The Collector fell back down to the mud bank with a click of its mandibles. Its weight sunk into the mud heavily, but it trudged out, fluttering its wings. Or one wing.
It analyzed combat with this 'sorcerer'.
He was capable of erecting a kind of forcefield around his territory, though of course, he did not utilize any conventional forcefield technology nor psionic shielding.
This was 'magic', and a vexing one at that.
The forcefield was capable of resisting the Collector's physical might and its monomolecular claws. In functionality, it was very much similar to the forcefields it knew. These, brute force struggled to deal with, and their constantly generated nature made them difficult to cut through.
The Collector knew that sustained applications of intense heat could overload a forcefield and shatter it.
Of course, this forcefield was different, but it would not hurt to try.
And, in a way, the presence of this forcefield was fortunate. It meant that this 'sorcerer' likely did not possess a means to render his physical body immune to the Collector's claws and blows. All it had to do was find a way through the forcefield.
But then there was the issue of the beam. The Collector had sensed its onset, but the speed of the beam was such that it clipped the Collector's tail and the top of one of it wings.
Minimal initial damage, but continuous degradation of carapace and flesh. Degradation so complete that it was on par with atomic disassembly.
But, rate of destruction slow.
Now that the Collector understood the destructive beam's firing rate, projectile speed, and the signs leading up to it, it would be exceptionally difficult to strike the Collector without advanced targeting systems.
The Collector had the reflexes to tear off its tail and wing before the effect could spread to the rest of its body. Unfortunately, this left it unable to fly back up to the structure in the sky.
It clicked its mandibles as it gazed back up at the structure, assessing how it would continue this battle.
Then, the sound came.
A sonic frequency originating from the structure's walls meant to agitate certain types of insectoids and arthropods. Confirming this determination, the Collector saw the giant scorpions unburrow from the mud and begin to skitter away.
Immediately afterwards, the Collector detected a seismic disturbance.
Significant tremors. Mud made exact calculations of the tremors difficult. Yet, tremors intensifying. Presence of a creature approaching. Extreme in size based off of even rough estimations.
The Collector leaped backwards as the ground where it had been disappeared in a yawning hole. A moment later, an enormous worm, its head as large as the Collector itself, emerged outwards with a shrill scream.
The worm continued to unravel its length, displaying an enormity that utterly dwarfed anything the Collector had ever seen in this world. It stretched into the night sky, a pillar of fleshy white intruding against the inky canvas of a star-speckled night sky.
The worm reached almost to the sorcerer's construct before it arched downwards, the many hairs lining its body standing straight up as it detected the Collector.
The worm unleashed a shrill roar, its mouth opening to reveal rows of rotating circular, serrated and rock shattering teeth.
Spines lined across the segments of its body also rotated in sawing motions, and the Collector understood then that a variant of this species, a smaller variant, perhaps one of the young, had created the dens the goblins inhabited.
The Collector estimated that the worm's entire length unsubmerged from the mud would reach close to thirty meters. It clicked its mandibles, eager to consume this creature.
Yet not now. The Collector currently lacked the strength.
But, as the worm sensed the Collector and began to arch down, aiming its hungry maw towards it, an idea formulated within the Collector's head.
The Collector stepped back, away from the softer parts of the mud until it found purchase on firmer ground. The worm tracked its movements, a little clumsily, given its massive size, but its motion-sensitive hairs were capable enough to allow its blind body to roughly home in on the Collector.
The Collector knew that if it took the force of the worm crashing down on it head on, it would likely suffer critical damage. The rotating sawblade teeth also likely had the capacity to tear through the Collector's carapace given short time considering it could easily grind down stone into dust, making an internal attack unfeasible, not to mention dealing with powerful digestive fluids.
But, as the Collector saw the worm's mouth nearing it, it calculated that the creature was slow, its bulk working against it in this regard.
It would work for the Collector, however.
Just before the maw of whirring teeth swallowed up the Collector, it leaped up in an explosive burst fueled by the jumping arakka legs and coilboosted ultrafiber muscles. The worm slammed its head into the dirt, shattering the firm ground apart with a roaring crack like a meteorite.
Before the worm could figure out it gnawed on rock, not the Collector, the Collector crawled up the length of the worm. It went into its eight-legged mode, its many legs crawling up the worm's length at breakneck speed.
The Collector's monomolecular claws were extraordinarily sharp, but they were small, and trying to pierce through the thick mass of this worm's flesh would take too long to subdue it. However, the Collector did not desire to challenge the worm.
It instead ran up the worm, scaling it with its arakka legs as it would a cliff and using it as a means to gain altitude to jump back up to this 'sorcerer's' structure.
===
"It's back!" The slaver yelled as the atelier shook and rumbled once more, the huge, splayed out figure of the enormous monstrosity of a beetle stretched out across the see-through blue barrier.
"It will take some time before I can unleash Chaos once more," said Ekur. "But make no mistake, I will let nothing stand in the way of my grand breakthrough."
