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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4026483" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 348IT HELPS TO BE PREPAREDAs their allies turned on them, and Dar swung to meet the blind rush of Talen, Varo turned, looked at Allera, and nodded. The healer closed her eyes and let the power she’d been holding course through her.  Maphistal tried to intervene, striking her with a wedge of magical power, but Allera had been ready, and the demon was too late to stop her as the mass heal spell blasted outward from her.  The spell, designed to provide succor to the injured, was instead a weapon of destruction against the undead that swarmed at them.  She did not need to see to direct the spell, gently directing the power into each of the undead creatures that grated like an abscess upon her senses.  A few of the eight greater shadows, protected by Maphistal’s unholy aura, were able to resist her magic, but the majority were riven by the healing fire.  The vampires were engulfed by blue flames, turning into pyres as the holy energies blasted away their corrupt and unliving flesh.  The spell could not snuff out their existence entirely, but it left all of them critically damaged. At least until Varo followed Allera’s discharge of power with his own mass cure serious wounds spell. The second pulse of healing power, following immediately upon the first, had a devastating impact.  Varo’s magic was far weaker than Allera’s, but her spell had weakened the undead to the brink of destruction, leaving them crippled and vulnerable.  Six of the shadows came apart, dissolving into nothing.  So did Hedder, Needles, and Drudge, followed a second later by Calla, who fell screaming to the ground, crumbling into gray ash.  Shay tried to get away, turning and fleeing before the divine magic, but this was an attack that she could not dodge.  She staggered and fell as the blue surge blasted her into nothing. Somehow, Talen survived both attacks, but as he faced Dar his visage was a blackened, ruined mess, his skull clearly visable where his gray flesh had been scored away.  His eyes, lips, and hair had been burned away, but somehow he could still sense the presence of his enemy, and words hissed from him as his jaw twitched and worked.  “You... must... finish... it...” he said, even as he lifted his sword and swung at the fighter.  Weakened as he was, Talen’s attack was feeble, and Dar easily deflected it.  The vampire staggered forward, off-balance, and tried to reach for Dar, to sap life from his body.  Dar spun and with a single cut from Valor cut the vampire in two.  Letellia, recognizing that she had little chance of harming Maphistal, disintegrated one of the shadows as it darted toward them.  Alderis started to cast a spell of his own, but before he could finish his magic, the elf’s body clenched, and his clutched at his chest, a terrible scree hissing from his throat.  The last shadow dove at him, sensing a vulnerable foe, but its claws passed harmlessly through him, unable to get past the death ward that Allera had placed upon him earlier.  The shadow, already seriously damaged by Varo’s mass cure, suffered further from a series of scorching rays from Letellia that bore through the protective ward around it and pierced its unholy substance.  Varo reached drew out his hand from under his breastplate and formed a fist, lifting it high toward Maphistal.  Something sparkled between his fingers.  His other hand clutched his divine focus, and another object dangled from that wrist, the small silver torch he’d taken from Serah, not so long ago. “The relics of a dead god will not save you, cleric!” Maphistal roared.  But Varo had clearly gotten the demon’s attention.  It charged forward, moving with insane quickness, closing the distance between itself and the cleric in a matter of strides.  But its path took it past Corath Dar, and before it could unleash a blow upon the priest, the fighter shouted a battle cry and smote the demon with Valor.  The axiomatic blade cut through the demon’s unholy aura like a hot knife through butter, and it bit deep into the thick hide covering the demon’s torso.  Maphistal had to outweigh Dar by a factor of at least five or six, but the blow still twisted the demon around, diverting it from its rush. But that brought its rage down fully upon Dar.  Maphistal’s mace came around, its head a blur.  Dar’s attempt to block was utterly overwhelmed, and they could all hear the crack as his right arm was crushed from the force of that blow.  The fighter went flying, and Valor shone in mid-air for a good second or two before caroming off one of the nearby pillars, and clattering to the floor.  Dar followed it a moment later, screaming as he landed on his broken arm, blood spraying from his lips as shards of broken bone worked their way deeper into his lungs.  That obstacle removed, Maphistal turned back toward Varo.</blockquote>

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