The Heavenly Host

“What the Abyss?” Bellyachus exclaimed as another rumble occurred, shaking them where they stood.

“An Abyssquake?” Talgorf asked. “I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

Suddenly their conversation was washed out by a large explosion, followed by a roar that didn’t seem to end. Lesteroth was pointing forward and to their left, where a giant, greyish black plume of smoke and ash was skyrocketing upward. Bellyachus grabbed Lesteroth’s arm and dragged him to the right, where another large plume was roaring upward as if in stereo. The ground began to shake even worse as the wind returned to a ferocious speed.

Bellyachus could see Lesteroth mouthing something like “What the hell?” even as he stared over the demon’s head at the rapidly onrushing greyish black cloud thousands of feet high with streaks of red fire and flashes of lightning rushing towards them like a tidal wave.

Bellyachus’s last thought before being engulfed was that it looked like a giant wall of doom. The irony was not lost on him.

∼

“Whoa!” Zelda exclaimed, looking at the empty grey plain where the invading demons had just been buried by the eruption.

“Such mastery!” Tamarin exclaimed from her vantage point up near the ceiling, where she was floating cross-legged. She clapped her hands enthusiastically. The djinn had wandered up to the command center a short while ago and was trying to stay out from underfoot. However, the explosive use of para-elemental forces was something she obviously enjoyed.

“That is going to take them some time to dig out of!” Arg-nargoloth laughed and high-fived Darg-Krallnom.

“We need to get troops out there to chop them to pieces as they come out!” Vargg said.

“Give the order!” Tom told Vargg. “What about the knights?”

“There!” Sekhmekt pointed to the area where the knights had been, which was now also covered by the eruption avalanche. An eruption which continued to drop ash, dirt and magma on the ground, albeit at a slightly slower pace. As they watched on the map, a distortion appeared in the region where the knights had been. The blackish distortion seemed to be growing, like a bubble forming on the surface of a liquid.

“It looks like they are floating to the top,” Arg-nargoloth said.

“Are you two ready?” Tom asked Sekhmekt and Talarius.

“Yes,” Talarius said, patting the hilt of Ruiden, once more a sword and on his back.

“Yes. The sphinxes are in position at the exit,” Sekhmekt said. “Grab my hands and I’ll teleport us there.”

Tom nodded. He looked at Vargg, Zelda and Zog and said, “You three have the conn.” He turned to Darg-Krallnom and Arg-nargoloth. “As planned, you come with us and join your troops from there.” The two D’Orc commanders nodded.

Talarius, Tom, Darg-Krallnom and Arg-nargoloth all joined hands with Sekhmekt, as did Antefalken, who had his scrying ball ready.

“To victory!” Sekhmekt shouted; the others, including all the D’Orcs in the command centers, repeated the cheer. The leaders vanished and flashes of light suddenly appeared on the map table, indicating their presence at the two exits from Mount Doom on the map.

∼

Tom flew towards the Maelstrom with Talarius flying to his left and Sekhmekt to his right. The sphinxes fanned out in an array behind them. Behind the sphinxes came the twelfth regiment led by Morok Deathstealer, two hundred D’Orcs strong in heavy mech suits, and a wide assortment of fully charged high-tech weapons of various types.

In person the Maelstrom, which by now had almost finished emerging from the newest layer of ash and magma, appeared to be an amorphous blob of shiny blackness. One could see movement inside the blob, barely, but it was hard to decide how many Knights of Chaos were in there, and how much of the space consumed by the giant blob was space between the knights.

The blob was large enough to contain at least a few dozen knights and mounts around the size of Tom or Sekhmekt, assuming the knights actually were humanoid, which Tom was not sure of. He had just assumed they looked like knights.

“Getting through the Maelstrom could be tricky,” Morok said dispassionately, coming up beside Tom.

“It’s a very nasty gravitational force-field sort of thing,” Sekhmekt said. “As I mentioned in the prep, we can try the portable gravity cannons on them first.”

Their unit was now about a thousand feet from the giant Maelstrom blob. “The key point is that we need to break the Maelstrom and force the knights to emerge,” Sekhmekt said.

Tom nodded. “As planned, let’s start with our two portable gravity cannons and then, while those recharge, we will hit them with the BFG 40K’s, and then riddle the thing with our blasters as the plasma from the BFGs play out over the Maelstrom.”

Tom looked over at the four D’Orcs with the two gravity cannons. “Let me know if you can lock on the Maelstrom with your instruments.” He looked at the BFG and blaster troops. “Same with you guys; I want to take down the visibility levels so they can’t hit us with any ranged weaponry.”

CRRAAACCKKKK!!!