“Eir!”
All three of Jadis screamed at once. There was no time to think, only a second to react. Her elven lover had been pulled over the rail of the Leviathan, her robes having been caught in the clutches of the stymphalia that Jay had hurled away from the airship. Rushing forward with superhuman reaction, Jay tried to catch Eir, hoping that her insane speed and long reach would be enough to undo the terrible mistake. Stretching out her arm as far as she could go, Jay’s fingertips just barely brushed against the hem of Eir’s robes…
And then the elf was out of reach, falling into the night sky.
Jadis didn’t hesitate. Without a word, Jay launched herself over the side of the airship. The shouts and screams of her other lovers surrounded her, their words sounding like they were in slow motion as the adrenaline coursed through Jadis’ brains. She knew what she was doing was dangerous, maybe even deadly, but with her huge level of health, there was a chance of her surviving the fall. Unlike Eir, who had no chance at all.
As the thought passed through her heads, several different realizations hit Jadis at once.
Firstly, Jadis remembered that Eir had her Protection of the D ritual active. The spell protected her from dropping below one health point so long as she wasn’t beheaded or something equally as catastrophic. And, since Eir was an incredibly powerful healer, she’d be able to bring herself back up to full health in no time, so long as she was conscious. Even if she wasn’t conscious, she had Beloved Cleric’s Autonomous Regeneration, which would allow her to heal automatically. That meant that, technically, Eir had a better chance of surviving a fall from a fatal height than Jadis did.
The second thought that entered Jadis’ mind was the question of how the fuck had Eir been caught by the damned bird in the first place? Eir had been inside the cabin of the Leviathan, healing when needed at a distance. She had not been on the deck. It shouldn’t have been possible for the diminutive elf to get caught by the stymphalia’s claws, even though that had been exactly what Jadis had seen.
Third, and most importantly, if Eir had, in fact, been launched off the side of the airship, why was it that Dys was staring at her purple-haired lover standing inside of the ship cabin?
“Jadis!” Eir cried out, a horrified expression on her face as she turned to look at Dys. “What did you—!?”
Jadis didn’t need Eir to finish her sentence to realize what had happened. It hadn’t been the elf who had been accidentally pulled over the edge of the Leviathan. It had been the only other person on the ship who had a copy of Eir’s robes and a habit of wearing other people’s faces.
“Got you!” Jay shouted as she wrapped her arms around Maeve.
The Fetch let out a strangled noise of panic that might have contained words of some kind, but Jadis did not have the time to interpret. Her mind was far more occupied with figuring out what exactly she should do next to minimize the chances of breaking her neck when she inevitably hit the ground hundreds of feet below.
Or was the ground really as far away as she thought it was?
A split-second glance told Jadis that, yes, the ground was, in fact, at least two hundred yards away. However, there was something quite a lot closer than the ground. Glanum’s central tower was several hundred feet tall. The airship was, at most, two hundred feet above the top of the structure, maybe closer to one hundred feet, which was a much shorter distance for Jadis to fall.
The problem was that the airship hadn’t been directly over the tower. While they were within what Jadis would consider the outer limits of her jumping distance, that was a far distance from being within falling range. The leap Jay had made brought her closer to the building, but not close enough to matter. She would be hitting the ground, unless Jadis did something within the next half second about it.
She had no magic that would make a difference, nor did she think any of her lovers who possessed magic could do anything to stop the fall. The only one who stood a chance of helping was Severina, and Jadis wasn’t sure that the Seraphim could lift her into the air unarmored, much less when she was fully equipped in her plate mail. Then there was the distance issue. If one of her bodies fell all the way to the ground, Jadis’ mental connection to her bodies could snap. She really wasn’t sure if the fall was far enough, but it looked damn close to the limit. If she did snap, her mind would fracture and she could end up doing horrible damage to everyone around her, before falling into a coma, if she was lucky. All that was to say, she needed to keep her bodies close to each other or risk a truly devastating situation.
