A lovely Jaunt through the woods

As we stand outside the forest breaking down our camp it starts to rain. With an atmosphere such as this we are all on alert, and with an enemy that has clearly stated intent there is no thought of holding back. We need to go find out what, or who, is causing this blight, and stop it if we can. With shoulders determinedly set, and no where to go but in, we start forward. Melfina taking the front with spike. Marda flanks to her left, and I flank to the left with Rorin and Aurane watching our backs. With our foes knowing we are here, we do not try to hide our presence as we follow the corruption into the trees.
As we walk into thicker and thicker trees, I can feel my body get ready for battle. When we went to fight the Hydra, it was different. We knew, mostly, what we were going to fight. We had a road we walked to get there, and knew what our opponent was going to be. Now, we walk in ready to fight, but not knowing what we should be fighting. A veritable maelstrom of emotions and feeling are crashing over me again. Something I haven't felt since in the army. I can feel the Heat building up in my chest, the anger and fire mixing together. The Storm of spasms that take hold of the limbs as adrenaline starts to pump, hopefully to fuel the lightning quick reflexes. The cold mental state coming in, which allows for the torrent of information coming in to be sifted through. It allows for fluid thoughts and tactics in the midst of chaos. The Icy fear is also there, in the pit. Fear that you may be way over your head. You or your friends may not come back.
Then the storm breaks. The first enemy appears. A hulking figure lets out a challenging roar. The undead owlbear, a fearsome creature in life, if even worse in undeath. The gruesome features from last night have not gotten better with the light, and killing this monstrosity is probably just a kindness to nature at this point. Melfina makes everyone know that it is there as we ready ourselves.
Calling for the divine energy from nature itself, I start to infuse my body to move like the wind.
Aurane tells us that something is closer to us, another mound similar to what had swallowed Rorin weeks before. Calling upon his divine power, his spiritual weapon appears near us. Rorin, not needing any divine spells, darts forward, bounding over small trunks and rocks that dot the forest floor. Landing with a mighty over head swing at the carnivorous mound, he lays into the thing with his staff and feet, stomping on it. I can't tell from this range if he is actually hurting it, but I'm sure he remembers what it felt like to be inside.
I finish my incantation and I feel like I can move faster, able to sway away from weapon blows. Wanting to keep the owlbear off of Rorin, I try to distract it. Gathering more energy in my metal arm, I stretch it out and fire off two bolts towards the beast. One goes wide, but I hit with the other, carving a grove out of the flesh. It clearly didn't like being it, as with another defiant roar the figure starts forward. Running right at us, ignoring the mound and Rorin. The Dwarf gets a backhand swipe into it was it passes his fight. Marda starts forward with her swords behind her, passing Melfina as she sends a bolt of radiant energy from her hands. The bolt hits the owlbear turning its head away from Marda who puts her swords parallel to the ground, and two slices are gouged into the side of the large beast as it passes. At the end of the cuts the blades come together, and a large strip of flesh falls, dangling from one side. Ichor cascades out, rotten muscles and bones exposed. Trying for a third cut before it gets fully past, she tries to turn her momentum, but she catches her hooked blade on a vine which trips her up. Tumbling towards the mound Rorin is fighting, she is able to dig the opposite blade into the ground, popping her up to stand next to Rorin. I'm not sure if the third cut was needed, as the undead entity falls to the side mid charge, seemingly defeated. Melfina's spiritual scythe appears behind the mound, and cuts into the plantlike monster. Coming out of the rainy mist, The Wraith raises its horrible claws, and tear into the mound, removing vines and dirt from around it. With a retaliatory swipe, it hits both Rorin and Marda, and draws them towards it. Rorin manages to wriggle free, but Marda is pulled in. As she is engulfed Rorin practically goes berserk, Slamming down with his staff, kicking and punching and grabbing the thing with his bare hands. Muscles bulging with spittle and all manner of languages flowing from his mouth, he rips the thing open, exposing Marda covered in mud and dirt. With a bemused glance at Melfina, I walk forward and decapitate the fallen owlbear, just in case.
