Crystalline streams of energy were flowing past us as the energy of the ones we’d slain on manifesting either dispersed or fed back to the ones behind us. Low-ranking Axiomatics were infused with the energy of their superiors and instantly promoted, a truly annoying ability. Cutting the head off of a group of Axiomatics just caused the next highest-ranking Axiomatic to self-promote to replace the one you just killed.

This meant that Axiomatics had a reverse psychology attack strategy, attacking with the powerful ones foremost, and as they died, the lessers behind instantly promoted up to replace them... and not incidentally, their access to x/day powers instantly started over. You could literally end up fighting an entire army of Greater Axiomatics promoted up from Cards if you were stupid about such things... or you wanted a whole lot of Karma...

Ahem!... Must not think about Karmic Abuse from slaughtering hundreds of Greater Axiomites! Must not!...

They probably weren’t happy to see we’d butchered so many of their own before they could manifest, but everyone was pointing in one direction, and with their multi-directional faces, the Axiomatics couldn’t help but look that way and focus on that big glaring plume of a Warp Breach rising there.

That Octohedral floating there was spinning its diamond-shaped excuse for a head, palms and fingers making passes and signs as it surveyed the area and the arena, and deduced what was going on.

A fight against us was pointless entertainment for the corrupted things watching all this. The threat level of me and my girls was indiscernible, which was all kinds of alarm bells for something that should be clocking in the 15-17 range.

It had merely lost some of its minion-level creatures, as anything greater had been promoted up. The Warped would naturally slaughter all the lesser creatures as rapidly as possible to prevent promotions, so in the end it wasn’t truly a great loss.

An Octohedral, two Hexagal lieutenants, four Pentals, eight Natals, and a few score Cubes. Against hundreds of us, and we’d already proven fast enough to kill over a hundred of them before they could fully manifest.

Tinkling chimes in Axiom spread out, and the creatures turned in series, 6, 5, 4, and 3’s, and marched or glided after the Octohedral as it flew towards the Warp Breach.

An Axiomatic manifestion was never more than half the strength of the Warp Event which brought it here... which still might be enough to win if the incoming demons were stupid and didn’t kill the low level Axiomatics first. Alas, not only had we killed many of them, this was an active breach, so demons would be pouring out into Gloom to contribute to the death and mayhem.

So, that had to stop, or we were going to die by infinite Warp spawns. Ergo, this was an exercise in intelligence. Would all the fighting forces unite enough to deal with the Warped before they couldn’t be dealt with, or would they be swept away in turn?

“After them! Keep them Cubes alive until they get promoted and can take care of themselves! Now that they are focused on the Warp, we aren’t in any danger from them!”

“We’re going towards the Warp?” the drow captain protested.

“We go towards it now, or we wait until it’s an ocean and comes at us then! What do you prefer?!” I shot back, as the four of us started out after the fast-moving Axiomatics.

The gladiators all grimaced. The Warp was not what they had signed up for here. Then again, they wanted to make it out alive, and these Axiomatics were going to be doing a lot of the fighting for them. This was indeed their best chance.

“Eyes on the prize, chowderheads, eyes on the prize!” Nobody made any further protests, hurrying after us as we hurried after the Axiomatics.

------

The Warp wasn’t that far away, we had good guides to follow, and the arena managers helpfully made the path more obvious even as we converged on it. A good Law vs Chaos conflict was something to see, after all.

“Your job is to keep the Cubes and Stars alive!” I told the gladiators. “The girls and I will be dealing with anything stronger that wants to mess with us or them!”

And I... would be shutting down that open Warp Portal.

Lured in by the siren call of violence, death, and bloodthirst, demons were streaming through into the Gloom. I perhaps should have been totally unimpressed to see they were mostly Amoureans, as this was a spectacle they’d be able to perform for, but a lot of them came in pretty damn quick there...

They definitely were not happy to see the Axiomatics coming in, the biggest ones leading the way instead of hanging back to watch lessers battle as was the way of the Warp.

Geometric cutting blades of force, fractal lashes in space, lines of solid force bisecting everything, and lots and lots of limbs started ripping into demons as warpfire and supernaturally strong claws and blades began to tear at those shiny metal bodies.

The gladiators flanked the Octohedral, the Hexagonals, and the Pentagonals as they led the attack, and the Cubes and Stars also ready to fight found themselves surrounded and preceded by gladiators ripping and tearing into the demons as furiously as they could, making it easier for the Axiomites to land crippling blows and cut into the demons screaming and singing and posing and dancing with claws and swords. Stink bombs went off here and there to defy the dazing perfumes starting to fill the air, breath filters were on, and Warp energies were a crazed haze in minds and reality.

The girls raged through them with the expertise of a lot of time in the deadlier parts of the Warp Zone, leaving trails of bodies burning black behind them. Me, I went right for the Portal.

There was a Vile Dancer and its serpentine body and six arms with swords lording it over this horde, with quite an assortment of its four-armed Spiral Troupe. I noted quite a few Possessed humans among the horde, visible by the way their demons seemed to be growing out of their bodies like tumors, screaming in ecstasy as some Warped thing made use of their meat to enjoy the pain and pleasure of living once more.

