Mage Tank

Chapter 282: Angry Angry Hippo

When our birdless birdplane struck the Hierophant, the resulting explosion was…

Well, it was okay.

Maybe I’d call it decent. A solid seven out of ten if I’m being generous, but that score’s definitely inflated by an extra point or two since the plane was an object that neither contained explosives nor any magic designed expressly for the purpose of exploding things. It didn’t even have fuel or other built-in energy sources that might add to the eruptive devastation, and it still did a pretty good job of going kablooey. It was, in essence, a hollow column of metal going really, really fast.

And therein lay the problem. The birdplane was designed to be carried, so it wasn’t built to be dense but as light as the Littans could make it. It was still quite heavy, but nothing close to approaching the weight-to-size ratio of a tungsten rod, for example. The fact that it was hollow also led to the object deforming on impact, which likely absorbed a great deal of energy. Thus, the resulting boom didn’t yield an apocalyptic kinetic bombardment with equivalent energy to a tactical nuclear warhead or anything.

It had the energy equivalent of, at most, several metric tons worth of tnt.

That is, the explosion blooming off of the beast’s flank was large enough to fill a professional football arena. The cloud of blood, dust, dirt, atomized wood, and metal was about as large as the Hierophant itself. From 800 feet away, the pressure wave hit me like a solid thunk on the chest from a friendly championship weightlifter. It wasn’t even painful.

The shrapnel was much more dangerous at our range, and Guar and I both had shields up to defend Etja. Even then, the debris plinked and clanked off our defenses, and none of it was dangerous enough to be any sort of real threat. An average person would have been in serious danger, but we were all hundreds or even thousands of times more durable than the average bear, much less the average person.

With Etja’s help, I could make a much bigger explosion. I had made a bigger explosion back in Throne’s Delve, so I was feeling a little snobbish about the quality of the big bang we’d just laid down. Of course, the explosion wasn’t what was meant to be impressive.

It was everything else that made the impact into something special.

Blinding bursts of gold and white accompanied the thunderous noise of the strike, and I felt the weight of multiple gods delivering judgment onto the monster. Translucent vines covered in Spectral thorns whipped through the air and latched onto the Hierophant, digging deep into the fresh wound on the creature’s side as a storm of arrows pierced through its hide. Embracing all the rest was a pulsating storm of ice, rapidly annihilating exposed muscle and reducing thick foliage into tinkling shards that fell away to the ground. Blood ran down the smited Hierophant’s side like a waterfall; corrupted, scorched, ionized, distorted, and frozen.

All of it was empowered by multiple global damage buffs, and many of my allies had burned a few stacks of Blessed to strengthen the attack even further. It was a hit that could reduce almost anything I’d ever run up against into a fine paste.

The Hierophant stumbled to one side, caught its balance with a lumbering jerk of two of its massive legs, then recovered. It had even used the opportunity to side-step out of all of the persistent AoEs the attack had laid out. It was missing a chunk of its side and abdomen the size of a large house, which would have been great if that had accounted for more than an insignificant fraction of its total volume.

While I surveyed the damage, I opened two Closet portals, one a half mile north, atop the walls of Krimsim. Ten Littan Delvers spilled out of it, Golds who’d rallied at Fort Ruiz. Half of these were instructors and staff from the fort itself, preparing Delver candidates for the first round of Eschendur’s Creation Delve. They weren’t a cohesive party, and they split off to reinforce various squads defending Nohrrin’s capital.

The other half was a dedicated artillery team stationed in the Eschen Gap. While I was curious as to why such a potent strategic resource was camping out in what was ostensibly friendly territory, the group would be a massive boon to the city’s cannons, even without ramping up their firing cadence.

This group of ten would make contact with the forces in Krimsim, establish communication, and ensure that the defenders were prepared for a skyful of Dragons to make an appearance. Ishi’s reinforcements couldn’t safely sally forth until they were certain the Littan gunners wouldn’t mistake them for scaly versions of their flying enemies.

The second portal I opened was much closer. Tavio blasted out from it, ahead of the rest of Team Pio. As Madel rocketed out behind him, I heard Cezil’s voice shouting from her back.

“Good job!” she hollered. “You took out eleven percent of its health!”

Eleven percent.

That’s what our grand opening salvo had been worth.

