There was little in the world more gratifying than the feeling of a plan working out exactly the way it had been envisioned. Jadis rarely got to experience that feeling, not when it came to battle where chaos reigned supreme and no plan ever survived contact with the enemy. And yet, here she was. A plan gone right. And it was thanks to that plan that Jay was able to watch with supreme satisfaction as her other two selves began tearing Demon Prince Vinea apart.
“What’s the big bitch saying?” Kerr asked, having just been set down from Jay’s arms.
“Panic… Confusion… Terrible… Anger…” Alex replied from her perch on Jay. “Terrible… Agony… She rages…”
“Yeah, I’d rage too if someone blew off a piece of my face,” Kerr growled as she hefted her bow and took aim. “Now let’s see if we can put a few more holes in this stronza.”
As Kerr loosed another, not quite as empowered, arrow, Jadis busied herself by landing as many mirrored strikes against Vinea as she could manage. The explosion hadn’t just torn one of the Demon Prince’s jaws off, it had blown a hole in the side of its head. While Vinea was stunned and just starting to curl up its jaws, Dys and Syd were both hacking away at the massive wound, doing what she could to make it worse.
Dys used her axe like a woodsman, standing on top of Vinea and chopping down like she was splitting logs. Each whack of her battleaxe shattered the Demon’s stony hide, widening the hole and causing more blood to pour out. The only thing that held her back from striking with more fervor was the fact that she still had Aila clutched in her left arm. Unfortunately, there was no time to run the arcanist back to safety, as she had to keep up the attack for as long as Vinea was stunned.
Syd’s sword staff wasn’t ideal for striking the thick outer scales of the giant wyrm, so instead of hacking away like Dys, she held the staff upside-down in both hands and shoved it downward over and over again. Her blows pierced deep into the Demon’s head, the enhanced size of her weapon allowing her to reach greater depths than would have been otherwise possible. With Mirrored Strikes triggering along with each stab, there was no doubt she was doing massive damage to the Demon Prince.
She wasn’t the only one, either. Noll had landed between Dys and Syd and had immediately begun cutting into Vinea with his daggers. It was clear that the weapons weren’t doing as much damage as likely would have been possible with his sword, but he wasn’t called Noll the Savage for no reason. The old wolf tore into the Demon, breaking apart its outer hide and utterly savaging the vulnerable flesh within. If Jadis hadn’t been so occupied with her own gore-soaked attacks, she might have taken the time to be impressed by how horrifyingly vicious Noll could be.
Explosions of fire and light caught Jadis’ attention, and while Dys and Syd didn’t deviate from her task, Jay was able to see the sources from her perspective.
Severina had landed further back on the Demon Prince’s body and was striking repeatedly with her sword. Each blow was empowered with a paladin’s divine retribution and the effects of her unhindered smites blasted away chunks of the Demon in great swathes. Beyond her, Jay could see Aelius’ flames bursting forth, and she had no doubt that the Seraphim was laying everything he had onto Vinea.
When a second bloom of blue fire engulfed the colossal wyrm, Jadis assumed that Tacitus and Bridget had found another opportunity to strike. Redoubling their efforts, she and the others did all they could to take as much advantage as possible. However, even though their focus was on slaying Vinea, the Demon Prince was not the only enemy on the battlefield.
As Syd raised her arms to drive her weapon deep down into Vinea for another piercing blow, she caught sight of something large moving out of the corner of her eye. It was no more than a shadow within the dark recesses of the Demon Prince’s body, but the movement had been visible to her through the creature’s many holes and openings. That slight warning of something prowling nearby was enough for Jadis’ gut instincts to kick in, and Syd immediately stepped back as the start of an evasive maneuver.
In the next instant, a massive stone spike at least six feet long blasted through the air. The high-speed stone scraped across the armor of Syd’s chest, leaving a gouge in the tough metal and causing the spectral armor Aila had cast upon her to crackle in protest. Whipping around, Syd looked for the source of the projectile. Since it hadn’t come from Vinea, she figured it had to be one of the unaccounted-for Greater Demons, or even a Matriarch like the dead head. Any foe like that needed to be dealt with swiftly, so that their efforts against Vinea weren’t disrupted.
