Goriel and Beyond, Part 5

[Drusia]

While the floating mage is distracted duking it out with Argus - and holy crap, he's stronger than I realized; elven blood must flow strong in his veins - I consider the tactical situation. A pincer move isn't a bad option, Tamina is correct, but that shield is a problem. I don't have any magical attacks to throw at it, and while my blade would add some stress, getting up there would require multiple short hops to fight gravity. Also, I'm rather worried that Argus might hit me with shrapnel.

So. What I can do is provide some ground support. There are still bandits incoming.

It looks like Tim, Udo, and Tamina can handle the ones with the swords. That puts me on bow duty again.

I bend reality and appear behind the farthest bowman. My Durus blade takes his head. I duck back and spot the next one. He can't see me from this angle, focused as he is on the ridge, so I save my strength and simply jog over behind him, slowing to a quiet walk as I near. Argus and the undead mage are making enough noise that I could probably have run on up, but again, saving my strength. That bowman loses his head as well.

I pick my next target and start jogging. Unless someone notices me, forcing me to resort to magical transportation, I can keep this up all day.

-- Drusia

OOC: Since she's not going to be much use in the magic battle, I figured this would be both useful and avoid raining on anyone else's thunder. I suppose Therese could snipe these guys, but I think her skills are needed dealing with that shield.

OOC2: It's really too bad Desiree is back at camp comforting Anfisa - Therese is being all awesome, and Desiree is once again missing it.

[Alberich]

The last bowman was decapitated by Drusia - there were no other bandits left visible. Except for the ones with daggers who had rushed Udo and jumped on him. There had been four - he'd killed one with a magic bolt as they rushed him and crippled another's arm, but now they and he were on the ground stabbing it out and it wasn't going that well for him from the look of things...

There was just something about Udo that didn't inspire people to help him in times of distress.

[Jack Rothwell]

"UDO!"

Tamina drew up and fired herself to her friend's location as fast as her remaining magic would allow. She hit the men with a hummingbird flurry, killing two and wounding the third with an inaccurate swipe which tore his arm, but hit nothing vital. Tamina let out a screech as the man's flailing sword scored a deep gash down her ribcage and sent her tumbling to the floor. She whimpered, clamping a hand on the wound and kicking her near-exhausted legs to struggle back to her feet.

[Alberich]

Meantime, Argus' rune-enhanced shield-smashing ram jutted up from the ground like ruthless thaumic rape. It drove into Carloc's front and pushed him and his shield higher into the air - and Argus followed up with another of his devastating attacks. The enemy had to struggle hard to keep his shield together and keep fighting back, and showed only rage without joy.

Argus, like a determined professional, did not let up, but pounded again and again. The enemy got the worst of the exchange - the penalty of a limited battle magic repertoire - but managed to get his defenses back together by the hardest.

At the end of it, Carloc was another six or seven feet up in the air, and was still shielded and was still fighting back. But Argus had definitely narrowed the power gap between them.

[Alberich]

Udo got a hand back on his staff, and casually dispatched the last wounded bandit. Bloody but unbeaten, he looked over at the kobold and smiled. "We got 'em!" He made an encouraging fist.

Tamina's rush had drawn Tim's attention to the left flank. Now that looked like his line of work. And it wasn't as if Argus needed him here. (Tim's magical senses were no good for combat; he couldn't begin to guess the strengths of their shields.) So he backed a little down the slope on all fours and jogged over to the former companions of Jamie. He didn't love these heathens but they needed a healer's touch.

[Graybeard]

"The idol he uses, we don't see. And don't want to!" So there's an external source behind that guy, Sister Rose realized. We have to break the connection.

After checking to make sure that the captive's bonds remained tight, she returned to where Therese was launching her magical attacks. The tall woman was holding up well, Rose thought, but nobody could do this forever.

"Change of targeting," she said, "and priorities. We need some detection magic. What have you got?"

