Chapter 485: Hold the Line

The sprint down the stairs of the tower was a chaotic avalanche of wild activity. Jadis couldn’t carry everyone at once, not even with three bodies, though she did carry those who would have struggled to keep up like Eir and Sorcha. Of course, the only one who could really keep up with her if she chose to go all out was Noll, but she purposefully restrained herself from doing so since there were a lot of soldiers and other people on the stairs that would have been crushed underfoot otherwise. Jadis was pretty sure that they passed by the commander who Fabio had been calling for at one point, but she didn’t stop to talk to the elf as their group passed the confused man by. If he had any comments or complaints, he could leave them with Violetta and Alban, who had stayed behind on the Leviathan to keep watch on the vehicle. Neither of them had unlocked their primary class yet, so they would have been nothing but a liability if they had come along. Instead, they were given copies of the imperial documents that proved their provenance, including the writ showing that Alex had been officially pardoned by Emperor Somerulf. Jadis would have preferred to leave one or two of her older companions behind with the airship as well, but that wasn’t an option under the circumstances. Fortune’s Favored had an enemy army to defeat, and considering the colossal demonic wyrm that was leading that army, Jadis knew she was going to need the strength of every companion she had by her side.

It wasn’t until their group made it out of the tower and into the open square she had seen from above that Jadis took a moment to pause. Just as she had observed moments earlier, there were soldiers and priests running around all over place, though not without order or purpose. Now that she was at ground level, she could see that there were two temples on either side of the northern gate leading to the Torre Sacra. One was dedicated to Valtar, the other to Charos. It seemed that the two temples were being used as hospitals, as men and women were carrying wounded soldiers to the places of worship where dozens of priests could be seen administering healing rituals and spells.

The number of wounded far surpassed anything Jadis had seen in the past. There were hundreds of men and women, many of whom were in terrible condition. While healing magic was powerful and could put a person to rights quickly, it seemed that there just wasn’t enough to go around. The clerics who could cast near instant healing like Eir were darting around the square, touching the soldiers who looked the worst and stabilizing them before they bled out from their grievous injuries. The priests who specialized in slower, lest costly, rituals were stationed at various points in and around the temples and were continuously powering auras of regeneration that were affecting everyone within range.

“Please, stop!” Eir called out as she struggled to turn about in Jay’s arm. “Wait!”

It took Jadis a moment to realize that her lover wasn’t talking to her, but to two men who were carrying a third soldier on a stretcher between them. The wounded man was in a terrible state. Jay could see a massive hole had been torn in his right side. His entrails were visibly spilling out and she could actually see what she was certain was his liver hanging torn in half out of the gaping wound. Jadis honestly couldn’t believe the man was still alive in that condition.

The two men slowed when they saw a priestess was calling out to them. Eir dropped out of Jay’s grasp and rushed forward, placing a hand on the dying man. As the holy light of her magic surrounded her, the change in the soldier was both instant and miraculous. The flesh around the gaping wound shifted together, sealing up the hole as the organs within regenerated their missing bits. Jadis knew that Eir couldn’t regenerate limbs and organs that were wholly missing, but as long as some of the flesh was left intact, she could make it whole again.

After only a few seconds, the once dying man was fully healed. His eyes opened wide as he gasped and coughed loudly, a look of shock, as well as wonder, on his face.

“My lady…?”

The man looked like he was seeing an angel, which wasn’t far from the truth as far as Jadis was concerned.

“Eir, we need to go,” Jay put a hand on the elf’s shoulder and pulled her away from the healed soldier. “We can’t stay here.”

“I know, but—” Eir hesitated as she looked around her.

The conflict was clear. There were so many wounded, so many dying, and Eir had the power to help them. She was a healer, after all. An amazing one, at that. Jadis could easily understand her desire to stay and offer all the aid she could to the brave men and women who lay on the ground, many of them in the direst of straits.

“They have healers here,” Jay told her as she picked the cleric up in one arm. “The faster we get to that wyrm thing, the more people we’ll keep from having to end up here.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Eir nodded as her expression turned to firm resolution. “I’m certain there will be many more for me to heal at the wall, in any case.”

As Jay and Eir turned to follow the rest of the team, most of whom were already at the wide city stairs that led further down into the second tier of the city, a voice called out to them.

“Jadis! Eir!”

Turning to look, Jay saw that the source of the call was Tegwyn. The Dryad was already in his huge goat form and, to her amusement, had Cora, Humbert, and Villum riding on his wide back. Terrance, Nevan, and Orla were running alongside Teg, easily keeping up as he loped across the crowded square.

“Any trouble landing?” Jay asked as the B Squad fell in next to her as she jogged towards the fighting.

