The impact was quite literally ground-shaking. The shocked and pained bellows were not quiet, either. Dust and air gouted up out of the pit in the ground, accented by generously pyrotechnic displays of fire and lightning blasting up very high into the sky.
None of which affected me as I wasn’t in the line of attack, not on the ground, and had enough Thunder resistance to offset the deafening cries easily.
There was only thirty feet of stone separating them, however, and it was probably something they could bash and blow their way through, and it was plain they were definitely lighting everything up down there.
I wasn’t really worried about them getting out, but I was a Stone Shaper, not a Lava Shaper, so it was best to get to the Red Bull first.
I glided up to the edge of his pit, and promptly got a huge detonation of elemental flame to the face, enough explosive power to wipe an acre of land and kill hundreds of people.
Heat Sink ate the whole thing with a swirl and a magical burp. I gave the Red Bull some Piercing Cold Shards to the face to show him what I thought of him, and wow, was that huge head glaring up at me from down there angry.
He actually managed to rear up on his back hooves, put his front hooves on the wall, and lunge for me with his great black horns trailing fire.
They crashed into the stone twenty feet short of me, and I punched weapons-grade Shards all over his thick hide at point-blank range, driving them through several inches of magically-strengthened hide and causing star-like eruptions all over his head.
Big, bad, belligerent, bellicose, and brutal, the Red Bull instinctively turned his head and backed away at the incredible pain.
Weapons-grade meant I got to apply weapons-based damage individually, instead of collectively, as I had to punch his natural armor to do so. If he wanted to set himself up so nicely to do so, I was glad to oblige him.
He fell back and down, and I had to return to mere touch attacks and a fraction of the damage, but that was fine.
Crown’s butt end was sitting on the ground, I was Shaping.
Sure, it was only two thousand cubic feet at a time, but two thousand feet of stones was approximately two hundred TONS of material. It might not have been as much volume, but it was denser, and it was heavier.
And, just like I had excavated that pit, I could fill that pit in.
The Red Bull didn’t see it, bellowing at me and returning my Piercing Cold Shards with blasts of fire that couldn’t even melt the stones I was floating just above before the Heat Sink Hexar Shield in front of me drank them in. Behind his flanks, the pit was closing over, thick and firm, a volume of stone flowing together over his flanks and back as he glared at me and voiced his defiance.
That was totally fine. I wasn’t trying to tame him or suppress him, cage him, make him obey. I was pretty sure that was stupidity and impossible.
No, I was just going to kill him, and feed him to the Land.
I was also fairly certain that any steaks made from him would be unpalatable, apologizing silently to Kris and Tim.
The Red Bull finally noticed the stone when the sides of the pit closed in and the ceiling of it came up right behind his head. He turned his head, and his horns clashed with the stone. He tried to shift, and suddenly there was no room to either side of him at all.
His burning eyes turned up at me, and the bellowing slowly stopped.
From the other pit, the Thunder Cow calling out for him heard him stop, and she stopped calling out as well.
The eyes that looked up at me were more than animal eyes. The fires didn’t shoot at me, watching as I came around the side of the pit, turning up to see me right above him, above the stone that was locking him in on all sides, giving him nowhere to go.
He was staring at me as I raised Crown, and brought him down.
The planes I Shaped were a quarter-inch wide, thirty feet high, and sixty feet long. The stone cracked audibly as they split from either side, and for a long and cruel moment that mass of thousands of tons of stone was extended out on a lip above the Red Bull.
Then the far end un-Shaped, and cracked loudly halfway through as the stone couldn’t take the weight.
It fell. Not far, because it didn’t have far to fall. But it was far, far more weight than even the colossal body of the Red Bull could support, and it hammered him straight down. His leg bones cracked instantly, spine smashing, ribs pulverizing, unable to deal with that much weight coming straight down upon him.
The fires below guttered, and went out. Flaming blood sprayed out of the Red Bull’s mouth under the pressure of the stone, and his internal organs started forcing themselves up out of his throat. I was sure broken bones were protruding through his skin, and high-pressure blood was escaping that way, too, muscle and organs being almost liquefied by the pressure and squeezed out and down under the remorseless weight of the stone.
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My Assay of the Red Bull below slowly winked out as its Health and Health Qi plummeted like a rock, unable to deal with that much pressure, that much damage. When it was gone, the Assay had no living target, and there was only its horned head protruding out from under a massive solid cube of stone, rendering him down.
I flicked out the Soulspear from Crown’s head, and drifted down into the pit.
---
A few minutes later I appeared above the edge of the pit the Thunder Cow was in.
To either side of me, supported on a couple Disks, the severed horns of the Red Bull, darker than any ivory should be and still spitting fire, rose in grim display.
There was a sad and wary lowing from below as the Thunder Cow, also obviously more intelligent than any normal beast, looked up at me, understanding what I was displaying to her.
There was one ineffectual bolt of Lightning, which turned and vanished into the Lightning Rod Hexar Shield there, not touching a hair of my head.
