Over the link, an annoyed and pained Arkesh grates,
<I have determined conclusively that illusionary concealments are ineffective against the Marauders.> You get a flash of an image from the drow's point of view, looking down at the bloody stump where her left arm had been; in that split second, the torn flesh begins to knit itself together. She looks up; over her left shoulder, Star’s blood-streaked profile is visible as the glowing sword Aurora arcs diagonally through another Witchlight Marauder dropping on them from above, slicing off its distended maw and sending it spinning away barely in time to avoid both Elves being swallowed whole. As the image Arkesh is sending dissolves, the creature bellows in rage, the sound echoing oddly through its wounds, and lunges down toward its prey anyway, bladed talons extended.
Back in the cavern, Sheerak's fists punch through the Uruk-Hai shaman's defenses in short order, crushing it to a pulp after several hits. As the creature falls lifeless to the floor, a ripple of Magical implosion bursts from the sagging sack of flesh, widening out as a disturbance in still pond water, as the Spells the shaman was maintaining collapse around it. When the ripple reaches the Magical energies that had hastily patched together the disintegrating archway in accordance with Thrash’s orders to the shaman, they are blown away like dandelion seeds. The portal is already shuddering in time with the quaking earth beneath the Tiefling's wings, still standing for the moment, the stony arch leaning with its silvery curtain bowed and stretched; the arch’s descent, that began after the Love, Janis blasts, resumes.
Four Witchlight Marauders lunge across the dais with surprising speed, pink tentacles blurring into grasping motions towards Halfaz and Ror. As the Marauders arrive, the tentacles bite through metal, Magic, fire, flesh, and bone with equal ease, rending and tearing enormous chunks from their prey and dropping them into the creatures' maws. Only the emerald axe, shield, and armor are not gobbled up.
Ror technically gets AoOs, but we’re going to skip them as they won't make a difference in a moment.
Via 8 tentacle attacks, Halfaz takes 178 damage from WM1 & 196 damage from WM2. Ror takes 214 damage from WM3 (luckily he's currently immune to crits) & 183 damage from WM4.
At the same time, six more Witchlight Marauders split themselves up. Two Marauders, working in tandem, toss a third into the air, which soars on a collision course into Sheerak, dropping from above, tentacles writhing and bladed talons extended. Two advance on Darayat's position, who is subjected to the same treatment as Halfaz; the final Marauder seems to lose control of itself and starts gobbling up screaming goblins by the dozen.
Sheerak has no AoOs left to use on the incoming WM7, and takes 146 damage from 8 tentacle attacks.
Darayat, from 8 tentacles each, takes 164 & 197 damage from WM8 and WM9, respectively.
A bunch of goblins bite it (or rather, are bitten).
Meanwhile, the rest of the Uruk-hai spring into action. Two of them pull boulders from the walls and floor and fling them at Throisar hanging in mid-air, leaving deep bruises in his hide, while the third concentrates briefly and a handful of shimmering blades made of razor-sharp energy flies at the Margravine.
Throisar takes 46 bludgeoning and 32 bludgeoning, total 78, and must make 2 Fort saves (DC 28) or be stunned for 1d4 rounds.
Margravine takes 39, 26, and 28 slashing damage, total 93, and for the next minute has to make a DC 31 Will save to cast a spell.
Suddenly, Star is on the link, shouting a warning, and scant seconds later, hairs stand on end throughout the room. There's a moment's hush, into which Thrash screams,
NOOOOOOOOO!At last, the shivering rock around the portal leans too far in its decent to ruin, and with a blinding silver snap, bone-jarring, grinding, it crumbles to dust, no longer able to contain the arcane maelstrom within. The billowing silver sheet of the portal itself begins to curl inward like burning paper, fraying and tearing at the edges as it implodes to a miniscule point… then explodes outward like a Retributive Strike, the impossibly intense density of arcane energy rupturing (it seems) the very fabric of reality as the hole in the Plane, exactly what a Portal is, breaks loose from its moorings, and its containment, and its destination, and expands outward to envelop everything and everyone within range. With Timesight, Ptolemaeus can see streamers of fractured Timelines erupting everywhere into jets of blue-gray as spacetime itself disintegrates; it looks just like the beginnings of the Maelstrom of a Timestorm that he saw
disrupting Bral’s Timeline when he
followed Star to Bral.
On the link, Star whirls around, tackles Arkesh, and the two of them shimmer into blue-gray smoky mist as Star’s presence dwindles to a brilliant, nearly actinic gold-white point and winks out.
In the last fraction of a second, members of Star's strike force watch in horror as the expanding arcane strike’s shock wave, with its Planar rupture, passes through the closest of the experimental portable spell cannons they are carrying, and the cannon does just what it was designed to do: the cannon resonates and triples the range, area of effect, and damage. Not tuned for this effect, the cannon detonates, adding its own Retributive Strike to the expanding bubble. Then the rest of the shafts of crystal and glass detonate one after the other in turn, shattering into razor sharp splinters, and releasing ever more tripled energy in a series of expanding, overlapping blast spheres, vaporizing flesh, metal, and stone nigh-instantly.
The many-times-tripled explosions tear through the dense adamantine of the Rock of Bral like so much wet bread. The city on the surface has no warning at all before it is blasted into dust, flying outward from the former asteroid in a silent, super-superheated rush as fusion begins and ends briefly in a burst of heavy elements (when an asteroid goes nova, and no one is left alive to hear it, does it make a sound?) which overtakes and incinerates the swarm of ships which surrounded it. After a long moment, the outrushing dust clears enough to see the aftermath: hundreds of fist-sized stones drifting outward, remnants of the once-proud interstellar crossroads.
Only a handful of remnants are of any size, nearly all of those being portions of the Rock furthest from the origin of the blast. They possess a certain majesty as they wheel through suddenly uninhabited space.
The blast races leagues outward to the edge of its many-times multiplied range, and finally dissipates.
((Campaign OVER!! It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal! You destroyed the asteroid and its temple to Dumathoin! You littered space with debris, which now has to be washed and sterilized, so you get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir! I said, good day!))
((JK. Please continue in the next thread. By the way:
CONGRATULATIONS!!
You have just brought about an explosion with a center of maximum damage over four miles in diameter – several times the diameter of Bral – and with over four hundred thousand HP of damage in that four mile wide center. Start with a 400HP retributive strike, factor in 3 to the 6th plus the additional damage and area of effect from each.
And that’s just the center. The overall diameter is nearly twelve and a half miles.
It’s a record setter! This is the largest explosion ever, in any run of Deadly Glory/Evil Is Our Game.
))
