271 Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-One – Slugging it Out, for Style Points! (1/2)

Now, there were others who wanted to get in on this, including our Exemplar Lite Paladins and so forth, but I inquired who might be able to survive a pond of poisoned, diseased, acidic vomit being dumped on them, and they shut up and decided to work on the other things we had to get into place.

So it was that dragons fought thessaldragons, pseudo-nats fought Exemplars and Primals, and Forsaken fought a defecated army of Warp demons.

Ah, high end slaughter and Karma. You take it where you get it.

Kaiju sat there like mountains, but in actuality were watching with great interest. After all, they could now get an idea of the action at our levels, which didn't look like ants tussling, but some seriously nasty combat, and way faster than they usually moved at. We were some awesome entertainment, such as it was.

The enemy didn't know what it was dealing with, and try as it might, Exemplars are not something easy for even the Divine to duplicate. Given how much the Warped fucked with both Fate and Luck, I doubted either force gave them any face, and so trying to replicate what an Exemplar was capable of was just something they couldn't do.

Pseudo-nats were nice, but Exemplars were better. The best thing Pseudos had going for them was crazy tough bodies and being impossible to crit with their unreal anatomies, but Exemplars didn't care about crits.

Exemplars with Class Levels were waaay past that. The Pseudos could try to dispel their Buffs, but they had more Buffs then the P-nats had Dispels...

That Dire Rhino was every bit as big as Lord Ivory... until Lord Ivory set off his Quickened Animal Growth, and suddenly was two dozen feet tall and massing a hundred tons. Great tusks blazed golden with Brilliance, and their mutual charge was thunderous... and resulted in that whale-size rhino being picked right up off the ground and tossed like a sandbag.

King Gray was in a fang dance with the Nine-Tails, his Mastery of Spell Resistance defying the enchantments it was putting out, ignoring its illusions, and his jaws ripping at its tentacled, many-eyed, amorphous body with glowing golden fangs.

King Gold was in a straight-up mauling contest with the Dire Tiger, also twice his normal size with shining teeth and claws... and doing damage to the Tiger way faster than he was taking it in return.

Yeah, nothing to worry about for the Exemplars, who were faster, stronger, and waaaay tougher than their opponents, even as they rolled and fought through the demon press with complete uncaring aplomb and splattering happily gibbering plague spreaders.

We just cut our way in, of course.

The air was full of acidic disease-carrying rotting slime flying in all directions, spewed forth by all these happy jiggling sluggors of various sizes, their Pusboy cheerleader squads, and whatnot. That was fine, fine, it just meant vivic fire had that much more unnatural shit to burn.

Yeah, they thought they were tough, what with immunity to pain, organs like jelly, all that mass to hack through, and tough hides and stuff. But, you know, vivic and banefire don't really care, and Cutting Life, well, the caress of Void Brother Blades and Axes and Glaives opened them up, set them on fire, and they felt their life and power burning away. It might not have been painful, but there's an absoluteness to it that must have been kind of horrifying, judging by the way they started squealing in voices that sounded like constipated farts.

The big, swimming pool-sized mounds of oozing fat and pus could take a little longer, but Hell... how many Forsaken were on this field with Greater Demon-killing experience? Hello, like, all of them. Could these things move faster than us? No. Could they teleport or fly on us? No. Could they throw magic down and just make us rot where we stood?

No. And once we got in combat range, it didn't matter that their hide was two feet thick. They were immune to rot and disease and poison, but they weren't immune to vivic fire, which found them just tasty, thanks, and when two or three Brothers with glowing Brilliant swords carved through them, they lit off one after another after another, and popped off a lot of Pusboys we were basically ignoring as they did so.

That Pandemic Sluggor was spitting out an army, but it seemed a lot slower now, and pestilence swarms flying over were spontaneously popping into unwhite flares from the amount of vivus in the air. I claim to be no expert on demonic kaiju facial expressions, especially when the head keeps dissolving back into the body and a new one forms somewhere else, but it didn't seem to be too jolly happy as its lovable little squirming horde burned away to ash, the Land ate them up with nary a belch, and all their little diseases went away with them.

The thessaldragons might have done really well if they could have gotten to melee with all those heads, but, alas. The five dragons were much faster and more agile in the air, and the lightning and cold they had delightfully been made impervious to ended up being multiple cones and bolts of flame coming in to pick them off one by one, while the acidic gouts they offered up in turn pretty much went nowhere. Given the born-of-disease nature of the things, the dragons didn't even bother to get into melee combat with them, a combination of fire magic and cumulative burning breath weapons sending them falling from the air one after another.

It wasn't a challenge for the dragons, and that was only proper for Classed Exemplar Lite Dragons, no?

The number of Pusboys weren't worth counting, the lesser Sluggors and their bosses numbered in the hundreds, if not over a thousand, and there were twenty-one dead Greater Sluggors and their mound-of-sewage corpses feeding the Land, several with the great jaws coming up to drag them down and feast. The Pandemic didn't look too enthused, and even his occasional burbling was going calm.

The waist-high vivic fog hissing against the slime and pus on his hide probably had something to do with that.

His lunging forward and sudden forming of a gaping mouth-cannon hole was anything but unexpected. We were separating in all directions even as it formed, breaking this way and that, four of us drawing a clearer arc it followed for a chance at hitting us all –

It thought it was immune to fire. But, as Fuego had been inspired to realize, Fire was just atoms in motion really fast. So, focused fire was just Fire moving really fast, and just as much about force as heat.

The breath he'd been slowly building shot across the distance and into that orifice that had been kindly formed to lead right into the innards of the Pandemic.