The Fanatics all had one of their arms converted to a razor-sharp pincer, and were all oiled and glowing with muscle, totally ignoring the thorns sticking into them, as if they were ribbons or other garnishes to their perfection.

They didn’t ignore it when Briggs smashed right into them and out the other side, mangled bodies flying in every direction. I heard the touch of Thunder as Estemar Smote his first target, thirty seconds until he could do it again, and finished the Fanatic with a crushing shield slam to the throat.

Their charge broken by the sudden appearance of the duo, the Fanatics naturally began to converge on this interesting new development.

Endure thrummed, burning flames red as blood and white as his soul, and the Hammer began to test the limits of their pain tolerances with relentless power.

The Spinners were sweeping forward on the flank. Mutated one-breasted succubi, with overly long legs that carried them with great speed, two arms and two pincers, dancing forwards with inhuman grace.

Behind them loomed the Dancer, six-armed, a snake-like lower torso, hands, pincers, bird-like talons, and an insectile stinger, along with dozens of whipping poly-colored tentacles undulating up and down the length of her like macabre feathers. The human hands, trailing tentacles like grotesque ribbons, bells held in them and tinkling all wrongly, wielded two massive Jotun-sized sabers as daintily as knives, shining Abyssal silver and forming scenes of madness as they spun about her lazily.

Both types of demon had hazy purple-pink Auras around them, Fascination effects that could stun a watcher and render them helpless to fight back with a combination of desire and overwhelming appreciation of their alien, inhuman beauty.

Ran into my Null and did nothing, of course.

Twenty of the Spinners. They saw me coming, and whirling about, began to converge to meet me.

I Inspired, and moved the Essence from Hasty Soul to Expert Soul, crashing into them at merely 40 mph.

I drew an arc of motion through them. Their slender blades shattered and went flying, their tittering song dissolved into painful, ecstatic screams somewhere between horror and orgasm… no, they definitely dropped into horror as vivic flames blew through them with the Banefire.

I crashed through their dance, broke the wild frenzy of it, and parts of Spinner demons went in all directions as Tremble wrecked their singing with a thundering condemnation in Celestial backed by Stand’s pounding drumbeat stamping order and rhythm on their wild dance. They lost their Demon Dance bonuses, and I reaped them with Cleaves and Attacks of Opportunity as they were stupid enough to try to snip at me with their pincers, and Sword Beats Fist generated more attacks.

My feet were moving too fast to see as I ducked, dodged, and danced through the swirl of attacks they were aiming at me, totally ignoring a good chunk of them as they slid along my skin uselessly, and then hacking through others as I slammed through their bodies with crushing force. They caromed into one another, disrupting the dance further, or were crushed underfoot as I came along and punched my heels into their faces and chests.

It took six seconds to rip a path through them, the fires of Tremble drawing crescent arcs right and left like blooming flowers as they died explosively, ending up at the center of a blossoming moonflower of Banefire when I was done.

The Dancer paused for just a beat, despite herself, to appreciate the sight. It was QL 40, after all.

Tremble dipped, and the Painted Rose Pattern etched into the air by the edge of a +VIII Blade followed the Sharding that spiraled up her length and shot toward the Dancer.

She definitely wasn’t prepared for a Banefire-and-vivus cocktail made up of her little over-sexed subordinates, and instinctively crossed her weapons to parry the attack.

Black Banefire roses splashed white vivus petals over the front of her, and her corpse-white flesh was cut and burned, peeling away to reveal the rot beneath. Skin was flayed from pustulant muscle and weeping bone, and suddenly the bitch wasn’t beautiful at all, even as vivus chased away her erotic Aura hungrily.

She shrieked, her arms came away to glare at me with a promise of exquisite, torturous revenge-

Damn, girl, don’t you know that when you cross your weapons in front of your face to avoid a Sharding, True Sight don’t do shit for you?

As she brought her sabers and limbs down, Tremble was literally less than a foot away from her face. Oh, hey, didn’t notice that third eye there, girl, thanks for the target.

Naturally, she had no time to evade. Tremble was at +X with Bane of Legends, and all of my weight and speed was on that One Strike as I hit her.

Spirited Charge, Valorous. A x4 Charge to the face, with a x4 crit on top of it, for x7 damage, and a One Strike on top of it all.

Tremble went in all the way to the hilt, and as she was smashed backwards, I was already rolling over her, turning the thrust into a rolling slash.

Her skull split like a melon – damn, her hair was tentacles, too! – and her spine and upper body decided to join the effort, even as they were driven backwards into the writhing mass of her scaled, serpentine lower body. She had been swishing and swaying with that lack of legs, and now she was just spasming out.

Vivus erupted richly as it tore through the unstable matrix of the ectoplasm that made up her body. A total sensate, I could hear her scream as it devoured her more absolutely than she probably thought possible. Nope, not reforming herself back in the Warp in failure. Her eternity was at an end, and–

With an explosion of vivus, the misty Jaws of the Land came up to feast, streaming up past me like a breaching whale, and then slowly withdrew, sending a wave of heavy white out past and around me, winding and writhing in the direction of the burning Spinners, and driving down on them like feeding eels.

