The sensation of being eaten could be considered interesting from one such as Pen who catalogs everything. But it ISN'T so she responds with fire.
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Already, Belmont was not expecting to be EATEN by maggots today.
So he decided to do the next best thing. And that was to shoot them. He drew the clan pistol and his duelling pistol and began blasting at the maggots, cursing as he felt the maggots burrow into his flesh.
"ARGH! GET THEM OFF ME!" he screamed
Pen burns the maggots with her flames while Briar and Visna hack and slash. Belmont's thundering shots further splatter the remaining maggots, and enough of them have been destroyed that the others wriggle into holes in the wall and retreat, at least for the time being.
Lying on the floor is a large amount of treasure, likely belonging to prior victims of the maggot pit. Altogether, there is 300 gp, 500 sp, 1,400 in various pieces of jewelry, a viper’s fang talisman, a set of bracers of armor type II, a mithral scroll tube worth 500 gp that contains a scroll of mind blank, and a belt of regeneration.
The ceiling of this oubliette lies a staggering 200 feet overhead. There doesn't seem to be any way out, but a thorough search of the walls reveals a cleverly hidden secret door in the north wall, 20 feet from the ceiling.
The door opens into an adjoining chamber. The air in this chamber is humid and fetid. A colossal, six-foot tall crystal, flickering with blood-tinged light, thrums from atop a thirty-foot pedestal of dark stone and rusted iron. Its vibrations make limbs leaden and the air thick. Surrounding the crystal are four thirty-foot-tall metal poles that appear to siphon the crystal’s light into the ground. The chamber has no ceiling, instead rising to a height of a few hundred feet before opening into the night. A low-hanging moon, much too large in the sky, illuminates the shaft with its light.
You only have a few moments to take it all in before a human-sized spindly demon with a skeletal appearance and tattered wings steps towards you. It speaks in a sonorous voice. "This is a restricted area. Please return to the oubliette behind you until you expire and your souls can be used to feed your betters."
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To add to Briar's comment, Belmont had reloaded his pistols and tossed the Belt of Regeneration to her whilst he himself raises his pistols. He pulls back the hammers and stares down the monster with a raised eyebrow.
"And get a face full of black-powder." he added. He already planned to stuff some jewellery into his bag. He was also in a lucky mood once again. He could feel the demonic blood in him preparing for violence.
"Well! What'cha say bucko?! Are you feeling lucky?!" he grinned wickedly.
"I do not need luck when I have the might of the Abyss on my side," the demon proclaims, brandishing its claws.
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"Sounds like your scared." taunted Belmont, he felt the grin turn into a wicked and devilish smile. "Abyss Shmyss! Let's dance ugly!"
With those remarks, he raises his pistols and opens fire on the demon, preparing to run to cover whilst the others would undoubtedly try and rip and tear into this monster.
One of Belmont's bullets finds its mark, while the other ricochets off the demon's hard carapace. Despite the wound, the fiend holds its ground, casting a powerful summoning spell. With a puff of foul smoke, a looming demon appears behind you, sporting enormous pincers and a pair of smaller humanoid arms sprouting from its chest. The summoned demon bashes Belmont with its pincer but fails to grab a hold of him.
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Knowing the speed of her companions is the most practical path to victory, Pen spins her magical staff in a complicated pattern and announces in arcane hexes that make it so.
As the empowerment settles, she then summons a simple shield of force.
Visna stares at the spindly gaoler, and a feral smile creeps along her face as she carves a baleful rune next to the bite of her axe. "Briar, would you tend to the lesser beast? I will hold off its master until you are ready to join me."
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Briar turns to see the pincered beast attacking Belmont and smiles. "Gladly, Axe Maiden."
Briar whirls on the summoned demon, snagging it with her jaws and locking onto it's neck with an adamantine grip.
Success: The target is unaffected.
Failure: The target is dazed and can barely vocalize. It's stunned 1 and its speech is raspy and hard to understand. It must succeed at a DC 11 flat check to use linguistic actions or supply verbal spellcasting components until the end of its next turn.
Critical: Failure As failure, but the creature is stunned 3 instead of stunned 1.
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The smack causes Belmont to drop his dueling pistol. However, the same dueling pistol returns to the bandolier and the sound of the hammer being pulled back is heard.
Although his head is ringing with pain, Belmont carries on. With the summoned demon being distracted (And being eaten) by Briar, he draws out his handheld crossbow, raises it to the summoned demon's master and pulls the trigger.
Visna hurls her axe, carried along by its haft as she streaks towards the foul demon gaoler. Its claws and chitin keep her axe from biting home, so she prepares her defenses until Briar can stand at her side.
Both Belmont and Visna miss the spindly demon. Briar grabs the summoned demon by the throat, clamping down hard and worrying the fiend.
The katpaskir maintains its summon, and the pincered demon snaps back at Briar. It hits but struggles to maintain its hold on her. The katpaskir then rips at Visna with its claws and talons.
