“Oh mighty, Moloch,” Pharah said, lifting her eyes to the tall deity, refusing to take a knee like her subordinates behind her. “We have been too long in coming to you with our gifts. We have basked in your great blessings and grown complacent. We beg your forgiveness and bring you this offering. A virginal young woman of immense power.”
Pharah turned to the small group directly behind her and beckoned them forward. Her magical powers allowed her to sense the strength within the red-haired young woman, but unlike her priestly second-in-command, she could not determine the true nature of that power. Djona had faithfully served her for all these years. She trusted him now.
The priest rose from the ground and summoned the two troglodytes behind him to bring the offering forward. Pharah knew this woman was called Draya and watched her struggle against the guards that hauled her along. She couldn’t be that powerful. If Pharah was similarly restrained, she would have easily thrown off her shackles and killed every troglodyte here.
And while the source of Draya’s power remained a mystery to the queen, she took comfort in Moloch’s positive reaction. Pharah’s eyes went from the young woman trudging toward her fate to the eyes of her deity burning bright with anticipation. The god’s stone features were typically placid, but they flowed about his face as his mouth turned up in a grin.
“Excellent choice,” Moloch said, his gravelly voice reverberating through the audience. “I can feel the fire burning inside her already. This mortal is truly a gift worthy of the gods.”
Behind and to Moloch’s right, Lamashtu cackled with glee, her wings flapping with excitement as her sharp fingernails steepled before her and tapped together. “Bring her! Bring her! Burn her!”
As the quartet drew closer to the god, Djona stepped aside and let the three behind him finish the trip up to the feet of the deity. Soon, the two lizardmen quaked in fear a few feet before Moloch, the heat from the furnace in his belly burning their skin. Draya’s struggles diminished now, and Pharah interpreted it as fear. Moloch implied otherwise.
“Put aside this feeble pretense of helplessness,” the god said, staring down directly at the young woman. “You do not fool me.”
Draya shrugged, ripped her hands free from her shackles, and used both to release jets of mage fire at the feet of her two guards. The troglodytes were already taking damage from being this close to the burning god, and now their whole bodies went up in flame from the powerful attack. Pharah was shocked and took a step back, but Moloch laughed.
“Excellent,” he said.
Draya tried to attack the stone giant before her, but Moloch cast a Hold spell, and she froze solid.
“No!”
Pharah heard the cry from down the slope and assumed it was the vampire rogue. She ignored it and watched as her deity stepped fluidly toward the young woman, displaying agility the queen didn’t think possible. His long arms reached down, picked the mage off the ground, and hoisted her into the air. “Oohs” and “ahs” came from the kneeling troglodytes, and Pharah finally joined them, supplicating before her god.
Moloch kept the woman aloft for a few seconds before releasing his hold on her, bending his elbows, and letting Draya roll down his long limbs and into his molten chest cavity. Lamashtu continued her psychotic squealing and prancing about as flames expanded from Moloch’s chest and soon engulfed his entire body. At first, the fire was orange, turning his skin into liquid rock. Moloch bellowed in glee from the release of his power and the apparent consumption of the woman within. But then the fire took on a darker crimson hue, and the god’s cries of ecstasy turned to ones of horror and pain.
Lamashtu noticed the change first and calmed her antics. Her wings lifted her from the volcano’s rim, and she fluttered a few dozen feet away from the spectacle. Pharah sensed something was wrong too and summoned a water shield around her.
Moloch stumbled back a few steps, his arms out wide as deep red fire climbed up and down his body. He eventually tripped on a large rock and fell to a seated position. No one could see what was happening inside his furnace, as the density of the flame was too intense. And as the crowd collectively leaned forward to try and peer into the inferno, the inferno peered back at them.
Fire streamed from the god’s chest, bursting into the crowd of lizardmen, incinerating dozens of them instantly. A single jet of red flame also hit the queen, vaporizing her water shield and tossing her backward. Once she rolled to a stop, Pharah looked toward Djona for help. “Do something!” she cried.
