To my left, Rollar was engaged with an oblate, using his huge hammer to deflect the cultist’s red lightning attacks and counter attacking with savage blows of the hammer, each smashing the oblate back a number of yards. Rollar’s opponent, however, was able to take most of the force out of the blows by blocking them with his lightning-crackling fists.
To my right, Elyse and Rami were tag-teaming one of the summoners; his lightning-powered hands were full as he desperately tried to fight off Elyse’s rope of light with his right hand and Rami’s vicious flurry of sai strikes with his right.
Ahead of me, Isu was engaged with another oblate. Using Captain Jandor and his zombie Crusaders as shields, she would dart out of a gap in the shield wall and blast acidic mist at the oblate, then duck back behind cover when he countered with a shot of red lightning.
Drok, Sarge, and my remaining skeletons had surrounded two more of the Blood God clergymen, and were attacking them with frenetic fury, with Drok in berserker mode, throwing immensely strong and super-fast attacks with his twin axes at the oblates, who were desperately holding off the attacks, back to back, with no chance to counter.
My zombie snipers were shooting at monks with their crossbows, but the oblates were stopping the crossbow bolts with their lightning-enhanced hands and disintegrating the bolts upon impact.
My companions would defeat the oblates—of this I was certain—but the problem was that there were too many of them. There were still a couple more oblates around the cauldron, chanting and pouring red lightning into the boiling blood to continue the summoning ceremony. Now, it had reached the point at which the Demogorgon’s head, shoulders, and torso were materializing. By the time we killed all of the oblates, it would be too late, and the Demogorgon would be fully materialized in this plane.
Then, we’d all be fucked.
There had to be something I could do to stop this. I didn’t have enough time to take out all of the remaining oblates one by one, and I couldn’t use my corpse explosion spell without harming my companions. Was there another way I could kill a bunch of them simultaneously? Or another method of using corpse explosion?
That was it.
As the idea took form in my head, I began to trade blows with the next summoner, with me fending off his lightning attacks with the chain end of my kusarigama and him desperately trying to block the slashes and hacks of the blade end with his lightning-charged fists. I faked a slash at his abdomen, and as he was blocking the blow, I drew Grave Oath one second and thrust it through his neck the next.
I didn’t wait for the dagger to suck his soul out though. There was no time for that. Instead, I whipped the blade out of his neck, unleashing a torrent of blood, picked the dying oblate up, and hurled his body into the cauldron of boiling blood.
He screamed in agony as the blood boiled him to death, and as he sank into the seething, foul-smelling liquid, I dropped my weapons, charged my fingertips, and prepared for my corpse explosion spell. I zapped a charge into his submerged corpse, and with a massive boom, the blast rippled through the cauldron, sending a huge plume of blood up to splatter the ceiling and drench the remaining oblates, who howled and writhed in agony as the boiling liquid burned their skin.
It didn’t kill them, though, and despite the pain they were in from the third degree burns, they continued to chant and blast lightning into the cauldron. While the explosion had taken a chunk out of the materializing body of the Demogorgon, the hole that had been ripped in its giant torso was quickly filled with more blood.
“Shit,” I muttered.
I needed a different plan, and I needed it fast.
Then, a memory came to me, a memory from my early boyhood, when I’d taken my kid-sized crossbow to hunt rats in the castle crypts. I remembered that there’d always been a ton of rats living down here, and I suspected that this hadn’t changed in the years I’d been away.
“Rollar!” I yelled. “Your Beast helm! Give it to me. Hurry!”
With a roar, he sent out a crash of thunder from his hammer that was so powerful that it hurled the oblate he was fighting up and back well over a dozen yards. The screaming cultist hurtled through the air, screaming, and landed with a plop in the cauldron, howling as he was cooked alive and sank into the boiling liquid.
Rollar whipped off his helm and tossed it across the chamber to me. I caught it, put it on, and felt its magic coursing through my body as I used that magic to locate every single rat in the crypts and the castle, everywhere nearby. It was like I had done in the Tree God’s temple, but a much more desperate command for assistance. I called them, communicating to them a sense of very real and urgent danger. If the oblates succeeded in bringing the Demogorgon into this realm, they would be as dead as we would be. I needed them to attack, now.
The rats understood, and being nervous and fearful creatures as they were, they grasped the immediacy of the danger they were in and responded to my call to attack right away.
From every nook and cranny in the chamber, rats began to swarm, coming in their hundreds, then their thousands, and they all charged, like a great furry, writhing ocean wave, at the remaining oblates. The thousands of rats swarmed over each summoner, biting and gnawing with a vengeful fury.
“That’s it, rats, get those assholes!” I yelled, as more and more rodents poured out of the holes in the wall and the cracks in the floor, piling on top of the screaming monks, who were dropping to the floor and writhing beneath a living carpet
