Chapter 49: Beating on a Boulder

Jadis was about ready to start running.

Every move of the massive stone lizard thing was like a mini avalanche. While not much different in size from the bone thief matriarch, this stone demon had to weigh hundreds of tons. Each time one of its boulder-sized feet slammed the ground, Jadis could practically feel the air pressure from the strength and mass of the stomp pushing against her. Just standing near it felt overwhelming as the demon’s sheer size and bulk was a weapon all its own, not even mentioning the huge horn and tail it kept swinging in her direction, trying to impale or crush her.

She felt like a caveman fighting a tank.

She’d had some success, at least, in that she’d managed to knock two of the stone lizard’s legs off. It had eight for some reason, though, so breaking off a leg or two was of limited effect. What was with demons and extra limbs, anyway?

Of far better import, the part of her that was Syd had finished up protecting the wagon from those horrifying deer demon things. With Syd now rushing in to help with the fight, she felt a little bit better about her chances.

Jadis had gotten used to the bone thieves, no longer caring overmuch about the intrinsic horror of aberrant skeleton monsters, so it had been a while since something had gotten her heart jumping just in terms of fright factors.

Bipedal deer people with twisted tentacle limbs sticking out from under their skin that could vomit acid bile like a firehose would definitely be haunting Jadis’ nightmares for many nights to come.

Jadis shook the thought of what had happened to Ludwas off. She needed to concentrate.

Jay dashed forward, swinging her maul around and smashing it against the stone exterior of the demon, right where the shoulder and neck met. At the same time, Dys swung her maul at the other side, intending to trigger a Mirrored Strikes attack. Unfortunately, Dys had to pull back on her swing and roll out of the way as the bus-sized stone lizard shifted and swung its head around at her, nearly crushing her between the side of its long head and its body.

Being made of stone, the demon didn’t seem to have the same limitations a flesh and blood body would. Its head, tail, and legs all bent and folded as needed in directions Jadis wouldn’t expect them to be able to. As long as it was an axis at which two rocks connected, it seemed like the demon could bend there. The complication of trying to predict how and where the rock monster was going to pivot to attack her made the fight far more difficult and dangerous, the strangeness and unpredictability of its movements making up for their lumbering speed.

As Dys moved back and ran around the front of the demon, Jay shifted further back, nimbly leaping over the huge tail that rushed through the air like a freight train. The sound of the stone appendage slamming into the ground wasn’t the huge crash it would have been in a movie, more of a muted thump, but the sight of the tail scoping through the dirt like a hand through water was plenty impressive all on its own, no overblown sound effects needed.

Dirt flew everywhere as the stone lizard shifted again, its tail moving on an odd axis as it sprayed soil and rocky debris out in a wide arc, catching Jay with some of it. Some got in Jay’s eyes, but with more than one pair to look out for her, Jay turned and pulled back and away in time to avoid the tail as it crashed to the ground where she had been standing a moment before.

As Jay pulled back to clear her vision, Syd arrived, striking out at the demon’s side with the blunt end of her spear. There was no chance the dagger-tip of the spear was going to pierce solid rock and the backend of the wooden spear wasn’t going to do any damage either, but that wasn’t the point. As Syd’s attack landed, so did Dys’.

Dys’ maul slammed down onto the face of the rock lizard, right at the base of the huge sharp stone projecting up like a rhinoceros horn. A sharp crack echoed in the valley as the stone shattered, pieces flying off, though the horn didn’t break completely.

With another roar like a thousand cinderblocks being dragged across concrete, the demon lunged forward at Dys, smashing its face down into the ground with enough force to bury it several feet deep.

Dys skipped back and away and to the side, moving as far out of the way as she could, though despite all her agility, not fast enough.

The demon pushed forward, scooping up and out, throwing a literal wave of dirt and stone into the air in front of it. Dys was knocked back and down, hundreds of pounds of dirt bowling her over. As she struggled to recover from the fall, the stone lizard turned and reared back, huge boulder of a head moving to slam down onto the prone form of Dys.

Having tossed her spear aside, Syd slammed a rock she’d picked up from the ground into the side of the demon’s tail, right at the base, coordinating her attack in unison with Jay’s maul strike on the opposite side of the tail. Cracks and fissures ruptured through the stone beast, parts breaking as the tail lost the durability it needed to stay intact. The colossal weight of the tail worked against itself as the whole appendage suddenly snapped off, crumbling to the ground.

The stone demon’s counterbalance gone, its stability disappeared and it stumbled forward, crashing face first into the ground, mere inches from Dys as she rolled out of the path of destruction.

As Dys rolled and dodged, the unbalanced and struggling demon still snapped its neck around to fold its head against its body in an attempt to crush her. The move clipped Dys’ leg, sending a sharp jolt of pain through her.

“Not my fucking leg again!” Dys screamed out, rolling to her feet and limping away.

While Dys moved back, Jay and Syd attacked again, coordinating another Mirrored Strike, this time against the rearmost back legs of the creature.

