by J. Langland
“Ours is but to do or die!” the two shouted together while laughing ruefully.
~
“Radar shows that the army has slowed and appears to be on the ground,” Horken reported from the TCC. “I would have to guess this is due to the wind speed. We are measuring sustained wind speeds of nearly 30 leagues per hour.”
Tom, standing at the 3D map board in the Command Center, replied, “Excellent! Those are hurricane-class winds, and I haven’t even started venting the volcano!”
“Affirmative,” Horken agreed. “We have them on the ground. We are also recording significant lightning strikes in the area. No direct hits so far, but there are plenty of close calls. At least for the demons. Really hard to see through the Maelstrom.”
“So, they continue on foot,” Arg-nargoloth stated. Since they were now on the rune network of the complex, the board could map their progress. “The Maelstrom has slowed as well; however, I am not sure if that’s due to the weather or simply keeping pace with the grounded demons.”
“Either way, for the demons, that’s somewhat impressive,” Darg-Krallnom said.
“Or stupid.” Vargg Agnoth chuckled.
“I would go with desperate,” Antefalken said.
Tom looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘desperate’?”
“I mean Lilith.” Antefalken shook his head. “Given the relatively short notice, the logistics of getting here, and most important, the very serious risk of using Knights of Chaos, I suspect she is feeling a bit desperate.”
Arg-nargoloth nodded in agreement. “She has never used Knights of Chaos against us here; not since the defeat, and never before.”
“We think she used them in Etterdam against Orcus. That is the most likely explanation for all the permanent casualties we had,” Vargg said. Tom looked at him curiously.
Vargg shrugged. “Knights of Chaos can kill demons permanently if they get a good strike in. At least against lesser demons.”
“So, as planned, we keep the D’Orcs focused on the demon army. Tommus, myself, Talarius, the sphinxes and Morok’s regiment will focus on the Knights of Chaos,” Sekhmekt said.
“Targeting them inside the Maelstrom will be difficult,” Zog Dethelm said.
Sekhmekt grimaced. “We will need to work to separate the knights, break up the Maelstrom.”
Zog nodded. “I think that is critical. The Maelstrom also acts as a shield to deflect attacks. As best as we can measure, it acts as some sort of dimensionally phased shield.”
“So back to Lilith,” Tom said, changing the topic. “You said she’s desperate?” He looked to Antefalken.
“She doesn’t normally strike first. For some reason, she’s not trying to negotiate with you or trying to trick you. She is coming at you with as much as she can muster on short notice. This isn’t her style.”
“If she doesn’t take Lord Tommus now, she may have to wait another twenty thousand plus years,” Darg-Krallnom suddenly spoke up. Antefalken looked at him curiously. “After a few failed attempts early on once she discovered Doom, she never attacked the fortress again. She realized quickly that when fully powered and with someone who knows how to use the wand—sorry, rod—Mount Doom is essentially impenetrable by a force of any size.”
“That is why she waited until almost all of our forces were in Etterdam. Even so, we still do not completely understand how she managed all of what she did. Even with Sentir Fallon, it had to have required a lot of luck,” Arg-nargoloth said.
“So she needs to take out Mount Doom before Lord Tommus can fully control it,” Sekhmekt commented. “It makes sense, but it is risky; if she is once again working with those treacherous Etonians, they could be pushing her.”
Tom said nothing, thinking about what was being said. He suddenly remembered something Antefalken said. “What did you mean about the serious risks of using Knights of Chaos?”
Sekhmekt snorted. “You are right, bard!” She shook her head. “I really hadn’t thought on that.”
Antefalken nodded. “Knights of Chaos are agents of change, insurrection, anarchy and destabilization. Typically one would unleash them to overthrow the forces of law and order, to destabilize a situation.”
“Using them to preserve the status quo is actually a very perverse use for them,” Sekhmekt agreed.
“Hmm. Therefore, if Lilith sees me as a threat to her and the current status quo that she established after Etterdam, then technically, I am the source of change. The knights should be on my side!” Tom exclaimed.
“One would think; but they are mercurial by definition. It depends perhaps on a larger scale than what we can currently see. They may have other reasons to agree to help her that create more chaos elsewhere in the multiverse,” Sekhmekt said.