I ended up going right through their lizard-riding cavalry, not quite touching the ground as I moved from scaly to scaly, and the eyeless, long-tongued hermaphrodite Eques riding them screamed and went tumbling as I moved against their momentum. I crashed through a line of Spinners, limbs and blades going in different directions than their tittering wielders, hacking a Cleave Train through them with brutal power, Hewing apart several Spirals and the Stud-oxes guarding them with oversized genitalia and mindless obedience.

I didn’t particularly care if they were following me or not, as the ones in front of me were dying fast enough and they couldn’t catch up... especially with my Interdiction not allowing them to blink around like ninnies, which was incidentally preventing them from coming in behind the gladiators holding back the deranged Wasted and Dancers having fun with the killers behind me.

The Vile saw me coming in expectation... I guess all those that had seen Ranthas in action had died en vivus, so they had no idea how dangerous what was coming at them was. Which was fine by me as I tore through, and then above, the demons streaming out of that rip in space, leaping for the big one... and as her curved blades hissed out in flesh-parting guillotines, five gravities slammed me to the ground, became 1/5 in an instant, and I bounced forward, off her shimmering pink and yellow scales, and away from her, across the Portal behind her, out of her reach and trailing heavy reality behind me with grim finality.

A dark line clearly chopped the tall Portal in half across its slender section, and the black flames of boosted Shadowfire gnawed greedily at the edges of the lambent pastels and puke color schema of the afterlife. They raced up like flames climbing tinder, and fell down like crackling oil spreading across a colorful pattern.

“NO!” the Vile screamed out in four-toned breathy denial, blaming me for everything, her Charms slamming into my Null and no, I didn’t do something else or stop what I had done. Actually, I bounced in the other direction, a crazy leap that covered more than two hundred feet across, up, and down slowly in the low gravity, and left another semi-circular trail of hard reality behind me.

With a roar and a woosh, the Portal collapsed behind me, exploding in black flames with white edges, shadowfire greedily feasting on the energies and feeding them to the Gloom in a field of black and white that sapped the insane colors out of the surrounding demons, who instinctively fled from the reach of it.

The Vile’s many veils did not look so sexy and alluring now, and she was writhing and swaying after me, screaming in outrage for having interrupted her fun.

I snickered, having never stopped moving, and as demons converged on me to stop me, all they did is give me more targets as Chalice Sang. The watching audience got to watch the very improbable sight of me one-hitting demons as fast as Chalice could move, and she moved very, very quickly indeed. A swirling swathe of shadows, greys, and blacks was surrounding me, occasionally odd white sparks flaring within it, and going through demons, pets, Warped slaves, and more demons without stopping.

The Vile was coming right behind me, and cursing and cajoling and taunting and daring me with the same words, multiple levels of language. It all ran into my Null and became useless gobbledygook, but some of the lesser demons were writhing and dying just listening to her trying to get me to stop and get chopped up like a nice little mortal.

I flung more burning demon blood into the air for her to run into, and actually managed to set one of her veils on fire, nyar nyar.

With precious little fuss and muss, I ran over some Spiral Dancers in hack-hack chop-chop chorus, their snake bodies making prime footing as I smashed through their defenses, relieved them of limbs and weapons, and then opened them all up properly as they screamed in delight and disbelief... and then horror as the shadowfire proceeded to start devouring them.

It wasn’t the Land, but Gloom was plenty hungry all the same. They weren’t going back to the Warp.

The Vile saw I was heading right for the Octohedral, which was plenty ready to welcome me coming by sending out some happy fractal blades whose area of effect swallowed a whole lot of demons and the Vile... and naturally me, if I hadn’t urgently darted out of the way to the side with distinctly inhuman speed.

It wasn’t because I was afraid of being hurt. I just didn’t want to be a firebreak for any demons behind me from the magic.

The Vile didn’t much like that, and replied with a scream that pulled in her servants for a good ol’ brawl and sent a crack crawling across the facets of the diamond-headed Axiomite, who was bearing quite a few gouges, scrapes, and scars from unending assaults by her lesser minions.

True to form, it lasted about two minutes in precise, measured combat, moving with a deadly, beautiful precision to cut with its many limbs, slamming and slicing in soullessly perfect form.

She wrapped the thing up as her Spirals and Stud-oxes were keeping the Hexagonals busy, screamed point-blank into its crystal head, and blew it and its eyeball-orbs to pieces, her coils rending and tearing it apart as her six swords moved in much too fast motion and tore it asunder.

Well, I hope she enjoyed what was about to come next.

Glittering light swarmed up out from its body, poured to the left, where a wounded Hexagonal was beleaguered by a swarm of Spirals and their many-horned Studs. The remains of the Octohedral fell to scrap pieces, battered by warpfire hissing around the veiled Vile Dancer, who watched the process in sudden alarm.

The crystals seemed to both converge, meld into, and build atop the Hexagonal, and it swelled in size and limbs as its body transformed. A new diamond head surrounded by floating eyeballs above its body rose up, suddenly at full health and looming over the demons that had been attacking it a moment ago.