In contrast to the previous chambers, torches along the walls shone bright as soon as the group appeared. This room was longer than it was wide and smelled of decay, with a faded red carpet with gold trim leading from the teleportation circle, all the way across the room to a throne with a long, gaunt figure sitting slumped in it. Between them, a dozen individual piles of bones lined the sides. On either side of the throne, Tahir could see a large pile of gold, gems, and other items, but he focused his attention on the figure on the throne.
They were dressed in green robes with their own gold trim. Underneath the robes, the figure looked like barely more than a skeleton with skin stretched thinly across. Tahir could have easily confused it for a corpse if it didn’t sit up straight with the sound of cracking bones. “Odium’s lapdogs arrived faster than anticipated.” A raspy voice rang out across the entire room that spoke in infernal, coming from Zorhe as he stood and picked up a staff that leaned against the throne. “But no matter. You have even brought me souls to harvest. I shall graciously accept your gift.” He tapped his staff on the stone floor, and the piles of bones began to rattle and form together.
“You will be judged, lich!” Neveroth shot forward. Tahir changed out the earth spirit, while keeping fire, to summon the Traveler. They appeared with a flash in the spot the erinyes just vacated, and looked around to see a dozen skeletons with various weapons picking targets.
“Hasn’t the situation escalated a fair bit, contractor?” The spirit moved to pull out their cane sword, but thought better of it. “That fight there is beyond you, but I suppose you will want to stop interference?”
“Right, keep the skeletons from shooting at Neveroth, and stay out of her way.” Tahir grabbed a throwing knife from his belt, and threw it at a skeleton taking aim at Neveroth. It struck it in the skull, staggering the skeleton and making its shot go wide, and bringing its attention to Tahir himself. He rolled to the side as it notched another arrow, and the remaining three in that space scattered as the final fight began in earnest.
Neveroth summoned a black maul into her hands mid flight, and swung down as she reached the throne. Zorhe dodged out of the way and avoided his head being crushed, and with a wave of his staff began floating upward in the air. He began to rain down massive orbs of green fire that burst in a wide radius. Neveroth took back to the skies well in advance, avoiding the flames and switching to her bow to fire back.
Meanwhile, the Traveler jumped in front of any skeleton that tried to bring its attention toward the erinyes, and gave it a mighty wallop with their cane. They jumped away long before the skeletons could retaliate, and ultimately drew their ire rather than the fiend attacking the skeletons’ dark master. Tahir, Theo, Metilia fought with the six skeletons without bows, using instead a variety of other weapons. Fighting two to one, Tahir ducked and dodged around a pair that used a warhammer and a sword and shield combo. The armor they wore made simply cutting them down a more involved affair than skeleton normally took. He considered for a moment switching his secondary spirit back to earth, but a glimpse of the green fire raging out over the other half of the room told him that he needed to keep fire for the resistance.
Metilia created another panel to ward off errant arrows and, hopefully, any stray blasts of fire from the lich. Otherwise, she fired bolts of magic at skeletons that approached her. Theo alternated between bursts of alchemical frost and concussive reactions to keep them back as well. A combination that saw their skeletons falling fairly quickly. With theirs out of the way, Theo rushed over and picked up a battleaxe from one of the fallen skeletons to support Tahir.
While he held off the two, Theo came in from behind and struck it in the skull with an overhead, aura enhanced swing. It dented the helmet and split the skull underneath, killing it instantly. The second perished as Tahir struck the spine, past the shield and armor, when it turned to face the new arrival. “I’m running out of supplies.” Theo told him when he looked at the battleaxe in her hands. “If I’m going to use them I should probably use them on the lich guy, right?”
He couldn’t argue with that. He glanced over to the Traveler, still toying with the skeletons that used bows. They managed to dispatch two of them from repeated swings with the cane, but had to jump away every couple seconds or so to avoid being littered with arrows. When he looked further ahead, toward Neveroth, what he saw made his stomach drop.
“Enough!” At Zorhe’s call, a glyph appeared on the ground beneath him. Tahir, Theo, and Metilia could all feel distortion of space and time around them in their very bones, a vibration that only affected their hearts and minds that signaled a massive pull from the void. The feeling of epic magic. Large blue chains shot up from it toward Neveroth. She tried to fly high and dodge to avoid them, but they flew at dazzling speeds, caught up to her, and turned mid air to wrap around her and drag her down to the ground. She slammed against the stone floor, and not a second later cried out as a powerful lightning bolt from the lich struck her in with a deafening boom. Tahir nearly fell from the tremors that followed, but he kept his gaze as the thinning dust cloud that revealed Neveroth. Her demonic aura shield held against the lightning, but only barely. It looked as if she’d certainly lose it against another spell.
