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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 3490564" data-attributes="member: 143">Think more chaotic neutral, Richard.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> * * * * * Chapter 156THE GUARDIANTalen felt an unnatural chill settle through his body, seeping through his flesh down to his bones.  Blackness washed over his senses, and he felt physically ill as energy was torn from him.  The dark wave passed quickly, but he could feel the lingering effects, a weakness that penetrated to the depths of his soul. Baraka, Dar, Bullo, and Travius had also been caught in that cone of shadow, but his companions further down the line had witnessed the attack, and were quick to counter.  Talen looked up to see an arrow, glowing with a light spell, streak up toward the cliffs above.  The missile struck a dark form that vanished, the arrow shattering against the stone.  But even as the light fell with the pieces of the arrow, it had given Talen a look at what they faced.  It was a dragon, covered with scales as dark as the blackest night.  It wasn’t especially large, its body about as large as a draft horse, but its sprawled limbs and spread wings gave it an illusion of greater size.  It had magic, as well; Talen had witnessed enough sorcery to be able to recognize the visual distortion that surrounded it as mirror images.  He wasn’t the only one.  “Do not waste the magic arrows on the images!” Varo yelled, as more missiles shot up from the companions.  As far as Talen could tell, they all either hit the shifting images, each vanishing as it was struck, or impacted harmlessly against the stone of the cliffs. Shay stood almost directly below it, lifting her bow, carefully calculating as she aimed.  The dragon leapt from its perch, spreading its wings as it descended upon them.  Talen could see a glowing circle of pale transparent energy in front of it, obviously another magical defense.  But as it spread its wings to arrest its fall, both the mirror images and its shield shimmered slightly and vanished, disrupted by one of their own spellcasters.  Bereft of its magic, the dragon still came on, confident in its power.  And as it struck, Talen saw that it had reason to be self-assured. It came down almost upon Travius, who had clearly suffered greatly from the dragon’s initial breath.  More than a little dazed, the legionary still managed to draw his twin swords.  But they were of no avail as the dragon shot out its head at it landed, seizing the fighter’s neck in its jaws and lifting him into the air.  There was an awful crunch and an audible snap, and then the legionary went limp.  The dragon tossed its first victim almost casually aside, shifting to face its next opponent. An arrow punched through the membrane of the dragon’s left wing from behind.  The shot did little damage, but the dragon let out an angry snarl in response.  But its attention was drawn by Bullo, who rushed forward, his axe lifted high above his head, his yells echoing off the adjacent cliff walls.  The dragon snapped out its tail like a whip, the end lashing the fighter hard across the chest.  Bullo went down like a rag doll, hurled backward ten feet from the force of the impact, rolling to a stop a good distance further away.  Dead or unconscious, he did not move.  Dar came at the dragon in the legionary’s wake, swinging Valor at its body before it could recover to strike again.  The axiomatic sword bit into its flesh just above its right shoulder, opening a gash about a foot long in the dragon’s muscled body.  Dar had put a good deal of his strength into the attack, but the dragon’s scales may as well have been steel for their durability.  The others were rushing forward to help the fighter, but before they could get into the fray, Dar paid a high price for his attack.  The dragon lashed out with everything it had, delivering deadly blows that even Dar’s magical armor could not fully absorb.  It tried to repeat its fatal strike on Travius, but Dar managed to shift aside, and the dragon was only able to get ahold of his shoulder with its jaws.  It lifted him a few feet into the air, the fighter’s struggles not enough to keep the dragon from digging its claws into his sides, or battering his head with its wings.  Finally it tossed him aside, right into the snapping sweep of its tail.  Dar saw it coming and tried to roll away, but he could not keep the tail from smashing into the small of his back.  The impact was like a blow from a sledgehammer, and Dar screamed and toppled forward to the ground, his sword clattering on the ground as it fell from his hand. But Dar’s sacrifice had bought the few precious seconds needed for his companions to get into the fight.  Missiles slammed into it from the front and flank, and a second arrow hit and penetrated, this one a shot from Pella’s potent bow that stuck into its sinuous neck.  A beam of searing light struck it in the chest, but the spell dissolved against the dragon’s considerable spell resistance.  Talen came at the dragon as it turned from Dar’s limp body, Beatus Incendia flaring into life in his hand.  The dragon screamed as the knight drove the holy blade into its body, the sacred flames searing its flesh.  A moment later it felt a sharp, stabbing pain in the joint where one of its hind legs met its body, as Shay surged in and delivered a nasty hit with her own keen blade. The dragon snarled and let out a hiss thick with fury and pain.  But as it looked up, it saw still more adversaries approaching, including Varo, Kalend, and Drakha.  It drew its wings in close around its body and sprang up into the air, gaining at least fifteen feet of altitude from the leap.  Even as more arrows continued to slice through the air around it, it summoned some sort of magic around it, shimmered in the air, and disappeared. Allera cast a mass cure spell, sending healing energy into Dar, Bullo, and Travius.  The first two stirred, groaning as the spell brought them back to consciousness, but Travius didn’t move.  The healer knelt beside the stricken legionary. “Allera?” Talen asked. “His neck is broken,” she said.  “He’s dead.”</blockquote>

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