The Thirty-Fifth Session (Crossover Pt. 2)

Gearing up after fortifying the city, Aoth and A'tehr decided to stay in Harrowdale to continue training townsfolk, while Fish and Nul continued with further fortification efforts and Xochic stayed to help train members of the Mage's guild. The remaining members of the Sentinels and the B-team got horses from Lawrence and headed north to No Man's Land.

Arriving at the Dragon's Delta in a heavy rainstorm, they saw it in tatters from weeks of consistent battle. There were dead bodies and damaged buildings everywhere, and the soldiers looked tired and stretched thin. They met with commander Himari of the Divine Tide, who informed them that while there had been 2-3 daily raids for nearly a month, there hadn't been a single one in 5 days, and she was growing suspicious. The group volunteered to do some recon, and took a small row boat across the river to the Flooded Forest in Lyria. Yief and Yhorik stayed with the boat while Shag, Halrek, Munygobr, and Violen travelled into the forest on a series of arcanely created pathways through the swampy terrain. Eventually, they came to a hillside that went up into a small mountainside. Casting invisibility, they climbed to the top, finding it dropped steeply into a canyon where a massive group of Ebonyborn forces were camped, over 2,000 strong with 500 demons in tow. Seeing that a group of warlocks was in a circle performing a ritual casting of some sort, Shag and Munygobr snuck down with Featherfall and got close enough to observe the ritual. Before they could decipher it, however, the ring of eldritch energy became a summoning circle, opening into an Abyssal pit, out of which climbed a gargantuan Balrog. The Ebony forces began to take up their arms and form ranks, as Shag used Dimension Door to bring them back to the mountaintop, and the group ran back to the boats.

Due to the rise in tide from the storm, the way back was harder than the way there, causing it to take longer for them to cross back to the point in the wall where they could be pulled over. Halrek blinked past the wall and ran to find Himari, warning her of the impending attack, at which point she commander all troops to take their battle positions. By the time this happened and the rest of the group was back on the resistance side of the wall, the Balrog had reached the river and crossed in only a few footsteps, attacking the wall and destroying a portion of it. An advance group of Ebony soldiers followed it into the camp, as the warlocks across the river began raising a platform across the river.

After the initial clash with the forces, the sheer number of the enemy quickly began to overwhelm the resistance, and the Balrog's Legendary Resistance proved too great for Shag's attempts to Banish it. Himari ordered the troops to fall back. The Sentinels and the B-team kept fighting to try and buy time, killing a number of the advance troops but having trouble dealing any serious damage to the Balrog. Despite the fallback order, the troops were still getting overwhelmed, until they heard the battle cries of an incoming force, and saw Melarra and Cormir arriving with approximately 200 troops from Myth Drannor. Melarra immediately cast 9th level Meteor Storm, dealing the first legitimate blow to the Balrog and wiping out nearly all the Ebony forces who had breached the wall, as well as damaging the pathway the warlocks created, slowing the forces on the Lyrian side from advancing. With the arrival of aid, the resistance regrouped, with Yief, Yhorik, Violen, and Halrek all taking command of units and surrounding the Balrog. Before he could join, Shag was cut off by a Warlock commander, who he had seen leading the summoning ritual. The warlock attempted to Dominate Shag, who nearly succumbed to it, but heard Xochic's voice in his head say "Resisting and overcoming magic of this caliber is your next trial on the path of the Paragon. I have your back. You can do this, my love." and broke the spell before engaging and killing the commander.

Now surrounded and overwhelmed by numbers without backup, the Balrog began to take much more serious damage, and in a final act of desperation, summoned a lesser Balrog to its aid, but to no avail, as Violen slayed the beast with his bare hands. As the aid troops closed in and helped overwhelm the second Balrog, the path over the river was repaired, and many more troops began to break the barrier. Before they could overwhelm the resistance, however, the mist that had covered the river and the battlefield grew much thicker, and Shag sensed an immense, terrifying divine presence. The mist cleared, and 2 men stood in the hole in the wall; an elvish looking man with black hair and purple eyes, wearing black and purple armor, and a tall, silver haired man in fractal-looking mythril armor. The elvish man killed 30 soldiers with a single pull of his sword, and lifted the entire structure in the river with all the soldiers on it into the air, and crushed in a magical implosion. The silver haired man then drew his swords and began attacking the remaining 30 soldiers still on the resistance side, with an animalistic ferocity, yet a striking accuracy and control to his movements. While he fought them all off, the elvish man approached the resistance, saying that today wasn't their day to die, as their destinies were to be much more important to the history of this world. He beckoned for the Sentinels to travel north along the river, and for the B-team to travel south. He then rejoined his protégé, who made short work of the unit he attacked, and looked across the river as the remaining forces began to retreat to the Flooded Forest. Giving a final look to the resistance, mist enveloped the 2 of them, and they disappeared.

A day later, after repairing the wall, cleaning up some of the damage from the battle, and reassigning the new set of troops from Myth Drannor, Aoth and A'tehr arrived, having completed their training of the Harrowdale townsfolk, and the 2 groups said their goodbyes, going their separate ways.