“Or she could be bluffing. Playing a game to bring them into play. When she last used them she was trying to destroy the status quo. She was trying to establish a new paradigm without Lord Orcus,” Darg-Krallnom said.
“So perhaps they don’t know that the landscape has changed.” Antefalken nodded his head in agreement.
Tom suddenly stared upward for a moment and then looked around the map table, grinning. “Good news! My kettle is finally at boiling point!” Tom raised his arms with the Rod of Tommus in his right hand. “Doom is at hand!”
Suddenly the ground shook with deafening thunder. The heat level in the room seemed to go up by an amount easily noticeable even to demons. Red spots suddenly appeared on the 3D map as the vents of Doom began erupting. Huge roiling clouds of greyish ash and smoke with highlights of both lightning and fiery magma could be seen sweeping down towards the invading army.
“Now, we bury them!” Tom shouted in glee.
“This is just too old school,” Bellyachus complained to Lesteroth as they marched through the wind, rain and steam. Steam. Steam was the worst visibility problem on the ground. The ground was still hot enough that a fair amount of steam was being generated as the rain hit it. It made the landscape seem foggy. Or maybe it was fog; Lesteroth had no idea. He had not seen either since becoming a demon.
“This is hell!” Lesteroth yelled in reply.
“No, it’s the Abyss!” Bellyachus laughed at the old joke.
“Seriously, does Darflow even know where we are? If we are on track? I can’t see a thing!” Lesteroth yelled.
“Well, he is a greater demon; they get paid to know that sort of thing!” Bellyachus shouted back.
“Wait! He’s getting paid?” Lesteroth returned with another of their favorite jokes.
“This is a miserable way to go into battle!” Talgorf yelled, coming up between them.
“The good thing is…” Lesteroth paused to make sure the other two could both hear him yelling. “They won’t be trying to oppose us on open ground!”
“That had been my fear with the new management! I was afraid we’d never make the tunnels!” Talgorf yelled. “Once we are in the tunnels, though, it should be much more like the old days!”
“Yeah, no way they would come out to fight in this weather!” Bellyachus yelled back. His voice suddenly sounded quite loud as the blowing wind died very quickly. The rain intensity also let up considerably. It was still very windy, and it was still raining, which was simply unnatural in the Abyss.
“What happened?” Lesteroth asked and then the world lurched.
“What the Abyss?” Bellyachus exclaimed as another rumble occurred, shaking them where they stood.
“An Abyssquake?” Talgorf asked. “I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
Suddenly their conversation was washed out by a large explosion, followed by a roar that didn’t seem to end. Lesteroth was pointing forward and to their left, where a giant, greyish black plume of smoke and ash was skyrocketing upward. Bellyachus grabbed Lesteroth’s arm and dragged him to the right, where another large plume was roaring upward as if in stereo. The ground began to shake even worse as the wind returned to a ferocious speed.
Bellyachus could see Lesteroth mouthing
something like “What the hell?” even as he stared over the demon’s head at the rapidly onrushing greyish black cloud thousands of feet high with streaks of red fire and flashes of lightning rushing towards them like a tidal wave.
Bellyachus’s last thought before being engulfed was that it looked like a giant wall of doom. The irony was not lost on him.
~
“Whoa!” Zelda exclaimed, looking at the empty grey plain where the invading demons had just been buried by the eruption.
“Such mastery!” Tamarin exclaimed from her vantage point up near the ceiling, where she was floating cross-legged. She clapped her hands enthusiastically. The djinn had wandered up to the command center a short while ago and was trying to stay out from underfoot. However, the explosive use of para-elemental forces was something she obviously enjoyed.
“That is going to take them some time to dig out of!” Arg-nargoloth laughed and high-fived Darg-Krallnom.
“We need to get troops out there to chop them to pieces as they come out!” Vargg said.
“Give the order!” Tom told Vargg. “What about the knights?”
“There!” Sekhmekt pointed to the area where the knights had been, which was now also covered by the eruption avalanche. An eruption which continued to drop ash, dirt and magma on the ground, albeit at a slightly slower pace. As they watched on the map, a distortion appeared in the region where the knights had been. The blackish distortion seemed to be growing, like a bubble forming on the surface of a liquid.
