Ch.36
With just a glance between me and Chris, we moved in opposite directions, FAST!
I activated a glyph of Air, giving both of us +10’ move and +1d6 lightning damage to attacks and Combat Arts.
In a flash, I was around the side of the pack of ghouls, and with zero hesitation I fired off an Elemental Spear, juicing it once for 7d6 base damage, +3d6 from the glyph and Elemental Flux, +7 for Djinni Style and +2 for Discipline Focus: Fo4E. 10d6+9 lightning damage, the entire length of their formation!
A 30’ long bolt of lightning, 5’ wide and high, carved itself through the ghouls. I made sure that the Necro Cowboy and his undead steed got hit by it, too!
I was more than a little surprised when I saw that it hadn’t put down any of the ghouls, like at all.
But external manifestations of supernatural energy aren’t supposed to work on Earth, yet... right?!
Well, that was what I had been told, but I’d noticed earlier that when I was fighting the vampires and then Bruno the half-Fey; they both exuded magical energy into the surrounding area. Sense Supernatural of course lets me see magical energy, and since I’d had it up this whole time, it was impossible not to see that energy trailing off of them like mist, saturating the surrounding area.
Plus, I’d been so mad when fighting Bruno, I’d completely forgotten about all of that and used a 5th Circle maneuver, one that was purely supernatural! According to Melnaria, it shouldn’t have worked... but somehow, it had! That meant that either she had lied or something else was going on here.
I didn’t think she had lied. She’d given me a lot of useful information and been patient and gracious towards me even when I’d acted like sort of an ass towards her. It wasn’t impossible that she’d lied, of course, but I just didn’t think it was in character for her OR at all likely.
I hadn’t been completely, 100% certain that what I just tried would work, but as far as testing a hypothesis goes, this felt like a success!
Now, I just need to figure out why an attack that should have hit for forty-five or so points of damage didn’t kill a bunch of things that shouldn’t have had more than thirty-ish hit points!
They had certainly not enjoyed it, though, that was for sure. That was important because it was obvious that the ability had injured them! After all, its not entirely impossiblt for magical enemies to have defenses to resist specific magical attacks, and I do focus on Lighning damage a lot more than other elements!
Meanwhile, Chris was getting his Sanguine Claim ability from his Crimson Count Harbinger Class active on the ghouls and the Necro Cowboy, too. It was essentially blood magic, and it was pretty strong. It let him draw Vitae from anyone he marked, and he marked three of them this round. Drawing Vitae damaged the Claimed opponent, and let him heal himself... every round, for the cost of a move action.
At the same time, he’d just fired off three rays of fire, with a little extra lightning kicker from my glyph, and was setting his stance for when they closed the gap.
The ghouls had basically split into two groups, but both I and Chris had a huge advantage in speed and more than one kind of ranged attacks, so both of us essentially just kited them in circles, always paying attention that neither of us was in the other’s firing lanes.
Friendly fire is both dumb AN easily avoidable with only two people working on a team. Us hitting one another would be inexcusable and years of experience playing video games together made coordinating easier than it might have been, otherwise.
Then I charged into the middle of the ghouls, using all of my biggest Combat art Maneuvers, including the one that gave me +5’ reach for 3 rounds!
It was just a normal hit, if you call 8d6+30+3d6+7 normal! 80ish damage slammed into one of the ghouls I’d caught in my opening lightning bolts, and apparently the 120 or so points of damage from BOTH was more than it could handle!
I Cleaved into the uninjured ghoul next to it for about the same damage, hurting it but not putting it down, and then my Cleaving Finish left one of the ghasts looking pretty messed up.
Something strange is going on here! These look like basic ghouls; they shouldn’t be able to take this much damage!
I had stopped advancing at the maximum range of my strikes though, so the undead were all at least 10’ away from me... which meant that to hit me, they’d have to move through my threatened space - something that provokes attacks of opportunity.
The best way I can explain how that works is that it’s like trying to get close enough to punch a guy who’s trying to keep you away with a spear or a long stick... reach is the whole reason why spears are considered the kings of the medieval battlefield.
