NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4239079" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 46REINFORCEMENTSDar could only wait for his companions to do something to intervene; while he doggedly clung to consciousness, he may as well have been a sack of grain for all that he could do to affect the ongoing course of the battle. The ground trembled under his feet, and he heard a noise that sounded like a pair of elephants colliding.  He heard a battle cry... female, but other than that, he could not quite place it.  Then he detected a faint smell, familiar, reassuring.  He did not feel the touch of her hands on his neck, but the flood of healing energy that followed was like a geyser of cool water.  Hands grasped him, helped him up, but he no longer needed the aid; Allera’s potent spell had restored him like a month of rest. He looked up to see the treant under heavy assault, its long branches flailing not five paces away.  Maricela, suddenly transformed into a giant, was doing the bulk of the beating on it, but Dar could see the way she favored her left side, and blood splattered the top of her breastplate where the creature’s branches had gotten in under her guard and torn through the chain protecting her neck.  Allera was already casting another mass cure, but the priestess did not withdraw, pressing her attack even as another pair of branches battered her hard, staggering her.  Dar could see how close she’d come to falling; she’d never withstand another full series of attacks.  Secundus and Qatarn were beside him; the soldiers had been the one to help him up, and the centurion offered him the hilt of Justice.  Now that the surge of healing had worked its course, he felt his nascent exhaustion creeping back in, but he squelched it ruthlessly as he accepted his weapon. “For Camar!” he shouted, charging once more into the battle. The treant had taken significantly more punishment in the brief moments that he’d been down, and he took advantage, targeting a long crevice that had been opened where its left leg met its body.  The treant obviously remembered him, for it lowered a branch to knock him away again before he could close enough to strike.  But Allera’s heal spell had been very thorough, and he was able to push through the strike, lifting his arms to protect his face as the stone branches raked him.  He planted a foot and delivered a blow that rang like a clapper striking a bell.  Yellow acid sprayed across his face, but he hardly heeded it, roaring as he drove his sword deeper into the gash, yanking at it as though the axiomatic steel was a prybar.  The caustic fog had gotten into his eyes, and he couldn’t even see the enemy any more, but he could feel it when the limb popped, and the treant started to fall.  Someone grabbed him and pulled him back, and bits of stone pinged against his armor as the creature exploded into rubble.  Yanking off his helmet, he tried to blink his eyes clear.  “Are you all right?”  Allera’s voice, close to him.  “Hold still,” she said, and a moment later, a flood of water washed across his face.  Blinking madly, he started to wipe a hand across his eyes, but Allera grabbed him and stopped him, making an annoying click with her tongue.  “Just give it a moment,” she said, and then he felt a soft cloth wiping away the water and what was left of the noxious fluid.The others stood around him, forming a wedge.  Or most of them; he glanced back to see Primus lying where he’d fallen, his body splayed out upon the stone.  The floor was littered with debris from the two destroyed guardians, making footing treacherous.  Letellia floated forward, her feet drifting a few feet above the floor.  “How long?” Dar asked.  His eyes turned back to what everyone else was looking at, the shimmering barrier behind which three more of the treants waited.  They had not left up, and while they could not hear the sound of their blows against the wall of force, they could feel the faint vibrations of their movements traveling through the floor.   Letellia’s expression was placid, unrevealing.  “Approximately twenty seconds,” she replied, as though he had asked about whether she thought it might rain today.  “Back, everyone back to the corridor!” he yelled, putting his own words into action.  “Can you put up another of those walls?” he asked.  “Yes,” she said, still cool.  “But it will only postpone the inevitable.  We need to get past them, any my resources are not unlimited.”Dar growled something unintelligible; there was a solution here, he could feel it, but it remained just out of his reach.  Qatarn had paused next to him, after ordering his men forward.  Secundus and Tertius took hold of Primus’s body, dragging the slain soldier back into the relative security of the corridor.  “We cannot hold the line against three of them, sir,” the centurion said, his voice pitched low so that it would not carry. Dar glanced back at the treants, and then at the corridor.  They would be hard pressed to fit into that confined space, he thought; it depended on how aggressively the things would pursue them.  