The Battle for Ulduar
6/16 afternoon
As it turns out, fel magic has a type advantage over void. That’s the whole reason that Sargeras, a titan of order, chose to harness the inherently chaotic demons to his will. Though the old gods had a lot of raw power, the true nature of the Void is corruption and manipulation. The titans could only harden themselves against something like that by becoming even more rigid, which in turn made them more predictable and exploitable. Demons, by contrast, were so inherently chaotic as to slightly warp future sight and were inconsistent enough that each needed a personalized plan for their corruption to the shadow. Of course, those are just manifestations of a far more profound dynamic.
Fel is one of the strongest and most difficult to control types of magic, and it just flat out burnt hotter when it was used against those who lurked in the shadows. Unfortunately I had something of a deficit when it came to active field duty warlocks; I’d just picked up a knockoff copy of Gul’dan but Ursula had legitimately been one of my strongest combat warlocks. I kicked myself for moving all of my mass capture operations out of Stormwind before properly taking over the coven, then kicked myself harder when I realized I could have captured Bolvar Fordragon at any time for a secondary Lich King. No time for that right now, though.
Lividia’s Flameborn, being a swarm of jumped up imps, were actually doing quite well for themselves; they could hurt the Old Gods just enough to push them back if they focused fire. They were also, unfortunately, my only organized hit squad that specialized in fel magic. That meant that in the great courtyard in front of the gates of Ulduar the Flameborn were the only thing holding off the enemy while the rest of my retinue got their shit together and gathered anyone and everyone with the slightest capacity for fel magic.
I’m not my own best tactician or even the strongest piece on my board; I know this. What I am is the best person in my retinue when it comes to dipping out of a losing battle. I could take almost any hit once, could heal very quickly, and could teleport out of the way of any attack with less than a mile radius. Rather than interrupting my generals while they were discussing technical details and marshaling my relatively small number of warlocks, I downed a dozen potions and joined the defense personally.
“Ready order 66.” I ordered as I equipped my new weapon, “I want Valeera ready to pull the trigger if this turns into a loss.”Strom’Kar was a huge slab of metal that I wasn’t very well versed in, but by equipping it into my inventory I was able to channel its power into my moonblade. The bursts of void spikes I could summon made Archaeus look like a stiff breeze, and far more importantly it let me fight in my preferred manner: without giving the enemy a meaningful chance to respond.
I beheaded one of the shadowflame using Gods before they even knew I was on the battlefield, splattering her head across the courtyard. She looked like a human with dark hair and eyes, but her entire navy uniform had been burnt off already and she was hosing my vrykul down with violet colored fire. It wasn’t exactly hard to tell which one was the real threat here.I’m gonna be level with you: I was dumb enough that for a few seconds I thought I won there. Long enough for long tendrils of black blood to reach out of her neck stump and retrieve the shattered skull, pulling it back to her neck while she stood up. Not before. While. She was already dropping into a casting stance before she had a mouth with which to intone the words of power. I’m pretty sure I just knocked her off balance and took away her spellcasting for a few seconds. Worth doing, sure, but none of my troops were close enough to really capitalize on it.
I launched a shadowstrike and a fan of knives to cover my retreat. Strom’kar needed a minute to recharge after a blow like that and I didn’t fancy spending that minute directly in front of my quarry. I’d been told that old gods couldn’t practically be killed by mortal arms, after all their flesh and blood is tougher than steel and they could regenerate at a disturbingly high speed, but they could be slowed down with enough people taking swings at them. If I could get one of them downed and surrounded by a mosh pit of Iron Vrykul chopping them up, I could probably force a jewel onto them. It would semi-permanently reduce my supply by one, but I wasn’t anywhere near as reliant on them for capture as I once was.
I even managed it, thank the Light, when I ambushed one that was taking the form of a winged serpent; probably Hakkar. She was fighting pretty artlessly, so even though they were outgunned in raw power Darcell, Algalon, Hodir, and Freya together managed to beat the former Soulflayer down by pressuring them with Darcell’s fel immolation and Algalon’s exploding stars. That was one of the weakest old gods present, just because her reset to tier one meant that she was running on pure instinct, but the moment I clapped my bracelet around her wrist and we tossed her paralyzed ass through a demiplane portal, my forces roared. They could be beaten.
Across the battlefield, my trio of dragon aspects plus Soridormi were fighting Chromaggus. The Titanforged had fallen back from that battle as the majority of the still uncaptured warriors were dreadfully vulnerable to being transformed into draconids by the twin chromatic wyrms. The advantage went to my dragons; the full team of five in their prime would likely have been able to handle even one of the proper old gods, so even with Ysera split in half, Neltharion missing, and Soridormi subbing in for Nozdormu they could beat a 2 year old godling and her minions. It did, however, take their whole attention to do so.Korialstrasz and the Kirin Tor were holding off another one, but the other old gods were chipping away at Lividia’s handmaidens. My heroes were at less than half strength, so even with Mimiron emptying out his coat closet of experimental superweapons they didn’t have enough firepower to properly focus on any one god long enough to really stop them. For my part I was playing whack a mole, disrupting the old gods and provoking them to take their attention off my rank and file. I was, in essence, an endless stream of delaying tactics making sure that the enemy was always too off balance to risk fully committing.
