20240604 - Run 51

We dropped one and one fled. 2 more to go in this squad.

It does look like one of the elves in one of the other squads has shifted to come deal with us. He moves up and flaps a cape at us, pushing a wave of psychic energy at us that shreds D.va, Nyla, and Caleb, as well as stunning them. The leader of the crossbow contingent Chad had been training then calls out for a volley against that dude, which hits him with 16 crossbow bolts. That is certainly enough to remove him from consideration.  Chad comes up and assaults one of the two elves on me; the rest of my party is not really shaking off the stun, so I’m going to have to go back and do some battlefield medicine. I hop back with step of the wind and heal D.va of her stun; and then come back up into formation with Chad. One of the elves, who has been talking shit at Chad and at everything in general, takes two swings at Chad and fails to connect. The other elf, the one who is injured, does manage to tag Chad on the leg. Runes in the sword flash red and do some kind of psychic attack when it injures Chad, and opens a badly bleeding wound. Looks a little defiling and infernal, too. 

And then three more elves come heading over - probably the remnants of the squad with cape guy. We hear a few more rippling snaps of those stun capes from the other side of the ship, and then another volley of crossbow bolts goes out from our militia folks, focused on our new friends. Our new friends from around the corner get pincushioned pretty bad, but aren’t down. D.va moves up to me and Chad and drops a shatter on the new squad of three, dropping one of them. Caleb shakes off the stun and gets ready to get stuck in; Chad misses the two elves we’re fighting twice; I take one down, punch the other with Hand of Harm, poisoning him, and then flee, getting slashed by the guy I just poisoned, and go back to heal Nyla.

Nyla nails one of the elves coming in with an eldritch blast, blowing a hole in his guts. She takes out the next one through the face. So we’re down to just one with Chad. I start trying to taunt the other 8 cannibal elves with insults in pre-Fall Old Kraskyan. The one remaining elf teleports up to the top of the ramp and throws something out of the ship, down the ramp at Chad, bouncing it off of him. The ball bounces off of Chad and hits the ground - purple, glowing. So that’s gonna blow up. The elf then hits something on the side of the bay and the bay door starts to lift. The crossbow militia takes him apart with a volley.

D.va casts mage hand and throws the purple blinking thing - maybe a bomb, maybe a beacon for artillery fire from their other ship - up the ramp as it is closing, and then runs around the prow of the ship. And she sees two squads of elves attacking the town. Several townsfolk are down and dead; there are flames on the roof of one of the buildings and an elf squad is moving further into the town.

Caleb runs up and whacks one of the landing gear of the ship, maybe doing some damage but it’s hard to tell. The ship was active with some kind of field that made everything vibrate. He continues moving up to roughly where D.va is. Chad forms up with them and sends his spiritual weapon under the ship; I yell for the militia to form up and follow us, and then head over to the group; Nyla runs like a slow short person and tries halfheartedly to catch up. 

(We actually mindfully schedule the next run to try to finish this combat.)