A cut burns into my back from an unknown source. I swing my axe as I spin, and make sure that it an opponent before my blow lands. The weretiger stands there behind me, claws out. My axe makes contact, and I can fell it sink in, but not nearly as far as it should. The moss and mushrooms I I could barely see before were very clear now, growing out of the beings body. With the knowledge that this must be something magical I need to be more tactical. With a quick word, I take the time to close my wounds and ready myself for another strike. While Marda and Rorin get closer, the new target moves away from me, faster than I had anticipated, and I can't hit them. Now that it farther away, I can see an odd detail that the hands are backwards, the palms facing outwards. I don't think that this is a weretiger.
Both Aurane and Melfina cast spells at the creature, not affecting it, and I try to magically trace it, but the spells seems to slide right off the thing. In the process of running the creature down, Rorin suddenly veers into the clerics, and tries to hit them a couple of times, even attempting a poorly aimed kick, which lands him flat on his back. Marda has been trying to chase down the dastardly fiend, but with it moving so fast, and her shorter legs it isn't going to happen. I even try to throw my hand axes, but I may be a bit out of practice with them, as they hit handle first, not blade.
With Rorin on his back, and the clerics' attention back on it, the creature tries to decide what to do, and that's when the wraith comes back to play. With a cataclysmic swipe of claws from behind, the wraith staggers the foe. Now, badly outnumbered, and with something that can badly hurt it, our foe dissapears. With all of us holding our breath, and trying to track an invisible, magically resistant foe, it apparently has left us.
With Rorin still frothing a bit at the mouth, I sit on him until he calms down a bit. Being unable to track our target, and not sure where to start looking in all this detritus around us, I know finding this assailant would be difficult. Melfina, on the other hand, has something else on her mind. While I am still scanning the surroundings, she is looking at the ground near the fight. Standing up, she walks over to me, and tells me to hold up my axe. In doing so I see the blood still on the blade, and she is able to collect enough that she quickly steps away. Calling out to her god, Her eyes turn Black, and she points without looking. Deeper in. She tells us the creature is moving quickly, going towards the heart of the forest. Well. At least we know it will be there too. I grab my thrown axes, and we start again.
While I try to guide them through as best as I can, Melfina makes sure our path remains true. The Ladies discuss what we may have fought, and after consulting a small book, decide it was probably a Raksasha. Fiendish creature, Magically resistant, and likes to Con people. That would explain what happened to Rorin, who is currently having trouble navigating through a particularly muddy patch.
After an hour, I am winded, as are the others. Running through the forest was never my favorite past time, but I certainly did a lot of it when I was younger. After all these years, I can still remember the tricks, but getting them done is different. With the last moments of her ability fading, Melfina stops, and closes her eyes. She says she can see the Raksashas vision, that it is going into a dense fog cloud in the center of the forest. At least we know where it is going.
We continue on until we estimate to be about 30 minutes from the center, and decide to take a break. Wanting to be reasonably refreshed before fighting something potentially much larger than we thought, we find a nice patch of ground to sit. Since we were still in a rather hostile area, we were still on edge, and thankfully able to spot the strangling vines before they caught us. The vines themselves were moving quickly, for vines anyway. Considering that a mound of dirt and grass had tried to kill us earlier, a killer vine wasn't very surprising at the moment.
Radiant energy flies off into the distance a Melfina fires wide. With undead spirits flitting around her she starts in on the vine near her. Rorin and I lay into the other vine near us, trying to cut it out of the tree it is in. Hacking away with her hooked swords, Marda seems to be doing the best, getting some solid hits in. These vies are rather more resilient than I would have thought. As our vine picks me up, I get tired of fooling around with it, and wrap my axe around it, and simply pull. With a maneuver I would normally use to trip someone on the ground, I rip the vine out of the tree to die. Walking over to the other one, I do the same. Instead of trying to cut it off, we should have just pulled it out. Lessons learned for next time.
With nothing attacking us at the moment, and everyone a bit tired, we sit again, keeping an eye out for more trouble, and try to prepare ourselves for whatever may be coming next inside that fog. Something tells me it won't be fun.