The creature wreathed in Alex’s holy flame was a dragon, though it was not one that inspired any sense of awe or respect within Jadis. This beast was nothing like the ice dragon, Vetregin. Even if it hadn’t kidnapped her pregnant lover, Jadis doubted she would feel anything but revulsion at the sight of the loathsome creature. This dragon was what the mighty Vetregin would have become, if she and her companions had not succeeded in slaying the Greater Demon that had been trying to possess him. This was a beast fully corrupted by Samleos and his kin.
The Demon Dragon was about the size of a sperm whale, which made it significantly smaller than the great ice dragon. It was still a colossal creature, with a long, whiplike tail and wings that could cast shadows over whole villages. As she drew closer, Jadis could see that the black scales on its back were spiked like a thorny devil lizard, while the rest of its surface was smoother, except for its tail which had even more spikes on it. It had a red and purple pattern mixed into the mostly black scales of its body, which turned into a bright red about halfway down its long tail. The dragon’s lengthy neck terminated in a head shaped like a crocodile’s skull, only with a ridge of flared spikes around the neck where it met the head. Even from a distance, Jadis could see a large, purple eye sticking out of the creature’s forehead like a bulbous pustule of disease.
The eye was not the only aspect of the creature that spoke of disease. The dragon was thin, almost skeletal, except for its torso which bulged like a bloated corpse. Even from a great distance, Jadis could see a dark substance oozing from between the dragon’s scales in various spots. Either the Demon who had possessed the dragon had no ability to upkeep the stolen body, or it was purposefully letting it fall into decay. That, or it had found a dragon corpse and used that as a host.
Jadis could see a large, pitch-black orb being carried in the dragon’s front claws. From out of one side of the orb stuck a long, black and neon blue tentacle that was whipping madly about. It looked like the Demon Dragon was trying to keep its fingers away from the angry tentacle but doing so while maintaining its grip was an obvious struggle.
As the flare of Alex’s divine smite wore off the dragon, Jadis tried desperately to increase her speed. Unfortunately, no matter how hard she tried, she simply could not go any faster than she already was. She had reached the limit of her power, at least in terms of speed, and her will counted for nothing in the face of hard stat limits.
She was catching up, though. As fast as the possessed dragon was, it couldn’t outpace her. The distance between her and her target was shrinking by the second, though Jadis wasn’t sure if it was fast enough. While one pair of her eyes never strayed from Alex and her abductor, her other two sets were taking in their surroundings, and things weren’t looking good.
Below them, Jadis could see that the terrain had become increasingly broken and corrupted. Huge swaths of foul mud had been churned up out of the ground, and a gray haze of toxin was drifting over the land. Even at her speed and altitude, she could see movement below, all of which looked hostile. No other flyers had come up to chase her, but she imagined that it was only a matter of time. More concerning was what she could see ahead.
Kastoria loomed on the horizon.
There were no lights lit within the stone walls and towers. The only reason why she was able to distinguish the city from the rest of the terrain was because of the calm sea that rested to the side of it. What little light that came from the waning moon reflected off the still waters, highlighting buildings and structures that reminded Jadis of Glanum, though there was no central tower to touch the sky. What she did see, even with the night’s shadows cloaking all, were the pulsating blobs of corruption that covered the city walls like a disease. Jadis didn’t know what they were, but she doubted they bode well for any who approached the doomed city.
Doing some quick mental math, Jadis’ hearts fell. Even though she was catching up with the Demon Dragon who carried Alex, she wasn’t going to catch up in time. At their current speed, they would reach Kastoria right when Jadis caught up with them, which was barely better than them arriving ahead of her. She would have to fight the dragon along with whatever else might be waiting inside the city walls that was capable of flight. And that was assuming the Demon Dragon didn’t just drop Alex into the waiting arms of the enemy below.
With gritted teeth, Jadis cast her Wings of the Succubi spell again. It was early, but she didn’t want the spell to wear off in the middle of a fight. That put her current magic reserves at six hundred and eighty-six. The only reason why they were that full was because Alex had been recharging Jadis during the talk, which had seemed unnecessary at the time. Jadis swore she would never even think about turning down one of Alex’s insistences again.
Her health was maxed out at two thousand six hundred and sixty, which was as ideal as things could be. She had no armor on, and only her sword staff with her, which was far less than optimal, but that wasn’t anything she could change. Well, that wasn’t true. She couldn’t materialize armor out of thin air like Aila, but she could go back to her roots. Sometimes, all a person needed was a really big rock to solve their problems.
A really, really big rock.
Casting Mirror Magnification on herself at the cost of another three hundred magic, Jadis doubled the size of her flying selves. She had harbored the vague hope that increasing her overall size would also increase her flight speed, but that did not prove to be the case. It wasn’t a surprise, since her wing spell specifically stated that her aerial speed was dependent on her Eldritch stat, so she didn’t linger on the disappointment. Instead, she used both her Jay and Dys selves to dive low towards the fetid land while her Syd self stayed on target.
The moment her two bodies dove into the gray cloud covering the land, she could feel her health dropping. It wasn’t an extreme degeneration, but her health pool was being drained for every second she was within the gas. Fortunately, she wasn’t inside the cloud for long. Making sure not to slow down, Jay and Dys grabbed hold of sizeable rocks that were on her flight path, ripping them from the ground. Jay’s rock had to weigh several hundred pounds and was the size of a motorcycle, but it came up from the mushy earth without issue and she was able to swoop back up into the sky. Dys’ boulder turned out to be larger by half again as much, with part of it being hidden under the ground. While she was still able to scoop it up as part of her flyby, her speed was slightly slowed by the effort, so she ended up falling a small distance behind her other two selves.