“Not really,” Terrance answered easily as the relatively slow pace they were running at was no trouble for the former city runner. “We locked the Behemoth up while Severina told the soldiers who approached us that we were on the emperor’s business, and that if they interfered with the airship, they’d have to answer to her. Then she flew off.”

“Nice to have nobles on our side, isn’t it?” Villum joked. “Not so annoying when they do things like that!”

“They do have their uses,” Eir smiled at her fellow elf.

By that point, they had all reached the stairs that led down into the rest of the city. While the constant rush of wounded soldiers and those who were freshly healed filled the main road, the streets were mostly empty. Jadis was reminded of Weigrun, where many of the houses and businesses had been locked up and abandoned as most of the citizens had been evacuated. That seemed to be the case here, as well, so at least they didn’t have to worry about innocents being caught in the crossfire.

A glance at Sabina reminded Jadis that the city wasn’t wholly empty of civilians. While they didn’t know exactly where the smith’s father and brothers were in all the chaos, she was sure that they had to be hunkered down somewhere safe and out of the way. The three men were workers, not warriors, and so they were hopefully far away from the fighting.

Of course, the giant demonic wyrm beast that had stuck its face through the northern wall of the city changed estimations somewhat, but Jadis had to operate under at least a little bit of faith.

“Follow,” Noll barked at Syd, who was the only one of Jadis’ selves who wasn’t carrying a slower member of the group.

In the next instant, the veteran warrior leapt up into the air and kicked off the side of a building, then landed onto the next building’s roof. Without hesitation, Syd followed suit, only she bypassed the first mansion-like house and just jumped the three stories she had to so she could land next to her mentor.

The view the higher position afforded them wasn’t a pretty picture. In the distance, Syd could see the massive creature’s head pushed through the wall, along with the horde of lesser Demons that were pouring out of its mouth. It was still hard to see exactly what kind of demonic abominations made up the majority of the masses, but overall they didn’t seem to be particularly large. Some walked on two legs, some walked on… more than that.

The giant wyrm had crashed through the wall between fifty and a hundred yards to the right of a series of three gates. From the air, Jadis had been able to see that there were docks and wharfs lining the wall of the city that directly abutted the Haliax River, so she guessed that those gates led out to those same docks. The city had been prepared for those gates to be breached, since there were a series of barricades set up around the square that would contain any attackers that broke through and provide cover for defenders. The massive Demon had made those preparations far less effective, however, as it had broken through the wall outside of the square and its barricades. Its head was instead near a T intersection dividing a row of buildings to the east of the riverside gate square.

Syd could see that there were soldiers on the wall, and more defenders on the streets, but the breach was in a bad position. It gave the Demons who were pouring out of the wyrm space to spread out, as the next closest barricades were far further into the city. Some of the soldiers were forming shield walls while others were trying to form makeshift barricades that could stop the tide of attackers, but the Demons were pushing hard into the streets and quickly spreading out across the first tier of the city.

“Look. There,” Noll pointed to a section of the city to the left of the breach. “That building.”

Following his direction, Syd saw a large building with four stories that stood taller than all the rest of the structures around it. It was situated on a corner of an intersection of the main road that led up to the second tier of the city and another large road that looked like it circled around the full length of the first tier. The city streets seemed to be purposefully designed to limit movement between one tier of the city and the next, so there were only a couple of gates that let traffic between the tiers. The intersection the building was on was situated about halfway between the breach and the gate that led to the second level. Jadis wasn’t sure why Noll had pointed out the building at first, but after a second, she realized his intention. Both roads were being swarmed with Demons from the breach, and once the swarm inevitably overwhelmed the far too few defenders who were trying to hold the streets, the attackers on both the north and east roads would have to pass through that intersection if they wanted to reach the second tier of the city.

“Set your defenses there,” Noll commanded. “Hold that intersection until we’re ready to push back.”

“On it,” Syd nodded as her other selves already began letting the rest of the group know what the plan was. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll make sure they head your way,” Noll said as she turned to leap off the rooftop.

“Hey!” Syd called out to the therion. “No fighting that big fucker without me!”

“No promises.”

Noll jumped from the roof, easily clearing the distance to the next building as he made his way directly towards the breach. He had no need to use the roads to get where he needed to go.

Syd went her own way, cutting across the rooftops to get ahead of the group. The gatehouse that divided the middle tier of the city from the lower tier was already teaming with soldiers who were preparing for the horde to reach them, though not as many as Jadis would have liked. The gates hadn’t been closed yet, but there were several hundred armed men forming ranks and setting up around the gates, getting ready for the onslaught.

Spotting someone who looked like they were in charge, Syd leapt off the building she was standing on and landed on the ground a few feet away from the elf.

“Get your men and follow me!” Syd shouted at the man as she stumbled back from her sudden appearance. “We’re pushing the Demons back!”

