Jadis had to give the soldier credit. He took his job seriously and did it bravely. Even if that seriousness and bravery led him to being a complete idiot, the dedication of the guy was admirable. Annoying, but admirable.
“I don’t care who you say you are!” the man shouted as he pointed his spear only a few feet away from Jay’s face. “I’m not letting you run around the Torre Sacra until I hear from the commander! Set your weapons down and stand against the wall!”
“Is this really the time for pointless procedure?” Jay asked while doing her best to not lose her temper at a man who was only doing his job. “The city is under attack, you know!”
“All the more reason not to let two suspicious, giant freaks run around the tower unsupervised!” he shot back. “You could be cultists, or possessed, or who knows what kind of trouble that will only make things worse!”
“Have you seriously not heard about the three fucking Nephilim that came back to the capital?” Syd growled in frustration.
“I have, and I heard they are in the capital! Nearly a thousand miles away! If you were them, you’d be there, not here, putting holes in the walls and destroying priceless relics!”
“Fucking shit man,” Syd threw her hands in the air, “I’m not rooted to one spot!”
“Where’s your commander?” Jay asked, still trying to be polite, if for no other reason than she didn’t want to actually cause a serious disruption to the imperial army in the middle of a battle. “Let’s just go and tell him I’m here! I’m sure he’s already noticed the two giant airships waving the imperial flag hovering over the tower!”
“I don’t know!” he shouted back, the expression of anger and worry clear on his face despite the helmet. “I sent Gerardo to find him! When he finds him, he’ll come back and we’ll sort this mess out, so until then you shut up and stand against the wall! All three of you!”
“Oh, fuck this,” Jay and Syd said in unison.
“Maeve, get over here, we’re leaving,” Syd said over the loud protests of the stalwart soldier.
“Yes,” the Fetch replied and, with no direction from Jadis, leapt up onto Syd’s back and wrapped her arms over her shoulders like a backpack.
“I said stop! Stop!” the man shouted to no effect as Jay moved up to him.
Despite his best efforts, Jay easily overpowered the soldier. In a flash, she had torn the spear from his hands and, picking him up, she tucked the struggling man under one arm while holding onto his weapon in her other hand.
“Where are we going?” Maeve quietly asked, her tone more subdued than usual.
“Up,” Syd answered in brief.
Dashing through the open archway the soldier had come from, Jadis found a long flight of stairs that stretched in both directions, curving around the interior of the circular outer wall. Using her incredible speed, she dashed up the stairs, taking six and eight steps at a time. In moments, she was outside and on the flat roof of the tower, where dozens of soldiers armed with crossbows and spears, as well as a quartet of ballista, were fighting off the demon birds still assaulting the city from the skies.
While some of the soldiers turned to look at Jay, Syd, Maeve, and the very noisily complaining man under Jay’s left arm, most were far more focused on either the combat around them, or the massive airship that was approaching the tower.
“I see you,” Kerr called out from where she stood horizontally on the Leviathan’s fuselage above the exterior deck. “You going to tell those poor sods to make room?”
“Working on it,” Dys said as she hefted both her axe and Jay’s war hammer over one shoulder.
While Jay and Syd had been recovering from the impromptu rocket man impersonation, the Leviathan had been descending on the tower. The aerial battle was still raging, though the situation had changed somewhat. The clash of possessed stymphalia and Seraphim that Jadis had caught sight of in the skies to the northeast of the city had moved. Now the birds were all circling around the tower, and the Seraphim had adjusted their flight paths so that they were protecting the Leviathan and the Behemoth.
Aside from Severina, who was still primarily running interference for the Behemoth, there were three other Seraphim fighting off the stymphalia. One of them was the aforementioned Aelius, who was now hovering a few yards over the top of the Leviathan. The huge, flaming sword the man wielded wasn’t literally twenty feet long, as Jadis had first assumed, but was instead a two-handed sword of more normal proportions that had a massive length of burning magic extending its reach. Aelius seemed to be able to change the length of his fiery blade at will, which made his sweeping attacks against the diving stymphalia quite a spectacle.
The other two Seraphim were less distinct to Jadis’ vision. She was far more focused on defending the airship and preparing for the landing than gawking at allied combatants. However, from the passing glances she got of the two figures who would occasionally circle past the side of the ship, she saw that one was heavily armored with a large halberd and blue wings, while the other was the Seraphim Jadis had seen earlier using the strange polearm with a ring on the end. She didn’t get a good look at either of them since they were constantly moving at high speeds, but she was fairly certain that Blue Wings was a man and Ring Stick was a woman.
