Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4692053" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 6Gral groaned, and drew himself slowly up into a sitting position.  He looked up to see Vhael looming over him.  The dragonborn looked a little battered, and blood still seeped from the wound on his shoulder, but he was far from finished. “Are you all right?” he asked the wizard.  “It’ll take more than a little beastie like that to put the tell to me,” the dwarf growled.  He accepted Vhael’s hand, and came to his feet, patting down his body, and checking that his pouches were all still in place.  “Over here, wait for it!” Vhael yelled to Carzen, who’d started tentatively toward the wizard’s cloud, which was just starting to disperse.  The young nobleman looked over at them and nodded, moving to join them, his shield lifted in the direction of the foe.  The wyvern, seeing no more foes directly in front of it, and apparently not quite grasping where the wizard had gone to, ponderously turned in place.  As the freezing cloud dissolved, it caught sight of the three foes standing in the open, and roared again, charging back toward them. This time, arrows greeted its rush; a shot from Gezzelhaupt arced over the defenders from where the guardsman had taken shelter behind a fallen log on the far side of the clearing, while another emerged from the tall grass a short ways up the hillside, likely from the halfling scout.  Both struck the wyvern, but it wasn’t clear if they penetrated the proven thickness of its hide.  The monster kept coming, and Vhael stepped forward to put Gral behind him.  He nodded to Carzen, who took up a warding position next to him, directly in the onrushing creature’s path.  At least he is not a coward, the dragonborn thought, as the young human raised his shield and sword, his boots twisting as they dug into the muddy dirt of the trail.  But before the wyvern could strike, both warriors were struck dumb by the utterly unexpected emergence of a streaking form from the tall grass, which shot out into the open and at the wyvern, intersecting its route of charge.  The new attacker was utterly dwarfed by the charging drake, which failed to notice the threat, at least at first.  That changed once the newcomer sprang up onto its leg, using the creature’s own momentum to boost him up onto the trailing edge of one wing.  From there he ran up to the first carpal joint on the front of the wing, where a small protrusion jutted up from where the bones intersected.  By now the wyvern had realized that something wasn’t quite right, but even as its lumbering stride altered, the small figure let himself fall, steel flashing as his knife bit at the leathery membrane of the wing, punching through and opening a long gash as his weight drew him down the full length of the wing.  The wyvern let out a blood curdling shriek and nearly fell as it suddenly stopped and lunged at the foe that had maimed it.  The sting shot straight down, perfectly aimed to impale the enemy, but in the instant before it struck the little form tumbled under the wyvern’s body, and the sting pierced only dirt.  Beetle came up on the far side of the wyvern.  He glanced over at Vhael and Carzen, and waved, a wide grin on his face.  The wyvern, still trying to figure out what had happened, yanked its sting free of the ground, hissing malevolently. Carzen shot an incredulous look at Vhael, but the dragonborn was already charging forward.  “At it, before it can recover!” he shouted.Vhael was on the drake in seconds, his sword coming down in a blur.  It bit deeply, and this time the wound was a nasty one, unleashing a spray of blood that left garish streaks across the warlord’s chest and face.  The wyvern quickly responded, the deadly head coming down to strike, but Vhael avoided the snapping jaws, suffering only a glancing hit across his forearm where the bony ridge along the side of its head grazed him.  The creature was slowing, now, but the warlord knew better than to underestimate the beast, even blooded as it was.  He felt rather than saw the impact that shuddered through the wyvern as Carzen took advantage of the distraction offered by Vhael’s attack to drive his blade home under the joint of its left wing.  The sheer punishing force of his brute strike drove the wyvern back a half step, forcing it to pause a moment to regain its footing on the trampled ground.  Carzen nearly had his sword torn from his hand at the wyvern’s rough movements, but the pair finally parted, the bright steel now slick with dark blood from the tip to the hilt.  The wyvern lunged at him with its sting, but its attack was sluggish, and the warrior easily blocked it with his shield.  A thud announced the arrival of another arrow, this one sticking into the ridged flesh at the base of its skull.  The wyvern’s gaze was more glassy than angry now, though it could still feel pain, and as Beetle busied himself with his dagger at its rear it started to bring its head ponderously around.  It did not seem to even see Vhael as the dragonborn brought his big blade up, and with a roar he swept it down in a stroke that took its head from its shoulders.</blockquote>

Verification