Defenders of Daybreak

"Then let's take the fight to them." Tao stretches in anticipation and makes sure her swords are loose in their sheaths. As she does so, Mara and Malachite return to the group from the edges of the courtyard, where they were scanning for hidden shadows. Since Mara can't detect undead herself, she had borrowed Karthos from Malachite. The sword seems disappointed to be passed from the beautiful paladin back to the grim hunter of the dead.

"Hang on, something is odd," says Nolin, peering forwards. "Agar, didn't you say that they were spread far apart in formation?" Nolin gestures out into the darkness. At the very edges of their darkvision, the group can see the ghouls clustered up at the wall. It looks like there are more than a thousand of them now, tightly packed and clambering over one another in their eagerness to acquire fresh meat. Their long nails scrape along the wall of force as they seek some sort of purchase.

"Well, there's one way to break them up," says Nolin, and he cheerfully utters the command word for his previously placed fire seeds. Tao does the same for her seeds that Nolin already placed, and multiple explosions signal their effectiveness in the tightly packed ghoulish army. Ghouls are thrown upwards, screeching, but the press at the wall redoubles. Then the ghouls back away, and a single figure stands at the front of the army. It's a dwarf; old, tall, ruggedly handsome, and very very dead. The resemblance to the dwarven prince would be obvious even if the ghoulish dwarf wasn't wearing a bejeweled crown. Angry and terrified murmurs radiate out amongst the dwarven soldiers in the courtyard.

With that, the Defenders of Daybreak move forward to take on the ghoulish horde.

On vast fiery phoenix wings, Nolin soars to the top of the sovereign wall and casts two fireballs after swooping through the gap. The powerful fireballs tear into the tightly packed army, burning away some ghouls while leaving others totally uninjured. In the light of burning and twitching corpses, Nolin can see the packed masses of the dead beneath him. He flies forward, the foul stench of their bodies filling the air and making it hard to breathe, and the ghouls reach up for him as if they were grasping for a particularly plump and juicy fruit on a tree. A few spears clatter off the uneven ceiling above his head, and he banks around a stalactite.

Malachite runs to the wall with Karthos in one hand. The paladin levitates up to the gap and looks down at the clambering ghouls that are climbing each other's bodies. "No," he says simply, and thrusts forward his hand as he calls on his faith. The divine radiance of Aeos pours forth, focused through Malachite's soul, and more than half of the ghouls within a hundred feet of him turn into ash. Karthos sings in triumph at his side, echoing the divine song that resonates through Malachite whenever the Hunter of the Dead calls on his power.

Looking down, though, Malachite can't help but notice that there are many fewer corpses beneath him than there should be. Either he completely disintegrated them, or something strange is happening! He lets the group know via his mindlink, and Velendo confirms his suspicions.

"I have true seeing up, and only about one in four of the ghouls is real. The rest are illusions." Using his new winged boots to fly, Velendo unleashes an incredibly powerful fire storm centered on the spot where the undead dwarven king is standing, and pauses to observe the results as the air itself catches fire. "The King wasn't real, either. Keep your eyes open for spellcasters." He ducks down as a bone spear shatters on the wall in front of him, and then begins another prayer.

As the dwarven troops roll out siege ladders to mount the wall themselves and take the fight to the enemy -- No cowards there! thinks Agar -- Mara leaps atop Luminor and pulls Galthia up behind her. "Hang on," she says as she shakes her long golden hair away from her face, and the warhorse activates the magical harness that gives him pegasus wings once a day. Luminor gallops easily into the air, banks tightly, and speeds towards the narrow gap between sovereign wall and ceiling. Galthia's narrow face pinches as he calculates that there isn't a chance in hell of the large warhorse actually clearing the gap.

The monk points, but Mara simply repeats her previous suggestion. "Hang on!" The flying warhorse angles itself, gathers even more speed, and ducks its head as it pulls all four legs in tight against its body. Mara leans as far back as she can, and Galthia is forced to do the same.

Galthia blinks as the cracked base of a broken-off stalactite whizzes past just inches from his nose, and he can feel the horse suddenly falling and lurching in mid-air. Then there is a *WHOMP* as the long feathery wings catch the rancid air, and they're safely through the gap.

"Nice riding," the monk mutters, and Mara grins in the darkness. Luminor does a barrel roll sideways to avoid a barrage of bone spears, and Galthia looks down. Riding with Mara is a little bit like traveling through Limbo. "I'll let you know where to let me off," he shouts over the wind, and Mara nods.

Tao grabs a hold of anyone who wants to come, and dimension doors into the heart of the disorganized ghoulish army. As Malachite lowers himself to join her and Velendo flies by overhead, she and Splinder use their weapons to great effect, cleaving through the ghouls already weakened by Malachite's positive energy burst. Soon the ground around the three of them looks like a charnel field. The newly formed undead foot soldiers throw themselves at the heroes, but their flailing limbs aren't skilled enough to easily batter their way past magical armor or well-wielded weapons. Tao's two swords are a blur, and despite the undead's natural resistance to damage she has little trouble in clearing away her enemies.

Behind her, one ghoulish hobgoblin does score a hit on Malachite when his companions aid him by flinging him bodily forward into their foe! Blood trailing down his cheek, Malachite easily fights down the creeping paralysis and batters the hobgoblin's skull in with the hilt of Karthos. One of the dwarves rushes in and finishes it off, and Malachite realizes that the dwarves are ensuring that no more ghouls have a chance to rise again. Good.

A huge bone spear arcs out of the darkness, missing Nolin and shattering on the force wall. "Undead siege engine!" calls Nolin in a ringing voice, and wheels in the air to fly back and carry Malachite and Tao. Hearing him, Velendo flies forward.

Rising from the darkness in front of the old cleric is a lumbering, hideous insect-like skeletal construct. It has at least six legs, and it is using its own massive ribs as ammunition as it slowly winches back the huge bone ballista on its back. Around it, several dozen ghouls scurry in attendance. Velendo dodges a bone spear and begins to cast. Within seconds, a blade barrier shimmers into existence next to the siege engine's front legs, and bone chips fly as the magical blades begin to spin.

"There!" Galthia points, and Mara angles Luminor towards the siege engine. As she swoops past and leans to hit it with her holy mace, Galthia leaps nimbly from the back of the horse onto the bone structure itself. He balances on a narrow and quivering rib, pulls out his magical staff, and begins attacking.

The siege engine doesn't last more than another fifteen seconds. The blade barrier chops into its front set of legs and a searing light from Velendo shatters a skeletal arm, just before Galthia's staff of disruption destroys its back half with an roaring explosion of golden sparks. The monk nimbly leaps clear of the magical blades, and they watch as the huge undead construct collapses.

It takes the Defenders another fifteen or thirty minutes to mop up most of the remaining ghouls, although they use many of their remaining spells to do so. Velendo uses another wall to block one of the cavern entrances, and although he suspects a handful of undead have successfully escaped, the vast army has effectively been destroyed.

coyote6:

So did y'all simply hit the fast forward button at this point and say, "Job done, 20 minutes gone, mark off X spells"?

Piratecat:

Pretty much. After they took out the skeletal siege engine and slew the important leaders, the ghouls' force degenerated from an organized army into a scampering mob. It was simple for the Defenders to take them apart at that point, so we fast-forwarded. With the last use of Malachite's positive energy burst, they managed to destroy the last major clump that was trying to escape, and then it was all over but the shouting.