The next few minutes of Nym’s life were pure chaos. Leaf, Blanchet, and Tiramaya all went for their assigned cores as quickly as possible. Tiramaya even managed to crack hers open before a bunch of meat and bones piled onto it. None of them were able to actually break the core prior to the bone behemoths animating.
His first impression was that the names were a bit of a misnomer. They were actually made of a lot of stinking, rotting meat slapped together and strung through with a wire skeleton made of arcana. All the bones were on the outside, glued to the meat in random spots, often piled on top of each other to form a full coating of armor. There were a lot of spikes and jagged edges in that coat, enough that Nym couldn’t imagine it going well for anybody who tried to jump onto one of them.
They had four limbs, though Nym was hesitant to decide whether they were all legs or not. Each was thicker around than he was, like a set of tree trunks stuck onto an enormous barrel. There was no head or tail, and it seemed able to walk upright as easily as it did on all fours. The only upside that he could see from the whole thing was that they’d sucked up so many corpses that the floor was relatively clear now.
As soon as the bone behemoths started forming, the undead lurking in the outer tunnels surrounding the cavern attacked. They poured into the cavern in a steady stream, or at least they would have if the team let them. Sakaro’s barriers flashed into existence about twenty feet down two of the tunnels. Her face was tight with concentration holding them up as the first of the ghouls hit them.
Nym took a different approach and started dual casting greater telekinesis to shove them back while simultaneously ripping down great chunks of the ceiling after transmuting seams of rock to sand. It was a controlled cave in, and not one he thought would hold for long. He was lucky to have found the patch of rock there at all; most of the terrain had been hard packed earth so far. The earth mage wights had gone around or removed the stone buried underground.
Flames roared through the room, swirling around the humans and scorching the bone armors of the behemoths black. They also torched three geists that had managed to sneak into the room unnoticed and were descending on Leaf. He was so preoccupied trying to carve chunks off the behemoth he was fighting that Nym doubted he even noticed the geists.
Nym threw up a hyperkinetic barrier against the backside of his impromptu rock wall to support it and turned his attention to the second cave entrance he was responsible for. “I’ve got this one,” he called out to Sakaro. His mage blades came out and flashed down the tunnel. That combined with a few strategic stunners was enough to keep the ghouls pushed back.
A pair of wights appeared in the middle of the ghoul pack, some working of ritual magic between them. Before they could release it into the cavern, Nym fired lances of his own arcana into the spell and twisted it. It shattered between the wights and dissipated into nothingness. A well-placed lightning bolt arced through the ghouls and struck both wights, hurling them from their feet and back into the tunnel.
Hopefully they were dead, but Nym didn’t have the time to follow up. “Ogric!” he yelled. “Switch with me and burn these ghoul parts down, will you?”
They made the switch smoothly with Sakaro’s help. Nym threw three stunners at the closest ghouls to trip the advancing line up while Sakaro popped a fresh barrier over the tunnel Ogric was actively working on. The two traded spots and the chopped up ghouls in the tunnel started to disintegrate.
They traded back and forth a few times, with Nym hacking apart incoming ghouls in one spot while Ogric toasted them on the other side, but then his original blockage failed. He felt the hyperkinetic barrier snap just before ghouls started pouring into the room, only to be picked up by the dozens and slammed into the ceiling with an application of greater telekinesis.
That didn’t do much beyond get them out of the way momentarily, but that was enough for Nym to gather up the arcana for a massive push of air. It howled down the tunnel, bowling over ghouls and sending geists tumbling hundreds of feet backwards. More importantly, it gave Nym the time to restack the rocks and even transmute them into something slightly more solid. He left a new barrier behind them and sent his mage blades up to massacre the ghouls he was holding onto.
Things were tense, but between the three of them, they were holding the four tunnels. Nym was under no illusions that it would last forever, but it’d be more than long enough for Zerek and Archmage Veran to break the anti-scrying ward preventing them from seeing into the mausoleum overhead.
Then a behemoth slammed into his back and sent him flying into a wall.
It wasn’t even a direct attack, though it took Nym a few seconds to put that together. It had merely brushed against him while it was focused on fighting Blanchet. He’d been winged hard enough to throw him ten feet into a wall and leave him groaning in pain. The barrier he’d been maintaining had failed, and Ogric was now floating overhead in the middle of the room, shooting fire in every direction while Sakaro tried to herd the ghouls with strategically placed barrier walls.
Nym regained his feet and flew overhead to join the other mages. It was impossible to see down the tunnels from that angle, but getting hit by a behemoth once was enough for him. Zerek was safe under a barrier of some sort Archmage Veran had put up, and the two of them were busy ignoring the general chaos around them while they worked.
“We’ve got to drop these behemoths already,” Ogric said. “Can you block all four exits?”
