As Hinterleaf got within attack range of Deznafar, I had him fire some spell at the monster and then gave up control. The cast required an enormous amount of plague energy to sustain, and there was no chance to top up my reservoir—I wasn’t about to put myself under fire.
My vision went back to normal. I quite literally came back to myself, and pointed Storm sharply upwards to get out of the Armageddon ‘s blast radius.
The preventers split into chaotic disorderly ranks. Some rushed ahead after Hinterleaf, some away. Others shouted loudly, pointing at the sky—the meteorite wasn’t falling where it should. It was flying straight toward the Great Portable Altarl Deznafar had recovered from the strike that hit him and now he made his presence known on the battlefield. The monster’s roar was drawn-out and screeching, drumming like a baton raked across metal bars. It pierced the eardrums, filling the air to the brim. The top players directly in front of Deznafar, Hinterleaf at their head, froze in place…
I thought it must have been something like the Montosaurus’s paralyzing roar, but a moment later I realized I was wrong. The space in front of the mega-undead dematerialized into vibrating pixels and the air blurred as if spreading across mirror shards. The bodies of the players within the radius of Deznafar s ability shook, vibrated, then burst all at once, exploding in showers of blood.
Then came the blast on the other side of the dune!
The fiery meteorite crushed the cart along with its altar and unlucky giant haulers. The defensive raid legion survived thanks to its last-chance artifacts, but couldn’t withstand the hellish heat that followed. Few climbed out of the crater.
Deznafar, suddenly incredibly mobile, tore into the ranks of the preventers; paying no heed to the mosquito bites from the top players, he trampled the ground with all eight limbs at once and released his terrible roar, blowing up humans, ores, elves and minotaurs, gnomes and dwarfs, lophers, fairies and hobbits, vampires and werewolves, ogres and titans, centaurs, trolls…
The raiders’ formations devolved into separate groups, which immediately fell into skirmishes with the advancing undead. A few rotters and queases killed by Armageddon had been combined into one enormous rotter that towered over the preventers like Gulliver over the Lilliputians. The beast leaked acid slime and feasted, grabbing players with its ten limbs and swallowing them alive.
The raiders had gone from slapping each other on the back a few minutes before, united and confident, to fleeing to the four winds. The whole Alliance looked in shock. The wipe was unavoidable, and the preventers now felt a new danger. Before they had time to appreciate their immunity to Plague Fury, something even scarier had hit them. Deznafar tore space itself in a thirty-yard cone in front of himself. I couldn’t see any way to defend against it. I felt sure that even the Montosaurus itself would be reduced to blood and guts if it stood before the attack of the Battle Avatar of the Departed. If the Departed had such pets, then how strong were they themselves?
The chief puppeteer made himself known too. My fellow Legate, the lich Shazz, joined in with the fun. He flew above the crest of the dune and span in a deadly dance. Bubbling Devouring Plague like the one I saw during the battle at Behemoth’s temple covered almost the entire dune, finishing off the despairing survivors that continued to fire off spells at Deznafar. I dropped lower to see his health stats— Armageddon and all the following attacks from the preventers had taken just a third of his health.
Shazz busied himself with precision strikes to finish off survivors, throwing handfuls of Grave Worms at their backs as they ran. The sickening dead magic hit the Azure Dragons rogue hobbit as he went into Stealth. The unlucky rogue was knocked out of invis, and the segmented bloody worms started diving into his skin. The massive combined damage killed the preventer in seconds. A Sphere of Serendipity appeared above the corpse, shuddered and disappeared, absorbed by my Magnetism.
The lich flew ten yards into the air, raised an arm and began to spin in place. His clothes, shaped like an inside-out tulip, began to spark. Petallike scraps peeled away from him, filled with mist and flew out across the battlefield. Grave Storml My breath caught as I remembered the spell’s effects.
They flew through the air in a deadly rain of black flakes, and when it hit the preventers’ armor, it melted away like wax. Shazz had gotten a little stronger since the battle on Kharinza: there were three times as many flakes in that Grave Storm, and they flew so far that all I could see was black land wherever my eyes fell.
I decided to use the distraction to make sure the altar was destroyed. Grave Storm had no effect on me, but it mined visibility.1 had to fly around to find the crater of the last Armageddon. From all around I heard screams of pain from players, the wailing of banshees, the crack and shatter of bones, Deznafar’s roar and the lich’s triumphant whisper. I tried to find players raised as undead, but saw none. Maybe raising players was only my job, and Shazz had his own assignments.
The altar had survived. Descending almost all the way to the surface, I looked at the range of glimmering dome shields covering not only it, but also the reviving players. They weren’t hurrying back into the battle. Mages casted shield after shield. From above, it looked like bubble wrap. So satisfying to pop. The undead hadn’t gotten here yet, and it seemed the preventers were taking advantage of the breather to discuss strategy. There was nothing for me to catch here.
I pulled up on the rains to ascend, and then…
The world roared and I went deaf. In