I mentally fortified myself for a drag-out fight as Guar grabbed my shoulder, hefted himself so that he was horizontal, then planted his boots on my chest. I stabilized myself with a quick burst of Gravity Anchor as he kicked off and used another Heroic Leap to close distance towards his party’s targets. The five Avian-Elemental hybrids swept towards us, and if I’d known how to read a bird’s facial expressions I would have been certain they were pissed. As it was, I could only assume as much.

Both of my Closet portals had extra backup on standby to come through, so both portals would stay open for the time being. The rest of my party would wait for me to grab the Hippo’s ire before engaging. As Tavio collided with the lead elite, a pure white sword-bill that was half lightning, half murder, I evaluated the Hierophant with one question in my mind.

How the fuck was I going to get this thing’s attention?

The System interrupted my musings on the matter.

Did you just ride a Delver-propelled rocket into battle against an enemy with a Grade more than twice your level?

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While wearing a pink cowboy hat?!

Fuck.

And we mean that in the most sensual way possible.

Here, have an achievement. Try not to think of it as payment in exchange for the absolute bliss you just evoked in us.

Intercontinental Ballistic MAGE: Mounts, vehicles, and projectiles of size 3 or lower gain a bonus to movement speed equal to your INT when you’re riding on one of those fuckers.

Also, gyroscopic stabilization on a projectile the size of a small plane, really? Aren’t you supposed to attack with spells and shit? Listen, that was a giant bullet, not a fireball.

Regardless, we’ll give it a pass. BUT… only because the idea of you lugging random shit around to huck your enemies like improvised shells tickles our cold, calculating machine mind to death.

Have you considered wielding a smoothbore cannon? Because then you'd be another step closer to becoming the literal embodiment of the first role you play for your party. At least you had one spell slapped onto that thing, so you’re sort of satisfying your second role as well.

Fuck it, here are some passive skills we keep in reserve for our favorite maniacs. We even changed their names so you’d feel extra special!

Maybe one of these will be good enough for your picky ass.

My mind went into overdrive as it was flooded by a dozen new options for passive skills. It should have been overwhelming, but I cancelled Elemental Barrier to get my secondary focus back. The Hierophant wasn’t even standing in its range anymore. I sent my second mind to task evaluating the offerings, and it barely took any time to find the one that sang a delightful melody to my soul.

M1A1 WIZARD: Your maximum mana is increased by an amount equal to 4 times your FOR. Your maximum stamina is increased by an amount equal to 4 times your WIS.

My stamina pool shot up by 160 points. My mana pool swelled by another 280, which was then boosted by an additional 25% through my Archmage passive, granting me a total bonus of 350. That put my base stamina at 860 and my base mana at 850.

A tingle ran down my spine from the fresh pile of resources, and I tried not to think about how the System and I had just given one another an intimate experience. Instead, I went back to evaluating the biggest, angriest hippopotamus in the world. At least, I hoped it was the biggest, angriest hippo in the world. It was at least the biggest and angriest hippopotamus anyone had ever seen on the planet’s surface.

World record land mammals aside, Cezil had told us that Wisdom was the Hierophant’s highest attribute, meaning that I didn’t have much hope that the mental effects we could dole out would take hold, and I was unlikely to benefit from the spell Cezil used to force aggro onto a specific target. My own feeble attempts at imposing the Distracted debuff were also unlikely to work for the same reason.

All that meant was that nothing had changed. I knew how I liked to taunt, and it would give me an opportunity to show the Hierophant how big of a bang we could really make. Plus, I had all this new mana, and it had to go somewhere. Might as well stuff as much of it as I could into one big-ass spell. Reveal and psychic comms were up on the party, Etja immediately got the message, and she wrapped me in her signature soul hug.

I started channeling Explosion!+.

The spell’s initial attack would be Sonic damage, which fell under the Physical school. The Hierophant was resistant to Physical, meaning the damage would be halved. However, Explosion! gained bonus Spatial damage every second it was charged. Spatial damage fell under the Dimensional school, and it didn’t have any resistance to that shit, so I just needed to charge the spell for as long as possible. In the meantime, I could abuse my teleports to get in its way and become absolutely obnoxious.