Rising up to the same height as her Syd self, Jay spun in air to give her throw the maximum amount of force that she could put behind it. Launching the huge stone at the dragon who was still a fair distance ahead, she aimed for its spiked back in the hopes that the blow would knock it from the sky.
The rock hurtled through the sky on a crash course for the abductor, its arc on a perfect trajectory that gave Jadis hope. When the projectile came within yards of the Demon Dragon, a dark purple rune appeared in the air over the creature’s huge eye, which then emitted a blast of arcane energy that knocked Jay’s stone of course. The dragon didn’t even slow from the attack.
A second later, it cast another rune, this one aimed at the boulder that Dys had thrown shortly after Jay’s projectile had been launched. This time, when the purple magic hit, the rock exploded into shards. Jadis would have cursed the Demon’s power, except that she saw in the next instant that the stone shards created from the defensive blast were still substantial thanks to the size of the huge rock Dys had thrown. Dozens of jagged stone shards that had maintained much of their momentum crashed into the back and wings of the Demon Dragon.
Jadis cheered inwardly as the possessed dragon’s wings were struck by the attack. The beast’s flight lost both speed and stability as it flapped its wings and struggled to right its flight. The reduction in speed was momentary, but it was substantial. More importantly, it was enough for Syd to catch up.
Syd came down on the dragon from its right side, slicing through the air with her sword staff in the lead. She aimed for the beast’s wing, cutting at the batlike bone structure in the part of the limb that came before it spread into fingers. The micro instant that her blade struck the dragon’s scales, an arcane shield flared to life. Not that it mattered. Jadis had already used her Break the Bulwark skill as part of the attack, and this blew right through the Demon’s defenses. And shortly after, right through the dragon’s wing, as well.
There was no roar of pain like there would have been with a true dragon. However, as the bone of the monster’s wing was cleaved in two and the majority of its limb trailed behind its body, held on by what little remained of the wing’s thick, stretchy membrane, the dragon plummeted from the sky. Rolling like a barrel, it dove towards the ground, and Syd was given a glimpse of the black orb that contained Alex, along with the break in the container’s surface that revealed the captured Demon’s limb. She was so focused on the neon-tipped tentacle that she didn’t even see the massive glob of scum that curved through the air towards her.
Her other selves saw it just in time.
“Fuck!” Syd cursed as she was forced to dive through the air to avoid the projectile.
The huge, misshapen sphere flew past her, close enough that her white tendril wings passed through the jelly-like surface. Since they were incorporeal, the contact did her no harm, yet she was still thrown off course by the evasive maneuver, which allowed the Demon Dragon to put some distance between itself and her. Despite the loss of its wing, the beast was not taken out of the sky. It seemed that dragons operated under the same rules as Seraphim. Wings were for control, but not a necessity for the act of flying.
As the demonic creature straightened out of its dive before crashing into the ground, Syd dove after it, aiming to intercept the dragon’s course. It could still fly, but the loss of its right wing had slowed it, as well as reduced its maneuverability. She could catch it.
Jay and Dys flew after the dragon and her other self, keeping one set of eyes to the fore while the other pair watched the giant glob of snot hit the ground. It was hard to tell its color at night, but the vaguely dark greenish sphere was big enough to fit a few horses inside of it, if not more if they were folded up the right way. The sphere splattered when it hit the ground, exploding in a wider splash than should have been possible, even for the speed it had hit the rocks below with. Jadis had no doubt that the disgusting-looking gel that had splashed all over the ground was some kind of acid or similar damaging substance, and she had no great desire to confirm her suspicions.
“Holy shit…” Jay gasped as she saw dozens more of the huge globes of death launch out from behind the walls of Kastoria. “It’s fucking bio-artillery!”
While they were still a few miles away from the city walls, that was apparently close enough for Kastoria’s demonic defenses to trigger. The giant balls of acid weren’t the only danger to contend with, either. While Jadis had noted the utter lack of light in the city before, now that she was closer, she could see hundreds of unnatural glowing motes appear all over Kastoria’s structures, with more emerging every second. They were too far away to see properly, but as many of the small light sources began to rise over the walls and surge across the landscape towards her, she realized that they had to be Demons, ones who possessed some sort of magic, or perhaps just had particularly reflective eyes. Distant dark figures rose into the sky as well, with various levels of speed.
The Demons of Kastoria had been stirred, and they were coming for her.
Jadis did her best to ignore the sight, since she knew that fighting so many while keeping Alex safe would be impossible. Instead, her focus fixed firmly onto the Demon Dragon. That was the creature she needed to slay, or at the very least, disable enough so that she could take her lover back. Once she had Alex and her unborn child in her arms, the enemy no longer mattered. She would fly away, back to Glanum. She didn’t need to go along with the Playwright’s idea of a final, climactic battle. She just needed to save her Alex. Not fighting the Playwright’s planned encounter was about as big a “fuck you” as she could imagine she could give the man. Other than killing him, of course, which was a firm goal she had in mind. But since she didn’t know where the fucker was, she’d settle for a giving his terrible storyline a giant middle finger.
Converging as only a gestalt entity could, Jay, Dys, and Syd spiraled down onto the fleeing dragon that had dared to steal her lover. Surrounding the beast from left, right, and above, she flared her wings and let out a battle cry of rage. Together, as one, she struck.
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