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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 4642409" data-attributes="member: 1210">This thing is incredible, thinks Gerontius, tumbling frantically around the ruins of the dungeons within Bile Mountain. The tremendous forces and multiple disintegrating effects unleashed have left the area with little resemblance to its previous form. Bits of rock and gravel pour from holes in the ceiling. Huge areas of floor are completely gone. The Axenscion Prototype breaks off its pursuit of Gerontius at its King’s command. It turns, unleashing null blasts at Sybele and Alcar. Both of them scream; Sybele falls to her knees, and Alcar convulses in the air and nearly collapses to the ground. The nimblewright whizzes past them, intent on reaching the unconscious (but regenerating) Queen of Bile and rescuing her from Chakar. Chakar nearly pisses himself. It’s going to kill me if I let it reach me, he thinks. By the time he’s had the thought, he has already activated his boots of speed and snapped the Queen’s neck with a rainbow strike.* He knows that the party cannot afford to let the Axenscion Prototype pull her away and bring her back into the fight. Then all he can do is brace himself as the construct flashes towards him.Tamult the Bile Lord claws at Gerontius as he flies by, ripping furrows in his skin, and then starts to back away out of sight. “No you don’t!” Sybele cries, and with a quick motion she fires an arrow into his robe, stapling him to the floor. “You aren’t going anywhere, bad guy dude!” Then, she initiates her psionic ability to control sound, stopping the King of Bile from casting spells, or at least those with verbal components.Inoke grits his teeth. He says, “I guess it’s time to get back to this f**king robot.” He mounts his flying harness- and he charges forward, unleashing an Inoke Special- a fully augmented psionic lion’s charge mixed with a heedless charge and everything else he can muster. He flies forward with a resounding battle cry and smashes his mace into the Prototype again and again. Two of the blows fail to do any real damage, but the other three smash it hard!** Meanwhile, the huge, chill form of Chaffelliox rears up and continues the battle’s tradition of rearranging the innards of Bile Mountain. She smashes a wall into rubble. Chunks of the ceiling collapse down. “DO NOT SEEK TO HINDER ME!!” she roars, a warning to all the other creatures present.She confronts the King of Bile.***Most of the Bile Lords are not in sight, and several of them are still somewhat above the fray, still descending to enter the battle, accompanied by yet more of the mountain’s inhabitants that they have roused. They are thrown into sudden disarray by the arrival of the paired spheres of ultimate destruction that plow into them from above. One of the beholders is immediately destroyed, while a hapless headless is annihilated by the other. This doesn’t stop the Bile Lords from entering the fray, but it does slow them down and draw away additional reinforcements. The remaining red-eye beholder suppresses the spheres with its antimagic ray, and the headless begin swarming up the shaft, climbing with amazing agility.Unfortunately for them, they are met with a blast of frigid air: Cirrus’ breath weapon. Worse yet, the few that manage to hold on and attain the top find her in her true draconic form, her wrath splendid to behold. Except, of course, to the headless, for whom it is instead quite dreadful.***Baron Lillamere brings a crushing fist of spite into being, and it smashes down at the Axenscion Prototype. The nimblewright evades at the last second, moving so fast that it’s just a blur. And then it unleashes a thousand cuts. It begins an incredibly graceful and deadly dance, drawing line after line of blood in our heroes as it dances around and weaves through them all, slicing Inoke again and again, Wankerman several times, Chakar twice- and then it switches tactics, grabbing the Queen’s body!“NO!!” roars Chakar. The two struggle. The dwarf wraps his legs around the Queen of Guts. The nimblewright tries to wrench her free. They wrestle back and forth violently.*** Chakar hangs on grimly as the nimblewright tries to pull the body free. The King of Bile, meanwhile, casts a spell. Both Blaze and Lillamere recognize it- it’s an ancient spell, but one that is out of favor in the modern age: vocalize. Able to cast spells again, the King ignores Chaffelliox and starts to fly up one of the shafts that the beholders bored through the corrupted stone of the mountain. Tamult shatters the arrow holding him in place and begins to follow.“No way!” exclaims Blaze. Rushing to the bottom of the shaft, he turns and casts upward, catching both Tamult and the King of Bile in a Mordenkainen’s disjunction! Their fly spells fail, and Tamult falls to the ground with a startled cry! The King manages to hang on to the ledge above him.“Let’s do this again,” Sybele says, and uses another stapling shot to prevent the King’s escape. The nimblewright finally rips the Queen away from Chakar. It springs away, though Chakar does give it a kick as it is moving away. Then it springs up one of the shafts, making good its escape.Tamult sneers. “Fools, this will not help you!” He casts a horrid wilting that nearly kills Blaze and heavily damages everyone else. “Yeah, well, that won’t help you,” Inoke retorts, flying in on his harness and performing another Inoke Special, this one on Tamult. The Bile Lord cannot withstand the attack, and Inoke crushes his chest. For good measure, he cleaves on the King of Bile. We’ve got to finish this before the Axenscion Prototype returns, he sends urgently over the telepathic link.JJ, meanwhile, takes down the last headless with another crystal shard, and then attempts another psionic attack- but the chaotic nature of his powers manifests at the worst possible moment, and instead of attacking the enemy, he finds himself blasting his own mind, as well as that of Wankerman. Wankerman collapses, stunned by the attack. Chakar springs forward and dumps a healing potion down his throat. And that’s about the point at which Alcar hurls one of the Belmax Corporation’s patented green slime grenades at the King of Bile. It’s a simple device, really: green slime enclosed in a glass globe. Dangerously easy to carry, dangerously easy to break- and very, very dangerous as a weapon. The King of Bile begins to turn into slime.***The Axenscion Prototype reaches Zurtneg and Chemnu, who are still descending cautiously, having left their lackeys to their fates with Cirrus, above. Their eyes widen as they see the condition of the Queen.The nimblewright gently lays the Queen’s mangled, regenerating form on the ground. “Guard her,” it orders the Bile Lords, and turns and swiftly descends the shaft it rose from. “Things seem to be faring poorly,” observes Chemnu.“Did you hear it?” screeches Zurtneg. “It gave us an order! How dare it!! I will scrap it when this is over!”Chemnu ignores his brother, staring at the Queen’s body. Thinking. Calculating. Staring at opportunity.***I can’t get through his resistance! Baron Lillamere shouts telepathically in frustration. Indeed, neither his crushing fist of spite, nor the maximized disintegrate, nor the puncture manage to hurt the King in the slightest. “I will slay you for imprisoning me!” bellows Chaffelliox, hitting the King of Bile with a cone of cold. The King winces, tugging at the arrow pinning him for half an instant before deciding on a more immediate approach to all of his problems, starting with a finger of death at Inoke.It shatters off of Inoke’s death ward. The King gnashes his teeth, but then fires a quickened chained disintegrate to annihilate first the arrow holding him and then a layer of ground. He drops down to the same level as the party, and then casts a quickened fireball directly on himself, burning the slime away.That’s a pretty good counter to the slime, Alcar admits. Our heroes close in on the King of Bile- but the Axenscion Prototype closes in, simultaneously, on them.Next Time: The finale!! *This was a coup de grace**427 points of damage came out of those three hits.***They actually tied on their grapple checks, and we had to stop and look up what happened... defender wins!</blockquote>

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