“Step back from there,” Dys told Aila and Noll who were both near the front end of the deck. “I don’t want to catch either of you in the rope.”
Noll simply grunted in acknowledgement as he shifted further back. He had run out of javelins to throw and had been lobbing arrows he had snatched from one of Kerr’s quivers at any good targets that came near. As the airship drew closer to the tower, he set aside the arrows and drew his sword in preparation of disembarking.
“What’s the plan?” Aila asked as she moved out of the way. “How are we handling this?”
“We’re going to tie the Leviathan to the tower,” Dys answered. Her speech was somewhat distracted as she was busily pulling out one of the large mooring ropes to have in hand. “It can fit well enough. The Behemoth will have to land somewhere below, but it should be able to fit between the buildings down there since it’s smaller.”
“I meant after that,” Aila clarified. She put one hand on Dys’ chest plate, forcing her to look her in the face. “This isn’t exactly how we planned on entering the city.”
“No, it’s not,” Dys shrugged one shoulder at her redheaded lover. “But no battleplan ever survives first contact with the enemy. Look, we’ll get the ships secured, get everyone gathered together, then we’re heading for the nearest fuster cluck of Demons. If we actually run into someone in charge, we’ll go where they say we’re needed.”
“That will have to do,” Aila nodded seriously.
“We’ve got this,” Dys told Aila. She wanted to kiss her, but since she was wearing her helmet, she settled for briefly squeezing her lover’s shoulder. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Aila replied, her mouth set in a firm line of determination.
Dys nodded once, then stepped forward and leapt over the side of the airship.
The fall wasn’t far, only about fifty feet or so. Dys landed with an easy crouch, though her weight did put a few cracks in the stone surface of the tower. Jadis had already used her other two selves to clear the way, so there was plenty of room. Dys tossed Jay’s massive war hammer to her, then focused on pulling the airship down and into place on the middle of the tower with the mooring line she had brought with her.
The circular top of the tower was big enough that the cabin of the Leviathan could fit safely inside its dimensions. There were tall pillars ringing the edge of the flat area, though, and those pillars had stone arches with flat tops across them. Those pillars were just tall enough that the Leviathan’s fuselage would have to rest on top of them, and thus the airship’s cabin would hang above the ground by about ten or twelve feet. Not an ideal landing, but Jadis could think of worse situations to be in.
Jay and Syd grabbed hold of more rope lines that were tossed down as the ship lowered onto the tower. Despite all of Jadis’ strength, she couldn’t make the ship float down any faster than it was currently moving. Not safely, anyway. However, she did her best to make adjustments to the alignment of the ship so that as it neared the tower, it rested in an orientation that wouldn’t interfere with the four ballista that had been set up by the soldiers defending the Sacra Torre, or whatever it was called. Not that all of the soldiers appeared to appreciate the consideration she was giving them.
“What are you doing!?” the soldier who had originally confronted Jay and Syd down below continued to shout as he stood a good distance back from the Nephilim. “Get this monstrosity off of the Torre Sacra! You are going to damage the tower even more than you already have! And you are directly interfering in a military operation! You need to stop! At once!”
“Fuck me, this guy doesn’t shut up, does he?” Syd grumbled to herself as she yanked on the mooring line in her hands to keep the airship from drifting too far. Turning to look at the man over her shoulder, she shouted a question back at him. “Don’t you have something better to do right now?”
“I am defending my city’s pride from crazed invaders!” the man shouted back at her.
“Then focus on the fucking Demons!”
Syd’s words were echoed by several of the other soldiers who were far less bothered by the unexpected arrival of the airship. While this one, high strung man was a pain, the rest of the tower defenders had quickly figured out what was going on and had just rolled with the change. Jadis supposed a big part of that fast acceptance had to be the fact that the assembled Seraphim, who were the literal avatars of the most revered god in the empire, were defending the airships. A few of the soldiers manning a ballista that was close to Syd and the annoying tower guard shouted at him in tandem with Syd’s admonishment.
“Fabio! Get over here and help us!”
“They wave the imperial flag, and the Seraphim are protecting them! Leave them be!”
“She’s right! Focus on the Demons!”
“I am focusing on the Demons!” Fabio screamed in a panic as he pointed wildly at the deck of the Leviathan. “Look! Look! Demons!”
Jadis’ momentary confusion was immediately cleared when she looked where the freaking out Fabio was pointing. The man had spotted Alex, who was standing on the deck next to Noll and Bridget.
“Look! Do you see! It’s a Demon! The ship brings Demons upon us! It’s a trick! They are—”
Fabio’s words were silenced by a large, clawed hand wrapped around his neck. Jadis hadn’t even seen Noll move. One moment, he was still on the deck of the ship. The next, the gray-muzzled therion was standing in front of the obnoxious soldier, holding the smaller man a foot off the ground.
