As the limbs of the fallen settled to the ground, the dwarves retreated across their bridge, resuming their positions as they waited calmly for Xuspgas to charge. The sky cleared, leaving the ground damp with the rain and the blood of the dead, too thick to be washed away.
It was onto this field that Xuspgas lead his crushers, certain of victory where the stabbers had failed. As before, the marksdwarves opened fire and the champions of Lanternwebs charged to meet them on the field, beak dogs and orcs scattering before their shields and axes.
But Xuspgas was not cowed by this display of dwarven fighting prowess. Like an enormous, predatory cat, he leapt into the midst of the dwarven soldiers. His lash flicked out, striking a swordsdwarf and slipping between the neck plates to find her throat. As the swordsdwarf fell to the ground, he twisted the whip and cracked it at another dwarf who had charged him. The dwarf blocked with his shield and lunged forward, cutting the beak dog out from under Xuspgas, forcing him to roll to the ground. He easily blocked an axe swing and struck back, the tip of the whip skittering off the finely-crafted plates of the dwarf's armor. An axe-stroke caught him in the left leg, deflecting off his chain mail as he turned to seem himself surrounded, and the rest of his squad slain or in retreat.
While some of the dwarves chased the remainder of the orcs as they fled, the majority focused on Xuspgas. Try as they might, their weapons could not strike telling blows through his thick skin and layers of armor. His weapon, though, was similarly ineffective, the barbed tip glancing off helm, shield, and chestplate as he sought to cast it into a joint where it could do some damage. Though he blocked many of their blows, axes and swords assaulted him from all directions, and though none of them were serious their cumulative effect was. A slash from a sword cut his eyes, and though he felt no pain his vision was obscured by his own blood. An axe thudded into his arm, and with a yell he brought the whip around to wrap the arm that held the axe, jerking it suddenly and grinning as he heard flesh and bone rend and the arm tear free, though the axe remained lodged in his left arm, the blade stuck deep in the bone and held fast by his shield.
((The inventory is truncated, since I didn't want to include the pages of leather and bone stuff he is wearing))
Gradually, Xuspgas felt his strength waning. There were too many dwarves, too many attacks to block. His arms felt like lead, and he could barely lift his whip to swing at them. The dwarves were still energetic, expending a fraction of the energy that he did as he blocked and counter-struck each blow. Though he could feel no pain, he could feel a burning deep within his muscles, and as he struggled to keep fighting he felt his control slipping from him as he crashed to the ground, overexerted to the point of unconsciousness. The dwarves quickly piled onto him, hacking at his now-helpless form until at last it ceased to draw breath.
In the mountains to the west, the last squad of crushers rose from the plateau they had been sitting, watching the battle below. High Priest Amxu would surely be interested in this new development, and the defeat of Xuspgas, as Amxu had forseen, would lend weight to whoever he put forward as the new leader of the Mysterious Dread. The crushers left at a comfortable pace to the south, confident that the dwarves would not pursue them far from the fortress, to report news of the battle to their priest. The war to break Lanternwebs had only just begun.
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I'll have reports from the rest of the dwarves up sometime later, but as a quick summary, Flint is now an axe lord, The Tooninator spent most of his time shredding beak dogs, and Silvereye had to go get a drink during the second battle, so he unfortunately didn't get any killing blows. The Tooninator's squad really is "The Lancers of Disembowelment", Silvereye is "The Geared Meteors", and Flint is "The Elder Banners".
Xuspgas was also an extremely scary orc: He was fighting 9 to 1 against elite and champion swordsdwarves/axedwarves with a whip, killed two, and didn't actually die until quite a bit after he passed out from over-exertion, despite the missing eyes and throat that he got about halfway into the fight.
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Topic: Lanternwebs (The End!) (Read 80072 times)