Was it fortunate that their conversation, whispered and frustrated, was unheard by the monstrosities that lurked just on the other side of the toppled tree trunks? Or was such leniency by the gods of the dice simply granted because it didn’t matter? Against the barbaric horde, no longer willing to hold back their own desires for slaughter and having given up on trying to puzzle out why they were here when none of them wanted to be here to begin with, the party plucked up their courage and charged!

Vaulting over the largest tree with superhuman speed and grace, the four-man vanguard all experienced the sensation of time slowing around them as their bodies sailed through the air. It gave them all precious seconds to determine their singular target, and like that, they struck! Magpie, exemplifying the dirty fighting and brute force of her Brawler class, felt the roar of her soul echo into her fist as she delivered an overhead smash that would’ve made the King of Combat proud. The unfortunate target of her violence couldn’t even let out a bray of agony before his face flew towards the ground, the muscular body of the gyunin doing a 180 before bouncing back up from the force.

He did not make it back down in one piece.

Though one-armed and with minimal strength, the similar anatomies of humans and gyunin allowed Raime to pick his targets cleanly, his own sword slicing into tendons and arteries. Murky blood gushed out, but such was his speed in that transient moment that his blade remained untainted by demonic viscera. And from behind, Ames rose up, the flame-haired animist’s hooked sword burning with a powerful radiance to chase away the gloom of the forgotten ruins. Thrusting forth, he drove his sword deep into the monster’s chest, before the additional force of his spiritual energies surged into the gyunin and tore the beast apart from the seams that Raime had sliced open.

The blast of shredded parts splattering against the ground was matched only by the sound of meat against meat, Klein and another gyunin engaging in the manly art of chest upon chest bumping. And still behind the fallen trees, Amulak spoke the cursed word of power granted to him by the miasmic nightmare-tree, splaying out both hands as blasphemous lightning shot out. Arcing across mossy green and crumbled stone, the bolts struck two desiccated corpses, granting unto them the essence of life once more. While the gyunin were all drawn by the brutish violence that the vanguard had displaced, four of them already closing in with braying battle cries, the dead rose amongst them, a green lightning sparking within their eye sockets.

And within Amulak’s mind, new nuggets of information about his undead thralls and the monsters they once were emerged.
[hider=Undead Gyunin]
[b]Vengeful Might[/b] – Passive. STR stat increases by 1 for every 1% HP lost.
[b]Demonic Fury[/b] – Passive. STR stat increases incrementally while in-combat.
[/hider]
Now, how could he leverage this?
[sub][@Shovel][@Searat][@Psyker Landshark][@OwO][@Yankee][/sub][hr]
[b]“Infinite lives but limited time,”[/b] Man-Joji sneered in retaliation. [b]“You’ll tire of your tenure in the Upper Realms by the time I’m through with you!”[/b]

Ari, swift as the cat that she borrowed her motif from, slipped into the brush as blades flew out of her hands, scattering against the serpent man’s thickened left arm as he swatted them away like a cloud of annoying flies. Drawing his writhing right arm back, he thrust out, and the multitude of snakes within fanned out as well, a cone-shaped burst of serpentine fury to decimate the foliage Ari had tumbled into.

[sub][@GreenGoat][/sub]