Therese took a deep breath. "Not much. Just detecting magic itself, a little on the forces and beams side. Why?"

Rose related the strange comment from the interrogation. "We have to separate him from his power source, I think. And that means we have to figure out what it is. Let's find some facts. I think we can afford it; almost all of the humans with that guy are dead ... but if we can't do something about him, we still may not win this. But just detection, not magical visualization." She shuddered. "We don't want what happened to Bree to happen to us."

"Who's Bree?"

"Tell you later. Just no magic visualization. Find out where the magic is, but don't look at it directly." She put on her own regular-vision enhancement as the knight of the Sisterhood chipped in with her detection methods, and they concentrated on this -- undead -- enemy.

[Alberich]

"No eating!" said the captive as he was left alone with Harker. "Killing yes - eating no!" The remainder of that dialogue might be amusing, but there was no time for amusement just now.

Rose and Therese made it to the crest right of Argus and peeped over. The mortal bandits had proven their mortality once and for all. Argus, center crest, was still trading punishment with Drusia's former foe down below. On the left were their other friends, out of sight on the friendly slope. Tim was healing Udo and Tamina, and Drusia was spying over the top as he did so, confirming the lack of further mortal targets.

Carloc was still near the bottom, hovering some fifteen feet above the ground, and giving as good as he got. There was no sign of an external power source (though it wasn't a bad thought) -- in fact, while he had once used his "idol" to save his life, he was not drawing power from it now. The two women didn't know that, but they could see he wasn't drawing power from somewhere external.

Their trained battle magic senses told them more as they looked. The magic around Carloc's own body, behind those shields, was not normally distributed - in fact, there were some places around his back and abdomen that seemed truly intense. Had they compared notes with Drusia, they'd learn these were places where she'd stabbed him thirty years gone - but Drusia hadn't kept notes, and wasn't in a position to compare them anyway.

Their examination also let them get a rough gauge of everyone's power now, and to understand the situation as Argus did. If Udo got back into the fight, and they fought all at once, the odds would be close to even -- dangerous but not hopeless, though they might lose some allies before it was done. If they could find another edge, a way to improve the odds more...then this Carloc could be decisively beaten.

[Drannin]

The bastard just kept going. How long since Argus had fought such an intense battle? On the upside, he was handling the flow of magic better than he had in years. With the calcification finally gone, his body was healthy, channeling with no problems.

Still, the rune ram clearly wouldn't work anymore. New plan.

About a dozen stone spears leapt from the ground, channeling electrical energy launched by Argus, glowing with force, before driving into the shield from twelve different points. The pressure on Carloc's shield was immense, but it was holding, for the moment.

Come on... he's on the run... gotta punch through... ergh... gotta be some way to put this guy down.

"Little...help...here..." Argus hissed through gritted teeth.

[Drusia]

I head back over Rose and Therese are conversing.

"It looks like Argus is holding his own," I say to them both. "Do you have anything that can add some punishment to his shields? If you can breech them, I can get in some hits."

"Little...help...here..." Argus hissed through gritted teeth.

"Or not," I sigh. "I hope you two have something up your sleves, cause the best I've got is throwing rocks."

-- Drusia

[Graybeard]

"There's good news and bad news," Sister Rose said as she dismissed the detection spells. "The good news is, we're not going to just die outright if we do the wrong thing."

"And the bad news?" Therese said.

"I'm running out of ideas." She peered back out at the inexplicably powerful mage ... and then she had one. "Take a shot at him with the pistol."

Therese was dubious. "Won't the shield stop it?"

"Probably. But there's another thing. Look at the way he's getting up in the air." She gestured. "If he's distracted while he gets the shield back to full strength, and can't maintain the levitation for just a second, I think I can get him to fall far enough to at least rattle his bones a little."

Therese thought about it. "Worth a try." She sighted carefully and fired ... and at the same time, Rose's "DISPEL!!" rang out, aimed not at the mage but at the column of magic that had to be supporting him.