Amara

WAVE TRIAL IN PROGRESS

<8 minutes remain>

Three of the Scorpirex thundered towards them from the hole they’d cleaved into the church entrance.

Lokar’s stealth field had dispersed with the melee now truly beginning in earnest. Amara stood poised, trying to track the swift movements of the monsters who were leaping over their dead comrade and aiming their barbed stingers at her face – like fingers dripping with poison just for her.

Before she fired another flaming missile, she looked behind and nodded once to the silent Kimon, who had been preoccupied with a kind of meditation since the combat had begun.

At her command, he craned his neck, focused, and slammed his staff into the bronze dais where they would make their stand against the horde.

“Ark’Lu Mikolash!”

In a flash of brilliant light, Kimon’s staff crackled with electrical energy, and when he drove it into the floor it created a shockwave that threw the approaching Scorpirex back, giving the rest of them ample time to strike.

“Aim for the vanguard!” Mendax shouted, readying his greataxe.

Lokar’s arrows found their marks in the instant he loosed them from his shortbow – embedding themselves in the exposed flesh of a Scorpirex’s neck. Amara watched, incredulous, as the creature dropped into a death spasm from the single puncture wound.

CRITICAL STRIKE: Weakness exposed

DMG: x2

Scorpirex HP: 22/35

“Shoot their necks if it please you, my Lady! Let your flaming retribution fly!”

Amara wasted no time in rebuking him for presuming to command her – instead she loosed another fireball and singed the rest of the beast’s flesh from its bones.

GLANCE: 20/40

EXP: +20

She backed up warily as the final Scorpirex surged forwards, directing its angular head at her jugular, opening its teeth in a razor smile…

…Before Mendax tore right through its skull.

Amara watched with incredulous eyes as the creature’s eviscerated head flew through the air of the church and smashed harmlessly against a stain glass window, coating the mosaic depiction there in the black blood of its host.

She looked at the shredded remains of the headless beast swaying before them, its claws still thrashing at the air before them, doing nothing but grasping at Kimon’s unrelenting field of lightning that surrounded them. Then, with a single stroke, Mendax brought his greataxe down to finish the beast.

As he did so, its pincer struck out in a death spasm, catching the back of his leg.

“ARGH!”

He spun to catch the appendage and rip it from its host, clutching his leg in the aftermath. But the damage had been done. Even with Amara’s low appraisal, she could see it.

HP: -12

HP: 38

POIS: 2pts/10 secs

“Brother!”

“I’m fine, Lokar,” he growled back over the din of the next approaching wave of claws and teeth that had just broken through the hole in the doorway.

“Mendax,” Kimon whispered, sweating under the strain of keeping up his shield. “We must-“

“I’m fine!” Mendax roared, bringing his hand up again to clutch the stem of his weapon. “Ready yourselves! Here they come again!”

Amara loosed another fireball at the approaching Scorpirex horde – managing to pin down one who fell before he reached their group. Before she could claim her kill, however, another simply leaped over his companion and threw itself straight at Kimon.

“From above!”

Lokar’s arrows managed to catch the predator, but not before his claws cleared the shield and raked across Kimon’s head, leaving a stain of three thick gashes across his brow.

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HP: -15

He screamed, staggered back, and in Amara’s rage she readied her last fireball to scorch the beast.

“NO!” Mendax roared. “This one’s MINE.”

<7 minutes>

His greataxe soared through the air and split the beast’s stomach clean open – dripping its entrails across the bronze obelisk that stood at the center of their formation. The beast fell at Mendax’s legs, and Amara loosed her final bolt at the downed creature who was just recovering on the floor below them.

GLANCE: 10/40

EXP: +10

Amara had no time to consider the diminishing experience she was already receiving. Instead, she retreated back to Kimon, noticing the shield around them beginning to wither as three more Scorpirex now tore their way through the folds of lightning the old sage had wrapped around them.

“I…I live,” he wheezed.

Amara saw Mendax try and help him to his feet, but the old Gnoll simply brushed his brother off.

“I LIVE!”

He slammed his staff into the ground again and brought the Aura of Lightning back to full strength, repelling the horde back with his dwindling ounces of power.

Mendax smiled to see his Brother so animated. With a mad rush of fervent fury that was increasing by the second, he turned and crushed another straggling Scorpirex under the weight of his weapon, and let Lokar finish it off by putting one arrow between its eyes.

“Who are we, Brothers?” he yelled. “The servants of the Ty’Kella! The Chosen of the Shifting Sands!”

They roared their assent, and even Amara had to admit that she was taken up by the mad thrill of the combat. The rush of the fight was seizing her like a songbird buried deep in her busom bursting into vivid, flaming life. Mendax swung his bloodied axe around, letting it dash the brains of any Scorpriex in his wake, Lokar shot arrow after arrow into the massing horde, and Kimon stood over them all, their sentinel, staring back at the enemy with the pure focus of a trained Glancer.

