Whyyy?

Tonight's session was very eventful. While exploring the underwater laboratories, we found a large group of iron golems, complete with control amulets. Right on cue, we get news from the surface of an impending army of underwater zombies. After a brief scuffle while retreating into the siege vaults, sacrificing the wizard's construct companion to blow up an undead aboleth, and having the iron golems seal the doors to buy us some time, we retreated deeper toward the vaults. I would like to note that I wasn't rolling too well, getting a natural 1 on a pick attack and clipping myself, and doing fairly poorly with some saving throws. After getting some distance, the doors were smashed open and we were surrounded by zombified sharks and their commander: a lich. The lich declared its intent to retrieve something from the vaults and started walking that way, stopping only to respond to an ineffective disintegrate spell with a blast that killed most of the men accompanying us and nearly took out the wizard. After slaughtering the sharks and quickly healing, we determined that risking death to destroy the lich was preferable to letting it get away with...whatever it wanted. Shortly thereafter, a lucky roll from the archivist stunned the lich long enough for our melee specialists to surround it and the wizard to give them all a mass bull's strength spell. At this point, I launched a series of attacks against the lich, each packing about as much damage as could be expected from all but the most dangerous spells in the party's arsenal. I rolled...two Natural Ones in a row. The lich escaped unharmed and I cleaved off nearly a third of my own health. Fortunately, the rest of the party did quite well in the following turn, the devil hitting with every single attack, the paladin smiting evil, and the archivist hitting with a bolt of glory for over 100 damage. The lich blew back the melee-ers, but one more bolt of glory (the archivist's last high-level spell) just barely connected, and the lich was destroyed. Thus ended the session.

The DM, after informing us that he did not expect us to chase the lich or to survive if we did chase it. He also told us all to go up three levels, which means that my character is leveling up three times for hitting himself three times. On the plus side, I did get to massacre some zombie in the first half.