Bast formed the [Dyna] rune with one hand and the [Luiri] rune with the other, utilizing his maximum level effect for something like ‘Violently Move Air & Sound.’ It was essentially explosive, and Dyna 5 with Luiri 4 was added together for caster levels, +1 for Ruinous Charge’s 1 per 5 levels… caster level 10 for a level 4 spell effect.

The outer wall of wood and brick exploded and collapsed inward in a terrible cacophony, much of it turned to dust from the impact. Despite the destruction, he kept it reasonably shallow, not knowing who was on the other side. Fortunately, there was — as expected — no one immediately in the vicinity, as it was a luxury bath area. Not so luxurious after his handiwork, however.

They all filed in quickly and began spreading out, waiting for the slightly delayed response of a Resemblant to show them the exact breach spot they needed to hit to drop downward into the basement, instead of running around in the halls for the route. Sadly, scouting until the glyph marring was done had been relegated to the imperfect deduction of the spies.

Come ooooon…

An armored figure started to come through a door, and Bast made another quick rune to blast the door and the guard behind, who was catapulted backward out of sight. More guards slipped around and in, while from a second door even more spilled forth…

Through gaps in the armor, he noticed they weren’t flesh, but some sort of animated mannequins come-to-life, slightly glowing with magic.

Ugh! This manor has a small magical army protecting it, for gods’ sakes!

The group collectively moved to deal with them, warriors darting forward to bar the way to the priestly types. Bast dropped another AoE explosion by the first door, even as one of them was tossing a spear at him. Mannequins, parts of mannequins, and armor pieces went flying, as part of the manor’s support infrastructure also collapsed. That particular direction had been quite blocked.

He failed to dodge the spear, taking it in the leg, and piercing his light armor… which simply took away a wound negation from his REX buff.

Oh boo hoo! It’ll take more than such primitive means to best me.

Fighting that remained got splintered up, restricting him from AoE for fear of friendly fire. He flung his hands and blew off the head of a mannequin with [Dyna]-[Luiri]. Fortunately, it did the trick — it collapsed in a heap, disenchanting. And so he did it to another. Crunch.

Meanwhile, Steve made good use of the magical axe Freykeich, once the weapon of the dread pirate Wraevas, tossing it and smashing it through a shield to decapitate another mannequin soldier. The axe carried through, then rebounded back to Steve’s hand.

“Alright! Go, Steve, go!” Bast called.

Tashome proved his wand’s mettle against the things — he was invisible but a mannequin just fell over, the wood inside rotting apart rapidly.

Don’t really feel so bad seeing it against these particular foes — a mercy for all of us.

Bast caught a Resemblant gleaming with light to make itself known, half popping up from the floorboards to wave, then point down significantly. In his mind, he heard, “Right here! Corner of the room!”

Imagery came to him showing Eremina still bound, standing near a chair in a basement room, but one man was holding her arms from behind, while a tough-looking captain sort was shouting at her from the front. Then he slapped her hard in the face.

Rage boiling up, Bast hurried to the indicated spot — or near enough — and directed full explosive force down through the reinforced wood of the floor, concentrating the area as much as possible while still giving enough room for people to get down. He tried to carry through as much as possible like a gust, to blow some obscuring dust in the wake to screen them.

The blast was a success, collapsing the floor and making a crater maybe two could fit through at a time. Making immediately for it, Bast called out, “B-group guard the hole, A-group follow me!”

Bast dropped down, feeling the ghost of a presence dropping down with him, which he was unsure was Tashome or a Resemblant as he had no time to verify. Immediately, he was looking for targets, hearing multiple people coughing from the cloud of dust and debris blown into their faces.

There were two goons evident, with one of them still holding the girl, and she was interposed between him and Bast. But he also saw the captain with a mace in his hand, and making eye contact…

Bast hit him with a Dyna-blast taking him right in the main torso, to which he went flying with a grunt, clearly only suffering knockback after some wound negation buff.

Meanwhile, the goon by Eremina had pulled a dagger — which he held up to the girl’s throat. After coughing one more time, he raspily called out, “Freeze, asshole! Or the lady gets it! S’why you’re here, eh? Eh?! I’ll kill her for sure!”

Bast grimaced but didn’t make a move. The captain guy rose and began stalking over, assessing the situation and grinning suddenly. Fuck…

Mentally he sent to Tashome, “Please tell me you’re here and about to do something!”

In answer, the goon suddenly seized up, his eyes going wide. Then blood spurted from his mouth and he went limp, as vague blurs could be seen behind him.

The captain roared and charged at Bast — to which he received a prompt new blast into his gut, knocking him back a second time to crash into the wall. Meanwhile, the other goon seemed to just drop his spear and fall to the floor, unclear what hit him…

Hmm- wait! He’s faking it to not get killed. Pfft!

Bast hurried to Eremina, whose bonds were being cut by an invisible blade. Crying, face beginning to swell from the slap’s damage, she threw herself into Bast’s arms, who wrapped her up in his own. She cried adamantly, “I never broke! Never! I kept the confidence of the Order! I’d die before I talk!”

Shushing her, Bast eyed the scene for any further threats… The captain might’ve stirred briefly — that was until he suddenly jerked with a cut-off scream, his flesh wilting rapidly into a blackened corpse. Bast grimaced and turned his head away. Maybe the man deserved it, but…

“We know, dear,” Bast declared confidently for Eremina’s sake. “You did amazing. Let’s put a cap on all this being over by getting the bloody hell out of here, hmm?”