Her attention was on me. She didn’t see the stone starting to close in behind her as she backed up as far as she could in the pit, choosing to keep blasting defiantly now, as it was all she could do.
I made sure I kept her attention, icy Shards raining down on her and poking her constantly, so that she didn’t notice the stone gathering above and behind her, or the area in front of her hooves rising up and restricting her ability to move back ahead.
It took a few minutes to do the job, and like the Red Bull, she didn’t notice until she tossed her head and her horns slammed into the stone that hadn’t been there a minute prior. Suddenly she realized that the stone had grown up under her head, and was also over her shoulders. She had no room to kick and buck and move, only to fall down to a squat, and that wasn’t going to save her.
Her bellow was loud, loud enough to make the stone crack and the air quake with the pure volume of her anger and defiance, earning her name in truth.
The crack of the stone splitting once in tandem, then another to finish things, was still totally audible, and with a devastating crunch, her thunderous final cry was smashed to silence.
A minute later, I drifted down into the pit, and came out shortly later with two great ivory horns, sheared cleanly from her skull and still sparkling with lightning. Behind me were two pits thick with vivus that was slowly staining all the stone down there very white indeed, and it wasn’t going to stop anytime soon.
I turned my eyes to the line of soldiers and mages watching me from the walls of Sanamar close by. I could feel their nervousness as they watched me, not knowing my capabilities, but aware I had just disposed of the threat that had been bedeviling them for years. They also did not know if they should be grateful or afraid of what was going to come next.
I flew rapidly to the east, down the hill and to the sea nearby. There I began the next step of what I had to do here.
------
It did not take them too long to venture cautiously out of the city. There was still the threat of a horde of Eaters coming this way, but those could be seen in the distance and out-run, so there was no chance of being killed by them.
The twenty-foot walls I was erecting two miles from the city were something else altogether, and had to be investigated.
They were nobles and knights, looking a bit ragged after so many years of restricted crops, no mining to speak of, and absolutely no trade. They’d been living on fish instead of their beloved cattle, and it had impacted their physical conditioning, clearly no longer the massive warriors of old times, especially the unfortunate souls once trapped inside their own armor and made slaves of by their king.
But, hey, Viamontians. Their king, sink or swim.
Watching me pull up a ten-foot thick, twenty-foot high wall, ten feet longer every six seconds, was definitely surreal to them, and at first they just paralleled my slow process, keeping pace as the new wall, so far beyond the city’s walls and out into the bare rock that had once been farms and fields, came into being.
There were some consultations between them about what to do, with a few overly-arrogant sorts actually proposing taking me prisoner and making my magic work for them.
Somehow, I wasn’t all that surprised when that particular loudmouth ended up with a sword in his throat, red blood gurgling out against blue skin, and any thoughts of attacking me died with him out there on the lonely rocks.
They swallowed when a Dart of white flame struck the corpse, and it began to burn with a misty flame that set the stone to whiteness all around it, a whiteness they could not fail to recognize from the throne room where their king and so many of his most loyal followers had died.
A rather haggard-looking fellow in the bright copper of treated pyreal Armor that was once a Hand, still kept up as immaculately as possible, its straps notably now made of woven straw instead of leather cord, took the initiative to walk up to me.
He was not, I noticed, the Count who had taken the initiative to approach Briggs and Kris at the Royal Castle.
“I am Count Ricardo du Bellenesse,” the tired blue-skinned man greeted me carefully, watching as stone flowed out of the ground in an even, unbroken stream as I glided along on spread Wings filled with stars. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?” he asked, bowing quite low.
I glanced at him. “I was expecting Count Furzi or Baron Lotila, Your Grace,” I admitted evenly.
He paused that I would bring up those names. “After several discussions, it was agreed that the two of them would not be representing the people of Sanamar in further dealings with the Imperial Princess,” he responded diplomatically.
“Did you burn them, or feed them to the fishes?” I asked with some disinterest.
“They were burned to ash, and used to fertilize the fields they refused to work all these years, my lady,” he replied succinctly.
“You turned away the Freebooters when they sought to return. That was wise of you. You should know that the men who came to coerce you again ended up floating in the seas to the east, courtesy of Master Oswald, the Green Hunter.”
He closed his eyes and breathed a long sigh of relief. “Neither Nuhmudira nor her daughter returned here, my lady,” he informed me as I glided slowly along. “May I ask what your intentions are here, my lady?” he inquired with painfully stiff formality.
I was no good at playing the haughty arrogant bitch. I’d bring Kris in if that needed to be done. She’d put the fear of the gods into this clan-abandoning Bellenesse noble. “I am the Lady Magos Ryin, foremost Magos of the Kingdom of Freehold and the First Stave of the Order of the Lost Light.” He couldn’t fail to recognize the swirls around Crown, after all. “What I am doing now is giving your people some succor and a chance, Your Grace.”
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