Oh, and I get FOURTEEN attacks of opportunity; the one that everyone gets, plus five more from my Dex Mod for Combat Reflexes, and plus seven more from Shield Check, then plus one more from my maneuver. that gave me Reach.
The ghouls started forward and I started throwing punches and kicks, laying into them for all I was worth.
Don’t get me wrong, I took a few hits. My AC totally outclassed their attack bonuses, but a Nat 20 is always a hit, and ghouls get three attacks per round. That’s where all of my DR comes in; in order for any of their REALLY nasty stuff to work, the stat drain, disease transferals, and so on... you know, all of the stuff that makes undead really scary; in order for them to work, they had to bypass my DR!
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A ghoul or a ghast’s claws or bite are magically sharp, but they don’t count as adamantine, so my full DR counted against them, leaving me at around a DR 21/adamantine versus their attacks. The highest base damage that a ghoul or a ghast can do is 1d8+5; so not even one of the ghoul’s critical hits, a doubling of their MAXIMUM damage, could even hurt me!
The ghouls probably wouldn’t have appreciated that if they’d known! The ghouls I had hit with my opening lightning bolt all went down from a single attack of opportunity. There were only five of them left from the group I hit initially when I entered melee.
Each of them got nailed with a +5 undead bane, Nemesis/evil punch or kick! Their ACs were in the range of 19 or 20 at a guess, but my attack bonus was +16 without the +5 from my mind gauntlets!
Basically, I could only miss because of the worst of bad luck.
About fifteen of the ghouls and ghasts had been directed towards me, and ten of them had gone after Chris. A quick glance told me that Chris was doing just fine; not that I expected anything less from him. He was almost as big a Rules Optimizer, aka Power Gamer, as I was.
I wasn’t familiar with every last interaction of what he was doing, because I frankly don’t like to play Wizardly types myself, whereas that was totally his thing!
He was basically tearing them apart, though. Even as I glanced over, one of them actually managed to get into melee range, and I watched as he performed a gorgeous iaijutsu draw cut maneuver with his enchanted Black Blade katana and nearly chopped the thing in half!
Only the ghast’s supernaturally tough spine kept it from being completely bisected!
It was something straight out of an anime, complete with a gleaming magical runic Black Blade covered in fire and lightning chopping undead minions to itty bitty pieces!
The Necro Cowboy actually tried to hit me with a Hold Person spell. Well, you can’t really avoid that kind of spell, but you DO get a save versus it. Good thing, too, because being paralyzed in the midst of a pack of undead? Not cool!
That’s what Hold Person does, of course. It freezes you in place, completely paralyzing you. Depending on the kind of caster you are, it's generally either a 2nd or 3rd level spell, which means that the save DC is 10 + spell level (2 or 3) + casting stat mod.
When playing L&L, that generally means a 15 or 16 DC for your save to resist it. My Will save was a +15 base and +1 from arcane defenses.
There’s almost always a chance that you’ll miss, unless the check is trivial. That means that the DC of the check is lower than your chance to make it. I had a +19 to my Will save, so as long as the DC is 19 or lower, I can’t miss!
The Necro Cowboy really didn’t appreciate it when his spell was completely ignored; well, that’s not true, really. I only ignored its effects.
I didn’t appreciate or ignore the fact that he had tried, though. Not at all! Sure, we were fighting his minions, but neither Chris nor I had attacked him, yet. This, on the other hand, could only be looked at as an attack on my person!
A REALLY lethal one, too! Potentially, at least. Paralyzing someone during a fight is a pretty severe attack, at least in MY mind!
A Qi-powered leap let me easily clear the few remaining undead and land next to Necro Cowboy; I uncorked on him with everything. I hit him with another Lightning Vortex, plus a red and gold 3-Ring Halo Strike.
It was my big gun; the biggest attack I had right now, and went off for about 115 points of damage... on an average hit! The huge explosion of Qi, Pneuma, and Psi was just as impressive this time as when I’d used it against Bruno!
Imagine my surprise when it didn’t put down the Necro Cowboy, either! Well, I guess that wouldn’t put me down right now, either, but it’s still surprising! Come to think of it, I hit Bruno for over 200 points of damage, too. Are things tougher over here than in my Dream?
That turned into an ah-ha moment for me when one of the ghouls that had taken a few hits from Chris keeled over a heartbeat later, without being touched again.