She could throw her other two selves over the edge, just to keep her bodies within range, though that would triple the amount of damage she took from the fall, whatever it might be. Eir would be able to heal her, as long as the fall wasn’t lethal, but Jadis wanted to minimize the damage done since she didn’t know just how bad a fall from such a height would fuck her up. The last thing she wanted to do was test the survivability of the drop with three of her selves.
With magic out of the question, and intercession from Severina unlikely at best, Jadis fell back on the one thing she knew she had going for her: brute force.
Flashing through the cabin at a speed that made the wooden floorboards creak in protest, Dys rushed at her other self. In the same instant, as part of her coordinated effort, Syd leapt up just enough to get her body clear of the deck railing and orient her bent legs towards Dys. In a thunderclap of steel, Dys slammed her arms forward while Syd straightened her legs out behind her. The resultant collision of two titans of strength shook the whole airship. Syd was shot like a cannonball as the combined strength of two of Jadis’ bodies pushing against each other launched her giant self out into the open sky.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” Dys heard several different people shout in one fashion or another around her.
Dys didn’t answer their cries of confused outrage right away, since she wasn’t sure the utterly insane act she had just committed herself to would succeed or not. She figured she could update them after her other two selves landed, in one fashion or another.
Syd whistled through the sky at a speed that made her stomach slip to the soles of her feet. In the millisecond of time she spent in the open air, she felt like some kind of rocket given human form. If she had more time to ponder her situation, she might have wondered if this was the stupidest thing she had ever done. She didn’t really have the time to reflect in the moment, though, as the speed her double-strength kick-push had sent her off at was far, far faster than the rate Jay and Maeve were falling. In the next moment, Jadis’ accuracy proved to be as good as she had gambled it to be. Syd crashed into her other self’s back.
The jarring collision allowed Syd to grab hold of Jay and Maeve in a tangle of armor and limbs. Her hugely enhanced momentum carried them both far further along than Jay’s leap had done on its own. Actually, as Jadis quickly realized from multiple different points of view, the speed at which she had hurtled herself through the air was far greater than she probably needed, if the time it took her two selves to close the distance to the tower was anything to go by.
At least she wouldn’t have to worry about falling.
The stark sound of combat echoing through the night air was momentarily overshadowed by the cacophonous noise of two armored Nephilim bodies, plus a Fetch, smashing through the wall of the central Glanum tower. Jadis didn’t even try to catch her selves, since the impact was so destructively chaotic. Instead, she just did her best to not crush Maeve as they rolled across some expansive surface that was, fortunately, not too far a drop from where they penetrated the outer wall of the towering structure.
“Are you okay?” Aila asked, her face pale and eyes wide.
Dys glanced at her worried lover before turning her attention back to the hole that her other selves had just put in the side of the tower.
“Surprisingly, yeah,” she shrugged. “Actually, my head is starting to hurt because of the distance between me and the rest of me. I think I’m near the outer limits. Can you please have Sabina and Alban guide the airship closer to that tower? I need all of me to jump down there before I get too separated.”
“Right,” Aila nodded, her expression showing that she had a lot more to say on the matter, but the battle raging around them took priority. “I’ll get us over top the tower.”
“We might want to anchor ourselves to it,” Dys said as she watched to see if any demonically possessed birds would chase into the opening she had made in the wall. “So we don’t drift.”
“And so no one else falls down,” Kerr growled as she walked across the top of the rail, secure in the knowledge that her enchanted boots would keep her in place. “Charos’ nutsack, Jadis! That was fucking insane!”
“I thought she was Eir!”
“Gods damned idiot Fetch,” Kerr cursed as she shot at a passing stymphalia. “What the flying fuck was she doing there, anyway?”
A good question, Jadis thought as her other two selves got their bearings. It was a question she would have to ask Maeve directly. Presuming she hadn’t accidentally squashed the shapeshifting troublemaker during their tumultuous landing.
“Are you okay?” Jay echoed the question that had just been directed at her.
