that the reason for all that was because she hadn’t been in her element. With a massive storm at her beck and call, any and all of it made all the more deadly by her Skills, she was pretty damn scary. I wasn’t sure how long she could keep the storm together, but by itself it almost totally suppressed the fortresses.

They were all high up off the ground, completely out of range of my influence, which meant I had no [Bane] benefits or other ways to directly touch them, even with Climates. At least that meant there was no ANATHEMA rage niggling at my mind and making me do stupid things. I’d managed to avoid anything too idiotic, but thus far the ANATHEMA effects had been no worse than a furious hatred of all the stupid monsters that Vok Lim had dumped onto my land. The killbox had gotten rid of all of them, though, so I no longer even had to worry about that.

At that range and with the hurricane in full force, the mage-kings had resorted to artillery bombardment. Sitting a couple kilometers above ground they had all the range they could want to try and flatten the countryside or level the mountains. In spite of the damage, the fortresses still had a hell of a lot of power, booming out enormous spell workings to crisp living things or crack stone. Between them and The Hurricane, all of Tarnil would be effectively scorched and scoured rock if it weren’t for [Conservatory]. It turned out it had been a really good idea to pull all the cities back inside the Caldera.

Hilariously, none of the mountains they’d been bombarding were my mountain. Instead they’d mostly focused on the one I’d been using to make my [Contained Stars], investing a lot of magic in trying to peel away the rock face. [Structural Mana Reinforcement] was proof against most direct attacks and [Warding] dissolved more intricate spellwork before it could do too much damage, which made their efforts come to very little.

Vok Lim had tried some of his magical artillery against Meil, but Iniri had put a stop to that. She didn’t even need to stay awake, thanks to her new Skill. At some point during her fight with Vok Lim she’d broken through to the fourth tier, and the results were impressive, to say the least.

Iniri Tarnil

Level 75 [Queen of The Sheltering Radiance]

Race: Kirin-kin demihuman

Health: 2250/2250

Stamina: 1500/1500

Mana: 3000/3000

Skills

[Lineage: Shield of Tarnil] 10: Inherited from the great hero Teash Arn, founder of Tarnil, this magic shield provides unequalled defense. Stellar mana has granted it an additional form: Nebula absorbs all incoming attacks, casting them into the blackness between the stars.

[Guardian Constellation] 1: Protect those under your care with the light of a lucky star. You may leave one or more tiny stars guarding a person or a place. They will consume themselves, projecting a shield to intercept any attack, strength scaling with the mana invested. At maximum mana investment they will project [Shield of Tarnil]. Additional stars protect larger areas.

[Celestial Augury] 1: You see what the stars do. With this spell school you can sense and communicate vast distances, as well as locate things far away.

[Radiant Mana-Furnace] 1: You blaze, radiant with mana. Not only can you twist your mana into other affinities, but that affinity gets an additional boost of stellar Affinity mana. Even unformed mana can strike with physical force.

[Sunwrought Lightforge] 1: Your light shines down upon your people. Your light constructs may be made permanent with an additional investment of mana and such permanent light counts as a crafting material. All light constructs are extremely durable, and may emit a revitalizing warmth as well as light.

[Phantasmal Authority] 1: Taking the lead, whether by speech or by spell, invokes the realm of the phantasmal, clarifying intent, focusing will, and separating truth from fiction.

[Coronal Body] 1: The sun is life. When you fortify yourself with your mana, every kind of regeneration is increased, physical robustness is significantly increased, and you glow with an aura that will retaliate against attackers with solar fury.

[Advanced Rune Carving] 1: Magic has a shape. Your efforts in understanding and transcribing that shape have borne fruit. You can now etch runes with great finesse and effect.

[Starlance] 1: The wrath of the stars. This ray of stellar fury destroys all in its path.

[Swiftray] 8: You move as swiftly as a ray of light. This skill lets you move instantly from point to point along any of your active light constructs.

 

Abilities

[Wisdom of the Stars] 1: The stars themselves grant you knowledge. You can see mana, and your mana pool and mana efficiency are vastly increased.

[Sunlight Supremacy]: Your light is superior. It protects from divinations, improves the health and flourishing of nearby creatures, and protects allies from attacks.

[Core Touched]: You are a dungeon’s eyes and ears.

[Purified]: Everything you’ve lost to Depletion has been restored. You are immune to Depletion.

[Lumensculpt] 3: You can control the details of light constructs with an incredible degree of finesse, and find it easier to create constructs of large size. Reduces costs of all light constructs.

