Rebirth of the Nephilim

Chapter 452: Cinders

“If I had a nickel…” Syd growled as she whirled to face the same direction as Dys.

Jadis had been blown up before. Only once that she could remember, but once had been enough in her opinion. Now she could say that she had survived being caught in an explosion twice. Quite the accolade, she supposed.

Jay was, of course, alive. Not unharmed, but alive. The explosion of demonic bodies had deafened her and left her head ringing, but her heavy armor, along with her tremendous Fortitude and Vitality stats, had allowed her to weather the magical suicide attack. Jadis had survived, but not without taking some damage. Checking her health, she saw that she had dropped from two thousand six hundred and forty points to one thousand five hundred and ninety-eight.

The explosion had done over a thousand points of damage to her. A massive number, one that would have spelled the death of most anyone else several times over. She had to wonder if the power of the attack had been based off of what the cultist’s knew about her strength from their previous attack on her. It certainly felt targeted.

Well, Jadis could handle being targeted. Unlike the poor souls who these Demons had ruthlessly murdered, she could fight back.

Jadis’ first target was the mage who had cast the barrier spell. While Dys rushed forward, Syd didn’t join her other self in the attack on the shadowed figure on the second floor of the burning building. Jadis fully expected more from the cultist’s ambush, so Syd stayed where she was. Her expectations proved to be correct as multiple Demons rushed out from different buildings around them, charging at her, Thea, and Meli from multiple directions.

“Don’t get separated!” Syd shouted a command at the two other women, more for Meli’s sake than Thea’s.

Jadis knew she could trust Thea to stay close and watch her back. Meli, however, was an unknown factor when it came to combat. She had no idea how the woman would fight, other than the fact that she used claws and speed.

As Syd gave her warning, Dys was already midair, leaping towards the cultist mage in the window. As she closed the distance, her axe raised overhead, the mage reacted by throwing up his other hand. A black wall of energy, much like the one that had blocked the front door to the bunker, appeared across the window. A second later, Dys’ axe slammed into the barrier, causing it to shatter like ice. Dys was just able to catch the sight of the mage stumbling backwards from the blow before she fell back to the ground and lost her view.

Dys bent at the knees, absorbing the momentum of her landing so that she could leap back into the air and make another attack on the figure in the window. Before she could, a scalding heat washed over the front of her chest armor and she was forced to roll backwards and away from a burning magical attack.

“What the fuck is that thing!?” Dys cursed as she tried to swipe the flaming substance that had stuck to her armor like napalm.

“Cinderman!” Meli shouted as she skipped away from the burning Demon and moved with Thea to face the other attackers that were rushing them.

The cinderman was humanoid in the vaguest sense of the word. It had a man’s body, with a head and human-like legs, but it also had a tangle of ten or twelve double-jointed arms sticking out of its bloated torso. Each arm ended in a three-fingered clawed hand, with half of the limbs walking on the ground like some kind of spider gorilla while the others jerked around in the air like angry spears. The Demon was made of flesh, but its skin was burnt black and there were cracks running all through it where an orange burning liquid was oozing from. Worst of all, was the cinderman’s face. It had a man’s head, except the eyes were empty sockets from which a never-ending stream of putrid black smoke poured. Its mouth was huge, three times the natural size of any person’s mouth should be, with a great gouty throat reminiscent of a frog. When the cinderman’s mouth gapped open, a stream of burning orange ichor vomited forth, spraying directly at Dys.

“Does everything Samleos make have to be so fucked up!?” Dys cried out angrily as she dodged out of the way of the flamethrower attack.

The liquid she had already gotten on the front of armor wasn’t coming off. Dys quickly realized that was why she had seen stone and dirt burning when it shouldn’t have been possible elsewhere in the village. The cinderman’s fiery liquid was like a sticky oil, clinging to whatever it touched while burning as hot as a furnace. She wasn’t sure if the fire could be snuffed out by water or smothering since it was a magical substance, but she didn’t have the time to waste trying to put it out in any case.

The cinderman rushed towards Dys in a strange, jerky fashion. Its many arms slamming into the ground like stakes as it half crawled, half ran towards her. She could feel the heat coming off of the Demon as it neared, its aura of flames overpowering even the heat of the fire Dys already had clinging to her armor. Regardless of the flames, Dys lunged forward to meet the Demon. Jadis had been burnt worse in the past. She could handle a little heat.

Dys feinted to the left, forcing the Demon to spew its burning bile in her direction before she dashed to the right with enough speed to make the wind whip up with her passing. Swinging her axe at the cinderman with a right to left chopping motion, she aimed to hack the burning creature’s ugly head off.

A black barrier of energy appeared in between Dys and the Demon, blocking her blow. Her axe still shattered the arcane shield, but the spell was enough to slow Dys’ attack and give the twitchy cinderman time to back away and dodge the strike. Dys was forced to jump back to avoid being struck by another gout of flames that the Demon spewed at her. Glancing up for a brief moment, Dys saw the cultist in the window, his red elven face highlighted by the flames as he motioned with his hands towards her.