The priest was so far untouched by the fire that continued to stream out of the god’s stomach, scattering her soldiers like ants. Djona rose to his feet, turned his back on Moloch, and lifted his scepter toward the chaotic lizardmen. “Into the volcano!” he shouted.
“What?” Pharah asked. However, when she saw several troglodytes race toward the crater at the mountain's peak and throw themselves in, she understood the betrayal. Her eyes went back to Moloch, and she saw the young woman climb out of the crippled god. She was dressed in a fabulous, jewel-covered gown and held a six-foot staff with intricate gold inscriptions. The mage continued to throw fire at the scattered minions. The queen focused on the staff and cast a spell to discern its power. She cursed. “Dragon fire.”
----------------------------------------
Jace and Djona hadn’t clarified the signal to start the attack, but it was pretty obvious. One would think the frantic attitudes of the lizardmen would make them more susceptible to the priest's mental control, and Jace watched several hurl themselves into the volcano, but chaos was hard to predict. Sometimes, it gave you a 1 for a saving throw; sometimes, it was a 20. Right now, it looked like Gandhi was favoring 20.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Either way, none of them paid any attention to the prisoners. Even the few guards commanded to keep the party members secured abandoned their posts and ran like fools. Jace’s crew had taken the opportunity to fully equip themselves with their standard weapons and armor, and they all went to work.
Esther wanted to protect Draya but followed orders and joined Psycho against Lamashtu. The ranger unloaded arrows toward the demon while the rogue took the ground route, hacking at random troglodytes to clear a path.
Jace told Rock to protect Leah and instructed Snowy to kill whatever she could. The wolf had been looking forward to sinking her teeth into the lizards for a while but didn’t go too far off on a hunt, not trusting Rock’s abilities against a large group of enemies. Any friend of Esther’s was a friend to Snowy, and she stayed near Leah to protect her.
Jace cut a path toward Draya. Diamond Etcher killed any troglodyte foolish enough to get in the orc's path, and that wasn’t many. Soon, he stood by Draya’s side and watched her unload fire attacks on the god. Moloch returned to his feet and snarled at the dragon mage as he endured her attacks. Jace understood from Gracie that they couldn’t kill him, but his physical construct in the realms was vulnerable. Dragon fire was one level higher than volcanic fire, and Moloch was not immune. However, he did have fire protection, damage reduction, and several bonuses to his saving throws against elemental attacks. Even with the advanced difficulty of Draya’s dragon fire, her attacks did almost no damage against the enemy.
Luckily, as a god, Moloch wasn’t an offensive weapon. He had a powerful Hold spell, which he cast again at Draya. She had no chance of saving against it, but unlike before, she now wore a cursed dress that did 100 damage to her each round. She was immune to that fire damage, but it still counted to release her from the Hold spell. Moloch also had unlimited lava and fire attacks, but he quickly found that Draya was also immune to those. He could trap her feet in cooling magma, but the mage had experience avoiding those attacks from fighting against the armadillion outside Stormhold.
Ultimately, they found they could do the most damage to each other in melee range. Draya’s staff made blunt attacks, which chipped away at the stone figure, while Moloch’s balled fists did crushing damage and took a third of Draya’s health from her when she failed her first Parry attempt. The mage desperately made the second blocking move, but crushing attacks were different than simple blunt ones, and she still went flying backward and took damage when she hit the ground.
Jace ran past Draya’s fallen form and focused on Moloch. The god regarded the orc momentarily and tried his Hold spell first. Jace stopped cold, with no chance of saving against a deity’s spell difficulty, but his ring shocked him the next round, and he kept coming. Next, the god tried his fire attack, drenching the orc in lava. Jace failed this save, and his susceptibility to fire damage made it even worse. The attack did about 600 damage, which should have knocked Jace unconscious and sent him into a death spiral, but his Damage Sink Totem took all the damage, and his health didn’t drop a point, other than the five he took from his ring for failing another saving throw.