[Queen’s Insight]: Provides passive, low level awareness of events within your kingdom. Light constructs may be deployed wherever [Queen’s Insight] covers, given enough knowledge to specify a location.

[Lineage: Light’s Chosen]: Children are born [Purified]. Mothers have improved health during pregnancy and childrearing. Infants are born with improved physical qualities.

There had been some interesting consolidation of skills. For example, [Phantasmal Authority] had absorbed her [Ritual Leadership], [Inspiring Speech], and [Phantasmal Beacon], which was an odd combination, but it seemed to work. [Sunwrought Lightforge] collected all her light-construct abilities aside from [Shield of Tarnil], which made sense, as did [Sunlight Supremacy] collecting all the passive benefits of her light.

The addition of stellar Affinity had shown a clear and dramatic effect on all her Skills, almost all of which were now stellar-flavored. Plus, her actual stats had jumped through the roof, though that may have just been due to the fourth tier breakthrough. From what I understood the fourth tier was known to come with a massive increase in power.

The coolest thing was [Guardian Constellation], which seemed to have come out of nowhere. Though considering the name of her Class and all the other Skills she had, it fit right in. That was the Skill she was using to guard Meil while she slept, and not simply by throwing a bunch of mana into it and calling it a day.

Instead she’d taken the name to heart, and put together a series of protective runes around Meil, using [Sunwrought Lightforge] to draw them in the air, then placed a maximized mote of [Guardian Constellation] at each turn and endpoint in the rune. Since I didn’t have much basis for comparison, I didn’t know how much more effective it was, but I doubted it was done at a whim. At the very least it made for a striking view, with silver and blue constellations glowing in the driving rain.

Now and then a bolt of lightning reached out to lick the city, and instead found a star-speckled darkness. For a while Vok Lim tried pulverizing the city, but the constellations lit up and consumed anything he threw at them. Not the same rune every time, either, which spoke to some deeper interplay of Skills than I’d seen so far.

In all, Meil was well-protected. I’d eradicated all the extant monsters and, though the fortresses tried dropping more once or twice, The Hurricane’s hurricane had pretty much wiped them out almost immediately. The only ones who seemed to be able to weather it were the elites. Unfortunately, there were a not-insignificant number of those, maybe a hundred level seventy-to-ninety monsters per fortress, and they didn’t seem to have any problem heading out into the storm to fix damage that The Hurricane had done.

I was glad that they hadn’t sent four hundred tier-four equivalent monsters at me, though maybe I could have handled them. It seemed they were trying to play it safe, rather than overwhelm me with numbers, and that was probably in part because they didn’t know where I was. The compass thing that had once been used to track my core down probably didn’t work anymore, not on the sheer scale of Tarnil and not with my magic literally everywhere, and four hundred agents wasn’t anywhere near enough monsterpower to search the area.

The mage-kings didn’t seem too interested in budging from their fortresses, either. Not that I blamed them. Despite all the damage that we’d done to them, they still had layers and layers of magical protections and the ability to throw out city-wrecking spells. Though they didn’t have much luck in smashing any of my dynamos or getting through the first few dozen meters of rock anywhere in Tarnil, they did blow up a number of my weather towers. Which, as it turned out, Conservatory fixed quickly and easily enough that I didn’t have to do anything manually.

While everything was under control for at least a few hours, I asked Iniri to come over so I could see what transcription would get me. Actually asked her directly, rather than sending Shayma over to translate. Iniri still wasn’t hearing me as a direct voice, apparently, but my intent was getting clearer because Iniri just told her staff that she was going to see me and stepped into the teleporter.

“Hey Shayma! Iniri is coming to do a Transcription because she hit fourth tier.”

“Oh yeah! She said she had but I forgot that meant you might be able to get stuff too.” Shayma was hanging out with the rest of her group, actually discussing Skills. Between what Shayma had seen her parents do and Annit’s attempts to covert her weapon Skill and her Affinity, the girls had realized they were not nearly as practiced with their Skills as the numbers might reflect. One-Eye-Green, of course, didn’t have Skills, but was eager to learn about them. According to her there was some degree of flexibility and mastery to the inborn abilities that monsters had, which seemed a step toward actual Skills. “Do you need me there?”

“It’s up to you. I don’t think I can tell her exactly what stuff I get yet, but barring anything requiring direct intervention you can just tell her over Concord.”

