NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2822070" data-attributes="member: 143">Thanks for the bump, Mimic!  Seems like since the board's resurrection, threads in the SH forum drop fast. I was working on a certain big scene that's fast approaching, and I think I can safely promise that the next few weeks in TSC will be intense. Enjoy!* * * * * Chapter 589The defenders in the second rank found themselves facing four advanced abyssal ravagers, and with the warriors cut off or buried by abyssal maws, there was no immediate help forthcoming for them. Dannel rolled and came up to his feet as the ravager that had almost hit him spun and snarled, its stinger dipping forward as it rushed him.  The elf shot and fired, but even though his shot hit the demon in the shoulder, he almost immediately had to dodge again to avoid its rush.  The demon slammed hard into the tunnel wall, but quickly recovered and shot out after its prey.  Callendes’s chest burned, and he felt his strength flowing from his body as the ravager’s poison did its work.  His celestial heritage gave him a good resistance to venoms, and ravagers were generally considered among the weaker of demonkind.  But these things… they were possessed of a fury and strength he’d rarely seen.  Something had bolstered them beyond the usual potency of their kind, and he had a pretty good idea of what that something was. But there was no time for idle musing right now, as the creature that had stabbed him came charging forward to finish him off.  Biting back the pain, he rolled to his feet, drawing his sword just in time to meet that charge.  He only narrowly missed getting stung again, and his counterattack, weakened by the poison, glanced harmlessly off the ravager’s thick hide. The Voice, separated from Avellos by the surging rush of demons, turned to deal with the ravager threatening him.  The demon’s sting glanced off his chest, but failed to penetrate his silver breastplate.  The sword archon’s blade in turn tore through the substance of the fiend, cleaving deep into its shoulder.  The demon shrieked in rage, and bore down on the celestial once again.  Once again its thrust failed to harm its foe, but the Voice in turn found itself distracted as a pair of abyssal stalkers wrapped themselves around his legs, tearing at its flesh with their nasty claws.  The Voice had to shift to defense as the ravager came forward yet again, threatening to push him over. Umbar struggled beneath the weight of the last ravager, which kept him pinned beneath its considerable weight.  Its stinger shot down from the side, jabbing into the gap under its body, trying to pierce the dwarf’s armoed torso.  Trapped as he was, the dwarf could not bring Alakast to bear, and his first attempt to heave the demon off him failed.  The dwarf was in great difficulty, but suddenly the fiend reared back, shaking its head violently to reveal an eyesocket that had suddenly become a bloody ruin.  The sudden movement gave the dwarf a brief opening, and he levered Alakast up so that the demon impaled itself on the weapon’s shaft as it fell back down.  The staff quivered but held as a loud crack announced that the demon, rather than the weapon, was the first to give. “Coming through!” Mole cried, becoming visible as she leapt from Umbar’s foe into the chaotic knot of demons that had collapsed onto Arun and Lok.  A maw saw her too late to react as she landed upon it; its jaws opened wide and it tried to grab her with its stubby claws, but she was already gone, leaving behind a deep stab wound that jetted black blood in a thin spray up into the air.  The gnome danced around the press of demons, hopping from one fat body to another, with as much ease as a child skipping across a schoolyard.  The demons were all too aware of her now, and she was forced to leave off sneak attacks and focus on avoiding the snapping jaws, the claws that tried to snatch her out of mid air.  She barely avoided one leaping maw, twisting her body in mid-jump as the uneven teeth snapped together an inch from her body.  The demon landed off-balance and toppled into one of its kin, and both collapsed on the uneven pile.  Mole landed smoothly in a crouch on the fat corpse of a dead maw, and smiled.  The maws snarled and turned toward her together, but before they could rush her, the pile suddenly heaved.  Several more maws lost their footing and fell awkwardly.  The pile moved again before they could stagger up again, and a golden flash briefly appeared beneath the press, followed quickly by a hiss of pain. “Sorry guys, I can only spare one dance for you,” Mole said.  “But my friends will keep you entertained.”  While she spoke, an abyssal stalker had crept up behind her and now darted forward, claws extended.  But Mole merely hopped back, spinning in mid-air to land on the fiend’s knobby back.  Before it could realize what had happened, she’d sprung back, disappearing over the wall of slain demons. A loud boom sounded from beneath the pile as she left, indicating that Lok’s axe, too, was still at work. In the rear of the battleground, the defenders were likewise still dishing out the hurt to their foes.  Dannel’s foe followed the elf as he retreated down the tunnel, picking up speed as it charged.  But the archer’s ploy shifted as he suddenly stopped and spun, an arrow fitted to his bow.  The ravager snarled and hurled itself forward, willing to take a hit to get to its prey.  But it could not have anticipated what happened, nor could it understand what happened with the song filled Dannel, infusing him and his bow with magical power, binding archer and weapon together.  The elf’s hands moved in a blur, and it seemed that with each step the demon took, another missile sprouted from its shoulders or neck.  Finally the demon just leapt forward, stinger flashing ahead of it; but the elf fired once more, the arrow piercing the demon’s left eye, vanishing entirely as it exploded through its skull into what passed for its brain.  The sting fell limp as the creature collapsed dead at Dannel’s feet. Callendes found himself hard-pressed by his own foe.  Unable to bring his own bow to bear, too weak to fly out of its reach, he held off the creature with feeble swings of his sword.  His arm bore another bleeding gash, from a grazing hit from the stinger which had thankfully failed to inject him with additional poison.  