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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2944000" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 615Arun lifted his hammer to defend himself, but never got the chance. “Enough!” Cal shouted, his voice echoing loudly despite his small size.  Electrical energy erupted from his fingertips, as he hurled a shadowed chain lightning at the surging vermin.  The anarchic spiders, while far tougher than their mortal kin, were nevertheless utterly obliterated by the devastating cascade of secondary blasts that streaked through their ranks.  Arun rushed to intercept Graz’zt, but the Prince had too much of a lead on him.  As he reached the seeping gap in the floor, however, a spray of water exploded from the opening, and Dana appeared, hovering in the air above the hole, blazing with the white light of a holy aura.  “Going somewhere, Your Foulness?” she asked.  Graz’zt tried to dart around her, but the hole was blocked by the bulk of a celestial orca, which had propelled her up through the opening. “You will pay!” he screeched, spreading his hands and unleashing a spray of black energy into her.  The tendrils flared against her holy aura, and died, somewhat to Dana’s surprise.  “Aaargh!” Graz’zt screamed, as Arun slammed him with his hammer from behind.  The blow knocked the Prince roughly sideways, to land in a heap against the nearby cavern wall.  He lay there squirming in pain, his right arm dangling limp at his side at a clearly unnatural angle. The rest of the companions came running up as Dana and Arun faced the fallen demon lord. “That was too easy,” Arun said.  “That magic he threw at me, it was barely up to the strength of a nalfeshnee,” Dana said, wary for any more tricks.  But Graz’zt seemed to have had the fight knocked out of him, at least for the moment. “It’s not him,” Arun said.  “Another trick.  Once again, the bastard has eluded us.”“No,” Cal said, as he floated up to join them.  His arcane sight had enabled him to discern the truth.  “That is Graz’zt… or what remains of him.”The demon snarled, but the movement caused another surge of pain to shoot through him, and he twisted again in agony.  “The Prince had to invest a great deal of himself into the assault upon Occipitus,” Cal said.  “The loss of Azzagrat, and of the seat of his power, had already dimished him.  And the exercise of so much epic magic, even with the augmentation of that artifact, drained him yet further.  He had hoped to restore much of what he had lost by binding himself to Occipitus, but that clearly didn’t work out quite as planned.”“You fools!” Graz’zt hissed.  “I shall rise again… One such as I cannot be so easily obliterated!”“He seems rather… pathetic, now,” Beorna said, looming over them still in her enlarged form. “Look at that,” Dana said.  She gestured to Arun’s hammer, which the dwarf lifted to reveal an ugly red slick hissing as it ate away at the metal.  Then back at the demon, whose emaciated form, his black hide stretched tight over a bony frame, was now familiar to them. “He’s a babau,” Lok said.  “That’s all he was, what he began as, and to what he has returned.”“Eww, yuck,” Mole said.  The gnome, inconspicuous during the battle with the elementals, had reappeared among them, her nose wrinkled.  “It is time to end it,” Arun said.  He took a step forward, but paused.   Turning, he offered the haft of the hammer to another.</blockquote>

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