Session 34 (08. 05. 2019)

Having arrived on the bottom floor of Sshil'cass, Telum Veritas finally came face to face with Alistair Newmont. The gnome stood alone on the other side of a great hall, a large round blood red portal behind him. In his hand, a tennis ball sized black orb - the Nightstone. They approached cautiously, wondering what surprises he had in store. He again promised that half of them would die. Suddenly, he used the Nightstone, and a blood wall sprang up, splitting the hall in two. Kim and Aella got stuck on one side, the rest of the group on the other. Newmont remarked on what incredible power he could gain from Kim's blood, and summoned a humanoid crocodile monster to his aid. He attacked Kim, and the bedraggled young monk soon went unconscious. Aella moved back, firing at him but unable to help her. Meanwhile, the others were charging forward but had to circle around the acidic blood wall. Empowered by Lia and Carthigan, Gunter was first to round the corner and engage Newmont and his crocodile minion. The others followed as quickly as they could. Frustrated by the way the creature kept shielding its master from his strikes, Gunter struck a mighty blow enhanced by his divine power and took its arm clean off. Lia's lightning knocked it out soon after. Meanwhile, Aella finally made it to Kim and fed her a healing potion. Newmont vanished, and a group of now-familiar blood shadows rose from the ground to attack. Viktor acted quickly, grasping his holy symbol and banishing most of them. In the confusion, Newmont moved to a side room and sniped Lia from the shadows, who fell down, bleeding. Carthigan rushed to her aid but had trouble finding the healing potion she kept on her person. Vincent solved the issue with healing magic. As the shadows were dealt with and the group moved to corner Newmont, Vincent and Gunter got too close to the portal. Claws reached out and yanked him in, making them plummet through a horrifying hellish landscape before spitting them out again. Newmont taunted Carthigan, who possessed Aella and walked straight into the trap, getting split off from the others behind yet another blood wall. However, the gnome miscalculated in locking himself in with a fearsome ex-Shadow, as Aella proceeded to shoot him multiple times. As the blood wall refused to budge, Vincent opted to walk right through. A badly injured Newmont quickly surrendered to him, then tried and failed to immediately stab him in the back. Vincent ordered him to drop the Nightstone, and he complied. As the stone clattered to the ground, the blood walls vanished, and Sshilcass began to return to normal. As Newmont was bound and placed under arrest, Vincent used magic to pick up the stone and put it in his portable hole, but despite these precautions, it immediately began to affect him, tempting him to use it. Once the area was deemed secure, the group cautiously approached the planar portal. Vincent found its control mechanism, which took a sequence of symbols as input, and after trying one randomly, which produced no result, remembered that he'd seen such a sequence in Newmont's notes. After inputting that, the portal opened - and instead of a hellish landscape, it showed a clear blue sky and beautiful clouds. The plane of air, where Newmont had gone to capture the lightning beast that eventually destroyed the Spire. Lia stared at it, mesmerized, her long-sought destination finally within arm's reach.