Jadis wanted to move in her other selves, to make a coordinated strike against the Demon attacking Dys. That, or have one self go after the mage while her other bodies dealt with the melee. However, there were more assailants on the battlefield than just the one cinderman, and she was finding her other hands full.

Syd stabbed with her sword staff, thrusting it like a spear at the translucent wight that was attacking her. The Demon dodged away, its mostly transparent body moving in strange ways as it bent to the side in ways that human joints would claim impossible. Before Syd could follow up her attack on the speedy Demon, a second one had moved in close to swipe its sickle-like claws at the backs of her knees.

Unlike the last time she had faced these dangerous Demons, Jadis was wearing armor. The wight’s claws weren’t able to penetrate the thick cold flame steel of her protection, but she couldn’t ignore the attacks either. Five of the aggressive Demons had swarmed her and they had already used a few opportunities to sink their blades into the weak points of her armor, cutting at her flesh underneath. Something about these wights was different. They moved even faster than before, and their attacks struck with even greater ferocity. She’d lost some blood and health to the sneaky attacks; not too much, but enough that someone like Aila or Eir would have died already. Syd could feel her slick blood flowing down her skin inside of her armor.

Whirling her sword staff around, Syd cut the hand off of one of the wights before it could strike her inner elbow. As she did so, she caught sight of Thea and Meli. She had her hands full fighting the wights, but those two had their own Demons to deal with.

Two more wights had ganged up on the Dryad. They were fast; fast enough that they seemed to be a match for Meli. She was doing her best to attack them, but the two wights were acting in a strangely cautious way. They didn’t attack blindly but instead focused on distracting her in a coordinated effort. Whenever she would attack one, it would dodge away while the other would attack her from behind, forcing the plant woman back onto the defensive. To avoid being struck, Meli was constantly falling back towards Thea, who had taken up a defensive stance by the crate of medical supplies Dys had dropped to the ground.

Thea was no match for a wight’s speed, but her ability to block incoming blows was uncanny. Every time one of the Demons turned on her, she had her shield up and in the way of the attack. She hadn’t landed any blows with her serrated spear so far as Jadis could tell, but Thea was serving as a wall that Meli could duck behind whenever either wight came too close to overwhelming the Dryad.

The fight wasn’t exactly a stalemate, but it wasn’t resolving as fast as Jadis would have preferred, either. She knew she would overwhelm the mage or the wights or the cinderman in time. But the longer the fight went on, the greater the chance was that some great injury would happen to either Thea or Meli. Plus, they still needed to find Tegwyn and Vera, who could be choking on fumes in the safehouse cellar for all she knew. What Jadis needed to do was get her Jay self out of the bunker and into the fight, as having her third body on the battlefield would bring a swift and definitive resolution to the combat.

Jay hacked and coughed as she staggered to her feet. It was impossible to breathe in the confined space of the safehouse. Not only had it already been filled with thick smoke before the explosion due to burning cinderman bile, but now it was also clogged with the noxious aftereffects of the demonic suicide attack. Whether it was due to the air being unbreathable, or the fumes being literally poisonous, just trying to catch her breath was causing Jay to hack up her lungs. It was even doing visible damage to her health pool, as the number slowly ticked down by the second.

While she had been blinded by the fumes put into the air by the explosion, the barrier that had blocked the door had also been broken. It wasn’t easy when her two other selves were so distracted, but Jadis used their senses and her own sixth sense of knowing where her bodies were positioned in relation to each other to guide her Jay self towards the door of the bunker.

Unfortunately, what waited for her there was not fresh air, but a second cinderman who had snuck out of the fires to block the entryway.

Jay threw herself to the left as the cinderman spewed what had to be gallons of burning oil into the safehouse. She felt the heat through her armor, some of the flames even managing to seep through the cracks in her plate armor to scald her skin underneath. Jay had lost hold of her two handaxes in the explosion, so she had nothing to throw at the Demon as it continued to pour its flaming attack in at her. Even if she had held onto them, she was effectively blind and doubted any thrown attack would have properly landed on the abomination.

Just as Jay had resolved herself to charge blindly forward into the flames in order to shoulder her way out of the deathtrap, the cinderman’s flaming attack ceased. While Jay couldn’t see, Dys and Syd caught glimpses as they continued their own fights.

Thea’s spear stuck in the back of the cinderman, the metallic point having pierced clear through to the poke out just under the bulbous neck sack of the nauseating fire Demon. Several skinny arms clawed at Thea as she pulled back, forcing the cinderman to follow after her as it staggered from the critical attack on its unprotected flank.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Jay charged forward, activating two of her abilities at once. The first being Knight’s Daring Charge, and the other being Mirror Shine. Jay’s aim wasn’t perfect. She was charging blindly, so when she reached the door, her shoulder hit the wall. Her shoulder then proceeded to crash through the wall as she continued out into the open in a shower of stone debris.