“Maybe for a minute if it’s just ghouls. As soon as some wight comes in and starts throwing spells at the barrier, things are going to start failing,” Sakaro replied.
“One minute. We can lay down some serious damage on one of those behemoths in a minute. Maybe we could even get all three.”
“Do it,” Nym said. Those things weren’t like ghouls. They were made of real corpses; a lightning bolt would probably shut them down hard unless they had some sort of special resistance to it.
She nodded, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Barriers snapped up in all four locations, and Nym pulled hard on second layer arcana. His soul well filled to the brim, and both parts of his brain started chaining lightning spells.
The cavern was filled with deafening booms that rolled around and echoed off each other as he hammered bolt after bolt after bolt into a behemoth that was missing a big chunk of its bone armor. Leaf was the one actively engaging it, but there was enough space between them as he scrambled to avoid its flailing limbs that Nym felt safe targeting it.
The behemoth shuddered when the first bolt struck it, collapsed from the second, and started smoking on the third. By the time the fifth one hit, it had superheated to the point where the bone armor cracked and blew apart, along with a thousand pounds of blackened meat. The core fell to the stone, fully exposed for the first time since they’d teleported in.
Leaf pounced on it and drove his sword clear through, shattering it into pieces.
The display blinded and deafened them momentarily, and it certainly drew the attention of everything still moving in the cavern. Nym switched to a localized scrying spell to see the room and took advantage of the moment to send his mage blades into action against a few ghouls who’d managed to slip in when one of Sakaro’s barriers started to give. It looked like her ability to hold them for a full minute was perhaps a bit too optimistic.
Two people hadn’t reacted to the display of lightning. Zerek ignored it completely, perhaps hadn’t even noticed it behind Archmage Veran’s barrier. The archmage himself certainly noticed it, but had apparently dismissed it as unimportant.
Not to be outdone, Ogric laid the heat down on another behemoth. Within seconds, Nym could smell the acrid stink of it cooking from the inside out, somehow a different smell than the one he’d blown apart by slamming it with lightning bolts repeatedly. Blanchet knew exactly what was happening too, and she switched strategies from attacking it to keeping her distance.
Far away from the others, Tiramaya had her behemoth completely under control. She was slipping in and out of the shadows, disappearing completely and popping back up somewhere else. The behemoth swung around crazily, limbs flailing in every direction as it slammed itself up against the wall repeatedly in an attempt to crush her.
Normally, Nym was confident in his ability to aim his lightning. It was something he’d practiced in his off hours quite a bit, but in this case, he couldn’t keep track of the scary woman in the bright clothes and he didn’t want to risk hitting her. A quick scan of the room told him he’d be most useful going back to blocking at least one tunnel so that Sakaro could focus on the other ones while Ogric finished cooking the closest behemoth.
“I’ve got this one,” he called out, floating down to the barrier that was starting to fracture and let ghouls through.
She let the barrier fall completely, and he went back to work slicing apart ghouls. It was a mountain of effort to get caught up enough to clear the mouth of the cave, effort made worse by how drained he felt from his trick with the chained lightning bolts. Both partitions in his brain felt that one. The fight wasn’t over though, so he kept his mage blades moving.
Then everything went black and his entire body lit up with pain. In a slim sliver of a moment, he felt the sting of hundreds of needles stabbing into him, followed by a burning sensation on his skin. His mind blanked out from the pain, just long enough for him to start screaming.
Then he summoned more magic, and lightning burst out of him in arcs going in random directions. A skintight cocoon of air slid into place, separating him from the geist that was trying to eat him, and with an effort of will, it billowed out and ripped the undead off of him. It was already dead by the time it let go, fried from the inside by Nym’s lightning and smoking as its body drifted on a current of super-charged air to smack into a wall on the far side of the cave.
Chest heaving and blood running down his body from hundreds of puncture wounds, Nym glared around the cavern. There, in a crack that had split the wall near where Tiramaya’s behemoth had slammed into it, were more geists slipping in. He forced more arcana through his soul well and sent twin bolts of lightning to splash against the wall and kill the geists there.
Ogric got the ones that were already flying through the air with bursts of fire. Below him, a second behemoth lay in a pile of crispy flesh, its core shattered to pieces. With only a single behemoth left, the warriors on the ground managed to surround and overwhelm it easily. The beasts were huge and ponderous, deceptively fast for their size, but ultimately too slow to keep up with the nimble humans attacking it.
They brought it down and broke it apart, carving a hole in one spot where they concentrated their attacks until the core was visible still inside the behemoth. Tiramaya took the strike, breaking it apart and prying it loose with the tip of her blade. The pile of meat and bones she was perched on collapsed on the spot.
Nym’s flight spell gave out then and he tumbled to the floor. “I think I need a break,” he said to no one in particular.
The ghouls still pouring in didn’t seem inclined to let him take a breather, so he pulled himself to his feet and readied his next spell.
