81 Chapter Eighty-One – To Poppa Slug (1/2)

I was behind the arc of vision of the Sluggor. Sure, it had a bunch of self-exploding little goobers running around it, but what were they going to do, alert it a little girl was coming at it?

Tremble waited behind me, sheathed and ready as I arced across the battlefield behind the huge mass of the thing. It had to weigh more then a whale, which also had to be tremendously painful and unstable for such an unnatural thing to endure here.

No worries. It was moving at a good clip, closing in on the panicking elves, whose arrows were basically sticking in about three feet of hardened fatty hide uselessly, and making to run as the crazed Warped men they were fighting bayed at them and pursued.

I kept the smell and the purple-yellow aura completely at bay with Vajra and Null respectively. The stench of the Sluggor could kill, and the aura was combined poison, disease, and acid, a lovely thing.

It was dragging itself along quicker with its huge arm, leaving a swathe of putrescent slime behind it as it went, none of which touched my feet as I swung in behind it, raced past a couple startled Pusboys, and leapt onto its back.

Tremble bit in, in full Legendary Demon-Slaying mode, and +X drove into the thick hide, splitting it open like a rotting fruit as I raced forward, not quite touching the heaving bulk.

A trait of these disease-and-poison resistant bastards was the ability to totally ignore the infections racing through their bodies, not feeling any pain. It was the blessing the men who'd been gifted with that purple aura were using to press on in the face of the fireballs that hammered into them and cooked more then a few of them to ash.

Still, the power of that much anathema parting its back open belatedly got a reaction from the thing as I sliced the bastard open, and leapt into the air as it turned the bulb of a head around, not really possessing a spine and so more elastic then what seemed possible for its size.

I was twenty feet in the air, Tremble pointing down underneath my feet. It stared at the massive wound opened along its back in surprise, but didn't look up in time to see Tremble coming down onto it.

She buried in hilt-deep, which caused something like ”Awk!” to blurt out of its mouth as a Spirited Valorous Charge punched a whole lot of banefire deep inside it. I bounced up as the fat and whatever passed for organs around Tremble exploded out, and then came back down to hammer my Sword's quillons with my feet, driving it completely down into the resulting hole from the gore explosion.

Whereupon Tremble began to inject a Blooding Banestar into this thing every three seconds.

I reached back to my Masspack, and drew out Fall.

My Autobow was only up to +Drei, so no true Speed at work yet. I did a full layout somersault in midair as its sprits rotated, the string drew taut, and I brought it down to start popping my first Pusboy before I truly hit the ground.

Force arrows sped out as fast as I could rack the action, keeping the Strength bonus down to +5 for ease and speed. With my Girdle on, I could effortlessly pump the action, pull the string back, and the Force quarrel would manifest in place.

Pusboys began to explode as fast as I could rack the action. Alas, no vivic on them, have to clean them up later.

The Sluggor, however, had stopped moving, and was now merely flailing about wildly with that gargantuan meat fist. Given that its bulb of a head was on multi-colored wrathfire, and suspicious smoke was starting to spurt out of the huge slobbering mouth on the front of its lower body, a lot of startled eyes were turned its way.

Mistfires were flowing off the wound on its back, and ignited its back trail quickly, leaping along it like gasoline. Feeling opportunistic, I popped the Pusboys in that direction, and their explosions of virulent goo also burst into vivus as the unwhite flames fed upon the Warp energy within these creatures.

I maintained fire as the incensed Pusboys converged on me, popping them precisely as they clustered up. There were a bunch of them, but that only meant they were easier to shoot as I crouched down, skated backwards, and drove a bolt through two or three of them at a time.

I was poking and popping the last of them, a trail of vivus following along smoothly behind, when a really weird groan came from the Sluggor.

There was a weird light glowing from the cut from on its back, which seemed to be ripping open in the death throes of the demon. Its body seemed to be swelling, and there was a strange popping as its virulent Aura was devoured in a second, ringing it in a circle of whirling vivus. Vivic fire was drooling out its mouth, like it was puking out its guts, but there wasn't enough left of the head above to really scream, as it seemed to glow.

And something came up out of the ground.

There was no denying the sight, as a pair of giant, wispy jaws, like a surfacing worm or snake or something, lunged up and closed, fully enclosing the struggling Sluggor… just before it exploded.

The sound was silent to all but the soul, but it staggered everyone else on the field and hammered my Null, sending me back three steps in reflex. The Warp army was ripped through by a moving wall of vivus, and every one of the bastards that sold their souls to the Warp gods fell down in shock and horror. Corpses of their own lit up like bonfires across the field, and suddenly there was waist-high unwhite mist everywhere, tugging at them, feeding at them, and drawing out the unnaturally strength and vitality they'd been given by their Patrons.

The Pusboys naturally blew up in little balls of vivus, and everyone could tell there was only mopping up left to do. Where the Sluggor had been, the ethereal jaws had pulled down and vanished, and there was no sign of it left behind. Well, unless you counted a battlefield full of vivic mist.