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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4742726" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 20Beetle was starting to wonder if maybe he’d made a small mistake. For some reason, his lungs didn’t want to seem to work, and the room spun around him a bit as he tried to get up.  He felt almost like he had the time that Dale Wanderwarren’s bull had head-butted him, and he laughed at the memory—or at least tried to; only a sick wheezing noise came out of his throat. Then rough hands were grabbing at him.  While he was still not quite sure what was going on, instinct told him that being grabbed wasn’t a good thing, and his body took over for his seemingly absent mind.  He twisted backward and away, leaving his cloak in the possession of the grabbing hands.  Someone snarled at him, and he felt a cool breeze as something flashed by, inches in front of his face.  There sure was a lot of smoke, making it hard to see.  An ugly face lunged in front of his, and he darted back, nearly tripping over something big lying on the floor.  A chair, he thought, then a table, the latter apparently on fire.  He ducked under the table and came out on the far side.  There was an opening there, a vague outline through the smoke, and he started toward it, only to come up short as several big—very big, and very armored—forms materialized in the doorway. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw the outlines of the goblin warriors, trying to find him in the smoke.  There wasn’t really anywhere to go, so he dove under the sagging bed where the bugbear warrior he’d killed earlier lay.  There was a lot of blood there, and he couldn’t help but getting it all over him as he rolled under the bed and came up on the other side, looking for a way out. Nothing really presented itself at the moment, except for a goblin that suddenly materialized out of the smoke, right in front of him.  Both jumped, the goblin’s surprise perhaps understandable at the sudden appearance of the garishly blood-streaked form of the halfling, appearing like an unholy fiend summoned out of the deepest pits of the hells.  Both responded instinctively, the goblin with a swing of his axe, the halfling with a jump backwards.  The goblin felt his weapon connect with something, and his mouth twisted into a grin at the cry of pain that accompanied it, but a moment later he felt a nasty stab of agony in his arm.  Reaching down, he plucked out the tiny knife that had buried there, and tossed it aside.  The Skullcleaver called out to his companions, who converged on the corner of the room, penning in their elusive foe, cutting off any avenue of escape. Barely twenty feet away, Jaron was all too aware of the danger to his cousin, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it at the moment, for between here and there a raging, desperate melee was being fought.  Jaron and Gez had brought the approaching phalanx under fire as they’d made their way up the corridor toward the position where Vhael and Carzen waited, but their bows had had little effect on the heavily armored warriors.  Gral’s icy beams were somewhat more potent, but the hobgoblins had shrugged those off as well, seemingly immune to anything that the adventurers could throw at them.  The warriors pounded their flails on the inside of their shields as they approached, raising a din that reverberated off the walls of the passage.  It was the dead mound of the dire wolf that finally forced them to break their formation, and it was then that Carzen and Vhael attacked, spinning out of their cover to lunge with their straight blades.  Carzen’s initial surge bounced off a hobgoblin shield, but Vhael’s longer sword came in over a warrior’s guard and clipped him hard on the side of the helmet.  The stroke failed to penetrate the steel cap, but the hobgoblin was staggered by the impact, shaking his head to clear it as he pushed forward back into formation.  His companions lashed out with their flails, and now it was Carzen and Vhael who were forced back, giving the hobgoblins the precious seconds they needed to reform their line.  “We need to do something!” Jaron yelled.  He raised his bow, but he didn’t have a shot that wouldn’t put the front-line fighters at risk.  “I don’t have a shot!” Gez shouted back, echoing his thought.  The soldier didn’t bother rushing to bolster the front line; in the narrow space of the doorway, he’d only get in the way of the two fighters.  And anyway, Gral was there, just a few steps back from Vhael, firing rays of frost into the hobgoblin ranks with pinpoint accuracy.  Jaron’s gaze traveled back to the balcony.  “Boost me up there!” he said to Gez, and started running in that direction. But he’d barely covered three steps before the door atop the balcony was flung open.  Hoping to see Beetle, instead Jaron felt a cold fist in his gut as a pair of hobgoblin archers appeared, arrows already fitted to their bowstrings. The feeling of dread deepened as the pair lifted their weapons and pointed them at him.</blockquote>

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