“Drop me off there,” Aila called out as Dys charged through the back streets. “I’ll be fine until you’re done with the matriarch.”
Jadis wasn’t surprised. Of course, Aila had picked up on what was going on just as quickly as she had. Her redheaded lover had always been the smart one, after all. Putting her down on a rooftop separated from everyone else while she was out of magic and a massive battle was raging didn’t seem like a smart move, but Aila hadn’t suggested it without reason. Dys needed to charge in and tackle the Dead Head Matriarch as quickly as possible, and she couldn’t do that so long as she was carrying Aila in one arm. That meant putting Aila somewhere safe, relatively speaking, and Dys just didn’t have the time to get to her other self and the rest of the backline group. They both knew it, and Aila had made the call for her.
Jadis still didn’t like the idea of just leaving Aila unprotected, though. Not in a torn-up cityscape where any number of Demons could be lurking, and definitely not in an area where the damn centipede monstrosity had been recently spotted. Jadis didn’t know where that Demon had disappeared to, but she wouldn’t at all be surprised if the thing was lurking in the shadows somewhere, just waiting for a moment of vulnerability. However, Dys just couldn’t get over to her Jay self and the others without either taking fire from the matriarch or going far out of her way and wasting too much time.
Not unless she did something incredibly stupid that her very intelligent lover would never have thought to try.
“Nope. Curl up and brace yourself,” Dys warned Aila as she dashed ahead so that she was at a street crossing that was parallel to where her other self was located.
“What are—”
Aila’s confused words morphed into a screech of terror as Dys underhand pitched the arcanist through the air. It wasn’t her fastest throw ever, but it was far from a slow toss. Aila was still very much moving at speeds that would see her crushed against a wall if she missed her mark, a thought that made Jadis’ insides clench with worry.
Jadis banked her stupidly risky move on the idea that the matriarch wouldn’t be looking for something small moving at high speed at a different angle, and she breathed a silent thanks to D when her assumption proved right. No blast of lightning came as Aila whizzed through the air before being caught as gently as possible by Jay a block away.
“Don’t you ever fucking do that again!” Aila screamed, upside down, in Jay’s hands.
“Yes ma’am,” Jay readily agreed, her hearts beating fast for more than one reason.
As risky a maneuver as it had been, tossing Aila had given her the safety she needed and bought Dys the few seconds she couldn’t spare. After the throw, she had kept up her charge through the streets, making it to an alleyway that would bring her up on the matriarch’s last seen position, approaching from the east. The street wasn’t a straight shot, as it had a fairly deep curve, so she couldn’t see the multi-headed Demon as she whipped around the corner. That suited Jadis just fine, since it gave her another moment or two to draw that much closer to her target before it could unleash whatever barrage of magic it had planned for her.
As Jay set Aila down through the window with the others, she pulled one of the hand axes from her belt. She knew there was no way to come at the Dead Head Matriarch without it seeing her, not with its myriad of stolen eyes to watch all angles. But hitting it from multiple sides at once was her most effective strategy; even if it was partially negated by the Demon’s obscene situational awareness, it would still have to dedicate resources to block the incoming attacks.
The moment the first floating head of the matriarch came into Dys’ view, Jay whipped around the corner of the building and hurled the handaxe with all of her might.
Just as she had suspected would happen, a beam of crackling lightning struck Jay a moment after she broke cover. Without Aila’s spectral armor to protect her, the spell hit even harder than before, and Jay was sent spinning back as her ruined shirt sported a new burnt hole in the upper left shoulder. That was fine, though, since the spell had hit only her, and not her stubborn passenger. In any case, her package was in the air, and she had a feeling that her aim was spot on.
Dys was hit in the same instant as Jay, another arc of lightning burning its way into her body. All she could do was grit her teeth and push through the pain, as she had no other tricks up her sleeves. Running headlong into the magic storm, she charged the matriarch in an effort to time her attack with her other self’s axe throw.