Light and thunder filled my peripheral senses as the elite birds hit Tavio and Guar with an onslaught of elemental attacks, but I didn’t have time to pay attention to their fight. I had to trust that the Littans could handle the avian defenders while we focused on the Hierophant. Grotto was looped into their team’s psychic connection and monitoring it on a subprocess, allowing him to filter and keep me informed of anything important.

I used Shortcut to pop up right in front of the Hierophant, a few hundred feet away from its face. The creature’s mouth was large enough to crush a pair of school buses, with a single pair of long tusks thrusting up from its lower jaw. The rest of its teeth were all molars, looking sturdy enough to crush boulders with more ease than a horse might crush an apple. The entire maw was dark and slimy, overgrown by moss and fungus.

Wet roots grew from its thick, grey-green hide to join at the base of the two twisting trees rising from its empty eye sockets. The growths were the color of rotting kelp, with hundreds of long branches arching from the tops of their thick, squat trunks. At the end of each branch was a severed head, and there were hundreds of branches expanding out into a broad canopy that covered most of its forward body.

There were at least a hundred of the rodent-esque Littans mixed into the sea of faces, but just as many of the bat-like Chovali as well. There were a small number of shockingly pale Hiwardians, and a smattering of faces bearing the antlers and wide noses that marked them as Timans. Many more were members of a race I’d never seen, having an elongated jaw and square pupils, similar to a goat.

All bore the bloody signs of a violent death, some much more recent than others, but all were otherwise well-preserved above the neckline. While their eyes held no spark of life, all of them had a subtle eerie glow, flickering in shades falling somewhere within blue, gold, or violet. They rolled lazily in their sockets, looking around at all of the different combatants on the field.

In the time that it took for the creature to recover from our opening attack and for me to appear in front of it, a new branch sprung from the trunk, burdened by the head of a female Littan. She wore a half-destroyed helm that bore the religious symbol of Yara, the throne of civilization. It was mana-woven, marking them as a fallen Delver.

A final check of the Hierophant’s Grade showed it had risen to 34.

I still had Haste from Etja, letting both of my minds work at a furious pace, but even taking that into account the Hierophant was still being slow to react. Either that, or its attention was primarily on managing the many birds fighting on its behalf. I took personal offense at its decision to ignore me, especially after I’d just sent it such a thoughtful welcome-to-Krimsim gift. I’d even sprung for the atmosphere-scorching delivery speed!

Oh well, no reason to overthink things. If more heads meant higher Grade, then leaving the Hierophant with fewer heads seemed like the right move. Maybe then my hippo senpai would notice me.

I started shoving a storm of hammers into the Hierophant’s many faces.

I hurled Somncres alongside five fleeting copies, summoned the hammer back to my hand at the end of my arm’s follow through, and threw it again in a backhand motion, immediately resummoning it for another attack. Ten Void Hammer combos cracked across the space between myself and the Hierophant, targeting five individual heads at random with a pair of Oblivion Orb-tipped hammers each.

The hammer portion of the attack was Physical damage, but the Hierophant’s resistance would be moderately offset by the penetration granted both from Tavio and from my hammers themselves. Flurry of Blows would add stacking damage based on my Strength, and a few other damage-boosting abilities were flying around from everyone’s buffs. Oblivion Orb would test its Planar defense, and I dropped extra mana to use the mana shape Funnel to double the spell’s damage. The mana shape only worked if my attack had a single target, and although I was attacking five different heads, they were all a part of the same enemy.

The whole volley cost me fifty mana and twenty stamina. The priciest Void Hammer I’d ever thrown, but this wasn’t the time to be holding back.

The hammers crossed the distance in an instant, arcing their paths to the five separate heads. They all struck true, the Hierophant making no attempt to dodge or swing the heads out of the way. The fleeting copies crushed and exploded the heads, then sucked the viscera into the void, leaving naught but empty, bloodied branches behind. The branches then exploded into gore all the way up their lengths until they were mangled nubs.

The Hierophant’s entire battleship-length body flinched, and I was taken aback by how well that had worked.

[Cezil says that your attack just did more damage than crashing the Littan vessel into the creature. She is being very loud about it.]

The yellow eyes of Yara’s fallen Delver rolled towards me, as did the eyes of all the hundreds of other heads on the Hierophant’s branches. Their combined gazes lit up into a brilliant, multi-colored constellation of pure rage.