158 Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-Eight – Bringing The Ligh (1/2)

Errant brought Grace from nearly his heels overhead and down, hewing through the neck of the Stone Jotun Warlock who he had just hamstring. Black earthen energy spewed out of the wound with the geysers of blood, sparking and flaring against the residual energy of his Pact, even if he hadn't called on his Wrath.

He stepped away from the blood, as vivic energy started to bubble, flaring quickly as the residual energy of the Dark Earth Pact of the Stone Jotun leaked away. It didn't stop the Pact from harvesting the Jotun's soul, of course, but it would eat away the twelve-foot corpse with great speed.

Residual holy energies burned around his Sword. Consecrating his Sword and making it a Warlock's Glaive was an extremely back-handed way of accessing his Wrath without actually discharging it. It required a Greater Soulbound Weapon, the Eldritch Glaive, One Strike, and Consecrate Weapon Feats, and a fair degree of skill at manipulating Wrath... which was rather difficult to come by if you didn't actually use it.

It wasn't the same as a true Eldritch Glaive, of course, which actually manifested Wrath as a solid weapon of its own. This way, the Wrath inside him naturally flowed along his soul and 'filled up' the sword, like it would fill up his arm, and so was discharged when he struck with it. Given that he had his Purity Mastery at Five, that meant a fixed +36 damage, 6d6 topped out, which was nothing to sneeze at.

And since he was a One Strike stylist anyways, it didn't bother him to slow his attack pace down in order to strike a devastating blow each time.

He sniffed the air, and looked around at the trappings of this shrine. Battered flesh and splintered bone began to rejoin as he stopped using his Wrath for other purposes, and it healed him from inside.

He could see that this had been repurposed from the original worship of the Stone Jotuns' racial deity. If he had any guesses, this runt of a Stone Jotun had gone dumpster diving for the power to overcome his lack of Stature, and found it in something Below.

An Aberrant Power, not strong enough to grant divine spells in mockery of the gods, but more than strong enough to grant a Warlock Pact, giving power over earth and stone... and the Stone Body enhancements, making him tougher, stronger, and sturdier then his bigger kinfolk.

This Jotun Runt had come back here, and either killed or driven away the original worshipers, slowly bringing the younger giants, in awe of his power, into his fold, and suppressing the elders. A Power from down deep in the darkness, which should not be rising to the light, was showing its power here.

He had killed six of the junior Warlocks, and fully a dozen normal Stone Jotuns. How many more had been sent to other tribes to take them over, he did not know. At least they had not started gathering here... or perhaps, they weren't gathering here, yet...

He looked at two of the idols that had been Shaped into existence, inhumanoid forms like pulsing tentacles veins of earth wrapped around a malformed brain, just begging to be cloven with Grace, and then crushed with a few proper blows of the Warlock Jotun's mace.

Best tool for the job, after all.

He'd seen two lesser versions of this thing in the were-boar home, giving him a good idea where the weres' Curse came from. It was probably a direct blessing from this Thing from down in the darkness.

Stone Jotuns were the most peaceful of the Jotuns. They were herders and carvers, not really caring about outside events, content with their lives and the message of the stone.

But they were Jotuns, and once their elemental urges were stirred up, they were hard to put down. Their Stature mindset made them look down on anything shorter than them, and once it came to the fore, their aggressive territorialism could be redirected into brutal conquest. If they were whipped into a mood for battle, it would take little for them to bring in lesser Jotuns, given their easy relations with them all, and so assembling a large force would be remarkably easy.

Had he just headed off a catastrophe, or stumbled into one in the making?

Soul Magic and Warlock Pact magic had some great synergies, including alternate ways of avoiding using Tats. Angel Walk and Angel Weight were very similar to Cloud-Stepping Sandals, so simply channeling the power of one into the other let him access the power without having to dedicate Wrath to doing so. Angel Eyes' Devasight gave him extraordinary visual acuity in even very dim light, but provided no benefit in darkness. However, a Halo Crown was simply a method of manifesting the light of the soul, and shining it out his eyes was a perfectly workable substitute.

So it was that his eyes were now basically flashlights. It wasn't the same as 360-degree illumination, but effectively, wherever he was looking was lit up, so the fact everywhere else was dark was moot.

It also freaked out the Jotuns, which was somewhat understandable. His eyes were literally glowing like incandescent bulbs right now, and if he didn't have Devasight, making him immune to brightness, he'd be blind. The Stone Jotuns, dwellers in stone, had darkvision, so having no light source basically meant little to them.

Having The Light as your light source could potentially reveal a lot of things, and that was one of the things he was once known for in the game, meshing all these different things together with the strength of a Vajra soul. The Light from his eyes swept the room, seeing where stone had been naturally worn away by water, Shaped by magic, cloven by tools, or worn away by the press of massive limbs. Angel Eyes opened his visual spectrum up to all the colors, including those above and below human sight, and he picked out the cunningly hidden door from its surroundings by the change in crystal structures, and the stalagmite that levered it open by the residue from the hands touching it.

He knocked it over with an elbow, the Shaped stone inside pulling a counterweight, and the stone door pulled back and slid aside with barely a whisper of sound. He strode within, eyes shining the way and doubtless alerting any guards within... not that he had sensed any, but they could easily be out of his range, and Stone Jotuns could be as motionless as statues if they desired.

Constructs and similar things didn't move randomly at all, of course.

The new area looked to be the living chambers of the tribe's Shaman, taken over by the Warlock. He scanned it quickly, looking for the glow of magic, things hidden or out of place, and naturally higher places where Jotuns liked to stow things from little thieves.

There was a big heavy chest behind a removable section of wall, that happened to fit that symbol he'd lifted off the severed neck of the dead Warlock, so out of place among his belongings. Errant opened the chest up, and was rewarded with the cold hard glare of magic.