Jay slammed into the cinderman’s side as they both hit the dirt in an awful tangle of too many limbs. She felt claws scraping at her head, chest, and sides, as well as the fire burning all over, but she pushed through the resistance to get a hand on the head of the horrid Demon. With an executioner’s finality, Jay slammed the cinderman’s head down onto the ground, leaning her full weight into the blow.

The Demon’s head popped like a melon under her hand. A terrible burning pain quickly consumed her hand as she did so, followed by the awful smell of flesh burning that Jadis was all too familiar with.

Despite the pain and cost to her health, Jadis had still managed to get her Jay self out of the trap thanks to Thea’s help. Even better, Thea was still swinging, as was Meli. With the casting of her Mirror Shine spell, the wights and remaining cinderman had somehow upped the intensity of their attacks. However, since the spell helped distract Jadis’ enemies so that they focused on her instead of her allies, she had given the two other women room to breathe.

As one of the seven wights swiped its claws at Syd’s heel, Meli struck the wight from behind, ripping its own leg to shreds before it or one of the other Demons could attack her. Acting on the vulnerability, Syd struck with her blade and lopped the wight’s body in half, spilling its translucent guts across the ground. When one of the remaining wights moved to attack the Dryad, she backed away and ducked towards Dys, causing the Demon to become distracted and realign its ire onto Jadis once more.

“Stand aside,” Jay coughed out to Thea.

“Yes,” Thea answered without question, moving to clear the way for what Jay had in mind to do now that she had her third self on the field.

Jay launched herself forward just as Dys maneuvered the flame Demon so that it was fighting with its back to her. A black barrier formed between Jay and the cinderman, but she had expected as much. Her charge went right through the arcane shield, crushing it as easily as she had the stone wall. She rammed into the side of the Demon, grabbing several of its arms.

The cinderman had dodged to the side to try and avoid being crushed by Jay’s attack, but it hadn’t been able to move fast enough. Especially since Dys struck at the same time, swinging her axe from the opposite angle. Jay tore multiple arms off of the burning abomination as she passed, causing it to spin and stumble while uselessly vomiting up its wretched flames onto the ground. Dys’s axe was blocked by another shield, but this time the Demon wasn’t able to take advantage of the temporary barrier.

The Demon’s body was split from shoulder down to its waist by Dys’ axe, causing a rush of burning liquids to pour out of its body as collapsed in not quite two different pieces. Just to be certain that she finished the job, Dys stomped down on the cinderman’s head, crushing it with the heel of her boot, triggering a second system message to appear in her vision.

With the two most dangerous enemies on the battlefield slain, Jadis turned her attention onto the wights and the cultist. While Jay quickly turned and made a charging attack in Syd’s direction, Dys glanced up at the second story window, expecting to see the mage casting more spells.

However, what she saw instead was the elf staggering away from the opening, a long shaft of dark wood sticking out of his left shoulder.

Glancing towards the safehouse, Dys saw that Thea had thrown her spear like a javelin, sticking the cultist with the serrated point while he had been distracted by Jay and Dys. While it didn’t look like it had been anywhere near a killing blow, the attack was apparently enough to force the cultist to rethink his position. The elf ripped the spear from his shoulder and threw up another black barrier, blocking all vision into the room.

He probably had a way out of the building, Jadis readily recognized, but she had to deal with the wights before she could give chase to the cultist. Her Syd self was still being encircled by the speed Demons, and there were other problems to deal with, too. Namely, Jay was still very much on fire.

Jay’s blind charge into the wights did not succeed in catching any of the Demons off guard, but it did have the benefit of letting her crash into the brook, as well as giving both her Syd self and Meli an opportunity to strike two more of the wights down. Thea also moved, using her shield in two hands to block and bash against any wights that came near her.

Just as Dys moved together with her Syd self to strike at another one of the wights, she noticed a dark shadow appear over her. Fully expecting either some trick from the cultist or an attack from another Demon, Dys rolled out of the way and came up swinging. However, instead of a Demon, she was greeted by an angel.

“Valtar strikes thee down!”

Severina’s thrilling battle cry echoed across the burning village as the paladin swung her gleaming blade in front of her. The Seraphim blasted through the air on two wings, flying past Dys to strike a wight like an avenging eagle. Her blade bit into the Demon, causing the wight to not just be cut, but shredded as the power and speed of her blow carried the Demon forward several feet as she flew by and back up into the sky.

“What the fuck?” Dys and Syd both cursed in surprise, though Jadis wasn’t fool enough to be distracted by the extremely distracting sight of her flying lover.

As Jadis crushed another wight between her two selves and Meli hamstringed another, Severina performed another flyby cutting a second Demon in half as she blasted by. As the paladin passed, Syd was better able to see that, yes, Severina did in fact have a second wing. Somehow. Only, this new wing wasn’t white like her left wing was, but a dark metallic color, like burnished steel. As Jadis finished off the last of the wights, Severina wheeled back around and came to a slow hover several feet off the ground.

“What, have you been keeping a spare wing in your back pocket this whole time?” Syd asked as she looked the Seraphim up and down.

“No,” Severina flapped one wing of feathers, the other of rune-etched steel. “Sabina did.”