Selena will cast ice wall to put a cap on as many of the trenches as she can, starting with the closest ones. Then she will move into cover with everyone else.
Next round, if it still makes sense, she will cast ice wall again to fortify the tower, putting the ice wall at a slant to be deflective and harder to punch through, taking at least some sting out of the bullets, and provide a fully concealed, if small way to move around the perimeter, and again deal damage to any soldiers that try to enter through breaches.
Then she will move to a spot to use her rifle.
Viktor starts climbing the ladder, making slow progress. Fin kills one of the soldiers firing from tower B, while Maka does serious damage to one of the battle wagons.
Selena traps the soldiers in trench P under a sheet of ice.
As it becomes ever more apparent that a lightning assault isn't going to work, Kalchine hustles back to the group. He can feel from the wounds he's sharing with Chest Thumper that everyone's going to need some healing soon.
"How does he make this look so easy?" the triaxian mutters, referring to his brother as he struggles to climb the ladder while weighed down by his armor. He only gets about 5 foot up.
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Chest Thumper does not like this. There are too many people with stinging sticks. He likes the people around him good enough, but he wants to be with his brother.
He looks around and spots the poor, week creature ever so slowly climbing the limbs that support this nest.
With a hoot, he swings over, clambering down and grabbing Kalchine's arm in one big paw.
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Quasit shoves the machine gun along its track to aim toward the tower to the east, then drops her swords at her feet and pulls the trigger, aiming for the creatures climbing the tower in the weird fog....
...only for the gun to promptly jam. "Gah, what's wrong with this thing?!" she shouts, rattling the gun back and forth violently on its track in frustration, and repeatedly pulling the dead trigger. "How do you fight a war with crappy weapons like this?!"
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Machine Gun: 1d20 + 16 + 2 - 2 - 4 ⇒ (1) + 16 + 2 - 2 - 4 = 13 MISFIRE!
The metal battle wagons turn their biggest guns toward the World Anchor tower. They fire at the ground beneath it.
The two shots explode one after the other, spraying those beneath the tower with shrapnel. Even the ladder is not spared damage. Blasted one way and then the other, it snaps in half, the lower half starting to fall away, the top half just barely staying bolted into the tower.
At the same time, the wagons turn their machine guns on Maka.
The soldiers in the trench spend this round smashing through the wall of ice. One of the towers on the other side of the camp turns its spotlight on you (Tower E), and you can hear a siren going off now. Those soldiers in the nearby towers continue firing on targets in the World Anchor tower.
"Are. You. JOKING!?" Maka roared as the tanks ignored her presence, focusing their attacks on her friends. Blue flames erupted from her hands and feet, burning so intensly they nearly turned white. With explosive fury, she launched at her foes.
Steel cracked and melted under her relentless assault. Her knuckles bleed and her muscles ached, but she pushed through the pain, determined to save her friends.
Kalchine finds himself caught in not one, but two blasts. Even were he not balanced precariously on a ladder, agility has never been his strong suit and he wouldn't have been able to avoid the effects.
Shrapnel peppers his body while flames singe fur and flesh. The force of the blasts knock him from the ladder and, when his body comes to rest on the ground, that is all that it is: a body.
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Seeing Kalchine take the full brunt of the battle wagon’s fire, Fin’s heart sinks to see the Triaxian’s burnt and shrapnel filled body fall to the ground with a sickening thud, knowing his already wounded friend could not receive such a vicious blow and live…
Crying out a heart-wrenching, ”NOOOOOOOOO!!!” the Elf then quickly follows that with a more practical yell. ”SELENA, COME QUICKLY, KAL’S DOWN, NEEDS THE BREATH OF LIFE SCROLL! Q, WE MUST RETREAT NOW!!!”
Selena rushes Kal, and pulls out the scroll and uses it to revive him, cursing the spell designer that accepted such a short time for usefulness as she is wary of their precarious position.
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As the explosions go off directly below her, Quasit shrieks and drops to the ground, covering her head, and again the pounding terror of the run through the woods visits her racing heart.
Crying out a heart-wrenching, ”NOOOOOOOOO!!!” the Elf then quickly follows that with a more practical yell. ”SELENA, COME QUICKLY, KAL’S DOWN, NEEDS THE BREATH OF LIFE SCROLL! Q, WE MUST RETREAT NOW!!!”
Quasit's blood freezes. She looks over quickly at Chest Thumper, hunkering down and moaning in a corner, and it only seems to confirm what Findurél is saying. She moves to the hole in the floor where the ladder came up and looks down, but mostly just gets a face full of smoke.
"I can't see. What's happening?" she says in the false calm of dazed confusion. She looks around at Bulvi and Sakitu. "He can't really be dead, can he?" She sees how badly Bulvi is wounded now, for the first time, and her breath catches. Were they all about to die?
"There was nothing we could do! They were waiting for us!" she asserts defensively, to no one in particular. She looks down through the hole in the floor again, waving a hand to try and clear away the smoke. "It's that headless general! He set all this up. On Rasputin's orders, but he set it up!"
"Saki, cast a flying spell on Bulvi, then he can carry you down. I'll try and shift Chest Thumper. Once we're on the ground, Selena can teleport the wounded away to safety. But then Maka and Fin and I are gonna find that general! You too Saki if you can manage it. Once we do that, we all get out and regroup." Quasit is talking fast, her hands tightly gripping the edge of the hole, her eyes looking at nothing.
"I'll cover Selena while she gets Kal sorted. We just need to keep some cool heads, Selena's grumpy but you know she wants the bragging rights to save his hide." Bulvi gave Quasit an attempt at a reassuring smile but he was concerned and couldn't quite keep the anxiety fully from his features. "A few minutes and I'll be right as rain but still caked in my own blood, I just need to be quicker on my feet like you guys. If I hunker down for a bit I could get back in the fight properly but the fighting might be done before then."