Shayma half-rose from her seat and hesitated, looking at the other three. They seemed to get along just fine but I understood the hesitation. One-Eye-Green was still a tall telepathic monster and neither Keri nor Annit were really equipped to deal with her if she meant them harm. Or just didn’t realize what she was doing. Or maybe I was misreading the situation and Shayma just didn’t want to interrupt the conversation.

“Yeah, don’t worry about it. I’ll just tell you what happens, and we’ll decide from there.” Shayma nodded, and settled back down. Iniri, meanwhile, breezed into the cottage with only a few glances at the hot springs and put her hands on the core. Unfortunately, only three of the Skills transcribed, the others being too similar to ones I’d already gotten, it seemed.

Transcribing [Guardian Constellation]…Skill becomes [Ability: Guardian Sun]: Light fields protect allies and impede enemies.

Transcribing [Wisdom of the Stars]…upgrades [Blue’s Sagacity]. Mana storage per point is increased.

Transcribing [Starlance]…Skill becomes [Starlance]: Dungeon may channel all the energy of a [Contained Star] into a single burst.

I was really excited by seeing those lines. I really needed more mana capacity, and not only was [Blue’s Sagacity] growing so very slowly, it wouldn’t even be enough when it hit maximum. When I went to check though, I was a little bit disappointed because the mana storage had only increased from twenty-five to thirty thousand mana per point of the Skill. Not nothing, but not an enormous step toward what I needed to Purify Ansae, either.

[Starlance] was nice. I was intending to weaponize my [Contained Stars] anyway, if I had to, but a way to do it officially meant I probably wouldn’t do something silly like ignite the atmosphere if I needed to use it. Since the mage-kings were giving me extra time, I was making [Stellar Fragments] as fast as I could, and if they’d give me another day or two I’d have three Stars, and if they took even longer I’d have four. Even with my shoddy descriptions, it said that [Starlance] took all the energy of a star, so it wasn’t something I could use more than once each.

The upgrades to the light-based Fields didn’t feel particularly amazing, but if that included [Panopticon] and [Purgatory] that would be pretty wild. Those were already incredibly powerful in their own way, and giving them further protective properties meant places like Ansae’s audience chamber would be even more fit for purpose.

“Okay, awesome. Thanks, Iniri!”

“You’re welcome, Blue,” she said. I knew she couldn’t parse the words, but it wasn’t like thank you was a complex intent. “Anything good?”

“Yup! I think so anyway.”

“Good! I’ll have Shayma fill me in when she’s free again.” Her eyes took on a faraway look, which meant she was reaching out with other senses, probably [Queen’s Insight]. Though I was pretty sure [Guardian Constellation] had some kind of feedback, so maybe she was just checking on it, since Vok Lim’s latest attempt had just gotten eaten. I was pretty sure this one was something to do with metal Affinity, since a swarm of razor-edged rings maybe a meter across each had actually approached Meil from under the lake’s surface.

Clever, but it didn’t help. Nor did it help in the next few hours when Vok Lim’s castings grew more and more convoluted. Spells that tried to burrow through the earth were torn apart by my mana, those that tried to bend space found that the depths of Nebula were more than large enough to accommodate them, and those that tried to overwhelm Iniri’s defenses with sheer scale and scope were laughable. With my mana reserves, I was pretty sure the only thing that could really threaten Iniri’s defenses was void magic, and the mage-kings didn’t appear to have any of that.

“Blue was far too prepared for us. At least two fourth-tiers, maybe three, what seems to be a fifth tier, counters to our monster types…” Bel Aci scowled. “I know that Tor Kot spoke with Blue, at least indirectly. Did he warn Blue about us?”

“Wouldn’t put it past him,” Vok Lim grunted. “He’s a worm but he’s not dumb. No way did Blue just appear. He had to be here this whole time.” His eyes narrowed in sudden thought. “I don’t know why we didn’t see it before. Everything here is Tor Kot’s doing — he’s trying to get rid of us. He knows that the Council wouldn’t support destroying a dungeon with any anti-Depletion properties, but that we couldn’t get past the defenses of this one even with our war cores.”

“I don’t know that I’d go as far as accusing Tor Kot of treason,” Tem Irn said. “But it does make sense. Doesn’t help us now though.”

“Sure it does.” Vok Lim said. “We know it’s all lies. Just use corekiller armament and be done with it.”

I had a bad, bad feeling about that.

