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[Amperzand]

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, we burst through a set of thick steel doors to find the beast, at least fifty meters long and ten high, standing among the wreckage of the four heavy cannon assigned to the cavern fortifications. The shining, beautiful dust swirls in the air around it, powdered diamond moving in endless lazy puffs from its translucent hide. For a moment, its legs seem made of ruby, but, as it takes a step forward, catching a fleeing soldier in the edge of its cloud, that illusion is shattered in a burst of red mist, the helpless dwarf shredded into ever-smaller pieces by a trillion impossibly sharp flakes of crystal, the pressure in his veins sending droplets of blood dozens of feet in every direction. A group of musketeers fire, sending two-centimeter lead slugs sailing towards the beast, only to become a rapidly slowing cloud of gray powder as the terrible cloud consumes them. Another step, and some trick of the subterranean winds swirls the fine, metallic dust of the ground up around it, obscuring it for an instant. Metallic. And the two-ton heavy cannons are simply gone, now.

"Oh, shit."

A lone dwarf, one of his legs ruined by a chunk of debris from the fallen wall, raises an outdated crossbow, the tip of the bolt wrapped in burning rags...

{Just to be clear, since this is sort of a boss fight, I'll be acting as crappypseudoGM for the duration, barring any arguments. An upshot of this is that no, you aren't allowed to one-shot it via godmodded heroism, and nor will I.}

[TheLifeweaver]

The human fires the Stubber in controlled bursts, hoping, no, praying that he could damage the beast as he slowly began to move backwards. How could they kill it? He wondered internally. (Sorry really tired... the downside of living in scotland is the time difference)

[Amperzand]

{Clarification, while the Stubber sounds like a wh40k machinegun, it's more like a 10-gauge sawn-off shotgun with much better recoil management and mainly intended for the specialty shells. One shot, eject the case, stick another one in. I intend to have handheld automatics at some point, but I haven't gotten that far yet. I could probably build a Sten-lookalike, but it'd be worthless here anyway. Also, no real need to worry about the above post, since if your wrist can survive the recoil, Stubber slugs, or, more likely, incendiary flares, are your best bet here.}

The maimed marksdwarf, his vision going gray as his destroyed leg pumps him dry, fires his last bolt. An iron bolt, of middling quality, its head wrapped with a bloodstained sock soaked in alcohol and ignited with the flintlock sparker of his useless handgun. It slices through the air, leaving a trail of sparks, hits the terrible, beautiful cloud, dissolves into a puff of smoke and red-hot iron filings.

The cloud, filled with combustible materials, composed itself of incredibly fine diamond flakes. Flammable, in other words. The flaming bolt ignites a fireball that, with an eardrum-shattering whumph, consumes the entire dustcloud, along with everything remotely near the best, spawning a massive overpressure in the air. A shockwave. Stone blows outwards, the surviving chunks of wall near the monster thrown away. The massive natural pillar of rock housing the stairway shudders, and rubble rains from the ceiling far overhead.

The monster is stunned, covered in soot, and covered in hairline cracks. Everyone within about three hundred meters can barely hear and no longer has eyebrows.

ROUND TWO; FIGHT!

[Pyrefly]

"I have decided this is a bad idea to melee," Pyrefly said quietly, yet bluntly. She wonders how to hit it, and gets an idea. "We just need something big enough to hit it before it gets shredded, have you tried dropping the roof on it?" Pyrefly asked Ampersand.

[Amperzand]

{I'm actually going to roll with what you said, since insects use very different methods to hear things, and don't have hair to burn.}

"GODDAMNIT OUCH"

I look at you in confusion, clutching my ears and speaking far too loudly.

"WHATSAT YOU SAID?"

"DROP TURF ON IT?"

[Pyrefly]

((I did not see that post... Yeah, let's roll with it.)) "TRY DROPPING THE CEILING ON IT." Pyrefly repeated, louder.

[Amperzand]

{Yeah, sorry, I ninja'd you.}

"HOW WOULD I DO THAT? THE SELF-DESTRUCT CHARGES HAVEN'T BEEN INSTALLED YET, IT'S NOT LIKE I CAN CLIMB UP THERE AND PLACE HALF-TON BARRELS OF POWDER IN THE RIGHTS PLACES JUST NOW."

On the one hand, I can apparently hear you fine now. On the other, the way I'm screaming casual conversation at you is becoming annoying.

[Amperzand]

{Ok, so there's a fairly simple way to kill it. Of course, I'd rather not become some kind of idiotic godmode sue here and fix every problem with  lots and lots of explosives annoying generic "'murican ingenuity", so yeah. DECISIONS.}

[TheLifeweaver]

The human pondered for a moment when an idea struck him. "Where is the nearest booze barrel?" He asked, having noticed the flammable nature of beast. It was his hope there could be a way to burn it to death.

[Amperzand]

It would appear that my ruptured eardrums have already healed themselves.

"In the little keep, there's a small storeroom kept stocked for the guards on duty down here, should be some booze. There's also about five tons of black powder in forty-kilo barrels in an adjacent chamber."

The little keep is a sturdy-looking cube huddled against the stairway's door, out of the beast's direct path. We cannot reach it without passing near the monster, but there are twenty or so soldiers over there.

{More clarification, the beast itself is only flammable at very high temperatures, but its dust, emitted either through its breath or, more slowly, by its skin, is essentially very finely ground carbon, mixed with even more flammable materials if it's just consumed anything interesting, like soldiers in iron armor with pouches of explosive on their person, and therefore explodes when lit, allowing you to damage it further.}

[endlessblaze]

"GUYS CAN WE GET AN ID ON ITS DUST?"


"EVERYONE IN CONTACT WITH IT IS DROWSY, BUT THE ADRINALEN IS KEEPING US AWAKE"

[Amperzand]

{...No, the dust is a cloud of razor diamonds, everything in contact with it is messily kill. We've said this already. Read stuff.}

[Pyrefly]

"Wait, what do I do?" Pyrefly asked, not having any idea what she should be doing.

[Amperzand]

"Okay, I have a plan. Those of us stuck on the ground can try to keep burning off the dust before it builds up again, and the firefly can bomb it. Sound good? It's simple enough for us to probably not screw up."

I take off the backpack I grabbed earlier and throw it to Pyrefly.

"That's four fuzed black-powder charges, if you can fly over it, time them correctly, and drop them on its head, we might get something done. In  the meantime, EVERYONE HIT IT WITH FIRE, THE RAZORDUST BURNS, WE CAN KILL THIS THING!"

[Pyrefly]

Pyrefly nods and catches the pack. She then takes off, trying to keep balanced with the weight of the armor and the pack. Once she gets the feel of it, she flies a bit faster to make it so that she can get over the forgotten beast with slightly less risk than the slower speed. Holding the pack with her bottom two hands, she opened it with her top two and tries to figure out how to 'time' them.