Chapter 508: Chapter 505: Regicide

While Jadis had been dealing with the Dead Head Matriarch, she had also been weathering the increasingly desperate counterattacks made by Vinea. Her Syd self had never left the top of the Demon Prince’s head and, while she hadn’t been able to do much attacking herself, she had dug in like a tick and refused to let the big monster worm push her away. The same couldn’t be said for her companions, though.

The Demon Prince had spent the past minute casting a barrage of near-constant, low power but high-spread rock explosions all across its head and front area. While she was no soldier, Jadis had seen enough war movies that she felt reasonably confident that being caught in the middle of the maelstrom was not all that different from having dozens of mortars or grenades going off all around her. Her armor was being constantly pelted by stone shrapnel and shockwaves, and her head was ringing so loudly that she couldn’t hear a thing, even with Eir’s healing topping her up halfway through the storm. Despite the pounding she took from the spell barrage, Syd was able to withstand the attacks well enough thanks to her heavy armor and high fortitude. Severina and Aelius, however, weren’t able to shrug off the damage like her. Both Seraphim had been forced to retreat when the spells started exploding or else they would have been shredded by the shrapnel. Even though the spells were relatively low power, they were still so numerous that the less sturdy couldn’t have handled that much damage over a sustained period.

While the two winged warriors had been forced to pull back, Noll had not followed suit. Instead, he dug in even deeper than Syd. During one moment when her vision hadn’t been too obscured by the clouds of rocks and dust being generated by Vinea’s spells, Syd had spotted the gigantified therion ripping one of the many holes in the Demon Prince’s body wider. In what came across as a reckless move even by Jadis standards, Noll dove into the opening and disappeared from Syd’s sight.

Jadis presumed the reason for the dive into Vinea’s depths wasn’t just to escape the constant battery of stone spells but was also to go after the Greater Demon that was hiding inside of the Demon Prince. Her assumptions were confirmed when she saw the four-fingered hands of the crawling Demon that hung inside of the colossal wyrm disappear from sight. Noll was dealing with the side threat directly while Vinea made it too difficult to easily attack its outsides. While she had no lack of confidence that the veteran warrior would be able to handle the Greater Demon on his own, she doubted the fight would be over instantly. He had gone inside Vinea, and that meant there were probably more dangers to deal with than just a giant stone monster that could shoot stone spikes the size of street signs. Maybe he’d be able to deal damage from within the Demon Prince, but that likely wouldn’t be until after he had dealt with the Greater Demon.

That meant, for at least as long as it took reinforcements to get to her, Syd was alone in her fight against the Demon Prince.

“Alright, you and me,” Syd snarled as she raised her sword staff. “Let’s see how you fucking like this.”

Her and Noll’s attacks had done a great deal to widen the already large wound in Vinea’s head that had been caused by Aila’s explosive magic. In a move somewhat inspired by her mentor’s headlong dive into certain danger, Syd leapt from her position on the edge of the ragged gouge in the Demon’s head and planted her feet directly into the gory mess of its torn flesh and spilt blood.

Syd’s armored boots sank up to her knees in the unstable surface, which was an impressive distance considering her doubled sized. While it made it hard for her to maneuver, she wasn’t looking to go anywhere. Instead, she began a steady hack and slash into Vinea’s flesh. She didn’t know if she was going to find a brain or what, but she did know that she was doing consistent damage to the massive Demon’s health by stabbing so deeply into the creature, and even a titan of a monster like the Demon Prince had to have a limit to how much Vitality it possessed.

Not seconds after Syd began her assault, a terrible noise rose up from within Vinea. It was the base tremor of an earthquake mixed with the haunting shriek of a thousand tormented souls, and it echoed across the city with such strength that even Jadis’ other selves that were further back from the massive Demon could feel the air vibrating in their lungs. The horrifyingly loud wail was accompanied by a lurch in the pit of Jadis’ stomach. Not all three of them, she quickly realized. Just the one.

“It’s rearing up again!” Aila called out, pointing out what Jadis could already plainly see.

Demon Prince Vinea was rising up from the breach in the wall, pulling its head away from ground. In seconds it had risen a hundred feet in the air at the least.

“Alex, can you tell what she’s doing?” Jay asked as she stared up at the wounded head of the great wyrm. “Is it an attack?”

“I cannot… See her intent…” the Demon replied from her spot on Jay’s back. “She is… Closed…”

Jadis understood what Alex meant even before she had finished speaking. Vinea’s four remaining jaws had shut and the many eyes and tentacles that lined their inner walls were hidden from view. The missing fifth jaw left a large gap in the colossal Demon’s closed maw, but its positioning at the top meant that Jay and Alex had no view of the inside once Vinea had risen above them.

