5/20 noon
The lure worked perfectly. Caledra had a fierce smile as she finished her trap. It was a simple fire trap rune, set to explode the next time something larger than a hound moves too close to it. All around her, her fellows were doing as she was, quickly applying a runic trap to the forest floor or a tree before getting in position to fire upon the first plant creature to show itself.
The other team, led by Hawkspear, rushed past to set up their own line of traps and take their own defensible positions while Caledra's team skirmished with the enemy. Once the freakish vine beasts got dangerously close, the Farstriders would disengage on her signal and switch off. If they proved too fast, the team would switch to less deadly but far more hampering frost traps.
The point was not merely to harm the enemy, it was to harm them and draw them out without losing a single ranger; there were other soldiers available to deal deathblows. For her part, she just needed to be sure that the enemy never got close enough to get in a good hit. As she and her comrades let loose a volley of arrows aimed more to hamper than to kill, her toothy grin never faded. It was like flying a kite during the Lunar Festival.
••••••••••
Abby had a mission of her own, per the command of her master. She was to capture one of the small red spirits; she didn't know why, but he seemed quite excited at the prospect, so she would endeavor. As the assault team swooped down upon the dragon, she focused on finding her targets, wrapping her mount and herself in an antimagic shell preemptively.
She saw the druid spirits, noting that they seemed to have all of the true undead clustered together. Her blood ran cold when she saw six of the non-undead Druids turn into huge birds and start diving straight for her. They saw her, in particular, as a threat and were targeting her with a specifically physical assault. Well. Bone armor it is then.
••••••••••
Emeriss was outmatched in a straight brawl, and it was very obvious that she knew it. Onyxia, in her new and improved form, was nearly double the mass of either of the two green dragons present. Initially the strangely rotting dragon seemed fairly confident in the strategy of hiding in a cloud of toxic spores from the mushrooms, but both that and the cloud of green sleep gas wafting around had absolutely no effect on my retinue. I let myself get a bit cocky while I watched Onyxia rapidly overpowering her while Ysondre hovered above the battle with her eyes closed, healing the big black dragon as Emeriss desperately ripped into her scales.
Personally, I was flying in a circle, partially faded to avoid unwanted attention. The backlash of Shadow Word: Fade was lessened by my bond with the Satyr, reducing what would have been the equivalent to navigating by a nightlight into the equivalent of a bit of light fog. I wasn't totally invisible, but I was subtle enough to safely observe and learn while I waited for the opportunity to tag Emeriss with the slime.
The first thing I realized is that the Nightmare definitely remembered me from before, or at least they remembered who was a problem last time. Abby was being attacked by stormcrows in melee, Talaada and Sadie were being focus fired by the Druids and would likely have been driven to the ground if Noboru hadn't rushed in to scatter any Druids that seemed to be rallying together, releasing flashes of light and consecrating the ground where his blood was shed. Unfortunately, keeping both the large Paladin Drake and themselves alive was a full time job; they couldn't afford to switch targets much, and it seemed that in the heat of battle Sadie was falling back on what she knew best. No shadow spells today.
Dremuus and Norin were being targeted by a team of wild shaped Druids as well, but where Abby was hard pressed, the married couple had started dogfighting. Norin had apparently been practicing her flying, because she was able to keep mobile and avoid getting entangled even as her husband opened fire with a rifle he'd picked up somewhere. They weren't inflicting much damage, but they were keeping about a fifth of the Druids occupied.
The other dragons, mounted by the likes of Kriss, Aurora, Ursula, and Drusilla, were mostly busy holding off the remaining forces from focusing upon Onyxia. They were doing reasonably well with Aurora and Ysondre serving as healers while the other three unleashed hell, but they were badly outnumbered.
The fifteen remaining Druids, quite capable of swapping between the roles of artillery, healer, and flying melee combatant, were bad enough. Then four hulking figures pulled themselves from the thorns, twisted humanoids made of giant thorny vines with a reddish light flickering behind their hollow eye sockets. The wisps had become ancient protectors, which I mostly knew as the defensive structure that night elves could build in Warcraft 3. I hadn't really thought about how terrifying a giant tree man tossing boulders would be until I saw it.
I started moving towards Emeriss; she was pretty locked down and it seemed like her thoroughly useless mushrooms were the only advantage she had cultivated. Those ancients were a game changer; I needed my dragons to be able to focus on them or my small cadre of dragon riding casters was going to get torn apart. Naturally it was at this point that Emeriss pulled out her trump card, spitting out a few words of power and unleashing a spell to feed the plants.
The mushrooms all around them started to grow rapidly, most disgustingly growing to fill the holes in Emeriss's own hide, and as they did Onyxia's scales and flesh started to rot and flake away. Her life was being drained by every single one of the cursed mushrooms. Ysondre was doing her best, but Onyxia was being torn apart faster than she could heal. Druidic healing, which appeared to be what Ysondre did, was excellent for sustained healing over long periods, but didn't have much of an answer for rapid deterioration like this. I was thankful for her healing anyway; Onyxia would have been killed in ten seconds at most without it.
