“Half!” Eir shouted in warning.
That was her signal to let Jadis know she was down to half her magic reserves. Not good. Jadis hadn’t thought she’d been injured quite that much by the bear man, and on a moment’s reflection she figured she probably hadn’t been. The problem was that Eir was casting her healing at a distance, which ate up a lot more of her magic to do, and she was also healing Thea and Tegwyn. Jadis didn’t know how much healing the men in black had left in them but she wasn’t going to assume less than Eir. Her priestess’ warning was just another signal that Jadis needed to end the fight soon.
It wasn’t the only signal, though. Syd and bear-man’s latest maneuver had only worsened the pounding headache that was chipping away at Jadis’ three skulls. Syd was far too far away from Jadis’ other selves for her comfort. There was a limit to how distant her bodies could be from each other and she could tell that she was getting close to that line.
Feeling the pressure, Jadis increased her efforts with Jay and Dys to put down the armored soldiers and the brawler as quickly as possible. Of course, if Syd could get away from the bear, that would be even better, but that didn’t seem likely. Not even with all the chaos happening in the tavern bar.
The bear charged at Syd just as she did the same, both locking arms again in a struggle of pure strength. Around them came the shouts and cries of anger and amusement as the unruly mercenaries, many of them no doubt deep in their cups, were turning the tavern into a mess of fists and broken furniture. Colliding with the bear, Syd slammed her head forward in an effort to knock the furry fucker out.
The bear had the same idea, or so it seemed, as he also slammed his head forward. The two knocked skulls together in a blow that echoed like boulders breaking. The attack did nothing good for Syd’s headache, though the bear didn’t fair much better. They both stumbled back, briefly stunned from their double headbutt.
Syd’s eyes cleared just in time to see Bridget charging at the bear man, a chair raised over her head.
“No, wait—!” she tried to stop her orc companion, but her warning came too late.
Bridget’s chair shattered over the bear man’s shoulders, leaving her holding nothing but a couple of broken wooden sticks. He barely even seemed to register the blow, his sturdy bulk completely unaffected. However, that didn’t mean he let the attack go. With an almost casual movement, he swiped his left arm to the side in a backhand that connected with Bridget’s chest. The orc hurtled backwards like she weighed nothing, her body crashing through two tables before she tumbled to a stop.
“Motherfucker!” Syd shouted in rage, her fury blinding her as she rushed the man who had just hurt her lover.
“You bloody wanker!” Jadis heard Addy shout as she, too, rushed at the bear in defense of her sister.
“Fucking blaggard!” The barbarian orc roared in his incredibly loud voice as he also charged at the bear.
Syd reached the bear man first. Leading with a right cross, she attempted to strike his jaw but failed when the bear caught her fist in his hand. Using her own momentum against her, he spun Syd and tossed her into Addy, sending both women crashing through a cluster of mercenaries. Rolling off of the stunned orc and the slightly squashed men, Syd looked up just in time to see the elite Flame Wolf barbarian collide with the bear.
The two men exchanged multiple fast-paced blows that Jadis could barely keep up with; not because they were too fast for her to follow, but because they were shockingly precise and complicated. For the briefest of moments, the orc and the bear looked like two peak martial artists in the midst of a highly choreographed stunt fight. That illusion was shattered when the bear struck the barbarian in his stomach with a knee, then did a double-fisted overhead blow that knocked the orc flat on the ground with enough force to crack the stone floor.
Then the bear stomped on the barbarian and put him through the floor to the basement below.
Jadis wasn’t idle while the two fought. She’d lost track of the mace she’d taken from the warrior’s hand earlier, but while he was distracted by the barbarian, she found the enchanted weapon amidst the broken clutter of tavern furniture. Just as the bear turned his attention back on her, she threw the mace with all of her strength.
The metal mace bounced off of the bear’s head with a satisfying clang. Stumbling slightly from the surprise blow, he failed to see Syd coming before she ran into him, tackling the bear in a flying leap that sent both of them back through the broken face of the tavern and out into the cold night.
Jadis still hadn’t been able to finish off either side of her fight, but she thought things were finally turning in her favor.
Tegwyn’s back hooves connected with the head of one of the heavily armored knights, sending him flying off his feet. His rolling tumble across the cobblestones was stopped when he hit one of Aila’s trap circles and ghostly chains wrapped him up tightly. He was the third soldier to be caught in one of her traps so far and the darkly attired assailants were starting to lose their numbers advantage.
