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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 1091348" data-attributes="member: 143">Post-A-Day Week continues!  * * * * * Chapter 30Facing a deadly new foe in addition to the already dangerous one that they currently faced, the companions hastened to defend themselves.  The archers shifted their fire to the oncoming ogre as it lumbered down the hall toward them.  Fellian, who’d been circling the raging melee with the stone spike to get to Fario, turned reluctantly from his stricken friend and fired a shaft from his shortbow down the length of the hall.  The arrow hit, sticking in the rotten furs that covered its mangy hide, but it did not appear to phase the beast in the slightest as it picked up speed, running toward them.  Zenna’s shot missed entirely, while Mole cursed as her bow misfired, the string jamming the bolt into the mechanism.  Arun slammed the stone spike again, yet once more his hammer failed to do more than jar the creature.  He did finally get its attention, though, and the spike shifted toward him, its arms stabbing out toward him.  On the far side of the melee, the wounded Fario, refusing to retreat, used that opening to attack the creature once more.  Realizing that his twin-sword attacks had little chance of penetrating, he dropped his shortsword, and with both hands on the hilt of his longsword, drove the weapon with the full force he could muster into the body of the monster.  The sword rang as it struck the thing’s stone skin, but after a moment of resistance it slid up to the length of its hilt into the elemental’s body.  The stone spike quivered, a single plaintive sound issuing from deep within its frame, and then collapsed into a heap of rubble.  Even as their first foe fell, however, the ogre rushed to join the battle against the hard-pressed pair.  Arun let out a deep growl that rumbled from his chest like a boulder rolling down a steep slope.  He charged the ogre, his hammer raised high to smite the foul creature.  Fario, heedless of his own serious wounds, was just an instant behind him, just as eager to strike down this latest adversary.  Behind him, Ruphos held his healing wand and bit his lip in frustration as the injured warrior charged out of his reach.  But the ogre seemed just as eager to meet its attackers, and as Arun charged it raised its falchion and brought the heavy weapon down in an inevitable downward arc toward the dwarf’s head.  However, the dwarf, was, like all of his race, used to dealing with foes bigger and stronger than himself.  As the ogre slashed downward Arun hurled himself to the side, catching the powerful stroke on his heavy shield and deflecting it harmlessly aside.  The dwarf’s momentum carried him forward, and as he passed by the hulking ogre he slammed his hammer into its side with powerful force.  The blow would have laid a hobgoblin soldier out on his back, gasping out the last moments of its life, but the ogre merely smiled down at him, fat gobs of slobber dripping from the uneven gaps in its ugly black teeth.  Fario rushed in from the far side of the creature, stabbing with his sword into the ogre’s torso.  His longsword cut through the ragged furs that covered its body, but the flesh underneath was tougher than boiled leather, and his thrust failed to penetrate.  Fellian, shooting over the darting form of his friend, shot another arrow high into the ogre’s chest, but like his first shot, it seemed to have little effect upon the massive creature.  Back on the far side of the hall, Mole yanked the jammed bolt out of her bow, but cursed as one end of the bowstring popped off of its mounting.  In frustration she threw down the bow, drew her sword, and rushed forward.  Zenna, who’d just finished reloading her own bow, saw her and cried out, “No, Mole!”  But she too, ultimately, followed, moving around the body of the destroyed stone spike to line up a clear shot at the ogre.  “So, you’re a tough one, eh?” Arun said, bringing his hammer around for another swing.  The ogre moved faster this time, however, and it brought its falchion around in a low sweep that the dwarf couldn’t dodge.  He grunted in pain as heavy blade caught him in the side, the force of its impact only partially stopped by the metal scales that covered his torso.  Even as the blade dug into his muscled torso his training and experience kicked in, and he spun with the blow and returned to a slightly wobbly defensive stance.  