[ooc]Waiting for the fly spell from Saki if she casts it then hell carry her down."[/b]
Many of Kalchine's wounds seal up and fade to nothing, though some still linger. He still lays lifeless and still for a moment, long enough to wonder if the magic worked before he breathes in softly then his eyes slowly open.
"Thanks for the healing but are you trying to take my job?" he asks Selena as he sits up.
He climbs to his feet and pulses some additional life energy through himself before looking up at the broken ladder.
"Any idea how we can get up there?"
”Just because I can heal, doesn’t mean I want to be a doctor. And next time, I’m using reincarnate. Maybe if you spend time as a dwarf, you’ll learn to stay in the back and heal.” Selena responds irritably.
Maka manages to get her flames into the ammunition stores of the metal wagons in a terrific double explosion. Fin kills another soldier and injures the remaining one in tower B.
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Sakitu peers over the lip of the tower's floor and watches Selena perform the magic. She breathes a sigh of relief when she sees Kalchine move.
"Looks like Selena save Kalchine," she says over her shoulder to Quasit. "Ok. Now Bulvi come here and I'll make you fly." She closes her eyes a second then says the magic words necessary to release her magic energies. A moment later Bulvi feels all the weight lift off his feet.
Sakitu grabs him by the waist. "Ok. I'm ready. Let's go."
There are only a couple of soldiers free to fire at you.
Maka roared in satisfaction as the smoldering wreckage of the tanks lay scattered around her. With her allies still in peril, Maka continued her relentless assault on the camp forces.
Kalchine is assessing the situation after waking back up when he finds himself all but crushed by a powerful embrace by Chest Thumper.
"What's the problem, you big baby? We've both been knocked unconscious in combat," he says with a shake of his head.
But he notes how injured the frost ape is and applies some healing magic to him, as well.
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Quasit watches to make sure Bulvi and Sakitu get away all right, then turns to Chest Thumper just in time to see the big ape clamber over the wall and climb down the tower. With the area now cleared, Quasit climbs down the intact part of the ladder then drops the rest of the way down, attempting as clean a landing as she can manage.
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Seeing Kalchine alive and on his feet she lunges to him and give him a quick, intense hug.
”Thank all the gods!” she says in a quiet, strained voice.
Then she releases him and assesses the others. ”Ok, we need to get the heavily wounded out of sight so you can heal a bit. Bulvi, take Kal and Thumper and Viktor to the nearest barracks building we’ve already cleared. Selena, go with them and help heal them up.”
”Fin? Saki? How are you feeling? You should help Maka clear those soldiers I think.”
”I’m gonna see if I can scout around and find our headless friend. Don’t worry, recon only. Once I find him, I’ll come get you all and we’ll go take him out. Then we’ll see where we stand.”
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”Fin? Saki? How are you feeling? You should help Maka clear those soldiers I think.”
Fin shrugs, ”I’m fine…some more fire from Maka along with a volley from me oughtta finish those troops…”
”I’m gonna see if I can scout around and find our headless friend. Don’t worry, recon only. Once I find him, I’ll come get you all and we’ll go take him out. Then we’ll see where we stand.”
Concern on his face, Fin shakes his head. ”Let me come with you, Q; you never know when you-know-who might show up. I can activate my runners shirt after I fire at the troops and follow after you…plus if you do run into Captain Headless, I might be handy to have around…”
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"I'm doing relatively fine. I have a few cuts but nothing serious," Sakitu responds to Quasit. She steps up to Fin and puts her arm through his. "And I'm glad that you didn't get yourself hurt this time. I mean Fin, you didn't get hurt. I'm ready to go out and take care of the soldiers in the trench. Where do we go?"
Quasit's hug is almost as powerful as Chest Thumper's was and Kalchine returns it hesitantly.
"Why is everyone acting so weird?" he asks as he hustles toward the nearest structure.
Fin is able to drop the last two active riflemen in the towers. The troop in the trench is wavering before Maka, but they're holding for now.
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Sakitu looks to the south and spots some movement in one of the trenches. "Those guys are a long ways away but they seem to be able to shoot this far. Let me see if I can scatter them a bit."
She goes through the steps to cast a freezing sphere that races across the frozen ground once it is on top of the troops it explodes.
A number of the soldiers manage to avoid the worst of the blast. The survivors quick-march towards you.
The remaining soliders in tower D continue to struggle against the tentacles.
You hear movement far off to the east, but you don't have a good line of sight to whatever's going on. The yellow fog that was at tower B has gone elsewhere beyond your sight.
Maka took to the air as she kept laying down fire upon their foes.
Kalchine and Chest Thumper hustle toward the building where they're regrouping.
As they move along, the triaxian keeps an eye out and, when the group is close enough together, draws some healing power out of the world around him and pulses it through everyone injured.
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Hurriedly opening the door, Quasit spies into the barracks and looks about warily to see if the vampirized soldiers are still convalescing, her eyes doing their best to accommodate themselves to the darkened interior. Her hands shepherd in her companions as she continues scanning about the room, with an occasional glance back outside and skyward toward Maka's fireworks.
"I thought I heard something. Off to the east. I'm not sure what it was. Hopefully there aren't more of those battlewagons clunking around, though I think I'd recognize that sound by now. Whatever it was, it's probably coming this way."
She tries to pick out the fellow she spoke with the previous day. "Hello Dmitri, we're back. As you can probably hear, your former friends seem to be objecting to our presence. We need to lay low for a few minutes and regroup." she says in Russian.