My ability didn’t let me see whatever argument ensued, so the only thing I could do was sit there and stew. I actually called on Shayma to go over and get with Iniri, in case I needed her expertise in shielding me from something more damaging than a lavaburst or kinetic detonation that [Conservatory] would take care of in a few hours. Unfortunately, even that much foresight wasn’t enough.

Agony wracked me with absolutely no warning, or even any indication of what was going on. I didn’t see anything useful with [Genius Loci], I couldn’t tell where the weapon was coming from, or how it was affecting me. If I hadn’t been forewarned about it, I absolutely knew I would have panicked. I actually did panic, but more constructively than I might have.

“Shayma! Iniri! I need some kind of shielding!” If I couldn’t see where it was coming from, I didn’t know how Iniri would block it, but she was the only one who could.

“Where!?” Shayma asked.

“I don’t know! The fortresses!” I wrestled through the haze of pain, grabbing the one thing that I was pretty sure I could use to make Vok Lim – and it had to be Vok Lim – stop. I grabbed one of my stars and yanked it out to where I could see the fortress, then pointed at it and triggered [Starlance].

A beam of blinding light reached out and touched the sky.

It happened fast, so fast I could only put it together in hindsight. A pinhole opened in the shell around the [Contained Star], the tiny sun within it flaring up at the sudden loosening of its bonds and then collapsing again as it became unstable, nova brilliance flashing through it and out through the pinhole. An eruption of radiation, superhot plasma, and blazing mana thundered upward, completely engulfing Vok Lim’s island and leaving nothing behind.

The shockwave blew apart The Hurricane’s storm. I knew that under normal circumstances even high-grade atomics would have issues disrupting a hurricane, but the sheer amount of mana involved shredded everything around. Even Meil needed to deploy Iniri’s Guardian Constellations to not get flattened.

The other fortresses were far enough away that their wards protected them, some hundred kilometers further south of Meil than Vok Lim’s, but even at that distance they visibly struggled against the explosion. The agony stopped instantly, but when I glanced at my overlay, I found something worse than being down a few hit points.

Core 1 HP 17/17

Core 2 HP 17/17

Corekiller Armament didn’t just hurt me. It permanently damaged me. In a way it made sense that the mage-kings would have figured out some way to deal with dungeon cores. Tor Kot had mentioned that cores could be extremely dangerous if left unsupervised, and likely from personal experience. I just thought they took them out with brute force. Like I just had.

“Rotten god cocks!” The Hurricane said, and made the wise decision of turning around and heading for the ocean fast enough that she made a sonic boom.

“Teleport us where you need us,” Iniri said at almost the same time, wobbling as the ground shock rattled all of Meil. If it weren’t for my reinforcement there probably would have been some damage.

“Blue just took out Lim,” Bel Aci said grimly, looking at the other three. “I guess corekiller actually threatens him.”

“What if he has more of whatever that was!?” Sen Rii demanded.

“He’s got one more at most. If he had three, he would have used them when we arrived, leaving one to go home and carry the message of what happened. If he had four, he would have used them. One or two, that’s not enough to effectively defend or threaten.”

“That means he could still kill another one of us!”

“But he can’t kill all of us.” Bel Aci was unsympathetic. “Everyone, use corekiller.”

I really didn’t like that Bel Aci was not an idiot. Another wave of agony hit me and left me scrabbling for my second [Contained Star], fumbling it into position halfway up a mountain so I could hit the two closest fortresses at once. Even impaired as I was, I knew enough not to bring Iniri and Shayma anywhere near until after I’d used the weapon. [Starlance] shot out once more, shattering the mountain face with the force of the explosion, engulfing one of the islands but only grazing the other as either poor control or pain kept my aim from being perfect.

The beam of fusion plasma obliterated the first island, half-melted the second, and touched the distant sea. All long its path it destroyed any lingering clouds from the hurricane, and ionized plasma plumed from both the mountain surface and the seawater where the [Starlance] had hit it. The gale of its passing even disturbed the pillar of smoke and vapor where I’d blown up Vok Lim.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop their corekiller at all.

Core 1 HP 14/14

Core 2 HP 14/14

I grabbed Iniri and Shayma, dropping them at the base of the mountain. Things were flattened and on fire, but Iniri ignored all that and flung out a massive [Shield of Tarnil]. Shayma jumped into the [Phantasmal Realm], heading straight up toward Tem Irn’s island. Unfortunately, despite a star-spangled darkness spanning multiple dozens of kilometers, [Shield of Tarnil] didn’t block the corekiller. Either it somehow didn’t defend against the attack, or even that large a shield wasn’t enough to stop it. I didn’t need to say anything, because Iniri immediately knew and shifted tactics, straining herself to enclose Bel Aci’s island, in a starlit bubble. It was the only fortress still fully intact, and maybe it helped, but the numbers on my core continued to tick down.

