>>5349747>>5349738>1 for divination, 18 for swordsmanshipYour blade slices through empty air, parting mist rather than flesh and bone. Your large opponent has slapped away from your slash and disappeared into the mist once more. You squeeze your eyes shut to try and focus yourself, to cast the spell again, only to take a heavy impact from a webbed fist to the side of your helm. You lose the spell, and you barely cling to your sword. Cling to it you do, though, and you manage to raise it in a frantic counterattack. You hear a low, gurgling hiss as the shadowy shape stumbles back, and a spatter of deep brownish-red sizzles hotly upon your armour and the stone before you. You doubt it was a mortal wound, alas.
From out in the mist comes one scream after another. First, there is Agno’s shrill cry of panic and pain, then the Cartographer’s deeper one. Olu bellows, and you hear the whistling and impact of unseen arrows, but the sound is one of splintering wood against stone—no lethal impact. Your fire-lizards croak and shriek, and you think you hear them flee to run and hide (hopefully not so far that you cannot recall them if need be).
Then you hear the cries of the dwarves, ill-trained and unarmed, and in fact chained, if their handlers have not released them.
>Failures for your allies, critical failure for your enemiesLuckily, your foes are distracted. Whatever magic erected the obscuring steam is now dying down, exposing them. Each of them ahs their back to you. Instead, slimy and amphibious things like an ichthian parody of a Reptilian, but with flat skulls and bulging eyes belying no greater intellect, grab at your retinue and your servants, grappling with them and dragging them towards the now-boiling cauldron of the hot springs.
You see eight of these smaller fishmen, while the larger one which assaulted you has already snatched Agno up and disarmed him, and is even now dangling him in the air while advancing on the spring-turned-cooking pot in which it clearly means to dunk him. He kicks, slashes, bites at the thing’s armoured hands, but even though one bleeds where you split the pal with your sword, it does not let up. The Cartographer is sprawled upon the ground, two of the creatures assailing him; Olu has fended them off, but his signature bow has been wrenched away, and he is pinned to the wall and keeping them at bay with a simple Reptilian assassin’s blade.