Pen point her staff at the katpaskir and sends a ray of Wrong green that tears across its flesh, turning a line of a half foot of flesh to nothing but ash.
The practical Pen might be a little angry at the use of its claws and talons across her companion's body.
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Athletics to grapple a creature you already have grabbed or restrained with the following additional effects.
Critical Success: The target is clumsy 2 until the end of its next turn and then is clumsy 1 for 1 minute.
Success: The target is clumsy 1 until the end of its next turn.
Briar topples the creature as it flails in attempts to grab at her flesh pinning the demon despite the size difference between them. Showing that she's the queen in this contest of strength she jerks her head to the side then back, causing an unsettling crack in the demon's own carapace covered neck. Her acidic saliva bites deep into the wound as she thrashes and tears the wound further.
Visna's blade flies and flashes, but the demon is one step ahead of her, taking only a single solid blow that cracks its carapace. Yet the hulking huscarl bears fortune of her own, the demon's blades turning at the last instant to leave her nearly unmarred in return.
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Belmont blinked then frowned.
Maybe he was more concussed than he realised.
He dropped his hand crossbow, the pistol disappearing then reappearing back into his Bandolier before he draws out his duelling pistol and raised it towards the winged demon once more.
With both Clan Pistol and Dueling Pistol in hand, he opens fire once again!
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The katpaskir resists Pen's distingrate spell, but Visna manages to snag it with one of her axes and Belmont shoots it twice. Meanwhile, Briar rips into the prone glabrezu, scoring a critical hit but failing to follow up o on it.
The winged demon maintains the summon, allowing the glabrezu to ineffectually attack Briar from its disadvantageous position. The katpaskir itself continues to slash at Visna. delivering a critical hit!
Visna's axe whistles past the katpaskir as it concentrates on the other demon and she snarls in frustration at least as much as pain when its claws puncture Crowstarver.
Multiple runes of frigid blue rotate around Pen's hands, tightly held around her ornate staff, as she chants loud and clear, before a blue-white ray of freezing air and sleet erupts toward the demon.
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Briar snarls through her teeth a nearly incomprehensible sentence. "G'mma mmm mivv ah aah fuh."
So she works at cracking through the Glabrezu's chitinous hide with more fury.
There is a final snap as her teeth break through something very important to the demon once again and it stops struggling. Relinquishing her death grip on her foe she turns to the one that summoned it and lunges across the battlefield.
Briarthron finishes off the summoned demon, which dissolves into foul-smelling mist. She charges the four-armed fiend, which sidesteps her attack, but Pen blasts it with a draining polar ray and Visna delivers another brutal chop with her axes. The demon makes a *tsk* noise and takes a step back, raising its four hands.
"You are more formidable than I had anticipated. I propose a truce. You are here for the Prince of Wolves, yes? I will tell you about his lair and those that defend it in exchange for my continued existence."
When it becomes clear that you have no intentions to negotiate, the demon resumes its attack. Fortunately, it isn't long before you are standing over its bloodied body!
Once you emerge from the oubliette, you get your first view of the Prince of Wolves' lair—a rocky, barren isle about two miles across. The aboveground portion of the oubliette is little more than a metallic rim around a hole in the ground, located atop a large promontory with a commanding view of the surrounding isle and the dark waters of the Abyssal sea all around. Hordes of demons of all shapes and sizes teem around the isle. It would be a grueling slog to try to fight your way past all of them.
This might be a good time to contact Usilket of the Pactmasters as All-Seeing Hajeck suggested to ask for reinforcements.
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Briarthorn looks over the teeming masses of demons and then to her companions.
"Looks like thing'ser coming to a head."
Pulling some herbal ointments from her pack she looks the others over, then also scrapes some fleshy demonic 'moss' off the nearby structure, beginning to work it into a poultice. "A tending of wounds while we call out to our allies perhaps?"
Visna smooths away the last of the tiny maggotmarks from Pentella's limbs with a soothing smile.
You retrieve the item that Usilket gave you when you forged the alliance with the Pactmastrs: a witchwyrd beacon. Made of djezet, orichalcum, and luminous, resonant crystal, the witchwyrd beacon looks like a series of concentric rings mounted on rods that allow the rings to rotate independently of each other. You place it on the ground and adjust its rings to link it to your location.
After several minutes, the rings begin to spin and rotate at a rapid speed, then Usilket appears in a flash of light. The witchwyrd spreads their four arms wide in greeting. "Hello, friends. We are eager to assist you. Those who you helped in Kho now come to return the favor."
There are more and more flashes of light as forces from the various factions you supported earlier teleport into the Abyss to fight by your side! Hadis, derhiis, morlocks, and xorns appear in rapid succession, followed by the immense form of the radiant warden, its gleaming hammers raised high!
"We will move at your command," Usilket says proudly.
"Then on, friends, on! Today we fight not for treasure or even glory, but to ward our homes and hearthfriends. We shall not let this Prince of Wolves play his games and lurk like a jackal outside the warmth of our fires. We go now to send this cur whimpering back to the Abyss that spawned him."