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“Traveler, get me over there.” Tahir shouted, as he ran past Metilia’s panel. He looked back at the two and quickly added “Take care of the archers!” Coming to a stop in front of the Traveler, he took their hand and lurched as the spirit made a smaller jump to avoid a flurry of arrows.
“We are of one mind, contractor, but what you plan to do is not easy, and I may not have enough energy left for an escape.”
“There’s no escaping that if it kills her. Let’s go!”
“Very well said.” The contractor jumped, and Tahir prepared a fire bolt and shot it off at the lich. He was mid-incantation for another powerful spell, but saw the bolt of fire coming and swatted it away with a dispassionate flick of the wrist. It did manage to stop the spell, however.
“Just with mana, not even a spell. What a monster.” He muttered, sliding on his knees next to a restrained Neveroth. “Right, let’s get you out.”
“Fool.” The lich readied another orb of green flame, but before he fired it he was forced to float off to the side to dodge a spike of ice larger than his own body, and several magic bolts that flew his way. Metilia readied more as Theo, covered from head to toe in frost and misty vapors, swung with wild abandon with her newly-acquired battleaxe at the archer skeletons. “More annoyances to deal with.” He launched the orb toward them. Metilia called Theo back and moved her magic panel to intercept, but the resulting explosion when the two collided shattered the panel instantly. Theo and Metilia flew backwards, and the archer skeletons all died immediately in the blast.
With that distraction going, Tahir grabbed Neveroths arms, and the Traveler followed suit. With a deep breath, the Traveler began to attempt a jump, and Tahir drew his remaining mana into their bond to bolster the spirit energy. They felt immediate resistance from the powerful spell that bound the erinyes, but struggled against it, pulling at the unyielding magic with their own, and felt the bonds slipping to allow the jump.
Perhaps the lich also felt the bonds slipping, because he quickly looked down at this sight instead of keeping his attention on Metilia and Theo. With an incantation that sounded like multiple voices, and that rattling reverberation of epic magic, he conjured the biggest ball of fire that Tahir had ever seen. With a wave of its staff, it let the orb fall at a great speed toward the three on the ground. At that moment, the Traveler laughed as they applied a burst of power to the restraining spell, loosening the chains, and allowing all of them to teleport nearly to the other end of the room before the fire could burn them all to cinders.
Another imprecise jump had them all rolling back across the floor until they nearly hit the wall. Metilia and Theo struggled to rise some twenty feet ahead of them, but they were all still alive. “He is finished.” Neveroth said, rising to her feet and into the air with her wings. She conjured a two-handed greatsword, and flew back toward the fuming lich.
Tahir hoped so, because he only had aura left to use. Even the Traveler exhausted all of their spirit energy to get Neveroth out of the imprisoning spell. If that and the massive conflagration took most of his mana, then this fight was all but over.
“My mana is of no concern. I need only take some.” The lich scanned over the room, and looked for the weakest soul it could see. His eyes flicked to Metilia, and then Theo, but ultimately settled on Tahir before he reached out his hand and spoke a single word.
That word seemed to echo but ring out silent, with all who heard it forgetting about it before they could even process what it was. Tahir gasped. His vision began to blur and lose color, he lost his sense of hearing and smell, and couldn’t feel the sword in his hand. Everyone else could see his mortal soul starting to leave his body, coalescing into an orb for the lich to consume. Theo cried out and reached for Tahir, but didn’t know how to stop what was happening in the slightest.
Everything was going dark, all he could feel were the bonds of his currently bound spirits. The rapid, frantic pulsing of the fire spirit as it raged against the magic to little effect, and the gentle pulse of the Traveler’s, which began to speed up as Tahir’s remaining senses focused on it.
“Very bold of you to seek my contractor’s soul, dead one.” The traveler slammed the orb back into Tahir’s chest, causing him to gasp again as all of his senses returned to him at once. A hidden wellspring of spiritual energy sprang to life, surrounding his soul, safeguarding him from the dark magic, and dispersing it completely. “I’m afraid that you aren’t entitled to any of it. Not a nibble, nor a bite, and certainly not the whole thing.
The dispersal caused Zorhe to pause. Both in shock, and in recoil from his soul magic being disrupted. Neveroth crossed the gap in that time, and didn’t waste a second in laying into the lich with her greatsword, carving away at his skeletal body, pushing him back and running him through - pinning him to the wall. “Enough of this, Lich. You now face judgment long overdue.” She clapped her hands together, and a magic circle appeared behind her, conjuring forth what looked to be a door.
No one saw what Zorhe witnessed beyond the door, but he grabbed the blade embedded in his chest and tried to pull it out like a man possessed. He screamed out in a language that none of them except perhaps the Traveler could understand, and they all watched a pair of black, clawed arms wreathed in smoke reach out, and grab the lich. Without even bothering to pull him through the door, once the hands wrapped around Zorhe, it all disappeared, leaving Neveroth there to pull her greatsword out of the wall, and float down.