<5 minutes>

Amara took one look at the Scorpirex bearing its pincer at her and launched her final fireball, watching it blaze through the dark air and burn the beast’s tail clean off. With that, all it took was a single strike from Mendax’s axe to finish it for good.

“Not bad,” Mendax huffed beside her. “For a rookie Glancer. You’ve used up all your power now though, eh?”

He braced his shoulder to bash against another approaching predator and pinned it to the ground, slicing through its neck with a roar of primal rage.

“That’s the problem with you Glancers!” he bellowed, covered in blood and darkly-coated viscera. “When your spent, you got nothin’ to work with!”

“L-l-look out!”

Lokar had just turned to witness his Brother’s bravado when he saw a hard-headed Scorpirex had managed to break through the reinforced window to their left. Mendax turned – too late – the beast was upon him before he could ready his hefty blade.

Or, it would have been, if a fireball didn’t throw it right back out the window it stormed in through.

Mendax turned to see Amara smiling up at him as Lokar sent to more arrows to pierce the throat of another approaching beast.

“I’m not quite spent just yet,” she told the hulking Gnoll.

“How?” he demanded. “Is the Lightbringer so easily able to cheat the system?”

She grabbed his grizzled arm and pressed down just as Kimon had done to her, and with her other hand she readied her next attack:

EXP: 250/500

LEVEL UP

LVL: 3

HP: 10/10

GLANCE: 40/40

SKILL POINTS AVAILABLE: 1

ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 4

She had little time to care about anything other than her Glance energies being filled again. This trial had come at exactly the right time.

And the once sulking Mendax smiled to know this, too.

“Not just some jumped up Surfacer kid then?” he snarled. “Good. Because we aren’t out of this yet.”

<4 minutes>

Mendax turned to his brother as another Scorpirex fell beneath a hail of arrows and fire. Then, as if time slowed to a crawl, Amara heard his snarl of triumph instantly fade away.

“Brother?”

She turned to bare witness to his horror – there was Kimon, on his knees, dark crimson blood streaming down his nostrils.

“Kimon!” Amara wailed.

She paid for her momentary lapse in concentration in full: the seeking stinger of a Scorpirex found her arm and she shrieked in agony – feeling its corrupting venom pump into her bloodstream.

HP: -7

POIS: 2pts/10 secs

HP: 3

She looked with stark realization at the words. In her flurry of fireballs, she had neglected her HP.

And it was far lower than even the weakest gnoll among them.

“H…” she sputtered. “Hel-“

Amara! Her mother called out in her mind.

HP -2

HP: 1

She felt her body give way, and in the next blink of her eyes the shadow of death would have taken her, were it not for the energized claw of Kimon grabbing her chest and pouring his Glance into her:

“Let the Lightbringer rise!”

Healing Wind

HP +10/sec

He kept his fist clenched on her chest to wait out the poison, his eyes starting to weep blood with the sheer concentrated effort maintaining both her life and their shield was taking from him.

Meanwhile, Mendax and Lokar fought back-to-back within the orb of lightning, stemming the continuous tide of monsters.

<3 minutes>

“No more!” Amara called out to the old Gnoll. “Don’t spend yourself!”

He removed his hand and looked at her with sad, reddened eyes, full of burdens she could only dream of. Ghosts swam in there that he had not revealed to her, or to his brothers.

“These old bones…still have…strength in them…yet!”

She helped him to his feet, steadying him and helping him keep his staff aloft.

“Ok, ok, but just a little longer!” she cried, aiming another fireball with her free hand. “Just a few more minutes!”

Behind them she could already hear the door creak open, but for Kimon, tired and heaving, only the sound of his Lightbringer was important. That was all he focused on, now.

“Just…a few more…” he gasped through his bloodied mouth. “Just…a little…for the future…”

----------------------------------------

You watch your siblings rip and tear at the big building the old masters of this place once knelt in, making strange noises and screaming names you did not understand.

You stare down at your own flashy claws, seeing the reflection of your vicious face and protruding teeth staring back at you.

You feel a pang of sympathy for the young ones as you hear them die, one by one, summoned to this slaughterhouse.

Only yesterday, this city had been a playground for the children.

Now, their screams haunt your mind as you charge forward, relentless, knowing your life is forfeit and yet having no power to change anything at all.

Ye want power, buddy?

You stop. That whisper is new. Not like the roars of your kind, or the timid whimpers of the children you were caring for at the nest. It is something different, and you feel the imperious command in its question as it comes again, with force:

Vengeance, yeah? Sound good?

You stretch your mouth in an agonized attempt to answer, but all you can do is caw to the dark heavens above, limited by the restraints of your flesh.

Ye wanna see yer enemies die?

Power…vengeance…die…yes, you know those words. You know you like the sound of them.

Then open up, the whisperer says. Let me in, and I'll give you yer victory.

Your pupils dilate and you rise on your hind legs, feeling your scales begin to snap apart, knowing your body is changing…growing…

Kill the old one first, the voice whispers before your mind goes blank. Then eat that red bitch's heart.