Undead don’t bleed out or die from accumulated damage after a while like living things do. You either do enough damage to put them down, or they just keep going!
That meant that it had just taken more damage from something!
I felt Skill checks going off in the back of my skull, finally giving me an answer to what the heck was going on!
Wait. No WAY! This son of a bitch is using a damage sharing Ritual! My Lore skills were certain that was what was going on.
In L&L, there’s a few enemy types that do stuff like this and necromancers that fight with packs of undead are one of them. To put it simply, any damage I did to the Necro Cowboy was divided between him and his undead minions, evenly. The reverse probably wasn’t true, though it could be!
It was based off of how swarms and hordes worked in the game. A horde of, say, spiders was nearly impossible to harm with single target attacks. But drop even a small AoE attack? They’re all dead!
A damage sharing Ritual did the same thing, but since each individual had a LOT more hit points to begin with, it was pretty terrifying if the pack was large enough!
So, if there are twenty-four minions and the Necro Cowboy, and you do 100 points of damage to one of them? All of them take four points! In big packs, with even minor AoE healing, it was a nightmare to beat if you didn’t know what was happening. They even shared healing, so even relatively small AoE heals could do a LOT of work!
Even 1 HP worth of healing to the entire group per round made a group like them really hard to kill without massive AoE damage!
They were probably so tough because he’d spent a LOT of time and effort buffing them in order to get their hit points as high as possible, so that they would be better damage sponges for him!
The Necro Cowboy had a look of supreme overconfidence; he probably thought it was something like self-assurance or confidence, but I knew better!
“You should have surrendered when you had the chance, peon! I am immortal! You cannot hope to win!” the Necro Cowboy gloated.
The sheer BALLS on this guy, huh? I had to give him points for it, if I hadn’t pulled off a decently high combination of Lore (Religion) and Spellcraft checks, I never would have figured out what was going on. His bluff might have worked, then!
I snorted. “Please, bitch!” He looked VERY offended! “You're doing damage sharing with your little undead minions. It’s a cool trick, but we’ve already carved down over half of them! Just be patient for twenty or thirty more seconds, buddy. Your turn is incoming!”
To say that it looked like he didn’t appreciate either my comment OR the fact that I knew his little trick was a HUGE understatement!
He tried casting, and got a punch to the face in return! Sure, very little of the damage was applied to him, but it didn’t magically disappear, it was just dispersed among his minions instead...
Which made THEM easier to kill!
Of course, the six remaining undead came charging at me, once again opening themselves up to attacks of opportunity, and I’d hit them all at least once now, plus they taken probably 15 or 20 points of damage from the damage sharing!
They all got exploded in the next few seconds, as they kept provoking AoOs and giving me Cleaving Finishes.
Then the Necro Cowboy had his necrosteed try to kick me.
Oh, I’m sorry Mr. Necro Cowboy, sir. Were you not aware that I still had attacks of opportunity and that attacking me provoked a trip attack from me?
Sure, it's completely logical to think something like, ‘But a horse is a Large creature, and being a quadruped makes tripping him even harder, right?’
Well, that would be entirely correct; but remember, I am REALLY good at tripping and throwing things... and takedowns, trips, throws, and tosses all counted as Trip maneuvers!
All my bonuses to hit count, and the trip specific stuff kick in, including Big Game Hunter since it’s Large sized. A heavy warhorse’s CMD, that’s combat maneuver defense, is a 25 versus trips. It gets another +4 for being one size category larger than me, meaning its CMD was a 29 versus me.
My base CMB, combat maneuver bonus, to trip this thing is a +27 right now!
It tried to kick me and missed terribly. I grabbed its leg and tossed it over my shoulder, smashing it into the ground! It took my unarmed damage from being thrown, and then it of course provoked an attack of opportunity since it was prone next to me.
So, I Vicious Stomped it. One advanced necrosteed, probably some weird necromantic variation on an undead Animal Companion put down, permanently.
Oh, yeah. The Necro Cowboy? Whaddaya know, he was ALSO prone in a space adjacent to me, having been riding said necrosteed.
Which of course means that he ALSO got a Vicious Stomp!