My target was the NEXT Fomorian, the one who truly ended the line. He was about a mile away, but with Sage-level power behind the spell, he could have been right in front of me.
I still didn’t have Tier 6 in ALL my Stars, but Tier-5, my Firefrost Seed topped out for maximum, Snowcasting, Elemental Aura, and a Dreadskull against Aquatics all did wonders for the show.
Over a hundred Greater Shards, looking like spears of hardened light sizable enough to be thrown by these very misshapen brutes, sped out from me across the ravaged landscape, this particular area an entire forest that had been utterly destroyed. Trees were eaten down to their stumps, countless holes in the ground where krill-like creatures boiled and consumed the very roots of the plants gaping up at us in squirming masses of eternally hungry creatures.
That Fomorian, who had a very overdeveloped chest and arms with shrunken legs and a tiny head, took the attack right in the hacking cut in his chest where the damage from his own oversized Axe had been returned to him via Spellflare. The launched Shards, brimming with the wrath of Nature and Heaven, punched into the open wound with a +75 bonus to hit, plunged through the remnants of his prodigious Natural Armor without pause, and unloaded inside of him.
Explosions of Fire, Frost, Lightning, and Thunder blew out from inside the Fomorian’s chest, then out its mouth, then nose, then ears and uneven eyes. Glowing lights burned within its barrel of a chest as it wavered, trying to find its balance, trying to resist, to endure...
The residual blasts burned through a hundred cracks in its skin at the same time, and it collapsed, almost falling apart as it fell to the ground helplessly.
I turned in the opposite direction as King Balor’s eye panned this way, and by the time he and the other Fomorian settled their gazes upon us, the Irish had driven a Sword of Light into the impact wound on their target, and Spears of Lightning plummeted down to ring it and feed massive discharges directly into its insides, all while its feet were caged in stone and three different Firefalls were pouring down onto the same injury.
The four points of a Void Compass connected, centered on the burning, immolating flesh of its injury, and everyone saw the gleam of Lightning escaping through a perfect line.
A final blast of Fire came down and knocked off the top of its chest and its head, pulsing electricity dancing between the halves as the Pillars of Heaven discharged in a final blast before dissipating.
The closest Fomorian was waving about a stone sword the size of a tree, a long gash across the obese blubbered expanse of his chest, having popped one of the four eyes scattered across it, the remainder of which were focused on me as its lopsided skull debated on the merits of taking a swing in my direction.
I pointed Noble, and Rifled up five Star Palaces to back my Greater Shards.
“Two Swords of Light, drop the Lightning right on top of them!” I ordered the men behind me, and the Shards exploded out, each Star Palace doubling the power of the one before it, tightly-formed crystalline Shards blazing like Stars as they exited the Rifling and crossing the mile to the Fomorian instantly.
The long gash in its chest was blasted wide open, eruptions of energy even coming out its back as it took the hundred shots. The multiple impacts drove it back off its feet as it squealed in massive pain, smashing heavily to the ground with the impact weight of a sixty-ton body far denser than human flesh. It blinked dazedly up at the sky just as the two Swords of Light hastily formed far above, and two Pillars of Heaven linked directly to them followed the plunging spells down.
They drove directly into the open gash splitting open its chest, and as the Fomorian tried to scream in pain, the entirety of the Lightning Pillars discharged into the two Swords. All that escaped its mouth was a terrified, pained squeal of ear-splitting intensity... a squeal which faded off into nothing as all of its eyes popped out, arm-thick Lightning boiled out of every gap in its skin and armor, and it cooked inside.
My eyes had never left the gaze of the Fomorian Emperor, King Balor still staring at me from across the miles.
Yeah, these were the weaker Fomorians out here. The last one was a Duke, the two before it were Barons, with the one on the end barely a Noble at all. Fomorians were an offshoot of the Titans, and so incredibly tough for their size and power. It took a monstrous amount of power to actually one-shot them, and just having Sage-level power didn’t mean instant-kills on them.
Burning open gaps in their Natural Armor to allow the men and women about me to pour down their most powerful Seeded Elements without having to eat through prodigious natural defenses? That was worth a lot!
We’d taken out three Fomorian Nobles in just a few breaths, and there were no real threats behind us at the moment, such as allied Sea Serpents or some other Noble Beasts of the depths. Turn the Sky into the Sea had dissipated after so much Salt had consumed vast amounts of Water Mana in the area, triggering a massive collapse of the magic.
Sure, they could put it back up, but now they knew we could eat it away very quickly, too.
Also, all those Fomorians were supposed to be invisible before we attacked, but now the Argent fires they were beating out had marked each and every one of them, and we obviously knew where they were.
I flicked up Disks under each of the Irish, and Reynard began to trot forward, somehow delicate feet for a Fox of his size and power walking on flashes of force in mid-air, bringing all the Irish powerhouses along with me.
The Fomorians didn’t have the arc to try that simultaneous attack again. A Rune Seal of Silver Magic hovered at the end of Noble, clearly waiting for them to try something, while my gaze remained focused on King Balor and his baleful Eye.
