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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 1442043" data-attributes="member: 143">Yeah, I myself am torn; on the one hand, I like Hodge too, but on the other hand, he's clearly an NPC, and we all know what happens to them...  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /> * * * * * Chapter 121Dannel helped Mole to her feet, the gnome looking rather unsteady still even after Dannel’s magical healing.  Arun was even slower to rise, the dwarf looking like a man who’d been beaten within an inch of his life, and then smacked on some more for good measure.Hodge’s cry of pain and alarm drew their attention toward the half-open door.  While Arun bent down to recover his hammer yet again, Dannel gestured for Zenna to stay with their injured companions while he ran toward the door.  He reached it just as Hodge burst through, a smoldering arrow jutting from a puncture in one of his shoulder-plates, his expression one of alarm as he turned and pushed the heavy door shut.  “What is it?” Dannel asked. “Demon... woman... very bad...” the dwarf panted.  He slammed the door shut, and leaned himself against it, wincing as the action aggravated the wound in his shoulder.  “Here, take this,” he said, handing the elf his bow.  The elf took the weapon and tested the string—still sound, though it would have to be changed after the soaking they’d taken.Suddenly a small crack and a familiar hiss sounded in the far corner of the room.  “Oh, damn,” Hodge said. They all turned to regard the strange woman, hovering a foot above the floor, her majestic height causing her head to nearly brush the ceiling above.  She regarded them with a haughty and terrible expression, and naught but cold death burned in her dark eyes.  Dannel didn’t need encouragement, as he immediately drew an arrow and fired.  The woman turned smoothly out of the path of the arrow, but it nonetheless punched through one feathered wing as it sliced past, causing the woman’s face to flicker slightly in what might have been pain, but which Dannel feared was more irritation.  She regarded him coldly and flicked the hand not carrying her bow at him in a desultory gesture. Instantly a cloying, familiar cloud of roiling chaotic energy erupted around Dannel and Hodge.  The elf felt a terrible rending sensation inside him as the unholy blight ripped into him, and Hodge’s curses a pace away said that the dwarf was suffering as well.  Zenna’s breath froze in her chest as she saw her friends swallowed up in the roiling cloud, but she realized that the creature—an outsider of some sort, she calculated—had made a small mistake.  By focusing the blight on Dannel, she, Arun, and Mole had been just outside of its effects.  She had no doubt that neither Arun nor Mole, seriously hurt as they were, would be able to withstand such an assault.  As she regarded the woman, she doubted their ability to triumph against such a foe.  Even were they not depleted and injured as they were, she knew that the creature’s resistances would make her spells all but useless, and that their weapons would likely also be of little use.  The others may have felt likewise, but such despair did not hinder Arun, who hefted his hammer and charged.  The outsider saw him coming and drew out an arrow, but even as she pulled the string back the dwarf rushed into her in an awkward but powerful rush, his armored shoulder slamming into her hip even as he propelled his hammer into her gut.  The blow should have crippled her, unarmored as she was, but the woman was only flung lightly backward, and she effortlessly kicked off from the corner wall, drifting into the center of the room.  “You’ll pay for that tickle, dwarf!” she hissed, in a manner that indicated that she could deliver on the threat. Another arrow from Dannel’s clipped her on the shoulder as she turned, a shot that should have sunk deep only drawing a slight trickle of black ichor as it glanced off her unnaturally tough hide.  Hodge was charging as well, his dagger looking pathetically underwhelming in his hand, and even the pale Mole started forward, looking for a way to flank this deadly adversary. The woman, surrounded by her adversaries, suddenly flickered, and in a slight puff of greasy brown smoke reeking of sulfur, vanished from sight.  “She’s gone?” Mole asked timorously. “Don’t bet on it,” Dannel said, clutching his side as he fought through the lingering nausea brought on by the blight.  “Our weapons barely scratched ‘er,” Hodge said, grimacing as he yanked the arrow from the wound in his shoulder.  Arun did not comment, only sagging back weakly, barely able to stand.  “Did you find any scrolls?” Zenna demanded, knowing that time was likely not on their side, as she crossed to where the others stood gathered.  Hodge nodded, handing over the rolled parchment he’d found earlier. Zenna took the scroll and unrolled it, glancing at the contents.  “Spread out,” she said to them.  “Clumped up like this, one more blight will take us all down.”  Her voice held the tone of command, sounding unfamiliar even to her, but the others nodded and complied, glancing warily at all corners of the spacious chamber, where the devil-woman might appear at any moment.  “Wait, Arun,” Zenna said, reading the words off the scroll and touching the battered dwarf on the shoulder.  The healing spell was only of average potency, though stronger than the curatives she herself wielded.  The dwarf in turn sank to one knee and offered a prayer to his patron, Moradin, sanctifying himself against the inevitable confrontation that would follow.  Mole, meanwhile, had moved to check one of the side exits.  “An anteroom, here,” she said.  “Smaller than here, less room for her to ‘port around in.” “Also less room to avoid those spells of hers,” Dannel observed.  “I think we should stay here, but spread out, as Zenna suggested.  If and when she appears, all attack with whatever you’ve got.”“We don’t got a lot right now,” Hodge grunted, favoring his shoulder as he reloaded his heavy crossbow.  Zenna unrolled the last scroll she’d taken from the kuo-toa earlier, in the aftermath of their battle against the priests and warriors outside, in front of the temple.  This spell was an enchantment to boost one’s endurance.  It would not last long, she knew, but she suspected that the woman-outsider would not wait indefinitely to resume her assault.  She was right.  Even as she laid the bear’s endurance upon Arun, the air shimmered in the center of the chamber with the now-familiar crack and hissing sound, and the woman reappeared, a blazing arrow already fitted to her bow.</blockquote>

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