The ogre chuckled and brought the blade up once more as it finished its follow-through, the arc of the falchion leaving a spattering of the paladin’s blood behind it on the stone floor of the hall.  Ruphos rushed boldly forward, though his destination was not the ogre, but rather the injured Fario.  He lifted the healing wand, a blue glow already forming around its head, and darted in with it thrust like a dagger to impart its magic to his stricken companion.  Fario, his attentions taken up by the desperate struggle with the ogre, did not notice the cleric coming up behind him, but the ogre, turning from its powerful hit on the dwarf, did see him.  The two lunged at the half-elf as one, the falchion pounding through the swordsman’s guard, batting his parry aside before digging a cruel gash in his exposed shoulder.  But for the half-elf’s quick dodge back, it would have been a lot worse, perhaps taking his head as well.  Even so, with the loss of blood from his other injury, Fario staggered and crumpled.  Even as he fell, the healing energies from Ruphos’s wand closed his wounds and stabilized him, but that power was not enough to bring the crippled warrior back to consciousness.  All too aware of the massive adversary standing over them, Ruphos dropped his mace and his torch, grabbed onto the half-elf by his shoulders, and dragged him back out of the melee.  Unfortunately, he underestimated the ogre’s reach.  “Ruphos, look out!” Mole cried, seeing what the cleric, intent on his task, hadn’t. The falchion clipped him lightly on the arm, almost a light brush at the fullest extent of the ogre’s reach.  That light contact, however, was from a steel edge backed by the considerable force of the ogre’s mass, and the steel tore through the cleric’s mail links covering the upper part of his bicep, slicing neatly through the flesh underneath.  Ruphos cried out and fell over Fario’s limp form, clutching at the wound that was pouring a runnel of hot blood down the length of his arm.  But after a moment he grimaced, pulling himself back up and grabbing hold of Fario once more with his good arm.  Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pulled the unconscious fighter to safety. The ogre took a step forward as if to pursue, ignoring the dwarf behind him as Arun landed yet another ineffectual blow on his fat, flabby torso.  The stream of dwarven profanities continued apace, but the ogre ignored that too, lumbering after its retreating victims. It drew up short, however, as Fellian leapt into the breach, his bow discarded and now replaced by his drawn longsword.  The ogre slashed down at him as he rushed in, but the half-elf leapt forward into a roll that carried him under the path of the stroke.  The edge of the falchion struck sparks on the hard black stone of the floor even as Fellian rolled back to his feet and thrust at the ogre’s body with his sword.  Unfortunately, he found the ogre’s unnaturally tough hide as tough as his companions had, and the blow failed to penetrate.  The ogre lifted its weapon to strike this new foe down, but turned as a shrill voice drew its attention to the side. “Hey, ugly!  Sheesh, do you, like, bathe in your own filth, or what?”“I cut you in half, little girl, then I bathe in your blood,” the ogre said, slicing down at Mole as the gnome darted in from the flank.  But Mole was quicker, easily avoiding the clumsy backstroke and dashing in to stab her sword into the monster’s hairy leg.  The blade sank only half its length into the thick limb, but it was quite clear from the ogre’s reaction that it felt that attack. “I crush you!” it shouted, rearing up before slamming the injured leg down on the gnome rogue.  She wasn’t there when the limb hit, however, having rolled out of the way, and as its foot slammed heavily into the ground, a new look of pain crossed the ogre’s features. “I see your brains are as defective as your sense of smell,” piped the gnome’s voice from below. “Blast you blasted giant, go down!” roared Arun, attacking once more as the frustrated dwarf threw all caution aside and virtually hurled himself at the ogre.  His hammer came up into its gut, but as the ogre spun around, still trying to find out where Mole had gone, it only smacked loudly but ineffectually against its fat belly.  Almost carelessly it dropped one fat fist from the hilt of its falchion, and punched the dwarf in the face.  Arun staggered drunkenly back, his head ringing from the force of the blow, but within moments his eyes cleared, and his expression became one of unadulterated fury.  “Oh, I’ll do you for that,” he said.  