It didn’t look like it, but Reynard was bending space as he moved, effectively traveling over 300 mph while all seven of his Tails were held high, wings out, looking like he was prancing on parade. The Irish mages could all feel it, and were already building up their Star Palaces, ready to release them, as we headed in to sweep the Fomorians away.
The proper tactical choice would have been for King Balor to charge at us while telling his underlings to flee. We had no way to actually kill the Emperor Fomorian without a very long and protracted struggle, and he could simply retreat to the ocean slowly while fighting, easily guaranteeing that he could get away. Without an incredibly strong Emperor Beast or something similar to stop him, there was no way to stop him from doing that.
But that would have required a level of care and empathy for his underlings. Instead, the King just bellowed out an order in the guttural half-Jotun, half-Aquan language of the Fomorians, and they turned and began to run.
“I will block his Gaze and cripple them! Kill them when they fall!” I hissed to the mages, as Void Magic swirled, jumped across a mile of distance, and suddenly we were right up on the next spindly Fomorian, who had three fully-developed, sinewy arms, two ending with over-sized claws, and the one erupting from its belly ending in an octopoid tentacle twice as long as the others.
It felt us arrive, but before it could turn around my Shards blew across its back and its knees, especially the somewhat longer right leg.
It was caught in mid-stride and tripped as the ragged ruin of its knee failed to support it, tumbling into a bone-crunching fall with a deep cry as it went down. The burning pits on its backside were in a specific configuration that, when it rolled over, were also sizzling and hissing across the parallel claw-like marks that had burned across its chest, eating away its defenses from inside.
The grim Irish mages unloaded on it promptly as Reynard kept going, making sure to keep precisely between them and King Balor as we headed for the next one, another flight of Rifled Shards going up to target its legs.
The Fomorians were gigantic, and could run surprisingly quickly despite their often-misshapen legs and bodies. But it was a long way to the coast, and if they couldn’t run, they could be caught. If they could be caught, they could be killed, one by one, and with great speed if I simply worked on the existing hole in their Natural Armor, or concentrated on taking out one leg!
------
The Atlantic Ocean surged with waves that seemed to have lost a great deal of their power. The Irish mages stared down at the smoking remnants of the last of sixteen Fomorians who had not made it back to the sea.
It was an entirely bittersweet moment, vengeance upon an ancestral enemy of the likes that would be told for a thousand years and more.
Looking about at the slime-covered, bile-strewn, completely devastated landscape that was all that remained of their green home, none of them felt that they had achieved a great victory.
Miles out to sea, they could sense King Balor watching them, his fury towering to the skies with great black clouds boiling out there. The waters were all thrashing and swirling, seemingly ready to rise up and flood forwards into a massive tsunami at his will.
But the waters didn’t come. The Lady Fae on her Golden Winged Celestial Fox was standing there in midair, looking out to sea coolly... and killing all the fleeing Aquatics around here as she did so.
Multi-hued javelins of Force burned in a constant stream from the glowing Orb at the end of her Staff, reaching out for miles in every direction to hit the Aquatics now fleeing back to the ocean. They hit unerringly, and most of the lesser Aquatics exploded instantly. Then the reduced magic continued on in looping, seeking, hungry chains of erupting bodies and dying Aquatics, precisely twenty-five more targets found and slaughtered per javelin.
By their estimation, she might be killing as many as eight hundred of the invaders per second, and it just wasn’t stopping...
Only Commander-grade or tougher targets would survive one of the missiles impacting them, but none of them were Fomorians. The Commanders just received an additional one, two, four, or eight more glowing missiles, until they dropped and burned with the many, many underlings around them whose flight to the sea would never happen now.
King Balor was watching it all, and still didn’t move to strike back at her. It was surreal.
“Mages of Ireland, I know you are tired, but the battle isn’t done. I can use an honor guard in the event of surprises, while I take a grand tour of your island and utterly slaughter everything that I can. We’ll start by retracing our path and making sure the corpses of the Fomorians are sent back to Castle Leap, there to be butchered as they tried to butcher us, and let the people know the backbone of this attack has been broken.
“But there are Krakenoids, Sea Serpents, Deep Horrors, and other Rulers and even Emperors commanding other sections of this force, and they might well try to prevent me from utterly obliterating their people. I think they will deserve everything that is coming to them, don’t you?”
The Irish mages could only look at one another, and the unending streams of hungry spears of magic lancing out for miles in every direction to find their targets.
“We’re with ye until the massacre is done, lass!” the Black Raven Sage called out, and the others all voiced their grim assents.
The silvery Disks underneath them all moved into formation about and behind her, while Reynard dropped from the sky and backward towards the fresh smoking carcass of the last Fomorian, this one complete with a second vestigial head, arm, and leg jutting from its shoulder and backside.
Lady Fae waved her other hand, and a half-circle of Void Magic swirled up, running down the length of the ugly carcass and transporting it away, back in the direction of Castle Leap.
Reynard turned loftily around, Lady Fae’s fusillade of missiles into the distance never changing as he headed back towards the next dead Fomorian, a thick boneless leg blown completely off it. Supremely tough, it had still managed to crawl a mile more towards the ocean and safety before they caught up to it and pounded it to death.
Out in the ocean, King Balor only stared after them and watched them go.