Anxiously, he cast his mind back to the greater realm, wondering how his goddess was faring…

 

✦•············•✦•···········•✦

 

Sammy — with an instant ‘flick of the wrist’ sort of action — dropped her Trick Up the Sleeve curse on Nestaire and his two goons, softening them up and maybe weakening any further retaliation. A searing light radial bomb dropped right in their faces from Seraphiel, followed immediately by scouring prismatic energy from Athos’s breath attack, and then topped by an even nastier light bomb of blinding energy from Sammy herself.

This shredded their defenses like cheesecloth, the two bodyguards having their protective field annihilated, their shields scoured to almost nothing, and their eyes painfully blinded. Some new contingency fired off from Nestaire, buying him more time with some sort of wound protections — a suit of armor encrusted him, made of smoke that also made his entire image appear blurry. He avoided the blinding as well.

Sammy began to feel a sinking, inexplicable dread as she eyed the man…

A hard light giant form swept in on the heels of the AoE bombs — a colossal squid-thing of endless darting tentacles seeking to entangle and disable. The bodyguards had no hope to defend, ambushed and blinded. The squid’s tentacles wrapped them up with pathetic ease, every limp caught and squeezed. Bones snapped and they screamed — before their mouths, too, were restricted.

One fell unconscious and the other struggled on uselessly, even in his anguish.

Nestaire, meanwhile, dodged out of its way narrowly. He touched his chest, spoke arcane words, and flung his hand, apparently activating some runic tattoo that flashed and blossomed an explosive fireball out beyond his hand, set to engulf Sammy and a few others almost instantly.

Reflect Force was useless against that sort of AoE, and — for whatever reason, perhaps due to the weird tattoo origin — her Detect Magic could not discern what it was exactly, despite understanding basically the obvious matter of what it was going to do.

Sammy prepared to take it and assume her wound negations would get chipped down, her armor damaged. Worst case scenario, she could use Alter Fate…

Goddamn AoE’s…

“By the Power of Faith, Thou Art Shielded!” came a resonating voice, delivered as Absolutely corny as anything could be. A pulsing energy field enshrouded Sammy and the rest, negating the damage of the fireball — Absolutely — for all in radius. They were untouched!

Gabriel was there, dropped in front of them as a winged resplendent form holding her Heaven Wall Shield high, grinning big and dumb and triumphantly, as she’d just completed one of her cherished dreams of swooping in and saving the day with a defensive maneuver. A timely Absolute Defense for the benefit of her beloved goddess.

The Ring of the Cheater on Sammy’s finger was Absolutely guffawing in mad glee.

Sparing a brief mental thank you to her guardian angel, Sammy dashed forward, aiming to take full advantage of the opportunity she’d been granted.

Multiple attack angles once again came down on Nestaire — single target laser-light beams, darts and blades of crystalline hard light, and even baleful curses blackening his aura and weakening him… the Cat Siths too, but the strongest one — of sheer vengeance — came from a certain ghostly gumshoe, calling, “The jig is up, jack, and you’re all washed up. Take that, ya white-livered scallywag!”

Sammy came in like the kill-dog going for the throat of that outgunned and outnumbered bastard of a foe. He was backpedaling for his life with his eyes trying to frantically track a dozen things happening at once.

His protections were stripped away again, and a hard light dart was sticking out of his leg. To top it off — layered in as a free action, essentially — Sammy tried for [The Unseen Animus] to curse and penalize him, which seemed to narrowly work…

And then the power of the Knockout Staff went for his face amid the rest like the hammer of god — goddess, actually. Sammy forced even more penalties on him with Alter Fate, like one final malus from reality itself to doom him.

The staff hit his skull like a thunderclap and he dropped instantly to the scorched, hot cobblestone, out like a light into Lala Land face first.

Sammy took a deep, satisfying breath as her eyes cast out to survey any further threats, but all was still. The squid-thing had been too big not to get blasted in part by the fireball and thus shattered, but her second, reserve squid-thing (rule #14 in the Sammyverse: always keep a reserve squid-thing) had swooped right in to take over and entangle them anew.

One was unconscious, and the other was struggling in a sleeper hold, inevitably to end up ‘out’ as well. Meanwhile, a spare Resemblant support and Seraphiel were stabilizing them to make sure they didn’t bleed to death internally and such.

The unconscious body of Nestaire gave Sammy some significant pause due to her concerns about the ‘explosion’ specialties of the tattoos.

But I mean, he won’t self-destruct himself, for fuck’s sake, right? But that dreadful feeling…

“Just get away from him, Madam,” Gabriel called as she walked over. “I’ll take him up. Don’t endanger yourself.”

Sammy waved a hand as she put her staff under the body and prepared to flip him over. “Eh, it’ll be fine.”

The head of Nestaire suddenly bent up from the road in a supernatural, impossible way. Instead of eyes, black nothingness was in his sockets — and from his mouth as it opened. “Just who the fuck are you, you cancerous wretch?” The voice was like one a serial killer would use anonymously calling into a news station.

Despite being a goddess, she was all girl in that moment. She —and Gabriel — screamed and leapt backward, both almost instinctively unleashing a laser blast right into that terrifying face at the same time.

There was an annoyed yelp from the ‘man’ that quickly became garbled as his face melted… and then he quite simply detonated.

This time, the damage was from an actual source point going outward, so she interposed her mirror shield in front of her and utilized Reflect Force — primarily to save her armor from damage, as she doubted the effect would hurt her severely. Gabriel, meanwhile, got thrown back, though she protected herself reasonably well via the shield and mostly just had her wings singed. Most others were far enough away…

Pretty much automatically, she selected [Wizard] for the extra exp. Aka, Fuck Bard.

There was nothing left of ‘Nestaire’ — he’d completely disintegrated. Sammy had to take a moment just to calm down and breathe normally.

Fuck, that was creepy. And weird. And… worrying.