A sudden noise alerted him to the collapse of the wall of force behind him; he resisted the urge to look back as he followed the others out of the room.  The others had taken up defensive positions in the passageway, the knights in front a good twenty feet back from the arch.  Maricela’s spell had expired, and she had returned to her usual size, standing next to Allera behind the warriors.  Letellia floated above them, her head almost brushing the ceiling above.  Dar turned to see the treants approaching fast, then Letellia gestured, and a glistening white wall of ice, thick enough to be almost opaque, appeared within the archway. “That may delay them a few mo—" she began, but as the first of the trees reached the barrier, it winked out of existence.  “Their spell resistance is... problematic,” she said, clucking her tongue in frustration.Dar didn’t get a chance to respond, as the lead treant bent low, almost doubled over, and surged into the passage toward them.  It thrust two of its branches ahead of it, the long finger-like twigs splaying from their ends like a knot of spearheads.  Letellia drifted back, behind the row of warriors, who formed an overlapping screen, the knights in front, Aldos lifting his glaive over Petronia’s shoulder, while in the rear the soldiers unlimbered their heavy crossbows and begun winding the mechanisms.  Zethas, in the back of the column near Allera, had kept up a desultory barrage of fire since the start of the battle, pausing only to refill his quiver from one of the bundles he kept stored in his pack.Dar roared a challenge as the long branches stabbed into the front rank of defenders.  Bits of stone broke off against his breastplate, and he felt others poking into the gaps where chain and leather lay under the magical plates.  The creature was at a disadvantage in these close quarters, but its sheer strength and momentum still allowed it to hurt them.  In turn, the fringe of branches made it tough for the companions to get close enough to inflict serious damage against its trunk. There was naught to do but keep fighting, however.  The second treant had crowded into the passage behind the first, unable to progress further beyond the bulk of its companion.  Their branches dug gouges in the walls as they pressed slowly ahead, like a cork being forced deeper into the neck of a bottle.  The lead treant had only enough space now to poke two of its branches forward, jabbing at the enemies in front of it.  That alone was considerable; Kiron took a hard hit that smacked right into the center of his pelvis, knocking him roughly against the wall.  Despite the armor protecting his torso, the blow had to have hurt.  Maricela forced her way past the soldiers and reached out to him, imparting a healing spell with her touch.  Petronia hewed at the branches with her axe, the adamantine blade shearing through stone as though the treant’s limbs had indeed been merely wood.  Standing beside her, Dar tore away half a forking length of branch that shattered like kindling as it fell to the ground.  Between them, Aldos wielded his glaive like a spear, delivering sharp, chopping thrusts against the treant’s thick body.  The knight was strong, but it was like trying to hew through a door with a dinner knife, and slow going.  For a dozen heartbeats the battle raged in the confines of the corridor, with the companions dealing damage, while the treant continued to pound at them in return.  The soldiers lifted their heavy arbalests and fired shots into the treant’s upper body, over the shoulders of their companions engaged in melee.  Letellia fired a series of scorching rays that inflicted minor damage; the majority of the fiery beams dissolved as soon as they touched the creature, and those that got through seemed to do little more than darken its trunk.  Of all of them, it was only Petronia and Dar who inflicted serious damage, hacking their way through the screen of branches to where they could start hewing at its legs.  Pinned as it was within the corridor, the treant could do little more than take the hits, although it continued to twist its body and bring new branches into play.  Slicks of vile yellow substance covered the floor where the fluid had jetted from the monster’s wounds, the fumes rising from them foul and toxic. When an end to it came, it was swift enough to be surprising.  Cracks and gashes covered the treant’s legs, and more than half of its branches had been hewn away, but the suddenness of its collapse was unexpected.  The stone treants seemed to just lose cohesiveness once they had absorbed a certain amount of damage, and it crumbled into debris, bits of stone bouncing off the warriors’ helmets and breastplates as they fell.  “Watch out!” Dar yelled, but the shout was lost in the clatter, not only of the falling debris, but the noise of the second treant thrusting its branches through the remnants of its destroyed cousin.  Petronia and Dar were thrust aside, and Aldos was hit hard enough to be knocked off his feet, landing awkwardly on his side.  