The next few minutes of Nym’s life were pure chaos. Leaf, Blanchet, and Tiramaya all went for their assigned cores as quickly as possible. Tiramaya even managed to crack hers open before a bunch of meat and bones piled onto it. None of them were able to actually break the core prior to the bone behemoths animating.
His first impression was that the names were a bit of a misnomer. They were actually made of a lot of stinking, rotting meat slapped together and strung through with a wire skeleton made of arcana. All the bones were on the outside, glued to the meat in random spots, often piled on top of each other to form a full coating of armor. There were a lot of spikes and jagged edges in that coat, enough that Nym couldn’t imagine it going well for anybody who tried to jump onto one of them.
They had four limbs, though Nym was hesitant to decide whether they were all legs or not. Each was thicker around than he was, like a set of tree trunks stuck onto an enormous barrel. There was no head or tail, and it seemed able to walk upright as easily as it did on all fours. The only upside that he could see from the whole thing was that they’d sucked up so many corpses that the floor was relatively clear now.
As soon as the bone behemoths started forming, the undead lurking in the outer tunnels surrounding the cavern attacked. They poured into the cavern in a steady stream, or at least they would have if the team let them. Sakaro’s barriers flashed into existence about twenty feet down two of the tunnels. Her face was tight with concentration holding them up as the first of the ghouls hit them.
Nym took a different approach and started dual casting greater telekinesis to shove them back while simultaneously ripping down great chunks of the ceiling after transmuting seams of rock to sand. It was a controlled cave in, and not one he thought would hold for long. He was lucky to have found the patch of rock there at all; most of the terrain had been hard packed earth so far. The earth mage wights had gone around or removed the stone buried underground.
Flames roared through the room, swirling around the humans and scorching the bone armors of the behemoths black. They also torched three geists that had managed to sneak into the room unnoticed and were descending on Leaf. He was so preoccupied trying to carve chunks off the behemoth he was fighting that Nym doubted he even noticed the geists.
Nym threw up a hyperkinetic barrier against the backside of his impromptu rock wall to support it and turned his attention to the second cave entrance he was responsible for. “I’ve got this one,” he called out to Sakaro. His mage blades came out and flashed down the tunnel. That combined with a few strategic stunners was enough to keep the ghouls pushed back.
A pair of wights appeared in the middle of the ghoul pack, some working of ritual magic between them. Before they could release it into the cavern, Nym fired lances of his own arcana into the spell and twisted it. It shattered between the wights and dissipated into nothingness. A well-placed lightning bolt arced through the ghouls and struck both wights, hurling them from their feet and back into the tunnel.
Hopefully they were dead, but Nym didn’t have the time to follow up. “Ogric!” he yelled. “Switch with me and burn these ghoul parts down, will you?”
They made the switch smoothly with Sakaro’s help. Nym threw three stunners at the closest ghouls to trip the advancing line up while Sakaro popped a fresh barrier over the tunnel Ogric was actively working on. The two traded spots and the chopped up ghouls in the tunnel started to disintegrate.
They traded back and forth a few times, with Nym hacking apart incoming ghouls in one spot while Ogric toasted them on the other side, but then his original blockage failed. He felt the hyperkinetic barrier snap just before ghouls started pouring into the room, only to be picked up by the dozens and slammed into the ceiling with an application of greater telekinesis.
That didn’t do much beyond get them out of the way momentarily, but that was enough for Nym to gather up the arcana for a massive push of air. It howled down the tunnel, bowling over ghouls and sending geists tumbling hundreds of feet backwards. More importantly, it gave Nym the time to restack the rocks and even transmute them into something slightly more solid. He left a new barrier behind them and sent his mage blades up to massacre the ghouls he was holding onto.
Things were tense, but between the three of them, they were holding the four tunnels. Nym was under no illusions that it would last forever, but it’d be more than long enough for Zerek and Archmage Veran to break the anti-scrying ward preventing them from seeing into the mausoleum overhead.
Then a behemoth slammed into his back and sent him flying into a wall.
It wasn’t even a direct attack, though it took Nym a few seconds to put that together. It had merely brushed against him while it was focused on fighting Blanchet. He’d been winged hard enough to throw him ten feet into a wall and leave him groaning in pain. The barrier he’d been maintaining had failed, and Ogric was now floating overhead in the middle of the room, shooting fire in every direction while Sakaro tried to herd the ghouls with strategically placed barrier walls.
Nym regained his feet and flew overhead to join the other mages. It was impossible to see down the tunnels from that angle, but getting hit by a behemoth once was enough for him. Zerek was safe under a barrier of some sort Archmage Veran had put up, and the two of them were busy ignoring the general chaos around them while they worked.
“We’ve got to drop these behemoths already,” Ogric said. “Can you block all four exits?”