Syd’s hands stung as the rock she was attacking with broke under the force of the blow, shattering and cutting into her palm and fingers. She winced, pulling back, her attack not destroying the leg but certainly putting some new cracks in the boulder-based shell of the demon.

Jay’s attack had done a bit better, breaking off a large chunk of stone, but the demon was still moving well enough that it was turning to face her, its huge and unwieldy head snapping around to try and pulverize her.

The demon was unbalanced now, but it was still far more intact than Jadis would have liked considering how much damage she herself had taken. Taking a quick look at her health pool, Jadis saw that she’d dropped down to two hundred and forty-two out of four hundred and twenty. She hadn’t been at full health to begin with and this fight was dragging on. Was it time to cut and run? Surely, without its tail, the demon wasn’t going to be able to chase after them, not with how unbalanced it was now.

As Jadis considered fleeing, she heard the sounds of a commotion coming from where she’d last noted the wagon being. Frankly, she’d lost track of it, all of her selves focused on the colossal boulder crocodile in front of her.

Boulder-dile? Boulder-dile.

As Jay jabbed at the boulder-dile with her maul, keeping its attention on her, Syd looked to see that Gerwas, Volker, and Specht were all rushing down the hill, straight towards Jadis and the giant demon.

She had to give them credit for bravery, but what exactly did they think they were going to do with crossbows and swords against a rock monster?

At that point Jadis noticed that they weren’t carrying either of those expected weapons, as she had previously seen them equipped with, but instead had steel maces with round heads in their hands. As he approached, Gerwas tossed one to Syd.

“Take it! The only way to kill a grundwyrm is to break it down and find the core somewhere in the middle!”

Syd caught the small, er, normal sized mace and gave it a test swing. “Grundwyrm?” she murmured, testing the odd word.

Jadis liked boulder-dile better, though maybe she’d keep that name to herself for now.

The three mercenaries closed in on the stone demon and started leaping in to strike once with their blunt weapons before rapidly backing away to avoid reactionary attacks from the boulder-dile.

The damage they did wasn’t much, but it was causing more and more cracks to form in the stone body of the demon as it awkwardly whirled around, lashing out randomly as it was attacked from many different sides.

Jadis could see now that the mercs weren’t stupid or acting unnecessarily brave. They were trained soldiers, men who’d probably been fighting for years as part of the same unit. The three men didn’t have the same level of unnaturally unified coordination that Jadis and her three selves had, but they moved as a team, calling out warning to each other as Gerwas acted as a lead, ordering strikes in one moment or telling them to back off the next. If there were a dozen more mercenaries like them around, Jadis could well imagine that they could handle the boulder-dile all on their own.

Well, Gerwas and the rest didn’t have a dozen more mercenaries to back them up. They had her.

Dys and Jay moved in at the same time, mauls striking against the middle left side of the boulder-dile, near where she’d previously knocked a leg off, while Syd’s newly acquired mace struck the damaged horn on the face of the demon.

The rino-like stone horn shattered, breaking off as the demon lunged and snapped its jaws at a now retreating Syd. As it did, a different snapping sound echoed as stone broke apart in a great fissure from where Jay and Dys had struck. The demon’s front half charged forward after Syd, leaving behind its rear half as its body broke in two.

A shout of triumph went out from the three mercenaries as they began attacking the severely damaged stone demon even more fiercely. The monster was still moving, struggling to chase after Syd or lash out at any target that came close, but it now had less than half the mass it had before, only three legs, and a head far too large for what remained of its body to balance properly.

Joining in with the mercenaries, Jadis began attacking with all three of her selves with abandon, her mauls and mace smashing huge chunks of stone off the demon.

The demon was still a dangerous foe, even in its weakened state, or so it proved when one of its remaining legs suddenly shifted at an unexpected angle and knocked Specht down, nearly crushing him. Jay was close enough to grab the man up and unceremoniously toss him aside, possibly hurting his pride but at least preventing him from being squashed like a grape under the foot of the boulder-dile.

With one more good swing of her maul, Dys broke open some hollow section of the demon’s body that was just behind the head, between where the shoulder blades would be if the monstrosity’s form followed actual biology. Inside the hollow space Jadis saw a large wriggling mass of purple tentacles, one large red eye peeking out from the center of the Lovecraftian wet dream.

Jadis didn’t hesitate, all three of her immediately striking the core of the demon from three different angles, pulping the purple flesh into a quivering mush of foul-smelling goo in an instant.

All struggles from the stone-beast ceased as the demon’s true body was destroyed.

In the sudden silence that filled the air, the three forms of Jadis fell back from the fallen demon, sweat dripping from their pale flesh as black blood dripped from their weapons.

“I’m starting to believe you three really did take down a matriarch on your own,” Gerwas broke the silence, patting Jay on the arm, not quite able to reach her shoulder.

“Was there ever any doubt?” Jay said with some false bravado, shouldering her mace.

As the makeshift weapon’s haft landed on Jay’s shoulder, a crack that had formed during the fight finally split and the maul broke in two, the heavy end falling to the ground behind her.

“Some,” Gerwas answered, eyeing the broken end of the weapon lying in the grass.

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