5/8 afternoon
I dove to assist Darcell with magic, starting with a renew to stabilize her and then shifting to lesser heals to fix her most egregious injuries. I remembered a few weeks ago how hard it had been to heal up a guy in a similar state; Annetta and I had both exhausted ourselves. I hadn't realized how much I'd grown until I helped Darcell to her feet and didn't even feel off. I could have done more, easily.
"So. What happened to you?" I asked conversationally while cleaning the blood out of her ripped clothing. "It seems like you decided to kill something very dangerous."
She looked sheepish. "I knew the big one was the target. You wanted him dead. He'd just finished fighting off another big gnoll who had this huge sword, and he seemed vulnerable. So I used stealth to get in close to him and just finished him off."
"And got yourself beaten into near death by his pack in the time it took for you to teleport away." I rubbed my temples with the heels of my hands. "Don't take risks like that, please. I happen to like you. We would have gotten him eventually, but there's only one you. There may be times when you need to risk your life, but that wasn't one of them. Even if it's very impressive you pulled it off."
The praise had more of an impact than the scolding, unfortunately, but I hoped that she'd take my statements to heart. If not I'd need to make sure she was always working in a group. "In any event, I suppose you will be joining us this evening after all. There is a powerful undead Paladin for us to kill. I'll be assigning you to a secondary team, though." I explained that the B team, consisting of Abby, Darcell, and the ghosts, would be standing by to clear out the graveyard so that Watcher Ladimore could get to her father's grave unimpeded. I figured that Darcell would be able to keep enemies off of Abby; she was a good enough fighter for that, at least.
The B team had been chosen mostly out of the necessity of keeping Abby and Eliza separated until tomorrow morning. If I'd thought about it I might have delayed the plan for another day so I could keep the giant blob strategy intact, but this seemed about as good. I was at the finish line. I was going to keep running.
••••••••••
I sent Darcell over to Eva's home; hopefully there would be some acceptable replacement clothes there. I had two more stops before it was time to get into position and gather up the ogres and watcher. Up next was picking up Mary. I was pretty sure she was firmly under my control, so I went ahead and teleported straight to her in her little home.
I found her, looking like the beautiful elf, curled around a hand mirror and crying in wonder and joy. "I'm beautiful again. It's wonderful." She was rocking and staring rapturously at her own reflection.
https://imgur.com/a/QQSpbtQ
"To your liking?"
"Oh yes, yes, yes, yes!" She jumped at my voice, then wrapped her arms around me. It was far more pleasant this time, if for no other reason than the lack of claws digging into my arms. Her arms had a strange, cold, putty-like feeling to them, but at least she wasn't trying to seize me violently. "How can I repay you? I'll do anything. Anything at all!"
I knew she meant it. Or if she didn't yet, it would prove to be completely true upon testing. I reached down to experimentally try groping her pert ass, but it wasn't satisfying. Way too much give, it was like groping a bouncy castle. Ah well, we'd work it out. "You'll be coming with me. There's no reason for you to hide forever in this little house in the middle of nowhere. There's much you can do to repay me, and I bet you'll enjoy a lot of it."
At around this point was when I heard her door creak open. I was a bit alarmed, and started to turn and look even as Mary piped up "Oh, Gregor. Wonderful news! I can see again!" The brief flicker of hope that comment gave me died as I was stabbed in the gut.
It was the hooded undead figure from before, wearing a battered night watch uniform with his sword drawn and torch glowing with eerie blue-white flame. "Gregor! No! What are you doing!" Mary detangled herself and tried to grab him, but was driven away by a swipe with his torch; it seemed to eat away at her form, leaving her as a flickering silhouette.
"My mother was always disappointed in me for not following the old ways. But I learned enough." As he spoke he withdrew his sword, slick with my blood, and I realized that I really shouldn't have come here alone with a known antagonistic force in the area. I cast renew and shield on myself in a frantic panic, which stopped the blood gushing from the wound and blocked his next strike respectively, and pulled out my sword and staff.
We started fighting and I realized rapidly that I was screwed. I let my sword and torch skillchip drive my body on instinct while I cast curses on him. Definitely not shadow words; I didn't know for certain that I could disable him, and I was alone except for Mary, who seemed hurt by the magical fire. I couldn't risk hurting myself more than him.
How else was I screwed? Well, he was using exactly the same fighting style as me but with superior equipment and substantially more skill. If it weren't for my shield spell he'd have tagged me two more times already, and that was getting thin. He was undead, so I didn't think he was going to get tired, and he seemed resistant to shadow magic. Weakness barely slowed him and I genuinely couldn't tell you whether or not he noticed Pain. Oh yeah, and I had a huge gut wound that was starting to heal, but still hurt enough to impede my movements.
