Chapter 107: Time to Run

The demon-twisted corpse of an auroch charged around an alleyway corner, sprinting with deadly intent towards the uncorrupted mortal lives it sensed nearby. Using the massive bulk of its two-thousand-pound body, it crashed through any crates, carts, or other debris that stood as barricades to its forward progress. Not even a waist-high stone wall could slow it as the wretch simply plowed through the barrier. As the targets of its aggression came into sight, the demon let out a bellowing howl as it ran that echoed horribly in the empty streets and stone walls of the abandoned village.

Jay silenced the twisted wretch’s screams by slamming her mallet into its deformed face with all the power her size and ninety points in strength afforded her. With a sickening crunch the demon’s skull was crushed and its spine broken. The corrupted beast flipped backwards as its forward momentum kept its lower body moving ahead as its upper body was sent back, completing a full rotation in the air before crashing to the ground as a bleeding pile of fouled flesh.

“Fourteen,” Jay called out, looking over her shoulder at the archer perched on the roof of the building behind her.

“Yebanyi

upstart,” Kerr called back, making a motion with her hand that Jadis assumed to be a rude one.

“What’s the score now?” Aila asked Dys, keeping her voice hushed.

“Jay has fourteen, Thurstan has twelve, Syd has eleven, I have nine, you also have nine, and Kerr has eight. Everyone else has five or less.”

“That’s more than a hundred so far,” Aila said with a hum. “I think the reports about this place having little demon activity may have been inaccurate.”

Indeed, once the group of mercenaries had delved deeper into seaside village, it had been like cracking open a seal. Demons had started coming out of woodworks, some launching surprise ambushes while others abandoned all attempts at sneaking and charging at them headlong. Aila was right that more than a hundred of the slavering monstrosities had come for their blood so far. Fortunately for the mercenaries, the attacks were disjointed, uncoordinated, and unfocused. Rarely did more than three of the demons attack at the same time, most coming at them in singles and duos. For the experienced mercenaries protecting the retrieval crew, those kinds of numbers were easily manageable.

So manageable, in fact, that Kerr had proposed a wager.

“As much ale and as many meat pies as I can eat is going to be a big bill for you to foot,” Jay teased as she casually flipped the dead wretch to the side of the cobblestone road. “Better hope Thurstan catches up if you don’t want to take a loss on this job.”

“Fuck you,” was Kerr’s eloquent reply. “I’ll catch up myself and you’ll all buy your own damn ale.”

“Don’t sell me short!” Thurstan called out from his side of the workshop. “I can drink orcs under the table on my bad nights! I win this and you’ll have to reserve a whole keg just for me!”

“Shut up, I will not,” Kerr groused, her head on the swivel for more demons.

When The Silver Breeze had arrived in Alawar’s port, Jadis guessed the time had been a little after noon. Checking the sun’s position now, she figured it had been at least two hours since they’d arrived and Centa’s crew was still working on dissembling what they had to before they could transport the enchanted cauldron. Looking through one of the open windows with Syd’s eyes, Jadis had to admit that she had underestimated just how large the object actually was.

Towering at least eight feet tall, the massive iron construction was six feet wide at the mouth and probably weighed several tons. And that was just the cauldron itself. There was also the lid, the custom pully-system for moving the cauldron and lid, the various pipes and tubes that fed to and from it that were part of the refining process and also the stand it rested on. All of it had to be carefully pulled apart, packed up, and loaded into custom carts for transport back to the ship. The task was made more complicated by the fact that Centa had to dismantle the enchantments on much of the equipment first before they could be physically pulled apart and moved, otherwise the magic would be destroyed.  

From the occasional frustrated swears and curses coming from within the workshop, Jadis didn’t envy Centa or her workers.

“There can’t be many more of these things,” Mounce grumbled from his position watching the road from where it led off to the right of the workshop. “We’ve slain a literal horde of the damnable fiends over the past couple of hours. Where are they all coming from?”