A glance at my Markspace, and I could see the sorcerers and their bodyguards were dead in various positions of surprise and extreme pain, assassinated before they had any clue they were in danger.

Huh, the Brothers have pretty crappy Weapons, I thought. I should do something about that…

-------------

The Fanatics all deflated somewhat when they died. The glamour around them that made them handsome, well-proportioned, and muscular dried up, revealing the poxed, scarred, and twisted men and sometimes women below, anything but lovely, especially with a freaking lobster claw for an arm.

When the wave of vivus washed over them, they collapsed like tires letting out air. The vivus gathered on them and devoured their corpses hungrily.

There were skirls of fighting going on throughout the woods, and the Warped were learning that elven pretty-boys were no jokes, being fast, skilled, grim, and determined… and hey, an Energy Touch spell through a Weapon was basically a death sentence. Borderguards lived fighting off random wandering monsters and raiding anthros and were no pushovers, whatever these brutes might think.

Estemar was panting, looking over the ugly corpses of the Fanatics getting eaten away by the vivus streaming past his ankles. He made a face and looked away, finding the undisturbed face of Briggs.

“Selling their souls for such hollow things…” he spat, shaking his head.

“Men have sold themselves for far less than strength and beauty,” Briggs agreed with a nod. “As long as you don’t care about what is beyond death, it’s an easy trade.”

“To have no care for your immortal soul…” Estemar sighed, face unsightly.

“Exactly. Well, not so much an issue here, with the Land taking the appetizers. At least the Warp Gods won’t get anything from this, net loss to them all the way around.” He snapped his hand, and Endure flew out like a javelin. A handsome fellow with prominent mustaches, currently running away from two pursuing elves, looked up just in time to receive the Hammer in his face, and his skull exploded with a wet crunch.

Vivus was crawling up his tight leathers before he hit the ground. Endure spun back to Briggs’ hand, free of gore, and he didn’t even look at the corpse as the elves rushed off to help cut down the few stragglers.

Estemar turned towards a white flag, which the wounded were converging on. “How many of these warbands do you think there are, Master Briggs?” he asked, pausing for a second.

“Dozens. And they’ll keep coming until the Rift is closed,” Briggs replied patiently. He saw Mikle waving at him from atop the Cabinets, floating patiently in the shadows of the trees over there, and headed that way.

There were things to make, Sama was going to need her Tat supplies… and the Brothers were coming his way.

Sama had some plans for the Brothers.

------

“So, you’re saying we’re weak?” Brother Windarrow asked, quite amused. Void Brothers had a fearsome, deadly reputation as the most adept killers on the continent. Being told he was weak by a young Ancient, of all things, after living so long with such a dire reputation, was frankly amazing.

“You’ve been killing horribly powerful things for a very long time. You should be at least as adept as Sama. You’re not.” Both Brothers blinked, and looked at one another. “On top of that, for all the looting and salvaging you must have done, your Equipment sucks. None of it is tailored, it looks more like trophies or hand-me-downs from elders.” He plunked down Endure in front of them. “Give me a month, and my Hammer will be a stronger Weapon than either one you carry.

“It’s not your fault,” he went on calmly, meeting the eyes of the two of them easily. “I don’t know the circumstances of how you started on this road, but I’m guessing you had to get really good, really fast… and you did. That’s what we call Ironskulling… you shoot for Ten as fast as you can, in order to get the raw power and skills you need to survive, and then… well, then you pay.

“And you pay a lot.” His Source field billowed around him, and the two Voids shifted, despite themselves.

“Now that you are Tens, you are paying Ten prices in Karma for everything. Levels, Feats, Masteries, Skills, whatever… it’s all very expensive in terms of Karma, so you probably feel like you have been barely improving over the months and years, because the easy Leveling which got you to Ten is no longer there, now that you want to go Deep. Am I right?”

The two Voids pursed their lips together. Everything he was saying was uncomfortably true. They were very good in a narrow band… but they wanted to improve, and it was very slow going.

“Let me give you an idea of your goal. You saw that Dancer that Sama Fed to the Land, right?” They both nodded. “Feeding that to the Land is worth one Level to you.”

They both blinked. “What of sending it home?” Brother Windarrow asked quickly.

“A third, maybe a quarter.” Their faces changed rather stiffly. “And I can tell just by looking at the two of you that neither of you are actually capable of killing that thing.” Briggs raised an eyebrow, but neither of them challenged him. “So, you have the foundation to get rid of the threat, but you don’t have the power to actually punish the powers behind them. Would that be an accurate summation?”

They glanced at one another again. “It would,” Brother Shadowknife agreed in his androgynous and forgettable voice. “You have some method of changing this?”