“How in Valtar’s name are we supposed to fight that?” Terrance said in awe as he ran with the others next to Dys. “It’s as big as a mountain!”

“The same way any threat is tackled!” Nevan shouted fearlessly. “One stab at a time!”

Dys paid little attention to the words of her companions as she led them and the many mercenaries and soldiers following them towards the breach in the wall. They had passed by her Jay self on the way, and she had tossed the corpse of the Dead Head Matriarch to her other self, as well as a bundle of arrows and a composite bow for Kerr. Once they had passed Jay and the others by, Dys had focused on leading the charge down the narrow street that would take them to the breach where Vinea’s head was. Despite all of the chaos and destruction of the battle between titans, there were still many lesser Demons running around the immediate area making a threat of themselves. Dys wanted to get to the Demon Prince with her reinforcements as quickly as possible, so she was doing all she could to stomp and sweep the obstacles out of her way without slowing down. Any of the mire hounds that got by her, though, were quickly slain by the others who barely slowed their own pace.

Just as Dys reached the edge of the oozing swamp that the Demon Prince had created earlier with its spell, she called out a halt to their charge. Partly because she saw that while her greater height would make it easier to cross the clinging muck, the others would not be able to push through so easily. But of far greater importance were Vinea’s movements, or lack thereof. The great wyrm had ceased raising itself into the sky and was instead leaning forward in a motionless hunch.

“I think it’s going to—”

Dys’ half-voiced guess was cut off as the massive Demon opened its maw wide, the abrupt action accompanied by a surging, rumbling sound. From out of its broken and bleeding mouth poured a wave of Demons that had likely been building up inside of the Demon Prince’s body ever since it had closed its jaws. Like a rancid waterfall of filth, the many lesser Demons that had been trapped inside the colossal beast’s cavernous insides were dumped out, falling around a hundred feet to splatter across the swampy ground below.

In that mass of crawling, squirming demonic vomit Dys spotted Noll. The oversized therion had been caught up in the flow and, as he fell to the ground, she saw that he was locked in combat with a huge, four-armed ball of rock that had to be the Greater Demon he had entered Vinea to slay. Mere meters before hitting the ground, Noll violently kicked off from the spherical stone Demon and sailed almost elegantly off to one side where he landed on top of one of the still standing rock pillars to the east of the breach. The Greater Demon, in the meantime, smashed heavily onto the swamped city street among its lesser kin.

“Don’t just stand there!” Tegwyn shouted loudly from where he stood next to Dys. “Clear the city of Demons! Let none survive to see the dawn!”

It was a good, rallying command and it had a strong effect on the soldiers who had paused in their forward charge to watch the utterly insane sight of hundreds of Demons being vomited out of a titanic worm. With another shouted, wordless war cry, the men and women of the imperium strode into the writhing fray, fearlessly attacking the enemy who had come to slaughter all life within the city’s walls.

While Tegwyn and the rest of Jadis’ companions acted as a spearhead to the soldiers who fanned out around them in a growing semicircle, a hail of arrows began to fall into the mix of mire hounds and other Demons. The band of therion archers had already climbed both standing and broken structures and began raining their arrows down on the enemy from elevated positions. It was a strong counterattack, one that despite the difficult terrain was already cutting down dozens of Demons in a matter of seconds.

Dys did not hesitate for more than an instant herself. While the way before her was hardly clear, her objective had not changed. She charged past the sprawling clump of squirming Demons, aiming squarely for the main body of the Demon Prince that was supporting the head and length of it that had risen into the night sky.

Her charge was momentarily disrupted by a large stone spear that shot out of the muck and almost skewered her in the side. The only reason the attack had turned into a glancing blow that scraped along the back of her armor was because her movements were so erratic thanks to the cloying muck of the artificial swamp. Turning her head as she ran, Dys saw that it was the spherical, four-armed Greater Demon poking its body out of the writhing mass of Demons. It had locked its aim onto her, and she could see another stone forming that would no doubt be shot at her in the next second or two. The sight left her with the choice of either diverting her charge and focusing an attack on the strangely shaped simulacrum or ignoring the Greater Demon to focus on the Demon Prince, leaving a dangerous enemy on her flank.

The need to make a choice was taken away from her when a loud, feral roar from her right heralded the arrival of backup. At first, Jadis assumed it was Noll leaping back into the fight. However, when a smaller, yet still bulky, figure came soaring through the air to land on top of the round body of the Greater Demon, Dys had to do a doubletake to believe what she was seeing.