The wizened sorcerer pressed his hand into the atelier's conduit, the circuits on the altar turning from green again to black. The entire atelier began to whine and whir, the magic crystal floating atop the conduit crackling as it strained to supply the necessary magical energy for a second chaos blast.
"That monster is a mere mindless beast, no more capable of thought than the countless scorpions and many-legged abominations writhing beneath us. Look, it knows that it cannot pierce my barrier, and yet, it continues to attack it again and again," said Ekur.
"Gods, what is that stench, fouler even than yours," remarked the slaver as he stood back, behind the sorcerer.
"Ah, the scent of the scolex worm. I hear they smell of rotted flesh. It is a good thing my sense of smell has ascended beyond mortal reasoning," said the sorcerer.
"No, you're just used to your own filth. Never mind – how long until you can strike this creature again?" said the slaver.
"Worry not and take care of the daemon, for without her, all hope for this world is lost," said Ekur. His breathing began to shallow as mana drained from him, slowly fueling the chaos beam again.
As his mana drained, it became harder for him to repress the negative emotions that welled up from uncontrolled mana usage. Regret and humiliation.
Regret that he could not have spent his life doing greater deeds, deeds that would have left him immortalized in the halls of Aetheria itself, not simply as a footnote in some mortal textbooks.
Humiliation that everyone, the Order, all those he once knew as friends, even family, rejected him when they learned the nature of his research, research meant to rid this world of the Undeath.
The slaver yelped as the monster suddenly revealed a face atop its body, a face equally as grotesque as its form as an odd combination of goblin and insect features and began to breathe flame that washed over the barrier.
The flame did not penetrate through the barrier, but the residual heat from it did, turning the stone walls beneath the barrier molten.
"As I channel the Chaos that will strike this beast into oblivion, I will tell you of my grand visions," began Ekur.
"I really don't want to hear it," said the slaver.
Ekur continued. "I was disgraced because they said I fouled the laws of life. As a scholar from the sands of Utu and a devotee of the Worldwind herself, the flow of wind, the breath of the world itself, has always been my calling, as has the plight of the people.
I have defended countless homes from the searing rays of the sun with my wind-conditioning, and yet, I wished to do more. And what problem is not larger than that of Undeath itself?"
"Your walls are literally melting," said the slaver as sweat began to pour from his face. The atelier's stone walls were red hot by now, but they were not important, the barrier was - and the barrier stood strong independent of the walls.
"Among those under the Worldwind's blessed faith, there are those that may guide the breath of life, knitting together damaged flesh and broken bone. But why stop there? Why can the breath of life not call upon those that have fallen, ensuring that their corpses do not come under the curse of Undeath?"
Ekur continued, his breathing growing heavier and heavier, and his vision growing duller and duller. He felt something was of, but he could not quite tell why, perhaps it was due to mana loss, though this felt…different.
Still, in his lightheaded stupor, he continued, his life's work, his redemption, unspooling from his lips now that he had someone to talk to for the first time in decades. "But when I devised a way to breathe life into corpses, a method inspired by the golems of Sunda, they still were not immune to Undeath.
My newly arisen broke from my control, killing hundreds, and years and years since, I have spent my time hunted and repenting, formulating a way to not only render the dead immune from undeath, but to even remove undeath from those that have already turned.
The answer…is Chaos." Ekur coughed, slumping over the altar.
"What is happening?" wondered the slaver as he too began to feel something wrong, his chest tightening and his eyes burning up.
The monster continued to breathe its flame in an unending stream, its face poised close to the barrier. The flame spread across the barrier, but did not pierce through, only some heat, so what was going on?
"With Chaos…long lost and hidden in daemonic blood…," continued Ekur. "Chaos I will extract from her…I will perfect the ritual. The Chaos I merely mimic now will become genuine.
I will destroy the Undeath rot first from the living dead with Chaos, then breathe life back into the empty shells. None will laugh then, the gods-,"
Ekur coughed blood, eyes watering, and then fell over. The slaver took note and immediately rushed to the sorcerer's side, not to save him, but to keep his hand planted on the conduit to keep the barrier up.
"Will welcome me," whispered Ekur finally before falling unconscious.
"How long did dead circuits last again? An hour?" said the slaver as he shook his head at the dying sorcerer. "An hour of time before I end up like you. I never should have taken this accursed job. Fuck."
The slaver looked up at the barely visible monster, at the flame continuing to coat the blue barrier in waves blinding white fire. "And fuck you. I'll make sure to hack your eye off or something when you get in here. Something to remember me by."
The slaver felt hands, small hands, latch onto his back, and he whipped his head back to find the daemon grasping at him. Her sleeping bonds were loose on the floor, undone from the chaos of the fight.
She stared at him with half open eyes that still managed to glow with pure hatred.
"Oh, gods damn it all-," began the slaver before an arc of purple magical energy coursed from her hands, spreading throughout the slaver like an electrical current running through wire and shattering his mind into nothingness.
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