Shrugging off his shield, he hefted his hammer with both hands, and with a dwarven battlecry rushed back into the fray. But the ogre was already in trouble, confounded by the efforts of the two rogues that faced it.  Fellian and Mole worked together without the need for open conversation, flanking the massive brute.  Mole continued to taunt it, and luck was with her as the ogre missed with yet another potent but clumsy swing.  That gave Fellian an opening; even though the half-elf lacked Fario’s strength and skill of arms, he was able to work his sword into a crease in the ogre’s bulbous torso and dig a nasty cut that spilled forth hot red blood across the black stone floor.  The ogre, stung by that attack, turned to smite the half-elf, a foolish decision given the proven threat of Mole.  The gnome wasn’t a warrior, and she barely came up to the ogre’s knee, but she leapt up and sank the entire length of her small sword into the back of the monster’s thigh.  It was already going down when Arun leapt up and bashed its skull in with a two-handed smite from his hammer.  “Eww,” Mole said, making a face as she gingerly tried to recover her sword from the dead ogre’s leg.  The weapon was slick from the blood of the monster, and she needed Arun’s help to finally drag it free.  Zenna had gone to help Ruphos and Fario during the final moments of the battle, but the cleric had recovered enough to heal both himself and the half-elf fighter with his healing wand.  Fellian drew out a scroll and went to help Arun, but drew back as the paladin threw down his hammer in disgust and walked away. “What’s the matter?” Zenna asked.  Mole had gone to recover her crossbow, but she paused to kick through the remnants of the stone spike, verifying that some precious item hadn’t been secreted on the body of the elemental thing.   “Blasted thing’s cursed!” the dwarf spat.  “Couldn’t hit that blasted bastard for bloody blasted squat!  Baargh!” Fellian strode up, still holding the scroll.  “That was no ordinary ogre,” he said.  “I don’t know what manner of thing it was, but its skin was... unnaturally resilient, and it shrugged off hits that should have slain two such beasts.  It is no failure to admit difficulty in fighting such a thing.”The dwarf met the half-elf’s look with a square gaze.  Finally he said, “Bah!” and went to recover his hammer.  He grumbled something not quite clearly audible, but what sounded like a threat directed at the weapon should it continue in its failure to perform.  He let Fellian cast his spells of healing from his scroll, restoring much of the damage he’d suffered at the hands of the ogre. With the elemental creature and the ogre both slain, the companions recovered the rest of their weapons and searched the rest of the hall.  Fario spotted another secret door on the far end of the hall from where they had entered, but they let it be for the moment.  The ogre smelled even worse in death than it had in life, so after a cursory examination to verify that it wasn’t carrying anything of value, they gave the corpse a wide berth.  Mole did find an iron key on a throng stuck through its belt, so she kept that.  They looked into the chamber from which the ogre had emerged, but didn’t get any further than the door.  The stench that roiled from beyond was an almost palpable thing, like a cloud that hung in the air and poured into their lungs with eager tendrils on every breath.  The chamber beyond the door was a rectangular space perhaps twenty feet across and thirty feet wide, and every square foot of floor space, every corner, was jammed with refuse.  It covered the floor, rising and falling in heaps like waves, forming mounds as high as a few feet in places.  Mole, possessed of perhaps the most sensitive nose of all of them, staggered back, looking ill, but through it she still managed to point to a particular heap of filth on the far side of the room to their left.  “Ith that a cheth?” she asked, holding her nose.  Fellian peered at the indicated site.  “Perhaps, it looks like some sort of rectangular object, under all that muck,” he said.  “I’m not going in there to see, though... feel free, if you wish.”Mole looked hopefully up at Ruphos, but the cleric shook his head.  “We’re not here for that,” he told her.  “We have to find the children.”“Well, drat,” Mole said.  But she still managed to look relieved when Fario pushed the heavy door shut.  With that, they turned to the secret door.</blockquote>

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