ZOMG! An update!
***
“Get it off me! Get it off me! Arrrrggghhh!” One of the expedition’s sages screamed and batted at his left arm where a dozen vrock spores had lodged into his flesh and were quickly planting their roots.
“Be ready to deal with those spores!” Florian shouted over her shoulder to Settys. “Even if we kill them quickly, the wind is going to be throwing them all over the place!”
She didn’t get a response, only a rapid series of curses in the cleric’s native tongue and the metallic ring of his sword rapidly blocking the claws of a fiend. Glancing rapidly towards him, she watched as he neatly severed the arm of an advancing dretch and then was forced backwards by the massive upper arms of a glabrezu emerging from the darkness. His eyes were wide, but he seemed more than capable of defending himself, but the combat was going to take away his ability to help with those spores.
“Stop moving, they’ll only dig deeper.” Florian said as she grabbed the injured sage by the arm.
The man gritted his teeth as the twisted, vine-like protrusions from his skin coiled underneath his flesh by the second, but he gave a sigh of relief as Florian’s prayers began to manifest to reverse the infestation.
“Once this is done, I want you to find cover and stay there.” She instructed as she examined his skin for any remaining traces of the spores. “If nothing else, it should keep you clear of any of this same infection in the wind. After that…”
Suddenly a vrock’s piercing shriek cut the air and drowned out Florian’s voice as a shadow fell over both her and the sage. Throwing the sage to the ground and off to one side, she rolled onto her back, brandishing her axe to meet the fiend’s descent, grimacing all the while as she knew the impact of its dive was going to be painful.
That impact never happened…
The vrock’s descent ended abruptly as it slammed into some intangible solid object in its path and the air resounded with the distant peal of bells, or perhaps more appropriately the hollow ring of two colliding cubes in Acheron. The fiend howled in pain as the suddenly crystalline air rammed into it like the invisible fist of a furious angel, and as the spell faded it was obvious how serious the damage had been.
Slightly out of breath, Professor Leobtav stood a dozen feet away with his hand held up in the air, the source of the spell. Apparently the Fraternity of Order had taught him a few tricks when it came to chaotic creatures.
“Yay!” Came a happy, draconic chirp from Leobtav’s shoulder.
“Not bad!” Tristol shouted over towards the ex-Guvner and his familiar as he simultaneously hurled a frigid cone of ice to finish off the injured tanar’ri.
“No no.” Ficklebarb correct. “Not yay for getting the demon. Yay for him actually remembering that spell!”
The drake grinned down at his master. “But getting the vrock was good too!”
“We can’t stay here.” Florian said. “They’ll be coming at the camp from all angles. We’ll need to split up and take them as they come in.”
Tristol nodded, and on cue so did Nisha, ducking out of a nearby tent with blade in hand. “We’ll try to meet up with one of the fighter-types, either Toras or Fyrehowl.”
“Doran? Leobtav?” Florian asked, looking at the two wizards, one of them competent but probably rusty. “Tag along with me?”
The elf looked at the professor. “I think we’ll be fine actually. Between the two of us, we can handle things rather, well, handily.”
Up on Leobtav’s shoulder, Ficklebarb sighed and shook his head. “Wizard yes. Poet no. Socially awkward at times? Most certainly.”
Doran rolled his eyes with a smile. “We’ll be fine Florian.”
She nodded and ran out towards the nearest sound of screaming, hoping to catch the fiends before they took too many lives in the process, and hoping that everyone who thought they were capable was actually as good as they were supposed to be. She didn’t need anyone playing hero when they weren’t up to the task.
***
Distantly, Fyrehowl ran between several rows of tents towards the sounds of a woman screaming and pleading for something to put her down. The screams increased amid the sounds of guttural, almost barking laughter, and then abruptly the screaming stopped as she burst into the clear.
Towering above her at least twice her height, a powerfully muscled, dog-headed glabrezu held one of the camp’s linguists at chest height -9 feet up- gripped chest and legs in the crab-like pinchers of its upper pair of arms. The woman’s clothing was red with blood, and the point of a sword was visible under the skin of her back, punched through by one of the fiend’s smaller arms.
Fyrehowl involuntarily cursed as she realized that she’d arrived a moment too late to save its victim. In acknowledgement of her arrival, the fiend turned to look in her direction, still holding the corpse like a perverse rag-doll or a bloody chew-toy.
“Have you ever wondered what your own innards tasted like celestial?” The glabrezu snarled with a chuckle as it calmly wrenched the body in its upper arms apart, spattering blood and rent viscera across the ground.
