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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 3896192" data-attributes="member: 143">Well, remember that Grezneck and the bee tunnel were closed off earlier. Shay had gotten out through the underwater tunnels in the troll caves and the Great Cavern, but that route was anything but friendly. I don't think they know about any of the other routes in at this point. * * * * * Chapter 297AGAINST ALL ODDSDar looked around, quickly.  There was little that could promise cover; a few clumps of small boulders nearby, some small ravines tangled with brush, a cleft in a hillside about a hundred yards off.  Ironically, the best thing he could see was the burned wreckage of Lord Sobol’s fort, but that was on the northwest side of the valley, and they stood on the edge to the northeast. All they had to do to get to it was hack their way through a few thousand undead...“Fall back to those rocks!” the fighter yelled, pointing to a knot of man-sized boulders about forty feet behind them. The screams of the gargoyles drew his attention back up, as his allies drew back.  His earlier guess about their numbers took a sharp tick upward; there looked to be thirty, maybe forty of the things, and all of them looked to be coming their way.  Valor snicked from its sheath as he fell back toward the rocks.  Ahead of him, at the valley’s edge, undead were already appearing, skeletons of all shapes and sizes, packs of slavering ghouls, about a dozen pale-skinned wights, a feral light shining in their eyes.   “Come on, you bastards!” he yelled, brandishing his sword at the gargoyles, trying to draw their attention away from the casters.  Alderis, half-carried between Marcus and Xenos, pulled himself free and cast a spell.  Almost at the same time, Allera invoked the same magic, the two forming overlapping globes of repulsion around them.  Between them, the diving gargoyles were driven back, shrieking as they were forced to abort their dives against the invisible barriers of potent magic.  The elf’s spell held them farther out, almost a hundred and fifty feet distant, while Allera’s had made the edge of her barrier closer, so as to leave any undead at the borders within range of her mass cure spells.  The leading edge of the undead charge was already within those ranges, but the overwhelming majority of them suddenly stopped, held at bay by the potent combination of divine and arcane magic.  The gargoyles were held at bay, their will insufficient to penetrate the repulsion fields.  Several fast undead, however, penetrated the outer field, and charged toward Dar.  Alexion hurled his javelin of lightning; the shaft transformed in mid-flight into a bolt of electrical energy that tore through a pair of wights.  Marcus and Zahera started to come to Dar’s aid, but the fighter ordered them back.  “Get the spellcasters to those rocks, form a defensive ring!” he ordered.  A wight rushed up behind him; Zahera shouted a warning, but Dar smoothly spun and met its attack with a downward strike of Valor.  The wight went down, its head and torso falling one way, its legs and hips another.  More undead that had made it through both repulsion fields were on his heels.  Above them, the frustrated cries of the gargoyles echoed over the battlefield like the raucus yells of spectators.  “Ring of steel... nothing gets through!” Dar yelled.  The three knights and Marcus had formed a half-circle with the rocks at their backs, and with Honoratius, Alderis, Allera, and Tullus inside.  Alderis’s shield guardian stood slightly off to the side, rising over the low mound of boulders.  Dar rushed into position on the left end of the half-circle, and spun to face a ghast that had pursued him all the way across the rocky field.  Shields clashed and weapons bit into undead flesh as Dar and the knights hacked down the few undead that had penetrated their wards thus far.  But more undead were ascending from the valley; and already two groups of several dozen each had accumulated at the curving edges of the barriers established by Alderis and Allera. “Well, archmage, let’s get going with the blasting!” Dar yelled.  With his foe down, he glanced over his shoulder to evaluate their position.  The “wall” of boulders was really just a jumble of rocks, none of them larger than six feet tall, but it at least offered them some degree of protection from their backs.  Thus far the undead had only come at them from directly ahead, but that would change as more of them made it through the barriers.  More undead were continuing to trickle forward, their arc of approach widening as the newcomers moved around those already penned in against the barriers.  The surge of undead coming into view over the valley’s edge had become a flood, and while most were held back by the spell auras, the sheer numbers meant that more would be able to muster the will to force through.  Honoratius did not respond to Dar’s shout.  Most of her higher-order spells had been invested in the transposition necessary to link the consciousness of the venerable magus lying in his bed in Camar with Letellia’s, and in the multiple teleports that now seemed to be useless.  The archmage had a number of potent evocations in reserve, but she held them for the moment, knowing that more dire threats existed here than the foes they had faced thus far. That thought was given substance a moment later by a shout from Marcus, who was holding their right flank.  “Demons!” Sizzling pops around the edges of their repulsion fields announced the arrival of fiends as they teleported in.  There were about a half-dozen tall, impossibly slender black forms, their rank hides oozing red ichor like droplets of blood.  They were accompanied by a fat, toadlike hezrou, its claws flexing in anticipation of rending human flesh.  And finally, high above them, a trio of vrocks shimmered into existence, each surrounded by a shifting array of mirror images.  Honoratius nodded to herself as she catalogued each of the demons.  This was going to be a problem. Unable to get close enough to attack, the vrocks instead concentrated their spell powers upon the defenders.  Rocks ranging from stones the size of a fist to small boulders the size of a man’s torso suddenly sprung up off the ground, flying toward the line of warriors as though fired by a catapult.  Dar, Xenos, and Zahera all took hits, the woman knight screaming as her right arm was crushed by a missile twice the size of her head.  That assault was followed by a surge of chaotic energy as the hezrou unleashed a chaos hammer upon them.  Even as the violent explosions of color faded around them, the babaus hit them with a barrage of targeted dispels.  They had no way of knowing which of their foes was the source of the invisible barriers that kept the undead back, so they focused their efforts on those who looked like spellcasters.  Their magic was much weaker than that of the companions, but one got lucky, unraveling the repulsion aura that surrounded Alderis.  Instantly two hundred undead came charging forward, accompanied by three dozen green gargoyles that plummeted down eagerly.  Most of them stopped again after a mere thirty paces, as they ran up against the second repulsion field around Allera.  But many of the more powerful entities, including an assortment of about twenty wights, ghasts, and mohrgs, kept on coming, hollow shrieks coming from their gaunt bodies as they pushed past their more mindless brethren.  Above them the green gargoyles shrieked in renewed frustration as they ran up against Allera’s repulsion, again kept at bay by the magic. Meanwhile, the three vrocks drifted down from above.  They did not test Allera’s barrier, but began to circle just above it, twisting and gyrating in the complex maneuvers of their dread dance of ruin.</blockquote>

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