The creature Syd spotted was partially obscured as it was inside of the Demon Prince’s body, but she could see enough of it that she figured it had to be the Greater Demon she had been warned of earlier. It certainly didn’t look like anything else she had seen in the battle so far. Large and bulky, it had a rocky exterior that reminded Jadis of the unrelenting simulacrum. The Demon also only had four limbs, which was possibly the most unusual thing Jadis had ever seen considering how most Demons seemed to sprout extra arms and legs like they were going out of style.
The bulky Demon was walking on all fours, each one of its large limbs ending in four-fingered hands that grasped onto Vinea’s body. It was inside of the far larger wyrm and was actually hanging upside down. It was hard to see much else about the Greater Demon, other than it didn’t appear to have a head, just like the simulacrum, though instead of an open round maw in the middle of its chest it had a large spike. A spike that was increasing in length, even in the short moment that Syd took to examine the monstrosity.
“Noll!” Syd shouted a second later, once she had a bead on the hidden foe. “Behind and on your right!”
The veteran mercenary wasted no time questioning Syd’s warning. Instead, his reaction was swift as he leapt back, turning in midair with the grace of a cat. The stone spike that whistled by his head missed by mere inches, but a miss was still a miss. When Noll’s feet landed once more on Vinea’s back, he was already sprinting towards the Greater Demon.
Jadis left that problem in her mentor’s capable hands. She returned her full focus to Vinea, who was finally starting to come out of its explosion-induced stupor. Despite what had to be thousands of points of damage done, the damn titanic Demon still wasn’t dead. Jadis was starting to wonder what she was going to have to do to kill the thing.
Aila saw the arcane runes before Jadis, and her warning came a second before the magic took effect. Huge shields of slate appeared over the wound in Vinea’s head, an attempt at protection that probably would have worked well. Except that thanks to her recent level up, Jadis had a counter to the magical barriers. With an exertion of Stamina, Dys and Syd’s next blows were empowered by Break the Bulwark. The giant slabs of magically conjured stone were shattered almost effortlessly, turning Vinea’s expenditure of her dwindling magic resource into an utter waste.
When the next round of runes appeared, Jadis knew that they were going to be offensive in nature, which was of far greater worry to her. Aila was still in Dys’ arms and while she had confidence she could shrug off anything the Demon Prince threw at her now, she was less certain her much more fragile lover could handle the coming spell.
Calling an audible, Dys pulled back from her attack and leapt away from the colossal wyrm.
“I’ve got to get you back to the others!” she shouted as she jumped the distance between Vinea’s head and the closest ruin of a building.
“No, keep fighting!” Aila protested, though there was little she could do to stop Jadis’ actions. “I’ll be fine!”
Dys was almost tempted to listen, but she knew she had made the right call when the explosions of rock shrapnel started going off all around Vinea’s head. The spells the Demon Prince had cast were the wide-ranging, self-damaging sort of magical explosions that came from desperation, not planned thought. Thanks to her many layers of defenses, her Syd self weathered the storm, however, Jadis knew that her estimation was right. Aila wouldn’t have survived the utter chaos of bursting rock. It was like being in the middle of an artillery barrage, except without fire or smoke.
As the stone explosions raged and Dys started running Aila away from the Demon Prince, Jadis tried to figure out how to land a final, decisive blow on Vinea. Even though the titanic Demon was proving to be even more resilient than they had feared, from Jay’s perspective, the battle for the city was looking vastly improved.
“I can see the army pushing in from the west!” Jay called out. She was standing on top of the building that Eir, Thea, and Sorcha were inside of and, with her increased height, had a good view of the surroundings. “It looks like the swamp shit Vinea created is slowing them down, but they're making progress!”
“From the east, too!” Kerr called in response from her perch on the building to Jay’s right. “Big fucking push! That giant dick monster is about to get hammered from two sides!”
Jadis wasn’t sure exactly what the army would be able to do damage-wise to the Demon Prince, but she figured that there had to be elite warriors mixed in with the regular soldiers. Elites would have skills that might be able to punch through the Demon’s potent defenses, which could be the tipping point they needed.