“Maybe for a minute if it’s just ghouls. As soon as some wight comes in and starts throwing spells at the barrier, things are going to start failing,” Sakaro replied.
“One minute. We can lay down some serious damage on one of those behemoths in a minute. Maybe we could even get all three.”
“Do it,” Nym said. Those things weren’t like ghouls. They were made of real corpses; a lightning bolt would probably shut them down hard unless they had some sort of special resistance to it.
She nodded, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Barriers snapped up in all four locations, and Nym pulled hard on second layer arcana. His soul well filled to the brim, and both parts of his brain started chaining lightning spells.
The cavern was filled with deafening booms that rolled around and echoed off each other as he hammered bolt after bolt after bolt into a behemoth that was missing a big chunk of its bone armor. Leaf was the one actively engaging it, but there was enough space between them as he scrambled to avoid its flailing limbs that Nym felt safe targeting it.
The behemoth shuddered when the first bolt struck it, collapsed from the second, and started smoking on the third. By the time the fifth one hit, it had superheated to the point where the bone armor cracked and blew apart, along with a thousand pounds of blackened meat. The core fell to the stone, fully exposed for the first time since they’d teleported in.
Leaf pounced on it and drove his sword clear through, shattering it into pieces.
The display blinded and deafened them momentarily, and it certainly drew the attention of everything still moving in the cavern. Nym switched to a localized scrying spell to see the room and took advantage of the moment to send his mage blades into action against a few ghouls who’d managed to slip in when one of Sakaro’s barriers started to give. It looked like her ability to hold them for a full minute was perhaps a bit too optimistic.
Two people hadn’t reacted to the display of lightning. Zerek ignored it completely, perhaps hadn’t even noticed it behind Archmage Veran’s barrier. The archmage himself certainly noticed it, but had apparently dismissed it as unimportant.
Not to be outdone, Ogric laid the heat down on another behemoth. Within seconds, Nym could smell the acrid stink of it cooking from the inside out, somehow a different smell than the one he’d blown apart by slamming it with lightning bolts repeatedly. Blanchet knew exactly what was happening too, and she switched strategies from attacking it to keeping her distance.
Far away from the others, Tiramaya had her behemoth completely under control. She was slipping in and out of the shadows, disappearing completely and popping back up somewhere else. The behemoth swung around crazily, limbs flailing in every direction as it slammed itself up against the wall repeatedly in an attempt to crush her.
Normally, Nym was confident in his ability to aim his lightning. It was something he’d practiced in his off hours quite a bit, but in this case, he couldn’t keep track of the scary woman in the bright clothes and he didn’t want to risk hitting her. A quick scan of the room told him he’d be most useful going back to blocking at least one tunnel so that Sakaro could focus on the other ones while Ogric finished cooking the closest behemoth.
“I’ve got this one,” he called out, floating down to the barrier that was starting to fracture and let ghouls through.
She let the barrier fall completely, and he went back to work slicing apart ghouls. It was a mountain of effort to get caught up enough to clear the mouth of the cave, effort made worse by how drained he felt from his trick with the chained lightning bolts. Both partitions in his brain felt that one. The fight wasn’t over though, so he kept his mage blades moving.
Then everything went black and his entire body lit up with pain. In a slim sliver of a moment, he felt the sting of hundreds of needles stabbing into him, followed by a burning sensation on his skin. His mind blanked out from the pain, just long enough for him to start screaming.
Then he summoned more magic, and lightning burst out of him in arcs going in random directions. A skintight cocoon of air slid into place, separating him from the geist that was trying to eat him, and with an effort of will, it billowed out and ripped the undead off of him. It was already dead by the time it let go, fried from the inside by Nym’s lightning and smoking as its body drifted on a current of super-charged air to smack into a wall on the far side of the cave.
Chest heaving and blood running down his body from hundreds of puncture wounds, Nym glared around the cavern. There, in a crack that had split the wall near where Tiramaya’s behemoth had slammed into it, were more geists slipping in. He forced more arcana through his soul well and sent twin bolts of lightning to splash against the wall and kill the geists there.
Ogric got the ones that were already flying through the air with bursts of fire. Below him, a second behemoth lay in a pile of crispy flesh, its core shattered to pieces. With only a single behemoth left, the warriors on the ground managed to surround and overwhelm it easily. The beasts were huge and ponderous, deceptively fast for their size, but ultimately too slow to keep up with the nimble humans attacking it.
They brought it down and broke it apart, carving a hole in one spot where they concentrated their attacks until the core was visible still inside the behemoth. Tiramaya took the strike, breaking it apart and prying it loose with the tip of her blade. The pile of meat and bones she was perched on collapsed on the spot.
Nym’s flight spell gave out then and he tumbled to the floor. “I think I need a break,” he said to no one in particular.
The ghouls still pouring in didn’t seem inclined to let him take a breather, so he pulled himself to his feet and readied his next spell.