“Who in the gods’ names are you!?” the commander cried out in surprise. “I can’t just—”

“I’m Jadis the Nephilim!” Syd cut the man off before he could begin to get bogged down in a case of bureaucracy. “I’m the one who flew in on the airships, and there are half a dozen different avatars with me! Just do what I fucking say!”

Jadis wasn’t sure if it was her hastily constructed argument, the sight of her team charging up to the gates, or the fact that she was a nine-foot-tall giant in heavy armor wielding a blade that could cut through boulders, but the commander didn’t fight back. Instead, he pointed at a few of his men and started shouting orders.

“Godfrey, Lauretta, Aldo! Take your units down the road after them!”

“Thank you!” Syd called out over her shoulder, already sprinting away to follow the rest of her team running through the gates.

“Thea, can you keep them coordinated around us?” Dys asked as she pointed at the soldiers who were quickly filing through the gates behind them.

“Yes,” the former soldier replied simply over the noise of their boots hitting the stone street.

Once more rushing ahead of the group, Syd ran on past various wounded soldiers who were retreating back towards the second tier. It wasn’t exactly a full-on rout, but she could see that more and more men were falling back as Demons pushed further into the city. When she reached the intersection, she saw that a few soldiers were already setting up another hasty barricade across the south side of the intersection, the direction that led to the gatehouse.

There were about twenty men, some of them wounded yet still fighting on, and they were pulling all manner of furniture from the nearby buildings to fill the street. They had only managed to block off about half of the road, though the barricade was at least on the left side of the street, along the corner where the large, four-story building was. Syd could see that the big building was some kind of multi-tiered shop, not dissimilar to the ones she was familiar with in Eldingholt, though that design made it stand out compared to the structures that surrounded it.

Syd jumped over the heads of the soldiers who were constructing the barricade. Turning as she landed in the middle of the intersection, she pointed with her sword staff first at them, then the four-story shop.

“Get inside the first floor of that building!” she commanded. “Don’t let the Demons inside!”

The soldiers froze, staring at her. Glancing across their number, it didn’t look like any one of them was in charge. None of them had the insignia on their hauberks that would denote them as having a higher rank. It seemed they were all just rank and file who had taken on the task of building a barrier on their own initiative. With Jadis confronting them, it seemed they weren’t sure if they should listen to her or not.

At that moment, Syd heard a scream coming from her left. Turning, she saw three soldiers frantically running towards her from the east. The man in the middle was limping badly, his right leg a mangled mess, and the other two soldiers were carrying him between them on their shoulders. The scream had been in response to the nightmare creatures that were charging up behind them.

The five Demons were some of the strangest looking creatures Jadis had seen. Their flesh looked like it was nothing more than a mix of sticks and mud, except for the occasional black tentacle that was bulging out of the foul assembly. They were shaped like dogs that had an extra torso added to the middle of their bodies, giving them six legs instead of four. While their back and middle sets of legs were animal-like, the front pair were more like human arms, with long-fingered hands that ended in sharp stone claws. The heads of the Demons were like wolves, except that a single huge eye took up the entirety of their forehead. When the fastest of the Demons neared the trio of soldiers, its front half rose up like some parody of a centaur, clawed hands raised to slash at the wounded men.

Syd’s sword staff split the Demon’s head in half as she passed the blade through its open jaws. Having dashed to put herself between the Demons and the fleeing soldiers, she continued the sweep of her weapon in a wide spin that caught two more of the monstrosities in the arc of her attack. She had to aim low, since even when their front halves were upright the Demons were no more than five feet tall, yet she still managed to slice the attackers into untidy pieces. When she finished her spin, Syd thrust the tip of her blade into the fourth Demon who had tried to sprint past her, catching it around the middle of its torso. Raising the dog-taur into the air, she whipped it over her head so that the Demon slid off her blade and crashed against the wall of the building on the other side of the street in a splattered mess of mud and sticky gore.

The fifth Demon attacked Syd directly, wrapping its front arms and long jaws around her right knee. She barely even felt its attempts at biting through her armor as it was completely incapable of even scratching the metal of her plate. Looking down at the foul monster, Syd’s eyes locked with the large, orange orb in the center of the Demon’s forehead.

“Fuck off back to the abyss,” Syd told the Demon before smashing the pommel of her sword staff through its eye and out the back of its head.

Jadis briefly glanced at the five notifications that had appeared in the corner of her vision, just to see what the horrible beasts were called. The mire hounds were weak, from what she could tell. Possibly even weaker than bone thieves, though it was hard for her to judge since she was so much stronger at her current level than she was when bone thieves were a legitimate threat to her. Still, she could see how the army would be struggling against the relatively weak Demons, if for no other reason than there were so fucking many of them.

Turning to look back at the soldiers who were still standing by the half-finished barricade, Syd pointed her muddied blade at them again.

“I said get inside the building! Now!”

The second time, they listened.

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