A stone tendril twisted around the knight’s ankle, and he yelled as he started to slide forward, back toward the arch and the hulk waiting there. “Aldos!” Petronia yelled, pushing off the wall as she lifted her axe in both hands.  The adamantine blade bit hard into the branch, cutting it a scant foot above the fallen knight’s entangled leg.  Dar was cutting at it from the opposite side, but a web of branches pressed at him, and each one he hewed away left another one between him and the embattled pair.  Kiron rushed forward, healed by Maricela.  Crossbow bolts flashed above his head, passing scant inches from the crest of his helmet as they slammed hard into the treant’s upper body.  More fiery beams followed them, flaring as they hit the treant’s body.  Dar lunged through the screen of branches, extending Justice out fully, targeting the gap where one of the treant’s legs met its body.  The tip of the sword flashed as it bit deep, the jet of yellow indicating that the fighter had scored, and scored deeply.  The treant drew back, but as it retreated, a branch caught on one of the straps of Petronia’s armor.  The knight was dragged roughly back with the treant, snagged like a fish on a trawler’s line.  “Petronia!” Kiron yelled.  He rushed after her, leaping to grab her hand, but a sudden yank by the treant pulled her out of reach, and his caught only empty air.  The woman knight cried out as the treant swept her back out of the passage.  It did not bother to hold her, merely thrusting its captive behind it, out into the room, where they could distantly hear her armor rattling as it hit the stone floor.  Her axe lay where she’d dropped it amidst a pile of stone rubble at their feet. “Forward!” Kiron yelled, driving ahead even as the treant turned back to block the passage, lowering a fresh set of branches to attack.  Kiron took a hit that shook his entire body, but he forced his way through it, laying into the treant’s body with his sword.  He barely had room to swing the weapon, hewing at it as though the blade was a lumberjack’s saw, working it deeper into the shallow crack he’d opened with his initial blow.  The treant brought up a branch and smashed it down into the knight’s face.  Kiron was tough, but the blow might have well been from a battering ram.  He staggered backward and fell onto his back, blood seeping from the front of his helmet.  Aldos and Dar were in his place before the treant could follow up on its attack.  Their weapons flashed, just as a flurry of bolts and arrows thudded into its body above.  Their assault was followed by another lightning bolt from Letellia, bolstered by the power of her staff, that blasted through the treant’s spell resistance and tore a black swath across its body.  But the thing was insanely durable, and even with yellow pustulence oozing from the deep cracks all over its body it continued to press its attack.  Thrusting its branches into the mouth of the corridor like a maid churning butter, it battered the defenders, who withstood the onslaught with grim determination.  That fortitude was bolstered a moment later by another mass cure from Allera, which closed wounds and dissolved bruises even as they formed.  Maricela had rushed forward to shield Kiron from the thrusting branches, and Qatarn joined her to help drag the injured knight back from the battle line and back to his feet.  No sooner had Allera’s spell taken hold than he was rushing forward again to rejoin the battle, although there was little space for him alongside Dar and Aldos.  As the branches came sweeping back, Dar let himself be dragged forward with them, until he was right in front of the treant’s body.  He swept Justice up in a two-handed swing with much of his augmented strength behind it.  The blade sang off of the stone of the treant’s body as it clove through and kept going, and then the treant was crumbling like the others.  Dar staggered through the falling rubble, already looking for the last of the creatures.   Gray dust coated him as he emerged in the mouth of the archway. He didn’t have to look long; the last treant found him, smiting him with a solid blow that knocked him backward, stumbling over the piled rubble that cluttered the arch.  He did not go all the way down, pushing off against the remnants of destroyed treants, lifting his sword in a defiance stance, waiting for the next attack, looking for Petronia. He saw her, or rather what was left of her.  There was nothing left of the woman knight but a few scattered heaps of bloody matter, here and there covered by what had once been clothes and armor.  Dar, who had seen battle and violence wrought on a scale few living men could match, felt a sudden surge of bile rise in his throat at the sight.  But there was no time to spare in retching; the treant loomed over him, its branches glistening sickly with fresh blood that fell in splatters around it as it lunged forward to continue the attack.</blockquote>

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