“Tunnel?” Aila cooly asked from her position near Dys.

“Probably,” Dys nodded slightly. “Could be an entrance nearby. Maybe even in the village.”

“If there was one of those secret tunnels nearby,” Mounce cut in, “then we’d have been overrun by now. This is way more than there should be, but it isn’t that much.”

“These are probably just the demons from the surrounding hills being drawn in by all the activity,” Jana speculated, keeping her own vigil from the roof of a building across from Kerr.

“Maybe,” Dys shrugged. “But I haven’t seen any come down from those cliffs or that road,” she said, pointing up towards the western side of the village where the landbound entrance lay.

“Neither have I,” Kerr confirmed.

“Dormant,” Douglas added his own opinion to the argument. “Demons wake slowly.”

“Yeah, but not two hours of noisy fighting slow,” Mounce scoffed at the big man’s explanation. “There’s got to be some way they’re getting in unseen. Not one of those tunnels the Flame Wolves found, but some entrance we don’t know about.”

“It doesn’t matter where they’re coming from,” Otwin’s commanding voice silenced the debate. “We’re almost finished here. Just focus on what’s in front of you.”

Otwin was right. After another fifteen minutes and six more various straggler demons slain, Centa and her crew were ready to move. They’d loaded the cauldron onto a custom-built, heavy-duty cart that had its own enchantments woven into it for sturdiness and stability. Two more wagons of the same size but lacking enchantments had been loaded with everything else they were taking, and the workers were ready to go.

Jadis and the mercenaries spread out, letting the slow-moving carts set the pace as they followed around them. The crew had to pull the carts themselves since animals had been seen as more a liability than aid in a situation like Alawar. The fact that the crew were able to pull the heavily loaded carts was honestly impressive, though she supposed the workers had the stats and skills specialized for such jobs.

Moving down the road of the abandoned village, Jadis couldn’t help her mind wandering back to the village she’d spent her first months in Oros at. While the layout was different and the size far larger, the architecture of the buildings was the same and it was giving her a serious case of deja vu. The demons everywhere trying to kill her was probably adding to that feeling, especially since many of them were bone thieves. Jadis had kind of thought now that she was so far from where she’d started, and much stronger, that she’d have been done with bone thieves, especially since she’d already killed their matriarch some weeks ago back in the mountain village. But no, here they still were, trying to rip her bones out. Such was her new life, she supposed.

A sudden clatter and crash interrupted her meandering thoughts and Jadis’ selves spun to face the noise, ready to fight whatever new foe had got the jump on their little procession.

“Shit, the axle broke,” Lars, one of Centa’s workers cursed as he knelt down by the second cart.

“You hit the pothole you dunce!” Centa shouted at him. “You have to avoid bumps like that when carting loads this heavy!”

While Lars apologized to the furious gnome, Otwin was already assessing the situation.

“Keep the other two carts moving, leave this one behind,” he ordered, waving both the workers and other mercenaries onwards.

“This cart has half the enchanted equipment in it! We need this—”

“We’ll come back for it after we unload the other carts,” Otwin cut Centa off mid-complaint. “The demons won’t care about this junk, just leave it for now.”

Centa wasn’t done being angry, not by a long shot, but she must have seen the sense in Otwin’s words as she stopped arguing and kept the carts going. Not without berating Lars the rest of the way to the docks, but she kept them moving.

Once the group reach the docks, the crew quickly set about loading their burdens onto The Silver Breeze. A cargo crane had to be used for such heavy equipment, but the workers and the ship’s crew knew what they were doing and got the cauldron loaded up fast, freeing up its cart.

“Go get the rest and don’t make another mistake,” Centa ordered Lars, sending four other men with him. “I’ve got to get this cauldron secured.”

“We’re prepped to go, so don’t be long,” Waltz, the merchant guard captain, told Otwin. “Only a few demons have tested the docks but Kruckel is eager to set sail and the boatmen are restless.”