“It looks like they are floating to the top,” Arg-nargoloth said.
“Are you two ready?” Tom asked Sekhmekt and Talarius.
“Yes,” Talarius said, patting the hilt of Ruiden, once more a sword and on his back.
“Yes. The sphinxes are in position at the exit,” Sekhmekt said. “Grab my hands and I’ll teleport us there.”
Tom nodded. He looked at Vargg, Zelda and Zog and said, “You three have the conn.” He turned to Darg-Krallnom and Arg-nargoloth. “As planned, you come with us and join your troops from there.” The two D’Orc commanders nodded.
Talarius, Tom, Darg-Krallnom and Arg-nargoloth all joined hands with Sekhmekt, as did Antefalken, who had his scrying ball ready.
“To victory!” Sekhmekt shouted; the others, including all the D’Orcs in the command centers, repeated the cheer. The leaders vanished and flashes of light suddenly appeared on the map table, indicating their presence at the two exits from Mount Doom on the map.
~
Tom flew towards the Maelstrom with Talarius flying to his left and Sekhmekt to his right. The sphinxes fanned out in an array behind them. Behind the sphinxes came the twelfth regiment led by Morok Deathstealer, two hundred D’Orcs strong in heavy mech suits, and a wide assortment of fully charged high-tech weapons of various types.
In person the Maelstrom, which by now had almost finished emerging from the newest layer of ash and magma, appeared to be an amorphous blob of shiny blackness. One could see movement inside the blob, barely, but it was hard to decide how many Knights of Chaos were in there, and how much of the space consumed by the giant blob was space between the knights.
The blob was large enough to contain at least a few dozen knights and mounts around the size of Tom or Sekhmekt, assuming the knights actually were humanoid, which Tom was not sure of. He had just assumed they looked like knights.
“Getting through the Maelstrom could be tricky,” Morok said dispassionately, coming up beside Tom.
“It’s a very nasty gravitational force-field sort of thing,” Sekhmekt said. “As I mentioned in the prep, we can try the portable gravity cannons on them first.”
Their unit was now about a thousand feet from the giant Maelstrom blob. “The key point is that we need to break the Maelstrom and force the knights to emerge,” Sekhmekt said.
Tom nodded. “As planned, let’s start with our two portable gravity cannons and then, while those recharge, we will hit them with the BFG 40K’s, and then riddle the thing with our blasters as the plasma from the BFGs play out over the Maelstrom.”
Tom looked over at the four D’Orcs with the two gravity cannons. “Let me know if you can lock on the Maelstrom with your instruments.” He looked at the BFG and blaster troops. “Same with you guys; I want to take down the visibility levels so they can’t hit us with any ranged weaponry.”
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
Even as Tom spoke, a bolt of black lightning came arcing through the air, only to be deflected by Sekhmekt leaping forward and batting it away with a large, round shield that shone as bright as the noonday sun, causing Tom and the D’Orcs to shield their eyes. Where in the Abyss the disk had come from was a total mystery, but it was now on her left forearm. The black lightning bounced harmlessly off it into the ground.
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
Sekhmekt leaped, spinning in the air to deflect another bolt.
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
The lioness spun again and nearly somersaulted to intercept another black bolt.
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
Tom blinked at the dizzying speed with which the lioness leaped and spun through the air, catching and deflecting each bolt of inky blackness.
“Target acquired!” the gravity cannoneers yelled.
“Affirmative!” yelled the various rifle groups.
Tom raised the Rod of Tommus above his head and summoned the power of Doom. A shudder shook the ground.
CRRAAACCKKKK!!! The lioness leaped again.
ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash! Normal lightning came from the sky, crashing against the Maelstrom as Tom created a large negative electrical potential below it.
Suddenly a grey cloud of ash, soot, rain and mud came raining down as hurricane-force winds began to buffet the region once more. The D’Orcs engaged their suits’ gravlocks to keep their position. Suddenly a thundering blackness came from in front of Tom as the first gravity cannon fired. A giant concussion rocked them as the gravity wave hit the Maelstrom as fast as the blackness that ate the very light around it appeared. ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash! ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash! Flashes of Tom’s weather lightning lit the darkness. The light in the region came back to grey and then went black again as the second gravity cannon fired and instantly struck the Maelstrom.
ZZHHHHOHHSSSHTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHHHSSSSZZZ! A purplish-green ball of superheated charged gas shot from the first BFG 40K plasma rifle to strike the Maelstrom, spreading out in a fiery, sparkling burst of electricity and luminescent gas against the inky Maelstrom bubble.
ZZHsshhZZZSSHHOHHSSSHTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHHHzzooohhHHTchchSSSSZZZ! went the second plasma ball, this one orange, red and white as it struck the Maelstrom.
ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash! More of Tom’s lightning bounced off the Maelstrom.
CRRAAACCKKKK!!! Came what Tom assumed was another black lightning bolt, followed by a brilliant flash of blinding light from Sekhmekt’s shield as the bolt bounced into the ground.
CRRAAACCKKKK!!! ZZHHHHSSSHoohhhssZZTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHooohhHHssHHSSSSZZZ!
CRRAAACCKKKK!!! ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash!
KABOOM! KABOOM! KABOOM! The thunder of the blaster rifles shook Tom’s eardrums. ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash!
Tom shook his head. It was hard to see with his eyes, but he could sense the Maelstrom’s darkness on the DoomNet grid. Things were looking rather at a standstill. He reached with his mind towards the nearest magma flow and started pulling it through the ground towards the Maelstrom.
ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash! Came his automated lighting.
ZZHHHHOHHSSSHTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHHHSSSSZZZ! Plasma rippled through the grayish darkness. KABOOM! ZZHHHHOHHSSSHTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHHHSSSSZZZ! KABOOM! ZZZZzzztttt!! KABOOM!
This was going to take several minutes. He sent a signal through his links to Morok and the D’Orcs around them to keep firing to keep the knights distracted. Blackness hit them all again as the first gravity cannon fired again. In the distant light of the plasma coruscating ove
r the Maelstrom after the blackness cleared, there did seem to be some changes to the shape of the Maelstrom bubble. He was not sure if that was from damage or from the knights shifting around inside.
ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash!
CRRAAACCKKKK!!!
ZZHHHHOHHSSSHTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHHHSSSSZZZ!
Tom kept his concentration on channeling magma and superheated gas below the ground. He needed to burst open a giant pyroclastic gusher directly under the Maelstrom. Tom closed his eyes to increase the power and speed of the flow. He could feel the ground around them shaking as he forced the flow, pulling tremendous energy from the Fire portal as well as huge amounts of fluidic material from the Earth portal.
ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash!
ZZHHHHSSSHsshhhhssZZTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHHHssHHSSSSZZZ KABOOM!
KABOOM! CRRAAACCKKKK!!! KABOOM! Even with his eyes closed, he could feel the flashing light of Sekhmekt’s sun shield. ZZHHHHSSSHsshhhhssZZTTTT—ZZZSSSSTTTTTHHHssHHSSSSZZZ!
Tom imagined he could feel mental sweat on his brow as he struggled to pull the elements together, along with gushers of air. He needed more mental hands than Tizzy had real hands! It was the high air pressure driving the fluid-like earth and magma through the ground. The superheated gas was dissolving the solid ground before it, tunneling towards the Maelstrom.
ZZZZzzztttt!! Crash! KABOOM! KABOOM! KABOOM!
There! “Aim higher!” Tom yelled at the top of his lungs as he finally released the pyroclastic flow beneath the Maelstrom. He was about to erupt a small volcano under the maelstrom. WHOOOOMM!!!!! The fluid earth shot thunderously skywards, taking the maelstrom blob with it.
Inky blackness and a large thud followed as the first gravity cannon’s tracking system followed the maelstrom up and blasted it; almost simultaneously, the second gravity cannon fired at a slightly different angle. The blasters and BFGs followed suit.
Suddenly, giant armored horses and eight-to-ten-foot-tall knights in purplish-black plate armor were falling through the sky and smashing against the ground! They’d broken the maelstrom!
Sekhmekt leapt to the front of their unit and drew a huge breath despite the rainy gray sludge permeating the atmosphere. “RRROOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!”