“No,” Maeve replied, her voice calm yet tense. “But I’ll live.”
Slowly sitting up, Jay and Syd let out conjoined coughs as they cleared their lungs and noses from the dust in the air. Since she had the ability to do so, she had one self check her status sheet while her other self got up to her feet and check out their surroundings. Looking at her health, Jadis was pleasantly surprised to see that she had barely lost any health at all from the fall. A total of forty-four health points, which was barely a scratch to her max health of over twenty-six hundred points. Sure, that much damage would have put a person with the more typical one hundred health points into a concerning state, but for her, that amount was nothing.
Looking around her selves, Jadis saw that she had landed inside of some kind of large, open hall. She wasn’t sure what the purpose was, exactly, but it seemed that the top floors of the tower were actually one large open space, where the ceiling was at least fifty feet above the marble floor, maybe more. She could see the large hole in the ceiling, right where she had noticed it from the exterior, and directly below that hole she could see a pool of clear water in the center of the rotunda. The walls lining the circular hall were lined with arched alcoves that had bronze statues set into them on pillars.
Jadis had apparently crushed one of those statues when she crashed through the tower wall, as she could see the bronze remains lying on the ground in a trail that went from a huge hole in the stone wall all the way to where she was standing. Whoever the statue had been of, Jadis dearly hoped they hadn’t been anyone too popular. She didn’t think the twisted wreckage that was barely recognizable as a depiction of a bearded man wielding a flanged scepter was going to be salvageable.
“Oh, shit,” Jay said as she got up to her knees and looked at the Fetch who had been partly crushed under her weight. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Maeve was, while not as crushed as the statue, not looking too great. One of her arms was forced backwards at the elbow in the wrong direction and her legs, now exposed thanks to the skirt of her robes being torn, were twisted together in ways legs weren’t meant to bend. Her torso also looked oddly lopsided. It took Jadis a moment to realize that it was because part of her chest was as flat as the floor.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Maeve said as her body shifted around in an oddly disquieting way. “I don’t have bones.”
The Fetch proved her statement true as she righted herself to a standing position. Her legs didn’t so much as untwist themselves as they melted into each other and then split apart again, looking completely normal and uninjured. Her bent arm flexed forward without a sound and her chest filled out like a balloon being inflated. In just a second or two, Maeve once more looked completely healthy. She also still looked very much like Eir.
“Okay, glad you’re alive,” Jay exhaled loudly. “Now, why the fuck did you change to look like Eir!?”
Looking down at the smaller woman, Jadis could see a war of various emotions play across Maeve’s face. Since she was her lover, Eir’s face and the expressions she made were intimately familiar to Jadis. The looks that passed across the shapeshifter’s copy of the elf’s lovely visage were both similar and alien to what she expected to see. Not every emotion was immediately recognizable, though among the ones she could pick out, Jadis saw worry, confusion, and most predominantly, fear.
Jadis could easily imagine what she looked like from Maeve’s point of view. A towering figure in solid black armor, faceless except for the glint of sharp eyes behind a dark helm’s visor. Jay was without her usual massive war hammer, but Syd loomed behind her, still wielding her rune-etched sword staff, which she gripped tightly in one hand. That weapon could slice a tree in half, never mind a person who barely reached Jadis’ waist in height.
“I—” Maeve hesitated, her voice coming out in strangled tone. “I thought—”
“Gods above!” a man’s voice shouted from across the hall. “Who are you? What are you doing here? And what happened to the statue of King Julius!?”
“We’ll talk about this later,” Jay waved a dismissive hand at the shapeshifter. “When our lives aren’t in imminent threat.”
Maeve shut her mouth and nodded once, her expression melting into a strangely subdued look. She stepped up close behind Jay and Syd as the two of Jadis turned to acknowledge the soldier who was shouting at them from across the hall. Once again, she had taken on the appearance of a demure elven priestess.
“Hey,” Syd called out to the angry looking man. “You’re probably not going to believe this…”
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