“A pity you won’t have the chance to tell me.” Fyrehowl replied, calmly pointing her sword at its chest and adopting a defensive stance. “As it is, I’m not sure I’d trust you to know. You don’t look like you’ve been eating well lately. Not cut out for your rank in the Abyss?”
The fiend’s eyes narrowed and a low growl rose deep within its throat; glabrezu weren’t particularly known for being subtle in their emotions. After the danger it had been through to escape the Abyss, and more so the molydeus that had been hunting it, how dare a celestial question its fitness.
A split second later it charged, and Fyrehowl was ready and waiting for it.
As large as it was, the fiend was deceptively quick despite its bulk. It was only on account of her supernatural reflexes that she managed to avoid being caught by either its pinchers, or the blades it held in the hands of its smaller set of arms. Still, that advantage worked well for her, and as she managed to score one or two cuts with her sword before retreating, its rage only grew to the point of recklessness.
It was clumsy, but it was still dangerous, and in the next minute it struck solidly several times with its pinchers and claws, wounding her but never managing to catch hold of her. But for each time it managed to hit, she struck once, twice, or three times in return.
Furious, it swung its arm out wide and overreached, and in that moment Fyrehowl darted beneath its reach and clipped its right ankle with her sword. She heard its tendons tear and snap, and with a roar of pain and anger the fiend collapsed onto the knee of its other leg. Bellowing, it grabbed for her with its other pinchered arm, only to see her instinctively back flip over its head and score a flurry of deep slashes along its back and shoulders before landing on her feet and wholly out of its reach.
Crippled and losing blood, the fight was effectively over. Scrambling for ideas, the fiend invoked a storm of chaotic energy down on Fyrehowl, but to little effect as she dodged most of the spell’s force. The fiend attempted the same ability again, to equally moot success, and finally in absolute desperation it called out for its fellows –a poor fiend’s summoning- only to receive the plane’s own howling wind in reply.
A freezing cone of ice from her extended hand and one final and deadly blow from her sword ended it all.
Fyrehowl stood atop the glabrezu’s corpse, resting heavily on the point of her blade, breathing hard from exertion. She was bruised across much of her left side where she’d taken a heavy blow from one of the tanar’ri’s clawed upper arms, and a dozen minor wounds and burns dotted her body elsewhere. Still, she was in decidedly better shape than it. The fiend was now slack and limp, staring up at the black vault above them with glassy eyes, its head separated from its body by a good ten yards.
Distantly she heard another series of explosions, probably Clueless or Tristol having fun at the fiends’ expense, but then she felt a distinctly odd premonition. For whatever reason she had the urge to move out of the way, and while it came with the typically gut instinct of the Cadence, it had a decidedly odd flavor.
“I f*cking hate Vrocks.” Frollis Terpense said with resigned annoyance, appearing out of thin air as far as Fyrehowl could tell. Maybe a teleport or dimension door, but the rogue clearly had some tricks up his sleeve. He was covered in blood and feathers, most of the former not his, and of course none of the latter.
“Vrocks?” Fyrehowl asked. “I think they hate you more based on how you look.”
That odd feeling returned.
“No,” Frollis said. “They hate you when you jump through the bare fringe of the Shadow plane that touches here, and you land on their back while they’re four hundred feet up in the air. A dagger in its kidney a moment later didn’t endear me in its heart either I suppose. Not that I was intending to do that exactly, getting on top of it and all, but I suppose it worked.”
The rogue pulled a few feathers out of his armor and dashed some sort of liquid on a vrock spore lingering on his cloak. Having cleaned himself up slightly, he looked up at the celestial.
“What’s with the weird look on your face?” He asked with a puzzled expression of his own.
All of a sudden a few pebbles landed at the rogue’s feet with a pronounced clatter. Frollis looked up towards the top of the adjacent rocky crag, but Fyrehowl had already followed her earlier urge to move.
“Sh*t!” The rogue shouted out with some alarm as the massive tanar’ri careened over the edge of the crag and toppled towards him with a garbled shout of its own.
“Sorry!” Nisha shouted, peering over the edge a moment later. “It wasn’t cooperating with the stabbity stabbity, so I got frustrated…”
Frollis rolled his eyes and dove into his own shadow, vanishing a split second before the fiend hit the ground with a bone-snapping crunch and a pained bellow.
“You can thank me for the grease spell!” Nisha shouted out again with a grin. “And Tristol for the telekinesis, and Toras for the boot to its head. The combination works wonders at the edge of a cliff!”