Roaring like a wild beast was a familiar, copper-furred Valbjorn wearing imperial colors. Commander Odilia, the bitch bear woman from the four-way intersection, had jumped on top of the Greater Demon and was slamming her sword down onto the stone monster in powerful, rock-shattering blows. In one of the more impressive sights she had yet seen that night, and there were many to choose from, Dys saw the Greater Demon launch another stone spear out of the hole in its body at point-blank range, aimed directly at Odilia’s chest. Without even slowing her pummeling attack, the Valbjorn knocked the stone projectile to the side with one paw, even as it was still exiting the Demon’s body. In the next moment, Odilia craned her thick neck down and bit into the Demon with her furry jaws and tore a literal chunk out of its rocky body.

“Alright then,” Dys mentally shrugged as she left the unexpected reinforcement to do her thing. She had bigger problems to deal with at that moment, anyway.

“Jadis!” Noll’s voice called out to her as Dys turned her attention back to her true target. “Look!”

Noll’s warning wasn’t necessary, though Jadis fully understood the man’s urgency. Jay had already spotted what was happening, and Syd was already responding to it as best she could. Though, aside from hitting the Demon Prince even harder than she already was, Jadis wasn’t sure what more she could do. Much to her consternation, it looked like Vinea was trying to retreat.

“Motherfucker, where do you think you’re going?” Syd half growled, half shouted as she continued to hack and chop at the wounded Demon.

Vinea had turned its head away from the city and, moving in a ponderously slow turn, was stretching its neck out in an attempt to leave Glanum. The Demon’s long body was mostly stretched out across the river, and for whatever reason it didn’t seem keen on just diving into the water even though Jadis knew that Demons had no need to breathe. Instead, the giant serpent was coiling its body forward on the city’s wall and shore while simultaneously starting to edge its head over the river.

Jadis knew that she couldn’t follow the Demon Prince if it fled the battle. Even putting aside the danger she would be in if she were brought over to the far shore of the river, alone amidst who knew how many Demons, she had her Mirror Body limitations to think of. She was already feeling stretched by the distance that had grown between her Jay and Syd selves; much further and she knew that she would be at risk of snapping, and that was the last thing she could afford at that moment. If she couldn’t do enough damage to kill Vinea in the next few seconds, there was nothing she could do but break off her attack and watch the detestable Demon flee.

Already seeing that she likely wasn’t going to be able to stop the Demon Prince from retreating, Syd pulled herself out of the bloody gore she had made out of Vinea’s head wound and started running along the top of its arched back. She had gone no more than thirty or forty feet when Bridget’s voice called out to her.

“Syd! You better bloody catch me!”

Looking up in the direction of the shout, Syd saw Tacitus diving by her, with the orc warrior dangling from his arms. As he made his pass, he abruptly let Bridget go, and the woman fell a dozen or so yards to land in Syd’s grasp.

“What the fuck are you doing!?” Syd shouted at her lover, taken completely off guard by the unexpected maneuver.

“Sev and I have a plan!” Bridget shouted back, already struggling out of Syd’s arms so she could drop onto the Demon’s stony back. “Hit it there! Where Noll dug in!”

Syd’s gaze followed Bridget’s gesture, and she spotted the hole she was indicating. It was a large gap in the Demon’s neck, a hole that had been torn wide open when Noll had forced his huge body into the Demon Prince to go after the Greater Demon inside. He had cut apart the connecting flesh that separated two of the natural holes that dotted the monster’s hide, creating a wide gap that was an obvious weak point, once it had been pointed out.

“Hit it!” Bridget shouted again, her strong voice echoing like a bell in the dark.

As she called out her command, the lantern-wielding woman slammed her flail into the Demon Prince, causing blue flames to erupt across its body once again. Reacting with all of her might, Jadis attacked the titanic wyrm. Dys struck first, having reached the moving base of the Demon, her axe cutting deep into the stony scales of its outer defenses. The blow was followed less than a second later by Syd’s sword staff cutting down into the Demon’s neck in an overhead strike that was empowered by both Mirrored Strikes and Break the Bulwark, just for good measure.

Syd’s chop cut all the way through another one of connective braids of flesh that made up the Demon’s body, widening the hole in its neck by yards. A second after her blow hit, a great flaming sword fell upon Vinea from the sky. Aelius’ attack struck the Demon’s neck opposite of where Syd stood, cutting deeply as his crimson blaze of magic mixed with Bridget’s azure fire. An instant after, before the fires had even had a chance to finish their blooming conflagration, the golden light of Severina’s smite exploded in a brilliant burst of Divine power. When Syd blinked the spots out of her eyes, she saw that Sev had landed on the Demon, a massive rend in the creature’s neck between them.

