Ranger Mistress Chert

RangerMistress Chert

Veteran of hundreds of patrols, dozens of larger skirmishes and several full scale battles, she knew her best abilities lay not in the heroic charge, but in her versatile approach to attack and support.

As the first waves of Shaahesk lines broke over the ranks of the elite strike forces, she aimed her high powered confusions at the densest press of the enemy and dived quickly for the shadows as she headed to the flanks. Again and again she hacked into her foes faces, eyes, fingers, tendons, anywhere to cause pain and weakness: she despatched those on their last legs, those distracted foes, and any that were hard pressing her comrades. It was neither pretty nor heroic, but it was brutally effective. As soon as the attention turned fully onto her, she melted away into the shadows, not always making it in time and taking blows that left her staggering into the mud. A moments chance was all she needed and she was away again, disappearing like smoke, only to reappear where she was least expected.

Time and again she paused to throw concealments on hard pressed comrades, and as the battle raged, she increasingly came across the fallen. As quick as she was able she concealed those near death, and applied healings enough to help them stagger from the fray. Time and again she cast confusions into the thickest hordes of the foe, scanning anxiously to make sure no comrades were afflicted, and scanning always for the strongest and most dangerous of foes, the elite casters or the Conclave of Murder. The first Shaahesk casters knew of being targeted was when their wards were stripped by repeated Breaches and Dispels, followed by a spitting hissing half-Nanshi's axes impacting in their faces, sweeping their legs away and brutally hacking the life from them as they tried to stutter a last spell.

The stink and smoke swirled like a living thing, and slowly the dead were seeming to outnumber the living. The battle raged on leaving a brief clearing with a fallen body.. one of her comrades.. a M'Chekian officer: too late for mundane healing, she murmured a prayer from a scroll and tensed, hoping for the fallen to return.. there! ~she quickly cast a Conceal and Freedom, willed that the warrior would have the wits to prepare before plunging again into the melee, and after sending out an area mind ward she again threw the nearest foes into confusions.

Tired.. so tired.. so slippery underfoot, a slight misstep and a Shaahesk blade catches her with such force it is as if she is cut in twain.. she twitches.. bleeding in the mud and gore.. but refuses to pass over.. pain screams in her ears as she staggers aside and sips from a potion at her belt, etherealness surrounds and protects as she gasps and clutches at a healing brew.. her assailant already swept away in the flow of the battle.. she finds herself in a lull, surrounded only by milling Shaahesk.. lights.. a force field?

She stares numbly thru the curtain of light, the Warmaster! and was that Thayliss? A lizard.. two lizards? She rubs at bleary eyes trying to focus. Who was that fallen?.. she tries to push thru the impenetrable curtain, the light pushes her back.. she must help somehow! Slowly the din of battle returns to her senses, and she realises she is surrounded by milling Shaahesk, protected only by a flimsy film of etherealness.

She shakes her head painfully trying to focus, checks her blades, then forces herself to down yet again the alchemical concoctions that may keep her alive as they ward her from the worst of blows: she turns away from the duelling figures and stumbles back towards the thick of the melee.