I was fighting defensively, and my amulet was hanging too loose to use. I needed to call in backup somehow, but Gregor wasn't giving me a second to cast a proper offensive spell, let alone ten seconds to summon someone from my retinue. I tossed a renew at Mary, but she didn't know anything about how to use the amulets and had been dispatched almost instantly instantly before; I did it because she might surprise me. It was time for another gamble. I tried to back off a little and defend myself as I started to chant a new spell.
I was rewarded with a torch to my sword arm. I think I heard something crack, I dropped my blade, and he swept my leg out from under me with a kick. Thankfully he stopped for a one liner, "Stay away from my family you son of a bitch," which confused me but saved my life, because I had a response ready. "Fear!"
My injuries flared a greenish yellow color and burned like I'd shoved hot pokers into each of them as I channeled all the fel magic I could muster. I wasn't taking chances. It worked, thank the light, and I grabbed my amulet as he irrationally broke and ran. I could only think of one person through the haze of pain; the woman I'd chosen to be a bodyguard. My knight. And so it was that when Gregor returned to finish the job he was confronted by Tessa Spaulding, fully kitted out for evening patrol.
I healed myself, which burnt through a lot of my remaining reserves, and felt a bit better about my performance when I saw that Tessa and Gregor were still going at it. He seemed to be the more skilled of the two, but she was better armored by a long shot. She winced when he hit her with his ghostly torch, but she was able to ward off the sword well enough. He, on the other hand, was able to dodge and deflect her counterattacks reliably, and didn't seem to worry about fatigue. He'd been fighting for a few minutes now and didn't seem to have slowed down at all.
Lucky for Tessa, she wasn't fighting alone. Once I was in good enough shape, I focused on Gregor and immolated him. I kept pouring fel energy into the flames, despite the pain, until he was burnt to a crisp. I had no clue who the fuck this man was, and right now I didn't care. If I'd been able to capture him that would have been great, he was clearly dangerous, but I wouldn't risk leaving him alive in my presence.
When he was just a pile of ash, Tessa wheeled on me and ripped off her helmet. Her cheeks were flushed and she was looking at me with a feral expression. She'd just assisted me in an extremely intense manner, so she was ready to fuck. I was still aching, but honestly? It sounded appealing right now.
Her armor and padding started vanishing off her body, at least the armor that would block access to her breasts and pussy, and she jumped on me like an animal. We didn't make love, or have sex, or even fuck. All those were too classy for the animalistic rutting that happened on the floor of Mary's cabin. We went at it for a solid twenty minutes, which was mostly quite vanilla if you set aside the sheer intensity. We were in a heap on the ground when Tessa finally spoke up. "Did I do well, sir?"
"Yeah. You did great. Want to stick around?" She nodded with a big goofy grin, then composed herself and laid herself against my chest with a sense of satisfaction, her boots and gauntlets still on. "Yes, sir. I would be happy to stay by your side."
I realized then that Mary had made a full recovery and just floated nearby, not wanting to interrupt. I laughed a bit at that, which made my ribs hurt. "Alright. Tessa. Get dressed. Come along you two. We have places to be." I cleaned myself, cast another power word: renew, and picked up Gregor's torch. It was obviously magical, and had survived being used to deflect a sword without a mark on it. I was keeping this; no question about that. I was going to need to put some effort into fixing myself up after those fear and immolation spells, so I decided to just go to Lakeshire for dinner and heal myself as much as I could.
I had Auffrey hand over her amulet to Anetta, ostensibly as a changing of the guard, so that someone was still available for teleportation. After that, I just relaxed and tried to flush the fel magic from my system with the power of the light. Maybe I needed to look into getting corruption resistance or soul defense? Whatever would prevent this happening again.
••••••••••
The Blackrock orcs took their security seriously, Keryn would give them that. Not many of the orcs were lazing about, and they tended to check, in force, when they heard strange noises. Compared to the gnolls, this was extremely touch and go. She could push herself a bit more because she would be able to bug out any time she could get ten seconds, but she was increasingly sure that she wasn't getting to the prisoners on her own.
The breakthrough came when she figured out how disguises worked. Bismark could have saved her a lot of grief with a quick workshop on how to use these damn amulets. Once she killed an orc and stole her outfit, it became an infiltration. Not her specialty, but she could work with this. She just hoped that nobody found the corpse and connected her to that new peon nobody seemed to really know.