Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2120987" data-attributes="member: 143">Don't worry, I haven't forgotten her. * * * * * Chapter 354Dannel spun at the noise of the minotaur’s arrival, and even as he took in the fierce appearance of the creature, he was fitting an arrow to his bowstring. Time seemed to slow around him, as the song filled him and the minotaur lowered its flat head, its steps shaking the ground as it charged.  First arrow…Damn, that thing’s huge…The arrow struck the creature in the meat of its left arm, but even though it dug deep into the muscle, the jutting shaft looked painfully tiny against the thickness of the limb.  The minotaur took its first step forward, its eyes locking onto Dannel with an almost audible click. It’s raging… make it tough to stop…Even as the thought came and went, his second arrow was fitted and fired.  He’s aimed lower, hitting it solidly in the thigh, and again the shot appeared to have no effect.  If anything, its charge continued to pick up momentum… a second step, a third, a fourth, the corridor seeming to tremble now at its passage. Fool!  You aren’t going to be able to slow it down… Your only chance is to hit a vital organ!His third arrow punched through the armor covering its chest, sinking deep into the minotaur’s body.  Its stare never wavered, and Dannel wondered if it was even feeling the hits.  He’d seen barbarian warriors lost in battlerage before, men who’d taken a dozen arrows, men who’d killed several enemies before their bodies realized that they were dead. The minotaur was only a few paces away, now.  The falchion came up, its cutting edge gleaming as it caught the light.  Dannel lifted his bow, his fourth—and last, he knew—arrow in place.  He drew the string back, drawing the bow taut.  The song screamed in his ears, filling him with power, passing through him into the bow, into the arrow. The bowstring snapped. Time unfroze. All he saw was a blur.  He was vaguely aware of the impact as his body caromed off of the wall… it had been several paces behind him… pain, as a slivered rib stabbed through his lung…Then nothing. * * * * * Even as the minotaur barbarian appeared to change the dynamic of the melee on the far side of the fog cloud, the rest of the group was still having difficulties against the first cohort of demodands.  Nidrama had crippled her adversary, scoring a third hit against her hapless foe, but the injured creature, confronted with one of its most hated enemies, refused to withdraw.  Instead the monster hurled itself at the celestial, taking another hit that nearly finished it in the process, but managing to lock the sticky fingers of one oozing claw around the crossguard of the deva’s flaming sword.  With its other hand it swatted her breastplate, doing no damage but snagging handfuls of her garment that clung to its foul limb.  Nidrama’s mouth tightened in disgust as the weight of the creature—now clinging to life only through stubbornness—threatened to drag her down off her feet.  Hodge, meanwhile, was already enjoying that fate, as he and the demodand wrestled upon the floor a few feet away.  The constant stream of profanities in dwarvish and common seemed to match the ugly sounds coming from the demodand’s jaws.  The demodand had the advantage of having natural weapons that could hurt the dwarf, while the dwarf’s axe was securely pinned to its body, but it was in turn hindered by the fact that its own adhesive slime was sticking its limbs to Hodge’s armor, clothes, flesh… and even more than a bit of his wiry beard. The demodand addressed this problem by snapping its jaws around Hodge’s shoulder, opening a considerable rip in his hide at the base of his neck.  This only amplified the dwarf’s litany, and with a sudden surge he tore his arm free, using that opportunity to jam his fist into the creatrure’s gaping maw.  Even though the punches weren’t doing a lot of damage, they seemed to make the dwarf feel better. “You want a fistful o’ dwarf!  Here, ‘ow’s that?  You want more?  ‘ere, ‘AVE SOME MORE, YOU SACK O…”He paused as he noticed something odd; the creature wasn’t thrashing around so much any more.  Drawing up (a considerable effort, as his body was still stuck to demodand all over the place), he saw that the fiend’s eyes had become gaping, bloody sockets.  The thing looked to be dead. Hodge looked at his fist in surprise.  He didn’t think he’d hit it that hard.  “Aug, teach ye to mess with a dwarf,” he said, turning himself to the tricky (and painful) process of extracting himself from the fiend’s sticky clutches. A few paces away, Mole grinned, but the sounds of battle behind through the fog were growing more intense, so she lowered her magical dagger—careful not to foul the sticky thing on her trousers—and darted back off into the cloying mists.</blockquote>

Verification