Vinea’s reaction to the attack was to jerk its head, bucking wildly as it tried to dislodge its attackers from its back. No magic, either shields or explosions, followed the forceful movement, which told the story of why the Demon Prince was trying to flee. It had run out of magic reserves and could not generate enough back in time to save itself. Vinea was all out of spells.

The Demon’s bucking brought it closer to the city rather than further away, which was fortunate for Jadis since she was certain that if Vinea dove away from Glanum she would be brought out of range of her other selves. Even as she thought it, Jay was already gathering up the others to bring them closer to the breach in the wall to help alleviate the risk of a mental snap. Dys was still whacking away at the Demon’s body where she was, for all the good it did, while Syd was forced to hold onto Bridget in one hand while her sword staff dug into the Demon Prince’s hide, holding them in place.

“Keep hitting it!” Bridget shouted, seemingly heedless of the danger she was in. “Don’t let up!”

As though he could hear Bridget’s words, even though he was still on the ground, Noll charged past Dys in a blur of dark fur. Like some great beast out of a fable, he clawed his way up the Demon Prince, almost as though he was running on all fours, vertically up a massive tree. He reached the top of Vinea’s back in seconds and, without missing a beat, took out his daggers and began tearing into the expanding wound.

Bridget struggled for a moment in Syd’s arms to get her arm free, then struck at the colossal monster again with her lantern flail. More azure flames blazed across the Demon’s surface, renewing the orc’s spell that increased damage done to the target.

“Keep going!” her orc lover said as another wave of fire from Aelius struck the side of the Demon Prince. “Finish it!”

A wordless roar of righteous fury welled up inside of Jadis and, giving voice to that feeling, she let out a shout that echoed across the city as she pulled her weapon out of the Demon’s flesh. Using the next bucking motion of the massive beast to aid her, Syd let it toss her several yards into the air. With Bridget in one arm and her sword staff clutched in a reverse grip in the other, Syd hung in the sky for a timeless instant, well more than a hundred and fifty feet above the surface of the world. Then, time resumed, and she fell.

Syd’s titanic, eighteen-foot-tall body, fully armored in thick cold flame plate steel, fell through the air just past the growing wound in the Demon Prince’s neck. Slamming her right arm forward, she caught the Demon’s side with the point of her sword staff and cut deeply into it. As her colossal weight pulled her down, her dark blade sliced through the wyrm's flesh and hide. A huge tear at least thirty feet long was opened up by her sword staff’s cutting edge, greatly extending the Demon’s already massive wound.

As Syd and Bridget reached the end of their falling attack, her sword staff came free from the Demon’s body, and they went into true freefall. Plummeting with her orcish lover clutched protectively against her chest, Syd didn’t take her eyes off the Demon Prince as it once more whipped its head around to try and dislodge Noll and Severina from its back. However, this time, when it threw its head to the side, a terrible cracking and tearing sound filled the air. The force and momentum of the Demon’s movement carried along its head while the massive wound in its neck spread wide. In a truly gruesome sight, Vinea’s head broke halfway free from its body in an explosion of blood. The colossal wyrm's multi-jawed skull dangled from its torn neck, the power of its own movement carrying it around to flap loudly against its side before, with a sickening crunch, the Demon Prince’s head fully separated and fell to the ground below.

“Got me!” Dys gasped out as she met her Syd self midair, catching her falling form to help disperse the fall damage.

The two of Jadis, along with Bridget, landed together in a crater of corpses and mud as a literal shower of Vinea’s blood rained down on them from above. Watching with morbid fascination, Jadis saw the great wyrm's headless body waver in the air for a moment, almost as though it was going to try and continue to either flee or fight. Then, like a tree that had been cut down at its roots, the Demon prince collapsed to the side, crushing more of the city wall to the east as it fell.

“That was your plan?” Syd asked with a shaky exhalation of her held breath.

“Well, not really,” Bridget answered, her own voice trembling with emotion. “I had no idea you were going to do that jumping bit. But it worked, didn’t it? Didn’t it? Please tell me it worked.”

Checking her notifications, all three of Jadis smiled in unison.

“Yes, Bridget. It worked.”

Agdistis

I just noticed that Rebirth of the Nephilim has surpassed five million views. Thank you all so much for reading my scribbles. Truly. I am deeply grateful to you all, whether you leave a comment or not. That you take valuable time out of your days to read what I have written is an honor. Thank you.

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