Core 1 HP 13/13

Core 2 HP 13/13

Meanwhile, Shayma hit the wall of wards on the inner tower, present even in the Phantasmal Realm, and started to tear through them. While Sen Rii’s fortress was half-destroyed and smoking, most of the emplacements melted or broken, the central redoubt was still strong, and she couldn’t channel all of my mana because Iniri was already taking big bites of it. Shayma was making progress, but not nearly fast enough.

Core 1 HP 12/12

Core 2 HP 12/12

I only had one option.

“Ansae! Help!” Usually Ansae could tell when something was going down, but if the corekiller attack was invisible to me, it might not be something she knew to look for. Or even if she saw it, she didn’t realize what it was doing. “The mage-kings have something that’s killing me!” That got her attention, as she literally dropped what she was working on, her head snapping to look in the direction of the battle.

“I can do something about that,” she said grimly. “But it will take the rest of my resources. You will have to protect me and swear to cure my Depletion as soon as possible.”

“I will,” I said, but it wasn’t a Bargain. Maybe because there wasn’t an obvious payment, or that it wasn’t an impossible task, or because we were both Powers. Not that I would have cared if it were a Bargain, under the circumstances, because I wasn’t going to argue when some weird dungeon-directed version of Depletion was chipping away at my maximum HP. There was even a ring of dust around each of my cores as they started to crumble. “I’ll—”

I was about to teleport her to the right place, but she didn’t need it. She took a step and was just there, wings spread and hovering in the air in front of the two fortresses. I had thought before that I’d gotten used to her presence, despite it being enough to flatten third-tiers if she wasn’t careful. I was wrong. She’d been keeping herself under tight control, because the sudden, chilling authority that snapped into existence shook even me.

The light changed. It took me a moment to realize that one of the moons had eclipsed the sun, the small one, turning it into a slit-pupiled eye and dyeing the light over the whole country pale silver. It actually knocked Shayma right out of [Phantasmal Path], sending her plummeting for a moment before she was relocated down next to Iniri. I say was relocated because it was very clearly not something Shayma did on her own, and Ansae’s will kept any Skills or magic from being used. Even [Shield of Tarnil] was cut off. Fortunately, so too was the corekiller weaponry.

“WOE UNTO YOU.” Ansae’s voice made the very mountains tremble, the hate in it thick enough to smash the island’s outer defenses. “YOU MEDDLE IN THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT. YOU TRESSPASS WHERE YOU ARE NOT WELCOME. YOU TAKE THAT WHICH THE WORLD HAS GIVEN TO OTHERS.”

Every syllable rang like the biggest bell in the world. My cores literally vibrated, despite being so far away, and people both in Meil and the cities inside the Caldera stopped what they were doing to listen. The silver light seemed to go completely through the world, rather than simply illuminate it. Somehow, I could see Bel Aci and Sen Rii sitting on their core thrones far above the world, along with the hundreds of elites and tens or hundreds of thousands of monsters packed into the fortress-islands. Each of them was picked out in exquisite detail, despite the distance.

I didn’t know what Bel Aci or Sen Rii were saying. They weren’t invoking my name, and while the strange clarity meant I could tell they were saying something, screaming it even, I wasn’t privy to any of it. I could well guess that Ansae was, though, and she didn’t seem impressed.

“Are you seeing this?” I asked Shayma.

“Yes,” she said, staring upward. Iniri had something different to say.

“The Silver Woe.”

“YOU WHO HAVE ATTACKED BLUE, WHO HAVE DESTROYED AND KILLED AND CONDEMNED UNCOUNTED PEOPLE TO DEPLETION, YOUR PATH ENDS HERE. I AM YOUR JUDGEMENT, AND YOU HAVE BEEN FOUND WANTING.” The eye in the sky seemed to glare, carrying the same cold appraisal as Ansae’s own. Mountains literally groaned and trembled from the force of her displeasure and I realized I hadn’t ever had the smallest idea of how powerful Ansae really was. This, with her depletion, and unable to regenerate what she spent. Ansae spoke one final time.

“PERISH!”

They obeyed.