The Dead Head Matriarch was roughly in the middle of an intersection of two side streets. The ground under its feet was undisturbed, so it didn’t look like it had popped up from its tunnel in that spot, which hopefully meant it had no easy method of retreat. There were no other Demons guarding the Matriarch, so far as Dys could see, which at least meant that she wouldn’t have to deal with anything other than the one foe. Just the one, ultra powerful magic casting foe. No big deal.
As Dys pushed past the blast of electricity, a wall of floating heads moved in between her and her target’s bloated body. Rather than its previous three-hundred-and-sixty-degree approach from earlier, it seemed the Matriarch had all of its focus on Jadis this time around. Dozens of magic barriers appeared in the air between them as the Demon cast its defenses, a blockade that would have stopped Dys’ charge in her tracks fifteen minutes before. Clearly, the Matriarch had not gotten the memo regarding Jadis’ latest level up.
Once more exerting her taxed stamina, Dys used Break the Bulwark as she swung her axe ahead of her charge.
The wall of magically conjured shields in all their multi-elemental glory shattered like stained glass in a hurricane. The sound of so many spells breaking at once was explosive, crackling so loudly that Jadis could barely hear herself think. She didn’t need to, though, since her goal was directly in front of her. Sweeping her axe through the shields had the side effect of cutting through multiple heads, and more still were battered and broken as Dys’ armored body charged through them. Beyond the defensive layer stood the Dead Head Matriarch’s body, the core of the Demon. That which had to be destroyed to slay the fiend.
As Dys neared her goal, Jay’s thrown axe struck one of the few heads the matriarch had left facing her direction. That head, too, had cast an elemental barrier to stop the projectile, however, Break the Bulwark worked on ranged attacks, too. At least, Jadis had been betting it would work that way based on the skill description. Fortunately, her assumption was proven correct when the axe shattered the conjured shield without slowing. A moment after Dys had pushed her way through the swarm of floating heads, Jay’s handaxe slammed into the Matriarch’s left shoulder.
There was no screech of pain. Jadis doubted the pustulant Matriarch had any means of vocalization. But she had no doubt in her mind at all that when the double-sized handaxe cleaved straight through the Demon’s shoulder and its arm flopped onto the ground like a dead fish, the Matriarch felt it.
More than just the Matriarch’s arm was cut off by the sharp edge of the huge axe. Several of the tentacles that extended from that side of the Demon’s stretched neck hole were severed by the attack, and at least six of the abominations long limbs fell, their stolen heads losing the light of their elemental magic from their eyes. As Dys neared the core of the Demon, intent on shaving quite a few more tentacles off the top, the Matriarch reacted in an unexpected way.
Collapsing in like the fronds of a sea anemone onto its prey, the Matriarch’s many outstretched tentacles wrapped around Dys in a morbid tangle of dangling heads. The limbs were too small and weak to stop her charge, but they did entangle her enough that her movements were hindered, if not stopped. The stranger part of the apparent defensive strategy was how the Matriarch lifted its body up from the ground, keeping a distance of several yards between itself and Dys even as her momentum carried her forward down the street that led to the west.
It was a stopgap measure, a momentary defense that had no hope of keeping Dys from her quarry for more than a few seconds. No more than the time it would take her to tear the feeble tentacles that wrapped around her armored body apart like tissue paper. However, as the glow of arcane runes appeared all around the charging Nephilim, Jadis had to wonder if those scant few seconds were all the Matriarch needed to cast one more barrage of spells that would be enough to finally stop her in her tracks.
As Dys gritted her teeth, preparing to soak whatever insane amount of damage was coming her way, an utterly unexpected voice echoed loudly over the sound of her stomping feet.
“Fortune Favors the Bold!”
