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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4366347" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 68PAIN AND TORMENTThere was nowhere to go, even if he had decided to try to escape.  Kiron's sword flashed red as he lifted it before his face, casting the monster’s features into grim red relief.  The ravager spawn seemed to move in a blur as it lunged at him, black claws and gaping jaws converging on his head.  There was a blue flash, and then an odd and sudden silence.  A pulse passed through him, and for a moment his entire body thrummed with the intensity of it.  But somehow, he was not crushed or torn apart, as he’d expected. It took him several long moments to realize why he was not dead.  As the chaos receded he found himself staring straight into the gullet of the beast, its jaws stretched unnaturally wide in front of him, frozen in mid-air, nearly close enough for him to reach out and touch one of the dagger-shaped teeth.  A transparent blue aura separated him from the creature, and as he looked around he realized it was a bubble, a sphere of force that had appeared around him right as the creature had launched its attack.  Protected by the resilient sphere, the creature could not harm him.  Amurru had warned that the touch of the creatures could disrupt magic, but apparently this spell—it had to be Sutheros who had cast it, none of their other mages were powerful enough for magic of this sort—was durable enough to withstand the spawn’s attack. The spawn was belatedly realizing this as well.  It unclenched its jaws and then leapt forward, perhaps believing that sheer mass could rupture the sphere.  Kiron flinched as the weight of the creature settled upon him, but the magical globe held, and it suddenly grew dark as the weight of the thing settled around him.  He could just see out from under the sides of its body by bending low, but could not discern what was happening at the forefront of the battle.  Both cursing and thanking the magic that held him safe, he waited to find out what would happen. And then, so suddenly that he started in surprise, the creature was past him, and he could see again.  The monster’s hindquarters were close enough to touch, its rear limbs half-folded around the sphere.  He could not hear the sounds of battle from within the globe of force, but he had no doubt that his companions were engaged in desperate battle with it.  Kiron was ready a second later, when the sphere abruptly vanished.  The epic sword danced like a switch in his hand, slicing half-through one hind leg, tearing through the second on his backswing, and then vanishing forward as he planted his feet and thrust the entire length of the blade into the monster’s bung-hole. The ravager spawn’s reaction was rather... intense.  Its body contorted improbably as it rose up into the air, its crippled rear legs spasming underneath it.  As the damaged limbs collapsed it fell heavily to the side, slamming hard into the wooden frame to which Duke Aerim was bound.  The impact sundered the wooden stakes and nearly did the same to the Duke, who was flung roughly to the ground, part of one of the sundered shafts still attached to him by his chains.Kiron was down; the spawn’s flailings had crushed his left leg, and blood oozed down his left side where its claws had penetrated deep through his armor into his body.  But power flooded into him as Allera unleashed another mass cure, and his pains receded, fading into the background of tumult and chaos of battle.  Petronia offered him a hand, which he took gratefully, staggering back to his feet.  He’d lost the sword, which was probably still embedded deep in the body of the spawn.   The ravager spawn had been seriously injured, but it still had fight left in it, and it used its four intact legs to drag itself back onto its belly.  Turning its eyes on the battered defenders, it issued a roar of pure malevolence that promised an accounting for its hurts.   An armored form shot up over the lip of the ridge, and flew headlong at the spawn.  Corath Dar held Justice in both hands, the sword trailing long tendrils of ravager blood behind him as he continued to pick up speed.  With his armor shining with a brilliance that went beyond the reflected lights from the hilltop, he seemed almost an avenging angel, intent upon the destruction of his foe.  But the spawn was not about to accept its fate meekly.  Digging its foreclaws into the stony knobs of the ridge, it lunged forward and seized the diving fighter in a single snap of its jaws.  Dar was too big a morsel to swallow easily, but pinned in its mouth, which engulfed him almost from shoulders to knees, he could not effectively strike back.  He still held Justice, but his swordarm was trapped between two black teeth, the blade jutting out from the creature’s mouth like a toothpick.  Kiron and the others rushed forward to Dar’s aid, but before they could get close enough to rejoin the melee, the ravager spawn convulsed suddenly.  Its jaws snapped open, hurling its prisoner free, as it roared again in pain.  In twisted onto its side, the motion revealing Duke Aerim, who pulled free of the spawn in a cascade of blood and gore that splattered over his entire body.  In his right hand the brilliant energy sword flared bright; somehow the Duke had managed to tear himself free, get over to the spawn while it was distracted with Dar, and seize the weapon embedded in the ravager’s body.  The ravager’s struggles were growing weaker, now; blood poured from its abused hindquarters as from a fallen decanter.  He lifted the sword to strike again, but in its last violent throes one of the ravager’s legs smashed into the ancient warrior’s body, launching him into the air.  He fell hard onto his back in front of the knights, still conscious but more than a little dazed.  Kiron made a motion, and two legionaries hastened to take custody of the man, reclaiming the sword before Aerim could recover enough to use it against them. The knight ordered his remaining forces forward again, but there was no immediate need.  Freed from the ravager spawn’s jaws, Dar had recovered in mid-air, using the still-effective fly spell to spin and dart forward once more.  The spawn could not react again in time, but it snapped its head up, trying to knock its attacker aside.  There was a blur of steel and then Dar was past.  Blood flashed in an arc above the spawn’s head, and then it toppled back, its skull shorn nearly in two by the critical hit.  After having put up such a violent fight, it died quickly, landing in a heap without so much as a tremor shaking its body. “Make sure of it!” Kiron yelled, gesturing for Petronia to use her axe.  A number of legionaries and dwarven sappers were still in the area, but most had either fled or been killed by the creature’s rush.  Three dwarves were still trying to work the scorpion, but the engine had been damaged in the fray, and they were having difficulty getting another bolt into the mechanism.  Dar spiraled around and landed beside Kiron.  “That’s two,” he said.  The two men looked out into the night at the far hill, where the third spawn had ascended.  The hillside was cloaked in darkness, now, the torches that had been set there either knocked down or snuffed by the creature’s ability to disrupt magic.  Nothing moved, although anything could have been lying in the deep shadows along the crest.  There was no indication that the twenty humans and dwarves that had occupied the fortifications atop the hill yet lived. “There!” Kiron yelled, pointing toward the gap between two of the hills, off to the west.  Even without light, it wasn’t hard to mark the passage of the ravager spawn, once they knew where to look.  The creature seemed to be moving off, although its course would take it close to the secondary camp, Dar noticed at once.  Maricela and the other reinforcements would be coming that way; maybe the creature had already detected them, and identified them as its next victims.  Dar hadn’t ever seen one of the ravager’s brood retreat from a fight, so the alternative seemed more plausible. Kiron had seen it too.  “We have to stop it!” he yelled.</blockquote>

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