“See this?” Noll growled before shoving the man’s face a few inches away from the silver belt buckle that the veteran wore, marking him as having surpassed CLR one hundred.
When the soldier choked out a garbled noise, Noll brought him back up to eye level.
“You know what it means. Nod.”
The man nodded.
“You know who I am.”
The man nodded again.
“They’re with me. Fuck off.”
Without another word, Noll dropped the man, who landed on his ass. Fabio quickly scuttled away, not even bothering to get to his feet in his haste to put distance between himself and the terrifying veteran.
“Hey!”
Noll turned his yellow eyes onto Syd.
“I was going to do that.”
Noll snorted, the corner of his mouth turning up slightly to bare a single fang.
“Then move faster and get a badge.”
Syd playfully made a rude gesture at the therion, but she didn’t have the time to waste on any further banter. With a few more tugs, the Leviathan made contact with the pillars of the Torre Sacra and settled into its resting position with a groan of wood and rope. Jadis moved her bodies quickly, gathering up the lines that were tossed down and tying them off at any available anchor points that she could find. In the meantime, Bridget unfurled a rope ladder over the side of the airship so that everyone on board could start disembarking.
Jay rushed to help everyone who needed the aid down from the Leviathan while her Dys and Syd selves ran to the edge of the tower. From the eastern side, she could see the Behemoth slowly making its way down towards an open square that had enough space to fit the huge vehicle. Severina was still guarding the airship, but she wasn’t flying around quite as frantically as there were far fewer of the stymphalia in the sky than there had been before.
“Sev!” Syd called out to the Seraphim. “Sev! Tell them we’ll meet them down there!”
Syd pointed to the northern side of the tower, where another large, open square was visible surrounded by important looking buildings. There were also a lot of people running around in that area, both soldiers and priests from what Jadis could see. She figured that would be the best spot for the two teams to reconnect. With all those soldiers, they might even find someone in charge who could direct them to where they would be able to help the most. Of course, someone in charge was probably already sending people to figure out who had just landed two airships in the middle of the city during a major Demon assault, but Jadis was willing to bet that the bottom of the tower would be an easier place for the local leadership to find them.
Severina flew up close to the two of Jadis, her metal wing gleaming in the light of torches as she came to a hovering stop.
“Magistrate Lodovico will be in that tower there,” she pointed at one of the other large towers located within the third tier of the city. “As will General Voss. They will be administrating the defense of the city. I will announce our presence to them.”
“Good plan,” Dys gave the paladin a thumbs up. “I’m sure they’ll have some input on where we should go. I’ll get everyone down to that square and then we’ll head to where they say we’re needed.”
Before Severina could open her mouth in reply, a noise unlike anything Jadis had ever heard echoed across the city and through the night sky. It was the bass rumble of an avalanche overshadowed by a hollow, roaring, almost musical note. The sound started low in pitch, then rose higher, then higher again as it continued. Jadis could feel her lungs vibrating with every breath she took, then winced in pain as her ears rang from the piercing, higher pitch. When the dread-inducing noise abruptly cut off, the world around Jadis was left in an almost supernatural silence.
Then a nightmare appeared on the horizon.
At first, it just looked like a hill shrouded in the darkness on the far side of the river. Then, as the rumbling cacophony of countless boulders crushing against each other sounded once more, the hill moved. The thing, immense beyond any expectation of living creatures, uncoiled itself like a serpent and pushed across the ground, churning up the land as it drove a crooked course towards the city. The massive, slithering creature paused at the shore, then reared its head up, and up, and up as though a second, profane tower had been built on the other side of the river. Like a great wyrm out of some deranged mythology, the beast towered above the land, its long, limbless body supporting a head that was more mouth than skull. A five-point jaw system split apart and, once more, the rumbling, almost musical, note filled the air with its deafening power.
As the bellowing monstrosity reached the apex of its nightmare call, it suddenly lunged forward. The creature’s body arched in the air and, with a boom Jadis could feel in the soles of her feet, smashed its head into the walls of the city that bordered the river. From where Dys stood, she could see its head break through the barrier. Despite the darkness and the billowing cloud of dust, she still saw its massive jaws open wide. From out of its hollow throat poured a river of dark, writhing figures that, while still indistinct at such a distance to Jadis’ eyes, clearly matched the horde of Demons who were raging on the other side of the river.
“Change of plans,” Dys told Sev as she pointed her axe at the Demon Wyrm. “We’re going there.”
250