Our interrupted trip, actually quite planned for, resumed with new motivation for the Hea tumeroks coming with us. Hea Rheaga had already promised to oversee the Rituals to restore them to the forms of true tonks, which many of the younger ones could never remember being, having actually been born the way they were. If they wanted to remain that way because of it, they could still set things up so their children would be born true Hea tonks of their ancestry.

  There were five menhir rings scattered around the plateau that had once been used by the Aun Shamans to suppress the olthoi/Wharu, the constant beating of their drums driving all the free bugs underground and largely keeping them there.

  The olthoi had long torn apart those menhirs after the Aun left, and likely would fight to make sure they weren’t all set up again. To that end, we had to plow a road to each menhir, set them up again under the direction of the Aun Shamans with us, and then leave a force and defenses behind to guard them while we proceeded on to the next.

  It was thus unsurprising that the olthoi were starting to mobilize as we proceeded from one menhir to the next, destroying any clusters of them we encountered and Sealing the Spawn Points of everything we could.

  By the time we got to the third one, leaving an Aun Shaman and forty Hea warriors behind at the first two locations, the first serious olthoi attack came sweeping in.

  It had obviously borrowed hundreds of olthoi from the land spawns, and they led the way as the boss olthoi followed after them, counting on bodies that didn’t matter opening the way for them to do some serious damage and stop what was going on.

  Well, we obviously weren’t having any of that.

  The Olthoi Hunters led by Lady Vundanewall were absolutely murderous, lines of Autobows racking up and punching out with incredible force and the accuracy of a whole lot of practice from atop the broad wall of the Wagon they were riding. Still, none of the troops engaging there had less than a hundred hours of pure grinding time against olthoi, and they knew how to fight all the different types of them with instinctive ease by now.

  It’s like we had prepped people to take on murderously powerful olthoi and their queens, or something. Who knew?

  I just plinked continuously with Darts, watching the soldiers at work behind shields while archers and arbalesters mowed down the olthoi from above. If they had to be Healed, I plinked them instead of the olthoi, and just Chained slowly and continuously, dropping multiple small Heals with Kickers and helping wear down a horde of over four hundred olthoi come to play.

  We didn’t let the Summons run away, killing them all just by making sure that a couple of the nobles and Swarm Soldiers lived long enough to keep them all here. Karmic harvest, sure, sure, they’d just respawn elsewhere, and it wasn’t like the System couldn’t make endless olthoi, drones that they were.

  I made up the menhirs even while the fighting was going on, as the Formations had all been shown to me ahead of time and I had little problem Shaping while sending out basically enhanced Cantrips.

  There would be more olthoi coming out of their nests as we made our way to the fourth menhir, I could feel the telepathic vibes in the air of the Matron Queen flexing over her underlings and the spawns on the island. Olthoi were starting to move over large areas, and we had to keep Sealing as many Spawn Points as we could to keep the numbers down. But it was a big plateau, nearly a hundred square miles of small mountains, hills, a river valley and two lakes, and we naturally couldn’t be everywhere all the time.

  The job was to get the menhirs up, defenses in place to protect them, and then be about the goal of finally taking down the Lightning Queen Matron, and that’s what we were about.

  We had to kill off five hundred olthoi who reached the site of the fourth menhir almost at the same time we did. Two Primordial Lightning Olthoi Sentinels, the big centauroid ones who were total pains to stop and fight, led that conflict, and more olthoi were arriving as reinforcements while the fighting was going on, meaning the respawns were being tracked and tasked actively.

  It was nice to see that the Queen Matron herself wasn’t out and wandering around the landscape, but that wasn’t her job, it was the job of her kids.

  We crushed the olthoi in time, the Summons still alive heading back under programming the hivemind couldn’t overcome when there were no living Wharu here to consolidate and focus their very simple minds.

  The menhirs and the walls were put up, forty more Hea and some Summons were tasked to remain behind as another Aun Shaman took up his place. The drums began to pound through the ground, turning the natural magic against Wharu. The drums set up a rhythm that drove the bugs back underground, like a continual ringing in the ears they couldn’t tolerate.

  There were fully a thousand Wharu swarming around the fifth menhir by the time we arrived, which was a pretty impressive horde of them by our standards.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  However, the landscape spawns were markedly weaker than those living ones coming out of the deeper hives and Dungeons here and there. Since the horde was so big, we just focused on the more dangerous living olthoi, spotters limning them in Faerie Fire and the archers teeing off on them as the melees and their Shield wall held back the hordes in a crashing, chittering gorefest of stabbing pincers, chopping pedipalps, acidic vomit and blood, and electrical discharges here and there.

  It still took a good hour to kill the last of the living ones, then watch the olthoi Summons break up and run away, obeying their programming as their link to the living hivemind was lost. More were surely coming back, that was apparent, but then the menhir rings were repaired, and the last Aun Shaman, Hea Aananua, took up his place as he once had years ago, and began beating on his drum.

