249 Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Nine – Grandmother Uraskalae, Hello! (1/2)

The couple of lightning bolts coming down might have alerted the Hags and Jotuns that something was going on in a different location. Of course, who would be dumb enough to keep using magic against Void Brothers?

And then a very angry lion flew up as some chuckling Rockborn Clerics turned the foundation to muck, tiiiiiip, and over she went.

The ley lines here were a lot less rigid, flowing around and through the place like rivers and streams. Just like before, there were five of them: three heading out to the neighboring zones, one incoming from the Slow Shard, and one going Over There to a palatial estate in some redwood-sized banyan trees.

Poor palatial banyans. I will say that seeing trees that large being tossed a couple hundred yards into the air is pretty cool, and when they came down in all directions it was pretty impressive on the old Wrecked-'Er Scale.

A thousand miles of ley lines blew into the sky heading north and south, a mere five hundred miles or so clockwise... and then an unknown distance backwards and through the sweeping wall of Slow Time looming over there counter-wise. Who knows just what might be happening in there?

But right now, we'd shut down two of the outgoing ley lines powering this Grand Formation. That meant all their power had necessarily been re-routed holewards into the only remaining ley line there.

Sever that Obelisk, and there would be a massive back-up of the energy being forced through this system. The implications were explosive, in a country-cracking kind of way.

Now, there was just to take out the Hags.

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They were the fastest to get here, of course, combination of flight and dimensional magic. Of course, they came upon a scene of total slaughter, thousands of butchered Jotuns, canyons splitting the ground, Obelisk fallen down, vivic fires having a freaking feast, the Wake punching a hole towards the sun in the sky miles wide and getting wider, cracking open a path towards the inevitable pressure of reality come to reclaim some territory.

Their screams and curses were indeed something to hear, and didn't fade when they noticed the Lion and its blood was missing.

They were even less happy when they came plummeting down out of the air, and the Brothers, Briggs, and I rolled aside the corpses we were waiting patiently under, and made for them.

Everyone was now fully ego-satiated that they could kill one of these Hags alone, and given we were missing four Brothers who were out there leaving a trail of dead Jotuns miles long behind them, this was a time for as much slaughter as fast as possible.

That meant the Empress Hag had to die. There wasn't much out there going to survive long when six Void Brothers, Briggs, and I converged on her.

The Hags were actually weaker than the shellycoat Empress' get had been, being almost uniformly Lesser Exemplars, with a couple with daemonic bloodlines who were obviously 'princesses'. No Pseudos, for some reason.

Empress Uraskalae was a full Exemplar, of course, even showing a hint of a mane in her hair from the stolen bloodline. Not that we much cared.

The strategy of the Brothers was pretty simple: feed the crits to me and Briggs. Briggs' were bigger, but I got more of them.

It didn't matter how fast she was, or how strong she was. She couldn't fly, and she couldn't teleport. She couldn't Cast at all; the magic was torn apart before it could ever take form with all those Helices on top of her.

The Health Qi venting off her was almost solid as she screamed in pain from the whirlwinds of attacks pouring in on her. She jerked and fell as Endure nearly cracked her knee before the Health Qi took the injury, and I blurred crits across her neck, up her face, under her ribs, and across her eyes.

Her daughters closed in quickly, some wasting time on spells or buffs, momentarily certain that their mother/grandmother/Empress could survive the horrifying round of attacks taking place long enough for the dozen of them to get in and relieve her.

Three or six attacks each by six Brothers, generating crits fed to Briggs and myself, resulting in six for me and three for him. Plus Cutting her Life.

We came together in a splash and spray of hacking, thrusting, sweeping Weapons, coordinated impossibly well, feeding into one another, feeling every dip and dodge we had to make to accommodate one another, aid one another, nobody's Weapon interfering with anyone else's.

Her cry of disbelief didn't do any good, as we blew through six thousand Health Qi in under ten seconds, and suddenly she was in seven pieces and falling apart as we came apart, and came back together on a ten-foot-tall winged and horned demon Hag with living vines for hair.

The Hag Princess had just enough time to gape in disbelief at the ruin of what was left of her mother before she was shredded in an explosion of Health Qi and the gore that came afterwards.

The incoming Hags slowed down precipitously upon seeing that, and our numbers split in both directions. Experience had showed us that the daughters tended to have two or three thousand Health Qi, which one team could burn through incredibly fast.

The Hags lost any magic they had working under violent Helix disassembly, flailed about with ripping claws, but because they hadn't come in as a group, we swirled around them in flurries of Weapons hungry for Legendary Hags, and tore them apart.

It was about then that the survivors realized that they should run.

Now we fully scattered, and lo, there were eight of them, and eight of us. The Empress was the only one who could have outrun us, and we didn't even let them get to the newly blasted canyons that were filling with water from all the rivers and marshes the ley lines had blown through.