[Suzerain of Sheol]

This will not last.

I am coming.

How long?

Soon enough.

Death spirals, snaking through the endless thousands, bodies annihilated in nearly incomprehensible slaughter, thousands upon tens of thousands, empty vessels laid to waste. Meaningless murder.

And endless.

Even now, after ten shrieking minutes of hellish battle, there are more of the foe than there were to begin with. And just as they mass once more, just as uncountable swords are raised for yet another charge, it comes....

CLICK.

CLICK. CLICK.

...and silence.

The moment seems frozen. The horde impending. Impossibly vast, climbing a mountain of carcasses to reach the party. They have no morale to break. No reserve to exhaust. Manifest hunger, and infinite gnashing jaws.

In the first stunned breath, Thomas is swift to act. Hurling his fist heavenward, he launches his power outward. There is a flash like intimate lightning. Blinding. Paralyzing.

And two thousand bodies fall to ash.

A hundred thousand more slaver in their wake.

But the priest is not finished. So very far from finished.

"Clear a path!" he screams to his men, who as one begin hauling bodies away from the staircase leading below.

Striding out into the carnage, Thomas hurls off his cloak, revealing... inhumanity. Cybernetic evolution.

A dozen tendrils of gunmetal steel, each articulate with a thousand interlocking joints like knuckles, writhe as prehensile limbs out from his back. A nest of whipping metallic vipers, and along their length course sparks of violet electricity. Each is tipped with an 8" diamond-edge drill bit.

With practiced ease, his mind manipulates the synthetic appendages as he walks into the heart of the enemy, a writhing crackling cloud surrounding him.

He rolls his wrists, and twin dagger-blades, nearly two feet long and so thin as to be invisible, erupt across the span of his hands. As the monsters surround him, he systematically destroys them, boring through eye-sockets and mouths, exploding nerves, choking, tearing, dismembering. The tendrils move with such snapping alacrity that the lightning they conduct weaves a blinding, searing net around the priest.

He makes it, perhaps, thee-hundred feet from the central grave.

NOW! he roars into Diogenes' mind.

Well out of range still, dripping head-to-toe in gore and melted bone, his khukri snapped in the middle from the sheer forces to which he has subjected it, the assassin advances. He can feel his last reserves burning away, every burst of strength to hurl back his attackers draining something essential. Every breath is one he could not take unaided, and still he advances.

Into the minds of all the party, he screams,

FLEE! BELOW! NOW, OR WE ALL DIE!

He catches sight of Thomas across the field, sees the priest's vicious nod, and reaches to his belt.

Pulling forth his bandoleer of Ectoplasmic Dispersion Grenades.

Readying them all.

And throwing.

There is no sound. Rather, an implosion of silence. A concussion of nothingness. A denial, spreading two-hundred-fifty feet around the stair. Driving away the controlling spirit from these creatures.

For fleeting seconds.

Innumerable bodies slump lifeless.

And with a final gasp, both priest and assassin fight their way back to the descent, stumbling over each other and falling, both unconscious, into the darkness below.