  It was interesting to see and feel the magic jiggling along through the Sublime Chord. It was a form of Primal Magic, very narrow and focused, designed specifically to annoy and suppress Wharu. How the Aun had devised it so accurately was a good question, but the fact was that it worked.

  The few living olthoi coming our way on the surface seemed to be almost maddened as they arrived, the sounds of the hivemind disjointed and breaking up inside their heads, like a maddening cacophony of noises they couldn’t deal with and only wanted to silence.

  Well, they were silenced and fed to the Land, ending the problem.

  From there, it was a relatively simple process. We had to invade the West Fork Dam Olthoi Hive, force our way past the barriers there, and make it all the way to the bottom of the place to confront the Lightning Olthoi Matron Queen. The original quest had involved gathering up tuning forks in a dangerous dungeon to shatter the menhirs, allowing us to pass the Portals into the hive, but with the Hives all materialized and no longer secured by arbitrary Portals, we didn’t have to put up with that crap and could go right to the beat-down portion of this Quest.

  We’d come back and clear the virindi out of the Chiming Dungeon, the Hive Warrior Mound, and the Hive Eviscerator Burrow in due time. The decision had been made to eliminate the olthoi from Marae Lassel, and that meant all the Dungeons, now hives, were to be cleared and eliminated permanently. If that meant clearing all the Spawn Points on the entire island, then so be it, and only the living would remain here then.

  Compared to the rest of Dereth, it really wouldn’t be that difficult a task. The most annoying part of it for me was all the markers I had to make to indicate every Spawn Point that was Sealed, a warning in case a surge happened in the future and they reactivated. Like they had in the Vesayans, Spawn Points could be encircled, the Summons contained, and even used as combat practice as desired to keep people on their toes, if they wanted to put a little work into it all.

  But not olthoi. We didn’t want any olthoi remaining behind here.

  -------

  The West Fork Dam was a huge construction, backing up the water from a massive underground spring, the power of Elemental Water very clear in the lake behind it that was pouring down a river of fresh water with no discernible natural source. The dam had once been harnessed for some special use, and even figured into the calculations of the Aun, the thunder of the water reverberating with the landscape and helping drive the olthoi to distraction.

  It might have been the thing making the lake behind it possible, as well as containing it. Something to ask Lady Aerefalle about, or something… oh, wait, she was all dead now. Maybe some of the older undead might know, but y’know what? We could live without the knowledge. Had for all these years, after all…

  ---

  There were olthoi in here with VOID MAGIC.

  Fuck the virindi!

  Not everyone in here had full Celdon Rose Rings, but the ones fighting in front soon did! There was a lot of cursing and swearing at the virindi, at the olthoi with Hollow lightning pincers and pedipalps, and even their over-sized grubs spitting out Void Magic blasts at us!

  Fucking virindi messing with organic lifeforms because they could and they wanted to see the results and expand their knowledge base was just a recipe for disaster. Only the fact that a lot of the olthoi larvae rejected the mutations and simply weren’t viable had contained them.

  That, and the fact that such olthoi were also rivals to all the normal olthoi and their queens out there. If this queen had actually started expanding and displacing all the normal olthoi, that would have been a clear challenge in the hivemind under the existing Great Olthoi Queen, which likely would have brought her here from the Olthoi North to put down this mutant challenger to her authority.

  She had already suppressed the Paradox-touched Olthoi Queen, alienating her from the other hives and controlling the number of drones the lesser Queen could spawn, restricting the size of her hive. Still, the Hollow Olthoi she sent forth were too useful in this world to truly get rid of, and the lesser Queen had obeyed without complaint. Whether she saw herself as a mutant thing or as a new and better form of Olthoi was a matter between Queens, but it absolutely meant that she was a native of this world, and if the Great Queen Mother were to leave, she definitely would not be heading to an entire world full of non-mutated olthoi who would be sure to challenge her impurity.

  So, we were going to have to kill the Paradox Olthoi Queen, too, no doubts about it.

  ---

  The Hive itself was long and involved, with organic door locks, biotech levers, and pheromonal filters that tried to keep out the uninvited.

  Also, there were a lot of olthoi in there.

  A LOT of olthoi.

  We went down over a thousand feet into the ground, and the hive spread in all directions, olthoi streaming in to greet us in proper choppy-stabby manner, Lightning and Void Magic adding to the fun of the occasional still-acidic sorts spitting on us. The bugs heaped up on us relentlessly, trying to drive us back with exhaustion and the press of bodies. They found instead that the corpses of those who died first Burned rapidly away, and the vivus so generated was tearing at the alien ecology they had naturally put into place inside the hive.

  It was a nasty fight, but we had the people to rotate in and out, and the skill to keep going in the face of such nastiness. The olthoi screamed and died, their ichor Burned en vivus, and we headed around and down, around and down, while the virindi and olthoi hounded us coming and going, and I closed off passageways with tons of stone to slow them down and force them to dig after us as we did so.

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