I looked around and saw Noboru was still fighting; the mushrooms around him had shriveled and burnt in a radiant circle of holy light beneath his feet. That inspired me to try something potentially stupid. But as a friend of mine from an old life says, if it's stupid and it works it ain't stupid. I quickly shielded both myself and bum rushed into the center of the brawl, with holy nova on constant full blast. The nova killed at least some of the mushrooms, and the shield protected both me and the blob protectively clutched to my chest for long enough for me to get in close.
Even once the mushrooms stopped draining, thankfully unable to maintain that kind of magical throughput, the fighting was still fierce. It was just slightly more even. Tails and wings were flailing around, trying to bash their opponents, not to mention gouts of acid and magma. It was suicidal to get any closer and too far to risk throwing the globster, especially with my shield fading and the soulless blob being an invalid target, so I did the only thing I could: I handed it off to Lividia, who was suddenly present the moment I reached out my foreclaw. She knew what the plan was. She knew what the gooey sphere was.
"Go!" I yelled as I enveloped her in the best shield I could manage and wheeled around out of the field of deadly mushrooms before a repeat performance came. My other girls needed me.
••••••••••
Lividia darted in. Mother wasn't paying enough attention, naturally, but neither of the bigger dragons were actually *trying* to swat her out of the sky. From what she'd been told, the blob creature could move about on its own, it was just vulnerable while it did so. Reveling in her immortality, the whelp dove in and smashed herself, and the blob, against the green female's wing as it flailed against mother's side.
Her shield popped, every bone in her body cracked, and even her iron hard scales were crushed together at the point of impact. It was excruciating, but she'd done as her king commanded. More importantly, she'd defeated a dragon more than a hundred times her age.
The dark red liquid flowed over the green champion, who couldn't effectively burn it away with her breath as mother pinned her neck, taking a splash of acidic spray on the shoulder in the process. The goo squeezed between scales, into the wounds opened up by mothers claws, past the weblike mushrooms plugging the holes, and the green went limp, convulsing slightly. Mother burnt away the mushrooms around her, and the rot in her scales began to reverse thanks to the new girl's magic.
"Saved you. Hah! I, Queen Lividia, was the one to land the decisive blow!" Lividia jeered as the enemy triggered the mushrooms near where she landed, draining away her life force, causing her to collapse into a bundle of ash. Thankfully; being broken *hurt.* Death would be much nicer, from what her king had told her.
••••••••••
Abby was fighting for her life. The useless dragon had already been forced down; thankfully her antimagic field was still intact, so she could blight the fungus before it started again. If it had been only one druid she'd be fine; they had no particular defense against a deathgrip slowly crushing their windpipe. Two would have likely been fine as well; cripple one to allow the dragon to handle it, then proceed as already stated. Three would have been touch and go, likely resulting in a few injuries, but that's what potions are for. Five? Five was overwhelming.
She used what she could; a few death coils despite their inefficiency as an offensive tool, swarms of blight spawned insects conjured to go for the soft bits, a spell to enfeeble one of them with simulated old age; she had to spread her spells among them all, just to keep them at bay. She didn't have much that would actually kill one of them; necromancy was focused on decay and control, and mostly operated on the assumption that the user would never fight alone. They would pull back and heal and she just had to be thankful to have the breathing room for a moment. Even if she could kill one of them, they were spirits. They would just wake up or die wherever their real bodies happened to be. Useless to reanimate.
Her antimagic shell flickered and died; she'd lost track of it. Before she was able to summon a new one, three of the Druids pulled back and called down beams of light, incinerating her body with charged moonlight. Her soul was released, and returned to her heart, the core of her vital energy. Floating as a spirit next to Eliza, her beloved, her living phylactery, Abby pouted.
She LIKED her body, dammit. She'd never properly finished the ritual to become a Lich because she had just wanted Eliza back. She didn't want to lose… something. She wasn't sure why, actually, she was a woman. Becoming undead lost her very little, as her senses would remain intact along with her flesh. There was hardly any downside, save the reactions of others, so long as she remained independent. Ah. That must have been what it was. She didn't want to risk Morbent Fel commanding her and Eliza. A bit paranoid, but it was the only explanation.
••••••••••
The rest of the battle went fairly well; Varian had even managed to subdue and collar two of the green dragonspawn. The ancients were scary for most of my retinue, but once Onyxia and Ysondre could focus on the greater battle, they splintered easily enough and released the wisps. We didn't manage to capture any of them; without Abby on hand, I didn't really have a method to capture floating mostly insubstantial heads. My one weakness; creatures with a nonstandard number of necks. I made do with a few of the Druids.
Thanks to Ysondre's ability to rapidly patch up everyone afterwards, only three casualties were Abby, her dragon, and Lividia. Of those three, only Baarton was actually out of play. Abby was even a ghost, which was honestly an upgrade in some ways. The rangers were all exhausted but uninjured, about half the demons were banished, and most of the undead gnolls had been crushed but were very replaceable. If the next week goes this smoothly, I'm golden.