As Dys approached their location, Jadis considered having her Jay self move in a little closer to the fight. They were the equivalent of several blocks away from the Demon, and while Jay could certainly chuck a few rocks at a distance, she wanted to do more. If all three of her bodies were banging on Vinea, instead of just two, then maybe that would be enough to finish the persistent Demon bitch off once and for all.
One look at Alex and Jadis discarded the notion completely. There wasn’t a chance that her stubborn little blue-eyed Demon would stay behind if Jay ran into the melee. Since she couldn’t keep Alex from following her, she had to keep a distance, for their baby’s sake if no other reason. Besides which, even if Alex’s pregnancy wasn’t at issue, Jay still didn’t have any armor on her. No, having all three of her selves beat on Vinea wasn’t an option. Instead, Jadis would need to find a different way to bring a close to the fight.
“Hey, I think I see—” Kerr started to say before her words were replaced by a screech of terrifying agony.
While Jay had been looking in the other direction, Dys had been looking straight at Kerr as she ran between the buildings to get to where she and the others were hunkered down. A blast of electrical energy had lashed out at Kerr from behind her, to the south. The therion’s body seized up painfully as the electricity robbed her of all motor functions. When the spell ended a second later, its light still an afterglow in the air, Kerr crumpled like a puppet with her strings cut.
“Kerr!” Jay shouted as she leapt over to the roof her lover had collapsed onto.
The whole structure groaned under their combined weight, but Jay didn’t linger on the exposed rooftop. Sweeping the unconscious archer into her arms, she fell with her over the side, putting the building between them and the enemy caster who had struck an unexpected blow from behind. She had little doubt as to the nature of the foe that had snuck up on them, and she didn’t want to give the abhorrent mage a second shot. Jay caught a glimpse of the Demon as she rolled with Kerr, but that brief sight of a disembodied floating head was all the confirmation she needed.
“Dead Head Matriarch!” Jay shouted her warning. “Keep out of sight!”
Since she didn’t hear the sound of more spells being cast, Jadis assumed that the others had ducked out of view and were no longer targets for the matriarch. She had left Eir, Thea, and Sorcha on the second floor of the building to the west of her current position, and they should have been more than safe enough so long as they retreated from the windows. Jay needed to get back over to them, fast, though. Kerr was dead weight in her arms and a quick check told her that the therion wasn’t breathing.
“Get on my front,” Jay commanded Alex as she turned so that she was facing north and away from the direction the lightning spell had come from.
Alex listened without argument, thankfully. In the next moment, as soon as she had made sure Kerr was bundled up in her arms and completely covered, Jay ran sideways across the street that was between her cover and the building the others were in.
A second blast of electricity slammed into her back, the powerful spell doing what Jadis had known would happen eventually. Aila’s spectral armor, as powerful as it was, couldn’t hold up under so much abuse. If it could, Kerr would have been spared the damage done to her to begin with. The translucent energy shattered, breaking to pieces as the spell was overwhelmed by too much damage. Still, it had done its job and protected Jadis’ bodies from a great deal of harm. And more importantly, it had let Jay cross the distance.
“Eir!” Jay shouted into one of the open windows. “Hurry!”
It took her a moment, but the door inside of the room Jay was shouting into was thrown open a second later and Eir hurried in, followed closely by Sorcha. The two ran up to the window and the elf immediately placed her hands on Kerr and began pouring healing magic into her.
“Can you cancel your spell so that I can pull her inside?” Eir asked, her voice strained but still maintaining calm.
Jadis did so immediately. Kerr had dropped her bow when she had lost consciousness, so it had doubtlessly already shrunk in size and would be useless to a giant-sized Kerr, presuming she would even be able to get back into the fight after taking a direct hit from such a powerful spell.
Of course she would be back in the fight, Jay instantly shook off the thought of Kerr having any lasting harm done to her. Even as the spell dissipated and she passed her normal-sized form through the window to Eir and Sorcha, Jay could see that her breathing had resumed. Kerr was tough. She would be fine. If anything, she was probably going to be pissed off beyond all reckoning when she woke up.
Not as pissed off as Jadis was at that moment, though.
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