Moloch had never heard of characters so immune to his potent magic and reasoned he would also have to trade blows with this one the old-fashioned way. In truth, another fire attack would have obliterated Jace’s totem and sent him into a death spiral, but Moloch didn’t have enough Wisdom to figure that out, and as mean as Gandhi often was, she didn’t cheat.
Diamond Etcher was explicitly enchanted to cut into stone, and Jace’s initial attacks against the 12-foot monstrosity were highly effective, carving out chunks of rubble from the god. Moloch stuck back, and Jace offered a Parry. Jace’s skill with the sword, his bulk as an orc, and his Carry skill all contributed to his saving against the crushing blow and not being thrown backward. However, he couldn’t then use the criticals he earned from the Parry to aid his subsequent attack, so his normal routine of blocking and counterstriking didn’t work as effectively.
After several vicious rounds, Jace backed away and looked again above the lava creature’s head. Usually, a level and Hit Point counter hovered over a character, but above this god, there was nothing. Draya came up beside him, having taken an extra round to drink a healing potion. “What’s the plan, boss?” she asked. “We just keep pummeling him until . . . what?”
Jace eyed up the few places on Moloch’s body where he had chipped away significant chunks of rock. The molten fire core inside the monster’s belly healed the creature similarly to the armidillion, and the voids on his skin soon filled back up with rock.
“Hacking him apart won’t work,” Jace said. “We need to separate him from whatever is binding him to the physical realm.”
“What is that?”
Jace shrugged. “I don’t know. A gem, a crystal, a glowing magical orb? Something that belongs back in Leah’s kingdom. Keep your eyes open.”
They couldn’t keep talking as Moloch brought the fight to them. Jace’s attacks had done more damage in the previous rounds, so the god focused on the orc, letting Draya pepper him with her staff, mostly unmolested. Jace slashed and parried the monster for a couple of exchanges, but the lava creature changed his tactics in the third round, joined his hands together, and swung them in from the side in a powerful attack that cost him a full round. The joined fists were like a boulder swinging at the end of a long rope. Jace got his block in place at the last moment, but it wasn’t good, and he was finally thrown from his feet.
He flew up the slope toward the volcano’s rim and feared he might go over the edge. Instead, his body landed short of the opening, and he slid forward until his torso hovered over the drop-off. The sight of bubbling lava 75 feet below him sent him into a panic, and he scrambled backward before his momentum took him over the edge. When almost clear of the drop-off, he stopped and examined the sight before him.
The pool of molten rock below him wasn’t absolute. A glassy black island a dozen feet in diameter seemed to float on the surface. A small ornate pedestal stood in the center, and Jace saw a glimmer of green amidst the heat waves that warped the dry air.
“It’s in the volcano!” Jace shouted, pushing himself off the ground and spinning back toward Moloch. The god had just tossed Draya again and was in the process of pursuing her to crush the life out of the woman with his fists balled together over his head, but he stopped at the declaration. Jace didn’t elaborate and charged the monster to attack from behind and distract it from killing his mage.
“The source?” Draya asked, rolling to the side and picking herself up. She drank another healing potion.
“Yes,” Jace said, blocking several of Moloch’s attacks. The god tried another double-fisted swing, but Jace was a quick learner, executed a better Parry this time, and didn’t go flying into the volcano.
“You want me to get it?” Draya asked, creeping up on the god from behind again.
“Well, I can’t,” Jace said.
Draya nodded and ran off. Jace had to focus on his opponent, but he stole glances at the mage and saw her gingerly run along the crater’s edge until she found a slope she could safely descend. A few moments later, she disappeared. Half a dozen troglodytes followed her. At first, Jace assumed they would throw themselves into the lava pit as before, but they executed the same care as Draya had and appeared to be climbing, not jumping.
Shouldn’t they be under Djona’s control? Jace thought. He wanted to look around to see how the priest was doing, but he needed to give Moloch all his attention as another two-fisted attack came in, this one from above.