Fyrehowl grinned back up at the tiefling, but she didn’t relax her stance, because even as Tristol, Toras, and Nisha were looking down from the top of the cliff, the Nalfeshnee was getting back up to its feet with an absolutely murderous look in its eyes.
Things weren’t over yet. Not by a long shot.
***
Having just managed to avoid a bolt of lightning thrown from the ground, and a subsequent column of reversed gravity, Clueless slowed his speed of flight and turned a long, slow circuit above the camp, looking for his next obvious target among the remaining fiends.
He watched as Fyrehowl dove to avoid a spell thrown by a decidedly angry Nalfeshnee, and he briefly considered helping, but the sight of Toras diving off of a cliff towards the fiend’s exposed back made him decide otherwise. They didn’t need him at the moment.
There was Florian charging something hedged in by a pair of blade barriers, and the other cleric was there with her. They seemed fine, and fifty feet away it looked like Leobtav had another glabrezu fully encapsulated inside a sphere of force while Doran was busily working on a banishment of some sort to take care of their snarling but otherwise harmless bottled fiend.
That was when he noticed the vrock circling on the other side of the camp opposite him, doing its own slow circuit and looking for easy targets just as he was. The vrock flapped its tattered, rotten-looking wings and gave an amused, bloodthirsty cry as it pinpointed its next prey, and then cued off, Clueless saw it a moment later.
In the middle of the camp, hidden from view at ground level, but fully visible from the air, one of the expedition’s sages huddled, unaware of his vulnerability, and ignorant of the vrock high above him. When the vrock dove down from the darkness, he never saw it coming, and he would have been dead upon impact had Clueless not intercepted the fiend less than twenty feet above him.
Feathers, blood, and a diffuse cloud of spores rained down on the sage as Clueless slammed into the fiends back and sent it awkwardly cartwheeling into a nearby boulder. The sage screamed and looked for a place to scramble too, but as he stood up to run, the vrock had already recovered and was making its way to its feet. Faced with the odds of outrunning an angry tanar’ri, the sage ducked down and hid a second time.
“Poor move mortal…” The vrock said, spitting blood and shoveling dirt from its beak with a mottled purple tongue.
Clueless didn’t respond except to gesture with the tip of his sword. The subsequent shower of flaming missiles struck the unsuspecting fiend full in the chest and hurled it back against the rock with a dull crack from one of its wings.
“No, it was a poor move to pause and talk.” Clueless replied, but only after he’d whispered a quick incantation to hasten his speed.
Angered and now partially crippled, the tanar’ri met the bladesinger’s charge with a flurry of claws and bites. The watching sage could scarcely tell what was happening, so quickly was the fight occurring. It wasn’t till he’d heard a strangled gurgle and the sound of a sword being pulled through several layers of wet flesh, after which the cloud of dust and spores settled, that he was really sure who had come out the victor.
The fiend lay on the ground, burned and bleeding from several deep wounds -including one that appeared to have pierced its chest and gone out its back. Clueless on the other hand was injured as well, mostly cuts from the fiend’s claws, and one spot where he’d contacted one of its spores, but otherwise he was in much better shape than the sage would have expected.
“I can’t thank you enough.” The man said, visibly shaking at having come so close to death.
“Don’t worry about it.” Clueless said as he wiped Razor clean on the tattered feathers of the dead vrock’s wings. “Just find a spot and stay hidden. They’re beaten, but a few of them are still out there.”
“Oh.” He said, suddenly looking around for the nearest cover. “Oh dear.”
“This should be over soon.” Clueless said as he flicked his wings and moved away, back towards the continuing sounds of battle.
“I hope so.” The sage said as he squeezed between a toppled tent and a cluster of boulders that largely obscured him from sight.
Jalo Temeric III wasn’t normally such a skittish person, but his close encounter with a disease ridden, flesh devouring demon had changed that. He’d felt its carrion-laced breath on his neck and its claws had probably been seconds away from snatching him up into the sky before one of the camp’s mercenary hirelings had dispatched it. Whatever they were paying those people, it clearly wasn’t enough, and as soon as everything was over and back on track, he’d be telling Highsilver and Leobtav just that.
Distantly, another fireball erupted and a fiend shrieked in pain, but the sounds of combat were growing both more distant and less frequent by the minute, slowly being replaced by the regular ubiquity of the wind and Jalo’s own slowly relaxed breath. He was safe and it was over.
“Maybe things won’t turn out so bad.” He sighed, trying to smile.
A moment later he felt a hand clamp over his mouth and everything went dark.
***