From atop Tegwyn’s back, Thea used her shield to block another knight from striking at the Dryad’s flank, her whole combat style focused on defense. Every time one of the men tried to attack anywhere the goat man couldn’t see, she was there to block them. Not only block but redirect as she pushed them back directly into either Jay or Dys’ attacks.
Every chance she got, Jadis struck at the armored foes, using her axe and maul to trip, push, strike, and bludgeon. Unfortunately, she couldn’t spare much of her attention on the relatively lesser soldiers since the short man was taking up much of her focus.
The brawler was fast and agile and hit with bone-jarring force. He lacked range, but he turned that to his advantage as he constantly pushed to be inside of Jadis’ guards, staying at just the right distance that she couldn’t effectively bring her large weapons to bear against him. Now that there were two of her on the battlefield, he no longer went for the grappling moves to try and tie her up, but instead struck at her joints and or swiped at her feet and legs, constantly trying to trip her or disable her movement. Jadis was fairly certain that the two healers further down the street were boosting him in some way as well since the man’s movements were even faster than they were before.
If she could, Jadis wanted to dash over to those two priests or clerics or whatever they were and take them out of the fight, but every time either Jay or Dys moved in that direction the small man was there to block her, aided by two or more of the soldiers in dark armor. She was still trying to figure out what to do to bring a swift end to this pointless and stupid fight when a new factor revealed itself.
“Halt! Put down your weapons and cease fighting!” a man’s voice cried out.
Glancing down in the direction of the docks, Jadis could see a squad of guards running towards their fight. Unlike the men she’d been fighting, these soldiers were wearing the white and blue livery of the city guard, so Jadis knew they should be on her side. Or at least not on general Egilhard’s side. All ten of the guards had their shields out and their spears pointed in front of them as they charged towards their melee.
“Stand back!” the female cleric shouted at the oncoming guards. “This is imperial business! By order of Prince Hraustrekr!”
Prince Hraustrekr? Jadis knew that name. Wasn’t that the first prince? What did he have to do with any of this? If anything, Weigrun was territory controlled by the second prince, the Kestil guy or whatever his name was.
Were these men not sent by Egilhard?
Jadis couldn’t waste too much mental effort on deciphering that situation. While the approaching guards and the enemy healing mages shouted commands at each other, she was still in the middle of two different fights. The short brawler was still trying to take Jay and Dys out at the knees while Syd and the bear were locked in combat.
More specifically, Jadis was finally giving the damn bear the beatdown he deserved.
As the two had tumbled across the snowy road, Syd had managed to land so that she was sitting on top of the bear man’s lower body. Clenching her thighs to make sure he wasn’t going to be going anywhere, she rained a hail of blows down on his ursine head.
Covering up, the bear managed to protect his head from many of the blows by blocking with his arms, but Syd was relentless. Now that she had him on the backfoot, she wasn’t going to give up her advantage. Strike after bone-breaking strike landed on the bear’s forearms, the sides of his head, and on any other exposed part of his body she could reach. She avoided hitting his pauldrons or the top of his head, both being thickly protected, but without pity she smashed her balled fist down on one of his round ears, making the bear visibly wince with pain as he let out a yelp.
“Stupid fucker starting fights!” Syd shouted as she continued her assault. “Could have just come to me like a fucking reasonable person and talked! Big, stupid, idiot, ugly, teddy bear!”
Her fists were starting to hurt, the skin on her knuckles split and bleeding, but that was nothing compared to the pain of the splitting headache she had. The piercing pain just fueled her anger even further as she kept screaming half-coherent insults at the ravaged bear, striking him so hard that the ground around him was cracking and indenting. When one particularly wild haymaker knocked his head to the side and left him open for a moment, Syd grabbed hold of either side of his furry head and slammed it down into the cobblestones, shattering the stone with the power of her strength.
“Stupid fucking asshole!” she shouted as she made the same move again, seeing that the bear’s silver eyes were clouded with pain and unfocused from the attack.
Before she could hammer his head into the ground a third time, a sudden intervention threw off her rage-filled focus. The intervention wasn’t between Syd and the Bear, though. It was between her Jay and Dys selves and the fight back on the original street.
