The hungry, hungry invader starts to take a bite of the sandwich it had been waiting for this whole time, only having been able to whet its appetite with a single pilfered egg that it had managed to convince its companion to sneak to it via the medium of continuous whinging, just in time for a shockwave to traverse itself through the atmosphere and blast the food out of its hands. The world seems to move in slow motion as the egg on top collides with the wall, bursting the yolk and wasting the delicious yellow liquid on the uncaring wood.

“Noooooooo,” it cries out forlornly. Turning toward the original invader, it asks, “permission to drop a class five eff bomb?”

“Permission denied,” comes the casual reply, as the invader happily chews on the sandwich it had caught with their immaterial grip while all the other ones were unfortunately blown away, “as of right now, you are only cleared for a single tier three.”

“Frik.”

“And that’s enough.”

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Ham plants his feet firmly against the stone of the tomb, sliding backward as the continuous pressure from the furious light blasting against him. He didn’t want to have to resort to magic so soon, but simply throwing massive amounts of dark energy around for some reason wasn’t working against a tool specifically created to destroy massive amounts of dark energy.

Weaving the general properties of darkness into something more specialized, Ham fountains a wave of dread at the blade. Imbuing a mind with the existential certainty of the oncoming nothingness generally served to shake the wills of anything he would catch in this particular spell, barring those with powerful minds.

Which usually meant it was useless against any of the priests.

It proved useless against the sword as well, other than to further provoke its rage. From the tip of the metal, the indiscriminate barrage of light focuses into a coherent beam, scything down into the podium, then up across the ground toward Ham. He throws himself to the side, rolling across the softening stone floor, powder clinging to his form as he dodges the incinerating light. It’s only after his roll stops that he notices that his trailing leg has had a line burnt through it. He decides to ignore that for the moment, since the nerves were already dead, and the trail the beam had gone across was erupting in secondary explosions of severing light.

Second attempt. Ham pulls across space, and summons the zombified corpse of a kobold next to the sword. With any luck, that would distract the weapon from trying to evaporate him, in favor of instead focusing on the practically harmless undead.

No such luck. Instead, the focal point of the beam disperses into different colors. Red blasts into the unfortunate zombie, which immediately bursts into flames that convert it into a free floating cloud of ash in moments, leaving the green and blue beams to spiral toward Ham. Almost entirely sure he’d be hit by one or both of them if he tried dodging, Ham instead summons one of the skeletons he had bound in the dungeon between the oncoming death beams and himself. The red beam had dissipated after atomizing his kobold zombie, so hopefully the skeleton would be an adequate interposed shield between himself and certain death.

Both beams of light strike the animated pile of bones simultaneously. For about a second or two, it cycles between melting and calcifying, individual bones bubbling and smoking or hardening into rock, before the entire skeleton settles on solidification. Directly in front of Ham is now an exquisitely carved statue of a skeletal guardian, in the process of melting.

Then it explodes.