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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 3963957" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 324A BLOODY MESSAllera had fallen to her knees when the demon’s blasphemy had struck her, reducing her strength to that of a small child.  But now the purging power of healing energy flowed through her like a torrent, a torrent that she cast outward with the precision of her mental strength and training. The mass heal spell found its targets unerringly, purging them all of the aftereffects of the demon’s utterance, and healing their wounds.  It also struck the charging undead like a hammer, ripping through them with grim efficacy, blasting them to the brink of destruction.  Behind their ranks Saracek hissed as the spell impacted against the skeletal warrior’s spell resistance, which barely withstood the force of Allera’s magic. Varo’s last summoned girallon, battered to the edge of death by the undead clerics, was given a new surge of strength from the healer’s spell.  It roared as it laid into the undead all around it, smashing one with every blow from its four arms.  A zombie tried to rush past it, but the ape lunged and bit the top of its head off with a powerful crunch of its jaws.  The zombie managed a few more staggered steps forward before it toppled over, finished. As Allera’s healing power flowed into his broken body, Dar yanked his left hand free of the demon hound’s jaws and smashed it into one of the eyes of the head pinning his right arm.  The eye squished under the impact from the armored fist, and its jaws opened, releasing him.  Its other head lunged at him, seeking to regain its prize, but Dar swept Valor in a blinding arc that sliced off a significant hunk of the hound’s snout.  Revirax roared in real pain, now, but before it could muster enough rage to renew its assault Dar stepped in once more, and drove Valor two handed into the beast’s chest.  The axiomatic sword found a gap between the monster’s ribs and slid home, the sword singing as the steel grated off of hard bone.  Blood exploded from the wound as the tip of the sword found the hound’s heart; a quiver shook its entire body, and then it collapsed in a mangled heap.Dar staggered back from the bloody remains.  Once again a stabbing agony pierced his head, and once again he barely fought off the mental probes from the mind flayer.  The distraction cost him as one of the hezrou demons leapt onto him, and he was only barely able to keep from being seized up in its claws and thrust into its huge maw.  The other demon hurled another chaos hammer at the other defenders, and followed that with a rush that took it straight toward Allera. ”Amusing, but ultimately futile.”As the demon’s words sounded in their minds, Maphistal raised a clawed hand, and invoked a fire storm.  The flames rushed up in a violent surge of orange and yellow, engulfing the companions.  Maphistal’s power overwhelmed the spell resistance granted by the holy aura still protecting Dar, Letellia, and Varo, and blasted them with hot flames.  Letellia lived only by the virtue of the resist fire she’d cast earlier, and even with that protection the exposed flesh on her face and hands was blackened by the flames.  Allera, shorn of her wards, suffered terrible burns, while Varo cooked in his armor.  His girallon’s fiendish resistances allowed it to weather the storm, if badly, but even as the flames died Saracek strode forward and smote the creature with a powerful stroke of its sword.  The skeletal warrior’s blade bit through flesh and muscle and bone, and the girallon was dissolving back into nothing even as it fell onto the scorched black stone of the chamber floor. The armor of Mailliw Catspar protected Dar, at least to some extent; the hezrou he’d been battling suffered more, but not enough to force it to disengage.  It came again at the fighter, but Dar brought Valor down squarely into the center of its skull, crushing through into the mushy core.  The demon, gibbering, fell to the ground and disappeared. Allera screamed as the last hezrou seized hold of her.  She wasn’t strong enough to fight it off as the demon lifted her into its gaping maw, which killed her cries as her entire head and upper body vanished into its mouth.  Her legs continued to kick violently as it kept pushing more and more of her inside it, its gullet swelling to accommodate her. Dar turned to intervene, but found himself confronting Maphistal, which had finally elected to join the fray in close quarters.  Its coming shook the ground, its body massive and heavy despite the almost skeletal appearance the demon presented.  Its deadly mace, held in one hand, trailed low beside it; Dar already knew the deadly power of that wicked bludgeon.  If he turned to help Allera, the thing would take him down before he managed two steps.  There was nothing he could do but attack.  He waited for the demon to lift its weapon, then surged forward, aiming a cutting stroke at its knee.  Valor hit even as pain exploded in his side from the demon’s counter.  He’d put a lot of strength behind the blow, and his aim had been true, but the stroke slid off the demon’s unholy aura like water on oilcloth.  The same could not be said for the demon’s blow.  He felt like he’d been hit by a battering ram; he nearly lost his footing entirely, and actually came a full foot into the air before gravity dragged him back down onto the ground.  Pain exploded through him, and he could feel his bones locking together as the fell power of the mace worked through his body.  ”You cannot stand against me,” Dar heard in his mind, and he knew that the demon’s words were not bravado, but rather simple truth.</blockquote>

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