But his own strikes were having little effect upon the creature.  A twisting violet beam lanced out from a point in space behind the creature, piercing its hide.  At once the demon’s violent movements became less certain, as a considerable portion of its strength was drained away.  The demon snarled and twisted to see who had attacked it, its stinger already poised to strike.  But there was nothing there, only empty space and demon bodies.  It could smell something there, and it was canny enough to know that a hidden enemy was nearby, but even its powerful senses could do only so much over the reek of blood and gore that crowded the tunnel.  Given another moment it might have noticed the bloody footprints in the ground that betrayed Cal’s location, but before that moment passed Callendes lunged in and stabbed his sword deep into the demon’s neck.  The ravager spun and returned its attention to the more immediate threat.  That proved to be a poor strategy a moment later, when a second beam hit it from behind, enervating it. The Voice tried to surge forward through the press of demons toward the trapped hound archon, ignoring the fiends that continued to press the attack upon it from all sides.  A wounded maw rose up before it, blocking its advance, and the stalkers continued to tear at its legs, their claws leaving the pristine celestial flesh ragged with bloody slashes.  The ravager had fallen back, critically wounded by the celestial’s blade, but as soon as the Voice had turned away it returned to the attack, stabbing it again with its stinger, this time avoiding its armor as it pierced one of the thick muscles of its wings.  But the Voice was a pureblood celestial, and the toxin imparted by the sting held little threat for one such as it.  Even so, there was a limit to how much abuse the archon could take, and once more it was forced to defend itself. Just a few paces away, the piled heap of abyssal maws shifted again, those few that were still alive tumbling away as their footing became unsteady beneath them.  Most of those that remained were dead, their bodies cut open or smashed into unrecognizable lumps.  A few still struggled within the press, still biting at the two warriors crushed under the weight of the pile. And then, finally, one side of the mound bulged outward, and two dead maws toppled away to reveal Lok, covered in gore, his axe thrumming with power in his hand.  One maw reached for him, weakly, only to draw a backswing that split its body wide open, ending its efforts for good.The genasi turned to help Arun, tugging away the corpses piled atop the paladin.  The demonic surge had begun to abate, and while there were demons still alive beyond the initial wall of slain attackers, most bore injuries that hindered their mobility, or were trapped under the bodies of their kin.  A few maws and stalkers clambered up over the wall of their dead to join the attack, but they found themselves under renewed attack from below.  Callendes and Cal had delayed the ravager threatening them long enough for Dannel to finish it, and now the arcane archer’s deadly arrows found demons that belatedly joined the attack, knocking them from their precarious perches back to where they’d started.  Umbar had gotten free of his foe, finishing it with a final crack to its neck, and he quickly helped the Voice by snapping the spine of the last ravager, before moving to aid Arun and Lok.  Of Beorna and Avellos, there was still no sign; the two were still cut off from the rest of the group by mounds of demons.  Demonic shrieks, accompanied by occasional comments from Mole, continued from the far side of the corpse barrier, as the gnome continued to harass the foe.  She’d gone to help Avellos, but there was no sign of the archon. It took the better part of ten minutes to find out what had happened.  Arun and Lok had to physically heave away a half-dozen maws before they saw Beorna, pinned under the weight of three of the creatures, her face twisted in a grimace of pain.  One had come down head-first onto her when the wall of the slain had collapsed, engulfing her entire upper body in its jaws.  She’d cut her way out with Aludrial’s Shard, although bits of the creature still clung to joints in her armor, and a long, broken tooth jutted from the visor of her helmet.  Another maw had gotten a firm grip on her leg, and while her armor had kept it from tearing off the limb, its crushing jaws had broken the bone.  Unable to move, she’d still managed to kill another two maws and a stalker that had thought her easy prey. On the other flank of the tunnel, they found Avellos.  Like Beorna, the hound archon had been crushed under the weight of several demons. But unlike the templar, the celestial had not weathered the assult as well. The first sign was a slain maw, clearly killed by repeated blows from an axe.  When they lifted the creature off the pile, they found Avellos under it.  At first, the archon appeared to be relatively unhurt; there were puncture wounds in its left leg, and one ear had been torn off by a maw’s eager bite.  But when they gently lifted Avellos’s body, they found that its right arm was missing at the shoulder.  Eventually, they found the limb in another of the maws, crushed deep under the pile by the weight of its allies.  They never did find the axe; it was probably buried in another creature deeper under the pile, and none of them felt up to that level of excavation, not with the minutes darting swiftly by.  While the companions lifted the slain celestial from the wreckage, Mole stood atop the tallest point in the heap of demon corpses, high enough so that she could have touched the ceiling with only a bit of stretching.  Looking around, she counted over eighty demons, and that was just the ones she could see.  The corridor was so cluttered with them that they’d had to climb over the slain just to make it further down the passage. “Damn,” she said, shaking her head as she hopped down to join the others. Wrapping Avellos in a blanket, they laid him within one of their larger bags of holding.  They lingered only a few moments longer to heal their injuries, and then made their way down the open tunnel, rising higher into the interior of the Skull.</blockquote>

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