And so, the battle is joined!
The world is a riot of screams and sulfur, a percussive hellscape that hammers against your very bones as you run across the barren isle. Before you, a ruined keep of dark, weathered stone stands on cliffs at
the edge of a night-shrouded sea. From its center, a ray of shadowy radiance coils up from the broken top of a circular tower. The moon overhead illuminates the area but casts little light over the churning ocean. Waves roar ashore, sending spray high into the hot, damp breeze. The wind carries the scent of brine and death.
Between you and the keep churns the horde: a living tide of chitin, frothing mouths, and lashing, barbed tails. Dretches bubble up from cracks, their stench a physical assault. Vrocks shriek overhead, their feathers shedding despair. The path is not clear. It must be cut.
But you are not cutting it alone.
To your left, a phalanx of Katapeshi soldiers advances with mechanical precision. Their burnished helms and mirror-bright scimitars flash in the hell-light, a stark contrast to the organic horror they face. Between their ranks stride unflinching stone constructs, their heavy fists rising and falling in rhythmic, crushing arcs, each impact a dull thud that sends demonic ichor spraying across the pale rock.
"Hold the line!" a Katapeshi captain bellows, her voice cutting through the din. The line holds, a wall of discipline against the frenzied surge.
From the fractured caves to your right come your stranger allies. The hadis, wiry and fierce, move like dust-devils, their curved blades finding the gaps in demon-hide with unnerving accuracy. A trio of derhii, the great winged apes, beat their chests and answer the shrieks of vrocks with roars of primal challenge, leaping into the air to grapple with the flying horrors, tearing at wings with furious strength.
Beneath your very feet, the ground shifts. Morlocks, pallid and silent, erupt from hidden burrows to drag shrieking dretches down into the suffocating dark. And there, where the demonic press is thickest, a xorn surfaces. It ignores the slashing claws, its stony maw opening to bite not flesh, but the very weapons of the foe, consuming swords, shields, and minor demons with equal, grinding relish.
You are a dart shot through the chaos, using every opening this allied mosaic provides. You vault over the dissolving corpse of a quilled demon, sidestep a crater left by a xorn’s departure, and feel the wind of a derhii’s wingbeat as it batters a vrock from the sky. The air is a soup of blood-mist, ash, and the ozone crackle of magic. The roar of the battle begins to narrow, funneling into the thunder of your own pulse in your ears. The cliff face looms. The shattered gate of the keep yawns open like a dead mouth.
One final stretch. A horned, hulking hezrou turns, sensing your purposeful rush, but before it can charge, a volley of Katapeshi crossbow bolts buries themselves in its back. It stumbles, roars, and is swarmed by hadis aiming for its eyes.
You do not stop. You do not look back. You pour the last of your stamina into a final, desperate sprint across the last twenty yards of open, corpse-strewn ground. The sounds of the epic battle—the roars, the screams, the crashing stone, the triumphant cries of allies and the death-rattles of demons—all fade into a dull, distant thunder as you reach the Wolves' Den.
But even as you approach the arched gateway that leads into the seemingly ruined structure, and immense shadow blocks out the moonlight as a huge reptilian demon lumbers out to confront you. The fiend has a quadrupedal dinosaur’s lower body, a vaguely humanoid upper torso, and a draconic saurian head. A black crystal implanted in its brow resembles a wolf's head, and riding atop the fiend is the shadowy echo of the Prince of Wolves that you previously fought during the invasion of Harrowheart. The partially substantial foe sneers at you, even as a pair of huge, corpulent boar-headed demons flutter down from the ramparts to land beside his saurian mount.
"This ends here and now! We will take those Harrow cards from your cold, dead hands, and the Unmatched will finally reign supreme!"
Visna chuckles as she sees the binding on the greatest foe. "Tyrants and slavers hold the greatest folly. All chains rust in time; all crowns may be broken."
Streaking forward under Pentella's magical encouragement, Visna seizes the towering fiend, climbing up its scaly frame enough to reach the crystal implant and tears it free!
Despite fear entering Pen's heart, she focuses her magic on enchanting her companions with speed. "The gem in his brow is controlling him." she calls out, careful to keep the quiver from her voice.
[ooc]Haste on all of them.[/b]"
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Belmont was not a soldier.
He did not face battle or violence on a grand scale. Running a gauntlet of what felt like running through the circles of Abyss. As they reached the final precipice, the stress begins to show on Belmont's face through hot tears and spittle on his mouth. He huffs, he puffs and he grits his teeth.
"I'm just getting started." he whispered shakily, still gripping his pistols tightly as he readied himself for another fight to the death with an enemy that wanted them dead once more. "Alright! C'mon then you ugly buck!" With shakey words accompanying with shakey hands, Belmont raised his two pistols and begins to open fire.
Of course; he wasn't aiming willy nilly. He aimed for the one thing that could potentially be a target. That glowing gem of a target.