Jay had picked up another one of the heavily armored men and thrown him through a wall to get him out of the way when the brawler had gotten behind her to punch at her hip. Dys had seen the attack coming from her angle, though, so Jay twisted to the side to dodge the attack. In the process of doing so, she accidentally jostled against one of the other armored foes who was nearby. It threw off her dodge and she ended up not quite getting out of the way. The result was that the brawler’s fist connected, though not where he had been aiming originally.
A pained groan issued unbidden from Jay’s mouth as she involuntarily buckled after being punched in the dick. It hurt almost as bad as the time she’d been burned alive, if more focused in scope. If it was that bad without balls, she couldn’t imagine what it was like to get hit like that for someone with a pair.
“Huh?” the brawler hesitated, apparently not anticipating the reaction.
“Bastard!” Dys yelled as she slammed the pommel of her axe square between the man’s legs.
He collapsed to his knees from the power of the blow and, for just a moment, he and Jay stared at each other in mutual pain and understanding. Just a moment, though, as both growled and rose to their feet, both rearing back to strike. Neither blow came, though, as a high-speed ball of blood-red light flew into the open space between them.
“Oh shit—” Jay cursed just before Vraekae’s orb of doom instantly expanded from about the size of a person’s head to roughly the size of Tegwyn’s goat form.
Jay and the brawler were both sent flying away from each other by the power of the spell. Because of where she was standing, Jay was knocked through the window of a storefront, glass shattering as she fell onto her back inside the building. The short man was sent all the way to the other side of the road, as were several of the armored soldiers. Even Thea and Tegwyn were thrown back a few feet as the orb clipped them.
“Enough!” Vraekae’s voice boomed with frozen fury. “All of you stand down or I will have you put down!”
Looking towards where the shout had come from, Dys could see Vraekae marching towards them from the direction of the docks. There were dozens more soldiers with her, most of them her own guards, though she saw a few people wearing the same dark clothes as the assailants who she had been fighting. She also saw that high priest Oswin was with her, as was general Egilhard.
From the look on Vraekae’s face, it looked like the next person who made a hostile move was going to be introduced to her orb in a non-too pleasant way. Jadis let out a sigh of relief at the sight. Chances were good that she was probably going to get in some trouble for this fight, at least from the perspective of property damage, but she had been the one wronged. Now that Vraekae was here, she could settle this shit and get the ridiculous charges that Egilhard or Hraustrekr or whoever it was had levied at her dismissed.
As the tension left Jadis’ body, she realized her mistake too late. She’d let her guard down because the fight felt like it had finally ended in her favor and a person in authority she had some respect for had shown up to take her side. But that was only where her two bodies were located. Syd was halfway across the city. And the bear didn’t have a clue what was going on where everyone else was.
In the couple of seconds that Syd let up her assault, relaxing her hold on the bear man’s head and body, he acted. With a swift move he struck Syd’s chin in a surprise uppercut that knocked her head back. As she reeled from the blow, he twisted his lower body out from under her and put his feet against her abdomen in a mirror of the same move she’d done to him at the start of the fight. Using all of his considerable strength, he kicked.
Syd was launched away from the bear, her body flying through the air for several seconds before crashing against something hard. She tumbled across the top of a roof, broken shingles flying everywhere as she spun uncontrollably. Her head felt like it was going to crack into pieces as she tried to grab hold of something to slow down, but the stone tiles ripped off of the roof in her hands. Eventually she felt herself go into freefall again as she fell off of the roof.
As she fell, she could make out that she was somewhere past the tavern, falling from the top of another tall building. She could see the bear man slowly getting to his feet in the distance. Closer, she could see Bridget pushing her way out of the tavern door, her sister right behind her. She was bleeding from her nose and her face was twisted in anger, though as her eyes found Syd her expression shifted into one of fear.
“Jadis!” Bridget shouted as she started running towards her, but it was hard to hear her.
Jadis’ heads were pounding, not just Syd’s but Jay and Dys’ too. Sound was muffled and light was blurry as she cringed in agony. It felt like her soul was being stretched beyond its limit, almost to the point of tearing apart.
Then, as Syd hit the ground, her fall causing her to bounce just a few inches further away, Jadis felt it happen.
Her mind snapped.
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