Situation Report Nineteen
General Summary
With the elemental banished, our next steps are becoming limited to a few final passages in the cisterns. We congregate in front of a door set with a new lock that seems out of place, and Cherry hears a faint sound of picks clinking on stone when she puts her ear to the door. Sylke attempts to walk quietly down the corridor with a sleep spell prepared, but is overheard by a pair of guards in the room some sixty feet distant. Her spell causes one of the two to slide to the floor asleep, but the other moves into the corridor to investigate the noise.
"Shit", I think and draw a bead on them from a vantage point up the stairs. "This is a tricky shot. Don't fuck it up Cran." The arrow flies true, sticking him in the ribs and spinning him around. He starts to shout and the fight begins.
"Wha?" I splutter as Ugnan teleports me right behind the injured guard, who slashes ineffectually at Sylke. Despite juggling my heartbow in order to drag Tarnak's axe out of the sheath, I land a crunching blow that shatters his arm and he drops. A coldly impassive Sylke slashes the throat of the sleeping guard and we move up to see what is being mined.
The smooth rock and sand of the floor crunch softly underfoot as we step down into a small cavern. Two impressive stalagmites rise up to a height of almost 20 feet or so to almost touch the ceiling. A small spring rises out of the ground opposite you and a narrow stream runs swiftly away into the darkness through a low opening in the rough crystaline rock wall. A wider tunnel leads southwards. As Cherry is investigating a bucket of new mining tools, a band of guards and a red-robed cultist emerges from the tunnel. I surprise the first with an axe to his shoulder, before attempting to block access to the rest of the enemy.
One of the guards runs around me and leaps to attack Sylke, and another bastard attacking me slips a Kynak into my side. "That's the last thing you'll do you miserable roach." The wound sends black spots dancing in my peripheral vision and causes me to stagger sideways, where all I can do is parry his slashing Kynak for a few seconds. I feint behind my foe and dodge towards the cowled spellcaster. "Try a spell now", I scream as my axe takes his hand off at the wrist. His eyes roll back in his head as he collapses face-first to the sand.
Cherry's arrow hits another guard in the eye with an incredible shot. His arm raises slowly to pull at the arrow sticking from his head before his nervous system catches up with reality and he collapses.
"That's got to hurt", I chuckle as I prowl over to dispatch one of the remaining two cultists. Cherry's arrow beats me to one of the final kills, a fraction of a second before my axe takes out the final foe.
We attempt to question the cowled enemy with the missing hand. He is rapidly bleeding out as he clutches his wrist-stump. The only useful piece of information we gather is that, "the Minister is currently at the Bank". His eyes plead with us to save him, but we're not in the mood to assist cultists who capture children and then let them starve to death. As his eyes flutter closed for the last time, I retrieve his severed hand from a cooling slick of blood and stick is upright in the sand before the corpse, middle-finger raised as a challenge to other cultists in the caverns. "Very macabre Cran", I reflect as we continue our exploration.
Ugnan's Death is Overstated
We sneak down a passage towards the mining operation, where Sylke has a vision of a giant skeletal figure with dagger-sized talons. As we near the large cave Sylke and Cherry quietly scan a scene of an excavation of a gargantuan skeletal dragon! Behind the dig-works they also spot four cultists and a second cowled figure. We make preparations to surprise them from two vantage points. "Why do I always volunteer for the dirty jobs?", I muse as I wade quietly through brassica water to my ambush spot. Not quietly enough, though, as one of them raises the alarm just as my arrow strikes the cowled cultist spell-caster under the ribs and he slides to the sand.
Ugnan loses concentration with his prepared spell, but, Cherry sticks another with a fine shot and Sylke hits one with a sling bullet that glances of his head.
Mayhem ensues as the cowled leader is being dragged away by a cultist. Another one hits me with a weak glancing blow from a thrown Kynak and, to my right, others close in on Sylke. I engage the Kynak-thrower but miss. Sylke misses her foe with an attempted sweep.
My axe destroys the weapon-arm of my foe as I jog past him to approach the badly wounded cowled figure. Sylke gets there first and, in a move that would impress even Sharna, after running to the guard, undertakes a masterful sweep, to leave the lunk prone on his back. That was a faintly farcical sight as the petite Erlini manhandled the burly cultist to the floor with apparent ease. [an open ended 98 and 92 followed by 98 critical!]
Things are getting out of control with our group separated – this is all my fault. I'm meant to be the martial expert in our crew.
Still separated from the others, I cut one across the abdomen and feel the axe connect with his spine on the way out the other side. Organs and viscera splatter to the sand as he falls to his knees before toppling on to his side. "Another one down", I think grimly as I run towards Cherry. She is isolated and being hounded by a much larger man. She receives a slash to her hip, screeches, but grimly keeps fighting. I run to help her and stun her assailant, but she looks badly injured.
And suddenly the dynamics of the scrap do an about-face. I hear a sickening scream from Ugnan, "He's had my leg off", and can only watch as he collapses to the sand, blood spraying from his thigh stump. His leg lies in the sand next to him, but his final cryptic words before he passes out are, "Just push the damned leg into the stump. I'll do the rest"… Sylke tries to battle past her assailant as I run to assist, but I can't focus as both Sylke and Cherry are in dire straits. "Finish the assailants fast Cran, or you won't have any friends left", I reprimand myself as I rush to help Sylke. Sylke conducts another impressive sweep but for minimal damage before I finish off her attacker.
Cherry is across the cave weakly defending herself against the last guard. I run to help and he finally goes down, closely followed by a heavily bleeding Cherry. Sylke and I scrabble furiously in Ugnan's pack, and fortunately the aging healer has labeled his herbs thoroughly and we are able to stabilise Cherry.
Miraculously, when we push the gory limb into the mess of Ugnan's thigh stump, the leg begins to knit to the stump before our eyes and his bleeding also stabilises to a trickle. Ugnan's healing powers are growing by the day – I've never seen anything like it in all my time campaigning.
Despite my barked orders to move the wounded out to the relative safety of our ship, Sylke searches the final cavern and finds a source of the rare material used in keeping Eidolon afloat.
We manage to carry and drag Ugnan, Cherry and the wounded and hog-tied cowled figure from the cisterns and exit the site. I stand guard over our unconscious friends while Sylke runs for help. My gallows humour returns as I watch Sylke jog off. "Well, that's a first Cran. Sylke. Running!" Our Elgata benefactor sends three carriages for us and we finally get Ugnan and Cherry to our ship.
Cherry soon comes round and starts on the road to recovery, but incredibly, Ugnan fully heals in four days. The healers that tended to him did an amazing job, but the man has the constitution of a polar bear. A jaunty, "Hey, Cherry, you've gained some respectable scars to tell your grand-kids about", is met with a flat-eyed stare. We need to keep an eye on Cherry, she's in a right fug after that skirmish.
While recuperating we question the cowled figure, a shady Thayan by the name of Thantos Than. He joined the cult after meeting a masked man named 'The Minister' and is one of three group leaders within the cult of the Iron Bell. The Thayan was in charge of mining; another group is responsible for recruitment; and a final section is in charge of the ceremonies dedicated to the worship of Bath 'Tuth (a demon). He also confirms that the cult was founded by Larkrise and Sunset, but is growing in strength with The Minister, a highly-recognisable Sel-kai figure, at the helm.
Bath 'Tuth is still at large in the cisterns somewhere and needs to be dealt with. And who is this Minister figure?
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