Logout Error: My NPCs Now Worship Me

The Chasm Bridge became a canvas for Kaelus's display of absolute power. While the trio of Boom, Blast, and Force acted as a relentless spearhead, carving a bloody path through the center of the horde, the rest of his retinue began their own terrible work.

Flora walked beside her master, a serene, beatific smile on her face. To her, this was not a battlefield; it was an untended, overgrown garden in desperate need of pruning. She knelt, her small hands touching the stone of the bridge, which was slick with the black ichor of the Crawlers.

"Such poor soil," she tutted. "No life. Let's fix that."

She pressed her palms flat against the bridge. [Domain Expansion: Verdant Requiem].

It began at her feet. A wave of phosphorescent, emerald-green energy spread outwards, not over the bridge, but through it. The ancient dwarven stone began to change. Patches of vibrant, glowing moss erupted from the cracks. But this was just the beginning.

From the moss, strange and beautiful plants began to sprout at an unnatural rate, fed by the endless supply of ichor and corpses. There were "Snap-Dragons" that were literal draconic heads on thorny stalks, snapping at nearby Crawlers with jaws of hardened bark. There were "Corpse-Bloom Lotuses" that unfurled over fallen bodies, releasing a sweet-smelling, paralytic pollen that froze entire swarms of the smaller beasts in place.

And then came the main crop. From the sides of the chasm, summoned by her power, immense fungal stalks began to grow, their caps glowing with a soft, purple light. These were Shrieker Spores. As the Crawlers swarmed past them, the fungi unleashed a high-frequency psychic scream that specifically targeted the Crawlers' simple, hive-mind nervous system.

The effect was devastating. Swarms of the creatures suddenly went rigid, their limbs spasming uncontrollably. Many simply collapsed, their brains fried by the psychic assault. Others went berserk, turning on their own kind in a frenzy of mindless violence. Flora had turned their greatest strength—their hive-mind connection—into their most crippling weakness. She was not just killing them; she was making them kill each other.

King Thrain watched from the gate, his beard trembling. He had seen his Runesmiths try to use fire and lightning to fight the horde. This... this was a level of biological warfare so advanced and terrifying it defied comprehension. This small, smiling girl was single-handedly causing more chaos and destruction than an entire legion of dwarven axemen.

Meanwhile, Gravity's contribution was more subtle, but infinitely more terrifying. She floated serenely beside Kaelus, her hands clasped before her, her Orb of Starlight humming softly. She was not targeting individual creatures. She was targeting the environment itself.

A group of elite, heavily-armored "Crawler Crushers" managed to break past the Doom Knights' flank, charging towards Kaelus's position. Gravity simply glanced at them and made a flicking gesture with her finger.

[Local Field Manipulation: Gravitational Inversion].

The gravity beneath the charging beasts reversed. They were not thrown into the air. The effect was instantaneous. One moment they were charging forward, the next they were slammed upwards against the cavern's ceiling, hundreds of feet above, with the force of a catapult launch. They hit the stone with a series of wet, sickening crunches, their armored bodies pancaking against the rock before falling back to the bridge as little more than heaps of broken chitin and black jelly.

Another swarm tried to overwhelm them from the side, crawling along the chasm walls. Gravity sighed, a sound of mild annoyance.

[Local Field Manipulation: Shear Plane].

She created an invisible, paper-thin plane of gravitational force in the air beside the bridge. The Crawlers, in their mindless charge, ran right through it. They didn't feel a thing. And then, as they emerged on the other side, they simply fell apart, their bodies neatly sliced into two perfect, bisected halves that tumbled silently into the abyss below.

The dwarves at the gate felt a cold dread creep into their hearts. This was not the magic of mages. This was the power to rewrite the laws of physics with a whim. The woman in the black dress wasn't fighting the enemy; she was editing them out of existence.

And all the while, Spidy was nowhere to be seen.

She had melted into the shadows the moment they crossed the gate. She moved through the chaos like a ghost, her eight crimson eyes scanning, analyzing, searching. She ran along the ceiling, her form clinging to the darkness, utterly invisible to the blind Crawlers below. She was not interested in the rank-and-file. Her master had given her a specific target: the Queen.

She followed the psychic trail of command, the faint waves of hive-mind control that were directing the horde. It led her across the chasm and into the gaping maw of a massive tunnel on the other side—the entrance to the Mithril Deeps.

The tunnel was thick with the pulsating, organic webbing. It was a throat leading into the belly of the beast. Spidy moved through it with a liquid grace, her daggers, the [Daggers of Silk and Shadow], held ready. The shadow dagger made her utterly invisible, while the silk dagger could produce a monomolecular filament capable of slicing through anything.

She finally emerged into a vast, terrifying cavern. The original dwarven architecture of the Mithril Deeps was almost completely obscured by the hive's grotesque organic structures. The walls pulsed with a faint, sickly light, and the air was thick and humid. In the center of the cavern, suspended from the ceiling by thick, artery-like tendrils, was a horrifying sight.

It was an egg sac the size of a castle keep, a bloated, pulsating mass of translucent flesh. And fused to its top, her abdomen grotesquely swollen and integrated into the sac, was the Hive Queen.

She was immense, easily a hundred feet long, a horrifying fusion of a centipede and a termite queen. Her head was protected by a thick, crown-like crest of chitin, and her multiple, small arms were constantly conducting, directing the flow of her minions across the bridge. She was not a mindless beast. Her black, multifaceted eyes, unlike those of her brood, were filled with a cold, alien intelligence. She was aware, and she was furious that her nest was being invaded.

Spidy crouched in the shadows high above, a predatory smile on her lips. "Found you," she whispered to herself. She sent a single, psychic ping back to her master. Target acquired.

Back on the bridge, Kaelus received the message. The path was clear, carved by his vanguard, and the target was located.

He stopped his leisurely stroll.

"It is time," he announced.

He looked back at the nine hundred Doom Knights, who were still holding the line against the endless tide, their numbers slowly but surely dwindling. He raised a hand.

[Tier 8 Spell: Undying Legion].

A wave of black and green necromantic energy washed over his skeletal soldiers. Every fallen Doom Knight, every shattered pile of bones, began to knit itself back together. The blue fire in their eyes rekindled, burning brighter than before. Skeletons that had been crushed rose again, their armor reforming around them. In seconds, his legion was back at full strength, their lines unbroken.

The dwarves at the gate, who had been feeling a grim satisfaction at seeing the undead army slowly being worn down, now felt their hearts sink into their boots. Their enemy's army could not be killed.

With the bridgehead secured, Kaelus turned his attention forward. "Boom, Blast, Force. The main chamber is ahead. Breach it. Leave the Queen for me."

The three Guardians acknowledged the command with a unified roar of effort. They broke through the last of the horde and disappeared into the tunnel leading to the nest.

Kaelus followed, Gravity and Flora at his sides. He left his undying legion to hold the bridge, a permanent, self-repairing wall of death that would prevent any Crawler from reaching the upper levels of the citadel ever again.

He stepped into the pulsating, organic throat of the hive, the air growing thick and foul. He was entering the heart of the enemy's power.

And for the first time since coming to this world, he felt a flicker of something he hadn't felt in a long time. The thrill of a true raid boss encounter.