Looking out past the docks, Jadis could see what Waltz meant. There was a line of four boats manned with sailors floating out in the small bay of the cove, tied to the ship by long ropes. She guessed they were how the ship was to get out of the port, acting as tugboats.

“We won’t be long,” Otwin said to Waltz, then spoke to the rest of the mercenaries at large. “Alright, let’s finish this, back up the road!”

The cart had broken down about halfway between the workshop and the docks, up past a full turn of the wide switchback street and right before the second turn. The full compliment of mercs and guard escort followed the five workers back to the cart and set up around them. Jadis mused that they had to feel pretty well protected with so many armed fighters guarding them.

“Nine! Ha!” Kerr crowed a second after her arrow left her bow, the deadly projectile piercing a bramble fiend Jadis hadn’t noticed skulking in the shadows of an alleyway.

“Still not enough,” Jay grinned at the archer. “You’d need another six at least.”

“But I only need two!” Thurstan shouted happily as he dashed forward up the road towards the bend. “And I’ve got them now!”

Two twisted wretches formed from the bodies of snow elk had just rounded the corner and Thurstan wanted them for himself. With a short chant of strange words Jadis couldn’t understand, the gnome’s spear glowed and the tip turned icy blue. As he neared his targets, he thrust the spear forward and the tip extended by several feet, a razor-sharp shard of ice lancing deep into the body of the wretch on the left.

Before he could withdraw his spear from the now dying wretch, a large crossbow bolt thunked into the chest of the second demon, sending it crashing to the ground.

“You asshole!” Thurstan shouted, turning to shake an angry fist in Jana’s direction.

When Dys looked down at the taciturn, impassive-looking woman where she stood resetting her crossbow nearby, she glanced up at Dys and shrugged.

“What? It was funny. Plus your sister will eat more and piss Kerr off.”

While Otwin yelled at the furious gnome to stop wasting time and get back in formation, Syd walked forward to lend a hand cutting the demons open. The little guy was so upset he was too distracted to even think about the bounties he was leaving on the ground while he cursed up a storm.

Since she was walking forward towards Thurstan, Syd had the perfect view to see a true demonic monstrosity amble slowly around the corner of the building.

Walking forward on four legs, the abomination’s lower half was the body of an elk overgrown to disproportionate size, its back standing taller than a Clydesdale. Patches of mottled fur had fallen off to reveal the festering flesh beneath, some of the open sores dripping with mixtures of black and green fluids. The demon’s stomach hung heavy and low underneath, filled with a squirming gravid load.

From where the neck of the elk should be came the rest of the horror. The demon’s upper body was that of a man’s with the skin peeled off entirely, revealing the sinew and muscle beneath, its proportions exaggerated to a gruesome extent. Discolored a dark gray, the flesh was slick and putrid with mold and decay, with slimy dark tentacles occasionally bursting out from between muscles to wrap around, in, and out of the body. The creature’s head was a mix between animal and man, like a crazed doctor had crushed a beast’s skull and tried to piece it back together in a vaguely human shape, then glued it all together with rotting meat. A crown of three different sets of antlers burst out of the flesh atop its head, festooned with dripping entrails.

“Thurstan!” Syd shouted as she brought her lance up for a charge.

The gnome warrior spun around to stare up at the looming threat, meeting the eyeless gaze and distorted, rictus grin of the demon. Before he could do more than take a step back, abomination’s mouth snapped open with an audible click.

A roiling mass of thick yellow-green gas poured out from the demon’s open jaws, enveloping Thurstan instantly before flowing down and around its feet and across the road in an ever-expanding cloud of toxic death. From where Syd stood, she could make out the gnome’s silhouette collapse lifelessly to the ground in mere moments.

Then, the matriarch took a step forward, gas still pouring out of its mouth as it advanced towards the rest of the mercenaries.

“Retreat! Now!”

Otwin’s shouted command broke the stunned spell they were all under, unleashing pure pandemonium.

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