Eventually I was stopped cold as I heard a shrill whistling noise and began dancing. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. I even kept fighting, killing the Kul’tiras marines with arcane explosions and fans of knives; anything that I could work into the dance. They were dancing too, and a hell of a lot less able to threaten me while they boogied than vice versa. I dimly realized that I was being affected by… something… around when a gorgeous woman in black armor approached me.Her eyes were fiery orange, and her hair was a chin length black mop. As we danced to the Piccolo of Flaming Fire, something screamed in the back of my head that I was in danger. She tried to show me something, something glowing, but I stared her straight in the eyes instead. I realized this woman was somehow Nefarian idly, and regretted taking off my necklace to disable Hakkar. It would have been hard, but I could have tried to do the same thing she was, somehow working my binding into our dance.
Mind defense helped keep me safe, letting me flit away my eyes, spin her, or even switch to a different partner when she tried to put that gorgeous gemstone in the center of my vision. Three of her old gods were forming a living wall of Saronite flesh around us as she tried to end this whole conflict right here.
“Tell me you love me,” she whispered in my ear at one point, “and you’ll be favored above all others.”
“You first, Neffie.” I shot back. “Same deal, maybe? You won’t get a better offer.”
It was hard to make myself want to escape, between the music, her Azsharan Glamor, and what I later realized was her Tsundere Service lure. I was only partly resistant to any of it, though I was slowly working up the willpower to fight back.“You know you’re going to be so fucked when I get free.” I heard a chime in my head as Dirty Minds triggered.
“You know what, fine, but only if you stay right here.” She pressed her body against me and her armor started to crumble away revealing creamy flesh underneath. My own armor followed suit.
I should have suspected something was up, even factoring in Dirty Minds scrambling her priorities, when her top priority was mounting my cock even as Drusilla earned some kind of reward by sniping her piccolo player with an infernal. I was just lucid enough, even when pinned under my opponent, to recognize the Demonic Skitterer ending its dance and crawling my way almost too fast to register. I did the only thing I could to fend off the parasitic capture drone: I used arcane explosion on full blast.
It tore apart the Skitterer, crippled the infernal, and seared off the outermost layer of skin from Neffie’s body. That revealed the shiny black core of nearly metallic blood and flesh for a few moments before she grew her face back with a manic gleam in her eye. She started bouncing harder, faster, pinning me with saronite tentacles that kept my magic sealed, preventing me from blinking away.
“Yeah. Harder. Struggle. That makes it so… much… hotter.” She moaned her appreciation for my impromptu bout of “rough sex” even as my troops bashed their heads against her trio of old god bodyguards. I don’t know to this day if sticky fingers made anything tangentially sex related into a kink for her or if she just liked the struggle to start with.
My head was just a little bit clearer, so I scraped together my mediocre talent with shadow magic and sent an order to one of Xal’atath’s overlord puppets in the area, thankful that she’d gotten over her crisis of conscience quickly enough to show up.“Xal’atath! Send the command to execute Order 66!”
“As you command, master.”
I had to trust that she would obey; I really couldn’t get away from Neffie and the only thing I had going for me was that she was more interested in fucking than efficient capture right now. I could only do so much to drag that out, but I used every trick that Sticky Fingers could scrape together to keep her focused on me, and not on our conflict.
She didn’t notice as all of my retinue members leapt into portals to Kharazan and my apartment. She didn’t care as her retinue stormed into an Ulduar defended only by automated weapons and automatons. She didn’t realize until far too late that I’d ordered Valeera Sanguinar to fire the only weapon I had that could verifiably kill an old god.
If it got her, I won. If she escaped again somehow, at least I’d be dead and out of this trap. Abby and Eliza were already waiting on the other side to pick me up.
“It’ll be so much better for you if you just give up.” I promised the insane goddess riding my cock, “You can get this every day.”
She screamed as she reached climax again, then smiled down at me as she fished for her dragon’s eye crystal. “Oh, trust me handsome. I’m going to be getting as much as I want rega-“ We, along with Yogg’Saron, her old god posse, Ulduar, the majority of the Kul’Tiras Navy, and the northern half of the Storm Peaks, were engulfed in a cleansing arcane light that reduced us to our component atoms as Valeera completed the reorigination sequence in Uldum, capturing everyone she killed in the process.
••••••••••
“Alright, I’ve got a great loss condition for this one,” Auriel jumped in, typing up the proposal.
Silas was unimpressed. “What the hell? Taking away Nef’s old god forms is a massive nerf! Completely unbalanced.”“The old god forms she only got because you made Erich’s whole retinue ignore Uldir for a few days?” The angel shot back, “That was certainly a fair and balanced MINOR mission reward.”
Ghostwalker shrugged. “She’s got you there. I’ll sign off on it. I get the need to drag this out but they are both throwing around nukes pretty casually.”
••••••••••
Three Stage Boss Fight Triggered. You will regain your next charge on 6/20.Penalty: You have lost the ability to use the species change feature of Injections until 6/23. In addition, your opponent has been made aware of this perk’s mechanics.