The incongruous and frankly cheesy war cry was so out of place that despite the urgency of her situation, both her Jay and Dys selves tried to crane their heads around to see where the shout had come from. While neither of her two bodies could immediately spot the source, Jadis’ brain caught up fast enough that she realized she knew the voice. Though how or why Villum of all people was yelling out the phrase was a mystery to—
Dys’ eyes went wide as the form of the youngest, lowest CLR combatant of Fortune’s Favored came flying through the air behind the hovering form of the Dead Head Matriarch. Villum screamed in a mix of fury and fright, arms raised overhead as he wielded his spear in a two-handed reverse grip. All of the bloated Demon’s tentacles were wrapped around Dys, so no barrier, either physical or magical, appeared between the two foes. Villum’s arching flight was aimed with perfect accuracy as he crashed into the Matriarch’s back, the force of his full weight behind his spear as he stabbed the weapon deep into the massive wound left in the Demon’s side where Jay’s axe had removed its shoulder.
Every one of the Matriarch’s tentacles seized up as the half-formed arcane runes filling the air fizzled out before they could complete. A second later, the Demon’s limbs went slack, all life leaving them. Dys skidded to a halt, very glad at that moment that she had a helmet on, so no one could see the dumbfounded expression on her face as she stared down at the elf who was hanging onto the dead Demon Matriarch that was dangling from her front.
“Why the fuck are you making that face?” Kerr groaned from where she lay on the floor where Eir was still pouring healing magic into her. “Did my near death freak you out that much?”
“Uh,” Jay shook her head as she fumbled her words. “Villum just killed the Dead Head Matriarch.”
The collection of blank stares that came at Jay through the open window mirrored exactly how she felt.
“Ha! Yes! We did it!” Villum shouted as he swung pendulously on top of the corpse of the Demon. “We killed it! Fortune favors us tonight!”
“Fuck yeah, I guess it does,” Dys said as she began ripping the tentacles from her body.
As she did so, she saw the rest of Fortune’s Favored come running up the alley towards them from the west. Tegwyn was in the lead, of course, with Meli running right beside him. Humbert was riding on Tegwyn’s back, as the Dryad was still in his giant goat form, while Terrance, Nevan, and Orla were running along behind them with a mix of happy and shocked expressions on their faces.
“I told you it would work!” Villum shouted at them as he extracted his spear from the dead Demon and dropped a couple of feet to the ground. “Woo! Fortune Favors the Bold!”
“What do you mean, told you it would work?” Terrance asked as he ran up next to the young elf. “All you said to Teg and Humbert was ‘toss me!’ before they launched you like a rotten melon out of a window. That wasn’t even a plan!”
“But it worked!” the spearman shouted, still clearly riding an adrenaline high. “Ha!”
Meli ignored the two men completely as she came to a stop in front of Dys. Instead, she asked the important question.
“Why are you so big?”
Well, not really the most important question of the moment, but Jadis could understand why the woman would ask it considering the last time she had seen Jadis she hadn’t been quite so colossal in size.
“Took a few levels, got a new spell. Details later. One of me is still on top of the Demon Prince getting blown to shit by rock magic and I need to get back to that.”
“Lead the way, friend!” Tegwyn called out as he pawed the ground with one hoof. “The night is still young, and we have more strength within our arms yet! And we bring allies!”
It was only then that Dys took the time to notice the figures that were filing into the side street behind her companions. Dozens of therions, the ones that Jadis had seen earlier in the night, were jogging up to them. Beyond that large collection of mercenaries were even more imperial soldiers, their spears and shields at the ready as they followed behind the archers. At a quick count, Jadis estimated there were at least two hundred reinforcements total, with more streaming from around a distant corner.
“Alright,” Dys growled. With a quick motion of her axe, she chopped the nest of tentacles from the Dead Head Matriarch’s body and picked up the egg-filled corpse, tucking it under one arm. “There’s a Demon Prince right around the corner that’s fucking begging to meet with its God in the afterlife. Let’s go make its wish come true.”
Her snarled words weren’t meant as any kind of motivational speech, but apparently her increased size meant her voice carried and the mercenaries and soldiers who had gathered before her took it that way. The group raised their arms in salute as they shouted a war cry of agreement. As one, they moved forward, following behind Dys as she led them towards the breach in the wall.
It was time to put an end to the attack on Glanum.
238