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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4804751" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 40Trying to avoid the grasp of the duergar scout, who had a huge advantage in size and weight over him, Jaron sprang back into the cramped mouth of the tunnel behind him.  With the passage shrinking down so rapidly to a mere crack within a few paces, there wasn’t much space to retreat, and he hit his head on the low ceiling as he tried to evade the duergar’s attack.  The dark dwarf took advantage of the opportunity to pull himself more fully up onto the ledge, blocking any possible route of retreat.  “Yield,” he hissed.  Jaron’s answer was to reach for the hilt of his sword, but before he could draw it he felt a sudden stabbing pain in his arm.  He looked down to see several of the thick quills from the duergar’s beard embedded in his skin; they gone through his coat like darts.  Almost instantly a fierce burning sensation spread out from the wounds, crawling up his arm. The duergar saw his distress and smiled, reaching for him again.  Down below, Rundarr and his guards converged below Jaron’s perch.  Seeing the enemy sniper apparently contained, the duergar champion turned to make certain that the slaves were under control.  The orcs were being free with the butts of their spears, and the duergar bristled at the delay that would follow if any of the slaves earned broken bones. Neither he nor his men spotted the tiny shadow that emerged from one of the low side-tunnels and slipped to the side.  But they heard the scraping noise that followed a few seconds later, rapidly growing in intensity until it seemed to reverberate off the walls. “Ware!” Rundarr shouted, in the same instant that the first kruthik burst from the crowded tunnel into the open space of the intersection.  Mara’s head swam from where an orc had batted her across the temple with the haft of his spear.  Struggling with the pain of her wounded feet and the despair of her circumstances, it had taken her a few seconds to realize that the slaver column was under attack.  She’d reacted quickly then, trying to tackle the nearest orc guard, but the chains linking her to her fellow prisoners had caught her as several of the captives had succumbed to panic and tried to scatter in a dozen directions at once.  The orc easily evaded her off-balance lunge, and his counter with the butt of his spear had finished the job of sending her to her knees.  He followed that with his boot, ruthlessly driving her onto her back.  The orc seemed intent on battering her into unconsciousness or worse, and any thought of attack was quickly replaced by a need to protect her already battered body from the creature’s harsh kicks.  With her wrists bound behind her, there was little she could do to defend herself.In that instant, she felt helpless, and was transported back in time to that little girl who’d found herself alone in the world, everything she’d ever had stripped from her by the merciless hand of fate.Are you just going to lie there and let them kill you? came a voice in her mind, so clear and stark that she was startled into awareness, opening her eyes to see the orc looming over her, his piggish face twisted into a snarl, his boot lifted for another brutal kick. Penned in by the larger, stronger duergar, Jaron did the only thing he could; he attacked.  Pushing off from the wall at his back, he sprang at the evil dwarf.  The duergar was waiting for him and had a meaty fist ready, coming across in a hook that would have likely left the halfling missing teeth, had it connected.  But with his first step Jaron dropped and dove under the dwarf’s swing, coming up into a roll that planted his bottom right in front of the duergar’s crotch.  Drawing his knees up almost to his chin, he snapped his legs out, driving both booted feet into the dwarf’s codpiece.  Jaron was stronger than he looked, and now it was the dwarf that was unbalanced.  The duergar stumbled back a half-step, his arms windmilling in an almost comical gesture as he balanced precariously on the very edge of the tunnel opening.  For an instant, it looked as though he would recover, but then momentum and gravity conspired against him, and he tumbled over backwards.  It was dramatic, although Jaron knew that a fall of nine feet was unlikely to finish off a foe as hardy as a duergar.  Scrabbling for his bow, the halfling pulled himself back up to a crouch and looked over the scene of utter chaos before him. A violent melee raged in the middle of the intersection.  Skittering kruthiks, their spiked limbs clattering on the floor as they moved, were everywhere, shifting and darting as they launched violent attacks upon the embattled duergar.  Jaron couldn’t count them immediately, but there had to be at least a dozen, ranging in size from tiny things barely larger than a housecat to armored nasties as big as a wolfhound.  The duergar leader loomed over all other combatants, swollen to almost twice his size by the same inherent magic that Jaron had witnessed in the Horned Hold.  As the halfling watched, an adult kruthik launched itself at one of the duergar warriors, and the leader caught it mid-flight with his hammer, delivering a titanic blow that launched the insectoid thing clear across the intersection, caroming off one of the walls before it tumbled at least twenty paces down one of the larger passages.  The duergar, moving faster than Jaron had ever seen, reversed the momentum of his swing and caught a second creature with his backswing, flipping it over onto its back.  It hissed terribly as it fumbled to recover.  A third kruthik sprang up toward the duergar’s legs, stabbing with its sharp foreclaws, but he merely shifted and kicked it away, bringing the heavy hammer up for another strike.  Jaron looked down at the ground directly in front of his perch, where the duergar scout he’d knocked off the ledge was trying to get up.  A hint of movement out of the corner of his eye resolved into another kruthik, this one barely half the dwarf’s size, which skittered forward with incredible speed, launching itself onto the duergar before he was even aware of the threat.  The dwarf screamed and fell back onto the floor again as the creature slashed at his face and arms, while he struggled to keep it away from him. Jaron would have preferred to be anywhere but down there, but what he could see of the struggle going on further back down the passage told him that he didn’t have much time to intervene with the slaves.  He had no idea where Beetle or Gru were, and couldn’t spare either of them more than a passing thought.  Taking a deep breath, he stepped off of the ledge, into the chaos below.  He grabbed the edge of the ledge with one hand as he fell, holding on just for a second before he let go and dropped easily to the floor, transferring his momentum into an all-out run.  He gave the struggling duergar scout and kruthik a wide berth, dashing along the near wall, trying not to flinch each time he passed one of the low, narrow tunnels that crisscrossed the entire area.  No more kruthiks emerged, and neither the ones already there nor the duergar seemed to notice his passing.  From what he’d seen, it didn’t look like the ones already here would last much longer against the duergar; he didn’t have much time. Then a loud crumbling noise drew his attention to the far side of the intersection, toward the small tunnel where the kruthik had originally appeared.  He almost tripped over his own feet as the wall surrounding the tunnel mouth exploded outward, and another kruthik, this one the size of a horse, stepped through the debris into the intersection.  It let out a shriek that seemed to shake the walls, and started forward.  To Jaron it looked like it was coming straight for him, but as the duergar champion shifted to meet it, he saw that he was fortunately too small to be noticed by either side as a threat.  Then he was past the melee, and the column of slaves was ahead, jumbled into a crowded circle, surrounded by the orc guards.  The orcs were all turned away from him, either focused on their prisoners or on the battle between the up-sized duergar leader and the kruthik hive lord.  Jaron reached for an arrow, intent on striking before the guards were even aware he was there. But even as he drew the arrow out of his quiver, a low-pitched hiss from behind him sent a cold chill down his spine.  He glanced over his shoulder to see another kruthik charging at him from behind.  The thing was barely larger than he was, but it looked no less deadly for that, its claws digging at the floor hard enough to scratch the stone.  No doubt they’d pierce his body like daggers, he thought. A shout from ahead answered the creature’s hiss from behind.  Jaron turned back to see that one of the orcs had in fact noticed him, and as he drew closer, the warrior lowered his spear, the steel head coming down to intercept the halfling’s charge.  Caught between a steel point on one side and a set of vicious claws on the other, Jaron found himself suddenly without any good options.</blockquote>

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